Heroes Not Zombies

Thomas Berry, in “The Great Work” writes that we can draw on what he calls “the fourfold wisdom” as we face the future together in the world. These are “the wisdom of indigenous peoples; the wisdom of women; the wisdom of the classical traditions; and the wisdom of science”.

He captures the essence of the these wisdoms as follows –

Indigenous wisdom is distinguished by its intimacy with and participation in the functioning of the natural world.

The wisdom of women is to join the knowing of the body to that of the mind, to join soul to spirit, intuition to reasoning, feeling consciousness to intellectual analysis, intimacy to detachment, subjective presence to objective distance.

The wisdom of the classical traditions is based on revelatory experiences of a spiritual realm both transcendent to and imminent in the visible world about us and in the capacity of humans to participate in that world to achieve the fullness of their own mode of being.

The wisdom of science, as this exists in the Western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, lies in its discovery that the universe has come into being by a sequence of evolutionary transformations over an immense period of time. Through these transformation episodes the universe has passed from a lesser to a greater complexity in structure and from a lesser to a greater mode of consciousness. We might say that the universe, in the phenomenal order, is self-emergent, self-sustaining, and self-fulfilling.

This is a beautiful model. We understand and experience the world through particular lenses. We experience life through the maps of reality which we create.

This idea of the four wisdoms gives us a fascinating map. Go explore.