One of the foundational pieces in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory is the concept of the holon.  The holon was first postulated by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine,  to describe an entity that was both complete in itself and part of something else.

In Ken’s model, and its augmentation by Fred Kofman, a key assumption is made about the nature of individual holons by declaring them to be sentient or insentient.  This leads to many anomalies and discrepancies in this supposedly unified theory, such as  any group of isolated individual or collective holons, including sentient humans, can be regarded as ‘a heap’.  A heap is defined as a random collection of items.

However, one person’s apparently random collection of items can be another person’s curated art exhibition or a compelling market perspective.  The holonic theory also seems to disregard any changes in context for a holon. When the Trojan Horse was wheeled in through the gates of Troy, it included forty holons inside it in the form of Greek soldiers.

When the soldiers vacated the horse, it changed from sentient to insentient, and if the soldiers temporarily hid in a shed before launching the attack then the shed artefact would become sentient.  This may make some philosophical sense, but in reality would be no help at all if you are a vulnerable Trojan being stabbed by a heap of Greeks.

Fred Kofman also specifies that all art forms, all language and all cultural products are all insentient entities or artefacts that can be separated from their creator individual or social human holons.  This has the effect of stripping these artefacts of any context or meaning and greatly reducing the opportunity to make significant connections between potentially valuable insights.

In Dreamwork, instead of trying to fit diverse entities into a supposedly universal theory, we identify and capture fragments of meaning from a wide range of perspectives.  We then help participants to make their own significant connections between these fragments and to become aware of any meaningful patterns that might emerge.  As a workshop participant recently observed, this reflects how the World Wide Web is evolving. 

The initial web was all about aggregation in the Web 1.0 model with holonic ISPs like AOL and portals like Yahoo! providing aggregated and inclusive meaning for users.  Web 2.0 is about fragmentation with tools like RSS and Twitter providing a significantly connected flow of meaningful fragments.