• Why systems thinking is so important today:
• The primary challenges which our children will face are all related to complexity
• The approach of linear, mechanistic science is to REDUCE complexity.
Example of Newton and the n-body problem.
Example of the complexity of ecosystems and causal LOOPS.
• Shifting attention from material components to process and pattern.
• This helps us handle complexity
• And it also helps us feel like we BELONG.

In the secular West, the incoherence between the human mind and the galaxy is taken as a simple fact, which reflects the undeniable nature of reality. As we’ve seen, however, this incoherence actually has a great deal to do with our philosophical perspective. More specifically, we’ve suggested that one of the primary reasons the cosmos appears so incoherent to us is that we’ve chosen to see it as a collection of objects, rather than a set of processes. When we humans identify primarily as physical objects, it does indeed seem that we share very little in common with a galaxy or an ant colony. Similarly, when we think of matter and mind as different kinds of things, it is indeed difficult to imagine how they could possibly interrelate.
If we conceive of the cosmos as a set of processes, however, we can see that the dynamics which weave ten thousand ants into a unified whole are quite similar to those binding our cells — and our human societies — together. If we allow our typical fixation on matter to recede into the background, and if we focus instead on the dance of actuality, possibility, and dynamic pattern occurring on every holonic level, the universe appears to be fundamentally coherent across its many different scales and epochs. More specifically, our framework suggests that new holonic levels — including those of symbolic and psychological cognition — are just new iterations of the same ongoing dance between possibility and actuality. In this light, we can see our own psychological awareness as a new stage in the same cosmological courtship that gave birth to galaxies, grasslands, and grizzly bears. From this perspective, we are not incomprehensible islands of consciousness in an otherwise senseless universe. Instead, we find ourselves part of a profoundly coherent cosmos.

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