Preface To A Beautiful Book (By Humberto Maturana and Ximena Dávila)
This is a beautiful book, a book for people who love living and who want to recover the conscious awareness of belonging to a natural world that enables us to live. The tragedy for human beings in western culture is our break with the natural world. In our vanity and blindness, we believe ourselves to be different from the whole of nature. We believe ourselves to be different, but everything shows that we are like all animals and plants in our biological constitution. The only thing that distinguishes us from other animals is that we are beings living in language, and so we write books such as this, and we are conscious both of our likeness to all other living beings and of our inhabiting with them in a nonliving material world that makes living possible.
Living beings began on earth about 3,500 million years ago. This beginning initiated a present that is in continuous change, and that is spreading in the course of generations as a biosphere of interconnected and independent living beings in continuous transformation. Human beings arose some three million years ago in the midst of the biosphere, in a world of coherences, amid other living beings that are both alien and near-alien because they are very different from us, near because our living has to do with them in many dimensions, from the physiological to the spiritual.
The biosphere - which includes insects, plants, bacteria, all living beings and their life cycles—arises as an interconnected whole to which we belong and in which our living generates its shape and meaning.
It is not only our physiological living, e.g. food, health and disease, that connects us with other living beings, but we also connect with them in our psychic living, for example, in the aesthetic domain, when we perceive beauty. In this way, this book, which proposes the circularity of living, surprises us and delights us with its beauty. Why? Or how is it that we find such beauty in this circular connection with everything alive?
We believe that this beauty arises to our eyes because everything alive belongs to the same world of coherences. The aesthetic look reveals these coherences to us, and shows us the hidden dimensions of our existence.
Perhaps if we realize this, we will realize that to destroy the natural world is to destroy ourselves. This is not a romantic opinion. It is an invitation to reflection.
There is no doubt that we kill insects and other animals and plants in our living; but if we act in the understanding of our common belonging to the same biosphere, our killing is an act taken with ethical responsibility, not an act of blind destruction and extermination.
In the course of our history, we human beings have reflected on our living in the attempt to explain. We have generated many different explanatory theories under the belief that we inhabit a cosmos that exists independently of what we do. In the process of generating these theories, we introduced the concept of purpose, as if this were a key element in the intrinsic nature of the cosmos, particularly in relation to living beings.
However, if we reflect on our biological condition, what in fact we find in our explanations is that we use the operational coherence of our doings in our living to explain the coherence of our living, and we find also that we generate the cosmos that we live in explaining our living through the operational coherences of our living.
The fact that we live in this manner and that we can do everything that we can do, is one of the great wonders of our existence.
Living has no purpose. Human living as a biological happening has no purpose. However, we human beings generate meaning and purpose in our cultural-biological living. In doing so, we generate the possibility of living contradictions in our cultural desires. That is, we can find ourselves desiring what we do not want to desire, as a result of purposes or contradictory reasons that we see as valid, even though we know that they cannot be simultaneously valid.
Living as human beings in networks of conversations is therefore both our great treasure and our great danger. We choose to do what we want to do immersed in networks of conversations, and we choose not to do what we do not want to do in networks of conversations. What we do and do not want to do arises either from theories that we accept, or from cultural manners of living that we have learned in living with our parents, families, friends and colleagues, either as infants, as children, or as adults, young or old.
And it is because we are human beings who realize our living immersed in networks of conversations, open or closed, that we can reflect or learn to reflect, and that we can also lose and regain the spontaneity of acting, in living and dying, without a priori judgments such as heaven or hell.
It is on this basis of our human existence, constituting our human living immersed in networks of conversations, that paradise and hell appear, and it is in the same networks of conversations that hell can disappear and paradise can be recovered.
That is why this work written by Jane Cull makes such a beautiful book. The book is an opportunity to see and encounter the world of living and human living, to enjoy its beauty, and to expand our ability to act responsibly as conscious creators in the anthroposphere-biosphere harmony that contains us and makes us possible. This book must be read: look at it and live it as a spiritual opening, an expansion of awareness in which we become conscious of our belonging and harmony together in a wide ambience of caring, where we experience the legitimacy of being, love and acceptance, the unity of all, in our daily lives. It is in an opening such as this that ourselves are revealed to us; a manner that is inherently circular.
Matriztic Institute, Santiago Summer 2009
http://www.matriztica.org
Introduction
This book has been written from a concern, a concern about what we are doing to ourselves, the environment and the planet as a whole, as a result of the western worldview that we live and participate in. Through a journey that has taken over 14 years, I came to the conclusion that we needed a paradigm shift, a shift in worldviews, for our crisis is a perceptual one, how we perceive and relate with one another and the environment.
Fritjof Capra identifies this perceptual crisis in his book The Web of Life, where he outlines the massive problems that humanity is facing: poverty and starvation, increasing population levels, extinction of plant and animal species, environmental degradation, ethnic and tribal violence, just to mention a few. He acknowledges that: "Ultimately, these problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most of us...subscribe to an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world." (1) This perceptual crisis cannot be underestimated.
This crisis is an existential one because we are radically changing the environment through our actions, our consumptive and materialistic lifestyles. Environmentally, the toxins and pollutants that we produce impact not only ourselves, but also the other living systems that we share this planet with. So not only are we polluting and killing ourselves in the process, we are also destroying living and ecological systems that all life forms, including human beings, depend on for their survival and existence.
This is why The Circularity of Life has been written, to wake us up to the reality of our existence or rather our mutual co-existence both socially and environmentally. We need to distinguish the consequences of our worldview and actions as they impact on large and small scales.
Circularity is the core of our mutual co-existence on planet Earth. We live in a circular flow of systemic interconnectedness and mutual interdependency. This is of course obscured by the prevailing predominant western paradigm of cause and effect, linear and dualistic thinking that is based on separation. This perceived separation stems from denial, the suppression of our natural biological emotionings ( emotions, moods and states), where everything is perceived as being external and independent from us. What we need to see is that we are not separate, rather we are systemically interconnected and mutually interdependent with the web of life. What we do to the environment, the biosphere and other living systems, we do to ourselves.
Often in our culture we put the sustainability of human life at the core of environmental change. This, however, is not the answer. Rather it is, as I see it, we must put the sustainability and viability of the web of life at the core, because without that nothing else would exist. We are part of the bigger picture, yes, but the bigger picture is not just about us. It is about life in general, the mutual co-existence of all living systems in the web of life. In sustaining the web of life, we sustain ourselves. This is a necessary perceptual shift for humanity to live sustainably on the planet.
This book provides the necessary understandings of how we can do that through understanding the circularity of life and our biology, how we do what we do as biological living systems, how we construct worlds, realities and experiences in language according to our emotioning ( emotions, moods, states). This provides an understanding of not only of what we have constructed and are presently living as our present worldview, but also how we can construct another kind of social reality that is sustainable.
Table of Contents
| PREFACE TO A BEAUTIFUL BOOK (By Humberto Maturana and Ximena Dávila) | IX |
| INTRODUCTION | XIII |
| AUTHOR'S PREFACE: THE JOURNEY | XV |
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | XVII |
| CHAPTER 1: THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF LIFE | 1 |
| CHAPTER 2: OUR BIOLOGY: A CYCLICAL VIEW | 5 |
| The Formation of Biological Living Systems | 6 |
| Pathways and Cyclical Activity | 7 |
| Waves, Patterns and Self-Organising Activity | 8 |
| Cyclical Durations | 12 |
| CHAPTER 3: CO-EXISTENCE: INTERCONNECTEDNESS | 14 |
| Co-evolution | 14 |
| Boundaries, Closure and Behavior | 15 |
| Waves and Motion | 20 |
| Sound Waves and Human Relations | 22 |
| The Surface of Our Bodies: Interactions | 25 |
| CHAPTER 4: HUMAN IDENTITY: SEPARATION AND INTERCONNECTEDNESS | 27 |
| Authoritarian Relations | 28 |
| Materialism | 30 |
| Differences in Denial | 31 |
| The We | 33 |
| CHAPTER 5: BIOLOGY: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TWO WORLDS | 35 |
| Origins: Our Present Worldview | 37 |
| How Suppression Arises | 37 |
| What We Do In Suppression | 39 |
| Controlling Our Emotioning: What Happens? | 43 |
| Lying and Deception | 44 |
| The Desire for Certainty | 47 |
| A Culture and Worldview of Denial | 48 |
| Denial and Destruction of the Environment | 52 |
| The Social Construction of Differences | 55 |
| Suffering | 57 |
| Social Isolation | 58 |
| How We Are Systemically Interconnected | 58 |
| Awareness of Emotioning | 58 |
| Trust: A Shift in Worldview | 62 |
| Maintaining Trust | 65 |
| Trust and Stabilised Wave Patterns | 66 |
| Social and Environmental Consequences of Trust | 67 |
| CHAPTER 6: A CIRCULAR VIEW: THE TRADITIONAL WAY OF LIFE | 69 |
| Working in Harmony with Nature: Cycles and Interconnectedness | 73 |
| CHAPTER 7: SUSTAINABILITY | 77 |
| Global Warming and Fossil Fuel Alternatives | 78 |
| Organic Farming Methods | 82 |
| Consumer Packaging and Waste | 84 |
| Clean Production | 85 |
| Healthy Gardens and Healthy Food | 88 |
| Toxic Waste Removal | 89 |
| Energy Conservation | 91 |
| Car Free Zones | 92 |
| Wildlife Preservation: Biodiversity | 93 |
| Forestry | 95 |
| Fishing | 97 |
| Chemicals in the Home | 99 |
| Ethical Investing | 100 |
| Sustainable Technologies | 102 |
| Sustainable Societies: Constructing A Sustainable World | 105 |
| REFERENCES | 109 |
| INDEX | 115 |