In 1952, Wolff—having been recently introduced to the work of Aurobindo—gave a “Holistic Lecture Series Dealing with a Method of Supramental Descent.” This list of twenty-seven aphorisms on the “Holistic” may have accompanied the content of these lectures. (3 handwritten pages + 3 pages of a typed copy)

This file contains the mission statement (The “Holistic Preamble”), the articles of faith, a statement of holistic principles, and other organizational documents for the renamed Assembly of Man. (20 pages)

Given its date, this would have been work ascribed by the Holistic Assembly. (1 page)

In the early 1950s, Wolff began to write, lecture and muse on a program he called “The Holistic.” In this unfinished essay, he defines this program “as a Religious, a Philosophical and a Scientific orientation in which wholeness is the central value in an explicit as well in an implicit sense and a value which is to occupy this central place in conscious practice as well as in theory.” He later explains that the central problem of “the Holistic Philosophy and Movement is an effectuation of the resolution of the One and the Many.” Wolff notes that he is not seeking simply a philosophical (or theoretical) solution to this problem, but one that is practical as well. Next he explains that the notion of ‘Holistic’ has a three-fold meaning, which may be called “the Ontological, the Static and the Dynamic.” Wolff devotes several pages to an explication of the first meaning, and starts on the second, at which point the essay ends. (8 pages)

This is a difficult and obviously rough draft of an essay. Wolff obviously has an emergent account of evolution in mind—that is a continuous history of life marked by stages at which fundamentally new forms have appeared, where each new form of life, although grounded in the conditions of the previous and simpler stage, is intelligible only in terms of its own ordering principle. Wolff asks: “Cannot man, with his vaunted intelligence and his ever-increasing control over everything in nature except himself, learn how to become a better animal? His evolutionary future is in his own hands, and if they continue to be dirty and inept, he will re-infect it and himself; the prognosis would then be unfavorable.” (28 pages)

In this essay, which is part of the Holistic program, Wolff discusses in some depth the Western notion of the “Unconscious” and asserts that this domain can be investigated in mystical states of consciousness. After detailing some characteristics of such states, Wolff suggests that we visualize the Unconsciousness as a shape somewhat like a horseshoe magnet, one branch vertically above the other. The upper branch represents the “Superconscious” while the lower branch represents the “Subconscious.” After a discussion of this figure, Wolff concludes by noting that the aim of the Holistic program is more ambitious than simply the Liberation from relative consciousness: “Today we see the problem of Yoga greatly enlarged, since the presently envisaged end is Transformation of Nature as well as Liberation. This new aim imposes very serious and difficult problems that were not a part of the older Yoga.” (22 pages)

This appears to a free-standing note in which Wolff asserts that mathematics, in its fundamental nature, “is a Way of Consciousness” that is “self-contained or self-existent with respect to perceptual, aesthetic or empiric consciousness, but not self-contained or self-existent with respect to Introceptual Consciousness,” and that “conceptual logic is its main instrument of manifestation.” Wolff notes that a “fundamental implication of the foregoing is the Mathematics is a Way to Truth, or a potential Way to Truth, that is independent of, and not inferior to, Experience, including Spiritual Experience.” The document was found among lecture notes on “The Holistic” dated 1952. (1 page)