My cosmology, or story of the universe and my place in it, has been evolving as has the universe. Although I didn’t even know what the word meant as I was growing up, I did have a worldview and a story about the way life is, which had assumptions that informed my relationships and my life decisions. My changing story has been greatly influenced by the societal worldviews of my circle of relationships at specific times on my journey, as well by my life experiences.
I will describe how my cosmology has evolved through four phases of my life, following the Hindu tradition of designating life phases, and I have added a fifth to capture how I perceive consciousness to continue after the physical death of the body. In each of the four phases, I describe the nature of my life situation and my perception or understanding of the universe, including how I define my spiritual views and life purpose along with the scope and nature of my relationships.
Phase I. (0 – 21 yrs,) I was born into a family of Swamp Yankees[1] in a seacoast summer resort in southern Rhode Island nine generations after my early ancestors walked off the boat in 1669. Of French Huguenot roots, my ancestral lineage has been deeply entrenched in Seventh Day or American Baptist traditions since arriving in America. I grew up in a post-depression working class family. My backyard for the first six years of life was a salt-water marsh, but I was in walking distance of beautiful beaches at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. I moved five miles to the family farmstead when I was six where I lived for the next 15 years while receiving my elementary, secondary and undergraduate education.
My world experience took place within the regional geography of the Northeast, particularly the New England states. However, through my education, I knew that there were other continents across the spacious ocean. World War II made this realization quite clear to me since my older brother was in the army in Europe. I also knew there were planets and stars galore in the spacious sky that became visible as our special star, the sun, became obscure as planet Earth rotates so that the sun is hidden on its opposite side. My scope of the galaxies was the visible canopy of the night-time sky characterized by the Milky Way.
The American Baptist Church I attended, along with my family and peers, was instrumental in shaping my spiritual understanding and place in the universe. During this phase of life, my early childhood image was of a two-story universe with a heaven and earth along with a supernatural creator God. This shifted later in the initial phase of life to embrace a spiritual dimension of my earthly existence with the notion of God as a divine force involved in the creation and ongoing activities of the world. At the center of my spiritual understanding (faith) was a focus on the life and teachings of Jesus as a way of knowing the nature of God. I strongly identified with Jesus as a model to emulate and found a sense of purpose in striving to live my life according to my understanding of the values and practices ascribed to him in the scriptures.
Native Americans have ways of honoring all species, not just the two-legged humans, but being present to all living creatures as well as the inanimate world. They refer to these as “all my relations” If you had asked me at this time in my life who was included in “all my relations” it would have been a rather limited “short list” and with a rank of importance that began with the family at the center with concentric rings of human groupings based on geography, religious and ethnic connections, and even economic and political biases. I was living a rather insular life in the initial phase of my life.
Phase II. (22 – 35 yrs.) At the completion of my undergraduate education at the University of Rhode Island, I moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where I began a five-year graduate program at Penn State and the next leap in my journey of consciousness. Living in a college town was quite different. I was continually being confronted with new challenges to some of my traditional worldviews and religious assumptions and practices. I encountered foreign students at church, as fellow graduate students, and as apartment residents with whom I shared a bathroom. I immersed myself in my studies and research. I received my Ph.D. in Horticultural Science and became an assistant professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. For another nine years, I was immersed in science and academics and rose through the ranks to full professorship at the end of my eighth year.
I was steeped in the scientific paradigm with confidence that research and technology would ultimately provide answers and solutions to the most perplexing problems facing humanity. Although my position at Purdue was primarily to conduct research, I found that I was equally drawn to teaching. Academia was both challenging and fulfilling. This was also a time in my life for raising a family. We had three children and built our first home in the suburbs. My spatial world did not radically expand in this phase of my life except through my intellectual pursuits. In fact, my research focus tended to reduce my scope or worldview to a more reduced, cellular and even molecular perspective.
In State College, I connected to a Baptist Church that provided a connection and continuation of Phase I. I married my life partner, Nancy, at the completion of my Masters degree, who joined me and brought both familiarity and complexities to my life. When we moved to West Lafayette to begin my academic career, we immediately connected to a local church that merged Baptist and Disciples congregations. This was during the ’60s, a challenging time for the United States and the church. There was growing social unrest around civil rights and the Viet Nam war. I became involved in a movement that was challenging the churches to become present and compassionate to the innocent suffering in the world. It was a trying time for the church as its traditional theology was being called into question by secular forces of science and the human potential movement. My life’s work in this phase was to teach, research and advance landscape horticulture. My spiritual path was still shaped by Christianity with a major focus on social activism and church renewal.
“All my relations” did not expand greatly during this phase of my life. It was different from the community I grew up with, primarily Anglo-Saxon with a few individuals of color, ethnic and religious background that exposed the narrowness of my cultural setting. We strongly identified with the civil rights movement and took every opportunity to support it and identify with it.
Phase III. (36 – 56 yrs.) I experienced a vocational-crises when I was 36. My life took a radical shift from academia to social activism. It was following the turmoil of the ‘60’s that I experienced a “call” to engage in changing the world. The extent to which I changed the world is debatable, but there is no question about the change that occurred in me during this time in my life.
My family was invited to join the staff of the Order Ecumenical, a secular-religious order with a mission of teaching the new theology of the 20th Century and renewing the church to care for the world. We left the comforts of academia and suburbia to live communally in some challenging living conditions around the world. Our children came with us reluctantly. It was a time of deepening our existential understanding of our faith and a radical engagement with the church and social structures of society. Both of us continued to be employed while being fully involved in the mission of the Order Ecumenical. It was a time of intensification and expansion of the scope of our care for the world as we spent over 10 years of our lives in Kenya and India.
My spiritual perspective was greatly expanded, particularly when we were in India. The symbols and cultural patterns of Hinduism permeated the fabric of India, It was entwined in every space and routine of daily living. Buddhism was likewise a strong presence in this part of the world and reached out to attract and impact Westerners as they dared to explore its teachings and practices. Not only were we getting clear on the existential grounding of Christianity, we were integrating or transposing Christian theology into various cultural contexts. We were also embracing pluralism as foundational to our emerging religious perspective. My life’s work and spiritual path in this phase were aligned with the mission of the Order Ecumenical
“All my relations” expanded to include all people in the global village that was now my home. I was immersed in and embraced diversity, in fact I found myself celebrating the cultures of the world. That which had once seemed weird was now part of my daily life. Humankind had become my extended family, either through story or actual connections.
Phase IV. (57 – 72> yrs.) Although residential communities of the Order Ecumenical dissolved in 1988, some of us continued to stay intertwined with the residual structures for a few more years. Nancy and I decided that the communal living style of the Order was important to us and after leaving India, where we had been for six years, we chose to join the Residential Learning Center (RLC) in Bothell, Washington that was one of the few remaining communal locations of the Order. A year after we arrived, the staff decided to dissolve the RLC and re-envisioned the nature of our community as a multi-generational cohousing community, named Songaia.
The Order, like other movements in history and an element of evolution, had come into being in response to a crisis, formed itself into a rather effective, cooperative entity, and then transisted or dissolved into a diversity of decentralized activities and enterprises. My life patterns and theological perspective had been radically shaped by the experience of the Order. Now, without the corporate vision and mission of the Order, I was free to forge my identity and worldview independently, though not without the influence of Order memory and the ongoing thinking/action of global colleagues.
This current phase has been a time of encountering new worldviews in the workplace, in events and conferences, and in readings I have been blessed by being immersed for 10 years in an alternative worldview as Chief Executive Officer of a professional graduate school of acupuncture and oriental medicine. My rational, scientific background was challenged by the art and practice of a medicine that did not fit the Western model. I observed and experienced the effectiveness of appropriately placed needles in overcoming medical issues for which Western medicine is ineffective. Overcoming skepticism and resistance by scientists and medical practitioners who were unwilling to consider this 3000 year-old medicine to have scientific validity, I worked diligently to bring this form of medicine into the mainstream. I employed Western scientist to apply rigorous experimental protocol to establish the validity of this “exotic” medicine. Gradually, the doors are being opened to the benefits of this form of complementary medicine.
The book that had the greatest impact on laying the foundation for my evolving worldview in this phase of my life was The Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry.[2] It was a paradigm shift for me, from an anthropocentric to a biocentric way of viewing the world. I discovered that the context of human development that had been the focus of my life was too small. An equally mind-expanding book was The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry.[3] A sequence of other books that I discovered rather synchronistically, have contributed to the framework, substance and choice of language and metaphors to describe my current cosmology. They include:
- The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- The Planetary Mind by Arne A. Wyller
- The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Will and Jeffrey Bada
- A Walk Through Time by Sidney Liebes, Elisabet Sahtouris and Brian Swimme
- Radical Nature by Christian deQuincy
- Evolutions Arrow by John Stewart
- The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos by Joel R. Pimack and Nancy Ellen Abrams
- Cosmology and Creation by Paul Brockelman
The events that shaped my worldview are too many to enumerate, but the nature of these will help inform the source and type of their influence. The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) was an organization that was profoundly important as I strove to integrate science and spirituality. It also provided alternative perspectives on spirituality than that provided by the institutional church and other religions. The Center for Ecozoic Studies (CES) provided an opportunity to delve into the implications of Thomas Berry’s writings and to express my own emerging perspective. Connection with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow’s traveling ministry to tell the great story (see www.thegreatstory.org) has enriched my understanding of the universe story and the evolutionary journey we are on. Participation in an EarthSpirit Rising Conference and a post-conference Council of Earth Elders in 2005 introduced me to my current Earth Elder path.
It has been a time of integrating life experiences, worldviews, and emerging perspectives into my current cosmology. I have been opened to new spiritual practices, from East and West. It was also a time for letting go of old patterns, such as of switching to organic gardening. I skeptically confronted my reliance on the reductionistic form of my science experience and became less doctrinal about science, recognizing that it had some of the same arrogance and rigidity that has plagued religion throughout the ages.
Each of us, as part of the latest evolutionary innovation of human consciousness, is beckoned to reflect on our beginnings, our endings, and that which gives meaning to the journey. The God-like qualities that are within each of us, beckons us to be conscious co-creators of the evolving universe. Being present to the planetary crisis, the next evolutionary leap requires an innovation in collective consciousness that propels us into new levels of cooperation to draw upon the wisdom of nature, to design and operate in concert with the natural world.
We are the universe becoming conscious of itself. As reflective beings, we are aware that we are on a spiritual journey. We are exploring a multitude of pathways to understand and celebrate that which gives meaning to our unique role in the evolutionary journey. Many gaps in the understanding of our beginnings as well as the natural processes of our evolutionary journey have been revealed through the contributions of science and the unfolding universe story. This new story can be the overarching, common story that unites us as a species, that relates and connects us to all that is. Each of us, from our individual and/or collective faith perspective, has the opportunity of integrating and revising our faith statements, which we stand before and commit to, based on this new cosmology.
In regards to my spiritual views and practices during this phase. I initially distanced myself from the institutional church for about 12 years while immersing myself in books about religion, such as The Battle for God and The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong, Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels, The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg, and Encountering God Diana Eck. It has become clear to me that the church and society is going through a transformation similar to the Axial Age described by Karen Armstrong in The Great Transformation. It was with this context that my wife and I joined a progressive United Church of Christ congregation two years ago. It was a church that we experienced as being on the edge of redefining a relevant new role for Christianity. We have decided that we want to be involved in this transformation and ongoing description of the evolving God. I believe the historic church continues to be a relevant laboratory in which this can take place.
Laying the contextual foundation for “greening” the congregation, I have led two discussion courses on Elders as Earthkeepers. I have introduced The Dream of the Earth and the universe story to the congregation from the open pulpit. I believe that our congregation, as well as others, are or will soon be receptive to exploring a new role for religion in the postmodern world as Ken Wilber projects in one of his recent books Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. This transformation in religion is an aspect of the evolutionary journey and unfolding universe story. It is one element of my current life’s purpose that can be best described as caring for the earth as an Earth Elder (see www.earthelders.org) while participating in the second great transformation.
“All my relations” has evolved to recognizing my kinship and intimate relationship with all the creatures of Earth, current and pre-historic. The great challenge is internalizing this relationship, where it becomes experienced from the heart and not just my intellect Creating and using story, songs and rituals that celebrate our connections with the natural world is a major effort of Earth Elders and my own journey towards embodying this new relationship to all that is.
Phase V (75+or- to infinity) Although I do not believe in a literal heaven or hell, I find myself anticipating a disembodied extension of consciousness when my physical body, including my brain, dies. It is not a denial of my mortality or even a longing to continue to exist in some spiritual form that informs this notion. Instead, it is being present to the accumulated psychic evidence from near-death experiences (NDE), past-life phenomenon, and instrumental transcommunication (ITC), or recordings of allegedly discarnate spirit. The research on these phenomena has shifted from claims from parlor séances to rigorously conducted research projects in university settings. For now, we can either accept or reject anecdotal evidence.
For most of my life, I have considered this a topic of interest, but not one that has been a focus of concern. Perhaps it was related to a denial of my impending mortality, or at least within a time frame that was worth dwelling on. However, having been diagnosed with ALS and now facing my death within the next 3–5 years, it becomes a topic that is more germane. The whole notion of consciousness and how it manifests itself in living and non-living matter, is a topic of extreme importance. Unraveling the mystery of consciousness will contribute to our understanding of whether the notion of a planetary layer of thinking substance or consciousness (Noosphere), as proposed by Teilhard de Chardin in The Human Phenomenon, has validity.
A visual depiction of my life journey showing my community of reference in the inner circle of icons and the primary focus of my life in each five-year period in the outer ring. The first decade of my life, as shown in the lower inner circle as a solid circle, representing my primary focus on discovering my individual identity, moving clockwise to the 7th decade, where the phylogenetic tree of life is my community of reference.
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