Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

50 Designing ecological Habitats
Its judgments are not alien to the scientific hypotheses of Jahn and Dunne
that “consciousness… can marginally influence its physical reality to a
degree dependent on its subjective resonance with the system or process
in question” or that symbol systems may even neurognostically ‘true’ our
experience (i.e. the brain may be wired for holistic experience) and teach us
“to perceive everyday objects, events and states of affairs as instantiations
of the totality”. 7
In the symbolism of the Yijing, the all-connected life of the universe
presences right here and now; it is not only a matter of remote eons and lightyears.
And its authenticity coexists in cultural creations expressed within us.
In every concrete situation of life, guan imparts and receives the “‘presencing
of Being’ which is the Way of [sustaining and sustainable] Transformation”. 8
Analogously, suggests Berry, the universe as the Great Self is fulfilled
in the individual self, the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self; and
the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. Disconnection
from the re-source-fullness of a contemporary guan is a primary factor in our
unsustainable ecosocial deracination.
A fruitfully ecosocial story sustains a symphony of life systems and of
diverse kinds of consciousness. This ‘ecology of mind’, rather than fixation
on the single aim of ego-benefit, sounds the narrative calling of our time.
We are invited by guan to outgrow the fragmentation of our interests and
reinvent (eco)humanity as a mode of the ongoing transformation-wholing –
not as a fragmented particle of a single-ordered whole, but as a participating
member and a ‘focusing’ of an open ‘fielding’ of emerging Earth-human
relations.
Ecohumane relationships for themselves and not as tools to externalized
ends (wealth, status, domination) least impose on their environment. Guaning
as members of life systems, we are more inclined to respect and sustainingly
care for those systems as well as for ourselves and the young in education,
right livelihood and celebration. Wuwei (unforced, nonacquisitive) conduct
moderating dysfunctional environmental abuse is simultaneously imparting
and receiving the wholing-event (taiji) in resonant, mutually beneficial guan
attunement. Contemplative guan restores in Earth-human relations the religio,
re-membrance, and reciprocity (shu) between ourselves and the natural
cosmic order.
Guan allows us to experience all beings in analogia entis, i.e. as self-similar
fractals of the field of Heaven, Earth and Humanity, or as embodiments of
the potentials of the all-connecting quantum field. Developing his narrative
of the cosmic “holomovement” wherein “everything is enfolded into
everything”, the physicist David Bohm analogously proposes that scientific
research should be complemented by meditative practice relevant to the
‘undivided wholeness’ disclosed by contemporary as well as ancient research.
This, others call a ‘mature contemplative’ orientation in the participationobservation
of nature. Identifying guan as a meditative and contemplative
method, Cheng echoes contemporary quantum physics in describing guan’s
benefit in allowing us to maintain the link and identification with the ultimate