The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner. This historical change is something more than the transition from the classical Roman period to the medieval period, or from the medieval period to modern times. Such a transition has no historical parallel since the geobiological transition that took place 67 million years ago when the period of the dinosaurs was terminated and a new biological age begun. So now we awaken to a period of extensive disarray in the biological structure and functioning of the planet. (3)

To appreciate the numinous aspect of the universe as this is communicated in this story we need to understand that we ourselves activate one of the deepest dimensions of the universe. We can recognize in ourselves our special intellectual, emotional, and imaginative capacities. That these capacities have existed as dimensions of the universe from its beginning is clear since the universe is ever integral with itself in all its manifestations throughout its vast extension in space and throughout the sequence of its transformations in times. The human is neither an addendum nor an intrusion into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe. (31–2)

To understand the human role in the functioning of the Earth we need to appreciate the spontaneities found in every form of existence in the natural world, spontaneities that we associate with the wild—that which is uncontrolled by human dominance. We misconceive our role if we consider that our historical mission is to "civilize" or "domesticate" the planet, as though wildness is something destructive rather than the ultimate creative modality of any form of earthly being. We are not here to control. We are here to become integral with the larger Earth community. The community itself and each of its members has ultimately a wild component, a creative spontaneity that is its deepest reality, its most profound mystery. (48)

The universe carries in itself the norm of authenticity of every spiritual as well as every physical activity within it. The spiritual and the physical are two dimensions of the single reality that is the universe itself. There is an ultimate wildness in all this, for this universe, as existence itself, is a terrifying as well as a benign mode of being. If it grants us amazing powers over much of its functioning we must always remember that any arrogance on our part will ultimately be called to account. The beginning of wisdom in any human activity is a certain reverence before the primordial mystery of existence, for the world about us is a fearsome mode of being. We do not judge the universe. The universe is even now judging us. This judgment we experience in what we refer to as the "wild." We recognize this presence when we are alone in the forest, especially in the dark of night, or when we are at sea in a small craft out of sight of land and for a moment lose our sense of direction. The wild is experienced in the earthquakes that shake the continents in such violence, so too in the hurricanes that rise up out of the Caribbean Sea and sweep over the land. (49–50)

Because such deterioration results from a rejection of the inherent limitations of human existence and from an effort to alter the natural functioning of the planet in favor of a humanly constructed wonderworld, resistance to this destructive process must turn its efforts toward living creatively within the organic functioning of the natural world. Earth as a biospiritual planet must become for us the basic referent in identifying our own future. (59)

One of the must essential roles of the ecologist is to create the language in which a true sense of reality, of value, and of progress can be communicated to our society. This need for rectification of language in relation to reality was recognized early by the Chinese as the first task of any acceptable guidance for the society (Analects XXII: 11). Just now, a rectification is needed in the term progress. There is a sense in which progress is needed in relieving humans from some of the age-old afflictions that humans have borne. Yet this sense of progress is being used as an excuse for imposing awesome destruction on the planet for the purpose of monetary profit, even when the consequences involve new types of human psychic and physical misery. (63)

Education and religion, especially, should awaken in the young an awareness of the world in which they live, how it functions, how the human fits into the larger community of life, the role that the human fulfills in the great story of the universe, and the historical sequence of developments that have shaped our physical and cultural landscape. Along with this awareness of the past and present, education and religion should communicate some guidance concerning the future. (71)

The transformation of human life indicated in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic Era affects our sense of reality and values at such a profound level that it an be compared only to the great classical religious movements of the past. It affects our perceptions of the origin and meaning of existence itself. It might possibly be considered as a metareligious movement since it involves not simply a single segment of the human community but the entire human community. Even beyond the human order, the entire geobiological order of the planet is involved. (84–5)

The tendency is to insist that ecologically oriented persons will accept the existing situation with some slight modifications. The system itself must continue in the existing pattern of its functioning. The alternative, the radical transformations suggested by the ecologists—organic farming, community-supported agriculture, solar-hydrogen energy system, redesign of our cities, elimination of the automobile in its present form, restoration of local village economies, education for a post-petroleum way of life, and a jurisprudence that recognizes the rights of natural modes of being—all these are too unsettling. Even though such books as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring are proving to be valid statements of the future that awaits us, they are still considered as too extreme to be accepted. (109–10)

As we reflect on this imposition of immense global corporations trying to take over the responsibility of "feeding the world," we can only wonder at the reduction of the peoples of Earth to a condition of being nurse-maided by some few corporate enterprises. We might conclude that Mother Monsanto with her sterile seeds wishes to take over the role of Mother Nature herself. The people of the world need the assistance of each other, but only such assistance that enables them to fulfill their own responsibility for doing the essential things themselves. Village peoples everywhere, indeed all of us, need assistance within the pattern of our own inventive genius, not being reduced to a franchise of some distant corporation. (135)

We are into a new historical situation. The forces that we are concerned with have control not simply over the human component of the planet but over the planet itself, considered as an assemblage of natural resources available to whatever human establishment proves itself capable of possession and exploitation. The intellectual, cultural, and moral conditions sanctioning this process have already been worked out. The truly remarkable aspect of all this is that what is happening is not being done in violation of anything in Western cultural commitments, but in fulfillment of those commitments as they are now understood. Thus any critique or quest for betterment cannot be supported simply on the claim that the present situation is in violation of Western cultural or moral commitments. Our Western culture long ago abandoned its integral relation with the planet on which we live. (146–7)

We might describe the challenge before us by the following sentence. The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human—at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience. (159)

We need to reinvent the human at the species level because the issues we are concerned with seem to be beyond the competence of our present cultural traditions, either individually or collectively. What is needed is something beyond existing traditions to bring us back to the most fundamental aspects of the human: giving shape to ourselves. The human is at a cultural impasse. In our efforts to reduce the other-than-human components of the planet to subservience to our Western cultural expression, we have brought the entire set of life-system of the planet, including the human, to an extremely dangerous situation. Radical new cultural forms are needed. These new cultural forms would place the human within the dynamics of the planet rather than place the planet within the dynamics of the human. (160)

From this we can appreciate the directing and energizing role played by the story of the universe. This story that we know through empirical observation of the world is our most valuable resource in establishing a viable mode of being for the human species as well as for all those stupendous life-systems whereby the Earth achieves its grandeur, its fertility, and its capacity for endless self-renewal. (163)

[The] myth of progress supplanted the earlier myths of personal presences manifested throughout the natural world. At this same time we lost the world of meaning in an evolutionary world governed by chance without direction or higher significance, a world of emergent process that would eventually come to be spoken of as the work of a "blind watchmaker," as in Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker. Yet a different interpretation of the data of evolution is available. We need merely understand that the evolutionary process is neither random nor determined but creative. It follows the general pattern of all creativity. While there is no way of fully understanding the origin moment of the universe we can appreciate the direction of evolution in its larger arc of development as moving from lesser to great complexity in structure and from lesser to greater modes of consciousness. We can also understand the governing principles of evolution in terms of its three movements toward differentiation, inner spontaneity, and comprehensive bonding. (169)

Each of the symbols we have mentioned has a new richness of interpretation. The journey symbol is no longer simply the journey from the circumference to the center within the context of the mandala where the divine, the human, and the cosmos become present to each other. The journey must now be understood also as the great journey that the universe has made from its primordial flaring forth until the present. This journey is carried out through a new mode of presence of these three to one another. (172)

In these opening years of the twenty-first century, as the human community experiences a rather difficult situation in its relation with 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. We need to consider these wisdom traditions in tersm of their distinctive functioning, in the historical periods of their florescence, and in their common support for the emerging age when humans will be a mutually enhancing presence on the Earth.... (176)

Indigenous wisdom is distinguished by its intimacy with and participation in the functioning of the natural world.... (177)

The wisdom of women is to join the knowing of the body to that of mind, the join soul to spirit, intuition to reasoning, feeling consciousness to intellectual analysis, intimacy to detachment, subjective presence to objective distance.... (180)

The wisdom of the classical traditions [i.e., religions] is based on revelatory experiences of a spiritual realm both transcendent to and imminent [sic] 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.... (185)

The wisdom of science, as this exists in the Western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, lies in its discovery that the universe has come into being by a sequence of evolutionary transformations over an immense period of time.... We might say that the universe, in the phenomenal order, is self-emergent, self-sustaining, and self-fulfilling. The universe is the only self-referential mode of being in the phenomenal world. Every other being is universe-referent in itself and in its every activity.... (189–90)

It becomes increasingly evident that in our present situation no one of these traditions is sufficient. We need all of the traditions. Each has its owne 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. (194)

We are now experiencing a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine. What can be said is that the foundations of a new historical period, the Ecozoic Era, have been established in every realm of human affairs. The mythic vision has been set into place. The distorted dream of an industrial technological paradise is being replaced by the more viable dream of a mutually enhancing human presence within an ever-renewing organic-based Earth community. The dream drives the action. In a larger cultural context the dream becomes the myth that both guides and drives the action. (201)