Unearthing the Earth: A Phenomenological Excavation of our Being-on-the-Earth
By Matthew Segall


“Eco-phenomenology offers a methodological bridge between the natural world and our own, or rather the rediscovery of the bridge that we are and have always been but—thanks to our collective amnesia—have forgotten, almost irretrievably. It is not enough to disguise our forgetting; there is also a matter of remembering—remembering the earth.”
-Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (“Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself,” p. xx).

    Phenomenology was laid down by Edmund Husserl as a path for thinking deeper than the superficial thought of objective natural science. It could be said that thought opens the world to human consciousness; thought, when spoken, builds the home I dwell in. Naturalism, on the other hand, prevents the blossoming of thought as the flower of the mouth by alienating consciousness from the body, from the earth, from the sky, and from the divine.

Heidegger says, “Being-on-the-earth…remains for man’s everyday experience that which is from the outset habitual…we inhabit it…” (MHBW, p. 349). It is, in other words, as easy to forget one’s earthly situation as it is to forget one is breathing. Earth is often taken for granted, becoming the unthought background of daily life. Commonsense is therefore naturalistic, paying attention only to the surface while forgetting the hidden face that lies beyond the horizon. As technological “advancement” swallows more and more of the lifeworld, consciousness finds itself falling deeper into exile from Being. Naturalism is a framework that conceives of the world, including the human body, as “consisting entirely of extensional properties related to each other within a causal matrix,” (EP, p. 3).  There is nowhere for me—for consciousness— in the nature of naturalism.

The early Husserl was as of yet unaware of his embodiment and being-on-the-earth and so concerned himself not so much with saving nature as such from naturalism, but with saving human consciousness from its nihilistic implications. As Brown and Toadvine put it, for many, Husserl’s phenomenology “is a reduction of the world to meaning, and of meaning to [human] subjectivity,” (ibid, p. xiv). While Husserl’s early work may be a noble attempt to preserve human freedom and values from the onslaught of scientism, it offers only a point of departure when it comes to bridging the gap between humanity and nature that lies at the root of the ecological crisis (perhaps his later work, explored below, goes further). It is clear that if a true eco-phenomenology is desired, it must reject naturalism not only to recover the meaning of human existence, but to recover the meaning of humanity’s being-on-the-earth.

    I will attempt in this essay to uncover the roots of human consciousness in the earth—to recontextualize the human being as a being-on-the-earth. This excavation will require both a conceptual examination of the four most general categories of nature as conceived of by naturalism (space, time, matter, and energy), and an experiential exploration of how these abstractions are originally revealed to us as embodied earthlings. Before I actually begin, however, I must establish the possibility of the unearthing of experience by way of the phenomenological method by responding to an important criticism.

    Phenomenology may be described, after Heidegger, as a mode of speech (logos) that lets things (phenomena) show themselves. Any return to the things themselves is thus always already in relation to language. Gregory Nixon (after Derrida) has argued, that “outside of language there is nothing to which we can directly refer, since all language is indicative only of itself,” (VFW, p. 258). If Nixon is correct, it would seem that all attempts to bridge the nature/culture gap in the service of alleviating the alienation of consciousness from earth must fail, as “knowledge outside of language [or culture] is literally unthinkable,” (ibid). Nixon’s view is that human conscious experience is the result of linguistic reflection, that “the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it,” (ibid, p. 257). He admits to the possibility of pre-linguistic, pre-cultural experience, but maintains that bringing it to consciousness has already changed it: to consciously experience anything, I must already have “drawn it into the inescapable web of the hermeneutic enclosure of language,” (ibid, p. 258).

Such a grim picture of language as “enclosed,” I believe, neglects its poetic potential to let things show themselves by opening us to an originary experience of our being-on-the-earth.  Language need not be a sticky, solipsistic web of self-referential signs, but can, by re-establishing its relation to the body and what Eugene Gendlin calls the “felt sense” of embodied meaning, become a bridge that carries us back to the earth itself. Gendlin argues that “bodily experience cannot be reduced to language and culture…[because] our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interactional process that always exceeds culture, history, and language,” (UE). Experience is always more intricate than language, and while language can never contain the whole of our experience, it can aid in, as Gendlin puts it, “carrying forward” our meaning. Nixon’s sharp distinction between conscious human experience and unconscious pre-linguistic experience neglects the possibility of a liminal space in between, where a bodily feeling of what Gendlin calls the “responsive otherness” of implied meaning gives rise to the sentences we speak (NPCF). The implied meaning is never fully transformed into the words, but the words nonetheless carry it forward, thereby allowing meaning to develop and expand as new words come. In Gendlin’s view, “Words mean the change they make when they are said… The change happens implicitly in the situation,” (ibid.).  Instead of reducing the meaning of a word to the other linguistic signifiers it points to, Gendlin’s way into language reveals that meaning arises out of the “implicit intricacy” of the bodily and inter-bodily situations in which words are spoken. Our knowledge of any given situation comes not from the words we use to describe it, but from the meanings these words imply for our sentient, situated bodies. 

    In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “the words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin,” (VI, p. 102). Philosophy must, if it hopes to remain alive in our dark age of amnesia, forego the habit of representing experience abstractly with arbitrary signs and instead rediscover a way of speaking poetically from experience, such that what is said sheds light on the subtleties of existence heretofore covered over by the sedimentary layers of language long dead. 

Having thus established that language, despite the fact that its inauthentic and naturalistic use can and has obscured the life-world, nevertheless possesses the potential to become what Heidegger, after Hölderlin, called “the flower of the mouth” (thereby re-connecting human experience with the soil out of which it was born and will return), I can now proceed to uncover the earthly roots of consciousness by phenomenologically grounding the naturalistic abstractions of space, time, matter and energy in bodily (and earthly) experience. If I succeed, consciousness will no longer seem a transcendental ego precariously, if at all, related to an objective, external nature, but will have become a unique flower blossoming out of a living planet.


Space
Rilke, speaking of those in poverty—of the homeless—writes:
“Has the earth, then, no room for them?
 …
They need only, as a tree does,
a little space in which to grow.”
(RBH, p. 229).

    If we follow a Cartesian (or early Husserlian) path of thought, pure consciousness “in here” comes to be directed toward extended objects “out there.” Consciousness is always of or about objects. The shortcoming of this way of thinking is that it covers over an original experience of the spatiality of our being-on-the-earth. As a Cartesian ego, extended space seems to be an object “out there.” Yet, as Kant realized, space cannot be conceived of objectively, but functions for the ego as a form of intuition pre-structuring all experienced objects. It might be said that Kant took the first steps toward a phenomenological account of space by showing how extension is not simply given to an entirely aloof subject; rather, the subject actively provides space as a form of intuition. But Kant’s account remains an abstract conception too tied up in the tired language of tradition to let space show itself originally in experience. While he reveals the necessity of space for experience, he fails to adequately account for the relationship between space, the body, and the earth.

    Returning to immediate experience, space appears as the possibility for bodily movement. I do not at first encounter space, but rather sense the possibility of moving from here to there.  Any such movement of my body from one place to another, before it is travel through empty space, is walking across stable ground.  This ground is the earth. As David Abram says, paraphrasing the later Husserl, “the earth itself is not in space, since it is the earth that, from the first, provides space,” (SS, p. 42).  So much is implicit in this most radical of statements that it would pay to dwell upon it, dwell in the double sense of think it deeply and live within it. How is our experience of space transformed by remembering the constitutive role played by the ground beneath our feet?

    Before exploring the answer, it should be made clear just how radical Husserl’s claim is in comparison to the naturalistic attitude of science, which sees earth as one among many planetary objects suspended in the void. Since the Copernican Revolution, the centrality of earth has come into question and the lifeworld has given way to a concept of nature as independent of experience. No other scientific finding is more responsible than the heliocentric theory for creating the apparent disagreement between perception and reality. Descartes would, a century after Copernicus, reify this disagreement into an ontological chasm separating subject from object, rational intellect from experiencing body (SS, p. 43).

    Returning again to the question posed above, it appears that the scientific conception of space as a container is groundless, the product of uprooted reflection.  Space is not that which provides the possibility of extended matter; rather, the earth provides the “un-get-around-able” materiality that makes space a possibility (EP, p. 157).  Space is not simply given, but is born out of the earth and our experience as earthlings dwelling on its spherical surface.

    Husserl writes that, “the original ark, earth, does not move,” (SS, p. 42). By this, he seems to imply that earth, as the source of both space and life, provides the basis out of which later scientific abstractions are derived. The earth provides the unmoving mark (unmoving only because its movement carries us) that allows the body to perceive motion relative to itself. Though it is undoubtedly true that the earth orbits the sun, the ability to understand such a truth rests in a more primordial experience of being-on-the-earth. As our bodies are of the earth, so too is space of the body. As Heidegger says, “I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it,” (MHBW, p. 359).  Distance depends on where we stand in relation to one another, and is not a function holding true of any “space” independent of our relation. The earth is not in space with the other planets and the sun, but participates with them in providing space for one another.

    As an example of the relativistic space articulated here, it should be pointed out that the appearance of the sun and the other planets from the surface of the earth remains the same regardless of our conception of how they are actually related to earth.  There is, therefore, no conflict between perception and reality so long as it is acknowledged that any explanation of experience arises out of that experience.  The discovery of earth’s position in the solar system does not contradict our experience as earthlings; it merely deepens our experience of the dimensional possibilities of space as provided by earth. We say the sun rises as we say the eye sees, and neither is wrong even while both are incomplete. It must be added that the earth shows itself to the sun and that the eye is seen.



Time
“You are the future,
the red sky before sunrise
over the fields of time.
…
You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
that rise from the stuff of our days—
…
You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.”
-Rilke (RBH, p. 177)

Before moving on from space to time, it should be noted that each of the categories under examination are only separable in the abstract. Space and time form a single continuum in lived experience, and though space alone was considered in the prior section, time was implicated in every step.

    Time is perhaps the most elemental of experiential elements, not easily covered over by the forgetfulness of the naturalistic attitude. The physical conception of time as a linear series of causally symmetrical instants entirely neglects what, after David Wood, may be called the “plexity,” or complex relationality, of our embodied experience (EP, p. 213). Time-as-lived is asymmetrical, meaning it flows irreversibly from past to future, unlike the equations of physics.

    Lived time, when situated on the earth, becomes not only an irreversible unfolding, but an unfolding coordinated by a variety of interwoven planetary rhythms, such as the day/night cycle and seasonal shifts. The rhythms give time a certain experiential texture, such that it becomes tied up in the very substance of existence, rather than being an arbitrary measure of homogenous change.

    Clocks measure, but it is not time that they catch—for the clock itself is aging, too embedded in the stuff of time to provide a fixed point of reference. Time knows no fixed points, as experience endures: the body moves not from one discrete moment to the next, but carries with it the events of the past into a present always opening to the possibilities of the future. The present is not a bare “now,” an instantaneous “here,” nor is it a rudderless raft pushed along by the current of the past. The present is endlessly pregnant with the past, perpetually giving birth to the future. What is born becomes again the seed for further unfolding.

    Space and time reunite in our being-on-the-earth not through a spatialization of time, but a temporalization of space. Space finds its origin in place, and place in the temporality of an event. I am here, breathing with/as the rhythms of time, in what is always a place becoming, a happening. Never does my being here cease to become in time, as my situation is temporal before it is spatial. I arrive at a café as I have the same way on many a day, but because the past I carry with me today differs, so too does my experience of the café. Similarly, the earth as spherical place provides spatial depth only thanks to the tempo of time. The earth was once a cloud of dust, and only after time allowed it to take shape could it provide a place for space to surround.


Matter
Rilke writes, again of the homeless:
“Is there by the banks
of the pond’s deep dreaming
no where they can see their faces reflected?”
(RBH, p. 229).

    The aforementioned formative influence of time in the shaping of the earth should not be taken to mean that the substance of the earth, matter, is merely a passive recipient of spherizing form. This conception of matter as raw stuff shaped by immaterial ideas has a long history in Western thought. The ordinary naturalistic attitude conceives of matter as inert and objective, something that exists extended in space. But as we saw above, matter is not “in” space, but when given time and present in sufficient mass (relative to sensate beings arising from its body), provides space. The formative influence of time should be understood as being of the same substance as the materiality of the earth itself. The spherical shape of the earth is an echo of the primordial “un-get-around-able” essence of materiality.

Materiality conceived naturalistically appears as the flat, extended surface of earth (at least until recently when a view of earth was revealed “from” space) and the closed surfaces of all the bodies upon it. The interior of surfaces (i.e., the sentience of bodies) is neglected by such a forgetful way of thinking (and dwelling in) the world.

Perceived via the self-sentience of the body, materiality is the weight of our own inner existence—that which embeds us in what would otherwise remain a world of mere surfaces but for the fold that is our face and the clearing it opens for us to behold and be held by the earth.  The human body is not the whole of our mass, or even wholly our own, but a temporary gift from the mass of the mother earth to which we belong. The reason matter and mind, or the body and human consciousness, have been so opposed to one another for much of the history of philosophy may be uncovered in the precarious relationship between our identity (our face) and materiality conceived naturalistically (surfaces as such). 
   
    Jacques Lacan described the human ego as the human being’s internalized image of itself as reflected in a mirror. The ego is, in other words, my idea of what I look like from the outside, as a surface.  But if it is true that matter is the “un-get-around-able,” then this egoic identity always remains a fantasy. I cannot fully identify with my skin-bounded body, because there is always a topological gap that prevents my internalizing it as a complete body. Materiality cannot be fully thought precisely because we are ourselves material.

Though Lacan’s mirror stage may be necessary for further development, our perspective on ourselves may become more authentic if the locus of identity widens from our individual body to the earth-body. Only recently have photographs of the earth from space given humanity the opportunity to inhabit it as our own body, just as the infant is given the opportunity to identify with its body after being placed before a mirror. The difference is that identification with the sphericality of the earth requires embracing the “un-get-around-able” materiality of our existence, unlike identification with a planar image reflected upon a mirror. The mirror image gives a false impression of wholeness, as its flat surface shows only as much as can be shown to it. The earth, on the other hand, provides a genuine face (not a surface) that more authentically grounds identification in a sense of wholeness not found in flattened images. In this way, my bodily identity can come primarily from the face of the earth, and only secondarily from my image of myself as an earthling living on its surface.

Questioning who I am is first a question of Being itself, and as such has an undisclosed origin that can never be fully articulated because it is always already assumed (the “is” in the question “what is Being?” must already be understood). But we are forgetful of this implicit understanding, and so we are lead, in answering the question, to settle on identifying with our own inverted image (an outside, made superficially because incompletely, inside). Objectifying nature alienates consciousness from its own naturalness, hampering its ability to fully be. But the very same naturalistic attitude that covered over our relationship to Being and lead to the false identification with the ego also ignited the rockets that took us beyond the senses to the stars, turning our eyes back upon the body of the earth for the first time so that we might rediscover the meaning of being home. 

Being-on-the-earth is also being of the earth, identifying with its living materiality. Earth becomes Gaia when we become again as children, regaining our primordial attunement to the life of things, though now an attunement that is expressed through speech like flowers reaching from the soil to the sky. In this way, language becomes a bridge built to carry we mortals back to the earth, and from earth, with creative inspiration, to the divine. As Rilke says to the earth, “There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse,” (RBH, p. 121).


Energy
“And weapons against all that breathes,
In an incessant pride, the human being carries;
In torment he consumes himself
And the flower of his peace,
The tender one, does not bloom long.”
- Hölderlin (from “Das Mench”)

    Energy has become a concept of central importance for the current ecological crisis. Cries abound for sustainable sources of energy, for technologies that extract energy for human consumption without destroying nature. But technology can never extract energy from the earth in a sustainable way, because to think in terms of the naturalistic conception of energy already enframes nature, such that it becomes a mere standing-reserve awaiting human use, a means to our ends.

    Nature conceived of as a source of energy enframes nature in that it “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such,” (MHBW, p. 320).  Technology seems to be the means to this end.  However, Heidegger argues that the essence of technology is not its instrumentality, but its mode of revealing by enframing. To reveal by enframing is to challenge-forth “energy” in the abstract, as something separable from the life of the earth. Heidegger contrasts this mode of revealing with that of poïesis, which brings-forth of itself. The best example of such bringing-forth is physis, “the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself,” (ibid, p. 317). Physis reveals the way in which energy and nature are originally united as the self-generating capacity of the living earth. A conception of “energy” independent of earth, extractable from earth, is the result of an enframed way of thinking only interested in quantifying what can be challenged-forth from nature.  The danger in relating to earth in such a way (as a “calculable coherence of forces,” ibid, p. 326) is that, eventually (if not already), even the human being becomes the standing-reserve of industry, which “[drives] on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense,” (ibid, p. 321).

Energy becomes, for the naturalistic attitude, the most neutral of names for the essence of nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. The earth does not originally show itself as a resource, as a standing-reserve, but becomes so only because of the technological way of being that forcibly reveals it as such. That technology nonetheless reveals is what makes it so dangerous, as all revealing (aletheia) is truthful. Energy does show itself as a quantifiable substance, but only after the earth is inhabited instrumentally. Both the revealing that is poïesis (or physis) and the revealing that is enframing provide a kind of truth; but enframing goes on for the most part unconsciously, because everyone assumes that the essence of technology is merely instrumental, that it is neutral but for how the human being puts it to use.

We do not realize that our technological presence on the earth has the potential, not only to forever forestall self-generating capacity of nature, but to forever alter human nature, as well. We risk losing touch with our own poetic roots in the soil and with the inspiration that lifts our language to new heights. Ours is a crisis not only of the ecosystem, but of the humanity dwelling within it. If the essence of technology remains hidden, and nature continues to be used up as mere energy, the human being will become a mere battery for the machines that replace us, homeless upon a dead earth.


Conclusion
“This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
-Rilke (RBH, p. 173).

    Heidegger warns not only of the dangers of technology, but after Hölderlin (“…where danger is, grows/the saving power also…” MHBW, p. 340), heralds also its potential to re-establish our being-on-the-earth, though in sublated form. This saving power is realized only if the essence of technology is understood. For Heidegger (as well as Husserl), scientific naturalism owes its existence to the technological method of enframing. This reverses the commonsense idea that science brought-forth technology. The great success of the scientific/naturalistic approaches is not the result of the metaphysical truth of their objectivism, but rather of the practical value of their methods. This method, made possible by the enframing of the earth as mere energy for instrumental use, has depleted its body of the life-giving qualities that created and provide for our human existence. It is the shock of this near suicide, however, that has given us the opportunity to truly stand watch over this earth as the only home we’ll ever have.

    The mythical fall from grace and eviction from the garden of Eden can only be overcome by taking to an extreme the alienating way of inhabiting the earth that caused the fall to begin with. We cannot turn back—we cannot put humpty dumpty back together again. Our destiny had to be lived out—our process of maturation could not be prematurely reversed. But in a typical enantiodromic twist, our rush to remake the planet technologically has lead to an opening that, if seen, will allow us to remember our original identity as earthlings, now capable of either destroying or saving the earth. For the first time, we can truly become aware of and responsible for the ground beneath our feet.

    As Heidegger says, being-on-the-earth already means being beneath the sky (MHBW, p. 351). And to be beneath the sky means to behold the stars, whose divine energies remain forever out of reach of we mere mortals. But instead of energy, we may find “something waiting inside [the things themselves], like an unplayed melody in a flute,” (RBH, 167). Only a way of thinking/dwelling upon the earth that grants such melodies their say, and that safeguards their becoming, can save us from the total annihilation of ourselves and the rest of the community of life upon this planet.


Bibliography

SS -Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage. 1997.
EP - Brown, Charles S. and Toadvine, Ted (Ed.). Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. SUNY Press: Albany. 2003.
NPCF - Gendlin, E.T. (2004). The new phenomenology of carrying forward. Continental Philosophy Review, 37(1), 127-151. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2228.html
MHBW - Krell, David Farrel (Ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Harper: San Francisco. 1977.
RBH - Macy, Joanna and Barrows, Anita. Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. Penguin Group: New York. 1996.
VI - Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press: Chicago. 1969.
UE - Roger Frie (Ed.). Understanding Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism, pp.100-115, Routledge. 2003
VFW - Varela, Francisco and Shear, Johnathan (Ed.). The View From Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness. Imprint Academic: Bowling Green. 1999.

This is a test run for a presentation I'm giving next week in a course taught by mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme. What are the cosmological powers?
http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/swimme.html

Text of presentation:

Slide 1:
All of the powers will undoubtedly show their faces at once point or another during the course of this presentation, but these three lured my imagination most. Seamlessness, Centration, and Interrelatedness. I’ve subtitled it From None, to One, to Many. Hopefully the meaning of this phrase will become clear as we go along…

Slide 2:
In the beginning was an infinitely fertile womb, an all-nourishing abyss, a nothingness so full of potential that it was unable to contain itself.
A full emptiness may not make much rational sense.
Nonetheless, there was a virgin birth, and from none, came one: from the void emerged the cosmos.

Slide 3:
But then, amidst this young cosmos, occurs another miracle: the emergence of particles, individual centers of autopoietic agency always already in communion with each and every other.  The One that came from None becomes Many.

Slide 4:
What you see here is a simulation of a cloud of atoms about a light year across. We’re going to watch them seek one another out over the course of 260,000 years. Astrophysicists call this ancient love of matter for itself “gravity. “ Perhaps this is the original meaning of “falling” in love…

Now, out of this atomic love-making, something brand new begins to emerge: stars. But this stellar nursery is no playground. This is a deadly dance constantly hovering at the edge of chaos and creativity.

Individual stars actually begin to compete with one another for matter. Some are ejected before they have enough fuel to ignite, becoming brown dwarfs. Others are destroyed by colossal impacts or swallowed by massive plasma vortexes. But the creative process is relentless: countless shining beings are formed from the fecundity of atomic interrelatedness and are flung into the privacy of a space all their own.

Slide 5:
But these freshly spun stars won’t be lonely long. Out of the halo of gas and rock still surrounding their core, planets emerge to receive the radiant gift offered by their solar parent.

So, to recap: from the empty fullness of the quantum vacuum came the cosmos, within which emerged the first atomic beings whose love for one another made the stars: from None (seamlessness), to One (centration), to Many (interrelatedness).

This mysterious trinity is still active upon the earth between we earthlings. Each of us represents a recapitulation of the original emergence of the universe from the creative womb. We come into the world as individuals, and yet we are always already related to one another. How are we—how am I—both one and many?

In chapter 3 of the Universe Story, Brian Swimme discusses what’s called the Pauli Exclusion Principle. This principle simply states that no two particles can occupy the same state. This principle can be said to assure the irreducible reality of the individual, not only at the quantum level, but also at our human level.

But there is a further principle applying to such individuals: the second law of thermodynamics. This law reflects the need that individuals have, whether atoms or human beings, to remain open to a continual flow of energy. Any being that fails to exchange energy with its environment will very quickly decay and dissolve. For human beings, this “energy exchange” includes our inter-subjective presence among one another and the rest of the earth community, a topic we will return to later. So, we are both separate and united, both individual and interdependent.

To understand this paradox, we have to delve deeper into the bizarre beginnings of our universe. The explosion we witnessed at the start of this presentation is an inadequate facsimile of the big bang, because there was not yet an outside perspective from which to view this most creative of moments. Both space and time themselves emerged from the quantum vacuum. Strangely, then, there really is no outside to our universe; nor is there a beginning in time, at least not one that isn’t still occurring now.

Slide 6:
Loren Eiseley has written that the human is the loneliest being on earth. Our special mode of self-conscious experience (itself an astonishing achievement of cosmic creativity) has become, in the industrial era, a force leading to increasing isolation from the universe that birthed us. We’ve gained untold amounts of technological knowledge about our universe as a result of this self-consciousness, yet somehow each new advance in power and control takes us further away from feeling at home.

Slide 7:
In an attempt to reconcile this alienation—to heal this wound—let us revisit our experience of the beings we call stars. Our own Sun provides us with a model for how the intense centration manifest in human self-consciousness might overcome itself.  Perhaps we can learn vicariously.

Slide 8:
The intensity of centration displayed in the self-actualization of the Sun is mirrored by the centration generating our special type of subjective reflectivity. The matter making up the Sun loves itself so deeply that it cannot help but transcend itself, overflowing in radiance, showering light and warmth upon our planet, giving it life. If a being as massive as the Sun is capable of such a miracle, there’s no doubt that you and I are, as well.

Slide 9:
If you recall my description of the cosmic creation moment, of the empty fullness that could not contain itself, you will see the striking parallel with the Sun. Every being in the cosmos is a recapitulation of the emergence of the cosmos itself.

That means present within each and every one of us is the same mysterious seamlessness from which the whole of existence continues to emerge.

It is here that the paradox of our communal autonomy—our autonomy in communion—gains its mystery: The deeper into our own center we go, the closer we come to approaching the whole.

Or as 17th century philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal put it: “The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. [The universe] is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”

In other words, looking outward at the vastness of the visible universe may understandably leave us feeling quite alone. But when we recognize that it’s center is everywhere—that in each of our hearts hides the mystery that gave birth to this unfathomable, uncontainable universe—then we feel not only at home, but recognize our natural inclination to love without bounds. There is no limit to what each of us can radiate, or to the depths of our interrelatedness.  The universe may not have an outside, but it has countless insides: You are inside of me, just as I am inside of you. We cannot escape each other.

Slide 10:
And yet the mechanized minds of modern human beings somehow remain isolated, not just from one another, but from the rest of the community of life on this planet. How exactly our species-wide autism arose is a matter of academic curiosity; what seems relevant to our current planetary crisis is how to best approach a cure. I spoke earlier of the need all beings have for energy exchange. To remain individually alive, we must give to and receive from those around us. We modern people are great at receiving—at consuming—but we are still learning how to give.

Slide 11:
It seems to me that our only recourse is to remember our relation to the (w)hole: that is, to the cosmos and its origin—to the none and her child, the one. What I am trying to do here is give a theological symbol cosmological significance.

Slide 12:
To give another perspective on what I am trying to convey here, I quote integral philosopher Jean Gebser: “Love presupposes not only the Thou, but also and above all, the I. Only where there is a true, selfless I can the Thou come forward. Without I there is no Thou; without the We which originates within us, there is no Love." [Recall in this context how, through intense centration and individualization, the Sun overflows with light and warmth and becomes the most generous being in the solar system.]

Slide 13:
Now, this is certainly a religious, or at least a spiritual prescription. Our modern industrial sensibilities may make us suspicious of such loftiness, but nonetheless, I am suggesting that only a renewed sense of the holy will allow us to feel at home in the whole.

The holy is that which secretly binds us all together, even while we outwardly appear separate. Our many-ness is overcome by our endless capacity to radiate love like the Sun radiates warmth, which we needn’t worry about running out of since it is supplied by the ever-present infinite potential of our cosmic source.

Slide 14:
I close with a poem by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who sings this all better than I could say it:

“How surely gravity’s law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing—each stone, blossom, child—is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they are in God’s heart; they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”
(transl. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)