The ancient Greeks called her Gaia, the earthly presence of anima mundi, the vast and mysterious primordial intelligence that steadily gives birth to all that exists, the great nourishing subjectivity—at once both spiritual and material—that sustains all that is.

In quiet moments in my study, or outdoors, this deeper voice convinced me that the prospects are bleak unless we can once again relate to the Earth not as a thing or as a machine, but as a strange creature that improvises its own unfolding in the cosmos through the ongoing creativity of evolution and self-transformation.

We must oppose the tendency of conventional science to de-personalise the world and hence to control it.

Active Looking Hold a small stone comfortably in your hand, and keep it at the same orientation for the duration of the exercise. Relax, and let go of any determination to achieve a result. Now look carefully at the parts of the stone’s surface. Pay very careful attention to all the subtle changes in colour and texture, to any scratches or marks, t

Goethe paid careful attention to how intuitive insights dawned on him in the very midst of careful observation, and was very interested in how Galileo used his own intuitive perceptions of swinging pendulums to develop an understanding of the behaviour of falling bodies in general.

In this method, careful attention is paid to the phenomenon being studied through a process of active looking, without attempting to reduce the experience to quantities or explanations. For Henri Bortoft, active looking involves the “redeployment of attention into sense perception and away from the verbal-intellectual mind”. In this way of seeing,

Physicist Fritjof Capra points out that this new approach, which he calls ‘systems thinking’, involves shifting our focus from objects to processes and relationships, from hierarchies to networks and from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge. What does this mean? A key insight in systems thinking is that we can understand a great deal more a