The Universe as a Living Whole

Daniel Wahl, Whole Systems Theory, and Process Theology


The purpose of this page is to bring into conversation two outlooks on life that offer hope for the world: Whole Systems Thinking and Process Theology. 

​I take as my example of Whole Systems Thinking the work of Daniel C. Wahl; the vision of Triarchy Press, which published his book, Cultivating Regenerative Community; and the Regenerative Future Project of the Royal Society for the Arts (the RSA).  Wahl was awarded 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal in recognition of his outstanding contribution to regenerative design.   I take as my example of Process Theology the vision of a multi-faith network Process and Faith, which is a project of the Center for Process Studies and the Cobb Institute for Process and Practice. I hope readers will turn to these organizations, Wahl's book, and Triarchy Press to learn more. 

Whole Systems Theory and Process Theology have much in common.  Both believe that the universe is composed of wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts; that life on earth contains an impulse toward regeneration; and that our calling today, in light of the world’s many problems, is to design regenerative communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, humane to animals, and good for the earth, with no one left behind.   

​As a process theologian myself, I see process theology as one form of Whole Systems Thinking, of which there are many others.  What distinguishes process theology from many other forms is that it is theistic or, better, panentheistic.  It sees God as the living and boundless whole of the universe, evolving along with it.   A unique feature of  the organization Process and Faith, however, is that it appreciates non-theistic as well as theistic ways of looking at the world.  Belief in God is an option in the process theological world, but not the only option.

We process theologians speak of four values that rightly inform our actions: whole persons, whole communities, a whole planet, and holistic thinking.   Whole Systems Thinking is a form of holistic thinking from which we in the process world have much to learn and for which we are immensely grateful.   Let there be many forms of whole systems theory and let process theology be among them.

  • Jay McDaniel, 2/10/2022​​​


Daniel Christian Wahl

​“Daniel Wahl has compiled a great deal of useful information in a masterful synthesis. That alone is a significant accomplishment, but he’s given us more than that. Designing Regenerative Cultures describes the doorway to a possible, indeed, necessary future. We are not fated to the dystopia in prospect. We have, as he writes, the capacity to design and to organize our societies to protect, enhance, and celebrate life. The blueprint was there all along. The awareness of our possibilities is growing. The art and sciences of ecological design are flourishing. The choice, as always, is ours and that of those who will follow.”

David Orr 



Daniel Wahl and Fritjof Capra
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On a Systems View of Life and
a Regenerative Community

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​​Daniel Wahl on the role of 
subjectivity and feeling in a
Whole Systems Approach
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A common critique of the ‘Gaian worldview’ is that it reduces reality to the physical/material reality of the ‘living planet’ or the ‘web of life’. While this might be true for some proponents, it certainly is not the approach explored here. As should have become clear already, this book aims to invite deeper questioning into the way consciousness and matter, the interior (subjective) dimensions and exterior (objective) dimensions of reality, interrelate. Exploring this relationship will inform the way we set about creating a regenerative culture. Yes, the language of ‘systems’ belongs to the exterior/collective quadrant (ITS) but a participatory whole-systems approach to our participation in living systems explores the relationship between all four quadrants.

​The integral map can make our experiences of participation more intelligible in ways that can guide wise action. Our individual and collective relating to the world actually brings forth the world we experience. The whole-systems or living-systems perspective explored here transcends and includes the dualism of the ‘out there’ of objective description and the ‘in here’ of subjective experience. Our cultural narrative shapes our individual experience of how we perceive and explain what is out there. Becoming more aware of this process is the first step towards what Einstein referred to as the new way of thinking that might help us to resolve the ‘problems’ created by the narrative of separation (the way of thinking that created these problems in the first place). I believe that the narrative of interbeing and participatory whole systems thinking will help us to transform and/or resolve many of these problems.

- Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures


Daniel Wahl on Regeneration

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Daniel Wahl on Systems as Wholes

The whole-systems understanding of the world acknowledges that a whole is always more than the simple sum of its parts, paying attention to the diversity of elements, the quality of interactions and relationships, and the dynamic patterns of behaviour that often lead to unpredictable and surprising innovations and adaptations...One way to define the word ‘system’ is as a set of interconnected elements that together form a coherent pattern we can refer to as a ‘whole’. Such a system exhibits properties of the whole that emerge out of the interactions and relationships of the individual elements. This systems definition could be applied to a molecule, a cell, a human being, a community or the planet.

- Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures
The systems view understands life as networks of relationships. We can find network patterns at the scale of individual cells, organs, organisms, communities, ecosystems or the biosphere as a whole. The qualitative emergent properties that make life worth living and sustain life as a whole are not located within one or many organisms, they are distributed across all of these scales as systemic properties of a living and transforming whole in which every participant counts and we all co-create the future. If we aim to sustain humanity’s common future, we need to learn how humanity can become a positive live-sustaining influence on ecosystems everywhere and the planet as a whole. This is the essence of creating a sustainable and regenerative human culture. By designing our technological, social and economic solutions around the principles of ecology and biology and informed by a systems view of life, we can transform culture so it becomes a restorative and regenerative force.

- Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures


Daniel Wahl on Spirituality 
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Ecology and spirituality are two sides of the same coin – understanding and making sense of our own interbeing with the world, and our interdependence. You can enter into an embodied experience of wholeness and meaning through the door of the natural world or through spiritual practice. In fact, the two are ultimately not separate but they are pathways to the same oneness of existence in and through relationships. A oneness we experience most of the time from the limited perspective created by the ‘illusion of separation’. If we want to reconstitute this oneness – the whole whose conscious reflections we are – we need to do so through the way we create meaning together and through the narrative we tell about our interbeing. Making time for solitude in wild nature helps us to have the largest conversation we are capable of having with the world. Communion with wild nature helps us embody our ultimate place and act wisely in recognition of our kinship with all life.

Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures


​David Orr on the religious side of
Designing Regenerative Cultures

Whether acknowledged or not, systems thinking is kin to the core meaning of religion — ‘to bind together’ in Latin. We, living in a secular culture, tend not to see the connection, but it is nonetheless inescapable. Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ and the rules of decent behaviour prescribed in each of the Axial religions bear more than a coincidental similarity to the rules of enlightened design. We are our brother’s keeper and also that of the bears, whales, birds, soils, trees, lands and waters; and they ours. The entire system is mindful, shot through with consideration.

- David Orr, as quoted in Daniel Wahl, Designing Regenerative Futures
The word ‘regenerative’ in the title of this book signifies a commitment to the life processes inherent in ecological design. That, too, is reciprocal, mutual and inescapable. It also carries the command of the writer of Deuteronomy to “choose life” [30:19] Whether from self-interest or duty, the command requires that we comprehend and value life and life processes, become ecologically competent stewards of land, wildlife, soils, waters, and that we care.

- David Orr, as quoted in Daniel Wahl, Designing Regenerative Futures
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Triarchy Press: 

​A Systems Thinking Publisher

from Triarchy Press About Page

Triarchy Press is a small, independent publisher, founded in 2005.  Our focus is on systems thinking, publishing books and ideas that challenge the way we think about and view the world, broadly as follows: 
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  • Improving the way that we run certain kinds of organisations (schools, local government, public services – including police and health services)
  • Improving the way that leadership, innovation and teamwork happen in all organisations
  • Improving the way that we think about the future (whether it’s scenario planning in a company, saving the planet from genocide, ecological disaster or societal collapse, or preparing for crisis)
  • Improving the way that we structure economies, banking and financial systems​

These themes of Triarchy's books invite us to think differently about the way people live together in families and in society, and to think again about a whole host of activities from movement and somatics to theatre and performance; forms of body and psychotherapy to ways of walking, and ways in which we understand ourselves and the problems we face. So we have published a great many ideas, booklets and books that explore all those fields. 
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The single thread that holds all these ideas and books together is Systems thinking – the notion that we can never realistically address any problem or opportunity, consider any individual or organisation, without looking at the widest possible picture, at the biological, social, cultural, organisational and ecological networks in which they participate.


The Universe as a Living Whole
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Process Theology, Whole Systems Thinking, and Regenerative Cultures​

As a process theologian, I find myself very much at home with what Daniel Wahl and others call "whole systems thinking" or "living systems thinking."   We in the process world speak of four aims or hopes for the world: whole persons, whole communities, a whole planet, and holistic thinking.  Whole systems thinking is a vivid form of holistic thinking, and, like process theology, it serves the other three hopes.  I think of process theology as one kind of whole systems thinking: a theistic form.

To be sure, whole systems thinking can have versions that conflict with a process perspective.  Perhaps some forms can neglect any sense of agency on the part of individuals and focus instead on "systems" as such, understood as wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. And they can view things primarily from a third-person perspective, neglecting the first-person and second-person experience. In these versions I miss something I find in process theology: subjectivity, agency, and respect for the feelings of individuals, including people and other animals.

But Wahl's version is not like this.  As seen above, his whole systems approach includes attention to subjects as well as the objects: to first-person experience ("I") and second-person experience ("We") as well as third-person experience ("It" and "They").  And he is sensitive to the fact that subjects themselves are living wholes. He writes that a systems approach to life can be applied to a molecule, a cell, a human being, as well as a to community or the planet as a whole.  

We in the process world believe that all wholes are dynamic and changing; they are wholes-in-process.  Wahl would agree.  And we talk about different kinds of wholes, all of them dynamic.  Following Whitehead, we call the "societies" or "nexus," but I will use the word whole instead.

  1. Living wholes that have agency in their own right, such as a living cell.
  2. Corpuscular wholes that are networks of parts, but not with agency of their own, such as a rock.
  3. Serially ordered wholes, the ‘parts’ of which occur one at a time, inheriting from their predecessors, such as the moment by moment stream of experiences constituting a human life.
  4. Enduring objects, such buildings, which are aggregate expressions of more microscopic wholes. 
  5. Wholes of wholes of wholes that are networks of living wholes, corpuscular wholes, serially ordered wholes, and enduring objects.

All are "wholes" of one sort or another, and always these wholes are nested within or encompassing of other "wholes" on which they depend.  Even a single moment of human experience (a moment of concrescence, to use Whitehead's phrase) is a whole. It is a process of many things becoming one thing, without losing their manyness. We live in a universe of wholes within wholes within wholes.

​To Wahl's examples of wholes, process theologians will add still another.  They add that the universe as a whole is a living whole.  This living whole is God, the ongoing life of universe, understood as a boundless (non-omnipotent) compassion within whose life all things unfold.  This living whole is within each creatures as its innermost lure toward regeneration and thriving; and it is beyond all creatures as a living companion to the joys and sufferings of each and all.  It is not cut off from universe; it is instead the mind of the universe. The universe is to God as a body is to its mind.

The process perspective is often called panentheism, but it could also be called Whole Systems Theism.  Whole Systems Theism would be a theism that envisions God, not as an autocrat in the sky, but as the living and ongoing Whole of the universe with feelings of its (his, her) own, who is found throughout the universe in possibilities for regeneration (healing, wholeness, and creativity), and who is a companion to the world's joys and suffering

Most whole systems thinkers do not speak of God even as they do speak of spirituality. For most of them "spirituality" is a sense of connectedness with the world but not faith in an inclusive Love. This leads me to think that, for some people, a process version of whole systems thinking, with its notion of Love within which the universe unfolds, might be particularly meaningful.

God or no God, the question of our time is: How might ideas and values such as these be practiced in daily life and in the affairs of the world?  On this I find  a small press based in England called Triarchy Press the publisher of Wahl's book, extremely helpful.  This press is devoted to spreading "whole systems" ideas and values, and it publishes numerous monographs on whole systems approaches to government, education, economics, public services (including health care and police), organizational management, and, not least, efforts aimed at helping save the world from genocide, environmental disaster, and societal collapse. Triarchy Press is a veritable goldmine of whole system thinking applications.  I offer this page to introduce you further to Wahl's work, to Triarchy Press, and to other whole systems thinkers, hoping the page might spur you to learn more in your own way.

​- Jay McDaniel, 2/7/22




An Introduction to
​Process Theology 
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Open Horizons