>> One influence that's very evident to me in the film is the thinking
of the French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
And while his thought is complex and rich, one point that we was much criticized for
but he was adamant, that his experience of the scientific community and
what he was himself an active scientist, that the human wasn't anomalous,
that the consciousness of the human was not wide-spread in the universe.
Consequently, we must be some random and
somewhat aberrant backwater in the mainstream of evolution.
For Teilhard, that was unacceptable.
If humans have consciousness, it's in the process to begin with.
He put humans back in the mainstream.
And his effort then was to reflect upon what does he mean by consciousness?
And for him that patterning, so you can see in the film,
we pick up on Pythagoras, and that whole sense of within the emergent
universe itself is patterning, subjectivity, interiority.
The capacity of form to shape substance.
And so, the human as, we seeing ourselves not as simply the culmination of that,
but rather a manifestation of that which is from the very beginning.
>> I love the way you put humans back into narrative and
it makes me think really for the first time how much we're out of a narrative,
and how much our telling of the universe is really us reflecting on something else.
And that's really so, that's so gorgeous.
And so I mean talk about something that feeds the soul,
that does feed the soul to be able to put us back in a place where we're part of.
>> And I feel too, Brian, in that sense from the conscient
perspective on, it's all human projection onto the world.
We have certain cerebral patternings that enable us to read the world,
but it's all the projection of this human subjectivity onto the world.
But if humans are replaced into the world then, rather than being separate,
we are telling the story also.
It's just all species are telling us of their story,
having come out of this universe.
We have a story to tell too.
>> We'll take one last question there.
>> I don't know if I'm going to be asking this question correctly.
But you talked about East Asian religions, and
you talked about Native American religions, and their cosmology, and
their basic, for better words, one with the universe.
How does that relate to the Judeo-Christian religions,
which seem to me to be much more egocentric,
and much more dealing with individuals,
people, and less with the cosmos.
I was just wondering if you can talk about that division.
>> Thanks.
>> It's a great question.
This is why 20 years ago, we did for three years at Harvard
the series on world religions and ecology and cosmology, if you will.
And so we did Western religions, Asian religions, indigenous.
And then there's these 10 volumes, edited volumes,
with many many scholars contributing.
But what we were trying to illustrate is that all
religious traditions have their ecological dimensions.