Ecosophy: Nature’s Guide to a Better World
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The most exciting and beneficial things I believe happened to humanity in the past century were physicists’ recognition that “the universe is more like a great thought than like a great machine”1 and astronauts lifting far enough from Earth to see, feel and show us how very much alive our planet is. Those events led to a wonderful sea change from the older—and rather depressing—scientific story of a non-living material universe accidentally giving rise to all within it, devoid of meaning or purpose.
The new view, revealing a conscious universe and a living Earth in which we are co-creators, takes us out of fatalistic victimhood to becoming consciously active agents of our destiny! It lifts the fog of our self-image as consumers of stuff, giving us awesome rights and responsibilities to live out our full co-creative humanity.
We humans always have been and probably always will be storytellers. Whether we create our stories from the revelations of religions or the researches of science, or the inspirations of great artists and writers or the experiences of our own lives, we live by the stories we believe and tell to ourselves and others.
Story, in the modern world, lost its importance as we assumed that science could tell us the truth, while story never did. But science was long based on the assumption of a reality independent of humans—a material universe that could be studied without interfering in it in any way. When physicists discovered that all the universe was composed of energy waves and that every instance of our human reality was a wave function collapsed from sheer probability by a conscious observer, everything changed.
It meant that our world is produced in our consciousness—that realities are not fixed scenarios in which we grope our way about, but the ever-changing creations we ourselves ‘bring forth’2 both individually and collectively through our beliefs and actions. In other words, a universe “more like a great thought than like a great machine” is more like a storytelling universe we make up as we go than like a stable physical reality in which we grope our way about.
Every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequences, practice of non-violence… Now is the time to share with all life on our maltreated Earth through the deepening identification with life forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia, the fabulous, old planet of ours. ~Arne Naess
Much more than a simple ecology, ecosophy is a wisdom-spirituality of the earth. ‘The new balance’ is not so much between man and Earth, but between matter and spirit, between spatio-temporality and consciousness. Ecosophy is not simply a ‘science of the earth’ (ecology) and even ‘wisdom on earth,’ but the ‘wisdom of the earth itself’ that occurs when a man knows how to listen with love.
~Raimon Pannikar
As conscious observers, we tell each other our realities as stories; as conscious actors, we create our realities. It takes time for the new scientific stories of a conscious living universe and Earth to percolate through society. But the time is ripe now for evolving our stories from that meaningless purposeless decaying old universe to a conscious, living universe and planet Earth. We must become active co-creators of our own reality once we realize we have the power—and the responsibility—to change it intentionally, day by day, even minute by minute.
Philosophers of science have long made it clear that science can only give us useful hypotheses, not truths.3 Even the ever-more-obsolete scientific beliefs and findings told us a story, and a very powerful story at that. It told us we lived in a one-way universe beginning with a Big Bang and running down ever since like a battery depleted in the process of powering all the random collisions that gave us galaxies and our world. Some of those collisions, we were told, brought about certain molecules that sprung rather magically to life, but life—so the (largely Darwinian) story goes—became a struggle for survival in fierce competition before the running-down tide called ‘entropy’ eventually sweeps all life away.
It was a tragically misleading story. We abandoned community to individualism and turned our human civilization into a competitive ‘Get what you can, while you can’ globalized shopping mall of stuff. We have been frantically chopping down, drilling, digging and scraping up Earth’s ‘resources’ as if—or rather, because—we expected no tomorrow. We have literally put ourselves into the Sixth Great Extinction and are the first of Earth’s species to create such disaster. Only Earth’s very first creatures, her most ancient bacteria, came close to our destructiveness, causing both global hunger and global pollution in turn. They, however, solved both those problems, as we would do well to note!4
Awakening and MaturationThe awakening of humanity from this depressingly hopeless creation story—surely the bleakest in the history of human cultures—comes in the nick of time, just when our rapacious activity has created the ‘Perfect Storm’ of crises in energy economy and ecology all at once. It is as though we are taking a collective Big Breath and releasing the burden of this story with a huge sigh. Just as everything seems hopeless, we suddenly have cause to Hope. “We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for!” has become the mantra empowering us not to wait for saviors but to be them.
Conscious creation through changing our stories, our beliefs, becomes the means by which we change ourselves—even our own genes5—as well as the world we experience. Technology developed in the fiercely competitive mode has turned to seemingly endless Internet capacity for cooperation and collaboration. We talk to each other, empower each other, build community, become human again after an interlude of trying to turn ourselves into cogs within the wheels of industry, of mechanized society, even of a clockwork universe.
We know there is something obsolete, something hopelessly immature, about the competing and fighting and grabbing going on at the highest levels of human society. After all, those are the very things we teach our children not to do to each other. The Occupy Movement that began in North Africa, moved to the Middle East, came ‘round the Mediterranean to Spain and swept across to America was a natural outburst against such destructive and immature behavior. In many places, Occupy has been a peaceful and overtly loving process.6 It is most surely part of the wake-up call to humanity.
Love and other values lost to consumerism are pouring back into our lives like fresh water. Community as a concept, finally having lost the taint of its association with communism, is in wonderful revival as local self-sufficiency and sustainability become very human and very practical goals in an uncertain world. Caring and sharing are replacing competing and grabbing, in no small measure due to the increasing empowerment of women, who have always held these values. Indeed, many of us see this as a growing-up, as the maturation of humanity. As an evolution biologist and futurist, I find this view entirely compatible with my own theory of a repeating evolutionary cycle of maturation.7
Values such as caring and sharing made little sense in a meaningless, purposeless material universe operating by mathematically describable scientific laws, including the law of entropy. But western science is not the only source of universal law and there is a considerable revival of the Perennial Philosophy—the universal truths found common to all religions and popularized in the West by Aldous Huxley, 8 as well as other compilations of universal laws honored in various ancient cultures (e.g., Vedic Indian and ancient Egyptian as attributed to Hermes Trismegistos, elaborated in contemporary scientific terms by Marja de Vries).9 These ancient laws, based on human inquiries into cosmology, have to do with Oneness, Correspondence (as in ‘As above, so below’), Vibrations (cosmic energy waves), Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect and Dynamic Balance. Further, such laws are in complete harmony with contemporary findings in physics.
Getting back to story, mythologer Joseph Campbell showed us over a quarter century ago that certain themes of mythology were also common to many ancient cultures, notably the Hero’s Journey.10 Campbell called for a new myth for all current cultures, for all Earth—a call I believe we are now answering as we co-create a new future.
The story most often cited as the quintessential Hero’s Journey is that of Odysseus’ wild and thrilling adventures. But the end of the story seems almost a let-down. We are relieved that Penelope’s faithfulness is rewarded, but Odysseus, with his son’s help, must continue to battle with his wife’s erstwhile suitors to restore order where disorder had reigned in his absence. Thus, the story ends on a note of relief and exhaustion. We are left without a clue to how Ithaca might become a stable, sustainable society. Penelope does not seem very important; we only know that Ithaca’s strong leader is back and all challengers dead for the time being.
In short, the Hero’s Journey, like the Darwinian evolution story, is one of competitive youthful adventure and ends with no guide for building a mature society that thrives in peaceful prosperity. We must now write the second phase of the Hero’s Journey story.
There is a lovely story attributed to Mark Twain, though never verified, of a youth who leaves home for his own adventures and returns, finding to his surprise that his father has gained considerable wisdom in his absence. We smile. It is the son who has changed. Whatever the actual source, the story conveys a kind of folk wisdom about youth and maturity—that a youth cannot perceive the wisdom gained by experience until he becomes experienced himself. We humans now stand on the brink of maturity, still in adolescent crisis, but just mature enough to seek ancient wisdoms for guidance.
READ ON:http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/ecosophy-natures-guide-to-a-better-world/Love Always
mudra
