Ian Sanderson

Naropa University

An excerpt from a new course I'm creating, that does a decent job of explaining what's animating me lately:

All human action is birthed by our thoughts, and even many well-intentioned efforts in the realms of Enviro-Social justice still suffer from the unconscious limitations of the inherited modern western thinking traditions. Dualistic, oppositional, linear, reductive, overly simplified or overly complicated conceptions of complex issues are still the waters we swim in most of the time, and the depths at which they influence our thinking – and therefore our actions that follow – can be insidious and subtle. These same attributes, and others, exaggerated to the point of absolute “rightness” in terms of how humans should think, have been a major contributing factor to the myriad challenges we face as a species today. To imagine and innovate what is necessary to create a just and sustainable future, we must learn other worldviews, paradigms, and thought traditions beyond the inheritance of the Western colonial worldview and its modern progeny.