Dialogues
Seven Voices
Visions

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

Visions- The New Story

Thomas Berry •

In moments of confusion such as the present, we are not left simply to our own rational contrivances. We are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us through the spontaneities within our own beings. We need only become sensitised to these spontaneities, not with a naive simplicity, but with critical appreciation. This intimacy with our genetic endowment, and through this endowment with the larger cosmic process, is not primarily the role of the philosopher, priest, prophet, or professor. It is the role of the shamanic personality, a type that is emerging once again in our society.

Hannah Arendt •

The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclosure of the "who" through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this medium, in which action alone is real, that it "produces" stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things.

These stories may then be recorded in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works, they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material. They themselves, in their living reality, are of an altogether different nature than these reifications. They tell us more about their subjects, the "hero" in the centre of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it, and yet they are not products, properly speaking. Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author.

Thomas Berry •

Children need a story that will bring personal meaning together with the grandeur and meaning of the universe. The secular school as presently constituted cannot provide the mystique that should be associated with this story...The tragedy of this situation is that schooling now fulfils a role in our society that is similar to the role of initiation ceremonies in earlier tribal societies. In those societies the essential mystery communicated to the youthful initiates was the story of the universe in its awesome and numinous aspects. The capacity for communing with and absorbing into their own beings these deeper powers of the natural world was bestowed on them.

The pathos in our own situation is that our secular society does not see the numinous quality or the deeper psychic powers associated with its own story, while the religious society rejects the story because it is presented only in its physical aspect. The remedy for this is to establish a deeper understanding of the spiritual dynamics of the universe as revealed through our own empirical insight into the mysteries of its functioning.

Christopher Lasch •

The best hope of emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in a recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims. It lies in a recognition of others not as projections of our own desires but as independent beings with desires of their own. More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods.

Thomas Berry •

The context of survival is radically altered. Our problems can no more be resolved within our former pattern of the human than the problems that led to quantum physics could be dealt with by any adjustment within the context of the Newtonian universe.

Willard Gaylin •

What we need is more of something good, not just less of something bad.

Thomas Berry •

What I am proposing here is that these prior archetypal forms that guided the course of human affairs are no longer sufficient. Our genetic coding, through the ecological movement and through the bioregional vision, is providing us with a new archetypal world. The universe is revealing itself to us in a special manner just now. Also the planet Earth and the life communities of the earth are speaking to us through the deepest elements of our nature, through our genetic coding.

In relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries. Only now have we 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.

Hannah Arendt •

If present technology consists of channelling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channelling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future techniques will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice.

The channelling of natural forces into the human world has shattered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is characteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not "made" but grow by themselves into whatever they become.

Thomas Berry •

No adequate scale of action can be expected until the human community is able to act in some unified way to establish a functional relation with the earth process, which itself does not recognise national boundaries. The sea and air and sky and sunlight and all the living forms of earth establish a single planetary system. The human at the species level needs to fulfil its functional role within this life community, for in the end the human community will flourish or decline as the earth and the community of living species flourishes or declines.

Christopher Lasch •

Horrifying images of the future, even when they are invoked not just to titillate a perverse and jaded taste but to shock people into constructive action, foster a curious state of mind that simultaneously believes and refuses to believe in the likelihood of some terminal catastrophe for the human race.

A sober assessment of our predicament, one that would lead to action instead of paralysing despair, has to begin by calling into question the fatalism that informs this whole discourse of progress and disaster. It is the assumption that our future is predetermined by the continuing development of largescale production, colossal technologies, and political centralization that inhibits creative thought and makes it so difficult to avoid the choice between fatuous optimism and debilitating nostalgia.

Thomas Berry •

What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation We are involved in a process akin to initiation processes which have been known and practised from earliest times. The human community is passing from its stage of childhood into its adult stage of life. We must assume adult responsibilities.

As the maternal bonds are broken on one level to be reestablished on another, so the human community is being separated from the dominance of Nature on one level to establish a new and more mature relationship. In its prior period the earth acted independently as the complete controlling principle; only limited control over existence was assigned to ourselves. Now the earth insists that we accept greater responsibility, a responsibility commensurate with the greater knowledge communicated to us.

Christopher Lasch •

The best defences against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work...that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.

Thomas Berry •

My own suggestion is that we must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent a sustainable human culture by a descent into our prerational, our instinctive, resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but "inscendence," not the brain but the gene.

Maria Montessori •

There is nothing in the world which plays no part in the universal economy, and if we are endowed with spiritual riches, with aesthetic feelings and a refined conscience, it is not for ourselves, but so that these gifts shall be used for the benefit of all, and take their place in the universal economy of the spiritual life.

Spiritual powers are a form of wealth. They must go into circulation so that others can enjoy them; they must be expressed, utilised, to complete the cycle of human relations. Even the heights of spirituality, if pursued for their own sake, have no value, and if we aim at these alone, we shall be neglecting the greater part of life and its purposes. Were we believers in reincarnation,, and said to ourselves, "By living well now, I shall be better off in my next life," this would be only selfishness speaking in us. We should have reduced the spiritual level to the vegetative level. If we are always thinking about ourselves, and of ourselves even in eternity, we shall be eternally selfish.

Willard Gaylin •

If our culture is eroding the conditions for required for love to flourish, we must change our culture. We must spend at least as much time concerned about personal relationships as on environmental deterioration. The contamination of our rivers and streams is of course an urgent problem and must be solved, but it is no more severe than the adulteration of our trusting relationships. The binding force of love is the only thing strong enough to support the weighty burdens of our complex modern community, and each and every individual is linked in survival to the stability of the community in which he resides. The human community is the moral and aesthetic world.

Thomas Berry •

This larger vision is no longer utopian. It directly concerns the hardest, most absolute reality there is: the reality of the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat.

TOP