“Your Mind Is Part of the Ecosystem”: From My New Book

It's a new edition of Being Ecological with a new preface for American readers.

I’m very glad to be able to tell you about this lovely extract from my book Being Ecological, which MIT Press have put on their website. There are some very good thoughts here, based on my constant love for the philosophical field we call phenomenology. When you exclude all the concepts such as “subject” and “object” and just look at the phenomena, what is arising, you discover all kinds of very urgent things about the way thought and the biosphere are entangled. I bring all my experience of psychotherapy and Buddhism to this!

I think you will enjoy the new preface if you’re an American reader, and I really love the new cover…

Here’s something to whet your appetite:

When you dream of nasty creepy-crawlies falling on you from the ceiling, you also have a certain feeling or attitude (or whatever you want to call it) toward the insects, perhaps horror or disgust, perhaps mixed with a strange detachment. This is the same as how in a story there is what’s happening (the narrative) and how it’s being told (the narrator, whether it be singular, plural, human or not, and so on). These two aspects form a manifold. When we look at a “thing,” we are forgetting that “thing” is just part of a manifold. It’s not true that there’s “me” and then there’s a “thing” I reach out to with my perception, like reaching my hand out to a can of beans in the supermarket. But perhaps we have tried to design our world to look like a supermarket, full of things we can reach out and grab.