Abstract/Precis “Reflections on Things at Hand: Contemplative Conduct as Self-Organizing Sustainability”

“’Reflections on Things at Hand’: Contemplative Conduct as Self-Organizing Sustainability” at the Washington Center Curriculum for the Bioregion Conference on Sustainability and Contemplative Practice, Whidbey Institute at Chinook, Clinton, WA, November 3, 2012. 
I wonder about an attentiveness so complete that its self-rewarding or autotelic practice leaves little left over of ego restlessly questing to extract reward from nature by unsustainably imposing on natural systems. In sharing such contemplative conduct and consciousness, we real-ize ourselves in analogy with and as resonating the event of cosmogenesis -- as being what Thomas Berry calls a dimensionality of the universe with and as which contemporary science and intercultural wisdom alike give evidence of our participation, evocation and performance. With the emergence of a correspondingly celebratory ecosocial mindfulness, “we should” in the words of  Mengzi,  “anticipate the will of the poets in our thought.”