1. Languages are forms of life; to learn a language is to acquire a sense of identity and complex relationships. These engender the moral sensibilities of the language community. Dominant narratives (stories) and practices instill and create value relationships and roles passed on through embedded metaphors and traditional myths.
2. All learning is education about contexts. It is not about just human culture and history, but also about the larger nonhuman ecosphere with its many communities of diverse beings - even when the latter are explicitly excluded. Every curriculum has an unseen teaching, sometimes this involves projection of repressed, or unconscious material. The shadow to Western Industrial society is wild Nature, the uncontrolled and unpredicatable. This is one reason it seeks to subdue all spontaneity that arises from deeper sources, including feminine energy. It requires deep inquiry to become aware of both sides of our nature, experiential learning, not just theory.
3. Ecophilosophy enables us to understand ourselves in context in practical ways, through, for example, experience in different worldviews. It is a total or whole approach. Modern philosophy seeks only human knowledge, but ecophilosophy seeks wisdom from the total ecological context in which we participate. It is a comprehensive and inclusive practice that seeks to include all values, our complete context, physical, biological, cultural, social, international, with all levels of diversity, and sharing in the wisdom of other beings. Ecophilosophy thrives in ongoing practices of questioning and inquiry into the values involved in all of our activities. Ecophilosophy practices enable us to unify all of our ways of knowing so that we have whole knowledge, which is insight and understanding. Ecophilosophy recognizes the wisdom of the Socratic dictum to know ourselves and to examine our lives, it embraces the virtue of Socratic ignorance, maintaining scepticism about the completeness and finality of any total view actually articulated and put forward. It is a form of happy or joyful scepticism engendering ever deeper knowledge and continuous learning throughout life.
4. Education and learning about contexts are participatory processes that have no conclusion. Vital learning communities and individuals ever deepen in wisdom and understanding; they are flexible, adaptive and spontaneously creative. They have inherent practices of transformation that lessen becoming stuck and unable to grow creatively. When we are caught up in confusion, termoil and suffering, we often have an opportunity for positive change and major growth in wisdom.
5. All communities have processes whereby knowledge and wisdom are transgenerationally passed along, modified and enlarged. In traditional societies oral transmission of narratives is the most important, whereas in industrial society there is a shift to centrally controlled print and electronic media. Ecophilosophy inquiry enables us to understand the deep differences between these two approaches to life and the world. (We can live wisely in either.)
6. Meaning and wisdom in human life are created, realized, and passed on through the medium of cultural narrative traditions and practices; when these are ecocentric (respect the intrinsic worth of all beings), they make ecosophy (ecological wisdom) possible in daily life.When we practice by these values ecosophy becomes manifest as harmonious relationships.
7. Cultures that do not respect the needs of the land and its beings will destroy the basis of their lives. They cannot thrive where the context is destroyed or where individual pursuits are more important than family, community and land. (Companies and individuals who value only the bottom line are not sustainable.) It is essential to be clear about our values, if we are to act intelligently and wisely. If we have straightened out our values, then we can create sound practices and business.
8. Western cultures are challenged to ecocentrically transform their activities of learning, practice and communication; the aim is to learn the ecological wisdom inherent in our places so we can create sustainable vernacular forestries, agricultures, and so on, that manifest ecological wisdom and harmony (ecosophies) in our specific places, communities and selves.
9. One aim of education is the realization of our ecological Self - which includes our subconscious and embodied interconnections with our ecological context. When we realize it, we can dwell in states of intrinsic worth with a sense of the sacred. Ecocentric learning practices continuously bring ecosophy into our daily lives. Ecosophy grows out of commitment to our places, primary relationships and communities. We cannot have well communities without well families; we cannot have healthy communities without healthy ecosystems, and so on.
10. Intelligence, wisdom, compassion, and awareness permeate Nature. Anthropocentrism, as human firstism, prevents completion of our educational mission, as do elitism, power over, and centralized control. All beings are learners who struggle together to transform their lives from self-centeredness to ecocentric communion. Compassion, or non-judgemental love, brings comprehensive understanding rather than objective separation from the subject of knowledge. All beings in Nature are subjects with intrinsic worth. The Way of Compassion is a practice and spiritual discipline which gives us access to this awareness and to the full spectrum of ecocentric values.
11. Ecocentric value systems are non-hierarchical - they are not based on power - and they recognize the intrinsic worth of individuals and all being-kinds. Diversity and richness in life forms, cultures and ecological functions are some of the intrinsic values in ecocentric systems. When persons go from egocentric to ecocentric values, they expand their capacity for caring; their sense of self-identification enlarges to embrace their ecological communities. Maturity involves accepting our ecological responsibility to manage our actions and practices according to ecocentric values.
12. In industrial technological societies ecosophy can be attained by means of the Way of Ecophilosophy; this is a fully conscious undertaking. Through it we question the power- over control models which characterize industrial paradigms as appropriate for everything. We consciously design and practice our way out of domineering relationships to live ecocentrically. We can attain ecosophy as individuals and communities. The larger society can be transformed through fundamental changes in its governing narratives. In traditional societies ecosophy emerges through rituals and ceremonies that allow spontaneous visions to arise unconsciously to be incorporated into bodies of practice and myth that enable cultures to maintain harmony with Nature. They are usually not aware that their own narrative practices create their worldviews, nor do they choose to step outside their own perspectives except through shamanic journeying, etc. Traditional societies use ceremony as a way to remain in touch with the values of each and every member of the ecological community so that no wisdom or insight is lost. Lack of hard records makes it possible for narratives to alter from day to day.
13. Ecophilosophy as a conscious practice is usually found in literate societies where history is born. In oral traditions myths and stories, in the meter of poetry and song, are primary for passing on wisdom and knowledge. In literate traditions information can be more precise and organized in quite different ways, based on visual models, rather than ephermeral sounds. Science as we know it begins with literate traditions as does the development of geometry and mathematics. Literate cultures realize ecosophy in ways different from oral ones. The fusion of oral and literate gives rise to cross cultural vision.
14. Ecophilosophy is the practice of philosophy committed to the principle that Nature and humans matter. It seeks ways to realize ecological harmony and wisdom. Thus, the aim of ecophilosophy is ecosophy. This word is derived from two ancient Greek words ecos, for place, and sophia, for wisdom. Ecosophy is wisdom of household places, and with it we dwell harmoniously. Cultures create worldviews with embedded practices that realize ecosophy as ecological harmony. The creation and communication of worldviews and values is dependent upon learning language through narratives which have dominant themes and insights at their core. When cultures lose their ecosophy (which is always tailored to place) they become disharmonious; they must regain their ecological balance or die out.
15. Ecophilosphy as the way of deep ecocentric inquiry should be a core practice in all education, if we are to transform industrial society. All education involves values, and conveys what is worth pursuing, and what it is to be responsible, etc. Ecophilosopy is cross-cultural in application; it seeks to know the total context, that is, to arrive at the most comprehensive understanding possible. But given human ignorance, we can never arrive at a complete and finished doctrine. All theories are stories that must be modified and finally dropped as they get out of sync with our dynamic contexts and lives.
16. Our success in life does not depend on accumulating fame, power, or wealth, but on being able to dwell in states of intrinsic worth, what the Greeks called eudaemonium, optimum living in harmony with Nature and the Cosmos. To live in harmony requires developing our whole self and healing our fragmented lives. This gives rise to unitive experience with the total integration of mind, body and spirit. We need to balance our different energies, such as feminine and masculine, for this there is Tantra Yoga, Aikido, and many other spiritual disciplines. This, in turn, enables us to achieve optimum balance of feminine and masculine energies which is experienced as a condition of blessing, perfect health, unlimited energy, bliss and joy in all things great and small (what in Hinduism is called satchitananda). This graceful condition enables us to work co-operatively with others to create contexts of meaning and purpose that are ecologically harmonious and beautiful. This in itself is complete fulfillment.
17. When we live in ecosophy the places in which we dwell become ecosteries (from eco sophy and monastery), which are sanctuaries of natural harmony, beauty and balanced energies that evolve with a rich abundance of diverse instrinsic values. This is called flourishing. Each flourishing ecostery community has profound influence on neighbors and even on the whole society, making transformation to an ecocentric culture more possible. Ecosteries in rural settings make possible first hand experience of the natural world. Wild Journeying as an ecostery practice provides experiential learning in the community of wild beings. The spontaneous and the wild are no longer repressed but are part of our friendly communion.
18. Ecophilosophy is a practical learning way to appreciate, create and live beautiful ecosophies. Its daily practice as a way to ecosophy leads us to realize that wholesome and comprehensive understanding and self-knowledge depend upon compassion. By practicing compassion our caring enlarges to the ecological Self and all beings. Through ecosophy we can realize communion with Nature and the Cosmos - one of the highest ends of human life. This brings the Sacred Great Mystery into the heart of daily life. In industrial society it is pushed into the unconscious, and projected unto the wild; religious institutions are used for order and control, instead of for liberation of the human spirit so that we can realize the Divine in our work, play, loving, and everything that we do.
19. We energize the presence of the Divine when our lives are harmonious, our selves unified, and we realize our larger Self. This highest state for human life has been called the Kingdom of Heaven in Christian traditions, and it has been described in utopian literature. In other traditions, this highest and most perfect condition is called satchitananda (unconditioned being, wisdom and bliss), sometimes referred to metaphorically as Shambhala, the perfect communion. We call it ecosophy and the ideal place an ecostery.
20. No matter what condition we find ourselves in there is always a way out of alienation and dysfunction. Sometimes it requires outside help to move us into growth and development once more. Ecophilosophy training centers, mentors and organized practitioners can facilitate removal of blocks to unification of our energies and ways of knowing. The practice of ecophilosophy is not limited to words and questioning inquiry, but also involves unifying practices, arts and activities. Ecosophy is translated into material reality by effective actions to provide food, shelter and communication.
21. Comprehensive Values Inquiry is expressed most fully in the fusion of thought and action, theory and practice, vision and concreteness, to live in harmony with all our relations, so our community of values includes all beings of our ecosphere. The highest state of ecological harmony - which has dynamic rhythms, ecstatic feelings, sounds and sights - is whole aesthetic aliveness. We call this realized unity ecoharmonia.
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