Thomas Berry(1914-2009)是一位研究世界宗教的历史学家，并且很早就对于唤醒对于环境危机的敏感性表达意见。他最知名的研究莫过于他的关于宇宙的“新的故事”，“新的故事”包括了进化科学和传统文化用来创造繁荣的未来。 这门课研究了Berry的一生并且联系到了宇宙之旅的项目之中。我们抽取了他的著作，文章还有以前的讲课录像，都是为了研究Berry的理念，包括了“新的故事”，“伟大的使命”，还有新兴的生态时代。这门课深入地研究了Berry对于宇宙的见解， 定位人类在动态无垠的宇宙中的位置和参与到我们时代的创造工作中。我们会着重研究Berry对于生态，经济，教育，灵魂，艺术时代更新和重塑。 课程的原理： Thomas Berry是原生的创造性综合性思想家，特别关注于我们全球环境危机的本质。他对于生态危机的回应体现了他的智慧，这回应是在进化论的背景下，应该把人类和科学带到一起。另外，他解释道，我们对于世界宗教的参与的需求也是可以用来解决环境问题。 他从研究宇宙学和宗教传统，并结合两者开始实现。感知到故事作为功能宇宙学的重要性，他开始探索这些故事的广泛影响并且通过传统进行传播，用例子来说明的话，就是仪式，道德和生存之道。
"我们时代的历史任务" Thomas Berry（第一部分）
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Thomas Berry的世界观：地球社区的繁荣 (The Worldview of Thomas Berry: The Flourishing of the Earth Community)
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宇宙学和生态学
Thomas Berry有关人类是地球生态的衍生品的理念：走向生态时代基础的治理原则
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Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
John GrimSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Anytime that you cannot hear me,
just raise your arm and
I'll try to remedy.
I would just like to say,
One other word about how we
developed our autism.
And then we'll spend the rest of the session talking
about where we go from here.
One of the things that strikes me as an historian and
studying Western civilization.
The more I'm convinced that the episode of the black death,
that occurred in 1347 to 1349,
had an important role to play.
At that time something like a third of Europe died.
And in some cases
in less than three
months, as in
As in Sienna and Florence,
well over half the people died in that period of time.
Suddenly during the summer months of 1348,
more than half the inhabitants Florence and
Sienna died of the Bubonic plague.
By September, only some 45,000 of the 90,000
people living within the walls of Florence were still living.
Sienna was reduced from about 42,000 to 15,000.
Never before or
since has any calamity taken so great of proportion of human life.
The plague struck again in 1363 and once more in 1374.
Although it carried off far fewer people than the terrible months of 1348.
The survivors were stunned.
The Sienese chronicler [FOREIGN] tells of burying
his five children with his own hand.
No one wept for the dead, he says, because everyone expected death himself.
All of Florence, according to Boccaccio,
was a sepulcher, and so forth.
It was a terrifying experience for which they had no explanation.
They knew nothing at all about germs.
Their only way of dealing with it was
as regard to moral causality.
The conclusion that they drew was
that the world had become wicked,
humans had become wicked.
God was punishing the world and
the best thing to do was to get redeemed out of the world.
The spirituality of the period changed decidedly.
And it's my overall view that we never have
recovered spiritually from the experience of the plague.
And that this is a background, our spirituality,
in the last part of that century and the art changed.
The wonderful, clear naturalism of Johto changed.
And the religious scenes depict Christ condemning the dead
with his arm outraised striking, condemning into hell.
The art changed in a very extensive way.
For the first time you've got these judgement scenes,
you get the last judgement scenes.
You get the depiction of distorted corpses and so forth.
The new motifs appeared in art, that had never appeared before.
And the spirituality changed, it was a very spiritual period, the 15th century.
So when the dance of death was developed,
the [FOREIGN], the art of dying.
There were 40 treatises on the art of dying that circulated at the period.
The morality plays developed, the every man.
The idea that nothing is worthwhile except what you take with you when you die.
And so we developed that alienation from the natural world.
It was particularly difficult for Christians because of the millennial
promises at the end of the book of Revelations of St John.
There, the course of history is described in terms of the woman clothed
with the sun with the moon under her feet crowned with 12 stars.
With the child and the dragon seeking to devour the child.
And the strife was to continue through history.
It was John effort to tell Christians that although
they were convinced that the Messiah had come.
That the peace and of serenity, the abundance,
the justice that was promised in the reign of the Messiah was not in evidence.
The early Christians thought in many instances that
the end of the world was coming within their lifetime,
some people stopped working.
That's why St Paul in the epistle to the Thessalonians,
I believe, or the Galatians had to say,
if members of the community don't work, don't let them eat.
So the problem of accustoming our western civilization
to history until the tensions and strife and
the continued sorrows of time you might say.
A western world experiences the afflictions of time,
what we might, what we call the human condition.
More sensitively than other civilizations,
because we're promise more, we're promised
in our sacred books, we're promised peace.
The dragon is to be chained 1,000 years.
That's where the millennial idea comes in, before the end of time.
And then the dragon is to be released for a time and
a time and half a time, and then comes a translation
of the earthly Jerusalem to its heavenly setting.
And paradise comes for
the redeemed.
Because of that 1,000 years, because of the millennium,
there is much more expectation in the historical order in the Western world.
And other parts of the world,
I think you can see where people have developed
inward capacity to accept the difficulty of life.
The West seems to have an inner rage against the human condition and
a quest to, and feel that we, it’s unjust.
We shouldn't have to go through the tensions and difficulties and so forth.
We can't stand it.
We're sensitized to it, and
this millennial expectation is what's driving our economics.
Dynamics of economics is non-economic, is visionary.
We’re looking for wonderland.
And that's why the Disney World appeals to people so much.
For them, it's a kind of a shadow,
almost a promise of the millennial, the attitude of this millennial age.
And that is what drives the industrial economics.
That's why we're seeking more and more, the more the stock market rises,
this is wonder, we're getting to wonder world.
And America is leading the way.
We’re taking the humanity out of the desert.
We’re taking them to the Holy Land, but
the Holy Land now, we think of in terms of a consumption.
And we tend to identify it with all that comes
through the extracted economy as a support of it.
That's why we can't even see.
You'd think that universities would be teaching this at their economics and
be telling the younger people, look, you'll need to deal with this,
particularly in the economics thing.
You'd think that in our legal structure, our jurisprudence
would being to see that there's no future for the human except in
an intimate relationship with the larger community of existence.
You'd think that the university would be teaching this, and like now,
teach history.
You can't teach history anymore in terms of simply of the Greek,
the Mediterranean world, Roman world.
They're known into the, a period of what you call the Dark Ages
of six centuries, from the 5th to the 11th century.
You can't, and then on the Middle Ages,
and then not, we're into,
as Brian explained, a way, or
into this transition of geobiological order.
History now, we are at the terminal phase of the.
We need to be taught history
in its planetary dimensions.
And this is no longer a kind of a choice, where you’re going to teach it this way.
If you're going to teach valid history, this is what you have to teach.
The other is we need to teach that, too, but that's microphase history.
We enter macrophase dimensions across the board in everything.
And the questions of social order, the society now is not simply human society.
The society is the society of the planet Earth.
We have to have a new dictionary.
We need an Ecozoic dictionary.
We need an Ecozoic religion.
We need an Ecozoic education.
Ecozoic economics across the board.
Ecozoic medicine.
It was somebody now in Toronto, somebody in the medical field that doing this and
actually this is happening now.
This study of health now has to go into study of the planet.
It has to be a planetary health.
If we are thinking this way now,
amazing things are happening now with regards to human and
our relationship to the other than human components
of the great society of the planet Earth.
The other than human components
that determine the human.
But we have to turn it.
We now have a branch of veterinary medicine for wildlife.
We have to take care of the health of the wildlife, not simply domestic animals,
but the wildlife.
The animals in there,
they have illnesses now that we have to treat from a medical profession.
So you can see that that across the board things are happening.
If we don't get the order of magnitude,
we are using inadequate answers for
significant problems.
It's like treating typhoid fever with aspirin.
[INAUDIBLE] a little bit but it's helping us in dealing with the basic issue.
So saying that, where do we go from here?
Brian, where are you?
Tell us, will you?
[LAUGH] We need somebody to tell us,
where do we go from here?
Well, my own invention is to think of the new age,
the neo new geobiological period.
I call it the Ecozoic.
Somebody else may have used that, I don't know.
I suspect they may, but I dreamed it up
one day and now identify our issue.
How do we move from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic?
How do we move our educational program from the terminal
Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic and across the board?
In the medical field now, there's environmental illness now.
They went into new dimensions of illness and we have to move our sense of health.
Into health and ecozoic era, ecozoic economics, ecozoic religion and so forth.
Ecozoic government and
talk to people at the secretary general's office in United Nations.
We need beyond United Nations.
We need United Species now.
Of the species economics and economics of interspecies, not just internation
relations or intercontinental, but interspecies economy.
Interspecies health because this is the only reality.
But we have become so accustomed to
these more limited frames of reference
that we don't appreciate the larger contact.
But we expect universities, we expect religious people to be,
to be able to deal with this cause that's the purpose of that university,
purpose of religion, is to deal with the big issues and the definitive issues.
And these are definitive issues.
And as I was saying before, this is the great work.
That's the great work now
that's ahead of us in every field, the great work to which everybody is called.
Is this transition of the great work.
Now, what's a great work?
Every people, every age has a great work.
Outside of the specific work of individuals or groups or so forth.
It was, when this country was founded.
What was the driving force?
Was, was called the manifest destiny.
And we praise those, were conquer the dead.
You guy came to this continent.
The strenuous idea of conquering, can't get it out of our heads.
It often thing, here were Europeans, coming across the sea.
Apparently having what they considered the finest spiritual tradition,
finest religious tradition ever invented,
the finest humanistic learning tradition.
The finest political stance,
the best laws, and all of this.
They come to this continent and
then after they've been here a few centuries, the continent is in ruins.
It's contaminated, species are dying, everything.
Why? Well, they came here the little black book
telling them all the spiritual truths they needed to know.
Then they took them and they say, we didn't come to learn.
We didn't come to join.
A society and a governance that already existed here.
We came to explore it.
Anyway, that's the basic idea.
But how do we go into this new period?
Everything in 15 minutes.
This, let me say it this way.
Some of you I'm sure have heard this, but it won't hurt all of us to hear it again.
My diagnosis of our situation is in three sentences.
My solution is in one sentence.
So simple, you come here, you'll know all the answers.
>> [LAUGH] >> But the three sentences go this way.
In the 20th century the glory of the human.
How many have heard this before?
Good many. In the 20th century,
the glory of the human has become the desolation of the earth.
First sentence.
Second sentence.
The desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human.
Third sentence, all human institutions,
professions, programs, and
activities must now be judged primarily by
the extent to which they inhibit, ignore,
or foster a mutually enhancing human-earth relationship.
That is the definition of the ecozoic era.
A period when human presence would be mutually enhancing,
human presence on the planet would be mutually enhancing to
both the human and the other components of the planet.
So, yes?
>> Could you repeat that third- >> The third sentence?
Yeah, that's a big one.
All human institutions, professions,
programs, and activities must now be judged
primarily by the extent to which they inhibit.
Ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human Earth relationship.
And that, now, is the central focus.
Now as I mentioned before, That's us,
now the one sentence, seven phrases.
>> [LAUGH]
>> All your problem's solved in one sentence.
Well, let me talk something about historical mission.
The mission of the Greek world was to create
a special mode of the human learning process and
the humanistic basis of Western civilization.
The Greek world began with Homeric period and
carried through the tragic writers and
also what's philosophers, Plato.
Roman, to give an organizing principle
of political life over an area,
they were the first ones really to
establish a structural context for
a community of nations.
And it was the Roman, or the Pax Romanas,
was rather admirable thing.
In the time of the Greeks The Greek world politically
could not think beyond the city state.
They couldn't even think of, they had a league of cities, but
you belonged purely and simply to a city.
That was your allegiance.
That was your political identity.
And there was no other context of containment or
of association except by kind of extrinsic treaty.
But with Persia first, they started the large,
but Rome was the first one really to do it in a significant way,
to relate to nations, peoples.
The Middle Ages was to establish a Christian world, a religious world.
There were six centuries when the cities died out in Europe.
No cities in Europe, functional centers that we would call cities.
I can't think of any.
Life continued in the great castles, in the great monasteries,
in these great political unities
that were focal points of a kind of heroic age.
Then, but the Middle Ages was the great work of
medieval Europe to create a civilization with the art.
They created the universities.
The Middle Ages created monumental thought tradition.
It's the Middle Ages that made science possible by disciplining the western mind.
The Middle Ages.
People that talked the Middle Ages down have no idea what they're doing
because it was among the most creative ages that humanity has ever known.
Well, like me, but that was a great work.
At that period, there's a story told about three men carrying stones.
First man was asked what's he doing.
He said I'm carrying stones.
Second asked what are you doing.
He said I'm supporting my family.
Third was asked what are you doing.
He said I'm building a cathedral.
That was the great work, the cathedral was the symbol,
it was the physical embodiment of a people, an ideal of a destiny,
of a purpose and existence, and a celebration.
It was constant celebration in the Middle Ages.
It was one of the ages where celebration was most extended.
We have very little celebration relative to other civilizations.
The Middle Ages, they have 54 celebratory
days in addition to Sundays and feast days.
But coming to our age.
We have a great work and inevitably I talk to university students or
college students and inevitably somebody's saying something.
Says what can I do?
I said, well, what do you like to do, what are you talented for, and so forth?
This is not something for some special group of people.
Certainly not for ecologists, it's not for this group or that group.
It's across the board, everybody's involved,
we're all carrying stones, we're all supporting families.
But beyond all that, there is the work of the age,
the work of the period to move the society, that's why we
have to protest, we have to assume in a democratic way of life.
We have to assume the responsibility for the society, for
the destiny of the society and for the future.
How would I further identify this?
Well, I would say it this way.
The historical mission of our times,
it's something that might be worth taking down, those of you.
Or it would be, [INAUDIBLE] thank you, might could use it.
The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human.
That's the first phrase.
The second phrase, at the species level.
With critical reflection,
Within the community of life systems,
In a time developmental context,
by means of story and
shared dream experience.
We've got to dream our way out of our situation, it's not something.
Because what we're experiencing now is a consequence of a distorted dream.
This is distorted dream, it's an illusion.
Our whole society is dynamized by a distorted dream,
that's turned into destructive directions.
We dreamed that we're going to have a better life, by creating for
ourselves a worse life.
And people that think that we are bringing
a better life to peoples throughout the world.
We're not.
Of course when people talk about that they want everything we have and all that,
this is after we have already corrupted and broken up their native ways of life.
The Indians of this country, they felt sorry for us.
And I have a piece here somewhere of
we've ruined the beauty of their life.
And you could tell if you're reading the documents
in the early colonial days that you could tell how
close an Indian lived to a white settlement,
by the disreputable appearance.
He didn't keep himself neat.
He lost the neatness, he became less presentable.
If you live further, you'll be presentable,
you would be neat, and so forth.
It was anything but the Type of savagery that we generally associate with people.
In some instances, it would have caused
the people would be living at a generally
lower diet, or perhaps with some of the.
Difficult in my experience, but on the whole, and
certainly one of the worst things we did was stop them celebrating.
I don't like to go to papers, and
I'm sure I might not have the one here, but
I should read but it's an order, I don't have orders from this country.
This country did the same thing.
But in Canada, they also were
fearful of the dances of the Indians.
They put out a long decree.
But the authorities,
the Euro-American authorities, were to stop the Indians from dancing.
Stop them from celebrating, stop them from wasting their time,
stop them from doing all these Pagan things.
And in this country, John Muir went to Alaska five times.
First time he went in 1878.
He went to an island off the coast of Alaska.
And he and Sarah put on a superb dance for them.
And in that, they imitated the animals and it just, a marvelous dance.
But after they dance, the chief spoke to Muir,
and he told him this is the last time that we're going to perform this dance.
We're going to give away our ceremonial garments.
Why?
Because we have learned that this is not the right way.
We've learned the Jesus story.
And we know that all this now belongs to our darkness, we've been enlightened.
Well, here is where, and this is something a person has to think about,
the way I phrase it is this, a good people are dangerous.
>> [LAUGH] >> All
this is done by good people without the proper reference of what's good.
Good people are dangerous, and I say because a good people without an adequate
idea of what's good, the better they are the worse the consequences.
I'd rather deal with bad people but they, it's more likely
a bad person allowed to do something good, and a good person was the wrong idea.
What's good?
It's dangerous.
So, westerners are terribly dangerous.
This sense of us coming to
this country without willingness to learn
the spiritual teaching of the forest, the spiritual teaching of the wildlife.
This is where the deep,
numinous element come through to us.
To our ports and musicians, and to all of us.
That's what children should be initiating spontaneously.
They experience this mystery, they experience this beauty,
they experience this step.
You don't have to teach your child to appreciate hearing of mockingbirds
singing in the evening.
I don't have to teach anybody how to experience the ocean.
A child rushes out, he wants to immerse in the wavelets, and so forth,
so that this is that context of things.
But when we came to this country, that was blocked off.
And largely, it was the result of the black death
that 15th century got this spirituality of alienation.
And we kept it to our times.
And it's largely a consequence of this
supported by the other religious developments in the centuries that
are basically responsible for where we are now.
And it's the attitude we're all the instances.
But going back to this statement,
this sentence, we need to reinvent the human,
because more than any other being humans reinvent themselves.
We're genetically coded, toward a further transgenetic cultural coding,
whereby we become human.
Genetic coding teaches a bird how to build a nest,
how to carry out mating rituals, how to find their food.
All that, they don't have to think about it the way we do, they know.
So, when a cult and
now, how to do all these things constitute our culture.
But we have to think about it.
We are genetically determined to think how we use our thinking is cultural.
We're genetically determine to live in society, but
how we advance our society, we invent.
And so, with all the other aspects, we're genetically determined to do things,
but how we do them, we invent.
Now, when it comes a time like this,
I say we have to rethink of what it is to be human at the genetic level,
because none of the cultures of the world are adequate for
this new situation which we find ourselves.
So, that's the first thing, is to guard, that we care.
I term this new cultural face equals era.
I gave it a geobiological context so
that we would see the proper order of magnitude what we have to do.
We need to reinvent the human at the species level.
Now, we have to go back to our genetic coding because there is a connection.
It's what Carl Jung spoke of as the archetypals.
There are the archetype,
there is a predisposition,
like the predisposition to rebirth ceremonies.
Humans need to be reborn spiritually,
culturally after their physical birth.
There are a number of other things that tend to be pancultural.
And which are result of archetypal
modalities like the sense of the Great Mother.
The sense of the Mandela symbol,
there are great many of the basic symbols that seemed to have an archetype,
a continuity between the genetic and the culture, and to bond these two together.
I think myself that the Chinese had the greatest overlap,
because they're constantly concerned with
what you do before you think.
And we, the ideal of culture, is to so,
to so influence a person toward say right action, it doesn't have to think.
The ideal is to know instinct and do it with delight.
Virtue is not to do something that you have to force yourself to do, but when
you do things, delight with the light and
spontaneity and immediacy, that's virtue we call it.
Or habit, now.
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