COMING HOME: A CREDO [by Ervin Laszlo]
The self-centered values and limited consciousness that dominated the world for the past two centuries brought us a state of global emergency. But these values and consciousness are not a permanent feature of human nature: they are an aberration. For most of the twenty or fifty thousand years that our species possessed a higher form of culture and consciousness, humans didn’t think of themselves as separate from the world around them.
They lived in the conviction that the world is one, and that we are an intrinsic part of it. The radical separation of a thinking, feeling human being from an unthinking and unfeeling world came only with the modern age, and came mainly in the West. It prompted the uninhibited exploitation of unfeeling nature by the thinking and feeling, and therefore superior, human race.
Insightful people have never accepted this narrowly anthropocentric view, whether they were artists, poets, mystics, or scientists. Giordano Bruno, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Nicolas Copernicus, and in more recent times Albert Einstein, gave eloquent testimony of their belief that the world around us, though in many respects still mysterious, is intrinsically meaningful and integrally whole.
Leading-edge scientists are rediscovering the organic face of reality. There is more to the universe than the impersonal concourse of particles in space and time. There is also nonlocality and entanglement—embracing connection and coherence, a fundamental unity that recalls the oneness proclaimed in the cultural and spiritual traditions.
All things are subtly tuned to all other things, and in some respects act as one. This is coherence, and it underlies all processes of evolution. There is no evolution in the world but co-evolution, and co-evolution can only happen when the evolving partners act in syntony—when they are coherent with each other.
Coherence is a fact throughout the sphere of life, in all species, populations, and ecologies. It also characterizes the cosmos. If it were not so coherently tuned for creating order and complexity, the universe could not have produced life, and life could not have evolved from its initial forms to the supreme architecture it now exhibits on Earth.
We have gained a better understanding of the nature of the universe, and of the things that emerge and evolve in the universe. These things are not inert and lifeless atoms, molecules, and chunks of matter, but co-evolving, interlinked systems of energy and information: organic or quasi-organic systems, not essentially different from us. In all its domains, the universe is coherent and it’s one.
We are an integral part of the whole-universe, linked in countless ways to each other and to the planet. In a remarkable resurgence of spirituality, more and more people are rediscovering this fundamental insight.
With the new discoveries our very identity is changing. We recognize that we are not skin-enclosed, mechanistic parts in a vast machine-like universe, but highly evolved elements of an organic, living cosmos. In us nature’s penchant toward structure, order and complexity has reached a pinnacle unparalleled in this corner of the galaxy.
We may not be the only, or even the most evolved, beings in the cosmos, but we are surely one of the remarkably evolved ones. Thanks to our consciousness we are an eye through which the cosmos is coming to know itself. This is a unique privilege: it allows us to rediscover ourselves in the cosmic order of things. And as we rediscover ourselves, we can perceive our role and our mission—we can regain our coherence with all creation.
The eye of the cosmos that has opened through us cannot be allowed to close. It must remain open and gain in depth and clarity. We must live up to the true potentials of a species that possesses a high grade of consciousness. We must evolve our consciousness, so that we could become coherent again with life on the planet. We must come home to the Earth, and to the universe.
reacties
Laat een reactie achter.
Subscribe
