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Systemic history is an approach to explaining the past, that tries to maximize our understanding of context. Unlike most history, it does not do this by just narrating a chain of causal relationships for a given group through time. Instead, it shows how simpler systems become more complex over time through the interaction of reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. Systemic history offers the best way of understanding the processes that shape the Middle Way, because the Middle Way involves improving responses to complexity, rather than falling back on shortcut simplifications (absolutizations). This book examines the history of the Middle Way in four inter-related ways: as the biological development of organisms in relation to reinforcing or balancing feedback loops, as the psychological development of individual humans during a lifetime, as a succession of reinforcing and balancing feedback tendencies in human culture through history, and as a successive development of integrative practice. This shows how the Middle Way is a path distinctive to the human response to complexity, but nevertheless one rooted in the wider processes of all life. In the process it provides a detailed exploration of the relationship between the Middle Way and systems theory, biology, developmental psychology, and world history.
Systemic History of the Middle Way: Its Biological, Psycho-Developmental, and Cultural Conditions, Robert M. Ellis, Equinox Publishing, Paperback, 240 pp, $32.00
Robert M. Ellis is the creator of Middle Way Philosophy, a practical philosophy working out the implications of human uncertainty and embodiment for every aspect of our lives. The Middle Way is neither a compromise nor a 'reality', but rather an principle of judgement that moves us into the uncertain experiential zone between opposing absolutes of false certainty. It is also not a Buddhist monopoly, but a basis for human practice that aspires to universality.
Robert is the founder of the Middle Way Society. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Lancaster and has earned a living as a teacher, lecturer and tutor. He now runs Tirylan House Retreat Centre in Wales. He has learnt much from Buddhist tradition, but is not solely committed to it, and draws inspiration from many sources in addition to Buddhism, including the arts, Jung, and Christian tradition. His work is highly cross-disciplinary, and draws extensively on psychology, Western philosophy, systems theory, embodied meaning and neuroscience as well as practical Buddhism.
His most recent books, published by Equinox, offer a detailed and updated account of Middle Way Philosophy. Of these, 'Absolutization' explains the human problem of thinking we have the whole story that the Middle Way is needed to solve, and 'The Five Principles of Middle Way Philosophy' gives a positive practical account of the Middle Way as a response to that problem. Other books such as 'Migglism', 'Truth on the Edge', and 'Parables of the Middle Way' provide more accessible introductory material. 'The Christian Middle Way' and 'The Buddha's Middle Way' apply the Middle Way Philosophy approach to the two different religious traditions of Christianity and Buddhism, showing how in both traditions helpful beliefs need to be distinguished from dogmas. Robert's fascination with Jung's Red Book as a source of inspiration for the Middle Way is also reflected in his 'Red Book, Middle Way', and his engagement with Jung has also produced a wider theory of archetypes as an aspect of Middle Way practice - 'Archetypes in Religion and Beyond'.
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