Changing Worldviews
Towards a Holistic-Relational Worldview
Integral ecology invites us to see the world not as an assembly of physical objects located in space and changing their position over time, as suggested by Newtonian physics, but rather as an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience perceived from many different angles. The world is therefore a process of becoming, consisting of a multiplicity of self-organizing patterns of activity in various relationships to each other.
At the center of this holistic-relational worldview is a participatory understanding of our underlying nature and the organic wholeness of the cosmos that we inhabit and co-create. The world is conceived as a network of relationships in which everything is intertwined and interdependent; nothing has a selfhood of its own; everything is in a state of continuous change and transformation. One therefore cannot understand the property of any part without understanding how this part is related to the others and how the others influence it.
Recommended reading:
Bortoft, Henri (1996). The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature. Lindisfarne Books
Bohm, D. (1983). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge
Briggs, J.P. and Peat, F.D. (1984). Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness. Simon & Schuster
Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. J. (1992). The Tree of Knowledge. Shambhala
Watts, Alan W. (1991). Nature, Man and Woman. Vintage Books