Opening to the Cosmos
With increasing accord and insistence, many disciplines and perspectives in our time have been pointing towards a more participatory and spiritually informed vision of the cosmos, as if a greater underlying impulse were at work through these diverse intellectual and cultural streams. Yet outside the private intuitions of a few and the private yearnings of many, the encompassing power of modernity’s disenchanted cosmology has continued unabated. The world picture that emerged and established itself during the Enlightenment in the wake of the Scientific Revolution still effectively informs the activities and values that most influence the world today, and the various challenges to its hegemony have until now been largely peripheral and tentative. The modern self still lives in a vast and, in a fundamental sense, alien universe that is the random consequence of exclusively material evolutionary processes—a universe devoid of any meaning or purpose, indifferent to humanity’s spiritual and moral aspirations, and relentlessly silent.
In the course of our civilization’s history, this determinedly “neutral” world picture has in certain respects been deeply emancipatory. It has freed the modern self from long-established structures of cosmic meanings and purposes that, while perhaps sustaining and numinous, were often problematically interpreted, shaped, and enforced by cultural authorities—whether political or religious—whose vision was not always profound, their motives not always beyond question. We have come to realize, however, not only the great liberation but the great loss that the triumph of the mechanistic world picture brought in its wake. The liberation and the loss at the heart of modernity have been inextricably connected.