The spirit of the time: Transformation, Becoming-Gaia
During my teenage years, one idea that alarmed me was the possibility of living, and not being contemporary with my time. Let me explain. Coming from Brazil, a country ‘invented’ by Portuguese/Western enterprise, I was studying the Copernican Revolution and the emergence of modern science. According to my history lessons, I could have lived during the period when Copernicus published his work, in his society, and still aged and died believing that the Earth was the centre of the universe. For me, this thought was unbearable.
At that point in time, I had no idea we were living through such a historical moment. It was only during my university years, through my personal research into transpersonal psychology and holism that I became aware of the scientific revolution triggered by the early 20th-century physics findings.
Adding a dramatic flavour to the current situation, we find ourselves in an unwanted race toward the destruction of planetary life. A race propelled and sustained by the obsolete worldview.
Here, I’d like to echo the brilliant Brazilian climatologist, Antônio Nobre’s call for an urgent need to catalyse collective consciousness to counteract the delays and backwardness provoked by reactions to Gaia Theory back in the 80s. I agree that the emergence of the Gaia Theory and its broad connections to the First People’s knowledge/worldview represents one of the most significant breakthroughs of our time.
In fact, we urgently need to integrate ideas and perceptions that starkly contrast with the worldview held by Western societies for centuries. Through colonialism/modernism, this worldview has become so hegemonic that even here in Brazil — a land where millennia-old peoples and traditions resist — the existence of other possible ways of living, of being, is denied, ignored, and rendered invisible (subjected to ethnogenocide).
To move from competition and violence to love and cooperation, and from separation and fragmentation to complexity and integration, recognizing unconditional love as the natural way/law of Life, is indeed a significant shift whose time has come. Addressing this challenge must involve the embodiment of planetary/Gaian consciousness through a process of education and deep craft – connecting with ancestral wisdom and honouring Gaia, herself.
As an international learning community, Schumacher College nurtures connections that go beyond traditional academic or fragmented frameworks. With its ‘loving disposition’ (as Ailton Krenak would say) to encounter and dialogue, it may cultivate living intelligence fulfilling a crucial role/function in this planetary moment.
I cited Ailton Krenak, one of Brazil’s greatest indigenous leaders, whom I hold in maximum admiration and to whom I always listen attentively. I want to share with you a (hammock) conversation where he speaks, among many things, about the importance of the mind-heart connection for human life experience and the heart as the key to all the transformations we wish to see in the world.
There is so much to this.
Indeed… we are Gaia, and the time has come for our alchemical transformation to take place.
Fraternal greetings to Satish K. and each one of us from Bahia – Brasil.
Gaia/Aphrodite
Watch in the YouTube @Selvagem – ciclo de estudos (Wild – study cycle):
Conversa na Rede/Hammock Talks- 心 Kokoro | Coração/ Heart - Ailton Krenak e Hiromi Nagakura:
Antonio Donato Nobre no Selvagem Ciclo 2019:
References:
Stephan Harding, Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche and Soul (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2022). Gaia Alchemy.
Mona Nasseri, ‘Deep Craft’, in In the Making: An Exploration of the Inner Change of the Practitioner (University of Dundee, 2013). In the Making.
Vandana Shiva, ‘Cultivating Living Intelligence’, in Regenerative Learning: Nurturing People and Caring for the Planet, ed. Satish Kumar and Lorna Howarth (Global Resilience Publishing, 2022). Regenerative Learning.