We are up against the issue of radioactive waste. We're up against the issue of air to breathe, water to drink. Up against the issues of climate change. People in Australia very severely up against the issue of the ozone layer. So this absolutely no issue of the present time as regards the universe, as regards the story of the universe. It's not immediately relevant and shockingly urgent for every person in whatever the situation we may be in, whatever age we are, because the planet we live on is just terribly deteriorated and becoming totally dysfunctional. So to realize that we are locked into a pathological society that's bent on self-destruction in a comprehensive way. Not only self-destruction of ourselves as human societies, but our self-destruction in terms of the North American continent, in terms of the biosystems of the planet in a comprehensive way. And so the question is how do the person deal with these issues in terms of awakening a sense of the universe? That, of course, is not easy, except to experience the urgency of finding out something about how the planet Earth functions, and how we can recover our place in the universe so that would be a viable presence on the planet. So that we'd be a valuable presence on the North American continent, so that our children would have a viable world now. It's not easy, of course, with any of us because we are all living, and living our lives. We're working in industries that are destructive. Buy a newspaper, we are killing off the forest. We ride an automobile, we are poisoning ourselves. So we're caught so deeply into this that we, that there's hardly anything that we do that's not having deleterious effects at a level that's baffling to try to encompass. So that one of the first things that I sometimes say that anyone that's not somewhat terrorized at present existence, our present situation, doesn't know very much or they're not very intelligent. Well, no no. Sorry, terribly intelligent and what to do about this or how to explain it, except that we, I think that we are, in general, intelligent enough to know that we are in difficulty. We're in severe difficulty. I sometimes use these three sentences to describe our situation. I say that the 20th century, these are my three sentences of describing our situation. In the 20th century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the earth. 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 judge primarily for the extent to which to inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship. If this is not achieved, everything else is irrelevant. So that there isn't a question of multiple choices about what we are about. What the objective of education must be, it's why a person has to question whether our universities have any sense at all of what they should be doing. Our universities are a disaster pure and simple because they are training people to disintegrate the planet. And they refuse to give, or are not competent to give some explanation of the power that they're communicating to their student, their scientists, particular engineering scientists, or the discipline of its use. And so I tell university people that it's like what we're actually doing is giving our people a torch and turning them loose in a powder factory. So there is a total irresponsibility, and our universities are not preparing the next generation to live in the world that they are going to be faced with. They're going to be faced with an awesome consequences of the exhaustion of the petroleum supply. And almost everything we do is petroleum based. Our food is petroleum based. Our clothing is petroleum based to a large extent. Our energy, our transportation, our implements, just about everything. But 50 years from now, it will be substantially gone. It will continue to on so much further, but substantially the patrolling will not be there. Meanwhile we're going to double the population or we are liable to have double the population that we have at present. And how can you double the population on a deteriorated planet as regard to our food supply and so forth? And so as regards the issue, this is not something, so to speak, of choice. It's a case of simply having the psychic energy to take seriously and not to stay in a state of denial. Basically we're in a state of denial. The universities are in a state of denial. They should know better than to be teaching history, and particularly contemporary history the way they're teaching it. And to their. Inability to give any real assessment to this unit of what is facing them in the 21st century or what has happened in the 20th century. And so in a situation such as this, there is the question of, say, of the common understanding. But first of all, though, before I'd say that I'd say this with regards to the young. Or the way in which I think I'm always very much concerned with the children. But as regards what I say now it's directed to the older children so to speak, or the high school and college people. And the people that are making their life decision, entering into adulthood, and who need to take on new responsibilities. They've not been prepared for what they have, but if there's anything we can do for them, I don't think it's trying to teach them religion and the traditional thing. I don't think they're ever going to be religious in future generations out of a book, out of a verbal revelatory experience. I think that is gone, it's over with. And there will be the basic new fundamentalist developments across the board. All religions now are surviving with a kind of a severe fundamentalist fixation. What we know as religion, in the traditional context, is something intensifying over against the fact that they don't know what to do. They're faced with a planet where the scientists are telling them that it's a mechanistic universe that's meaningless, and so forth. And meanwhile, we have this preoccupation with all types of communication with very little intention to what is being communicated. We're just speeding up enormously the communication of trivia, so that we will have this super highway of trivia going back and forth at an enormous rate. So that there is this problem. But as regards the people that need something that might, I don't know whether religion is the name for it. I don't know. You see that's why our friend from Korea, is it? >> Mm-hm. >> He brought up a great point. Only Western peoples have the word religion. There's no word for religion in Indian, Hinduism doesn't have a word for religion. China doesn't have a word for religion. Does Korean have a word for religion? It's an inventive modern word. Religion, it's impossible to even think of life without this dimension that we call religion or without this sacred dimension. It's inherent with the nature of things so that they don't have a word. In India, they speak of Dharma. In China, they speak of Tien, about the Tien and the Dao. There are the various words, but they don't mean religion. They mean the way of things. They mean the normative functioning of existence. But that normative function of existence as co-extensive with life as lived. It's not something that is called religion outside. And so even in the West the term we use for religion is very new, basically. Religion in St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica is a little paragraph under justice. It's under the moral virtue of justice. What we talk about as religion is in the sense of expressing a certain belief structure, a code of conduct, a way of worship. Those three basic things and prayer too. This is the structure of the catechism of the Council of Trent. But it is come to be in contemporary religious studies, they come mainly out of anthropological studies or contemporary, particularly history of religion. Our teaching of the tradition of Christian religions is something, religion was never the word. There's no book on religion written in the middle ages. What'd they write about? Faith, faith, not religion. So and what that means, I don't want to go into a lot of discussion of faith. >> Please do. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] But in other words, it's not easy to locate what we're about. And it's for this reason particularly that I talk about how the universe functions. And the need we have to become present to the universe on the universe's terms, not on our terms. That's the basic thing. Coming back to those going into adulthood at the present time above all need something to affix their lives in, something firm, something they cannot do it, I don't think, in words. In other words, in other words, words. >> [LAUGH] >> Yeah. >> [LAUGH] >> Verbal revelation has to be secondary to very secondary to primary revelation. Primary revelation, where's the primary revelation? Well Michael was trying to express the idea of the primary revelatory experience as immediate to us. And in the, Wonders of the sky and the wonders and majesty and awesome and terrifying qualities of the forest and the sea and the Earth and the beauty of things and all of that. When we're cut off from that, our souls are destroyed. To lose the great forest and that's what's terrible to hear discussion about the logging of the forest on the North American continent and to talk about jobs and things like that. Well, and money and corporation and rights and private property and all that, and with no recognition if you lose the forest, we lose our souls. It's not just an economy, it's a soul lost. We lose our souls. If children in the cities cannot see the stars, they lose their souls. Because we are in a world that has to be activated by the outer world. If we don't have these experiences, if we don't have this wondrous world to live in, and it's why we have eyes, why we have ears, why we can feel the wind, why we can hear the birds in the evening, and why we can walk on the shore of the water. Well, we are privileged here, but there's so many people that don't have this privilege. But we have a chance for some of this. But we live in a world that's progressively alienated from the deepest source of our experience of meaning, our deepest source of elevation of mind and of excitement with life and existence. And this is what Maria Montessori was writing in that wonderful book of hers that she wrote. And well, she gave the lectures in the 1930s. It was published in 1940s on how to teach six-year-olds. And she pointed out then that you have to give the child a sense of the universe. And that is what excites the child. That is what elevates the aspirations of children. And then she tells a story of the universe. Now, there's so much else to be said as regards to this. But there's a further question of the fact we don't feel that we can tell the story, and that is tragic. People say everybody knows how to tell the story of the universe. And they tell the stories, go the Australian Aborigines, they'll tell you the story of the universe. They'll tell it many different ways. Go to any tribal people in the world, they have a story of the universe. Everybody knows the story of the universe. We are the only people who don't have a story of the universe. We have a genesis story, but that's not a functional story in our times. That has nothing to do basically with the way we structure life, the way we buy and sell, the way in which we provide for the necessities of life. We don't have a story. But there are difficulties, it's a difficult thing to know our story. But why is it important? Because the knowledge that we have now is what's ruining the planet. And we have to capture that story and bring it into a meaningful context because as long as it remains in its present mechanistic meaning of this context, it's going to devastate the whole planet. And we have to learn that story. We have to bring it into our minds. We have to be able to adapt it to our children. We've got to be able to express it in music an poetry and make it the substance of education. Because if we don't tame that story, if we don't bring it into a meaningful context, it's going to explode us. It is exploding us at the present time. So that when I talk about the story, this is not something that we can do or not do. This is a case of a story that of a type of understanding. If we gave a part of the time to the story that we give to Bible reading or to the liturgy of the traditional liturgies that we have, it would be something. But what we need, even liturgically as regards liturgy, we need a liturgy that would celebrate the shaping of the universe, particularly I think a liturgy for the supernova moment. Because as long as the first generation stars were there, of course we need the story to celebrate the emergent universe. But after the emergent universe, one of the most amazing moments has to do with the collapse of the first generation stars. And that was a moment when we became possible. Earth became possible, life became possible. Before that, it was not possible. You only had the lighter elements. You only had hydrogen and helium, perhaps a couple of lighter elements. But you couldn't have a planet Earth with simply those elements. So how are you going to get 90 some elements that you need for the planet Earth, that you need for life, you need for trees, for butterflies, for human existence? Where are you going to get it? Well, it required a great sacrificial moment of the first generation stars. And that's why in the book when Brian Swimme and I tell the story of the universe, we name that star. And still, the astronomers never have named the star out of which the solar system was born. That star that collapsed in enormous heat and fashioned the elements, all the elements needed, exploded into space. And then out of that enormous fragmentation in the heavens through gravitational attraction, the sun came into being, which is 99% of the solar system and then these fragments of Earth around. And then, we became possible. Life became possible. Beauty, as we know it, became possible. So, we need a liturgy that would celebrate that. But children, it's such a glorious thing. We celebrate the moment of crucifixion. I call this moments of grace. I have outlined in one of the things I did for an introduction where I call it cosmological moments of grace. You cannot have Historical moments of grace or religious moments of grace until you first have cosmological moments of grace. And we should celebrate these. These are the great moments. These need to be put to music. These need to be dance. These need to be celebrated in sanctuaries. And it's only on condition of this that they enter into our thinking. And in a meaningful way. Now, the others, there are many others that shaping versus, great mystery. Shaping the, all the planets are the same originally. Mars turned to rock. Jupiter remained that swirly mass of gases. Only the earth developed. Why? It's a great, it's a fantastic story. It's told, we tell the story of the earth in the universe stories. One of the most magnificent sections of how the earth took shape and why it is different. Why Mars turned to stone, why Jupiter remained this enormous massive gasses, why nothing firm can be there, nothing fluid on Mars, now, but on Earth you have this creative turbulence. You have Jupiter's too turbulent, Mars too fixed, the Earth is both turbulent, it has what might be called controlled turbulence. Or creative turbulence would be a better word. Creative turbulence and it's this turbulence of Earth, the capacity for volcanoes and all of that. That and earthquakes and such things makes life possible. So to know the story is an urgency because only if we know the story are we going to be able to interact creatively? And define our place in the story? And that is available for us now. It's not such a big issue and of course one of the reasons why we don't know the story, why we can't tell the story to our children. But now it's beginning to be told already we have a word such as that book, I don't know if you've seen it on the day you were born, such a magnificent book for anybody from 2 to 80, on the day you were born. The way in which the universe welcomed you is what we need in our baptism, our baptism ceremony is awful in the sense that it introduces us to the divine, into a religious human community, it does not introduce us to the earth. Or simply doesn't to introduce us to the universe. But the universe are to most people have these introductions of children to the universe as the universe announces that a new life has come into your midst, and protect this child. Care for it, nourish it, support it, guide it. And without that guidance, without that rapport, it's no wonder we're in chaos. We've lost our protector. We've lost our guide. We don't know the language of the trees any more. We can't listen to the universe anymore, we've become autistic. My generation is the autistic generation, it had no feeling for, no relationship to an outer world, it was caught up in the human. If we don't breakthrough that autism and that's what's the matter I'm saying we have to break the primary effort has to be to break that autistic pathology that we're caught in. And how to do that, there's a fair amount of things to say about this, but what's the purpose of Port Burwell? Purpose of Port Burwell ever since I've come, is to break through that autism, is this one mission that this place has, is to break through the autism, and emission that I have. And when people talk about the story or talk about this general direction of thinking of this universe, that's what we're all concerned with, the community of those that want to break through the autism. And already it's widespread, it's not simply something that any one person has started, it is wakening on a broad skill with many people and that's one of the great things about the ecology movement generally. It's not centralized, it doesn't have any single source or any single author or inspiration, it's emerging all over everywhere out of a common consciousness that we will live or die together with all the other faces of the earth, all of the planets. And one of the things that I suggest and I was at a conference, the Episcopal people had a, well, stupendous, but most impressive conference in Kansas City about four or five weeks ago. And they had the best people there. Had Peter Raven, who opened it. And Peter Raven is at the Missouri Botanical Garden. He knows the biosystems of the planet as few biologists do. There's no finer person to do something like this than Peter Raven. He opened it. There was Lovens who knows the energy systems of the planet more than anybody. There were other people there, the best people. And I had a short part in it. And, but Peter Raven was asked, how much time do we have? He was described in the question. Zero time. He says you don't have time. It's over with. We have to, the time is gone, we have to act. We have to do something. So anyway, but what I want to say as regard to my own thing, which I expressed at this conference. I described a number of things. I talked mostly about the North American continent and I described there that I look for the day when all the children of the North American continent. I said all the children. The children of the tress, the children of the birds, the children of the animals, all the children, the children of the insects. All the children of planet, including the human children that these must go into the future and express the idea. They will go into the future as a single sacred community, or they will experience disaster on the way. And, they will live or die together. They will survive and have a wonderful life together. Or they will suffer together, or they'd be diminished together. They will be undergo degradation again. And not two community. There's only one. Thank you.
