Embracing Life

Subtitled 'toward a psychology of interdependence', this book is a valuable contribution to the unfolding story of connectedness with its concomitant ethical implications. The author had a stroke in 2003, which radically altered his life and gave him a new experience and awareness of the betweenness of things and the importance of relationships. His perspective is that we are extensions of Life itself, part of its web, the pattern that connects. The discussion is framed within the evolutionary process of synergetic relationships and emphasises the importance of understanding Arthur Koestler's idea of the holon, further developed by Ken Wilber, which represents a balance between autonomy and integration. This moves naturally onto a discussion of the psychology of interdependence and what the author calls sociotherapy, the capacity we have to open up in community through dialogue.

What he calls the social koan calls us to move through diversity to interdependence in a process of transformative learning. We find ourselves in a 'developmental impasse' demanding new forms of behaviour and relationship – only last night I was watching an interview demonstrating the logical necessity for transformation in our social relationships given our technology and exponential impact on the planet; together these create a risk of self-termination. We need to overcome our intolerance of otherness and move from one aspect of Darwinism represented by survival of the fittest to the other, relatively neglected until recently, individuality in relationship represented by symbiosis and synergy – 'the survival of fitting in'.