Quotes from Fritjof Capra

The challenge of the 21st century will be to change the value system of the network society, so as to make it compatible with the demands of human dignity and ecological sustainability.

From the new systems point of view, knowledge is part of the process of life, of a dialogue between object and subject. Knowledge and life, then, are inseparable, and therefore, facts are inseparable from values.

What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth but the entire web of life on which our longterm survival depends.

Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.

Thinking systemically, we will recognize the major problems of our time as systemic problems—all interconnected and interdependent.

The illusion of the viability of unlimited growth is maintained by economists who refuse to include the social and environmental costs of economic activities in their theories.

We must teach our children, our students, and our political and corporate leaders the fundamental facts of life—for example, that one species' waste is another species' food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

Our highest aim is therefore to become aware of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things, to transcend the notion of an isolated individual self and to identify ourselves with the divine reality. For the Hindu or Buddhist, this realization, which is known as enlightenment, is much more than a mere intellectual act. It is a religious experience involving a total change in the state of consciousness. Eastern philosophy can therefore never be separated from religion.

In Hinduism, the various forms of the divine are symbolized by numerous gods. Through their worship, the Hindu approaches the supreme Brahman, knowing, if he or she is intelligent and educated, that all these gods are ultimately identical. They are creations of the mind—images through which reality is approached. In science, their counterparts are the scientific models whose purpose is exactly the same: to convey something about reality which cannot be stated explicitly.

All things are forms of the same universal reality that is simultaneously spiritual and material. The whole cosmos is a unity and the whole cosmos is alive.

We shall try to show in the following that the views of modern physics are in agreement with the two ideas basic to Eastern philosophy that have been described above: the idea that the universe is an organic unity whose parts are interdependent and inseparable, and the idea that the cosmos is alive. Both of these ideas also arise in quantum mechanics and in relativity theory and find their clearest modern expression in quantum field theory.

In atomic physics, the sharp Cartesian split between mind and matter, between the I and the world, is no longer valid. We can never speak about nature without at the same time speaking about ourselves.

Cualquier camino es solo un camino y no es vergonzoso, ni para uno mismo ni para los demás, abandonarlo si así te lo dicta tu corazón [...] Observa detalladamente cada uno de los caminos. Ponlos a prueba tantas veces como creas necesario. Luego pregúntate a ti mismo, y solo a ti mismo, lo siguiente: «¿Tiene corazón este camino?». Si lo tiene, el camino es bueno; si no lo tiene, no sirve para nada.

The most complex ecosystems on Earth are the tropical coral reef and the tropical rainforest. Both are characterized by large numbers of species, a rapid turnover of matter and energy, and extensive recycling of all essential materials. In both of these ecosystems, the principles of ecology are exhibited clearly and beautifully.

A living organism is primarily engaged in renewing itself, cells continuously breaking down and building up their structures, tissues and organs replacing their cells in continual cycles. While these continual structural changes take place, however, the organism maintains its identity and overall pattern of organization. This coexistence of stability and change is one of the hallmarks of life.

Solar energy, transformed into chemical energy by the photosynthesis of green plants, drives all ecological cycles.

As I have suggested earlier, this fascination likely came from a deep and correct intuition that the dynamics of vortices, which combine stability and change, embody an essential characteristic of all living forms.

Since the early days of ecology, these multileveled arrangements have been called hierarchies. However, this term can be misleading, since it is derived from human hierarchies, originally from the Catholic Church and now from the military and corporate worlds. These have fairly rigid structures of domination and control, quite unlike the multileveled order found in nature.

The view of living systems as networks provides a helpful new perspective on the so-called hierarchies of nature. For example, we can picture an ecosystem schematically as a network with a few nodes. Each node represents an organism, which means that each node, when magnified, appears itself as a network. Each node in the new network may represent an organ, which in turn will appear as a network when magnified, and so on.In other words, the web of life consists of networks within networks.

In the 20th century, ecologists discovered that in the self-organization of ecosystems, cooperation is actually much more important than competition. We constantly observe partnerships, linkages, associations—species living inside one another, depending on one another for survival. Partnership is a key characteristic of life. Self-organization is a collective enterprise.

all living systems are complex - i.e., highly nonlinear - networks …

Religion is the organized attempt to understand spiritual experience, to interpret it with words and concepts, and to use this interpretation as the source of moral guidelines for the religious community.

Just as the decay of last year's fallen leaves provides nutrients for new growth this spring, some institutions must be allowed to decline and decay, so that their capital and human talents can be released and recycled to create new organizations.

Whenever we look a life, we look at networks.