©2005 Guy Burneko, Ph. D.
all rights reserved
May 3, 2005; rev. Mar. 25, 2006 and Jan. 28, 2007
The Institute for Contemporary / Ancient Learning
www.beyondthematrix.com/inst
ABSTRACT
Ecosemeity in the Global Noetic Repertoire
(Alternative working title is: "Rooting for Sustainability in the Intercultural Repertoire"
Teilhard de Chardin’s larger argument concerning our collective cerebralization beyond the material realm includes the duty of humankind to exploit and to dominate the natural world. Although admiring the encompassing unity of Teilhard’s vision, Thomas Berry interprets its uncritical emphasis on progress as an imperial tendency serving a dysfunctional cosmology rather than the well-being of the entire earth community. In Berry’s critique, Teilhard supplants the spontaneities of the earth with the controls of human intellect. This interdisciplinary essay proposes a mediation between Teilhard’s imperative to conscious evolutionary dominion and Berry’s emphasis on enhancement, rather than exploitation, of the functioning of the natural world. It is developed from Confucian, Daoist and intercultural insights suggesting that the authentic spontaneities of the naturally acting sage actualize, embody and eco-humanely extend the transformations of inseparable heaven, earth and humankind. These relevance of these insights for a sustainable future is explored in the context of a global noetic repertoire of nondualist and nonreductionist thinking from the sciences, indigenous traditions and what may be called “operational mysticism.”
An essay now under consideration for publication with this working title relies, in part, on the following resources:
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