Twelve Principles: Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process
1. The universe, the solar system, and the planet Earth, in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence, constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being
2. The universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically-related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of planet Earth is especially clear: each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being.
3. The capacity for ordered self-development, for self-expression, and for intimate presence to other modes of being must be considered as a pervasive psychic dimension of the universe from the beginning.
4. The three basic laws of the universe at all levels of reality are differentiation, subjectivity, and communion. These laws identify the reality, the values, and the directions in which the universe is proceeding.
5. The universe has a violent as well as a harmonious aspect, but it is consistently creative in the larger are of its development.
6. The Earth, within the solar system, is a self-emergent, self-propagating, self-nourishing, self-educating, self-governing, self-healing, self-fulfilling community. All particular life-systems must integrate their being and their functioning within this larger complex of mutually dependent Earth systems.
7. The human emerges within the life systems of Earth as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in a special mode of conscious self-awareness. The human is genetically coded toward further cultural coding, by which specifically human qualities find expression in a remarkable diversity in the various regions of the Earth.
8. Domestication: transition to village life and greater control over the forces of nature took place in the neolithic period, 12,000 years ago; beginnings of agriculture, domestication of animals, weaving, pottery and new stone implements.
9. The classical civilizations: progressive alienation of the human from the natural world; the rise of cities, elaborate religious expression in ritual and architecture, development of specialized social functions, increase in centralized government, the invention of writing and related technologies.
10. The scientific- technological industrial phase: the violent plundering of the Earth takes place, beginning in Europe and North America. The functioning of Earth is profoundly altered in its chemical balance, its biological systems, and its geological structures. The atmosphere and water are extensively polluted, the soil eroded, and toxic waste accumulates. The mystique of the Earth vanishes from human consciousness.
11. The ecological age: a new intimacy is sought with the integral functioning of the natural world; destructive anthropocentrism is replaced with ecocentrism; transition to the primacy of the integral Earth community.
12. The newly developing ecological community needs a mystique of exaltation and finds it in the renewal of the great cosmic liturgy, which celebrates the new story of the uni- verse and its emergence through evolutionary processes.
These twelve principles of the universe are reprinted, without permission, from Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology (ed. G. Costello, TwentyThird Publications, Mystic, CT, 1987) and from the book by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story (Harper San Francisco, 1992)Thomas Berry's book, The Dream of the Earth, was published in 1988 by Sierra Club Books. Audio tapes by Thomas Berry and by Miriam MacGillis, O.P. are available from Global Perspectives, P.O. Box 925, Sonoma, CA 95476.
I really wanted to add the work of the new cosmology that Swimme and Berry teaches because it helps us gain a strong foundation for cosmology itself. The Bioregional Animist cosmology is based off the the new cosmology with the exception of the slightly anthropocentric point of view that is still being slightly put across by Swimme and Berry. the Animist new cosmology would say that there are multiple forms of self-reflexive or self aware consciousness and human consciousness is just one variety. Animism doesn't place one species on top of the evolutionary latter (please see this wonderful easy on this subject http://www.greenearthfound.org/geo03.php ) but instead cultivates relationships based on equality and respect. With this in mind we must view all life forms as being self-reflexive expressions of the cosmos. We might also expand this a bit more and begin to see that it is not just life forms that have this self-reflexive awareness...according to animist cultures around the world and through out history this is the case. Humans as well as life forms period cannot be said to be the crown jewel of the universal process of creation. though we do have a very unique and valuable contribution to make to the creative process of the totality. But so does the Red tailed Hawk and the wind.
Brian Swimme points out that the earth had to wound itself to become self-reflexive through us, and that our birth was the act of the planet and the cosmos becoming self-reflexive. Though I can feel the validity of what he is saying, anthropocentrism it still is and animists normally are animists because, carry in their hearts the experiential knowledge that they aren't the only intelligent thing in the universe!
In many animist creation stories the animals existed before man ( which is true to the history of this planet) and could shape change into "people". This would seem like a personification of animals to some people but if you ask your self where this idea came from in animist people you would eventual come to look at the transrational states of consciousness that all animist people embrace. The view of animals and forces of nature as well as places having a form that is human like or that they have a human like intelligence, or that animals and places and forces of nature can shape change into human like vestiges and actually communicate in language we can understand, is not a primitive rationalization of pre-industrial people. The view came forth from the actual experience of animals and other non-human persons shape changing into human like vestiges and communicating in ways we can understand.
For many animist peoples transrational states of consciousness are interwoven into their daily rational waking state of awareness. While in a transrational state of awareness it is more then possible to experience an animal take on another form and communicate with you. I personally have had many such experiences. It is a cross cultural phenomena, an experience one can have. You don't even have to seek it out, the experience of an animal or plant or force of nature changing form and communicating with you can just happen spontaneously. As it did for me one day...
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3 comments:
I'm wondering if one , lacking third eye sensitivity and teacher plants could initiate a practice of taking some tea made of fallen needles or leaves while sticking to a bland diet for some days with intentionality might hope for a comunication from a tree.
that very well could be my friend! I would say that such an act could possibly potentiate a communication with a tree. just sitting beneath a tree while fasting could provide some duely needed resluts as well!
honestly i think that it, there are many many ways in which one can fascilitate the sensativity needed to commune with nature. some times it is focused on purely transpersonal levels otherr time like in my example with the crow and the mushroom patch, you just talk to an other than human person in the right way and they talk back, the language barrier itself is gone, and everything is understood.
Though transpersonal work makes it all the more easier ( well its not really easy...) to commune with other than human persons, its not nessescary. All you need to do is pay attention. The world is speaking to us all the time.
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