An MP3 version of the talk is here.
Our carbon consuming culture has completely internalised the belief “that the world is made up of dead stuff plus active minds and acquisitive wills,” wrote Rowan Williams in This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook.
We have forgotten the spiritual intelligence that knows how to align with the natural intelligence embodied in the living world.
To escape the toxicity of this mindset, Williams continues, will require radical change at the level of lifestyle and industry, yes. But more profoundly, it will demand that we ask again what is it to be human.
In this reflection, I consider 5 principles that can be practices and which might, in time, rediscover an older consciousness made new.
1. How comedy embraces tragedy, in the sense that there is a good that will not let us go, discovered through love.
2. How simplicity embraces complexity, not by being simplistic, but by seeing sub specie aeternitatis.
3. How ecology is wider than the machine, bringing back awareness of the all that’s beyond us all.
4. How life is fundamentally abundant and generous, not scarce and priced.
5. How sacred myths can see beyond scientific explanations, rebalancing the celestial and terrestrial.