There’s something deeply restorative in the above quote ~ a reminder that the true aim of knowing was never control but coherence. Capra and Luisi speak here not of abstraction but of intimacy: wisdom as attunement, understanding as relationship, and harmony as practice. Before “science” hardened into a discipline, it was a way ~ a dao 道 (way) of seeing and living within the rhythms of nature. The natural philosopher was not a specialist peering into the world from a distance but a participant listening from within it.

 

That’s the old school spirit. The early yangsheng 養生 (nourishing life) adepts were naturalists in the truest sense: observers of pattern, experimenters of breath, gardeners of vitality. Their laboratory was the body, their data the shifting seasons of qi 氣. When they spoke of resonance between Heaven, Earth, and the human, it wasn’t abstract metaphysics ~ it was systems thinking expressed in ancient poetics. They studied feedback long before cybernetics had a name for it. Their findings weren’t published but practiced: breath refined, diet adjusted, rest timed to solstice and moon. 

 

To call oneself a natural philosopher today is almost an act of rebellion. It rejects the reduction of knowing to data and returns it to wisdom & lived ecology. In that sense, old school dao reclaims philosophy as praxis: thinking that breathes, analysis that grows roots. It remembers that knowledge is not a possession but a posture, cultivated through listening (ting 聽) to both inner and outer currents. 

 

This is why the final clause of the quote, “and living in harmony with it,” feels like a forgotten imperative. It is the missing verb in most modern systems thinking: not only modeling the world, but living in resonance with it as well. The old school daoists would have recognized Capra and Luisi immediately as fellow travelers tracing feedback between cosmos & consciousness. 

 

So let this be our opening note:

old school dao is natural philosophy reborn as living art.

It is not nostalgia for antiquity, nor a romantic return to simplicity, but an embodied renewal of coherence

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~ the body-mind as part of ~ not apart from ~ the great system of life ~