Putting it all together: reframing our view of the world to change

Putting it all together: reframing our view of the world to change our practice

Our cultural narrative shapes our individual experience of how we perceive and explain what is out there. Becoming more aware of this process is the first step towards what Einstein referred to as the new way of thinking that might help us to resolve the ‘problems’ created by the narrative of separation (the way of thinking that created these problems in the first place). I believe that the narrative of interbeing and participatory whole systems thinking will help us to transform and/or resolve many of these problems. (Wahl, 2016: 103)

It will now also have become apparent to you that there is strong similarity between indigenous and many non-Western ways of knowing and the ideas that have developed in Deep Ecology. Ecological and ecosystem thinking looks at the relationships between phenomena rather than the parts. Restoring health, for example, is not about fixing a specific body part but about restoring the balance between the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social dimensions of a person’s life. The ecological paradigm fits with the notion, previously referred to, that the mind is not separate from the world; rather, that reality is always in subjective–objective relation. Thus, cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world, but a continual bringing forth of the world through the process of living (Maturana and Varela, 1987). As Gregory Bateson (1979) argues, we need to move our focus from seeing ‘things’ to seeing patterns, we are part of any field we study and, to understand the field, we must also reflect on ourselves as part of that world, what Capra (1996) calls the ‘web of life’. As participants in that living system, we need to cultivate the art of appropriate participation.

The ideas presented in this chapter are at their heart very simple. Everything is connected. However, we have conveyed those ideas largely through a propositional approach whereas, if we are true to the philosophy, you can only really engage with the ideas through a process of coming to know with all your experience – emotional, practical as well as cognitive. We urge you to explore other modes of knowledge creation to explore these ideas, such as poetry, art and human sculpture.

Challenge yourself:

1. Spend some time in nature without any technology, and experience how you feel before, during and after? Find a way to express those feelings through any medium you choose: art, sculpture, music …

2. Take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle. On one side of the paper draw a figure (which can be a stick person) that expresses how you are feeling at the moment. On the other side draw a figure representing how you would like to feel.

What small thought or action will move you from the figure on the first side to the one on the second?

We have suggested that Western science provides a useful but limited tool for understanding reality and needs to be integrated with embodied and other forms of knowledge to help us to make good deliberative interruptions that can change the world. Thinking in a participatory way is a different way of knowing; it alters our view of the world and leads to ways of being that are based on cooperation and a world in common. Ecological ways of knowing lie at the core of this worldview, and we can take metaphors from the natural world to understand communities and their relationships in a more dynamic way. We can also learn much from indigenous philosophy and ways of being. It is important, however, to remember Bateson’s (1972) reminder that these are maps, not the reality. They are frames that affect our understanding of the world and hence underpin how we take actions.

What are the frames through which you view the world?

Wilber et al (2008) provide a useful model to help us understand with our limited Western minds the different interrelated elements that we need to address at one and the same time in the process of expanding consciousness. There are echoes of the medicine wheel in its quadrant structure. Although largely rejected by academics, these ideas have been incorporated and applied to a variety of contexts, including recent work on integral cities by Marilyn Hamilton (2019) and by Beth Sanders in her book Nest Cities (Sanders, 2020a). The model has been applied to the adaptive cycle in systems in Wahl’s work on designing regenerative cultures, where he describes it as ‘the rhythmic dance between order and chaos, between stability and transformation as a fundamental pattern in complex living systems’ (Wahl, 2016: 107); see Figure 3.4. It is also found in the notion of spiral dynamics approaches to organisations, developed by Beck and Cowan (2014), and in relation to creating organisations for the next stage of human consciousness, by Laloux (2014).

The integral map can make our experiences of participation more intelligible in ways that can guide wise action. Our individual and collective relating to the world actually brings forth the world we experience … [it] includes the dualism of the ‘out there’ of objective description and the ‘in here’ of subjective experience. (Wahl, 2016: 75)