Post by Admin on Feb 3, 2022 12:03:41 GMT
Towards a regenerative cosmology: Re-inhabitation, re-enchantment, re-indigenisation
The ‘design’ brief to redesign the human impact on Earth from predominantly exploitative and destructive to by and large regenerative and health-generating invites us to ask fundamental questions that define the story we tell about the world and our role in it.
medium.com/age-of-awareness/towards-a-regenerative-cosmology-re-inhabitation-re-enchantment-re-indigenisation-1f9a4caf14b5
Innovating and designing a regenerative culture requires us to live the questions and reflect on our participatory relationship with life and nature. We need to re-examine the founding mythology (and scientific record) of our origin, the cosmological framework that defines our context and offers answers to: Where do we come from?; Who are we?; Where are we going?
So, where do we come from? There are many ways to answer this question. Cosmology is how a culture answers this story. Over the last 250 years our scientific cosmology has become the dominant story of origin, and what an awe-inspiring story science tells!
Yet, as any story tries to establish itself, there is a tendency to discredit alternative ways of seeing and complementary narratives. This seems to be due to the way we tend to frame things in either/or-type exclusive dualisms.
The big challenges in changing something as important as our cultural and civilizational narrative is to avoid turning culturally creative narrative into a new dogma and to value the positive aspects of what the previous narrative helped to create.
Dogmatic and ideological tendencies have deprived the scientific cosmology of the guiding role that meaning plays in cultural narrative. Science has revealed so much to us, and in part it has done so thanks to the way that the narrative of separation (objectifying the world) enabled many useful scientific and technological innovations.
Scientific insights from all disciplines tell an awe-inspiring and meaningful story about our intimate connection with the processes of life and consciousness. Rather than dismissing science we simply need to question where dogmatic tendencies might have made us blind to deeper meaning and significance.
Our current scientific cosmology has been distorted by an overly zealous rationalism and materialism, a bias towards quantitative and reductionistic analysis, towards mechanistic instead of organismic metaphors. The economic and biological stories of scarcity and competition offer a mutually reinforcing excuse for inequity, war, and competitive behaviour.
We may not yet be ready to offer a definitive answer to the deeper question whether consciousness or matter is primary. We might have to live this question a little longer and explore the wealth of wisdom that the world’s spiritual traditions offer as complementary perspectives to the developing scientific story.
It might also not be the appropriate question to ask. Maybe consciousness pervades matter and at a certain levels of complexity this leads to autopoietic distinctions between self and world (life emerging) and at yet higher levels of complexity living beings become self-refelctive and capable of bringing forth more and more complex world through cultural evolution (through the story they tell about themselves)?
Fact is that we can, retell the remarkable story of our cosmological origin, using science to deepen our understanding of interbeing and the role of symbiosis and collaboration, rather than reinforcing the cultural dominance of the story of separation and competition.
My friend Brian Swimme and his mentor Thomas Berry were among the first to explore how we could find a higher synthesis of scientific and spiritual cosmologies. The magnificence that science has reveal about the nature and history of the universe and life on earth can offer us a cosmology capable of re-enchanting the Earth and our participatory role in the Universe story.
Uni-verse
Universe — I do not use a preposition on purpose since there is nothing outside, and therefore Universe is not an ‘it’ (object) but a process that spans the inner and outer dimensions (quadrants) of consciousness. The word refers to the all-connecting and transforming process of which all of our lives are creative expressions. Universe is neither object nor purely material, simply put, uni-verse is the ‘one verse’ of relationship, perspective, and participation.
Universe came into being some 14 thousand million years ago in an event we now refer to as the big bang. Whether this beginning was simply an initiation of a new cycle of universal expansion and contraction is a question we have not yet answered.
The ‘design’ brief to redesign the human impact on Earth from predominantly exploitative and destructive to by and large regenerative and health-generating invites us to ask fundamental questions that define the story we tell about the world and our role in it.
medium.com/age-of-awareness/towards-a-regenerative-cosmology-re-inhabitation-re-enchantment-re-indigenisation-1f9a4caf14b5
Innovating and designing a regenerative culture requires us to live the questions and reflect on our participatory relationship with life and nature. We need to re-examine the founding mythology (and scientific record) of our origin, the cosmological framework that defines our context and offers answers to: Where do we come from?; Who are we?; Where are we going?
So, where do we come from? There are many ways to answer this question. Cosmology is how a culture answers this story. Over the last 250 years our scientific cosmology has become the dominant story of origin, and what an awe-inspiring story science tells!
Yet, as any story tries to establish itself, there is a tendency to discredit alternative ways of seeing and complementary narratives. This seems to be due to the way we tend to frame things in either/or-type exclusive dualisms.
The big challenges in changing something as important as our cultural and civilizational narrative is to avoid turning culturally creative narrative into a new dogma and to value the positive aspects of what the previous narrative helped to create.
Dogmatic and ideological tendencies have deprived the scientific cosmology of the guiding role that meaning plays in cultural narrative. Science has revealed so much to us, and in part it has done so thanks to the way that the narrative of separation (objectifying the world) enabled many useful scientific and technological innovations.
Scientific insights from all disciplines tell an awe-inspiring and meaningful story about our intimate connection with the processes of life and consciousness. Rather than dismissing science we simply need to question where dogmatic tendencies might have made us blind to deeper meaning and significance.
Our current scientific cosmology has been distorted by an overly zealous rationalism and materialism, a bias towards quantitative and reductionistic analysis, towards mechanistic instead of organismic metaphors. The economic and biological stories of scarcity and competition offer a mutually reinforcing excuse for inequity, war, and competitive behaviour.
We may not yet be ready to offer a definitive answer to the deeper question whether consciousness or matter is primary. We might have to live this question a little longer and explore the wealth of wisdom that the world’s spiritual traditions offer as complementary perspectives to the developing scientific story.
It might also not be the appropriate question to ask. Maybe consciousness pervades matter and at a certain levels of complexity this leads to autopoietic distinctions between self and world (life emerging) and at yet higher levels of complexity living beings become self-refelctive and capable of bringing forth more and more complex world through cultural evolution (through the story they tell about themselves)?
Fact is that we can, retell the remarkable story of our cosmological origin, using science to deepen our understanding of interbeing and the role of symbiosis and collaboration, rather than reinforcing the cultural dominance of the story of separation and competition.
My friend Brian Swimme and his mentor Thomas Berry were among the first to explore how we could find a higher synthesis of scientific and spiritual cosmologies. The magnificence that science has reveal about the nature and history of the universe and life on earth can offer us a cosmology capable of re-enchanting the Earth and our participatory role in the Universe story.
Uni-verse
Universe — I do not use a preposition on purpose since there is nothing outside, and therefore Universe is not an ‘it’ (object) but a process that spans the inner and outer dimensions (quadrants) of consciousness. The word refers to the all-connecting and transforming process of which all of our lives are creative expressions. Universe is neither object nor purely material, simply put, uni-verse is the ‘one verse’ of relationship, perspective, and participation.
Universe came into being some 14 thousand million years ago in an event we now refer to as the big bang. Whether this beginning was simply an initiation of a new cycle of universal expansion and contraction is a question we have not yet answered.