The Illusion of Separation from Nature

By Giles Hutchins

I believe deeply that we are all born biophilic. Every human has an innate instinctual love for life.

Yet, at deep and partly unconscious levels we perceive life as a struggle for survival set within an evolution of selfish ascendancy. Large swathes of modern humanity have become "biophobic" -- meaning we seek to control and dominate our inner and outer worlds for security against this competitive struggle. Cultural conditioning teaches us to dominate or become dominated. Through our fearful search for control, we sever ourselves from the very ground of our being – nature – further exacerbating our perceived need to dominate, control, exploit and enslave.

This sense of separateness corrupts our basic need for intimate relationships and we begin to mistrust even life itself. Enter the ethical and ecological corruption in our midst. Deal with this and you deal with the mother of all our problems. We can move beyond creating solutions infected with the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.

The good news is E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis in 1984 assists in turning the tide back towards our essential biophilic nature by scientifically and philosophically recognizing our innate urge to love life. This love allows us to look beyond the illusion of separation we have created with our control-based anthropocentric logic.  In opening up to the understanding that we are psychic and physical expressions co-creating within a participatory matrix of nature, we also begin to recognize the wisdom and inspiration within and all around us, before our very eyes. For instance, the emergent disciplines of biomimicry, permaculture, ecological thinking, cradle-to-cradle design, regenerative economics and biophilic workplace design are all inspired by nature while containing the potential to facilitate our unfolding destiny of living more harmoniously within nature – the essence of true sustainability.

Nature is what the founders of western philosophy revered as the ground source of wisdom. As Shakespeare knew,

‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound.’

And so what is in-the-making here is a most profound transformation: a metamorphosis in our ways of inter-relating with our inner selves (rational and intuitive ways of feeling and thinking), with others (a shift from competitive, power-hungry exploitations towards loving attention and co-creativity), and our deeper relation with the wider matrix of life (allowing individual and collective psyches to permeate with the deeper wisdom of life beyond the illusion of separation). This is our turning, whereupon Homo sapiens live up to our name as wise beings.

Giles Hutchins will be speaking about this new paradigm at The Hub in Islington on 10th December 10th, to attend book here.

A special for Triple Pundit readers - a 20% discount code AF1014 when ordering The Illusion of Separation paperback here and the ebook here.

Giles Hutchins applies twenty years business experience to the emergence of new business logic inspired and in harmony with nature, for a short video see here.

Author of The Nature of Business and recently released The Illusion of Separation, Giles blogs at www.thenatureofbusiness.org, Facebook community and tweets @gileshutchins