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The Dynamics of The Future

Thomas Berry : The Dynamics of The Future

As we enter the twenty – first century we observe a widespread awakening to the wonder of the Earth….. The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth…. (GW, chapter 15, page 166)

Our present peril is not the first that the Earth and living things upon it have endured. The Earth found its way into being amid an amazing sequence of both creative and destructive experiences. A long sequence of cataclysmic events has shaped the continents and the various forms of life that have themselves engaged in a continuing struggle for survival. But the present danger to the planet is the first conscious intrusion on this scale into the natural rhythms of the Earth process…. (GW, chapter 15, page 167)

But while this peril is a cause for concern, it is also a cause for advancing consciousness. Responsible people no longer think of the world simply as a collection of natural resources. We have begun to realize that the Earth is an awesome mystery, ultimately as fragile as we ourselves are fragile. But our responsibility to the Earth is not simply to preserve it, it is to be present to the Earth in its next sequence of transformations. While we are unknowingly carried through the evolutionary process in former centuries, the time has come when we must in some sense guide and energize the process ourselves.

To succeed in this task of shaping the future, the will of the more comprehensive self must be functioning. The individual will can function in this capacity only through acknowledged union with the deeper structures of reality. Even beyond union with the human community must be union with the Earth, with the universe itself in the full wonder of its being. Only the Earth can adequately will the Earth. If we will the future effectively it will be because the guidance and the powers of the earth have been communicated to us, not because we have determined the future of the Earth simply with some rational faculty….(GW, chapter 15, page 173-174)

We must feel that we are supported by that same power that brought the Earth into being, that power that spun the galaxies into space, that lit the sun and brought the moon into its orbit. That is the power by which living forms grew up out of the Earth and came to a mode of reflexive consciousness in the human. This is the force that brought us through more than a million years of wandering as hunters and gatherers; that is that same vitality that led to the establishment of our cities and inspired the thinkers, artists, and the poets of the ages.

The same forces are still present: indeed, we might feel the impact at this time and understand that we are not isolated in the chill of space with the burden of the future upon us and without the aid of any power.

We are a pervasive presence. By definition we are that reality in whom the entire Earth comes to a special mode of reflexive consciousness.

We are ourselves a mystical quality of the Earth, a unifying principle, an integration of the various polarities of the material and the spiritual,

the physical and the psychic, the natural, the artistic, the intuitive and the scientific. We are the unity in which all these inhere and achieve a special mode of functioning. In this way the human acts as a pervading Logos……(GW, chapter 15, page 174-175)

We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation. (GW, chapter 15, page 175)

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GW: The Great Work, Thomas Berry ISBN 0-609-80499-5

The Human Life

Thomas Berry: The Human Life

We need to move from our human – centered to an Earth – centered norm of reality and value. Only in this way we can fulfil our human role within the functioning of the planet we live on. The Universe, the Earth, the Human are centered in one another. (GW, chapter 6, page

Human society in its beginnings would not have survived if it had not had some basic role to fulfil within the larger Earth community… Once we recognize that a change from a human-centered to an Earth- centered norm of reality and value is needed, we might ask how this is to be achieved and how it would function. We might begin by recognizing that the life community, the community of all living species, including the human, is the greater reality and the greater value.

The primary concern of the human community must be the preservation and enhancement of this comprehensive community, even for the sake of its own survival. (GW, chapter 6, page 56-57)

…Ultimately humans find their own being within this community context. To consider that one is enhanced by diminishing the other is an illusion. Indeed, it is the great illusion of the of the present industrial age, which seeks to advance the human well-being by plundering the planet in its geological and biological structure of functioning…… The planet that ruled itself directly over these past millennia is now determining its future largely through human decision. Such is the responsibility assumed by the human community once we ventured onto the path of empirical sciences and their associated technologies. In this process, whatever the benefits, we endangered ourselves and every living being on the planet. (GW, chapter 6, page 58)

The term “profit” needs to be rectified. “Profit” according to what norms and for whom? The profit of the corporation is the deficit for the Earth. The profit of the industrial enterprise, whatever the advantages, can also be considered as a deficit in the quality of life…(GW, chapter 6, page 63)

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GW: The Great Work, Thomas Berry ISBN 0-609-80499-5

The Fourfold Wisdom

Thomas Berry: The Fourfold Wisdom

In these opening years of the twenty-first century, as the human community experiences a rather difficult situation in its relation to the natural world, we might reflect that a fourfold wisdom is available to guide us into the future: the wisdom of indigenous peoples, the wisdom of women, the wisdom of the classical traditions and the wisdom of science. …(GW, chapter 16, page 176)

Indigenous Wisdom is distinguished by its intimacy with and participation in the functioning of the natural world…As the years pass it becomes ever more clear that dialogue with native peoples here and throughout the world is urgently needed to provide the human community with models of a more integrated human presence on the earth.” (GW, chapter 16, page 177)

“The wisdom of women is to join the knowing of the body to that of mind, to join soul to spirit, intuition to reasoning, feeling consciousness to intellectual analysis, intimacy to detachment, subjective presence to objective distance. When these functions become separated in carrying out the human projects then the way into the future is to bring them together….developing both a sociology and a cosmology of women.” (GW, chapter 16, page 180)

“The wisdom of the classical tradition is based on revelatory experiences of the spiritual realm both transcendent to and imminent in the visible world about us and in the capacity of humans to participate in that world to achieve the fullness of their own mode of being.”(GW,chapter 16, page 185)

“The wisdom of science lies in its discovery that the universe has come into being by a sequence of evolutionary transformations over an immense period of time. Through these transformation episodes the universe has passed from a lesser to a greater complexity in structure and from a lesser to a greater mode of consciousness. We might say that the universe, in the phenomenal order, is self-emergent,self-sustaining, and self-fulfilling. Awareness that the universe is more cosmogenesis than cosmos might be the greatest change in human consciousness that has taken place since the awakening of the human mind in the Paleolithic Period.”

…If the unity of the universe is one aspect of the wisdom of science, another aspect is the emergent nature of the universe. The third is the existence of human intelligence as an integral component of the universe. (GW, chapter 16, page 190)

It becomes increasingly evident that in our present situation no one of these traditions is sufficient. We need all the traditions. Each has its own distinctive achievements, limitations, distortions, its own special contribution toward an integral wisdom tradition that seems to be taking shape in the emerging twenty-first century.

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The Human Presence

Thomas Berry on The Human Presence

….A truly human intimacy with the earth and with the entire natural world is needed. Our children should be properly introduced to the world in which they live, to the trees and grasses and flowers, to the birds and the insects and the various animals that roam over the land,to the entire range of natural phenomena…(DE, chapter 3, page 15)

One of the finest moments in our new sensitivity to the natural world is our discovery of the earth as a living organism. …In considering the larger patterns in the earth functioning, we are now able to identify its five major components: the geosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere. They are present to each other in a comprehensive manner and are all infolded in the light and radiance of the sun. In this context we have a new mode of understanding our own intimacy with the earth and also of our total dependence on these other modes of earth expression….(DE, chapter 3, page 20)

…This re-enchantment with the earth as a living reality is the condition for our rescue of the earth from the impending destruction that we are imposing on it. Anthropocentrism is largely consequent on our failure to think of ourselves as species. We talk about ourselves as nations. We think of ourselves as ethnic, cultural, language, or economic groups. We seldom consider ourselves as species among species…. We must now do this deep reflection on ourselves. (DE, chapter 3, page 20)

What is needed on our part is the capacity for listening to what the earth is telling us. As a unique organism the earth is self-directed. Our sense of the earth must be sufficiently sound so that it can support the dangerous future that is calling us. It is a decisive moment. Yet we should not feel that we alone are determining the future course of events. The future shaping of the community depends on the entire earth in the unity of its organic functioning, on its geological and biological as well as its human members. (DE, Chapter 3, page 23)

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DE: Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry ISBN 0-87156-622-2

The Ecological Era

Our Relationship with the Earth Community

Thomas Berry on: Our Relationship with Earth Community

We might observe that our Western religious institutions are strangely indifferent to what is happening. This indifference arises, apparently, as a result of excessive concern for redemptive processes out of this world, which is considered to be seductive-rather than integration within this world considered to be sacred. There seems to be little realization that the disintegration of the natural world is the destruction of the primordial self-manifestation of the divine. The very existence of religion is threatened in proportion as the splendour of the natural world is diminished. …If we lived on the moon, our sense of the divine would be as dull as the lunar landscape. (ET, chapter 4, page 47-48)

Realizing that there is something terribly wrong in our relations with the natural world our religious traditions have recently begun putting special emphasis on the concept of stewardship as the primary relationship between the human community and the natural world. This concept of stewardship is derived from biblical statements concerning human dominion over the Earth and all its living creatures.

To many religious people, this seems quite adequate as a basic orientation toward the natural world. To others, stewardship itself is the origin of our present evils. There is no way in which we can care for the natural world or improve the genius of nature. (ET, chapter 4, page 52-53)

It should not be said that stewardship exhausts Christian concern for the world about us. There is profound Christian awareness that the natural world itself is a manifestation of the divine. This has led to the concept of revelation being contained in two scriptures: one of the scriptures of the natural world, the other of the scriptures of the Bible.

While this sense of the natural world as revelatory has been severely diminished since the sixteenth century, with the discovery of printing and the consequent emphasis on the written word, it is still available in the tradition itself. If more fully developed, this could lead to a more effective concern for the survival of the planet. (ET chapter 4, page 53)

As humans we are born of the Earth, nourished by the Earth, healed by the Earth. The natural world tells us: I will feed you, I will clothe you, I will shelter you. I will heal you. Only do not so devour me or use me that you destroy my capacity to mediate the divine and the human.

For I offer you communion with the divine, I offer you gifts that you can exchange with each other, I offer you flowers whereby you may express your reverence for the divine and your love for each other.

All these benefits the Earth gives to us individually, in our communities and throughout the entire Earth…..(ET, chapter 12, Page 139)

Alienation

The integrity of the life systems of the planet, diminished in the spread of humans across the planet, must now be restored. Neither the historical human nor the distant divine nor both together can provide the deeper integration we seek at present. This integration cannot be attained simply by the human, for indeed the human is not the ultimate measure of its own fulfilment. Neither can this integration be attained through the divine, because the divine cannot be its own manifestation. We need the phenomenal world for this. A universe. An integral self-organizing universe. (Sacred Universe/SU, chapter 3, page 43)

It takes a universe to bring humans into being, a universe to educate humans, a universe to fulfil the human mode of being. More immediately, it takes a solar system and a planet Earth to shape,educate, and fulfil the human.

The difficulty in recent times is that the concern of the human in all the various traditions, with few exceptions, has been focused almost exclusively on inter-human and divine-human relationships. Human-Earth relations have not been given the comprehensive consideration needed. That is where our contemporary challenge is located. (SU, chapter 3,page 44)

Our Way forward

…Our alienation is definitively overcome within a unified understanding of ourselves, of the universe, and all the forces present therein… (SU, chapter 3, page 46)

We need a new pattern of rapport with the planet. … Only a change that profound in human consciousness can remedy the deep cultural pathology manifest in such destructive behavior. Such a change is not possible, however, so long as we fail to appreciate the planet that provides us with a world abundant in volume and variety of food for our nourishment, a world exquisite in supplying beauty of forms,sweetness of taste, delicate fragrances for our enjoyment and exciting challenges for us to overcome with skill and action. (SU, chapter 3, page 48)

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Earth meditation Heal, Filippines

ET: The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, Thomas Berry ISBN 978-1-57075-851-5
Kosmologi Kristen, translation of ET, Thomas Berry ISBN 9 789799 447920
The Sacred Universe, Thomas Berry ISBN 978-0-231-145952-5

Our Relationship with the Universe

Thomas Berry on our relationship with the universe.

We bear the universe in our beings as the universe bears us in its being. The two have a total presence to each other and to the deeper mystery out of which both the universe and ourselves have emerged. (DE, chapter 10.page 132)

A new intimacy with the universe has begun within the context of our scientific tradition. …Scientists suddenly have become aware of the magic quality of the earth and of the universe entire…The physicist Brian Swimme tells us, “The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human ” From the tiniest fragment of matter to the grand sweep of the galactic systems, we have a new clarity through our empirical modes of knowing…..We experience an identity with the entire cosmic order within our own beings….(DE chapter 3, page 16)

We know more about the universe than any people ever knew. We have more command over the functioning of the earth than any people ever had. Yet we are less intimate with the universe than peoples of previous time……Only through understanding the universe can we understand ourselves or our proper role in the great community of existence. All human occupations and professions must themselves be expressions of the universe and its mode of functioning. (/ET,chapter 10, page 113-114)

We seem not to appreciate the dazzling wonder or the sacred dimension that finds expression in the universe itself, a universe that emerged into being by a creativity beyond anything we can imagine, a world that assumed its present form by an unpredictable self organizing power…..Even when we penetrate so deeply into the reality of the physical and the biological orders, even when we understand clearly that human story and the universe story are a single story, we somehow fail in our ability to tell the story in a way that would provide a comprehensive meaning for our human way of being….(ET,chapter 10, page 117)

…A universe that comes into being by a primordial flaring forth giving rise to an irreversible sequence of transformation episodes. These episodes move in the larger arc of their sequences, from lesser to greater complexity of structure and functioning and from lesser to greater consciousness. This unfolding sequence is self-emergent, self-sustaining, self-educating, self- governing, self-healing and self-fulfilling.

From this source must come all the emergence, all nourishment, all education, all governance, all healing, all fulfilment.

Humans, in this earlier period of cultural development, experienced themselves as owning nothing, as receiving existence itself and life and consciousness as an unmerited gift from the universe, as having exuberant delight and unending gratitude as their first obligation. It was a personal universe, a world of intimacy and beauty. A universe where every mode of being lived by a shared existence with all other modes of being. No being had meaning or reality or fulfillment apart from the great community of life. (ET, chapter 10, page 117)

Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry ISBN 0-87156-622-2
The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth Thomas Berry, ISBN 978-1-57075-851
Kosmologi Kristen Thomas Berry, 9 789799 447920

The New Story

Thomas Berry

It is all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between two stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story. Our traditional story of the universe sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes and energized actions. It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge.

We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not necessarily make people good, nor did it takeaway the pains and stupidities of life or make unfailing warmth in human association. It did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner. (DE, chapter 10, page 123-124)

A radical reassessment of the human situation is needed, especially concerning those basic values that give to life some satisfactory meaning. We need something that will supply in our times what was supplied formerly by our traditional religious story. If we were to achieve this purpose, we must begin where everything begins in human affairs – with the basic story , our narrative of how things came to be, how they came to be as they are, and how the future can be given a satisfactory direction. We need a story that will educate us, a story that will heal, guide and discipline us …(DE, chapter 10, page 124)

No sustaining values have emerged. Our social problems are not resolved. The earth continues to disintegrate under the plundering assault of humans….The human venture remains stuck in its impasse. Children who begin their earth studies or life studies do not experience any numinous aspect of these subjects. The excitement of existence is diminished. If this fascination this entrancement with life is not evoked, the children will not have the psychic energies needed to sustain the sorrows inherent in the human condition. They might never discover their true place in the vast world of time and space. Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the mostimportant events in their lives. Children need a story that will bring personal meaning together the grandeur and meaning of the universe. (DE, chapter 10, page 130-131)

The world of today is controlled by its cosmology, not by its philosophy of culture.The present modern cosmology is associated with the observational sciences. We have come to understand our Universe in terms of evolutionary unfolding over vast periods of time, through vast extent of space. (Christian Future/CF, chapter 4, 26)

To know the Great Story in all depth and all the change this brings is the greatest change in human consciousness since the Neolithic period. This change is difficult for all human consciousness, not only for religious people. The New Story shows us where we are in our time: the great Ecological Crisis. We begin to understand in what time we live and where the destruction comes from. We cannot just restore a former, religious, moral, humanist tradition. We are re-ordering the human in its relationship to Earth. (CF chapter 4, 27-28)

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CF: The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, Thomas Berry ISBN 978-1-57075-851-5
Bahasa Indonesia Kosmologi Kristen, Thomas Berry 9-789799 447920
DE Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry ISBN 0-87156-622

Earth as Sacred Community

Thomas Berry

It is important that we be mindful of the earth, the planet out of which we are born and by which we are nourished, guided, healed- the planet, however, we have abused to a considerable degree in the past two centuries of industrial exploitation. This exploitation has reached such extremes that presently it appears that some hundreds of thousands of species will be extinguished before the end of the 20th century. (DE,chapter 2, page 6)

We can break the mountains apart; we can drain the rivers and floods and valleys. We can turn the most luxuriant forests into throwaway paper products. We can tear apart the great grass cover of the western plains and pour toxic materials into the soil and pesticides onto the fields until the soil is dead and blows away in the wind. We can pollute the air with acids, the rivers with sewage, the seas with oil- all this in a kind of intoxication with our power for devastation at an order of magnitude beyond all reckoning. We can invent computers capable of processing ten million calculations per second. And why? To increase the volume and the speed with which we move natural resources through the consumer economy to the junk pile or waste heap…. We are, supposedly, creating a technological wonder world. (DE, chapter 2,page 7)

We must reflect especially on the extinction of species we are bringing about…. Extinction is a difficult concept to grasp. It is an eternal concept. ….It is rather an absolute and final act for which there is no remedy on heaven and on earth. A species once extinct is gone forever….(DE, chapter 2, page 9)

We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of the planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence… (DE, chapter 2, page 11)

Because of the distortion in our thinking, we are carrying out what may be one of the most devastating assaults ever on the Earth in more than 4 billion years of life on this planet. …we are presently extinguishing some ten thousand species annually (E. O Wilson, Harvard University) / ET chapter 4, page 47)

…It is a change in the very chemistry of the planet that makes life possible. It is a change in the bio systems of the planet. It is a change in the geological systems of the planet.Not simply the human future is involved. The future of every living being on the planet is at issue. The fate of the planet itself in its most profound physical and psychic structure is being determined. We are witnessing nothing less than the dissolution of the planet Earth and all its living systems in consequence of this strange distortion of our human role in the Earth process that has emerged from within our modern Western world… (ET, chapter 4, page 47)

The change that is taking place on earth and in our minds is one of the greatest changes ever to take place in human affairs, perhaps the greatest, since what we are talking about is not simply another historical change or cultural modification, but a change of geological and biological as well as a psychological order of magnitude. We are changing the earth on a scale comparable only to the changes in the structure of the earth and of life that took place during some hundreds of millions of years of earth development. (DE, chapter2, page 11, 12

Earth As A Sacred Community

The magnitude of the ecological crisis of our time is such that we are presently terminating the Cenozoic era of Earth’s development and entering into the Ecozoic phase of the Earth process. The Cenozoic has been the period of the expansion of life in the full brilliance of its expression, but this expansion of the life systems of Earth is being terminated. This will affect all our human institutions and professions that were appropriate to the Cenozoic era. They must now undergo a transformation if they are to be integral with the new period in the historical evolution of the planet. The transformation required is a transformation from an anthropological norm of reality and value to a bio -centric or geocentric norm. This will affect every aspect of our human thought and action. It will affect language, religion, morality, economics, education, science, technology and medicine. (ET, chapter4, page 43)

…We need to understand that in all our activities the Earth is primary, the human is derivative. The Earth is the primary community.

Indeed, all particular modes of Earthly being exist by virtue of their role within this community. (ET, chapter 4, page 43)

DE: Dream of the Earth , Thomas Berry, ISBN 0-87156-622-2
ET: Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community ISBN 978 -1-57805-130- 4

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Christian Cosmology

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Christian Cosmology Thomas Berry

1. Christian Cosmology , Thomas Berry

Our modern cosmology is associated with the observational sciences, whereby we have come to understand our universe in terms of evolutionary unfolding over the vast periods of time and through the vast extend of space. Presently, Christians are not thinking or acting within this accepted story of the universe. Yet outside this story we can do very little in making the Christian vision visible…..

…What needs to be recognized is that the New Story of the universe represents the greatest change in human thought and consciousness since the rise of the Neolithic Period. This it is not only a difficulty for Christians, it is a difficulty for human consciousness throughout the Earth community…. (CF, chapter 4, page 26-27)

The new paradigm for the understanding of reality and of value can be defined in the following manner:

First: the new paradigm sees the universe as a sequence of irreversible transformations begun some 13.7 billion years ago.
Second: the evolutionary process of the universe has from the beginning a psychic-spiritual as well as a material physical aspect. There is no moment of transition from the material to the psychic or the spiritual.
Third: Earth has a privileged role as a planet where on life is born wit all those special characteristics we find in Earth’s living forms. The unity of the Earth process is especially clear…Whatever happens to any member effects every other member of the community. Here we can see how precious Earth us as the one living planet that we know,how profoundly it reveals mysteries of the divine, how carefully it should be tended, how great an evil it is to damage is basic life systems, to ruin its beauty, to plunder its resources. For these things t o be done by Christians or without significant Christian protest is a scandal of the primary order of magnitude.
Fourth: the human is by definition that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness. The human is a mode of being of the universe entire as well as a distinctive being in it.
Fifth:….the ultimate created value cannot be found in any one part of the universe, but in the collective whole…We need to avoid that extreme anthropocentrism that would make the human in itself so absolutely norm of value that we fail to recognize that the larger concern must be for the universe that includes the human, but is a greater value than the human.
Sixth: the universe itself can be understood as the primary revelation of the divine.St. Paul tells us in Rom. 1 that from the beginning of the world “we came to know the invisible nature” of God through “the things that have been made”…
Seventh: biblical revelation, the incarnation, redemption, and the shaping of the Christian community – all these have taken place within the larger cosmological and historical context.

….The period of creation has not been closed; it is still in progress. We still are in the sixth day of creation. In and through ourselves the world is coming into being. One of the main characteristics of creation given by the New Story is the genetic relatedness of every being in the universe with every other being in the universe. Every living being is cousin to every other being….(CF, chapter 4, Page 29, 34

CF: The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, Thomas Berry ISBN 978-1-57075-851-5