“The idea of Permaculture ecological design: reading nature’s book
A very short history of the development of human conciousness
We all have our various points of view, in our everyday lives and also in our deeper consciousness. We might experience the same events, but we often interpret them completely differently. In a similar way different eras throughout history have also seen the world from different points of view. There is a popular idea that our knowledge of the world has grown and developed during the course of our history. That in the beginning we knew very little and that now we know a lot. That we have developed from ignorance to knowledge. But when we look closer we find that people just experienced the world differently when we look closer we find that people just experienced the world differently in past ages and that our development is not simply a straight line ascending.
In the age of Mythology our experience of the world was full of meaning and significance. The ocean, for example, was enormous, changing, deep, wild or calm. It reflected our own mind, it was an experience of a personality, Poseidon to the Greeks. Everywhere in nature there were faces and personalities. The natural world around us was a reflection of ourselves and we could gain insight into ourselves by observing it.
About half a millennium before Christ there occurred in the West, in Greece specifically, a change from Mythos to Logos. A change form the mythological consciousness to logical thinking and rational thought. The philosophers began to ask questions about the nature of the world. Where does it come from? What is it made up of? One of their starting points was the idea of the four elements, earth, water, air and fire.
Hippocrates laid the foundations of western medicine around 450 BC. He was obsessed with process and how the temperaments related to various substances of the body. Air was related to blood and the sanguine temperament, water to phlegm and the phlegmatic. Fire was clearly choleric and had to do with yellow gall, while earth was melancholic and related to dark gall.
This system of thinking continued and was developed without structural changes for the next two thousand years. Alchemy continued the aspect of process in a strong way, relating various elements, such as mercury, sulphur and salt, to the four elements already defined by the ancient Greeks. Process was still seen as the most important aspect of the world and the human being. Paracelsus, 1493-15441, was an alchemist and is still regarded as an important figure in medical history. Alchemy today is widely regraded as some kind of medieval superstition, but today’s chemistry is actually mostly alchemy without the spiritual bit, ‘Alchemy Lite.’
With the Renaissance there came a complete break from the traditions of the ancient world. Copernicus discovered the heliocentric nature of our solar system, Luther broke with the venerable and dominating Catholic Church and eventually Descartes declared that anything that cannot be measured is not worth considering. Materialism gradually came to dominate our western thinking and this began to spread around the world with the so-called Age of Discovery. Art, Science and Religion had until then been regarded as an undivided trilogy; gradually they drifted apart. Today they seem to be completely unrelated.
Since the Renaissance we have taken apart the world. We have become caught up in a reductionist science that removes the spiritual component as unmeasurable and therefore irrelevant. For Descartes nature was dumb, there was no spirit in sticks and stones, nature was res extensa, a dead thing, while res cogitas was the thinking component which was the foundation of our existence: ‘I think therefore I am.’
Surely we are much more than just thought. We walk, talk, intuit, feel and act. ‘I walk, therefore I am,’ or ‘I talk, therefore I am,’ or even ‘I intuit, therefore I am.’
In our era, having completed the journey from the whole to the part, our task is to put both the world and the human being together again. We need to reintroduce the wholeness of the world and the creatures within it.
Writing something may be taken as analogy: I have an idea; to begin with it is a complete whole, but I analyse it, break it up into manageable components and begin formulating chapters, paragraphs, and finally compose sentences made up of words and letters. I hope that someone will read these letters and words, understand the sentences and eventually come to share my understanding which initially inspired me to write. In our view of the world we may now be at the stage of being obsessed by its letters. But the idea of writing is that what I write should be read by someone. Now that we are able to read the letters of existence, surely the next step is to read what is written.
This is the immediate task for us at this point in the development of our consciousness, to read the book of the universe we have been given. To arrive back at the Big Idea by laboriously making sense of the letters, getting the understanding implied by each sentence and finally comprehending the universe by the flow of ideas we perceive in the paragraphs and chapters given to us by nature. This is what Permaculture sets out to do.”
Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities p.38-39
