Journey of the Universe weaves together the discoveries of the evolutionary sciences together with humanities such as history, philosophy, art, and religion. The course draws on the Emmy-award winning film, Journey of the Universe, and the book from Yale University Press. Journey explores cosmic evolution as a creative process based on connection, interdependence, and emergence. It examines a range of dynamic interactions in the unfolding of galaxies, Earth, life, and human communities. It investigates ways in which we understand evolutionary processes and the implications for humans and our ecological future. The Journey course, thus, is based on a new integration that is emerging from the dialogue of the sciences and humanities. Journey tells the story of evolution as an epic narrative, rather than as a series of facts separated by scientific disciplines. This changes our perception so that we begin to see ourselves as an integral part of this narrative. By situating ourselves within this story we can better appreciate the complexity and beauty of processes such as self-organizing dynamics, natural selection, emergence, symbiosis, and co-evolution. As we discover these intricate processes of evolution, we awaken to the beauty and complexity of our natural environment at this critical juncture in our planetary history.
Tucker and Grim with Brian Ackerman at Jacob Burns Center (3 of 3)
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En provenance du cours de Yale University
Journey of the Universe: The Unfolding of Life
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Yale University
171 note
Cours 1 sur 3 dans Specialization Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Times
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Rethinking Matter and Time within the Emerging Earth Community
What does it mean to you to live in cosmological time? How is thinking like this different than your previous understanding of time? What implications does it have for your understanding of yourself and your sense of your relation to the world around you? This module explores answers to these questions.
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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
It's just amazing you know,
actually on the flip side of that in the film is that moment in the film when he
talking about how we only thought that this was the only galaxy.
This was the entire universe, excuse me, our galaxy.
And a discovery that there are 100 billion to a trillion galaxies.
The sense, if we could actually meditate on that to get a sense of the awe,
it's just impossible to begin to conceive of that.
>> Since this is a series on meditation and so on, right?
No, but really, that's what I was thinking watching this just last week.
This is a meditation.
And you see, I think the invitation is exactly along these lines,
back to these questions over here.
If we meditate on our galaxy, but then how many galaxies?
Hubble Telescope pictures are awe-inspiring, I think.
Every part of this is awe-inspiring, and I don't want you to go away with,
that's very beautiful.
We are aware and in this film in every alive human being is aware
in this particular challenging moment of tremendous suffering,
of tremendous loss, of extinction, of we don't begin this
film with the sad bad news because people are so aware and it's so disempowering.
But what we're suggesting is the creativity that infuses this
process with its loss and, even earlier extinctions,
there's creativity and destruction at the same time.
We know that's in ourselves.
We're amazingly creative and also amazingly self destructive, hurtful, etc.
So how we're going to navigate that is aligning
ourselves with these processes, and understanding these deep patterns.
That's what alternative technologies are doing, it's reading the sun,
it's reading the waters, reading the geothermal energies, you see?
That's the realignment of a creative new forms of energy.
>> Of course, there's the pain and anguish that clears a space for meditative
reflection, when we think occasionally about the making of this film.
A couple of people in the humanities going out a project like this,
we didn't know what we were doing.
There's so many ways to enter this type of discussion, but
the one that I come back to, that you keep interesting is the music.
The music is original to the film.
And we had initially a electron composers, electronic music.
And we found it not satisfying.
There are still some remnants from the film and we still have
a good friendship with him because he realized, also we wanted real instruments.
Then we found a composer and a musician who could write original music.
But when we worked with him, he didn't get the film.
He wasn't the cosmopolitan person, so we had to leave him.
And then the final person that we worked with and my feeling was well,
you turned it over to him, he watches a film and he makes music.
I didn't appreciate seeing Mary Evelyn every night for a year,
he would send ten seconds of music and he would have ten versions.
You'd listen to this and it's just amazing to think of how this project-
>> Think there was someone else.
>> A couple more questions.
>> Yes, really this begs so many questions.
I hope I boiled it down to maybe two.
The first is we have from this just begun to understand how
the universe perhaps was formed, and how we have come into existence.
And we exist for an instant in time, our 70,
80, 90 years is an instant, we're a tiny speck of dust in our big universe.
What occurred back 14 billion or
37 billion, whichever number you want, where did this start?
What occurred before the start of the universe?
That begs a big question.
And the second question is if we are beginning to understand how,
we have not even asked the question of why.
Is there a purpose in any or all of this?
>> I just happened to have the [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> So of course,
the before question is always the stumper.
Brian Swim in his lovely book, The Hidden Heart of The Cosmos,
talks about the all nourishing abyss, and
he has a set of reflections upon his meditation on what came before.
>> No, I think this is a great question.
But you know traditions I study in East Asia would also say this is,
this ongoing creativity they don't come back to a moment of creativity.
Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism are all this ongoing creativity.
Now this is where I was suggesting at the very beginning.
We have to rest in mystery, and it's not easy.
It's why many of us love Rilke, who in his letters to a young poet,
said we have to live the questions.
We have to live into these, and if we had the answers,
we probably wouldn't have made this film.
But I think you know the other part of it.
So, that's why we also like to call great flaring force.
We don't like to call it the big bang.
That's why language and images, and those of you who are writers, this matters.
The language matters hugely, and hopefully will have other images to suggest to
the human imagination something about origins, and
the scientists are perfectly happy to be agnostic as well, you see.
But the meaning part or the purpose part again, we are suggesting
back to Brian's question, the one thing we might be able to say about ourselves,
we used to think language and tool making made us distinctive.
Jane Goodall blew the tool making out of the water with the chimps and so on.
We know many mammalian species have languages,
they're communicating all the time.
Whales and dolphins and so on.
The singing and it's exceptional.
You know they're migrating patterns.
This is language.
But it might be the case that we are symbol making creatures,
and in that sense, we are meaning seeking creatures,
and meaning making animals, dream making animals.
So in that sense, that may be one of our best hopes for the future.
We're creating meaning all the time, all the time.
And I think our question is, are we consumptive animals or
we participatory animals, in something much larger than ourselves?
These what's students want,
they want a creativity that will let them loose out of a box.
Being aligned with these processes, that's meaning of their own sword,
of their own making.
>> 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.
If you take Christianity, their ecological and their cosmological dimensions.
They all have a story of the universe.
They all have their Genesis story, okay?
The question is how are we going to interpret it right now.
But ecologically, you can say or in terms of the living cosmology,
the sacraments of a Christian tradition are weaving people into nature.
Christmas being at the winter solstice.
It's the same with Passover and Easter,
at the special time of the equinox and so on, in the spring.
So there's these seasonal cycles, there is the daily cycles,
all the monastic orders had people praying in the early morning, at night.
So do the Buddhist traditions.
So all these traditions have symbols and
rich rules to weave people into natural systems.
Bread, wine, a Sabbath, lighting candles, having meals.
So that's what we're trying to illustrate that there are tremendous
ecological components of all the world's religions.
Cosmologically, without doubt, again if you take
a Christian notion, this is notion of a cosmic Christ in the whole universe.
You see the whole universe and coming back to this Logos idea.
John's Gospel begins within the beginning is the word, which is Logos,
which is pattern, which is intelligibility within everything.
So- >> A stoic idea.
>> It's a stoic idea, yeah.
So, just to conclude, sorry, because this is such a great topic.
What we're trying to illustrate is if you take, in the western traditions,
God above the world, God within the world.
You take human relations to God in the world, above the world.
All of these traditions, western traditions,
have pronounced views of a transcendent god above the world, okay.
You stand at the wailing wall in Jerusalem,
you sense that Islamic world is filled with that.
No images in their Mosque and so on, transcendence beyond name, form, word.
But every one of them has hugely rich elements of eminence,
of the divine within nature, within the world, sophism.
The great most widely read poet in the west, Rumi Sophi,
is all about this divine love but within the world as well embodied forms.
The incarnation is embodied forms.
In Jewish mysticism is embodied presence of the divine.
So all of that has kept these traditions alive
throughout history, the embodied form of divinity.
>> I can't resist taking just a short shot.
It's such a rich and leading question.
And I would pose a response in terms of what I see
as a dilemma of all of the religious traditions.
And that is somehow to allow the original revelatory moment in
the tradition to be transmitted among the community in ways
that keep it alive rather than boxing it in and shutting it down.
So that the revelatory dynamic of tradition,
if you think of Judaism, I think of the Exodus experience of Moses,
the burning bush, the encounter with the natural world,
the names of the Divine are often associated with natural entities.
If it's a mountain or this sense of awesome power in the world itself.
So that within the tradition we're calling Judaism,
which is a late designation, maybe earlier, the Israelite people.
And so how should we distinguish it?
One of the ways to clarify this or to think about in Judaism,
this encounter with the question that I've posed of the revelation and
how to keep it open rather than shutting it down is that Torah becomes written.
And the written Torah or the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures,
Tanakh, is encountered within the tradition itself, and
there is a turning towards oral Torah.
And that oral Torah is the heart of the Rabbinic tradition or
what we call Judaism today.
So that in that tradition, there was a conscious turning
towards preserving the vital and
living character of the revelatory experience by opening it up.
So you know, really, I'm not talking about the natural world exactly, but
for me that's what's embedded in that particular term in Judaism.
>> So wonderful we can have a conversation like this with you guys.
Thanks so much for coming.
>> Thank you so much.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you.
Thank you for all coming.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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