A Biodynamic Manual

For anyone already practising, or turning to, biodynamic gardening and farming methods, numerous detailed questions arise, such as:
* How do you choose your seeds?
* What fertilisers should you use?
* Which natural products are most effective?

This manual, fully illustrated with explanatory diagrams and photographs, provides the answers. The book covers
* all aspects of making and using biodynamic preparations and composts
* managing the health of plants
* weed control
* parasite control
* issues around mixed cultivation
* animal care
* specialised crops and planting such as fruit trees and vines

Although the technical aspects of biodynamic growing are exhaustively covered, the author also considers the human qualities necessary for this kind of agriculture to succeed.

This is an invaluable guide for all biodynamic growers to have to hand daily.
Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I. Hello, Consciousness
1. Some User-friendly Notions of Consciousness
You and me: the fundamentals of subject-object dualism
Setting boundaries and getting centred
Mind-body, mind-matter and other dualisms
Observer and observed: a general perspective
2. Through the Darwinian Paradigm and Beyond
Evolution evolving: how all paradigms change
Darwinism, mechanism, materialism — and their shadows
Shifting to the next critical phase: beyond linearity
Perennial philosophies of holism

PART II. The Evolution of Consciousness
3. Consciousness and the Individual Life Cycle
Being childish: how our minds grow
The rhythm of life: intellectual and emotional cycles
Spiritual emergence
4. Ebb, Flow and Cycles in Collective Consciousness
Changing generations: the fourth turning
History’s masculine and feminine moods
Slowly coming to our senses
Pattern and structure in revolution and renaissance
Time and space consciousness: before and after memory
5. Human Consciousness from Deep Time
A fleeting glimpse of Homo habilis
The Gebserian paradigm: an epic cultural philosophy
Archaic consciousness: the dormant soul
Magical consciousness: the emergent awareness of nature
Mythic consciousness: the emergent time-conscious soul
Mental consciousness: the measure of man and the universe
Integral consciousness: a whole new language
Repackaging Gebser: towards a grand integration

PART III. Biological and Psychological Dynamics
6. A New Look at Who We Are and How We Got That Way
Integrating the cosmic individual
Reading the dynamic organization of the biosphere
Evolutionary timescapes: biological clocks and heterochrony
How organisms take shape: the dynamics of head-to-toe growth
Knowing ourselves: new perspectives on humans and mammals
Integrating morphology and consciousness structures
7. New Evolutionary Paradigms: Coherence, Unity and Beyond
All for one and one for all
The body electric: energy fields, brainwaves, subtle bodies
Enveloped by consciousness: gaseous genies and Russian dolls
Molecular democracies and spooky quantum quandaries
May you be forever young
A new evolutionary grandeur
8. Into the Mystic
Scientific prophecy and global mind change
The evolutionary co-emergence of self and sensibility
In the beginning was the word, and the word was sacred
What’s in a name?
Sin, sacrifice and the loss of innocence
Into the mystic: the cosmic connection
9. Closing the Circle
The poetic impulse: its psycho-spiritual origins
Mystics and scientists: the same universal truths
Crowning glories: kundalini shock and awe
The courtship between science and spirituality
Longing for love: the happiness of homecoming