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Dear Readers,
This ezine is dedicated to favorite topics, and within the ideas quoted below are veiled references to corporations that are causing collapses of Earth’s species, which disheartens me. I remembered the other day that Earth’s crust, upon which we breathe and move, is like the thickness of an apple’s skin to the apple; comparatively, the Earth’s crust is just that thin. Neither is Earth’s crust stationary; crusty continents shift continually as rafts floating on water.
Earth is a moving and breathing entity entirely created by unimaginable magnitudinal forces generating infinite varieties of energetic dynamisms. One of which is climate, itself composed of infinite dynamisms. Then, there are the births and deaths of infinite varieties of species of which we human Earthlings are only one birthed out of, you guessed it, infinite dynamisms.
Numerous for-profit corporations are treating Earth’s crust as if it was a lumber yard or gravel pit, and, apparently, we nonchalant North American residents are evidencing our maladroit consumer traits by not stopping those masculine types who mastermind viperous hierarchies: via mass media campaigns, corporations use the common understandings of the human subconscious for turning inner compulsions into obsessive consumption. Thus, shameless consumerism causes productions and distributions of billions of products every day. Begin imagining the numbers of products purchased, used, and replaced with more of the same around the world, annually.
“Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.
“The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.”
~ Chris Jordan dot com; video presentation Bill Moyers’ Journal
In early September, 2008, a friend sent me her copy of a DVD production that was directed by a previous business associate. When The Awakening Universe DVD arrived, I began transcribing from the DVD some cosmological ideas presented here for your consideration.
Humans Are a Story
“… You ask questions about the purpose of the human, then you’re drawing upon philosophy, religion, art, and history. When we think of cosmology, there are different ways to approach it, but my own background is in science. The scientific understanding is that cosmology is the study of the Universe as a whole, in particular, it’s an account of the birth of the Universe and its developments. There’s a further aspect of cosmology that takes us outside of science, and that is, given the Universe, what’s the role of the human in the midst of the Universe? What’s our purpose? Why are we here? Cosmology is ultimately a story of the whole vast Universe and what we’re about.
“… The great discovery, really, the most stunning discovery of the twentieth century is the Universe’s story. I think that would be a way of capturing just what science has offered. The Universe isn’t just a place, a background, a context; rather, it’s part of the story—it began 13.7 billion years ago. It developed. We are learning our notion that we are a story, individually, is actually embedded in the larger story; embedded [again] into the larger story; embedded [then again] into the full story of the Universe. I would say that is the great achievement of modern science: the discovery that fundamental reality of the Universe is its story.” ¹
The Story Envelops Everything
“The new cosmology would be the discovery of developmental time. The switch is from the idea of the cosmos to the idea of the cosmogenesis: that everything is coming into being. In the past, the notion was that the Universe was there in a stable way, and, within that, the humans had this journey they were on. But the new cosmology is the discovery that the story envelops everything. And, this discovery is based on empirical observation. We are gathering together the data that we have throughout the scientific era reflected on, coming from observation, and discovering the depths of time. So, we can talk about what took place billions of years ago—this could have never been done until our time. That was the kind of precision to the empirical data.
“The new cosmology is the discovery of our place in the story of the Universe. One way to think about it is that there was a time when humans did not know about the North American continent; then, this moment came during the last twenty thousand years, or whatever it was, humans arrived on the North American continent for the first time. Well, our moment is when humans are arriving in a cosmological context of the 13.7 billion year story, and we’re discovering it for the first time. That’s what’s really new.” ²
Each Species Is Spectacular
“… One way to characterize the cosmology that really is at work in our culture is this: the natural world, the Earth is there for us to satisfy our needs and desires, whatever that might be. We make things, we use the Earth to make things; or, we think of it as something like a lumber yard. We use the word resource, so that there are resources there for us to use as we see fit. Now, that orientation is actually not that bad as long as humans are not that powerful. But, suddenly, when we become so massively present, that orientation turns out to be completely pathological. You can’t call a forest a resource; it’s filled with amazing beings. You can’t call the ocean, with all those fish and marine mammals, a resource.
“Each of these species is the end result of 13.7 billion years of evolution; they are spectacular; they are stupendous. They have a right to be here. To think of them as a resource, and to use them however we like, is really what is driving our destruction. They have their own intrinsic rights; they have their own beauty that we have to come to appreciate and know we join. So, that notion of the Earth as a vast community, even a sacred community that we have to join, would be, I think, the new cosmology: an emergence of a new story very different from the story that’s driving us now—the idea the Earth is a lumber yard or gravel pit.” ³
Energies of Renewal in Creativity
“… One of the great things we can get from the story of the Universe is the sense of hope. It’s almost nonstop; the more you learn about the Universe story, the more you realize there’s reason for hope. For instance, in the early Universe, there is a moment when the matter and the antimatter begin to annihilate. So, matter in the form of protons and matter in the form of antiprotons come together, they form light. The entire Universe was actually being transformed into light. It turns out to be not quite symmetrical. For every billion protons, there weren’t exactly a billion antiprotons; there was just a little difference. If you had been there, in the moment, looking round, it would seem it was all over, collapsing into nothing but light. Yet, there was a remnant: one particle out of a billion made it through. The Universe found a way to survive that.
“One of the most amazing occurrences in the Universe, which directly bears on the question of hope, is the explosion of a star, the end of its life. So, you have a star that’s going into a collapse. As it collapses, it heats up, and it begins to burn new fuel, which works for a certain period of time. It collapses further. As the fuel is burnt up, the collapse continues. If you were there, in the midst of that, you would see it’s all going to come to an end. Sure enough, when the star begins to form iron in the center, it collapses entirely into a dot, into a nonentity. So, you think it’s all over at this point.
“But, no, instead, the star at that point explodes back out, and, in that explosion, it creates all of the elements of the Universe: oxygen, phosphorous, nitrogen, magnesium; and, out of that, we have come into being. It is this amazing way the Universe will take a disastrous situation and reverse it. We clearly live in a moment of collapse; things are collapsing everywhere. At the same time, there’s reason to believe the energies of renewal in creativity are also coming forth in the midst of the collapse.” º
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