It is my impassioned conviction—reinforced through both my professional and personal experience—that nothing impedes our lives and our ability to thrive as distinctly as the outdated, seventeenth-century worldview of mechanism. This outmoded paradigm imposes a straitjacket on our beliefs and our thinking, impoverishing our life experiences. Not having kept pace with the advances of science and its ensuing shift in philosophical thinking, many of our operating assumptions and beliefs are obsolete, incoherent, and invalid. Not only has mechanism fostered a disenchanted view of the cosmos, and consequently our lives, but it assaults our individual and collective psyches as well.

The mechanistic model of the world says that the world consists of separate and inert objects that are disconnected from one another, interacting only through cause and effect. According to this picture of reality, the world operates as a giant machine, and we become the cogs in the machine, detached from one another and disconnected from the universe at large. Separation being the essence of the Newtonian worldview, this image is devoid of any sense of relatedness, leaving us as strangers in a cold, austere world, absent any scintilla of belonging or purpose.

Through this filter, we experience a vast array of struggle and malaise: anxiety, depression, failed relationships, incoherent communication, and the gloom of existential despair—all of which we will explore later in detail. The motif of separation isolates us and induces us to compete rather than collaborate and promotes extreme individualism over the common good. Winning replaces compassion. Conflict trumps cooperation. This crippling worldview colonizes our thoughts and beliefs, and for the most part, we live out our lives in accordance with this construct.

Another core tenet of the mechanistic paradigm is known as determinism—the ability to predict future conditions based on present circumstances. Determinism strips us of our sense of wonder and creativity, but even worse, it drives us to seek certainty as we avoid the uncertain. As a culture, the epidemic of anxiety that we experience is caused in large part by our addiction to certainty, which has us fear and avoid the unknown. Certainty also imperils our relationships as it thwarts our ability to be truly present.

From this cosmology we succumb to the dispiriting mechanization of our spirit. Meaning and purpose are cast out in deference to cause and effect—the fundamental by-product of separation. It is little wonder that we suffer as we do. As the noted eco-philosopher Henryk Skolimowski succinctly put it, “As we read the universe, so we act in it.”2 If we constantly envision a machine operating, we become machinelike. If we see and think in separation, we’ll experience our lives through this lens of isolation. Imagine wearing very dark sunglasses permanently affixed to your face. You wouldn’t see things the same way as others would. The tint of your glasses would filter the light. The worldview of mechanism is the dark filter through which most of us see.