we're in a system

To appreciate the relationship between parts and wholes in living systems, we do not need to study nature at the microscopic level.

If you gaze up at the nighttime sky, you see all of the sky visible from where you stand. Yet the pupil of your eye, fully open, is less than a centimeter across. Somehow, light from the whole of the sky must be present in the small space of your eye. And if your pupil were only half as large, or only one quarter as large, this would still be so. Light from the entirety of the nighttime sky is present in every space - no matter how small.

.

This is exactly the same phenomenon evident in a hologram. The 3 dimensional image created by interacting laser beams can be cut in half indefinitely, and each piece, no matter how small, will still contain the entire image. This reveals what is perhaps the most mysterious aspects of parts and wholes: as physicist Henri Bortoft says, "Everything is in everything."