Thomas Berry on : The Dream of The Earth
…..We need guidance. Our immediate tendency is to seek guidance from our cultural tradition, from what might be designated as cultural coding. Yet in this case our need seems to be for guidance beyond what our cultural traditions are able to give. Our cultural traditions, it seems, are themselves a major source of our difficulties…. (DE, chapter 15, page 194)
It is a bitter moment especially because our hopes were so high, our arrogance unstrained even by simple modesty. It is a bitter moment, also, because the origins of our actions go so deep into our spiritual and cultural traditions, fostering a sense that we are the measure of all things….. We somehow did not belong to the community of earth. We were not an integral component of the natural world. Our destiny was not there. We deserved a better world, although we had not even begun to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of this world of its entrancing qualities….
The story of this dream vision and the manner of its transformation into the vision of progress has become the central story of the human community, even of the earth process itself…..The difficulty of our time is our inability to awaken out of this cultural pathology…(DE, chapter 15, page 204-205)
There are two radical positions – the industrial and the ecological – that confront each other, with survival at stake: survival of the human at an acceptable level of fulfillment on a planet capable of providing psychic as well as the physical nourishment that is needed. No prior struggle in the course of human affairs ever involved issues at his order of magnitude. If some degree of reconciliation has taken place, it remains minimal in relation to changes that are needed to restore viable mode of human presence to the earth…(DE, chapter 15, page 213)
… In relation to the earth we have been autistic for centuries. Only now we have begun to, listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe. (DE, chapter 15, page 215)
forests and mountains Rumania, internet free source
DE: Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry, ISBN 0-87156-622-2