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August 24, 2025
Introduction
Human beings have always turned to models to make sense of the invisible: from myths and parables to equations and scientific theories. A model does not merely describe reality; it focuses our perception, distilling complexity into a form that can be grasped, communicated, and applied — and as guides for how to most effectively live one’s life.
The holomorphic process is such a model. Emerging at the intersection of mathematics, philosophy, spirituality, and society, it offers a way to understand continuity of consciousness across transformation — whether in out-of-body experiences, near-death states, reincarnation, or even the evolution of political communities. By borrowing the concept of holomorphy from mathematics, the model points not only toward mystical possibility but also toward recognizable structural patterns in the natural and logical order of reality.
The Holomorphic Process Defined
At its core, the holomorphic process is a cycle — a patterned unfolding of consciousness that loops through four key stages:
- Separation – a departure from one’s familiar state of being.
- Projection – the outward extension of awareness beyond its prior boundaries.
- Reflection – turning back upon experience, gaining insight and perspective.
- Reintegration – returning transformed into embodied or renewed life.
This cycle repeats, each loop expanding consciousness further. Like the smooth continuity of a holomorphic function in mathematics, each stage flows into the next without rupture, maintaining identity across transformation.
The framework expands on Joseph Campbell’s famous monomyth or “hero’s journey.” While Campbell mapped the archetypal journey of mythic heroes as separation, initiation, return, the holomorphic process applies the cycle more broadly as a model of expanding consciousness itself. For further exploration, see holomorphicprocess.com.
Models and Their Importance
Models are indispensable because they serve as mediators between experience and meaning, and as guides for how to most effectively live one’s life. A myth can encode wisdom; a scientific theory can reveal regularities in nature; a parable can point to truth through story. The holomorphic process belongs to this lineage, but with a distinctive character.
Parabolic Models
The holomorphic process may be thought of as a parabolic model. In geometry, a parabola gathers all incoming rays to a single focal point, as in the design of a satellite dish. Similarly, this model collects diverse spiritual insights and experiential data — out-of-body accounts, reincarnation narratives, meditative states — and focuses them into a coherent principle of continuity.
This is why so many parables, whether spiritual or scientific, can be read as reflections of the same process:
- The Prodigal Son (Christian tradition): Separation when he leaves his father’s home, projection as he squanders his life in a distant land, reflection when he awakens to his folly, and reintegration when he returns humbled and transformed.
- The Buddha’s Great Departure (Buddhist tradition): Siddhartha separates from his princely life, projects himself into the world of suffering, reflects through meditation and confrontation with Mara, and reintegrates as the Buddha, returning to teach the Dharma.
- The Atomic Model (science): Early atomic theory separated the atom into nucleus and orbiting electrons, projected outward with orbital models, reflected on its shortcomings, and finally reintegrated into the unified quantum wave function — a model that reconciles what seemed divided (particle and wave) into a continuous whole.
- The Cell Cycle (biology): A living cell divides into two (separation), each projects growth and differentiation, mirrors the other through DNA replication (reflection), and reintegrates continuity into the life of the organism.
Though drawn from different domains, these stories converge at the same focal point. Each embodies the holomorphic cycle of separation, projection, reflection, and reintegration. The model demonstrates its power by illuminating patterns across religion, myth, science, and life.
Hyperbolic Models: Rhetoric Without Convergence
By contrast, a hyperbolic model disperses rather than gathers. In mathematics, hyperbolas expand outward in opposite directions, never converging on a shared focus. In language, this corresponds to hyperbole — exaggeration for effect.
Hyperbole has its place in poetry or storytelling, but when it dominates discourse, it loses the power to focus truth. Political rhetoric often relies on hyperbole: opponents are painted in extreme terms, policies are exaggerated as existential threats, and citizens are encouraged to see themselves in perpetual opposition. The result is polarization without resolution — a landscape where each side expands further from the other, never meeting, never converging and often leading to major conflicts.
The Mathematical Parallel
In complex analysis, a function is holomorphic when it is continuous, smooth, and infinitely differentiable across its domain. Such a function cannot be arbitrarily broken; its continuity guarantees that small changes ripple seamlessly across the whole.
As a metaphor for consciousness, holomorphy suggests that awareness, too, flows without rupture through transformation. Out-of-body experiences or even death itself do not sever identity, but rather mark transitions in the ongoing unfolding of awareness. Just as a holomorphic function extends its identity through every transformation, consciousness maintains continuity through the flux of existence.
Spiritual Continuity: Death and Rebirth
Within the holomorphic framework, death becomes a passage rather than a terminus. Consciousness does not dissipate into abstraction, nor migrate to alien worlds, but re-enters the fabric of human life.
Reincarnation, in this sense, is not random. It is mediated through the living — through birth, which becomes the vessel of renewal. Each rebirth presents conditions suited to the next stage of growth: challenges that refine, rewards that encourage, and circumstances that provide the raw material for spiritual development.
In this way, the holomorphic process affirms both continuity and purpose: awareness carries forward, reborn not arbitrarily, but into the precise situations that sustain its evolution.
And just as the individual soul undergoes cycles of separation, projection, reflection, and reintegration, so too does the collective consciousness of a people. Civilizations rise, fracture, project competing visions, reflect upon their failures, and are reintegrated through renewal. This parallel between the personal and the collective sets the stage for applying the holomorphic model to politics itself.
Politics and the Holomorphic Process
The holomorphic process does not apply only to individuals; it also illuminates the life of societies. Nations, like people, experience cycles of separation, projection, reflection, and reintegration.
Modern politics, however, often falls prey to hyperbolic models. Democrats and Republicans — or any political opposites — are encouraged to see one another as irreconcilable extremes. The rhetoric exaggerates differences until each side expands outward like the branches of a hyperbola, never converging. This resembles what Strauss and Howe (The Fourth Turning, 1997) describe as an “Unravelling,” a phase that always leads to crisis.
Yet if political discourse were reframed through the holomorphic process, a different picture would emerge. Separation of perspectives and projection of competing visions would not be treated as final ruptures, but as necessary stages in the cycle. They would be accepted as challenges rather than crises. Reflection on the strengths and limits of each side would become peaceful unwinding rather than destructive unravelling, preparing the ground for reintegration.
The ultimate aim would not be victory of one faction over another, but unity of the people through harmonization of opposites. In this sense, a new civic cycle could replace the crisis-driven one: Awakening → High → Challenge → Unwinding — a rhythm resembling the life of a healthy individual who does not live in crisis mode, but wakes each morning renewed, embraces challenges, and integrates lessons into greater wholeness.
Conclusion: Toward a Civic Philosophy of Unity
The holomorphic process is more than a metaphor. It is a cross-disciplinary model that bridges mathematics and mysticism, science and spirituality, the individual and the collective. Like a parabola focusing scattered rays, it gathers disparate insights into a single principle: that continuity, transformation, and reintegration are the hallmarks of growth.
Applied personally, it offers a guide for how to most effectively live one’s life: to embrace separation as the start of growth, to project oneself courageously into new experience, to reflect deeply on what has been learned, and to reintegrate those insights into a fuller, wiser existence.
Applied politically, it suggests that our divisions, too, can be reframed as stages in a cycle that ultimately points to unity. Democracy itself may be understood as a holomorphic process: a system in which differences are not suppressed but projected, reflected upon, and reintegrated into a larger whole. If embraced, this model could guide us beyond hyperbolic rhetoric toward parabolic convergence, where truth is not scattered but focused — and where unity is achieved not by erasing differences, but by harmonizing them.
Consciousness, community, and democracy alike are holomorphic: they do not fracture; they flow forward. And in that flow lies the promise of renewal — life after life, cycle after cycle, toward ever-deeper awareness and ever-greater unity.1
- I have to thank ChatGPT for reviewing my work and helping me write this article. ↩︎
The Holomorphic Process 