The Story of Gaia

Jude Currivan’s brilliant new book on the evolution of Gaia is an expression of a sea change that is underway as a new and more meaningful cosmological story begins to take hold. In his extraordinary book Passage to Modernity, Louis Dupré explains that Renaissance thinkers like Giordano Bruno postulated a world soul that ‘rules and directs all things from within while surpassing each one of them’: natura naturans unfolding into natura naturata. In this view, there is no separation between inner and outer, but the advent of mechanistic philosophy in the 17^th century changed all that. Mind is sundered from matter, and humans from nature; primary qualities are defined as the visible, tangible, measurable and quantifiable, while mind is relegated to the status of a derivative secondary quality. The first is objective knowledge, the second mere subjective opinion.

Many of the great Enlightenment scientists were Deists, and the transcendent notion of God as a great clockmaker removed from creation became popular. William Paley updated the cosmological argument from design early in the 19^th century, and it is in this context that one must understand the impact of Darwinism as a fundamental challenge to the notion of design (Darwin had read this book at Cambridge). The order manifesting the universe comes about through chance and natural selection; mechanistic thinkers had already rejected the notion of cosmic purpose, along with Aristotle’s final causation: it was no longer legitimate for the scientist to ask why, only how. This cultural trend reflected a welcome liberation from ecclesiastical authoritarianism, as scientists set out to formulate an account of the world and evolution based entirely on natural causes, with mind as emergent – and even epiphenomenal – with no causal power. The logical endpoint for such thinking is the statement by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.

Over the last 100 years, pioneering thinkers have challenged this presupposition of a mindless and pointless universe. Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution springs to mind, as does the process and organismic philosophy of Whitehead and that appears in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form. Then we have the work of Teilhard de Chardin on complexity-consciousness promoted after his death by Sir Julian Huxley, and more recently the emergence of the Gaia Hypothesis formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Ervin Laszlo published The Creative Cosmos – and many books since – 30 years ago, while Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme elaborated ‘the great work’ of a new story based on a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. Elisabet Sahtouris has also articulated a new evolutionary vision prioritising a maturing into cooperation in Gaia’s Dance and other books. And in physics, John Barrow, Frank Tipler, Martin Rees and Bernard Carr pioneered the anthropic principle of cosmological fine-tuning.

It is in this context that one can welcome Jude’s widely acclaimed book, which is a sequel to The Cosmic Hologram, and based on the same underlying principles, perhaps most importantly ‘that mind and consciousness isn’t something we have; it’s literally what we are and the whole world are.’ Jude continues: ‘the reality of our Universe, its meaningfully in-formed and holographically manifest appearance of space-time and energy-matter, emerges from nonphysical realms of causation and intelligence.’ This was the vision of ancient sages as well as pioneers in quantum physics, expressed in Jude’s reformulation of the big bang as ‘an exquisitely fine-tuned and ordered Big Breath.’ Beginning each chapter with a personal attunement, Jude eloquently tells the story of cosmogenesis and evolution with keen insight and understanding of technical scientific details backed up by recent research and consistent with the new story of the Universe as a unified and innately sentient entity that exists to evolve.

We find that harmony and harmonic resonances are universal in ‘a Universe that exists and evolves as a nonlocally unified entity’ with meaningful relationships at all scales of existence and where we humans are microcosmic co-creators within a macrocosmic ‘Universoul’. The fundamental evolutionary impulse (pp. 103, 108-9) is to create complexity and eventually individuated self-awareness, using the simplest possible relationships and with minimum energy. Entropy becomes ‘in-tropy’, whereby the overall informational content (along with coherence) of a system always increases over time. This means that the neo-Darwinist view of beneficial random mutations as the primary driver of evolution is fundamentally flawed (p. 108). Instead, Jude’s approach highlights intimate co-evolutionary and dynamic partnerships involving symbiosis and mutualism where ‘cooperation and holarchic organisation… fundamentally drive evolutionary complexity.’

While mechanistic biologists regard the universe as alien, impersonal and dead, Jude proposes that it is inherently intelligent and alive, embodying an impulse to evolve having ‘undertaken a great journey of experience, exploration, embodiment, and evolution – from simplicity to complexity, individuated sentience, and self-awareness.’ (p. 132) She gives many examples of Gaia’s extraordinary resurgence and resilience, sometimes taking millions of years, but always ultimately advancing and flourishing anew. We are now discovering the sentience of plants and the distributed intelligence of fungi in symbiotic partnerships co-evolving with soil microbes and pollinators. These relationships are evidence for ‘the innate, dynamic, and in-formational interconnectedness and collaboration of the entire gaiasphere… pulsed, not by passive continuity, but proactively by change and challenge’ resulting in evolutionary emergence. (p. 261)

It is these collaborative and synergistic principles that humanity now needs to understand and emulate, and which were already understood and applied in indigenous cultures. The journey from what Owen Barfield called original to final participation is where we are heading, and as Jude also writes: ‘from Unity, to Unity in diversity, to a re-membered Unity in belonging, and an ultimate return to Unity.’ This is where we stand; this is our collective and emergent evolutionary challenge. Major books like The Story of Gaia can inspire and empower us to express and enact a higher, wiser and more integral intelligence. Over to us!