Tom Berry became a Roman Catholic monk, he says, because ever since childhood he has been a brooder, and family life would have been difficult for him. He has taught university in America and China and is author of several books on Zen Buddhism and on a new, emerging view of the cosmos that encompasses both astrophysics and a reverence for creation.
I became aware of Tom Berry six years ago when I interviewed nature photographer Jim Brandenburg (author of Brother Wolf and White Wolf). At the end of our interview, Jim handed me a book by Berry -- Dream of the Earth -- saying, "This book has influenced me probably more than any other." In it, Berry outlines the importance of a culture's story of creation:
For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story is the basis of ritual initiations throughout the world. It communicates the most sacred of mysteries....The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation....Our story not only interprets the past, it also inspires and guides our shaping of the future....
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries another historical vision was introduced, by Francis Bacon, the vision of a better order in earthly affairs through scientific control over the functioning of the natural world, a vision that was first articulated as the doctrine of "progress" by Bernard Fontenelle in the following century. This vision found its fulfillment in the industrial age of the past two centuries. Whatever their differences, both liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism committed themselves totally to this vision of industrial progress which more than any other single cause has brought about the disintegration that is taking place throughout the entire planet. By a supreme irony this closing down of the basic life systems of the earth has resulted from a commitment to the betterment of the human condition, to "progress."
...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 presented only in its physical aspect. The remedy for this is to establish a deeper understanding of the spiritual dynamics of the universe as revealed through our own empirical insight into the mysteries of its functioning.
In this late twentieth century that can now be done with a clarity never before available to us. 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. Other-wise 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.
- Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth. (from the introduction and page 131)
That concept of the human mind representing the way the universe reflects back on itself kept coming back to me and so I approached Tom Berry for an interview. We met at his apartment above a former horse stable on the outskirts of Greensboro, North Carolina. I rang the door bell. He appeared at the top of the stairs and shouted down, "Welcome friend." For a year or so, Tom has been a subscriber to Heron Dance. We sat in his living room. I sketched him while he talked, something I rarely do. Most people are too self-conscious to be sketched during an interview. Tom, however, retreated into his own internal world and did not notice me. He sat comfortably in a chair, wearing several layers of clothes on the cool October day we met. He amazed me with his knowledge of human cultural history. He also talked about the roots of human creativity.
"Dante said that human art is the grandchild of God. The human is a work of art. When we in turn create art, it is not purely out of ourselves, but out of a continuation of the creativity of the universe.
"For a long time, there have been two major schools of thought on the universe: random and determined. Religious people think that God runs the universe. Generally scientists believe that everything is pure chance. There is a third option. Oshansky, the great geneticist of this century, said the universe is not determined or random, but created. It self-creates. Even chemical elements self-organize. They are dynamic articulations. Both individually and in relation to each other.
"Since the universe began, its three major tendencies have been differentiation or articulation, the bonding of different parts, and spontaneity. The universe is divine precisely because it is composed of parts. All creative realities are composed of parts. They go together to create something new.
"The tendency towards differentiation is counterbalanced by bonding, or, in the physical order, gravitation. No one knows what gravitation is. An attraction between bodies. Newton knew how it operated but he said he didn't know what it was. And we still don't. But it is why the Earth must be round. The bending back toward each other, the spherical shape, allows things to be. Otherwise we would have just an endless proliferation.
"Anyway, the two forces of difference and bonding mean several possibilities. If the differentiation is stronger than the bonding, then the universe would explode and drift off. If the bonding overcomes the differentiation, then it collapses. One more possibility is equilibrium but if there is equilibrium then there is fixation. Nothing happens. There is only one possibility of having a universe. That is a creative disequilibrium. The process by which the universe self-creates.
"Art emerges out of a disequilibrium in search of a new equilibrium. The creative act itself is the emergence of something new. That is why it is so important to create. That is why the artist is always at the margin. Nothing creative ever happens at the center. The artist revels in the ultimate disequilibrium of things. Monet's impressionistic art was something new. He blurred the outlines and expressed something that couldn't be expressed any other way.
"Artists have something in them that is wild, something guided and inspired ultimately by imagination. The universe from the beginning has been poised between the expanding and the containing forces, and no one knows if this creative balance will collapse or will continue indefinitely."
Some other readings from Thomas Berry’s classic The Dream of the Earth:
What is remarkable throughout the Asian world is that terms designating supremely affectionate qualities carry ultimate cosmo-logical significance. So in the Chinese world, jen, a term translated as love, benevolence, or affection, is not only an emotional-moral term, it is also a cosmic force. This can be said also of the virtue of ch 'eng, translated as sincerity or integrity. In India the term bbakt4 devotional love, was a cosmological as well as a spiritual force. In Buddhist tradition the term karuna, compassion, is a supreme cosmic power. Thus we find a pervasive intimacy and compassionate quality in the very structure of the universe and of the earth itself.
A sense of the earth and its meaning is particularly urgent just now, for the different sciences have developed an immense volume of information about the natural world in its physical aspects, and a corresponding power to control it. Yet the earth is still seen as so much quantified matter. Life and consciousness as integral and pervasive dimensions of the earth have until recently found little appreciation except as more advanced phases of a mechanistic pro-cess. Because of this, the human community, the psychic component of the earth in its most complete expression, has become alienated from the larger dynamics of the planet and thereby has lost its own meaning. That we are confused about the human is a consequence of our confusion about the planet.
The industrial-commercial mode of consciousness in our society has coexisted with a traditional spiritual coding in the pattern of Western classical spirituality. These two patterns cause little trouble to each other because neither the modern scientific mode of consciousness nor our spiritual consciousness is concerned with the integral functioning of the earth community. Indeed, both modes of consciousness experience the human as Olympian ruler of the planet, the planet as naturalistic functioning, and earth's resources as objects for unlimited human exploitation.
We now begin to realize, however, that the planet Earth will not long endure being despised or ignored in its more integral being, whether by scientists, technologists, or saints; nor will it submit forever to the abuse it has had to endure. Already the earth is taking away the oxygen we breathe, the purity of the rain, our protection from cosmic rays, the careful balance of our climate, the fruitfulness of the soil. Finally we begin to recover a reverence for the material out of which we were born, for the nourishing context that sustains us, the sounds and scenery, the warmth of the wind and the coolness of the waterfall of which delight us and purify us and communicate to us some sense of sacred presence. In the twentieth century this reverent attention hardly exists, nor can it exist in any vital mode until the spirituality of the new eco-logical age begins to function with some efficacy.
Some awareness for the wide range of activities that is supporting this new coding can be obtained by paging through the book by Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, a work that surveys the transforming movements already taking place throughout the world, and especially in America.This spontaneity as the guiding force of the universe can be thought of as the mysterious impulse whereby the primordial fireball flared forth in its enormous energy, a fireball that contained in itself all that would ever emerge into being, a fireball that was the present in its primordial form, as the present is the fireball in its explicated form. What enabled the formless energies to emerge into such a fantastic variety of expression in shape, color, scent, feeling, thought, and imagination?
As with any aesthetic work, we attribute it especially to the imaginative capacities of the artist, for only out of imaginative power does any grand creative work take shape. Since imagination functions most freely in dream vision, we tend to associate creativity also with dream experience. The dream comes about precisely through the uninhibited spontaneities of which we are speaking. In this context we might say: In the beginning was the dream. Through the dream all things were made, and without the dream nothing was made that has been made.
While all things share in this dream, as humans we share in this dream in a special manner. This is the entrancement, the magic of the world about us, its mystery, its ineffable quality. What primordial source could, with no model for guidance, imagine such a fantastic world as that in which we live – the shape of the orchid, the coloring of the fish in the sea, the winds and the rain, the variety of sounds that flow over the earth, the resonant croaking of the bullfrogs, the songs of the crickets, and the pure joy of the predawn singing of the mockingbird?
Experience of such a resplendent world activated the creative imagination of Mozart in The Magic Flute, of Dante in his Divine Comedy, and gave to Shakespeare that range of sensitivity, under-standing, and emotion that found expression in his plays. All of these derive from the visionary power that is experienced most profoundly when we are immersed in the depths of our own being and of the cosmic order itself in the dreamworld that unfolds within us in our sleep, or in those visionary moments that seize upon us in our waking hours. There we discover the Platonic forms, the dreams of Brahman, the Hermetic mysteries, the divine ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the infinite worlds of Giordano Bruno, the world soul of the Cambridge Platonists, the self organizing universe of Ilya Prigogine, the archetypal world of C. G. Jung.
Each of these is enormously attractive, having a certain inner coherence and revealing some aspect of the universe and of the planet Earth that is fascinating to the human mind. They can be understood as facets of a mystery too vast for human comprehension, a mystery with such power that even a fragment of its grandeur can evoke the great cultural enterprises that humans have under-taken. In this context we have shaped our languages and lifestyles, our poetry and music, our religious scriptures, our political ideals, our humanistic literature, our life-sustaining economies. Of special importance is the grand sequence of rituals whereby we insert ourselves into the ever renewing sequence of springtime renewals in nature.
The human condition could be overcome by our entrepreneurial skills. Nuclear energy would give us limitless power. Through genetic engineering we could turn chickens into ever more effective egg-laying machines, cows into milk-making machines, steers into meat-making contrivances, all according to human preference, not according to the inner spontaneities of these living beings as determined by their genetic coding, a coding shaped through some billions of years of experiment and natural selection.
Ever-heightening consumption was the way to ultimate human fulfillment. Every earthly being was reduced from its status as a sacred reality to that of being a "natural resource," available for human use for whatever trivial purposes humans might invent. It would take a while to describe what has been happening in all our professions and institutions in this period of assumed cultural progress.
