It is very strange that we carry on behaving as we do. If we were on a walk in a forest and found ourselves on the wrong path, then the last thing we would do is carry on walking in the wrong direction. We would instead retrace our steps, go back to where we took the wrong turn, and follow the right path. This is why I feel it is so important to offer not just an overview of our present situation and not just a list of the solutions. I certainly want the world to wake up to the fact that we are travelling in a very dangerous direction, but it is crucial that we retrace how this has come to be, otherwise we will not head onto a better path in the future.
Crisis of perception
I would suggest that one of the major problems that increasingly confronts us is that the predominant mode of thinking keeps us firmly on this wrong path. When people talk of things like an ‘environmental crisis’ or a ‘financial crisis’ what they are actually describing are the consequences of a much deeper problem which comes down to what I would call a ‘crisis of perception’. It is the way we see the world that is ultimately at fault. If we simply concentrate on fixing the outward problems without paying attention to this central, inner problem, then the deeper problem remains, and we will carry on casting around in the wilderness for the right path without a proper sense of where we took the wrong turning.
That is why I wanted to put this book together. With Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly’s help, I want to demonstrate that we have grown used to looking at the world in a particular way that obscures the danger of a very disconnected approach. All of the solutions I want to suggest depend for their success upon looking at the world in a different way. It is not strictly a new way and that is why we will travel back in time to see the world as the ancients saw it, but it is a way of seeing things that stands very much at odds with what has become the only reasonable way of looking at the world. If that reaction starts to grow then I urge you to hold onto one important fact, that this timeless view of things is rooted in the human condition and in human experience.
It may be a bit daunting if I suggest at the outset that I want to include in this journey a brief tour of ‘traditional philosophy’ but I can assure you that such an explanation will be painless and that everything will be explained simply. Not least because it is simple.
Perhaps it is worth remembering what that word ‘philosophy’ means. It is a combination of two Greek words: one meaning ‘love of’ and the other meaning ‘wisdom’. So, to be a ‘philosopher’ is to be a lover of wisdom, and the wisdom this refers to is human wisdom, of the sort that has been handed down from generation to generation in all societies throughout the world. Until quite recently, this time-honoured wisdom framed the way all civilizations behaved. It emphasized the right way to see our relationship with the natural world, it taught in practical ways how to work with the grain of Nature rather than against it, and it warned of the dangers of overstepping the limits imposed by Nature on herself. In short, this wisdom emphasized the need for, and the means of maintaining, harmony.
Islamic patterning depicted in the Attarine Madrasa Fes. This geometry is found throughout the natural world and is demonstrated in the relationships between planetary orbits and their proportions. As we shall see, it is the grammar that underpins the whole of life.
Ancient wisdom
As I first struggled to understand what age-old thinking like this could teach us, I began to notice a curious connection between the many problems our modern world view had created and a subject that increasingly fascinated me.
The five-petalled rose pattern traced over 8 years in the skies above Earth by our nearest neighbour, Venus, depicted 400 years ago by the German astronomer, Johannes Kepler. It is the source of the familiar fivepointed star found in many natural forms and in the world’s sacred architecture.
It was a surprising subject. It was the design and symbolism of the architecture of the temples, mosques, and cathedrals of the world. The more I learned about it, the more I became aware that there was a similarity between the way ancient civilizations built their sacred structures and the way the natural world itself is structured and behaves. The ratios and proportions that define the way natural organisms grow and unfold are the same as those that underpin the structure of the most famous ancient buildings. I was among a number of people who began to piece together a great jigsaw which revealed, much to my surprise, a profound insight into what really lay at the heart of ancient thinking. I shall explain this with lots of images in the section called ‘The Grammar of Harmony’ in Chapter 3, which gives context to the history of modernity, simply because there is a direct relationship between the patterns that inspired the builders of all those great masterpieces of sacred architecture and the way the natural world operates when it is in a healthy state of balance. The two speak with the same ‘grammar’.
Seeing this, I began to realize that the great juggernaut of industrialization relies upon a somewhat aberrant kind of language – a man-made one – which articulates a world view that ignores Nature’s grammar. Much of the syntax of this synthetic language is out of synchrony with Nature’s patterns and proportions and this is why it so often jars with the language of Nature. This is why so many Modernist buildings don’t feel ‘right’ to so many people, even though they may find them clever; or perhaps why we feel uncomfortable with factory farming, even though it makes economic sense because it supplies such a lot of food at such low prices; or why we feel something is missing from a form of medicine that treats the body like a machine and does not accommodate the needs of the mind or the spirit.
I find, by contrast, that if people are encouraged to immerse themselves in Nature’s grammar and geometry – discovering how it works, how it controls life on Earth, and how humanity has expressed it in so many great works of art and architecture – they are often led to acquire some remarkably deep philosophical insights into the meaning and purpose of Nature and into what it means to be aware and alive in this extraordinary Universe. This is particularly so in young people and the results of such immersion are as heartening as they are surprising. They help to point to the changes in thinking that we need to make to achieve the wider vision of a Sustainability Revolution.
Essentially it is the spiritual dimension to our existence that has been dangerously neglected during the modern era – the dimension which is related to our intuitive feelings about things. The increasing tendency in mainstream Western thinking to ignore this spiritual dimension comes from a combination of the growth in cynicism during the latter half of the twentieth century and the wholesale dismissal of the big philosophical questions about our existence. The dominant world view only accepts as fact what it sees in material terms and this opens us up to a very dangerous state of affairs, not least because the more extreme this approach becomes, the more extreme the reaction tends to be at the other end of the scale, so we end up with two fundamentalist, reductionist camps that oppose each other. On the one side, a fundamentalist secularism and on the other, fundamentalist religions. This seems to happen in Christianity as it does in Islam and, wherever it happens, the more puritanical and literal the religious interpretation becomes, the more a culture abandons and then even attacks the age-old, symbolic interpretations of its own tradition – those teachings which actually emphasize the necessary limits to our behaviour. With so much emphasis on the historical accuracy of the origins of a religion, the search for mystery appears to give way to a vain search for certainty. What was a traditional attitude becomes a ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ one, all too intolerant of restraint, and so the limits – Nature’s necessary limits – end up being overshadowed by dogma.
Has this come about as a result of one dimension of our outlook becoming too dominant in our thinking? And if so, what is the nature of that outlook? Having considered these questions long and hard,