EarthDance Quotes

“Indeed nature is more suggestive of a mother juggling resources to ensure each family member’s welfare as she works out differences of interest to make the whole family a cooperative venture, than of a rational engineer designing perfect machinery that obeys unchangeable laws.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance:Living Systems in Evolution

“Communications systems, which we humans now have worldwide, are prerequisites to the organization of larger living systems.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“Many humans find that with spiritual practices such as meditation and contemplative prayer, they can directly perceive cosmic love and unity through inner senses. This adds a very important extra dimension to their behavioral guidance system, because they perceive all things—including people—as One.  The great teachers of our world, such as Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha, gave us ethical systems based on this kind of perception—ethical systems showing such universal interconnectedness that what is done to others is done to yourself.  Now western physicists showing us non-timespace and non-locality begin to teach the same thing!”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“But there was a size limit beyond which individuals did not work so well. Trees that grew too tall could not stand upright in storms or pump water to their highest leaves. Giant dinosaurs were too large to survive a catastrophe that smaller creatures did survive. Mammals the size of whales and elephants seem to be about as big as the Gaian life system can manage successfully.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“Flowers, those marvelous sex organs with their wonderful blaze of color, brought a special kind of beauty, but that beauty was practical as well.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“Life, then, is the most powerful of geological transformers.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“Vernadsky understood metabolism as the activity of all Earth's living matter taken together, as well as that of any particular organism, since he saw all living matter as a constantly shifting high-energy portion of the Earth's crust.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“Metabolism, then, is the most basic autopoietic activity of all life.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“Evolution is this improvised dance of transformation in which ecological balance is worked out again and again.”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

“The balance between any holon's autonomy and holonomy must be worked out as mutual consistency if the holon is to survive as part of a holarchy, and it cannot survive in any other way if we accept the fundamental notion of mutual consistency”
― Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution