' I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe'

R. Buckmister Fuller

This quote from R. Buckmister Fuller, provides a rich example of the way that our language can influence how we percieve and experience our world. This idea that we are somehow 'things' that are static and in seperation to nature and the universe at large is a way of conceiving of ourselves that seems ubiqutious. Yet the concept of our 'self' as a process through which matter and energy flows is in many ways closer to what we actually know in our experience. We are not in any way static, our bodies and cells are changing all the time, we are in every moment communicating and interacting with our environment and it is responding in turn; in each breath we take we don't just breath in air, but we also breath out and change the chemical composition of the air around us, we are an emergent property of our context, and this context is one of evolution change and increasing complexity. Yet there is something that exists in our experience of being human that leads us away from these grand and profound realisations of the way things are....Gregory Baetson, a profound systems thinker and phiolosopher provides an explanation for this in the quote below:

'All peoples of the world, I believe, certainly all existing peoples, have something like language and, so far as I can understand the talk of linguists, it seems that all languages depend on a particulate representation of the universe. All languages have something like nouns and verbs, isolating objects, entities, events and abstractions. In whatever way you phrase it 'difference' will always propose delimitations and boundaries. If our means of describing the world arises out of notions of difference...then our picture of the universe will nessasarily be particulate...'

In this way the structure of our language can fool us into thinking it is more than it is, the stuff of descriptions and lead us to understand it to be inherent to the nature of the world. According to this idea we all unkowingly project the linguistic relationships of a particular language upon the universe and see them there. This according to Baetson leads us into a conception of the world that is not able to see wholes, and rather engages us in trying to understand the world and ourselves by the reduction and isolation of variables and parts and making the assumptiion that somehow we can know the world via understanding the part, not its relationship with the whole.

The Brain itself is wonderful metaphor for understanding these ideas. While modern neuroscience has provided us with what appears to be deep understandings of the structure of the brain and the structure of the approximatly 100 billion neurons that the 'average brain contains' this understanding in itself does not get us much closer to understanding the complex and emergent properties that evolve from the cybernetic interaction of these cells with each other. The sheer complexity of the non-linear interactions is something which cannot even be glimpsed by understanding the part, i.e. the cell itself, and the cells function and role cannot be understood without looking at how it interacts and is related to the whole as the brain itself cannot be really understood without its relationship to the body. With this premise in mind it can also be stated that with all living systems, when we seperate them in our awareness, we are always looking at both a whole and a part, the cell is a subsyetm of the brain, the brain a subsystem of the body and the body a subsystem of broader human systems and so on...

Systems thinking allows us to see this reductionistic worldview as a level of abstration which has been useful in many ways, yet which also leads us into a view of the world which highlights our seperation from it, and obscures our view of the fundamental unity of which we are part. This is not a mystical concept but rather a branch of epistomology that see's neutonian science and its ofshoots as being fundamentally limited in their ability to aprehend 'reality'. Can we ever begin to understand a whole which emerges from the interaction between the parts when we only look at parts in isolation....

So how can we free ourselves from the limitations of our own perceptions and conceptions of seperation and isolation? Maybe the only way is to try to move beyond language and thought into pure exprience.

So to enter into experience, not out conceptions of it, is in many ways the only approach we can make contact with truth, and one cannot know what this is......as to know something would imply a seperation from it.......I would invite you to look around and enter into your experience without names, without articulation of 'chair', or 'computer' or 'room', but rather see, feel and hear what experience in its essence.....when you do this you begin to become the awareness that you are not only in intimate interelationship with the world, it is not around you, it is you, and these interelationships, this cybernetic and circular process of perception is itself a reflection of interelationships in all of nature, all systems and all knowing, what is happening within is also happening without, you are the process, you are also what you see and experience.......this conception of a 'self' that one experiences as somehow seperate is an artifact of language, without the conceptions of language which divide and seperate we are both subject and object, in fact their can be no subject or object.....yet as I write i recognise that I cannot describe that which I am attempting to allude to......a beautiful paradox....

This 'experience' of the fundamental inter-relationaship of the whole and the part, of which 'you' are both is the essence of 'deep ecology'. This is the recognition that in only thought and language can we somehow seperate the part from the whole, it is not just a philosophical understanding or something that we can cognitivley get. It is an experiential philiosophy, where we become aware of how our environment is integral to our existence, and recognize that the boundaries drawn and seperations made at different levels of an ecology, are nothing but artifacts of our own lanuage and thought projected onto the whole. We can hence only 'know' an arc of the greater whole, this may be the limits of our perception and the construction of knowledge..in short it could be said that:

'the map is not the territory'.....

Yet to believe the map is the territory and that we can know 'things' as seperate from the perception of them is something that invites us into an experience of seperation, and this sense of seperation and isolation from the 'world out there' is closley related to the need to control and overcome 'nature' which is endemic to our modern world... and the more that we battle to overcome nature, the more we destory ourselves.

Hence Systems thinking and the experiential philosophy of 'deep ecology' allow a way of relating to our perception and experience and to the whole of nature that is inclusive and relational and could be understood to be fundamental to changing the ways we treat ourselves, each other and the natural environment of which we are an integral aspect. This idea that our human mind is a nested system within a much larger system i.e. an integral function of the universe, would imply that we are not an isolated mind, but rather we are an microcosim of an expanded 'mind' at large, as the intial quote in this article noted 'an evolutionary process'....this is summed up well in a final quote from Gregory Baetson.......

“The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.” (p. 40)

'The task is to remember our selves as context, and free ourselves from the logical error of seperation, entering into the undifferentiated wholeness of nonduality and mind at large'