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Spiritual Ecology: Overcoming the Onlooker Consciousness & Healing Our Alienation from the Earth

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Spiritual Ecology: Overcoming the Onlooker Consciousness & Healing Our Alienation from the Earth [Type text] Spiritual Ecology: Overcoming the Onlooker Consciousness & Healing Our Alienation from the Earth Andy Shaw [email protected] 1 Running Head: OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS Spiritual Ecology: Overcoming the Onlooker Consciousness & Healing Our Alienation from the Earth Andy Shaw Goddard College 2 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS To the mourning doves who nested on my porch this spring & summer … And the robins too … 3 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS Abstract What is the true nature of the modern environmental crisis? This thesis posits that it is fundamentally a spiritual crisis characterized by an artificial and unhealthy alienation of humanity from the Earth. This alienation stems from the development of a one-sided “onlooker” consciousness and corresponding epistemology over the past five-hundred years which fails to adequately acknowledge the scientific reality of the spiritual or supersensible. This unwarranted scientific denial of the supersensible has placed humanity in an untenable position. Because our problems have both sensible and supersensible aspects, a science that excludes the latter will result in a distorted, one-sided picture of these problems, and hence an inadequate response. The onlooker consciousness is useful for certain scientific and practical purposes, yet fails to provide a comprehensive context for our healthy existence in the world. We have allowed the methodology of subject/object separation to become an ontology, with catastrophic results. My proposed solution for healing this diseased consciousness draws primarily on the work of Rudolf Steiner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Georg Kühlewind. This solution entails an “upstream” cognitive movement that will enable us to become conscious of the supersensible aspects of the world and to thereby overcome the deceptive subject/object dichotomy which causes us to view the Earth as a collection of objects in the first place. Keywords: spirituality, ecology, consciousness, Goethean science, anthroposophy 4 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................................................................4 Introduction.........................................................................................................................................................................6 The Scientific Reality of the Spirit, Part I........................................................................................................................8 The Organizing Idea in Cognitive Perception..............................................................................................................12 Organic vs. Inorganic .......................................................................................................................................................16 The Roots of Modern Materialism & the Onlooker Consciousness........................................................................18 Our Current Situation ......................................................................................................................................................36 Does Materialism Make Sense?.......................................................................................................................................39 Our Modern Consciousness Disease.............................................................................................................................50 Environmental Effects of the Modern Consciousness Disease................................................................................58 Scientists vs. Fundamentalists.........................................................................................................................................60 Steps Toward Healing the Subject/Object Split..........................................................................................................62 The Cognitive Path...........................................................................................................................................................78 The Scientific Reality of the Spirit, Part II....................................................................................................................92 Spiritual/Ecological Naïveté ...........................................................................................................................................95 Evolutionary Cosmology: Teilhard, Swimme & Berry ............................................................................................101 Conclusions......................................................................................................................................................................106 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................................................................111 Appendix: Personal Statement..........................................................................................................................................117 Annotated Bibliography.................................................................................................................................................125 Gratitudes.........................................................................................................................................................................131 5 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS Introduction “I see no other hope of avoiding destruction than for our mentality to change.” - Georg Kühlewind, The Gentle Will “[I]t may now be necessary to foster a new environmentalism of the spirit.” - Al Gore, Earth in the Balance The world we live in is not merely a material world; it is also a spiritual world, and hence the current environmental crisis is undergirded by supersensible elements that are passed over by our essentially materialistic practice of modern science. The thesis here considered posits that the deepest roots of the ongoing ecological devastation are in fact spiritual in nature, manifesting as a diseased modern “onlooker” consciousness which treats the world as an object to be exploited rather than as the nourishing and sacred context of our existence. Further, this thesis contends that the unwarranted and ironic denial of the scientific reality of the spirit is the single most fundamental of these roots, and hence that humanity’s most pressing need is the raising of consciousness entailed by the adoption of a truly modern science which acknowledges this reality. My intended audience for this thesis is that portion of modern humanity which already “smells a rat,” as it were, in modern materialistic worldviews. An understanding of the following criteria may be useful for the prospective reader in determining whether or not to proceed: 1. A salt crystal and a toad placed side-by-side on a table are not simply two different substances or groupings thereof, but there is an order of difference between them. 2. A man and a woman sitting down together to make a papier-mâché Christmas ornament as compared with a man and a woman lying down together to make a baby are not simply 6 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS examples of two human activities, but there is likewise a highly significant order of difference between them. 7 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS The Scientific Reality of the Spirit, Part I “We need to awaken to the functioning presence of spiritual realities in our lives. They are much more subtle, less sensational, more delicate, less crude, than we may expect. Consequently they are easy to overlook.” - Gertrude Reif Hughes (Introduction to Rudolf Steiner’s Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path) “[T]he spiritual can be experienced and is thus self-evident.” - Martyn Rawson, The Spirit in Human Evolution As previously mentioned, the crucial axis on which all else depends, epistemologically speaking, is the denial or affirmation of the scientific reality of the supersensible. What is the true state of affairs in this regard? The first thing to realize – and undoubtedly the hardest thing to realize in these materialistic times – is the fact that the supersensible is neither a theory nor an abstraction, but a reality that is directly experienced. It is quite remarkable how controversial and even outrageous this simple assertion sounds to most of us today. Yet it is quite easily verified by unprejudiced reflection on the nature of thinking. At its most basic level the matter can be worded thus: Thinking presents itself to us directly as thought, not as substance. However irrelevant this statement may seem at first blush, it is actually of critical significance for the current inquiry, for if an ignorance of this fact is allowed to pass unnoticed, a spectacularly impressive (albeit specious) edifice of materialism can be – and indeed has been – built on it. Many of us have been taught in school that thinking is reducible to and fully explained by certain physical substances and processes in the human brain: neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, 8 OVERCOMING THE ONLOOKER CONSCIOUSNESS etc. Yet our thinking does not present itself directly to us in this manner (i.e. as processes and substances which in turn have to be interpreted as meaning), but rather as meaning or thought. Indeed the statement that thinking is reducible to physical processes
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