The Dream of the Earth
It’s all God, but will we wake for heaven’s sake?
What a day. How to say anything while we hold our breath? My wildest thought is that Trump winning could unite us. Of course we would despair and there would be much pain, but there is that ray of hope that it would be what saves us. Then the future would look back and say holy shit, look what it took, with more than half the voting public choosing a death path, for humanity to pull itself off its crash course and choose life.
At the beginning of this fateful day, when urging people to vote Democratic is no longer in play, please read this historical analysis about what got us where we are. I do a lot of posting about Brian Thomas Swimme, as I am devoted to his advocacy to adopt a new creation story to get us from being avaricious to being altruistic, and this is Thomas Berry, his mentor. Berry shows us where we are and inspires us about where we could be, so whoever wins the election this is a good start to get us on the road to the better future that is there for our taking.
From The Dream of the Earth, by Thomas Berry, forward by Brian Thomas Swimme, from pages 40-48:
By the mid-eighteenth century the invention of new technologies had begun whereby we could manipulate our environment to our own advantage. At this time also an “objective world” was born – a world clearly distinct from ourselves and available not as a means of divine communion, but as a vast realm of natural resources for exploitation and consumption. These scientific attitudes and technological inventions became the modern substitutes for the mystical vision of divine reality and the sympathetic evocation of natural and spiritual forces by ritual and prayerful invocation.
Yet, though differing in its method, the historical drive of Western society toward a millennium of earthly beatitude remained the same. But the means had changed. Human effort, not divine grace, was the instrument for this paradisal realization. The scientists and inventors, the bankers and commercial magnates, were now the saints who would reign. This, then, was the drive in the technological age. It was an energy revolution not only in terms of the physical energies now available to us, but also in terms of the psychic energies. Never before had we experienced such a turbulent period, such a movement to alter the world, to bring about an earthly redeemed state, and, finally, to attain such power as was formerly attributed only to the natural or to the divine.
This achievement was associated with a sense of political and social transformation that would release us from age-old tyrannies. The very structure of existence was being altered. In this mood America was founded, achieved independence, and then advanced through the nineteenth century to a position of world dominance in the early twentieth century. America took seriously the words written by Thomas Paine in 1775 in his pamphlet Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not appeared since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…“ Earlier the pilgrims had foreseen this continent as the setting for the new City on a Hill to which the universal human community could look for guidance into a glorious future. Throughout the founding years, even until the twentieth century, people crossed the Atlantic with a vivid sense that they were crossing the Red Sea from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom and abundance of the Promised Land.
With such expectation came a new exhilaration in our powers to dominate the natural world. This led to a savage assault upon the earth as was inconceivable in prior time. The experience of sacred communion with the earth disappeared. Such intimacy was considered a poetic conceit by a people who prided themselves on their realism, their aversion to all forms of myth, magic, mysticism, and superstition. Little did these people know that their very realism was as pure a superstition as was ever professed by humans, their devotion to science a new mysticism, their technology a magical way to paradise.
As with all such illusory situations, the awakening can be slow and painful and filled with exaggerated reactions. Our present awakening from this enchantment with technology has been particularly painful. We have altered the earth and human life in many irrevocable ways. Some of these have been creative and helpful. Most have been destructive beyond imagination.
Presently we are entering another historical period, one that might be designated as the ecological age. I use the term ecological in its primary meaning as the relation of an organism to its environment, but also as an indication of the interdependence of all the living and nonliving systems of the earth. This vision of a planet integral with itself throughout its spatial extent and its evolutionary sequence is of primary importance if we are to have the psychic power to undergo the psychic and social transformations that are being demanded of us. These transformations require the assistance of the entire planet, not merely the forces available to the human. Otherwise we mistake the order of magnitude in this challenge. It is not simply adaption to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification in our system of social or economic controls. Nor is it some slight change in our educational system. What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and of value.
What is happening was unthinkable in ages gone by. We now control forces that once controlled us, or, more precisely, the earth process that formerly administered the earth directly is now accomplishing this task in and through the human as its conscious agent. Once the creature of earthly providence, we are now extensively in control of this providence. We now have extensive power over the ultimate destinies of the planet, the power of life and death over many of its life systems. For the first time we can intervene directly in the genetic process. We can dissolve the ozone layer that encircles the earth and let the cosmic radiation bring about distortions in the life process. We can destroy the complex patterns of life in the seas and make the rivers uninhabitable. And we could go on with our description of human power, even over the chemical constitution and the very topography of the planet.
In its order of magnitude, this change in our relation to the earth is much greater than that experienced when the first Neolithic civilizations came into being some twelve thousand years ago. Nothing since then, not even the great civilizational structures themselves, produced change on such a significant scale. Such change cannot be managed by partial accommodations or even by major adjustments within the civilizational contexts of the past. The context of survival is radically altered. Our problems can no more be resolved within our former pattern of the human then the problems that led to quantum physics could be dealt with by any adjustment within the context of the Newtonian universe.
No adequate scale of action can be expected until the human community is able to act in some unified way to establish a functional relation with the earth processes, which itself does not recognize national boundaries. The sea and air and sky and sunlight and all the living forms of earth [need to] establish a single planetary system. The human at the species level needs to fulfill its functional role within this life community, for in the end the human community will flourish or decline as the earth and the community of living species flourishes or declines.
A primary allegiance to this larger community is needed. It will do little good for any nation to seek its own well-being by destroying the very conditions for planetary survival. This large vision is no longer utopian. It directly concerns the hardest, most absolute reality there is: the reality of the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat…
Much of our trouble during these past two centuries has been caused by our limited, our micro phase, modes of thought. We centered ourselves on the individual, on personal aggrandizement, on a competitive way of life, and on the nation, or the community of nations, as the guarantor of freedom to pursue these purposes. A sense of the planet Earth never entered into our minds. We paid little attention to the more comprehensive visions of reality. This was for the poets, the romanticists, the religious believers, the moral idealists. Now we begin to recognize that what is good in its micro phase reality can be deadly in this macro phase development.
Much of human folly is a consequence of neglecting this single bit of wisdom. A few hundred automobiles with good roads may be a great blessing. Yet when the number increases into the millions and hundreds of millions, the automobiles is capable of destroying the higher forms of life on the entire planet. So with all human processes: undisciplined expansion and self-inflation lead only to destruction. Apart from the well-being of earth, no subordinate life system can survive. So it is with economics and politics: any particular activity must find its place within the larger pattern, or it will die and perhaps bring down the larger life system itself. This change of scale is one of the most significant aspects in the change of consciousness that is needed.
The ecological age into which we are presently moving is an opposed, though complementary, age that succeeds the technological age. In a deeper sense this new age takes us back to certain basic aspects of the universe which were evident to the human mind from its earliest period, but which have been further refined, observed, and scientifically stated in more recent centuries. These governing principles of the universe have controlled the entire evolutionary process from the moment of its explosive origin some fourteen billion years ago to the shaping of the earth, the emergence of life and consciousness, and so through the various ages of human history. These principles, known in past ages by intuitive processes, are now understood by scientific reasoning, although their implications have not yet been acted upon in any effective way. The ecological age must now activate these principles in a universal context if the human venture is to continue…
To Isaac Newton, we are especially indebted for our understanding of the gravitational attraction of every physical reality to every other physical reality in the universe, an attraction that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the affective attractions that exist throughout the human community. Without the gravitational attraction experienced throughout the physical world, there would be no emotional attraction of humans to one another. To Darwin we are indebted for our understanding of the genetic unity of the entire web of living beings. To Einstein and his theories of relativity we are indebted for a new awareness of how to think about the dynamics of relatedness in the universe.
The ecological age fosters the deep awareness of the sacred presence within each reality of the universe. There is an awe and reverence due to the stars in heaven, the sun, and all heavenly bodies; to the seas and the continents; to all living forms of trees and flowers; to the myriad expressions of life in the sea; to the animals of the forests and the birds of the air. To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice. Our primary need for the various life forms of the planet is a psychic, rather than a physical, need. The ecological age seeks to establish and maintain this subjective identity, this authenticity at the heart of every being. If this is so of the prehuman phase of life, it is surely true of the human also.
Only such a comprehensive vision can produce the commitment required to stop the world of exploitation, of manipulation, of violence so intense that it threatens to destroy not only the human city, but also the planet itself. If we would terminate this danger, we must create another, less vulnerable, life situation. So far, this new world order has not had its adequate presentation. Yet when it comes, it will take the form of what we are designating as the ecological age. This age can provide the historical dynamism associated with the Marxist classless society, the age of plenty envisaged by the capitalist nations, and the millennial age of peace envisaged in the apocalypse of John the Divine. At present, however, we are in that phase of transition that must be described as the groping phase. We are like a musician who faintly hears a melody deep within the mind, but not clearly enough to play it through. This is the inner agony we experience, especially when we consider that the music we are creating is the very reality of the universe.
It would be easier for us if we would remember that the earth itself, as the primary energy, is finding its way both to interior conscious expression in the human and to outer fulfillment in the universe. We can solve nothing by dreaming up some ephemeral structure of reality or by giving the direction of the earth over to our bureaucratic institutions. We must simply respond to the urgencies imposed on us by the energy that holds the stars within the galactic clusters, that shaped the planet under our feet, that has guided life through its bewildering variety of expression, and that has found even higher expression in the exotic tribes and nations, languages, literature, art, music, social forms, religious rituals, and spiritual disciplines over the surface of the planet. There is reason to believe that those mysterious forces that have guided earthly events thus far have not suddenly collapsed under the great volume of human affairs in this late twentieth century.
What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation. We are involved in a process akin to initiation processes which have been known and practiced from earliest times. The human community is passing from its stage of childhood into its adult stage of life. We must assume adult responsibilities. As the maternal bonds are broken on one level to be reestablished on another, so the human community is being separated from the dominance of Nature on one level to establish a new and more mature relationship. In its prior period the earth acted independently as the complete controlling principal; only limited control over existence was assigned to ourselves. Now the earth insists that we accept greater responsibility, a responsibility commensurate with the greater knowledge communicated to us.
This responsibility has so far been more than we could use wisely, just as the new powers of a young adult are powers seldom used wisely without an intervening period of confusion, embarrassment, and juvenile mistakes. As the child eventually learns a mature mode of conduct, discipline, and responsibility, so now, as individuals and as a planetary community, we will, it is hoped, learn our earth responsibilities.
So, we have our work cut out for us. And, as what is unbearable inspires us to change, what could be a better inducement than this? http://www.thebulwark.com/p/online-right-maga-fake-news-problem.
When this election is over, however it’s gone the perfect movie to watch is Me Before You, where a good cry, whether of joy or of pain, and the beauty of every shot will help cleanse you of the ugliness we’ve been bathed in. Ignore the bad reviews – as we’ve learned, there’s something wrong with America’s heart. This review got it right: “Me Before You is one of the most refreshing romance movies to hit the big screen in a long while.”
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