Subject-headings:
Spirituality ; Nature ; Ecological thinking ; Self-organization
; Second-order
cybernetics
Abstract
The two traditions of Eastern and
Western thought offer sharp contrasts in presenting
man’s relation to nature. In most traditions of
Eastern thought, humans are regarded as being endowed
with spirituality which is immanent in the universe and
which, therefore, is the vital link between man and all
the other things in nature. In contrast, most traditions
of Western thought - religious as well as scientific -
have treated spirituality as an entity which is separate
from the physical world. The West had to wait until the
eighteenth century before nature was turned into an
object of worship by Romantic artists. The conceptions of
nature and spirituality in the two traditions of Eastern
and Western thought now appear to be converging with the
emergence of ecological thinking in the West in this
century. How the two traditions are coming together is
discussed in this paper in relation to the philosophy of
deep ecology and the theory of self-organization,
utilizing insights obtained in systems science and
second-order cybernetics.
