of the
cosmos in our bodies and our consciousness.
The next step in our evolution is driven on the one hand by increasing crises with accompanying
unrest and turbulence, and on the other by a deepening and ever more evident unsustainability
in the world. The economic, social and political crises of our time are clear and objective evidence
that the kind of thinking dominating our world is flawed. Its fragmentation into I/you, we/world,
man/nature dualities cannot ensure the survival of the seven billion humans of the global family. It creates polarization in society and gaps between humanity and nature.
Einstein was right: we cannot solve the significant problems of our time with
the same kind of thinking that gave rise to them. We need new thinking.
Young people, and all people young in spirit, realize that to confront the problems of our time we
need something radically and fundamentally new. We need a new culture. Culture is not a luxury,
the exclusive province of the privileged; it is the essence of how we see the world, and ourselves
in the world. It is the ground of our values and the warrant of our aspirations.
The new culture we seek must offer an embracing view of the human being, of society, and of
the web of life on the planet. It must suggest a pragmatic ethic for life in a globally extended,
interacting and intercommunicating world. And it must enable us to transcend the fragmented
and ever more dysfunctional culture that still dominates the contemporary world.
Ervin Laszlo
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d I am in the world.
I am part of nature, and nature is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with all living things. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the web of life on the planet.
I am part of society, and society is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with my fellow humans. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the community of humans on the planet.
I am more than a skin-and-bone material organism: mybody, and its cells and organs are manifestations of what is truly me: a self-sustaining, self-evolving dynamic system arising, persisting and developing in interaction with everything around me.
I am one of the highest, most evolved manifestations of the drive toward coherence and wholeness in the universe. All systems drive toward coherence and wholeness in interaction with all other systems, and my essence is this cosmic drive. It is the same essence, the same spirit that is inherent in all the things that arise and evolve in nature, whether on this planet or elsewhere in the infinite reaches of space and time.
There are no absolute boundaries and divisions in this world, only transition points where one set of relations yields prevalence to another. In me, in this self-maintaining and self-evolving coherence- and wholeness-oriented system, the relations that integrate the cells and organs of my body are prevalent. Beyond my body other relations gain prevalence: those that drive toward coherence and wholeness in society and in nature.
The separate identity I attach to other humans and other things is but a convenient convention that facilitates my interaction with them. My family and my community are just as much “me” as the organs of my body. My body and mind, my family and my community are interacting and interpenetrating variously prevalent elements in the network of relations that encompasses all things in nature and the human world ...
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