A beautiful scene that struck me as a child. When I was around ten years old, my family moved from a certain part of a small Southern town, 12,000 people, so out to the edge of town. And below the house there was an incline to a small creek, and across the creek, a meadow. I saw the meadow first in spring time, a morning in May, and the field was covered with lilies. And there were crickets there and butterflies. There were woodlands in the background, woodlands that extended for an extensive way. That scene is something that I, of course, did not reflect on fully at that period in my childhood. But it stuck with me, has stuck with me all my life, and somehow deep in my own conscience, I've brooded over that scene. And I've come to a kind of an awareness that that experience of the meadow has conditioned all my thinking. That is a good economics that is integral with the functioning of the meadow. An economics that violates the meadow is to me not good economics. Good politics is what reserves that meadow and enables it to be protected from excessive intrusion or devastation by humans. That is a good religion that gives me some appreciation of the depths of meaning and the mystery of the meadow. That is a good education that reveals to me, enables that meadow to speak to me, or to give me an understanding on the sense of the poetry of the meadow. So in a certain sense, my thinking has to do with the meadow. That meadow has been destroyed in the meantime, but it's not only the meadow that has been destroyed, but it's also a sense of the larger North American continent. It was so beautiful, and we came here, most of us, from the European world basically, and have been, as it were, predators on this continent. They meadow of this continent has been severely damaged. But I don't want to go too much into that except to say something that my probing into history. I undertook the study of history to try to come to an understanding of humans, and how are human cultures developed, and why we were such a devastating presence on the the natural world. This has led me to envisage the problems that we have, that I could see rather clearly that what was happening wasn't an extraordinary thing. And the more I studied history and the more I could see that what was happening now could not be explained as a sequence in such as from the classical period to the medieval period to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and on to our times. Which is the way we teach history. As all these changes have taken place before, changes will take place again, and we don't really need to worry. But the more a person looks at what was happening now is something different. This was not just a change of culture, this was not just a political change. This was something strange. This was change in the chemistry of the planet. This was extinction of biosystems. And I would search for, when did this ever happen before? And the more a person goes to the biologists, the more a person sees that what is happening is a change such as is paralleled only by the devastation that took place 220 million years ago at the end of the Paleozoic or at the end of the Mesozoic, 65 million years ago. And since that time, for 65 million years, no such change of this order of magnitude has impacted on the planet Earth or the life systems of the planet. So that we are into a process that's far deeper than Western civilization, far deeper than Christianity, far deeper than the human, far deeper than any of the particular life systems. This is impacting the destinies of the planet Earth, which so far as we know may be the garden planet of the universe. Certainly there are other planets. Certainly there must be other beautiful planets, but we don't know about them. But this is what we know, something superbly beautiful, because during the Cenozoic, about 65 million years, is the lyric period of life on the planet Earth. And then, we see a single species. And this is unique because the extinctions at the end of the Paleozoic, when 90% of all living species apparently perished, life was not so highly developed. And just what the causes were, we don't know, but they extended over a long period of time. And the lifeforms that existed before were extinguished, and then a new surge of life took place. And the same took place, it was less severe at the end of the Mesozoic, 65 million years ago. But the trees, and the flowers, the birds came through, and the mammals. Mammals, particularly, and so we come along at the end of the, Age when the planet Earth had become superbly beautiful. And apparently, it was necessary that the planet be this beautiful for a species to come into being that would carry the type of consciousness that humans have. Apparently, we needed so much beauty. Apparently, we needed this for the awakening of intelligence, for the sense of the deep mysteries of existence. And for the beautiful and the benign that we associate with the divine, along with its fearsome and terrifying aspects. Well, we come into being at this time, and now we get a civilization that a person might say has a Christian, biblical background, deep religious commitment. A deep religious commitment, a profound humanist background, a scientific perception of extraordinary intensity, and a jurisprudence and a social order that we consider of a supreme achievement. Our democratic process isn't our concern for the social well-being of people and so forth. But none of these are able to do anything. The religion is not able to deal with the issue. The humanist traditions and our great universes are doing more damage, probably, than good by training people in the skills that are needed to explore the planet. Our science are mechanistic science. Again, are running the chemistry plants and so forth, and making the poisons and so forth, and carrying out the nuclear processes. And then we get our jurisprudence, which in Western jurisprudence or English derived jurisprudence, such as we have in America, in the US, certainly I think probably here. Which has this sense of human dignity, of participatory government, of individual rights, and of individual rights and property. All four of these that we think so highly of are incompetent. Why? Why are they so incompetent and what is the answer for it? Well, if you look through it, you'll find that all four of these are based on a certain anthropocentrism. All four of these have taken us out of the universe. We don't live in a universe. It's what's so striking about our indigenous peoples. They live in a universe. The Australian aborigines, no clothes, no shelter, almost no implements. They have only food for the day, and so forth. And when we got there originally, we didn't know, there was a question about how human they were. Now we find they live in a magnificent universe, a great universe. A world that is created by song. They have the song lines, they have the dream forces, they live in a universe. We don't live in the universe, we live in a nation. We live in a religious tradition. We live in a culture. We live in an economic system or a technological system. We don't live in the universe. How do we get back into the universe, I see as the supreme issue. How do we get back into the universe? How do we see the world? How do we feel it. How do we dance with its rhythms? How do we hear its music and so forth?
