The Integral Nature of Things

by Lata Mani

The world is an interdependent whole of which everything is an integral, complexly related, part. Yet current ways of thinking, and being, persistently separate social phenomena and the individual self from the multiple dimensions with which they are interconnected. The Integral Nature of Things examines this revealing paradox and its consequences in a variety of everyday language, labour, advertising, technology, post-structuralist theory, political rhetoric, urban planning, sex, neoliberal globalisation. Mani demonstrates how even though the interrelations between things are obscured by the ruling paradigm, the facts of relationality and indivisibility continually assert themselves. The book interweaves prose with poetry and sociocultural analysis with observational accounts to offer an alternative framework for addressing aspects of the cognitive, cultural, political, and ethical crisis we face today.

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 2013

Reviews

[Akankshya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful collection of essays, poems, vignettes on interdependence, shared realities, spirituality & newer ways of seeing things. My absolute favourites are Beyong Antithesis, Witnessing, Repetition, Interdependence, Reciprocal Flows, The Tree & I.

Reading her really helped me make sense of my own experience of being somewhere within this complex web of life layered with its social, ecological, political, emotional & spiritual undercurrents.

Truly an experience of cognitive & spiritual nourishment I would like to return to time & again as an exercise of articulating & remembering what I understand about our shared plane of existence & how we shape it.

[Seema · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is for the keep. There are passages that i read over and over again, and each time there was either a overwhelming sense of wanting to say" exactly" or "that's a really good way of looking at it'.

philosophical, pragmatic, dissecting, reflective and spiritual read.