Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

contemplative ecology: an intercultural story 51
source of being and becoming. Whether this is labeled a quantum vacuum
field, Gaia, ever-present origin, or taiji is a matter of points-of-view which in
guan become sustainably integrated, not simply left as fragments of humancosmic
self-narration. In the end, Cheng observes, “Scientific objectivity
is dependent on nonscientific subjectivity and we need to transcend and
integrate both”. 9
We are now, claims Berry, entering the Ecozoic Era whose ‘awareness
that the universe is more cosmogenesis than cosmos might be the greatest
change in human consciousness that has taken place since the awakening
of the human mind in the Paleolithic Period.’ Analogously, we find the
practical Confucian sensibilities that,
... although human nature in its original substance is completely identical with
the ordering principles of the universe, the human mind has to be purified
[cultivated] through learning before it can fully realize the principle inherent in
human nature. 10
In this story, uncultivated ego proves unsustainable, rendering us, says
Berry, ‘autistic’ to the Earth and to the spontaneities of cosmos in ways
that amplify our ecopolitical dysfunctionality. Hence, Berry speaks of the
Great Work as “the most far reaching restructuring of being that we have yet
experienced”. Translating guan across time and civilization, Tucker agrees
that “The art of Confucian spirituality might be described as discovering
one’s cosmological being amidst daily affairs”. 11
This is also the narrative of evolutionary systems theorist Kauffman’s
recent book, Reinventing the Sacred, and of what Berry emphasizes is the
reinventing of the human in a living realization of ecohuman celebration.
In this view, practical contemplative experience is sustainably functional
conduct. The story goes on...
We are not here to control. We are here to become integral with the larger
Earth community. 12
Notes
1 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988): 111-13; Chungying
Cheng, “Philosophical Significances of Guan (Contemplative Observation): On Guan as
Onto-Hermeneutical Unity of Methodology and Ontology”, International Studies of I Ching Theory
1 (1995): 156-203; Guy Burneko, “Contemplative Ecology: Guan for a More-than-Sustainable
Future”, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37.1 (March 2010): 116-130.
2 Cheng, 163, 167-8, 170-76; Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau, The Conscious Universe: Part and
Whole in Modern Physical Theory (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
3 Cheng, 170, 176-77, 187, 192.
4 Berry, Dream, 82, 87, 195.
5 Berry, Dream, 45.
6 Charles D. Laughlin, “Archetypes, Neurognosis and the Quantum Sea”, Journal of Scientific
Exploration 10.3 (1996): 375-400; Charles Laughlin and C. J. Throop, “Imagination and Reality: On
the Relations between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea”, Zygon 36.4 (2001): 709-36;
Bernard Haisch. The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields and What’s Behind It All (San Francisco:
Weiser, 2006): 17.
Hexagram for
Observing (guan).