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PHILOSOPHY
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"Northern
Landscape" 1979,
Oil on board, 45"x60" © Robin Baring
A New Vision of Reality...
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Albert Einstein
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place. And the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. Carl Jung
Visionaries of a new holistic and ecological paradigm are themselves deemed to be neurotic. They have moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you have got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero’s deed." Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negociation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth...A change is needed in every phase of human life.
Thomas Berry, Evening ThoughtsInspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed - be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization - will be unavoidable.
Václav HavelYou have been telling the people that this is the eleventh hour. Now you must go back and tell them this is the hour. Hopi Elders
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This website is devoted to the affirmation of a new vision of reality that might be able to unite a distressed and fragmented humanity in a shared approach to the deeper issues facing us at this crucial time of choice. I would like it to be a place that reflects the emerging values that express our responsibility towards life, each other and the planet as a whole. Thomas Berry, in his book, The Dream of the Earth, writes that this supremely important time is asking us for "possibly the most complete reversal of values that has taken place since the Neolithic period." We cannot afford to let this moment of choice slip by and fail to respond to the urgency of this time. Acting together under the inspiration of a new vision, we may - through the transformation of our own understanding - be able to influence the way the world is governed and to replace the deficient values that now control it with new values. This, as Berry rightly says, is the alchemical Great Work that is now in process as more and more people awaken and respond to these new values.
(see lecture 13)
I would also like this website to be a sanctuary for the heart, a place of reconciliation and healing between mind, body and soul. I would like to share the understanding gathered from my life quest with those who might be interested. I believe the soul is a matrix of unimaginable extent and complexity connecting an unrecognised dimension of reality with our world, connecting each one of us at the deepest level to all others and to the greater life of the cosmos. Above all else, my work is devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world, to the recovery of our connection to the cosmos and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the "body" of the Earth, and between us and an invisible dimension of the universe that is the source or ground of both. I would like to create a channel for "the voice of the secret whole that sings above history." (William Anderson, The Face of Glory)
My own understanding has been immeasurably deepened by the work and insight of close friends and fellow authors. To them and to all visionaries, past and present, I would like to express my gratitude and homage. The friends and mentors who have helped me to articulate this vision are as precious to me as Dante's fedeli d'amore - those companions who instinctively recognise and serve the divinity of Life.
I feel we are living now in a mythic time of choice - a time of stupendous scientific discoveries which are enlarging our vision of the universe, shattering the vessel of our old concepts about the nature of reality. Yet the delicate organism of life on our planet and the survival of our species are threatened as never before by an ethos that seeks dominance and control of nature. This ethos reflects a brutal desire to conquer and master nature for our own purposes, shows no respect for the Earth and disregards the perils of our present interference with the intricate web of relationships upon which life on this planet depends. We are an integral part of this great web of life, and cannot survive without respecting all aspects of it.
I believe that the new epoch we are now entering will see the creation of a new paradigm and with it:
a new understanding of God or Spirit a new understanding of nature a new understanding of ourselves This new understanding may help to modify the deeply entrenched belief that spirit and nature are separate and distinct and may eventually restore to us our lost sense of relationship with a sacred Earth and a conscious Universe.
For the many millions of people whose lives were sacrificed to the fanaticism of totalitarian ideologies, the twentieth century was a dark night of the soul. From another perspective, however, it began to open a door through which we could enter into a new understanding of life. Perhaps for the first time we will soon be able to view the whole panorama of the evolution of consciousness, to gain insight into the reasons for our suffering, our presence on this planet and our (still unrecognised) connection to the cosmos. In his visionary book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, Christopher Bache gives us this description of an experience that may be waiting just beyond the threshold of our present understanding of life:
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"I saw humanity climbing out of a valley and just ahead, on the other side of the mountain peak and beyond our present sight, was a brilliant, sun-drenched world that was about to break over us. The time frame was enormous. After millions of years of struggle and ascent, we were poised on the brink of a sunrise that would forever change the conditions of life on this planet. All current structures would quickly become irrelevant…Truly a new epoch was dawning."
Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, p. 220
(see New Vision 11 for more excerpts and booklist for details)
We are living now at the end of a great trajectory - perhaps 5 million years or more - which has brought about the gradual separation or differentiation of our human species from nature and the development of a sense of self or individuality as well as a highly developed intellect - everything that we now call human consciousness. But in the process we have lost the ancient sense of participation in a sacred cosmos. This story can be described, in Richard Tarnas's words, as a heroic ascent to autonomy but, at the same time, a tragic fall from unity. Yet now, as Tarnas suggests at the end of his book, The Passion of the Western Mind, we are in the midst of a great awakening of the soul, one that could see the "marriage" of the masculine and feminine principles: -----
"The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its quest not only to realise itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, to differentiate from but then to rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul."
Looking back over the last two millennia, it is apparent that, during this time, conventional religious teaching did not preserve the ancient insight that nature and instinct are an expression of spirit: in splitting nature from spirit, emptying matter of soul, and contaminating the instincts with guilt and fear, an essential part of our wholeness has been lost. It is, as the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung pointed out in his many books, crucially important now for us to balance the masculine ethos of our culture with its emphasis on power, control and conquest by integrating the less valued aspects of the feminine archetype: nature and matter, soul and body, feeling and instinct - that is - to create a conscious, healing and redemptive relationship with these neglected aspects of spirit, within ourselves and within the culture. What he offered was not a new belief system but a spirituality grounded in self-knowledge - in particular, awareness of the power drive of the "shadow" aspect of our nature - leading to ethical responsibility towards life in all its aspects, seen and unseen. He knew that we did not have much time in which to accomplish this momentous task. In The Undiscovered Self, he wrote:
"A mood of world destruction and world renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral backwardness of our species which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social developments. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he conscious of the path he is treading and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic situation?… does the individual know that he [or she] is the make-weight that tips the scales?" (brackets mine)
Our present problems have to a large extent arisen not only from the split between spirit and nature but from the secular belief system resulting from it which has increasingly come to dominate western culture since the seventeenth century and has increasingly separated us from nature and from soul. This belief system, usually presented today by its protagonists as incontrovertible truth, might be summarised as follows:
> Matter is primary and gives rise to mind as a secondary phenomenon. Consciousness is therefore a by-product of the brain. > There is no survival of consciousness after death. The death of the brain is the death of the individual. > The idea that there is an independently existing soul or spirit is an erroneous fiction. > "God" is an unnecessary hypothesis and the concept of soul an irrelevance. We can impose our will on nature to serve our needs. > There is no transcendent purpose or meaning to our lives. This is what I would describe as a "flat earth" hypothesis and I often use the hedge of thorns in the story of the Sleeping Beauty to illustrate what a barrier it presents to reaching a different understanding of life. It offers no vertical or depth dimension to human existence, no awareness of any dimension of reality beyond that of the conscious, rational mind. But there is an alternative hypothesis to consider - one that could open a way through the hedge of thorns and reconnect us with nature and with soul, so restoring our fragmented being to wholeness:
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Consciousness is primary and matter secondary. That is to say, the phenomenal world arises or manifests out of an invisible or transcendent dimension of reality. |
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The universe is conscious and there are many dimensions or levels to this consciousness. |
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Our human consciousness is integral to that greater consciousness, even though it is still partially developed or immature. |
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Consciousness in some form survives the death of the physical body. |
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What we have called "God" or Spirit is the divine ground as well as the process of life in the universe, our planet and ourselves. There is nothing outside or beyond "God". All is one life, one energy. In other words, we participate in the life of "God" which is the life of the Planet and the life of the Cosmos. (see "A New Image of God" under Reflections heading) |
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Cosmic soul can be imagined as a vast matrix, field or web of relationships connecting finer vibrational fields with the denser field of physical reality. Our body/mind organism is intimately connected to these finer fields which together constitute the web of life. |
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The purpose of our lives on this planet is to be reunited with the source and ground of our being and to live our lives in growing awareness of that connection. |
To clarify the above further, here are these thoughtful words from an address read at the funeral of the distinguished physicist, the late David Bohm - words that he himself had written for the memorial service of Malcolm Sagenkahn, one of his classmates at university."In considering the relationship between the finite and the infinite, we are led to observe that the whole field of the finite is inherently limited, in that it has no independent existence. It has the appearance of independent existence, but that appearance is merely the result of an abstraction of our thought. We can see this dependent nature of the finite from the fact that every finite thing is transient.
Our ordinary view holds that the field of the finite is all that there is. But if the finite has no true independent existence, it cannot be all that is. We are in this way led to propose that the true ground of all being is the infinite, the unlimited; and that the infinite includes and contains the finite. In this view, the finite, in its transient nature, can only be understood as held suspended, as it were, beyond time and space, within the infinite.
The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is "wind, or breath." This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies." (from the last page of Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, by F. David Peat 1997)
There are certain questions that people have always asked and ask ever more urgently today: "What is the deeper purpose of my life on this planet? Does God exist? Why does He seem indifferent to human suffering? What is the source of evil? Will I survive death and see my loved ones again? How can I discover my true path in life? Why is the human species seemingly addicted to destroying itself?
Aspects of the books I have written address these questions but there are talks and seminars given over recent years as well as articles by other people and extracts from books and book reviews that I have also put on this website for those who are interested. In everything I have written I have wanted to give expression in this dimension of reality to what I hold to be eternal, indivisible and holy as well as to my passionate love of life and my devotion to this planet and all the forms of life it sustains.
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