How do we define Wholeness?

To be whole. What does it mean?

It means we create by removing. We give birth to new selves by chiseling away what no longer fits us. It means that everything we will become is already within us. It means that every solution we need is present. The present is carved out of the future, not built out of the past.

In physics there is a field called signal processing. It is what makes your radio work. It is what encodes your streaming videos and Spotify feed. In signal processing it is understood that oftentimes light plus light makes dark. You can drive between two hills positioned just so and find that your radio reception dies, because the signal bouncing off the hills adds together and becomes nothingness. Have you ever been in a physical room where sound was amplified or deadened in certain locations? Music studios pay a lot of money to avoid this. Sound plus sound equals no sound.

You could, in principle, start with the static heard between the stations on your car radio, and by removing just the right pieces of the static you could leave behind the sounds belonging to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The patterns are there, but they’re buried until you find them.

It is true for us too. We walk around with noise in our minds, thoughts about who may have hurt our feelings or fears about the future. This noise drowns out the love we feel in our hearts, the gratitude we feel for each other, the excitement we feel to get up and live another day. Those positive feelings are always there, they’re just drowned in the noise of other, more urgent signals.

Grief can clear the filter. When tragedy strikes, we can often find ourselves able to be grateful for simple things in a way that we were unable to before. Maybe it’s because in the face of true loss, the noisy urgency no longer seems so. We throw out the unnecessary worries and what remains is our essential self.

This is what I mean by wholeness. It is there, within us, maybe obscured by memories of painful situations, but ready to emerge when the layers of noise are simply removed. It’s not so much what we do, but what we don’t do, which determines what life we create for ourselves. When we stop listening to the noise, we automatically start noticing the signal.