Category: Life

  • Doing little things with great love

    I started searching for life-giving ways of working in 2012. I think Daniel Wahl and Satish Kumar capture the essence of it in their conversation on Feb 1, 2023. It’s about doing little things with great love. The following statement by Daniel particularly caught my attention: 41:16 >>Daniel Wahl: The old medieval guilds … have…

  • Governance in harmony with Life

    Alfred Huang describes an ancient culture seeking harmony with Life, governance without coercion, in Understanding the I Ching. What they knew 3000 years ago, we need to relearn today. My emphasis in italics. The I Ching reveals an ancient culture that honors Heaven, esteems the Earth and expresses love for the people. It espouses a…

  • Bill Plotkin on Purpose

    The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as a human being. Bill Plotkin has the following perspective to share on purpose (my emphasis in italics): Our Soul purpose is categorically different…

  • Bill Plotkin on Soul, Felt-sense, and Metaphor

    The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as human beings. Bill Plotkin uses common words in uncommon ways. Soul is, for example, an ecological concept. Soul Bill Plotkin writes (my emphasis…

  • Craig Holdrege on Living Thinking

    I want to show that it is possible to move beyond object thinking and develop what I will call living thinking. Living thinking is a participatory way of knowing that transcends the dichotomies of man-nature, subject-object, or mind-matter, which are so ingrained in the Western mind and form the bedrock of object thinking. One of…

  • Classical physics is a limiting case of the physics of life

    Robert Rosen points out in his Essays on Life Itself that one of the striking features of Erwin Schrödinger’s essay What is Life? is his apologies, both for his physics, and for himself personally.1 While repeatedly proclaiming the ‘universality’ of contemporary physics, he equally repeatedly points out (quite rightly) the utter failure of its laws…

  • We need a new worldview more consistent with life

    Christopher Alexander presented propositions about living structure throughout his four books on The Nature of Order.1 They are, most importantly, results of observation. Many are based on felt sense.2 Unless our worldview is changed to one which is more consistent with the felt reality of life, the idea of life, aliveness, or livingness, will not…

  • Life brings responsiveness

    Iain McGilchrist conveys in The Matter With Things the complexity, responsiveness, and purposiveness of living cells — let alone trillons of them acting together.1 Iain McGilchrist maintains that “life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to and within the world“.2 What life brings is the capacity for valuing. All living creatures are able to…

  • Life and unfolding wholeness

    We need to discover how to sense what is unfolding rather than simply trying to execute a plan… —John Huss 1 …all our experience…is…a complex flow, a constant unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures. It exists in process and in relationship… —Iain McGilchrist 2 It is…a process of unfolding…, in which the whole precedes the…

  • Personal feeling is directly connected to deeper order and life

    Personal feeling is directly connected to deeper order and life. It is my vulnerable inner self being connected to the world, participating in all things. It is, for example, the feeling of being part of the ocean. The personal nature of deeper order appears in nature. The ocean, with its waves, is personal, and has…