Editing Relations (section)

== Fritjof Capra ==

I should also add that artists often think, maybe not so much in terms of relationships, but in terms of patterns. When you think about the arts, whether it's the visual arts, or the performing arts, or music, it's all about patterns. A melody is a pattern, you know, a dance performance, performance in a choreography, is a certain pattern. The plot in the novel is a certain pattern of relationships. So artists focus very much on patterns. 

the arts can be of tremendous help today, especially also, because the arts don't analyze patterns in a rational, scientific way. They represent patterns in an emotional way. And so the emotional dimension that comes with the arts, it's very important, because today, if we want to persuade people, to change lives and act differently in the world, rational arguments often don't make it. But if you can get to them emotionally, you have an additional means. And there again, the arts can be very helpful.
   
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At the edge of science, there's always the unknown. There's always mystery, no matter how much we progress, we always come up against the unknown. There is a very beautiful saying by Blaise Pascal, who was one of the leaders of the scientific revolution in the 17th century in France, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. And Pascal said, knowledge is like a sphere. And the surface is the border to the unknown, as we increase knowledge, so the surface increases, so the border to the unknown becomes larger and larger too. 




Fritjof Capra: Yes, I think my way of thinking about this is to say that most of the phenomena we study in our environment are phenomena that have to do with life. So, you know, when we go out into nature and observe various patterns and processes, whether it's, you know, plants or you know, ecosystems or, you know, animals or social systems, it all has to do with life and you know the derivatives of say economics management, health care and so on, in the human realm, it all has to do with life and life has evolved in such a way that human evolution and the evolution of other living systems have happened in a process of coevolution, of mutually dependent coevolution. 

And so, human beings have developed a very great sensitivity toward life. And, for example, you know, recently, experiments have shown that people who are sick and were in hospitals get well much faster, when they are exposed to nature, even just having the hospital bed by the window and looking out into a garden is therapeutic. And so, we have co-evolved with nature, and we have many ways of communicating with nature, communicating with life, including ways that are not at all understood by science. Another part of that is the fact that living systems are highly nonlinear. And the current version of systems thinking is very essentially informed by complexity theory, which is a mathematics that is nonlinear and for the first time has allowed us to model and describe nonlinear systems, mathematically, but, non-linearity is very difficult to understand with our rational mind, because our thinking and speaking and writing necessarily needs to be linear. And so, approaches like meditation, or trance, or ritual, or again, artistic approaches to understand living nature, are extremely valuable, because our subconscious is nonlinear, and can deal with the non-linearity and can communicate with the non-linearity of living nature, often much better than our rational consciousness.