MUSICAL BEGINNINGS I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1932. My mother was a professor of piano and my uncle, who lived with us, was a philosopher. Both were influences for me as a child.
I started my life as a musician, playing my first public piano concert at nine years old in Budapest, with the Hungarian Philharmonic. I went on to win the Geneva International Music Competition when I was 15, receiving invitations to Paris and New York. When I was 16 I was the youngest individual to receive the highest degree in music - the artist diploma of the Franz Liszt Academy of Budapest.
SCIENCE FRICTION In my late teens and early 20s, I rediscovered an interest I had as a child - namely questions about life: Who are we? Where are we going? How do we fit in and relate to nature? My knowledge of the sciences is self-taught. I would read intensely during train and plane rides - from country to country for performances. I finally decided to write down some of my notions. From 1959, I kept a diary of ideas.
After a concert in Holland in 1962, someone asked me about this interest and I showed him my notes on the relationship between human society and nature. The next morning, he came back and said he'd like to publish them, which he did in 1963. Turns out, he was an editor at a Dutch publishing house. [Laszlo's first book was titled Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction.]
There came a point when I was playing a recital in Germany and I noticed in the middle of one of the movements that I was so involved with the ideas I was working on I quite forgot where I was - wasn't quite sure if I was still at the beginning or at the end of a piece. It was tragic because if I made the wrong choice I would either skip the entire movement or I would repeat it. I made out fine that time but it made me realise that I could not do both things if I wanted to do either well. So I accepted an invitation from Yale University [in the United States] to spend a semester at its department of philosophy and do research, even though, at that point, my only degree was in music. Effective immediately, I became a professional academic who occasionally gave concerts for charity. I have since written 69 books and contributed to over 50 other publications, with essays on integral thinking.
DIGGING A WHOLE You could use the term 'wholistic', in the scientific sense, to describe my ideas about life. It is about systemic thinking, thinking in terms of wholes and focusing on what something belongs to, rather than what it is on its own.
In typical Western medicine, if you have a complaint about your liver, [doctors] will focus on that organ. They don't look at it in context. [Now] scientists are starting to look at the entire organism, even the surroundings, in terms of psychological make-up, family conditions and so on - all that enters into health. Traditional Chinese medicine is entirely wholistic.