THOMAS BERRY
"Great Consciousness Crisis"
We would like to share with you the Past and the Possible Future for the evolution of the Human Species on Earth’s Garden Planet.
So what makes a Community Real?
We believed the best resource to document whether a Community is Real or not Real has been the lifetime work of the Monastic Catholic Priest Thomas Berry. We chose three of his classics to share below.
In 1988 my colleagues and I began reading Berry’s classic The Dream of the Earth published by the Sierra Club which was founded in 1892 by John Muir. We were inspired by Berry’s way of thinking that “progress” had to include an entire community. The more we read, the more we realized we were dealing with the task of “reinventing the human.”
In 1992 we began reading The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Fourth to the Ecozoic Era…A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos that was co-authored by Thomas Berry and the scientist Brian Swimme. They celebrated our total community of existence as they united science and the humanities to celebrate the “Flaring Fourth and Unfolding of the Cosmos.”
In 1999 we began reading Berry’s The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. The humans present on planet Earth in the opening years of the 21st century would be the ones to create a mutually enhancing mode for humans to dwell in on planet Earth. Nourishment of both the oute body and the inner spirit would be essential.
LET’S GO BACK TO 1988, THEN 1992, THEN 1999 TO COLLECT CLUES FROM EACH BOOK TO GIVE US CLUES TO THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF THE EVOLUTION OF OUR COMMUNITIES.
1988: Now we will search for clues in The Dream of the Earth.
Awareness of an all-pervading mysterious energy articulated in the infinite variety of natural phenomenon seems to be the primordial human consciousness awakening to an awesome universe filled with mysterious power. One of the finest moments is the discovery that Earth is a living organism. Seldom does anyone speak of the deficit involved in the closing down of the basic life system. This deficit in its extreme is the death of a living process…This story of the past provides our most secure basis for hope that the Earth will guide us through the peril of the present…The difficulty is in the order of magnitude of change…The Dream of the Earth is where we can go for guidance for the task of what is before us.
Nations exist in an abiding sequence of conflicts that have grown especially virulent…For the first time the planet has become capable of self-destruction…After the concern for the integrity of the Earth, the next concern is to see the human as an integral member of the Earth community…Among themselves humans have experienced unending conflict…As human power over the total process has increased, the spontaneities of nature have been suppressed or extinguished…If the supreme disaster is the closing down of the major life systems of the planet, then the supreme need of our times is to bring about a healing of the Earth through enhancing the Earth community.
Communion with the natural world is understood instinctively by tribal people…This is something all our sciences and technologies are unable to appreciate…We see the North American continent as divinely ours to do what with what we please. With supreme shock we discover our historic mission is not what we thought it was…and that this continent is in a delicate balance with life systems…The future of the human species lies in our acceptance and fulfillment of the human role…Our species came into being in the life community through billions of years that shaped the world so humans could evolve…The greatest single need at present is the completion of the Story…One difficulty experienced by the human was the capacity for communion.
1992: Now we will search for clues in The Universe Story From the Primordial Flaring Forth…A celebration of the Unfolding of the Unfolding of the Cosmos.
We are now experiencing that exciting moment when our new meaning, our new story is taking shape…we hope it soon will find expression not simply in a narrative such as this but in poetry, music, and ritual through a universal. The greater problem is not the lack of data, but in our capacity to understand the significance of the data that we already possess. The invention of the bureaucratic system with its hierarchical authority made possible vast transformations of the human and the natural processes. Population and wealth soared. Warring deities replaced the image of the Great Mother as the principal symbol.
The human situation in the last decade of the 20th century is vastly different in any previous period in human history or even the history of Earth itself. The population of the planet is immensely greater. The power of the human to interfere with functioning of natural life systems is much greater than ever. Present human activities affect all other components of the planet: land, water, air, and life in all plants and animals. Among insights attained, all things are held together in intimate presence to each other. From earliest time this vast embrace bonding all things together in the entire created order can be understood in the maternal metaphor of the Great Mother. It was this nurturing quality we identify with the grand curvature of the universe and nursing context of all that exists.
A momentous change in human consciousness was in process as revelatory, meaning a new awareness of how the ultimate mysteries of existence are being manifested in the universe about us. This revelatory experience enabled the universe to pass from a Lesser to a greater complexity in its structure as well as to a greater variety and intensity in its modes of conscious expression. The failure of humans to understand this change of consciousness perhaps is the most profound cause for the disturbed conditions of the planet in the late 20th century.
Only now we have a new understanding of the sequences of transformations that have been taking place over past eras to shape the galaxies, fashion the elements, gather the solar system together with its array of planets, and churn together those awesome materials that make up the Earth. This is the story that “becomes conscious of itself” in human intelligence. Beyond all of that is the role of women in the future. The need of a woman’s capacity to interpret the human venture is at its most basic level. Family, child-bearing, and child-rearing will always be central to human concerns. For women a new range of activities is needed. We cannot do without the insights that women offer in every phase of human existence. The human species must limit its population…and we must insure that every woman around the Earth will have access to birth control.
1999: Now we will search for clues in The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future.
Prolog: To the children…To the children who swim beneath…The waves of the sea, to those who live in the soils of the Earth… To the children of the flowers, in the meadows and the trees in the forest…To all those children who roam over land and the winged ones who fly with the winds…To the human children too, that all children may go together into the future in the full Diversity of their regional communities.
Human presence on the planet Earth in the opening years of the 21st century is our subject. We need to understand where we are and how we got here. Once we are clear on these issues we can move forward to create a mutually enhancing mode of humans dwelling on planet Earth…We seem to expect a wonder-world attained by ever-greater science, technologies, and commercial projects…while we are causing immense ruin of the world around us…We might think about our present life-situation and the wonder of Earth…How it came to be the garden planet and what might be human role to play…Our future destiny rests even more on our capacity for intimacy in our human-Earth relationship.
Our educational institutions need to see their role not as training personnel for exploiting the Earth…It is the planet that brings us into being, sustains us in life, and delights us with its wonders…We must have a vision of the future that will sustain us in the transformation of the human project now in process…That future can exist only when we understand the Universe as composed of subjects to commune with…Not subjects to be exploited…Nourishment of both the outer body and the inner spirit will be achieved in intimate association with each other or not at all…
The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human at a species level…within the community of life-systems by means of our Story and our shared Dream experience…Reinvent the human because humans more than any other species invents themselves…We need to reinvent the human at the species level because the issues we are concerned with seem beyond our present cultural tradition…The human is at a cultural impasse… Radical new cultural forms are needed…We see clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human…What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world…if the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. We are now experiencing a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine…
But even as we make our transition into this new century we must note that moments of grace are transient moments…The transformations must take place within a brief period... Others wise it is gone forever…So many dangerous moments have been navigated successfully…It is difficult to believe that the larger purposes of the Universe or planet Earth will be thwarted…
We could still be on our way to solving our Great Consciousness Crisis, much as the way Prokaryotes solved their Great Oxygen Crisis. Our greatest challenge was to communicate new knowledge to other members of our species much as the way one-cell bacteria had been able to communicate their new knowledge to the rest of their species