Renewing the Balance

Book excerpt: In Renewing the Balance, Dirk Dunbar shows how the balance worshipped in ancient Earth wisdom traditions is being integrated into Western culture’s dominantly masculine, rational value system. Filled with hope, revelations regarding cultural evolution, and scholarship of the highest order, Dunbar’s book passionately challenges all of us to recover the archaic reverence for the natural world, to reconsider the limits of growth, progress, and mechanistic thinking, and to join in the newly reclaimed celebration of life that fosters peace and the potential for a sustainable future. Dirk Dunbar’s Renewing the Balance is a crucial and comprehensive account of how traditional cultures maintained a healthy balance that preserved our natural world and how our modern technocratic, economic ideology has produced a culture that is dangerously out of balance. It is at once a diagnosis of our dis-ease and a prescription for healing our collective psyche, polis, and environment. A truly fascinating philosophical adventure. ~Sam Keen Author of 12 books, including The Passionate Life and Hymns to an Unknown God Renewing the Balance brings depth and breadth to our efforts to understand how Western culture evolved as it did and to appreciate the many streams that now flow into our efforts to manifest ecological wisdom in a hypermodern world. ~Charlene Spretnak Author of 9 books, including States of Grace and The Resurgence of the Real