A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries int… - Fritjof Capra

The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.

The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self... It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhkha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought.

In the Germany of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, both orga­nismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist.