Reconnecting to Nature: Self and World
This is an excerpt from the Worldview dimension of Gaia Education’s Design for Sustainability curriculum.
“It is true that anything I can see is not the real Seer — because everything I see is the Seer. As I go within to find my real self, I find only the world … the real self within is actually the real world without. The subject and the object, the inside and the outside are and always have been one. There is no primary boundary. The world is my body, and what I am looking out of is what I am looking at. The real self resides neither within nor without because subject and object are actually not-two.” — Ken Wilber (1979)
How exactly we understand and explain the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘world’ lies at the heart of any worldview. The whole, whether you call it the Kosmos, the universe, or pure consciousness, has no direct means of perceiving itself from outside (since it is the whole, the all, and there is nothing outside it). We, therefore, need the first distinction, the first differentiation of the whole, in order to create a perspective from which that totality can be experienced. This separation creates the possibility of the self to emerge. It brings into being a conscious participant/observer who can experience the whole in all its magnificence.
The blind spot of the modern worldview has been to assume that because of this distinction the self has to be an ‘other’, something separate from that whole, rather than a co-creative participant in the creative unfolding of that whole. The distinction can be based on inclusion, just as well as exclusion. This may all sound very philosophical and theoretical. You may want to revisit the section on ‘organizing ideas’ and on ‘holistic and analytical consciousness’ in the first part of this worldview module, to help you understand how important these organizing ideas or meta-design decisions can be in shaping how we see the world and our role in it.
In exploring the relationship between self and world, we are also exploring the relationship between humanity and nature as well as the relationship between mind and body, and between consciousness and matter. As we have seen in the section on ‘the emerging holistic worldview’ modern science and ancient wisdom are beginning to converge on a new kind of understanding that regards these dualistic categories not as mutually exclusive but rather as fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.
Gregrory Bateson viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system, the Mind, that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.
The biologist, anthropologist and co-founder of cybernetics, Gregory Bateson, was one of the first to begin the scientific dialogue about the relationship between ‘self and world’ and ‘mind and body’. In the mid-1950s Batson wrote: “The individual nexus of pathways which I call “me” is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind.” Batson warned:
“This false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. We have imagined that we are a unit of survival and have to see to our own survival, and we imagined that the unit of survival is the separate species, whereas in reality through the history of evolution, it is the individual plus the environment, the species plus the environment, for they are essentially symbiotic.” — Gregory Bateson(in Macy, 1994)
To overcome the planetary crisis of perception, which lies at the core of the environmental, economic and social crisis of today, we have to individually and collectively overcome the pervasive illusion of our “self” being separated from the entirety of existence. It is now possible to integrate some of the central insights of modern earth system science, physics, ecology, and neuroscience to tell a scientifically informed story about who we are as participants in an expanding and transforming universe and a living self-regulating planet Earth. Such a reintegration is deeply necessary at the beginning of the planetary era. It will help us to create a more sustainable human presence on Earth, to honour the value of scientific and spiritual perspectives alike, and to create a new sense of place and sense of belonging for humanity. John Seed, one of the co-founders of the Deep Ecology movement and the Rainforest Information Centre has said it beautifully:
“Through thousands of years of anthropocentric conditioning, absorbed by osmosis since the day we were born, we have inherited shallow, fictitious selves, and have created an incredibly pervasive illusion of separation from nature. … As long as the environment is ‘out there,’ we may leave it to some special interest group like environmentalists to protect while we look after our ‘selves.’ The matter changes when we deeply realize that the nature ‘out there’ and the nature ‘in here’ are one and the same, that the sense of separation no matter how pervasive is nonetheless totally illusory. I would call the need for such realisation the central psychological or spiritual challenge of our age.” — John Seed (1993).
John Seed; the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) was born out of the successful struggle to save the sub-tropical rainforests of New South Wales, Australia 1981. Since then they have been involved in campaigns and projects which protect rainforests and at the same time recognise the legitimate development aspirations of rainforest peoples.
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This is an excerpt from the Worldview dimension of Gaia Education’s Design for Sustainability online programme. You can learn more about how the work is viewed from a Gaian perspective in our online course where we will cover topics, including Holistic Worldviews, Reconnecting with Nature, Transformation of Consciousness, and more.
The course will start on 1 June 2020. You can find out more about this course here. You are able to get a 20% Early Bird discount if you register by 20 April 2020 (Discount code: WVGE20GAIA).
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