through connecting with & observing the world inside us & around us we may become aware of the interconnected, impermanent nature of reality • the realization that we all die & are part of the same inexplicable something may bring about compassion with others by feeling connected through love & suffering (Tolle 1999) • through this deep insight into the nature of reality, our understanding of who we are changes and allows us to operate from a new place (Tubali 2019)

I see an opportunity to liberate ourselves from destructive & oppressive social structures (social institutions and our personal selves) by integrating other forms of story telling, our emotions, our bodily experiences, our intuition, and connection to our inner source (Monica Dennis) into spaces that seek transformative change for everyone’s thriving (ecological justice) • the internal process is of importance because our body-mind-spirit complexes are the instruments through which communication & action emerge

our internal world reflects structures of external social systems (Scharmer 2015) • therefore, our inner world is a great place to start the process of self-transformation and self-improvement • the personal process will inevitably affect our social systems because our internal values and beliefs condition the social structures we create • since our social systems recreate themselves and the conditions for their emergence (Luhmann 1998), a high level of consciousness (personal & collective) of embedded values & beliefs in the system structures is essential in creating social systems conducive to a thriving world for all

We see a misalignment between the engineering field’s constitutive-interests rooted in the reductionist sciences and the needs of the 21st century in the socio-political, environmental, and spiritual realms. Following Habermas’s critical theory, the knowledge-constitutive interest of the natural and reductionist sciences lie primarily in the manipulation of the physical world for the purpose of predictable and quantifiable outcomes by reducing the studied system to its smallest components. Such interests are unfit to understand and intervene in our world; a living world of dynamic complexity. We argue that a renewed science of holism will create the conditions for a critical engineering education that can mimic the properties of living systems to recreate a thriving existence for all living beings on this planet. In this thesis, we identify six loose web-nodes to draw a picture of a science for the whole: (1) Natural phenomena such as emergence, self-organization, or autopoiesis acquaint us with the nature of nature. (2) The study of our world brings us closer to our cosmos’s mysteries, which naturally introduces spirituality to the holistic web. (3) Dynamically complex systems theory attempts to understand the relationships between parts of the system to make assumptions about future behavior or opportunities for intervention. Practices that are commensurate with the nature of reality are crucial for an effective engagement with living systems. Such practices include (4) methods for a co-creation of the future and (5) research and learning methodologies that embrace unpredictable emergence of insights and emancipate us from hidden oppressive power structures. (6) Lastly, a holistic science includes the reductionist sciences to analyze, predict, and control non-living, simple systems. Our hope is that a holistic science will re-shape engineers’ understanding to learn and interact with our world to recreate the nature of nature in our systems: a thriving existence for all.