A Quote by Brian Swimme
That is our larger destiny: to allow the Earth to organize in a new way, in a manner impossible all the billions of years prior to humanity
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We are made for larger ends than Earth can encompass. Oh, let us be true to our exalted destiny.
I don't know if most people have truly taken on board what this says about our place in the natural world. It doesn't mean that humans are dominating the Earth, ruling over all of nature. In fact, it is a reminder that we are only a tiny part of nature, at the mercy of a system whose operations predate us by billions of years, and will continue billions of years after we're gone.
Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position-at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary pat in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos.
I think the Bible is completely inspired by God in its overall messages. But, for the people of those days to know what was going to happen 4,000 years later in a world of astronomy or subatomic particles. They didn't have access to the knowledge that we presently have about geology. So, we know now that the world was created many of billions of years ago, 13 or 14 billion years ago. As far as they knew, the earth was the center of the universe. They thought that stars were little twinkling things in the sky where as now we know stars are very distant and much larger than the earth.
Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being.
There are billions of people on the earth and there are billions of earths, billions of universes. It is endless.
Eventually we must leave Earth-at least a certain number of our progeny must as our sun approaches the end of its solar life cycle. But just as terrestrial explorers have always led the way for settlers, this will also happen extraterrestrially. Earth is our cradle, not our final destiny.
Thinking about the new epoch - often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity - challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Heidi Cullen had said that all of these local and cable weather forecasters who have been certified by the AMS, the American Meteorological Society, should be decertified if they refuse to accept the proven science of man-made global warming. There are numerous credible scientists, who have not been convinced that this is anything other than sunspot activity or normal cycles that the earth has gone through for billions and billions and billions and billions of years. Science can't prove man-made global warming, they simply can't, so they come up with this notion of consensus.
Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution can compromise humanity's traditional sources of meaning - work, community, family, and identity - or it can lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours.
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
[Stanley] Kubrick was a fascinating, larger than life guy who had been a friend for many years prior to our working together on that film. I found the best part of working with him to be the long conversations we had between set-ups.
Our God is the God of the impossible. When we say yes to doing new things as we step into our destiny, we'll get to see God show up and equip us for the journey ahead in miraculous ways.
