I just read something which brought together strands of my approach to living and writing in a startlingly fresh way. I was reading Freya Mathews, the Australian environmental philosopher, who was comparing Western philosophy with Chinese philosophy. I found it very exciting and confirmatory and I will share the insight and its ramifications in a moment; but first I need to give a little background to my life to help provide context.
From the age at which I could crawl, I was always fascinated with animals and the living world, which led me to study zoology at university. But I found the biology taught at that time (this was back in 1970) to be very reductionist and quite unconnected with Life. Even ecology, as taught, seemed very materialistic and dull while I had hopes of discovering a living cosmos. Disillusioned with biology, and searching for depth and meaning, I took off to India, immersing myself in spirituality. This led to many years of meditation and spiritual practice (another whole story) which has afforded me much insight and a deep grounding in being.
I’ve always been a keen naturalist with my passion for the living world, but it didn’t sit well with my spirituality. It seemed to me that most spiritual paths tended to ignore or at least have very little interest in the living world. And this always felt like a strange omission.
Because of this, I have been long drawn to Daoism and Chinese Buddhism, as in general (and I know it’s a generalisation, so bear with me) these approaches didn’t separate human beings from nature and the living cosmos. I’ve engaged in Qi gong daily for many years and love reading the ancient Chinese sages and Chinese river-and-mountain poetry.
In my writings on this website, I write broadly about nature but attempt to avoid conventional observational nature writing, or aiming for literary or romantic flavour per se, writing instead from a perspective of being an intrinsic part of this extraordinary life world.
This finally brings me to what I discovered from Freya Mathews.
In examining whether the deepest roots of a future ecological civilization might lie in traditional Chinese thought, Mathews illuminates a fundamental divide between Western and Chinese philosophical origins, which had never previously occurred to me so clearly:
The Western Philosophical Tradition: Traced back to classical Greek thought, the philosopher seeks an objective, abstract “truth.” By constructing intellectual frameworks and theories to accurately represent reality, the thinker inadvertently becomes a detached subject examining the world as an external object. This is the basis of dualism and our alienation from the living world.
The Chinese Strategic or Congruent Tradition: In contrast, the Chinese sage sets out not to analyze the world from a distance and create theories, but to adapt and accommodate to it. The focus shifts from theoretical inquiry to strategic congruence, seeking how elements can be harmonized for mutual benefit. The famous first line from the Dao Te Ching: “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao” forms the foundational principle of Daoism and is still part of the Chinese cultural DNA. This has acted as a kind of buffer to prevent any theory from being considered as the ultimate reality.
This distinction brings together and explains to me why I have consistently been drawn to Daoism, Qi Gong, Chinese poetry, and Chan (Zen) Buddhism. These traditions embrace a syncretic approach where ideas coexist harmoniously rather than competing for singular theoretical dominance. Within this framework, consciousness is inherently non-dualistic; the sage operates within reality rather than outside it. Funnily enough, I’ve always thought it slightly absurd that human beings could think that they stood outside of the world and then proceed to come up with theories about the nature of reality.
Rather than relying purely on intellectual inquiry, Chinese philosophy historically emphasized practices—meditation, martial arts, and somatic arts—that cultivate deep sensitivity and responsiveness to the immediate environment. This aligns with the concept of wu wei, or effortless action. Wu wei is not passive resignation, but the art of least resistance: tailoring one’s path to work dynamically with the existing forces of nature.
I’ve often written about how I have similarly developed my own practice. When I am outdoors walking, It’s been a long term habit of mine to fully engage with all the senses while not giving any energy to thinking about anything removed from the actual activity. Then it’s about adapting to and accommodating the reality in which I am immersed.
I realized that for me it was actually doing things, going walking, hiking, tuning into the senses, being part of the totality, responding to life directly. Rather than thinking about things, this is a way of strategy or coming into congruence with the world as I meet it.
And in that, it’s fascinating because in those moments, you’re actually living in non-duality, because there’s no inner or outer. You’re not thinking – or if you are thinking, that’s just a part of everything too. Self or no self is beside the point. The self is selfless and also part of what the Chinese call the ten thousand things. There’s no distinction between mind and matter. It’s just the actuality of being fully engaged.
That’s why I realised that you have to do practices because we’re so enculturated in this subject-object way of being that you can’t just think or reason your way out of it. And it’s sad because most modern people have ended up being quite out of touch with the actual real world.
Today, we obviously can’t go back to a hunter-gatherer society, even if we wanted to. Those people needed to be constantly attuned with and responding to their environment directly in a way that was very fluid and could be called strategic rather than theoretical.
You might think that daoist approaches and wu wei are no longer relevant in a modern society, but I think the opposite. Wu wei is frequently misunderstood as passivity or resignation, but it is actually a state of highly refined, responsive alignment. It’s the practice of acting in harmony with the grain of the cosmos, reducing the friction between human intent and the natural order. This philosophy is inherently ecological.
It does not advocate for abandoning agency; rather, it suggests that our interventions should be collaborative. When we adopt wu wei, we cease to impose our rigid designs upon the environment and instead accommodate, adapt, and listen. We move from being external managers of nature to internal participants within it.
In fact there are many larger scale ways to align practically with this Daoist ethos. Take rewilding: instead of locking nature away in static human-defined reserves, we merely aid nature’s inherent capacity for self organisation. Regenerative agriculture and permaculture accommodate nature in a similar way. And bioregionalism seeks to work at much more local levels that are attuned to local ecology and are very different from the current extractive mode of agriculture and life. New circular economies, where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated, learn from nature’s strategies in what has been called biomimicry.
And in urban areas, I’ve always been struck by the unexpected biodiversity of brownfield sites. When industrial areas are abandoned, they do not remain sterile; they become sites of spontaneous regeneration. In the rubble and concrete, life finds a way to thrive, often exceeding the biodiversity of more manicured landscapes. These sites are a testament to the resilience of the cosmos and the efficacy of stepping back rather than controlling. .
It’s my hope that we can shift from a posture of dominance to one of alignment; to stop imposing and start participating. In doing so, we do not just save the environment; we recover our own sense of belonging within a living, breathing whole. And a sense of aligning with the grain of the living cosmos.
