From the ‘crisis of perception’ to the ‘systems view of life’
After initially training as a zoologist and marine biologist at the University of Edinburgh and the University of California (Santa Cruz), I have spent the last 20 years of my life in search of answers to one extremely complex challenge: How can we create a more sustainable human presence on Earth?
Extracts Below the Fold
Holistic thinking is the new way of thinking needed to (dis)solve the problems created by reductionist thinking.
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In today’s leading life sciences, evolution is no longer seen as a struggle for existence but as a collaborative dance and exploration of novelty. Capra pointed out that “sustainability is a dynamic process of co-evolution rather than a static state. Sustainability is a property of an entire web of relationships” (personal comment) rather than a characteristic of a single individual, company, country or species.
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Human beings are natural systems thinkers, but like any innate capacity, this talent must be understood and cultivated.
Peter Senge (2008: 167)
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The ‘living systems view’ of life is not an objectification of nature and biology as separate from the interior (individual and collective) experience of consciousness, but understands life and consciousness as fundamentally intertwined manifestations of one and the same process.
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his consciousness can be loosely described as a ‘perspective-making, perspective-taking’ system that creates, collects, and organizes deeper, wider, more sophisticated points-of-view as it develops.
Ken Wilber & Allan Combs (2010)
Read full subchapter at Medium.com.
[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
