“The universe does not exist ‘out there,’ independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe.”
– Physicist John A. Wheeler, 1981
It started with worldview disruption. It was inevitable. There was no other place to begin though we didn’t necessarily choose to start there. Nothing else could happen until the deep structures of the western psyche really began to unravel. These structures were the source of western metaphysics itself and they provided the conceptual and psycho-spiritual foundation for the global economic system that was pushing both planetary ecological and human social-political systems to the brink of collapse by the year 2024. That metaphysical system was old and had functioned for millennia in various forms, but it no longer worked. We were in a time of collapse and we were in-between stories. These two conditions were not coincidental. They were reciprocally expressive. We were in a state of collapse – biologically, ecologically, politically, socially, psychologically, spiritually – because our sense of the world, of the cosmos, and, ultimately, of ourselves, was no longer coherent with our experience. We were fragmented. We were lost. And we were terrified.
Everything we’d been told, everything we’d learned, everything we’d believed began to fall apart. The metaphysical structure of our world, of our minds, was coming undone, dismembered by our own grief and our longing for another world, for something beautiful, something coherent, something that actually engendered in us a sense of belonging. This structure, which the western world has continuously refined and extended over the last few millennia, was rooted in fundamental dichotomies that ultimately serve to estrange us from the world while shaping everything we could perceive or understand about the nature of reality. These dichotomies created oppositions between mind and body, human and animal, male and female, the unchanging and the changing, the rational and the irrational, subject and object, spirit and matter, perfection and imperfection, light and dark, activity and passivity, animacy and inanimacy.
We began to notice that in all of these oppositions, one side (the first of each pair listed) included characteristics conventionally associated with God while the other included characteristics associated with the world, with nature or “creation.” There was, of course, implicit in all of these dichotomies the overlay of the opposition of good and evil, wherein God is understood to be human-like, unchanging, rational, of-the-light, masculine and fundamentally good, while the world is understood as creaturely, changeable, irrational, of-the-dark, feminine, and fundamentally evil or fallen. But there was one primary dichotomy which subsumed all of these others and which constituted the framework upon which all of western civilization depended. It lived inside of us like a story, the story upon which all other stories, all other possibilities, all other ways of seeing and knowing, were based. This was the metaphysical dichotomy of God and World – the opposition of the sacred and the immanent, the conceptual separation of the holy from the universe. It was the belief that the locus of what makes us human and what makes life worth living exists, somehow, outside of the world.
It was this schizophrenic split that needed to be healed. We needed a new story. But, as much as we often want to believe we do, humans do not consciously make cultures. We do not consciously create our primary guiding stories that structure our metaphysics and give coherence to our sense of ourselves and the world. They are, like the rest of the universe, emergent functions of complex intra-action. They arise out of the creative reciprocal engagement of the multiplicities that constitute the whole. There is something beautiful and poetic in this recognition of the nature of stories, for it was precisely when we came to terms with our need for a new story that we began to understand that this emergent quality of stories and of the cultures that give them life, also pointed us toward the nature of this newly emerging story itself.
What I mean is that the new story that we started seeing and hearing everywhere was the story of the creative unfolding of the very universe that not only constituted this story, but gave rise to all stories, even to the possibility of story. We weren’t hearing a story created in disembodied human minds or received as divine revelation direct from God from some non-place outside of the world as we would have previously implicitly assumed depending on which rendition of the old story was being told. No, we were now beginning to experience the story of the universe itself emerging into our consciousness. And this was possible only because in learning to perceive the universe, we were also learning to perceive ourselves. That is, we came to recognize our own inherence within the universe, and in that recognition our new story was being born through our own creative capacity to create emerging story. The nature of the new story’s emergence is the nature of the story itself: Our human creativity is a dimension of the creativity of the universe.
The world is not a static backdrop to our lives. There is no “environment.” The universe is not the logos of a dead and mechanical cosmology of accidents, devoid of meaning except by escape to the heaven of a humanoid man-God. It is a process. An unfolding. A creative flaring forth that did not simply happen in some distant past in an unthinkable dimension of space, but is happening everywhere, all the time. The creation of the world, here and now, everywhere and all the time. This is what was meant by two of our greatest story tellers of those years, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, when they spoke and wrote of the Universe not so much as a cosmos but as a cosmogenesis – a constant and creative coming into being.
And therein was the keystone for real transformation that extended beyond shallow aspirations for technological fixes or simple tweaks of social and economic systems. What we discovered, not through solipsistic self-flattery or even self-flagellation, but by way of offering our attention beyond ourselves to the creative universe that includes ourselves, was a kind of spiritual technology that I called ‘The Art of World-Making.’ This spiritual technology was the emerging consciousness not only of the universe’s unfolding creativity, and not only of our inherence within the universe, but also of the fact that we are aspects of the universe participating in its own creation.
“The Art of World-Making” is a kind of participatory consciousness that understands that the universe is made up of worlds within worlds within worlds constantly flaring forth in constant becoming, always and everywhere shaping all other worlds, all of which constitute the universe. We are the universe emerging into conscious relationship with itself. Everything that constitutes the universe is what it is precisely because of its relationship with everything else. Everything, everywhere, always in constant, dynamic, unfolding relationship. This is what makes the universe what it is, emerging from the given constraints of the past which provide the necessary structure for creativity, into an unknown future of possibility.
We realized, ultimately, that we are all poets in the original Greek sense of the word, which comes from the Greek poiesis, meaning “to make” or “to bring into being that which did not previously exist.” In the original Greek, poiesis was a word of embodiment, implying artistry and craftsmanship and an embedded context in the world. Poetry is the art of bringing into the world that which did not previously exist, which is, of course, as Heraclitus tried to point out nearly three thousand years ago, the nature of the world in every dimension of every moment. The universe everywhere always in constant unfolding. We are all poets. Human and more-than-human. Animal and plant. Mountain and cloud. Cell and photon. We are all world-makers in every moment of our lives, everything everywhere constituted by our relationships with everything else.
And we are not only world-makers, but, beautifully and perfectly so, we are also made by the world. So, how we show up matters. We constitute each other, not only in our human communities, but in our ecological communities, within the entire biosphere, and even throughout the cosmos. As the poet William Stafford wrote in his poem Being a Person, “How you stand here is important. How you / listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.” This is how the world is made. Indeed, The Art of World-Making became the foundation for a kind of self- and community-empowerment that went so far beyond the shallow narcissistic empowerment of late-stage capitalism that fostered a sense of isolation from each other, from the world, from the holy, and, ultimately, even from ourselves. This empowerment stemmed from our growing awareness of our relational embeddedness and became the soil in our consciousness within which the seeds of practical change could finally start to take root. Creative and holistic initiatives snowballed, generative movements coalesced, and the more we accomplished the more became possible. And this is how we came to understand, now in 2050, something of the foundation of our new metaphysics, based not on separation, isolation, and opposition, but on relationship, emergence, and participation: that the world is not a mechanical and dead backdrop to our lives, but is the creative source and context of all of our lives; that we are a part of a living cosmos that is not only generative, but also fundamentally and deeply poetic.
As for me, I have been but a small part of that unfolding though I have done my part by creating a multimedia platform to develop, articulate, and facilitate experiential deep dives into the The Art of World-Making. This last quarter century has been a wild ride and I’m so grateful to be able to experience the emergence of this new world.