Читать книгу Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World - Tony Juniper - Страница 5

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.