Humanity’s current behavior threatens Earth’s capacity to support life and relegates more than a billion people to lives of destitution.
This self-destructive behavior and our seeming inability to change have deep roots in the stories by which we understand the nature and meaning of our existence.
The challenge before us is to create a new civilization based on a cosmology—a story of the origin, nature, and purpose of creation—that reflects the fullness of our current human knowledge; a story to guide us to mature relationships with one another and a living Earth.
Three distinct cosmologies have each had their influence in shaping the Western worldview. Two are familiar; (1) the cosmos is created and ruled by a Distant Patriarch and (2) the cosmos Is A Grand Machine.
The third - and most relevant to the task at hand - The cosmos is a manifestation of Integral Spirit - has ancient roots, and may in one form or another be the most widely held.
Our creation stories have powerful implications for our understanding of our place in the cosmos and thereby shape our most foundational values, our politics, and the distribution of power in society. Though sharply at odds regarding the presence or absence of a spiritual intelligence, both the Distant Patriarch and Grand Machine cosmologies affirm the self-destructive individualism and separation that lead us to behave in ways that threaten Earth’s biosphere and our future as a species.
The Integral Spirit cosmology appears to offer many of the elements of the story we seek. Yet even with its ancient roots and its affirmation and enrichment by recent breakthroughs in science, it too remains a partially developed story and we are limited to speculating on many of its elements.
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