Deep feeling as the guiding principle
If living processes, guided by feeling for the whole, and guided by feeling, were to shape all acts of construction in society, then everything, nearly, that we know about modern society would be changed.
Above all — and what I wish to say now is not a small thing — it means that people would have a self-awareness, a knowledge of reality and wholeness as it is, quite different from the ignorance of inner feeling we came to accept as normal in the 20th-century.
The idea that feeling — above all feeling — should become the main anchor of the huge, hundred-million-variable process which creates life on Earth, seems hard to take seriously. Above all, it seems hard to implement. We live in a world of computer processes, banking, strictly controlled procedures. How is it possible to contemplate a world in which the freedom exists, that could allow natural unfolding — the unfolding governed by deep feeling — to control processes of such magnitude?
(1) By feeling, the reader must remember that I mean adherence to the whole. It is not an idiosyncratic touchy-feely kind of thing, but serious, holistic connection with the whole, which provides a wholesome feeling in the actor.
(2) Next — a feeling-guided process was typical in most human societies, during much of the Earth’s history. That alone should give one pause in dismissing it too quickly. Why should it not also be possible for us?
(3) What I have called a feeling-based process — the fundamental process as I have described it — is demonstrably necessary for the production of living structure.
At the beginning of the 21st century, even the biologically oriented views of complexity theory, are chiefly guided by interaction of complex variables, mathematical attractors in phase space, and so on. The power of the techniques that have been elaborated is startling. But it remains true that human beings, and human nature, are intuitively more in tune with feeling than with mathematics. Our humanity — humanity itself, our sympathy for one another, and for ourselves — all has its origin in issues concerned with archetypal feeling.
From this point of view, the importance — in my view — of the techniques I have described, is their capacity to create a living world which is rooted in human feeling, because that will create a world in touch with us, with our true nature, with our humanity.
The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument — that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings — and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/Conclusion#