Page 110 - ECOlogic Book

But also, I can tell you from experience
That there will be wonder.
There will be great wonder. 133

Perhaps the lessons we are learning about Otherness through animals and
other humans have been basic training for dealing with this deepest of all
Othernesses to date.

The Contemporary Imperative
“What is being asked of us now?” Commenting on the postmodern mind,
Richard Tarnas speaks of the imperative to rethink and reformulate the
human relation to nature. It is an imperative, he says, “driven by the
growing recognition that modern science’s mechanistic and objectivist
conception of nature was not only limited but fundamentally flawed.” 134

Psychologist Stephen Aizenstat believes we are being asked to tend the
psychic relations that exist between the creatures and things of our world,
and to facilitate, in particular, interaction between the psyche of nature and
the human psyche. “Through the lens of depth psychology,” he says, “I
have discovered that human behavior is rooted most deeply in nature’s
intentions – that our actions are fundamentally expressions of nature’s
desire.” 135

Thomas Berry echoes this thought in Principle No. 11 of his Twelve Principles
of the Universe: “the main human task of the immediate future is to assist in
activating the intercommunion of all living and non-living components of the
earth community in what can be considered the emerging ecological period
of earth development.”

“Our bodies have formed themselves in a delicate reciprocity with the
manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate Earth,” observes
Kellert, “our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our
ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the
honking of geese . . . We are human only in contact and coincidentally with
what is not human.

133 IBID.

134 Tarnas, Richard, the Passion of the Western Mind, (Ballentine Books, New York, N.Y., 1991).

135 Aizenstat, Stephen, “Jungian Psychology and the World Unconscious, “from Ecopsychology, by Roszak, et.
al., (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA, 1995).

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