If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on...
Religion is the organized attempt to understand spiritual experience, to interpret it with words and concepts, and to use this interpretation as the source of moral guidelines for the religious commun...
Communication, according to Maturana, is not primarily a transmission of information, but rather a coordination of behavior between living organisms.
He had a deep respect for life, a special compassion for animals, and great awe and reverence for nature’s complexity and abundance. While a brilliant inventor and designer himself, he always thought...
Genuine mental health would involve a balanced interplay of both modes of experience, a way of life in which one's identification with the ego is playful and tentative rather than absolute and mandato...
The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear line...
Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in th...
The conceptual problem at the center of contemporary healthcare is the confusion between disease processes and disease origins. Instead of asking why an illness occurs and trying to remove the conditi...
Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in...
… all living systems are complex - i.e., highly nonlinear - networks …
The parallel between scientific experiments and mystical (read spiritual) experiences may seem surprising in view of the very different nature of these acts of observation. Physics perform experiments...
The double role of living systems as parts and wholes requires the interplay of two opposite tendencies: an integrative tendency to function as part of a larger whole, and a self-assertive, or self-or...
As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time – energy, the environment, climate change, food security, financial security – cannot be u...
The properties of a particle can only be understood in terms of its activity—of its interaction with the surrounding environment—and that the particle, therefore, cannot be seen as an isolated entity...
Taught us to be aware of ourselves as isolated egos existing inside our bodies; it has led us to set a higher value on mental than manual work; it has enabled huge industries to sell products – especi...
There is another way in which Arne Naess characterized deep ecology. The essence of deep ecology, he wrote, is to ask deeper questions (quoted by Devall and Sessions, 1985, p. 74). This is also the es...
Albert Einstein, for one, repeatedly expressed these feelings, as in the following celebrated passage (Einstein, 1949, p. 5): The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundament...
Systems thinking is contextual, which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a l...
Care flows naturally if the self is widened and deepened so that protection of free Nature is felt and conceived as protection of ourselves…Just as we need no morals to make us breathe…[so] if your se...
Throughout the living world, we find living systems nesting within other living systems.