We Need a Cosmic Story
Humanity seems to be lost, living in a fast-moving world filled with data and information — mostly misinformation and disinformation. Most people think that they know everything there is to know about life, and obstinately hold on to what they know, with an aversion for adventure and suspicious of surprises. Psychologist David Dunning is shocked about the depth of human ignorance he has seen in surveys. What alarms him is not how much ignorance there is, but that ignorant people don’t know how ignorant they are. “We are not very good at knowing what we don’t know,” he says.
We need to heed Alvin Toffler’s prescient warning about our cultural and religious illiteracy and make every effort to be open to lifelong learning. According to Toffler, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
A surprising insight about learning new things is that you don’t have to deny, discard or disbelieve your old beliefs. The human mind is unlike a chalk board. To write something new on a chalk board, you have to erase the old writing. To erase anything old from your mind, all you have to do is write something new.
According to New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, “The three largest forces on the planet — technology, globalization and climate change are accelerating at once.” Ancient cultural stories and old paradigms are not holding up against the onslaught of algorithms and artificial intelligence of the new era. In this “age of anxiety and bewilderment,” incisive author Yuval Noah Harari says that “Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them.”
There are various cultural and religious stories competing for our attention. The problem with our old stories is that they are limited by time and space, and constricted by tribal, national, religious, and cultural biases and prejudices. They don’t serve us well in a globalized world. Our theology must evolve along with the expanding cosmology. According to Benedictine sister and theologian Joan Chittister,
“We do not by and large as a culture have a God big enough to believe in. We have diminished God. We’ve made God a puppeteer, a warrior, a judge, all slivers of ourselves. But, of course, anybody with an understanding looks up in the sky at night, saying to themselves what is out there? Where did all this come from? Where is it going? And what about the people who have left our lives? Where are they? Those are cosmic questions. And I believe that, for me, my God is a cosmic God.”
The challenges we are currently facing are beyond the competence of our old cultural and religious stories. We need a wider story, an all-inclusive story, a cosmic story that covers the entire planet that can cause a species-level awakening. According to cultural historian, Thomas Berry, we need a “universe story,” a new appreciation of our “cosmo-centric identity” and, we must deal with problems at the “species level,” rather than the tribal level.
My new book, Cosmic Kindergarten, is an attempt to frame a new story on a planetary level. It is a manual to simplify our complicated lives by returning to some very basic principles which are as old as the planet itself. It starts with a new awareness about planet Earth as part of us, rather than apart from us.
Thomas Berry puts it powerfully:
“We come into being in and through the Earth. Simply put, we are earthlings. The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our educator, our healer, our fulfillment. At its core even our spirituality is Earth derived. The human and the Earth are totally implicated, each in the other. If there is no spirituality in the Earth, there is no spirituality in ourselves.”
After a lifetime of monastic life in the woods of Kentucky, walking the Earth barefoot in a sacred manner — meaning reverently, with his whole being open to the feel of the Earth underneath him and of the air around him — American spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton proclaimed: “How absolutely central is the truth that we are first of all part of nature, though we are a very special part, that which is conscious of God. In solitude, one is surrounded by beings which perfectly obey God.”