This past Saturday, our previous Awakin Call guest, Fritjof Capra, an Austrian-born American physicist and systems theorist, returned to Banyan Grove, where he spent one heartwarming and inspiring evening with the ServiceSpace community in summer. This time he came with a group of systems thinkers, who are Capra Course alumni, to share and discuss their individual and collective passion in waking the world up from fragmentary worldview to systems view of life. Fritjof spoke in 1984, “For the modern physicist, the material world is no longer a mechanic system made of separate objects, but rather appears as a complex web of relationships….” He has devoted his life to transforming the fragmented scientific worldview and introducing systems thinking to all aspects of life since his first book The Tao of Physics published in 1975. Knowing deeply the significance of taking children out to nature or school gardens, in 1995, Capra co-founded the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy, which is dedicated to advancing ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education. He now concentrates fully on Capra Course, his online course based on the textbook The Systems View of Life that he co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi, a grand synthesis of his lifetime work—integrating the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions of life into one unified vision.



The gathering began with an optional 30 minutes sitting in collective silence and an introduction to the space at Banyan Grove and ServiceSpace, and then individual self-introductions, which were followed by viewing Fritjof's new video that is to be shown to the UN officials and NGOs around the world on implementing systems thinking in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Fritjof asked near the end of the video, we have all the solutions to live harmoniously, but why don't we do it? After the group gave feedback on the video, the gathering ended with a presentation by Mansoor Vakili on his recently published writing, Systems Philosophy. Below are brief bios of the participants from the group.



Marilyn is adjunct lecturer at CIIS with a background in East-West Psychology and Consciousness Studies. For over two decades, she has focused her academic work on developing conscious leadership capacities and practices to foster a more sustainable world.

Vitório is a Brazil-born digital product designer who believes in poetry and beauty in everything, everyone, and everywhere, and yearns to "design a world where there's more flow and connection and less barriers and friction."

Riley is a business development leader in real estate finance who has experienced profound spiritual awakening. He is enthusiastic about systems thinking and passing it down to the next generation.

Manuel is a Colombia-born organizational consultant with tremendous international working experiences, who co-founded Institute for Evolutionary Leadership in Oakland to transform worldviews and build an ecological civilization.

Geoff, a UK-born Deep Time walker, was part of the initial movement of The Walk Through Time in Silicon Valley in 1997. He now volunteers for Deep Time Walk app, a smart phone app that "tells the story of life on Earth as it emerged through time. Every step represents a million years."

David is a communication designer and researcher in San Francisco who lives as "a stoic optimist—and resilient Canadian—constantly examining the way things are, while engaging in creative interventions that counter-argue for other ways of thinking/doing/being."

Reinhard is an environmental scientist. After 28 years of working for the State EPA at CalRecycle as a regulator, he will now "be working exclusively on adult environmental education as the key to spreading systems thinking into popular culture. He believes a thriving and viable biosphere needs a much deeper ecological fluency among the public."

Mansoor, born in Iran, believes in humankind’s great ability in transforming its current inefficient relationship with its environment and resources. His passion in science, spirituality, philosophy and poetry has led him to the theory of The Living Universe and nonlinear perception based on universal behaviors of living systems.

Tawn ran a teens-as-teachers environmental education program and trained UC Santa Cruz undergraduates to teach sustainability-focused seminars before he joined his current organization, Bike Santa Cruz County as the Youth Program Director.

Mira, besides being the Capra Course Administrator, is currently adjunct faculty at CIIS, who has worked in India and Nepal, and coordinated a program on food justice issue and training the next generation of leaders in sustainability at UC Santa Cruz. Her academic study focused on resilience and how it can be cultivated on the personal, community and ecological levels.

Xiao, born and raised in China, is currently a full-time student at Dharma Realm Buddhist University at The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah.



As Mansoor wrote, "Living systems are cognitive systems with an inherent tendency to structure themselves in nonlinear network patterns capable of performing highly complex functions with minimum effort. There is a deeper simplicity within the living world." But why are we walking in the opposite direction and working so hard to make things more complicated, while getting "smarter and smarter" in ways of "killing" the planet and ourselves? As Mahatma Gandhi put, "A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes." May we be the change that we want to see in the world by transforming our fragmented thinking.

Work Cited
Fritjof Capra and His Work (ServiceSpace blog)