The Great Story

by Mary Coelho

Part I. Background

There is a growing concern that human beings are gradually losing an experiential, felt knowledge of our embeddedness in the earth and Cosmos. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank has said that when humanity lost the Cosmos, we became neurotic. Erich Neumann, a Jungian analyst, has asked if consciousness has lost its link to the whole and is thus deteriorating. Teilhard de Chardin was concerned with “the dying down of the zest for life” in the modern world. Thomas Berry asks how, if we are without roots in the earth and Cosmos, we are to activate the psychic energy that is required to address the major ecological issues confronting us.

The following extended quotation from Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth is his analysis of the situation in our culture.

It’s all a question of story

It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story. Our traditional story of the universe sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes, and energized action. It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge. We awoke in the morning and we knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not necessarily make people good, nor did it take away the pains and stupidities of life or make for unfailing warmth in human association. It did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.

Presently this traditional story is dysfunctional in its larger social dimensions, even though some believe it firmly and act according to its guidance. Aware of the dysfunctional aspects of the traditional program, some persons have moved on into different, often New-Age, orientations, which have consistently proved ineffective in dealing with our present life situation. Even with advanced science and technology, with superb techniques in manufacturing and commerce, in communications and computation, our secular society remains without satisfactory meaning or the social discipline needed for a life leading to emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual fulfillment. Because of this lack of satisfaction many personas are returning to a religious fundamentalism. But that, too, can be seen as inadequate to supply the values for sustaining our needed social discipline.

A radical reassessment of the human situation is needed, especially concerning those basic values that give life some satisfactory meaning. We need something that will supply in our times what was supplied formerly by our traditional religious story. If we are to achieve this purpose, we must begin where everything begins in human affairs–with the basic story, our narrative of how things came to be, how they came to be as they are, and how the future can be given some satisfying direction. We need a story that will educate us, a story that will heal, guide and discipline us.

The discovery of a new origin story

We now have a remarkable new origin story, the story of the evolutionary universe discovered largely in the last three centuries. First evidence appeared in the realms of geology and paleontology, indicating that there was a time sequence in the very formation of the earth and of all life forms upon the earth. The earth was not the eternal, fixed, abiding reality that it had been though to be. It suddenly dawned upon Western consciousness that earlier life forms were of a simpler nature than later life forms, that the later forms were derived from the earlier forms. The complex of life manifestation had not existed from the beginning by some external divine creative act setting all things in their place. The Earth in all its parts, especially in its life forms was in a state of continuing transformation.

Discovery of this life sequence, with an explanation of how it came about, found expression in Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Now the evolutionary story has been vastly extended to include the beginning, the great flaring forth of primal radiation, sometimes called the Big Bang, estimated to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. In a matter of seconds, the early radiation took form as the nuclei of hydrogen and helium. Subsequently, by a little-understood process, galaxies came into being when the universe was a billion years old, and it is within the galaxies that stars of many sizes began to shine as the primordial hydrogen underwent nuclear fusion within the stars. It was within stars and within exploding supernova that all the other elements (besides hydrogen and helium) that comprise the earth and our bodies were created. Our sun and the earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, at which time the earth began its stupendous creative journey. Life emerged very early in the earth’s history, and then, over hundreds of millennia of gradual differentiation and complexification, the great diversity of species of the earth came into their astounding glory.

Although there are cycles of destructiveness, such as the major extinctions that closed several geologic periods on Earth, the overall thrust of the story is clearly one of great creativity. The very destructiveness prepares the way for bursts of creativity. Norman Pittenger, an Anglican process theologian, writes: "The evolution of the universe is not a mere unfolding of what has already been the case. There is continuity of process with the emergence of genuine novelty."

A Copernican-like revolution in our thinking

The realization that we and all the beings of the earth are differentiated forms of the substance of the universe and the earth offers of a Copernican-like revolution in our thinking. (Copernicus demonstrated that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa.) In fact, Teilhard de Chardin says it involves the greatest change in human consciousness in 2 million years. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of the cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world. Yet, since the story emerged out of science, many people are suspicious that it cannot significantly inform our identity and be a source of spiritual insight. Thomas Berry observes: “The secular school as presently constituted cannot provide the mystique that should be associated with this story. Nor can the religious-oriented school that has only superficially adopted this new story of the universe evoke this experience [the grandeur and meaning of the universe] in the child”. Yet it is most heartening that Brian Swimme teaches that “expressed within the context of the dynamics of the developing universe, the essential truths of religion would find a far vaster and more profound form. The recasting would not be a compromise nor a diminution nor a belittlement; it would be a surprising and creative fulfillment, one whose significance goes beyond today’s most optimistic evaluations of the value of religion.” A convergence between science and religion of great importance is developing.

Brian Swimme says, “We are restructuring our fundamental vision of the world…it overwhelms all previous conceptions of the universe for the simple reason that it draws them all into its comprehensive fullness.” Furthermore it is a story around which “we can begin to organize ourselves for the first time, on the level of species. Loyal Rue, a professor of philosophy of religion, writes that the story is a “Wisdom tradition,” tolerating a diversity of interpretations yet providing a means for global solidarity and cooperation. It is a story of mythic proportions with the power to engage the deep structure of the human nature and to transform how we think and what we do. It can protect us from sitting back and letting our knowledge be packaged and paid for by private, often corporate interests.

Part II. New insights and many questions

The remarkable story immediately offers many insights and raises innumerable questions. Without being aware of what was happening, during the years of our education in Western culture, most of us learned attitudes and adopted philosophical and religious assumptions that directly contribute to our alienation from the earth. One common assumption is the dualism of matter and spirit, and the associated radical scientific materialism that suggests that we live in a meaningless, random universe. The great danger of this dualism, placing God outside the natural world and outside the person, is that the natural world is denuded of value and becomes an object of commercial exploitation beyond our basic needs. There are no restraints on exploitation. Furthermore, also of tragic consequences, is the perception that the individual person is denied intrinsic power, creativity, and value, leading to the loss of psychic energy and zest for life. Also as a consequence of the dualism, there has been a move away from biblical holistic thinking to a dualism which separates the sacred realm from matter.

Parker Palmer has written: “Western culture has a million ways of reinforcing the illusions that the world consists of inert stuff out there and that we are the active agents of change whose role is to get that stuff in shape...This is the assumption on which most modern education has been based, an education aimed at giving us the tools to exercise dominion over the earth.” Closely related to this is Thomas Berry’s observation that in our dominant Western worldview “the earth [was] no longer a communion of subjects. It has become a collection of objects to be adjusted to in an external manner.”

Thomas Berry notes that: “Children who begin their Earth studies or life studies do not experience any numinous aspect of these subjects. The excitement of existence is diminished. If this fascination, this entrancement, with life is not evoked, the children will not have the psychic energies needed to sustain the sorrow inherent in the human condition. They might never discover their true place in the vast world of time and space. Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.”

The mystery of matter

Unexamined and harmful assumptions, common to the Western educated person, about the nature of matter; are immediately challenged by the remarkable history of the earth. The diagram below summarizes this history, starting when the earth formed 4.6 billion years ago as our sun began to shine within the Milky Way galaxy. Since the early material coalescing around the earth eventually became birds and trees and people, we see right away that matter must not be inert and dead. Otherwise how did the very substance of the early Earth undergo such dramatic change, involving untold transformations, to become the earth as we know it today?

Another source of challenge to our assumptions about matter has come from the experimental investigations of atoms at the turn of the last century, which gave sensational and totally unexpected results. It is important to be aware of them as we seek to understand the story of Earth. When quantum theory, the theoretical foundation of atomic physics, was worked out in the 1920s it became clear that even the subatomic particles were nothing like the solid objects envisioned by classical physics. Far from being the hard and solid particles they were believed to be since antiquity, atoms turned out to consist of vast regions of empty space in which extremely small particles, electrons, moved around the nucleus–which contained the particles known as nucleons (protons and neutrons).

The subatomic units of matter are, we know now, very abstract entities. Depending on how we look at them, they appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves. This dual aspect of matter was extremely puzzling. The picture of a wave that is always spread out in space is fundamentally different from the picture of a particle, which implies a sharp location.

Mass is a form of energy. Energy is associated with activity and with processes, and this implies that the nature of subatomic particles is intrinsically dynamic. The being of matter and its activity cannot be separated. (Fritjof Capra) From the perspective of daily experience, material objects around us seem passive and inert but when we magnify a “dead” piece of stone or metal we see that it is full of activity.

The generative depth of things / the indwelling God

Thomas Berry describes the cultural situation as follows: “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 present only in its physical aspect. The remedy for the failure to recognize the numinous quality within the West’s own story, is to establish a deeper understanding of the spiritual dynamics of the universe as revealed through our own empirical insights into the mysteries of its functioning.”

If an atom were enlarged to the size of Yankee stadium, it would consist almost entirely of empty space. Brian Swimme explains: “The center of the atom, the nucleus, would be smaller than a baseball sitting out in centerfield. The outer parts of the atom would be tiny gnats buzzing above at an altitude higher than any pop fly Babe Ruth ever hit. And between the baseball and the gnats? Nothingness. All empty. Indeed, if all the space were taken out of you, you would be a million times smaller than the smallest grain of sand.”

Quantum physicists state this dramatically when they tell us that the wave/particles are so small that things made of matter, including ourselves, are proportionally as void as galactic space. Yet this very “emptiness,” we are told, is full rather than empty; it is only referred to as empty because it is empty of measurable things. Brian Swimme teaches from the elementary perspective that; “the root foundation of anything or any being is not the matter out of which it is composed so much as the matter together with the power that gives rise to matter.” It is crucial for Westerners to learn that what we call matter has an inside so to speak. As just described, it can no longer be conceived of as tiny particulate pieces, like very small grains of sand, but rather as a mysterious, generative emptiness within which there are interconnected, minute wave/particles of energy/matter. Werner Heisenberg, one of the creators of quantum theory, has argued that at the deepest level of reality, the ground of the vacuum, there is emptiness, equivalent to what the Buddhists call sunyata, prior to anything that “is.”

It is important to know that in Western theology there is also a tradition, the apophatic tradition, of understanding God as a nameless mystery, free of any distinctions. This realm is for Meister Eckhart and others a fertile, fecund ground. The similarity between this tradition and recent insights into the nature of matter cannot be without great significance. We have to guard against too facile assumptions, but it seems evident within our new context that both traditions are exploring the same mysterious realm each in their particular mode of knowing. Fritjof Capra observes that it is ironic that physics, that extreme specialization of the rational mind, should be the science that has now led us to mysticism. According to Capra, mystical thought, in fact, provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science, a conception of the world in which scientific discoveries can be in perfect harmony with spiritual aims and religious beliefs.

Brian Swimme, a physicist by early training, says that the entire Cosmos came from this “emptiness.” He goes on to say; “The realm or power that brings forth the universe is not itself an event in time, nor a position in space, but is rather the very matrix out of which the conditions arise that enable temporal events to occur in space.” Though "the originating power gave birth to the universe 15 (now estimated to be 13.7) billion years ago, this realm of power is not simply located there at that point in time but is rather a condition of every moment of the universe, past, present and to come." This realm is of what we ourselves are largely made. The entire Cosmos came from the emptiness of which we and all of Earth and Cosmos are largely made.

Most remarkably, Bede Griffiths, the Benedictine monk who established an ashram in India, says that the Hindu search is to find that inner center where the whole universe is in you. From this insight, we are conferred a remarkable identity, radically challenging many Western dualistic assumptions that so completely separate spirit and matter. We and all beings are rooted in mystery. We dwell in creativity. We are at the center of things.

This creative, bonding realm, this “no-thing-ness” or “emptiness” that is a plenum, what Brian Swimme calls the “All-Nourishing Abyss,” does not visit now and then; it is always present. Clearly the New Story and the New Physics challenge some conceptions of God that developed within a static cosmology. Earlier dualistic theologies emphasized the transcendence of God, a God who only occasionally intervened to move material things that are otherwise lacking spirit and the fullness of life. This conception is not congruent with the evolutionary story.

It can be proposed with considerable confidence that it is this realm, the plenum that has been experienced as love or known through a kind of alternative, intuitive knowing or as Light. It is here as we live within the plenum or it within us, that we find a very profound belonging that addresses directly the loss of roots and modern alienation. Often, a difficult, transformative journey is required to come to an ongoing consciousness of this nourishing Presence. Such a pathway has been worked out by many traditions. These pathways lead to personal wholeness and unity with the natural world.

The universe carries within itself a psychic-spiritual dimension as well as a physical material dimension

Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist born in 1881 in Auvergne, France, and Sri Aurobindo, from India, first articulated the New Story of the evolutionary universe from a religious perspective. They arrived at the same basic vision, which is that the unfolding of the universe is a physical evolution and also a spiritual evolution. Brian Swimme thinks of these two men as both geniuses who had insight into an integrated worldview.

Thomas Berry writes: “Empirical inquiry into the universe reveals that from its beginning in the galactic system to its earthly expression in human consciousness, the universe carries within itself a psychic-spiritual as well as a physical-material dimension. Otherwise human consciousness emerges out of nowhere. The human is seen as an addendum or an intrusion and thus finds no real place in the story of the universe. In reality the human activates the most profound dimension of the universe itself, its capacity to reflect on and celebrate itself in conscious self-awareness.” Other beings share this psychic-spiritual identity in their particular mode.

When we tell the new story of our origins, we must seek to hear the story freshly, recalling these insights into matter and its mysterious depths.

Part III. Additional insights from the new story

Human beings belong to a diversified unity

Most noteworthy is the revelation from the new story that every thing that exists in the universe came from a common origin. The material of our bodies and the natural world are intrinsically related. Our ancestry stretches back through the life forms and into the stars, back to the beginnings of the primeval fireball. Everything is a differentiation of a single energetic event. Brian Swimme explains that the universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life. With regard to the earth we see clearly from the long history of the earth summarized in Diagram A that the earth is a diversified unity. It is of critical importance to learn from the story that the unity derived from the common origin from the matter that coalesced around the sun 4.6 billion years ago is not broken with the emergence of diversity and complexity.

It is not only from the evolutionary story that we learn of the unity of things. The mathematical language of quantum theory convincingly reveals the basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independent existing smallest units. Fritjof Capra writes: “As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building block but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole.”

One reason that it is difficult for us to recognize that we are part of an unfolding unity is that we easily assume, given our education, that complex beings and objects are put together the way a child piles one block on another to make a tower. This is another of our unexamined assumptions. If the atoms were separate, discrete particles as was once thought, there would indeed be no real unity among complex forms. However, given the radical discoveries about the nature of matter just outlined, we can now begin to appreciate and to imagine that there is an organizing from within matter by self-organizing processes such that distinct beings remain integral to the unfolding whole. Atoms themselves are self-organizing forms. There is a nesting of self-organizing forms within larger self-organizing wholes. An atom, a functioning whole, becomes part of a cell also a functioning whole. The cell in turn may be part of an organism. We leave the world of discrete blocks and everything changes. In some manner not fully discerned, local laws of physics and random events are caught up in the larger form patterning of the implicate orders and plenum. Ordering powers, or form-generating powers, according to David Bohm and others, are in the implicate order, a dimension of the plenum. The true meaning of form, said David Bohm, is known by realizing that they are generated and sustained from the plenum. This grounds complex forms in the mysterious plenum or All-Nourishing Abyss undermining our illusion of a world of separate beings.

Thomas Berry asserts that we will enter the future as a single, sacred community of the human and other than human or we will perish on the way.

A changed conception of time

Human beings are just beginning to realize that human activities are radically and irreversibly affecting the conditions of the earth and that the changes occurring now will be carried indefinitely into the future, affecting the unfolding Earth story in unpredictable ways. For centuries human beings assumed that, except for seasonal changes, the earth was static and unchanging, formed as it is from the hands of the Creator. We have not seen ourselves as integral players in the unfolding future of an evolving Earth. We believed we were placed on the earth, not forms of the earth itself, not key players in the earth’s destiny. It is only as we understand that the behavior and activities of human beings are integral to the unfolding story in a time-developmental universe, will we begin to take seriously the consequence of our behaviors and reconsider our role as Earth-beings.

In a time-developmental universe, time refers to the ongoing, changing state of affairs of each successive now. Time is not independent of the changing state of affairs of the earth, contrary to the impression of a clock measuring minutes as it ticks on the shelf. Time is not external to our lives. Depending on the characteristics of a rock, a geologist can assign a rock to the particular condition of the earth in which is formed, a certain time. A paleontologist can assign a fossil to a particular situation of the earth in which the organism once lived, the particular time in the unfolding story. The date, which human beings have assigned to that situation representing a certain year on our calendar, simply labels and identifies a certain condition. Brian Swimme reminds us that there was a time when the extensive New York subway system could be built. It could not be built now, it is no longer the time. There are times in human lives when we can do certain things, such as have a family. Later it is no longer the right time. We need to discern what time it is now here on Earth and live in a manner congruent with that time. The survival of our whole civilization may depend on whether we can learn to discern the time within the story of Earth.

Teilhard de Chardin seemed to say that the idea of awakening to eternity was very, very significant in human history but not as difficult as awakening to the time-developmental nature of the universe.

Creativity and Friends leadings

Brian Swimme writes: “The dynamics that fashioned the fireball and the galaxies also fashion your ideas and visions…In your specific personal dreams and desire, the whole process is present in your personal self.” This is a critical insight and remarkably congruent with Friends’ understanding of leadings. We are awakening to the fact that human consciousness has the potential for being an exponent of the creative experiments of the whole. Our insights and activities can actually be occasions of the original creativity of the universe.

As an example of this original creativity, Brian Swimme describes Einstein’s experience when his insights into relativity came to him. “Chock-full with the very dynamics he sat contemplating, Einstein experienced a birth that permeated him whole, his mind, his muscle, his viscera. Effortlessly, and as a form of the very dynamics, he jotted down the field equations. This chunk of the Milky Way jotted down the dynamics of the Milky Way. This region of space-time, rich with the interactions of the universe, jotted down the symbolic form of the interactions of the universe. This fleshy portion of the world transformed its insides into graphite to reveal the harmonies at work throughout the fleshy world.”

Although very few people are likely to have such comprehensive, original insights as did Einstein, given that we are a form of the unfolding whole, the movement of the whole may find expression in us. Creative ideas can be expressed in small acts of kindness and also quite radical changes in the way that we understand the earth, value it, and relate to it. Alternative forms of knowing and creative insights are available to all of us. We must be faithful to them and at the same time, faithful to the earth.

We have found more than a belonging. We join a dynamic, creative reality within which we can create a viable, life-giving future. It is a place that stirs the heart and soul.

As a conclusion we offer several excerpts from Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth and a closing, summary paragraph.

If this integral vision is something new both to the scientist and to the believer, both are gradually becoming aware of this view of the real and its human meaning. It might be considered a new revelatory experience. Because we are moving into a new mythic age, it is little wonder that a kind of mutation is taking place in the entire Earth-human order. A new paradigm of what it is to be human emerges. This is what is so exciting, yet so painful and so disrupting.

Now a new way of understanding values is required. We are returning to a more traditional context of story as our source of understanding and value. It is somewhat fascinating to realize that the final achievement of our scientific inquiry into the structure and functioning of the universe as evolutionary process is much closer to the narrative mode of explanation given in the Bible that it is to the later, more philosophical mode of Christian explanation provided in our theologies.

It is of utmost importance that succeeding generations become aware of the larger story outlined here and the numinous, sacred values that have been present in an expanding sequence over this entire time of the world’s existence. Within this context all our human affairs--all professions, occupations and activities--have their meaning precisely insofar as they enhance this emerging world of subjective intercommunion within the total range of reality. Within this context the scientific community and the religious community have a common basis. The limitations of the redemptive rhetoric and the scientific rhetoric can be seen, and a new, more integral language of being and value can emerge.

There is no way of guiding the course of human affairs through the perilous course of the future except by discovering our role in this larger evolutionary process. If the way of Western civilization and Western religion was once the way of election and differentiation from the others and from the earth, the way now is the way of intimate communion with the large human community and with the universe itself.

Here we might observe that the basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the earth. If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and the seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.

The new story of the evolutionary universe offers a vision of the whole that values differentiation without destroying unity; it values matter without becoming materialistic; it values unity without demanding uniformity; it values spirit without degrading matter; it values the present without disregarding the past; it values the future without failing to look honestly at the present out of which the future will unfold.

Questions for reflection

• Has your conception of God changed within the context of the vast, ever-changing cosmos, described by the new story?
• If you actually experienced the sacred within the natural world, how do you imagine you would behave differently?
• Has the New Story of the evolutionary universe informed your self-understanding or assumptions about nature and the earth in a significant way?

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