The Gaian Institute
A Holistic-Relational View of Reality

"Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our philosophical orientation draws on a perspective embracing the human spirit, science and our planet.  It combines the intuitive visions of the great wisdom traditions, and the constructive and unifying insights of modern science.  We reject the dominant worldview and social paradigm based on mechanistic thinking, instrumental rationality and economic growth, which render humans isolated from each other and from the rest of nature.

Our worldview is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond objectivist scientific rationalism, to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations, and its perpetual cycles of change and transformation. At the center of this worldview is an understanding of our underlying nature and the organic wholeness of the cosmos that we inhabit and co-create. According to this worldview:

  • The Universe is a unified, self-generated, self-sustained organic wholeness rather than an assembly of physical objects, as suggested by Newtonian physics.
  • Everything in the Universe is intertwined and interdependent; nothing has a selfhood of its own; everything is in a state of continuous change and transformation. One cannot understand the property of any part without understanding how this part is related to the others and how the others influence it.
  • Our encounter with the world is transactional, interactive; to touch, see or hear something or someone does not tell us either about our self all on its own, nor about a being out there all on its own.  It tells us about a being in a state of interrelation and co-presence with us.

Recommended reading:

Bourne, E. J. (2008). Global Shift: How a New Worldview is Transforming Humanity. New Herbinger Publications

Bohm, D. (1983). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge

Bortoft, H. (1996). The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science. Floris Books

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2006). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge