Other Ways of Knowing: Recharting Our Future with Ageless Wisdom

NEW SCIENCE / INDIGENOUS CULTURES OUR CIVILIZATION IS IN CRISIS. Overpopulation and overconsumption have jeopardized our survival while technology's great promises have resulted in environmental disaster. This situation, says John Broomfield, results from the serious error of the Western world in equating one way of knowing with all ways of knowing and mistaking a thin slice of reality for the whole. But the wisdom needed to chart a new course is available to us from many sources: from the sacred traditions of our ancestors; from the spiritual traditions of other cultures; from feminine ways of being; from contemporary movements for personal, social, and ecological transformation; and, surprisingly enough, from the very source of our current crisis, science itself. Other Ways of Knowing examines perceptions and practices that challenge the narrow perspective of the Western world, and provides answers to the complex questions that face us as we move into the next millennium. Instead of trying to master nature and suffer the consequences which that entails, we can follow the example of the Lakota shaman and work with nature, knowing that the world is forged of relationships. Other Ways of Knowing gives us the wisdom necessary to arrest our headlong race toward destruction by rediscovering the ancestral teachings that guided humanity for millenia. JOHN BROOMFIELD was Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Michigan for twenty years and has written extensively on the impact of the modern West on non-Western peoples. He has studied shamanism with Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman and was President of the California Institute of Integral Studies from 1983 to 1990. He now lives in New Zealand.