The Berry Treasure Hunt

Tetra Versailles Red Cosmos

Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us. Since the Seventeenth Century we have not heard, we have not understood the inner world about us. We have experienced the external phenomena. We have had no entry into the world of interior meaning. We have not heard the voices. ~ Thomas Berry, 1996

1. The universe in its full extension in space and in its sequence of transformations in time is best understood as story: a story known in the twentieth century for the first time with scientific precision through empirical observation. The greatest single need for the survival of the Earth or of the human community in the twenty-first century is for the integral telling of the great story of the universe. This story must provide in our times what the mythic stories of earlier times provided as the guiding and energizing sources of the human venture.

2. The universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of the planet Earth is especially clear; each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being of the planet.

3. The three basic tendencies of the universe at all levels of reality are differentiation, spontaneous self-organization, and bonding. These tendencies identify the reality, the values, and the directions in which the universe is proceeding.

4. The universe has a violent as well as a harmonious aspect, but it is consistently creative in the larger arc of its development.

5. Earth, within the solar system, is a self-emergent, self-propagating, self-nourishing, self-educating, self-governing, self-healing, and self-fulfilling community. All particular life systems must integrate their functioning within this larger complex of mutually dependent Earth systems.

6. The human emerges within the life systems of Earth as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in a special mode of conscious self-awareness. The human is genetically coded toward a further cultural coding invented by the human community with remarkable diversity in the various regions of Earth.

In memory of Angelica Goffman
27 April 1964

 7. The transition from a hunter-gatherer mode of life to the beginning of village life with control over the forces of Earth through agriculture and domestication of animals took place some twelve thousand years ago, This period, generally known as the Neolithic period, was also the beginning of pottery, weaving, and new ways of fashioning stone implements. The major shaping forces of human societies were manifest at this time in the intellectual, artistic, and emotional developments that ever since have characterized the various human communities.

8. The rise of cities with extensive populations: the advent of more elaborate religious expression in ritual and architecture; the extension of intellectual, religious, and moral reflection; the development of specialized social functioning; the increase of centralized government; the invention of writing and greater technological expertise; these achievements, developed some five thousand years ago, were centered in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Indus Valley and the Ganges Valley of India, and in the Yellow River valley in North China. Later they appeared in the Western Mediterranean and European areas and in the Americas.

9. Modern scientific achievements, based on empirical observational processes, originated in early-sixteenth-century Europe. They were further developed in Europe, in North America, and in other countries of the world in succeeding centuries.

10. Modern industrial exploitation of the resources of the Earth, factory manufacturing, scientific technologies, and capitalist economies all had their beginnings in Europe and in North America in the eighteenth century. In this period the violent plundering of the Earth took place. The functioning of the Earth in its chemical balance, in its geological structure, and in its biological systems has been profoundly and permanently altered by human agency. The atmosphere and water are extensively polluted. The soils of the Earth are wasted as a result of erosion, road building, industrial establishments, shopping malls, and waste disposal practices. The earlier mystique of the Earth seems to have vanished from human consciousness.

11. In the last half of the twentieth century, as a new period – of electronics and genetic engineering – was developed, a new intimacy was sought with the integral functioning of the natural world. Now the dominant anthropocentrism is being replaced with ecocentrism. New programs are being instituted for integrating human technologies with the technologies of the natural world. A sense of the larger interspecies social order is being developed.

12. The newly energizing Earth community needs a mystique that will provide the high exaltation appropriate to the existence of such a stupendous universe and such a glorious planet as that on which we live. This can be found in celebrating not simply the seasonal sequence but also the irreversible transformational sequence, as this has taken place in the evolutionary story of the universe.

Thomas Berry’s  Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe, from his 2006 book Evening Thoughts (ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker, SF:Sierra Club Books), p. 145-147.