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Blog
entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and
reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer
have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent
essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them
with all who are interested.
Post
#121 is an extensive review, written for my own self-understanding, of Thomas
Berry's book on the role of global humanity at this present transitional time
in the Earth's evolution.
===
The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, by Thomas Berry. Crown
Publishing Group (December 1999)
This is an exciting book for me personally.
Nearly everything I consider important is here: modern science, biological
evolution, cosmic perspectives, the meaning of life, shamanism, sacred
ceremonies, seasonal celebrations, ancient myths and archetypes, Jungian
psychology! These central concerns of my adult life, some of which are
seemingly so marginal to contemporary society, are acknowledged and affirmed in
Berry’s book as of central significance. That's why I find his work so
fascinating.
1. BASICS.
Berry begins by saying that his book is about
awe and wonder, the beauty of the world, the meaning of life. And it is indeed
about all of that. It’s really almost too much to deal with; the ideas are
almost too big to handle.
The great work of our time, to which the title
refers, is the cosmic task given to us by the universe at this time in history.
Many cultures have had such cosmic tasks; examples are the spirituality created
by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the classical culture of the Greek world, and
the unification of Europe by the Medieval world.
Our great work, says Berry, is that in a world
devastated by industrial civilization, we are to learn how to enter into right
relations with all the components of the natural world. Berry makes the point
that this communion with “all our relations” is a shamanic vocation, and that
we can trust that along with such a calling we are given the ability to fulfill
it.
Our task, here at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, is to help in the transition to a new world. Berry also
makes the important point that in human history, just as in the lives of individuals,
dark times are creative.
The essence of Berry’s viewpoint is that we
humans are part of the universe and to align ourselves with it is what life is
all about. Quite fascinating, and personally satisfying to me, is his claim
that we do this most intentionally via sacred ceremonies. Berry says that a
necessary condition for recovery of our relatedness with the earth is the
recovery of daily and seasonal ritual. He makes this point not in passing but
at the very beginning of the book. His emphasis delights me because an
understanding of the principles and practice of sacred ritual, especially
seasonal ceremonies, has been a major focus of my life.
Ours is essentially a world of wonder and awe,
given to us for our delight! How different that vision of reality is from the
typical views of Americans.
But those conventional perspectives are not,
and never were, the norm for humanity. As Berry says, for most of human history
the powers and forces of nature were thought of as personal manifestations of the
numinous, expressions of the sacred Mystery behind the universe. For a time in
human history, some five thousand years, a period which seems long to us but
was in fact a very small fraction of humanity’s existence, this sense of the
sacramental nature of the world was lost.
But-- and this comes as a surprise to many--
modern science allows us to recover it. Berry calls the modern scientific
understanding of the origin and development of the earth, including the
emergence of life and human consciousness as an integral part of it, the New
Sacred Story.
All cultures have stories about their origins
and significance. What’s especially important with regard to this New Story is
that it is global; thanks to modern scientific education, it is the common
heritage of everyone, everywhere.
As an example of humanity’s ancient sacred
vision Berry offers the religions of native Americans. They are, he says, among
the most impressive spiritual traditions known to us. As examples, he
highlights a few practices: the vision quest of the Plains Indians, the baby
blessings of the Omaha, the healing rituals of the Navaho, and the thanksgiving
ceremonies of the Iroquois.
Berry describes the arrival of Europeans in
North America as one of the most fateful moments in human history. “Everything
changed,” he says.
Europeans came with the view that the natural
world has no rights, that it exists only for exploitation, for trade and
commerce. Great damage was done. We see that damage all around us. But this
perspective is now being thoroughly critiqued and we are beginning once again
to pursue the ancient vision. “We live,” Berry says, “in a historic moment.”
As he points out, all transitional moments are
liminal; they are characterized by uncomfortable feelings of being “betwixt and
between,” when the old is gone but the new is not yet.
Our historic moment, says Berry, is awesome in
its liminality; it marks the sunset of 65 million years of life on earth, the
old Cenozoic Age, and the dawn of a new period, the Ecozoic Age. This recovery
of the numinous, the wild and natural, says Berry, calls for a supreme creative
response.
Any summary on my part of the content of that
response is nearly impossible; the best I can do is mention a few major ideas:
The universe is itself sacred, the manifestation of Mystery, and reverence
before its beauty and terror is the beginning of wisdom. This means, as Berry
says, that there is nothing trivial about our lives. The source of all human
creativity is the earth’s natural wildness, a wildness which is not random and
senseless.
As Berry puts it, the universe is both at home
with itself, and yet profoundly discontented with any final expression of
itself, so that its wildness is both a natural expanding force and a containing
power which results in a creative disequilibrium between expansion and
containment. Berry calls this creative balance “a sacred exuberance manifesting
the deepest spirit of the cosmos,” and notes that at the human level it shows
itself especially in dreams and art.
The implications of such a cosmic vision are
enormous. To begin with, each human person can be understood to be the universe
reflecting on and celebrating itself. This means that the universe needs each
of us, that we wouldn’t even exist if we didn’t have a basic role to play. It
also means that we need the universe, just as we need one another. Out of this
perspective a fundamental ethical principle emerges: “we do not enhance
ourselves by diminishing others, human or non-human.”
The diminishment of the non-human by humans is
the central issue of the twenty-first century; and, says Berry, it comes down
to a struggle between corporations and ecologists.
The corporations have all the power. They
possess the earth’s natural resources and they control the national governments;
the earth is already severely damaged. Healing, Berry says, can only happen by
an effort and action as intense and vigorous as that which caused the damage in
the first place.
He compares the present situation to a
bewitchment (although he doesn’t use that word) or an entrancement. Nature is
perceived as having no rights while, since the late 1800’s, corporations have
had the same legal rights as individual persons.
The situation is like a cultural addiction, he
says, and points out that the pathology is especially evident in everyday
language where words like “progress” and “profit” are validated and promoted as
positive terms, while in reality “progress” is synonymous with the earth’s
degradation and “profit” means a deficit for the earth. “Development” is other
example; it in fact almost always means destruction of the natural environment.
As Berry points out, the important question
is, Why this damage? If we do not enhance ourselves by diminishing others, why
this mentally disturbed attitude, this mental illness, which makes ours the
most pathological of all cultures? The answer, he says, lies in that inner rage
against the limitations of the real world which is found at the heart of
western culture. This inner rage seeks to dominate and control the natural
world which it perceives as threat. We remain unaware of it, for the most part,
precisely because we are caught in the power of its addictive trance.
The best understanding I have of this inner
rage which seeks, as Berry says, to dominate and control the natural world,
comes from an unlikely source. It’s one I stumbled on accidentally: a
psychoanalytic study of fascism based on the literature of pre-Nazi fascist
groups known as the Freikorpsmen. The book is Male Fantasies, Volume II, by Klaus Theweleit
(University of Minnesota Press, 1987). It is especially helpful because the
fascist Freikorps provides us with an example of Western culture’s inner rage at
its most blatant extreme.
Fascism, according to Klaus Theweleit, is a
repudiation of everyday life and the natural world; it is against everything
that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure. It has its origin in the fascist male
ego’s fear and hatred of the feminine.
Similarly, the inner rage and destructive
violence against women and nature found at the heart of western culture has its
origin in the patriarchal ego’s terror at the threat of its destruction. The
threat comes from a fear of fusion with the mother, says Theweleit, and is
based on lack of pre-oedipal separation from her.
“Such men were never fully born,” he says;
they never differentiated enough from their maternal source to relate, as a
separate ego, to an other, and they can only feel the integrity of the ego-self
and sustain a sense of bodily boundaries by inflicting violence on others.
Similarly, disdain for the world and the
contemporary exploitation and destruction of the natural environment by Western
civilization is a desire to destroy the mother. It is the result of the
patriarchal ego’s alienation from nature. It comes from the sense of not being
cared for by Mother Earth, of not being wanted by the universe. At bottom, is
the feeling that reality itself is not to be trusted.
As I said previously, how different this
attitude of alienation, fear and hatred is from the ancient view that ours is
essentially a world of wonder and awe, given to us for our delight. How
different, indeed, from patriarchal culture’s rage and destructive violence
against nature is the ancient perspective that we are part of the universe and to
align ourselves with it is what life is all about!
How may this alienation be overcome? According
to Berry, the path to reorientation is to be found in a return to the depths of
our own psychological roots. We can overcome our alienation from nature, he says,
by “our attention to fundamental archetypal images found in the human psyche.”
He mentions specifically those of the Great
Mother, the Eternal Round of Death and Rebirth, the Cosmic Tree of Life and the
Hero-Journey. These empowering archetypes, he notes, need to be valued and
promoted especially by the guiding professions, education and religion, because
as symbolic images they provide us with the basic story of how the world works
and how humans fit into it. (An excellent book on the topic of archetypal
guidance is Tracking the Gods, The Place of Myth in Modern Life, by James Hollis
[Inner City, 1995]).
===
2. EDUCATION AND RELIGION.
There are four basic human establishments,
politics, economics, religion and education, says Berry, and at present all
four are failing. The reason for their failure is simple: each presumes a
radical discontinuity between the human and non-human. Personally, I find it
amazing that our political, economic, religious and educational establishments
continue to alienate us from the world of nature. It is very difficult to
understand how we can continue to remain so unconscious.
Berry has much to say about education and
religion. As guiding professions, they, especially, need to be grounded in the
modern scientific story of the earth. But, as he says, they tend to remain
stuck in fundamentalist traditions of the past or to get lost in New Age
trivia.
Berry notes that although there are many
twentieth-century nature writers-- Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and Gary Snyder,
for example-- they have no influence on the contemporary university. The
present educational system exists simply to prepare students for roles in the
domination of the earth, not to be in relationship with it. In his view, the
educational establishment is one of the principal supports of our contemporary
social pathology.
His sees the religious establishment as being
no better. Religion is seriously deficient, he says, in not teaching
effectively that the natural world is the primary revelation. Its overemphasis
on redemption, for example, “leaves us unable to benefit religiously from that
primary and most profound mode of experiencing the divine in the immediacies of
life.”
Berry makes the point that, in education
generally, liberal studies and the humanities are so extensively focused on the
human that our place in the cosmos is missed. He says that in Western culture
up until thirteenth century, the cosmos was understood as primary recipient of
the benefits of the incarnation and redemption, but that in the fourteenth
century, the experience of the Black Death in Europe changed that perspective.
The result was an aversion to nature, which in the seventeenth century was
pushed further by Rene Des Cartes, who saw nature only as a machine to be
exploited. Even today, Berry notes, scientists still remain suspicious of
nature.
Yet we are now coming to see that a more
reasonable response to the world is not hatred and fear but awe and wonder.
Education can give us a new revelation of the mystery of the universe. Berry
calls his generation “autistic” with regard to the presence of personal
spirit-powers in the natural world. “Religion has been too pious, corporations
too plundering, governments too subservient.”
Is healing possible? Is there a way out of
this pathological condition of alienation from the real world?
With regard to reestablishing the continuity
between the human and non-human, Berry stresses that it is the place of the
universities to provide guidance to the young. He says that in an evolutionary perspective,
the university can be seen as the universe reflecting upon itself and
communicating its self-reflection to the human community, so that the basic
course at every level of education must be the New Story of the universe and
humanity’s place in it.
Against rationalism and materialism, Berry
makes the point that we ourselves are the best evidence for the fact that the
universe is a mind-producing, psyche-producing and relatedness-producing
process.
But even at the pre-human level there is, as
he says, much evidence that natural things are in some sense subjects to be
related to, not merely objects for exploitative use. This experience of
relating to the personal presences found in nature is one of the most difficult
things for contemporary people to understand. For some wonderful examples, see
Jane Goodall’s recent book, Reason for Hope, A Spiritual Journey (Warner Books, 1999).
Berry says we need to re-think everything in
terms of the New Story: how, for example, the older cultural forms fit into the
new context and how, for each of us, the New Story is also our own personal
story.
To me, this seems one of the most important
aspects of his whole vision: seeing that our personal development, that our
inner growth or “individuation,” as Jungians call it, is in direct continuity
with the rest of the evolution of the earth. It would seem to be a powerful
response, for example, to the restlessness and rootlessness of contemporary
young people. The New Story says to each one of us: “You count. Your life is
not trivial. The universe needs you.”
Such a perspective should come from the
religious traditions, but the western religious attitude toward nature remains
superficial; it finds itself unable to accept life in the conditions given to
us. “Salvation” has come to mean “from life in the world,” rather than “for the
life of the world.”
Thus, says Berry, contemporary religion and
the humanistic traditions are principal supporters of our present alienation.
We need to go back to our genetic roots: we need to recover the historical and
psychological roots of our human heritage in the Paleolithic and shamanic
perspectives of a sacred earth. It is in this very old, yet totally new,
revelatory experience that “our hope for the future” lies.
===
3. COMMERCE and POLITICS.
At present, every aspect of life is absorbed
into the context of commerce and industry; and, as Berry observes, we do not
seem to be able even to imagine any other. Ecologists and environmentalists are
still considered radical, or romantic, or simply caught up in New Age trivia--
an indication, he says, of the pathology of our addiction which can bear no
alternatives.
For several centuries, since early 1600’s,
industry and commerce have been the principal instruments of devastation of the
planet. At present, financial corporations direct the discovery and use of
science and technology for the benefit of humans and financial gain. But, Berry
says, devastation of the planet for human benefit is simply unacceptable.
Since the late 1800s, corporations in the
United States have had the same legal rights as individual persons, but none of
the responsibilities.
His condemnation of corporations is
relentless. They oppose government regulation, they resist restraints based on
concerns for environmental protection, they do not share profits with their
workers. By their control of media and advertising, their corruption of
governments, and their oppression of the workers, they are the most influential
of all institutions on the planet.
From the time of the early settlers and the
building of canals and railroads, to the development of electricity, cars and
petroleum, and now to their extension from the United States to the entire
planet, corporations have justified their devastation of the natural world, as
well as their use of public lands and public money, their manipulation of the
media and their exploitation of workers, always in terms of progress and free
enterprise.
This is the central issue of the early
twenty-first century, says Berry. This is the stark reality that has to be
dealt with now.
Certain defining moments contributed to the
creation of the present situation, Berry points out.
The joining of Judeo-Christian spirituality
with Greco-Roman humanism and imperialism allowed for the mentality of a
radical discontinuity between nature and humanity, and this attitude of
alienation from nature led, via the Black Death, to seeing nature as a threat.
It also led to the modern scientific suspicion of nature, allowing for control
of nature by commerce and industry.
Since the 1880’s, this has produced a terminal
(rather than an ever-renewing, organic) economy, resulting from the extraction
industries’ use of the earth’s resources without regard for consequences. Our
great need now, says Berry, is to see that the earth and biodiversity are the
primary values: to see that nothing exists in isolation, that “nothing can be
itself without everything else.”
One especially important aspect of this
organic rather than mechanical worldview is the issue of diversity and
standardization. As Berry says, “nature abhors uniformity; it produces
individuals.”
Berry’s focus on the petroleum industry is
especially enlightening. As both an extraction industry and the source of
innumerable synthetic and damaging petro-chemicals, it is the cause of enormous
problems. Yet it is the world’s most profitable industry and the very basis of
our present way of life; and it is not sustainable, in any case, for more than
a few more decades.
Berry concludes that in the face of all this,
if there is to be hope for the future, we need to “reinvent the human.”
===
4. REINVENTING THE HUMAN.
How can we go about reinventing the human? We
humans create ourselves, in a cultural sense. As Annie Dillard says, quoting an
anthropologist in her new book, For the Time Being, “Once the naked ape
starts to talk, the mouth becomes the organ of reproduction.” Berry says we
create ourselves “via story and vision.” Tribal peoples in West Africa call
sacred rites and stories “the amazing word of the world.” How can we learn to
speak again this “amazing word?” Where can we turn for help?
Our present cultural traditions are, as Berry
says, at an impasse. The older traditions are not in themselves equal to the
task before us. They have neither prevented the present devastation of the
earth, nor have some of them even begun to critique it. We need a new cultural
focus.
And we have it, says Berry, in the new
revelation of cosmogenesis given to us by modern science: our awareness of the
universe as an evolutionary process, and situating the human within the larger
context of earth and nature.
This New Story-- that we humans are part of
the universe and to align ourselves with it is what life is all about-- is
probably the greatest change in human consciousness since we first appeared two
or three million years ago; it is the global equivalent of the creation stories
and origin myths of earlier cultures.
But this present understanding of the universe
as evolving and emergent, and of the human psyche as integral to cosmic
emergence, is especially significant not only in that it allows us to see
ourselves as the result of cosmic evolution. It now allows us also to see
ourselves as the guiding influence for the earth’s continued development.
This is where “our hope for the future” lies.
Only with this vision we will be able to
overcome the current trance state and addictive pathology of our present
culture. Only with such a vision, says Berry, can we think in terms of local
subsistence economies and legal rights for the mineral, plant and animal
components of the earth. Only with such a vision will we be able to accomplish
our Great Work, the cosmic task given to us by the universe at this time in
history.
===
A FEW REFLECTIONS.
First, it seems to me especially important to
realize that this new revelation of sacred earth is, in fact, a recovery of the
shamanic and sacramental perspective that is our human birthright from
Paleolithic times.
It’s in our genes, as Berry says: it’s a
recovery of empowering archetypal images from deep within the human
unconscious. To the images Berry mentions, especially those of the Great Mother
and the Hero-Journey, I want to add two: the Shaman and the Trickster.
Any implementation of the New Story seems to
me to be especially dependent on a recovery of these two archetypes. The Hero
is part of the patriarchal stage of development, and we need to go beyond the
hero.
If, as Berry has said, the root of our
problems lies especially in the inner hatred and rage against nature and the
feminine on the part of the patriarchal ego, then it seems especially important
that we recognize that there is an alternative to this patriarchal model of
manhood, one which is not based on fear of the natural world.
Deep within the male psyche is a much earlier
masculine archetype, that of the shamanic trickster. It prevailed through most
of human history and is an image of manhood in communion with, rather than
alienated from, the earth. It still remains to be discovered by our culture.
The fact that we are only just beginning to
recognize the existence of an alternative to patriarchal masculinity
demonstrates the strength of our continued enmeshment in the patriarchal trance
state.
If our culture thinks of the shaman at all, it
thinks of him as a primitive witch doctor; perhaps, even, as one practicing
satanic rites. The reality is different.
As Berry says, during the Paleolithic age,
which constitutes approximately ninety-eight percent of human history, we
humans found the meaning of life in responding to the ocean of physical and
psychical energies in which we live. Our ancestors experienced the energies and
forces of the earth as spirit-powers and personal presences. Being sensitive
and responsive to those earth energies is precisely what shamanism is all
about.
In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, C. G. Jung says that whether or not they appear to be personal,
when these archetypal powers present themselves to us, we should consciously
relate to them.
“Talk to them,” Jung says. That such an
experience of the powers of the earth and the human psyche remains so little
understood in our culture is yet another indication of the patriarchal ego’s
alienation from the currents of life on earth.
It seems to me that if we are ever to move
beyond the patriarchal male ego’s alienation from the world, it is absolutely
essential that we recover the empowering image of the shamanic male, one who is
not afraid to be in communion with the powers of the earth and the Mystery of
the universe. Sacred manhood and sacred earth go together; we can’t have one
without the other.
We also need to recover the related image of
the Trickster. We know this archetype from the cartoon character of Wily Coyote
and perhaps Brer Rabbit, but it is much more significant than simply that of an
individual who plays tricks and causes unnecessary troubles. The Trickster
image is also part of sacred manhood.
Just as the Shaman is one who is unafraid in
the face of the powers of the earth and the unconscious, so the Trickster is
one who is unafraid in the face of the conventional views of society.
Our empowerment by the Trickster archetype is
what allows us to go beyond the conventions of the patriarchal perspective.
Patriarchal authority demands of us that we do what we’re told, that we do not
question authority, that we don’t rock the boat. The Trickster has the courage
to laugh at the pomposity and rigidity of the patriarchal mind and to move on
to deal with the life-giving issues that need to be dealt with.
But going “beyond the hero,” with the recovery
of the Shaman and Trickster images of a grounded and sacred manhood, allows us
to recover even something more. It allows us to recover the very basis of the
Western religious tradition, the sacramental nature of the world.
The archetypal energies of the earth and the
forces of the unconscious can be understood from two different points of view.
From one perspective, they are the source of
our personal meaning, identity and purpose: they literally empower us to be who
and what we are. This is especially important in that “nature abhors
uniformity,” as Berry says. The universe wants and needs each one of us in our
personal uniqueness.
From another point of view, which does not
exclude the first, the spiritual energies of the earth are nothing less than
manifestations of the numinous. They are epiphanies of the sacred, expressions
of the Mystery of the universe giving itself to us. And giving itself to us as
our very selves.
To the patriarchal mind this sounds like the
grossest heresy, but it is in fact the ancient sacramental vision of life. It
proclaims that “In God we live and move and have our being,” that we are
participants in the divine nature, that we are co-creators along with God.
And, thus, that the transfiguration of the
world is in our hands.
Berry says our future depends on our ability
to see ourselves in this context. How diminished our lives are when we are
alienated from the currents of life on earth!
The modern worldview is overwhelming in its grandeur
and the New Story allows us to see again that what life is all about is to
experience awe, reverence, joy in the earth. Our future depends on our ability
to see ourselves as celebrants of the sacred, to see the evolutionary
transitions as moments of grace, and to see that it is all now up to us.
As Berry puts it, we need not only to be
present to the earth, but to be the earth. And our task is to direct its
development during the next sequence of transformations.
Finally, there is the question of whether we
are up to it. Are we capable of carrying out the Great Work which the universe
has given us?
Berry says that we can in fact trust that we
are capable of accomplishing the cosmic task to which we are called. He says
that we can indeed trust, based on past experience, that we will be properly
guided by the spirit-powers of the earth and the archetypal energies of the
human psyche.
He notes that these spiritual energies are not
depleted but increased when we use and share them. But he cautions that “such
natural forces are available to us not by domination but by invocation.” The
ancestral powers will guide us rightly when we give them our attention. “For
our success,” he says, “we need only call upon them.”
It would seem, then, that one of the most
immediate tasks before us is to learn how to give our attention to the
ancestral powers of the earth.
As the tribal peoples of West African say, the
‘grandfathers’ and ‘grandmothers’ are summoned to our support via “laughter,
rite and story.” If it comes as a surprise to many that contemporary modern
science allows us to recover the ancient sacramental vision of the world, the
age-old significance of sacred rites is probably more of a surprise.
Far from being the superstitious practices of
primitive peoples, sacred ritual is the very means by which the guidance of the
spiritual forces of the earth is evoked. This has always been known by
everyone, everywhere, except in our own patriarchal society.
But the techniques of ritual story-telling and
sacred ceremonies have been preserved for us, outside mainstream global
culture, by the native peoples of our planet. It is to them that we must turn
for help if we are to begin to implement the New Story.
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