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Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature's Intelligence, by David Fideler
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Humanity’s creative role within the living pattern of nature
• Explores important scientific discoveries that reveal the self-organizing intelligence at the heart of nature
• Examines the idea of a living cosmos from its roots in the earliest cultures, to its eclipse during the Scientific Revolution, to its return today
• Reveals ways to reengage our creative partnership with nature and collaborate with nature’s intelligence
For millennia the world was seen as a creative, interconnected web of life, constantly growing, developing, and restoring itself. But with the arrival of the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, the world was viewed as a lifeless, clocklike mechanism, bound by the laws of classical physics. Intelligence was a trait ascribed solely to human beings, and thus humanity was viewed as superior to and separate from nature. Today new scientific discoveries are reviving the ancient philosophy of a living, interconnected cosmos, and humanity is learning from and collaborating with nature’s intelligence in new, life-enhancing ways, from ecological design to biomimicry.
Drawing upon the most important scientific discoveries of recent times, David Fideler explores the self-organizing intelligence at the heart of nature and humanity’s place in the cosmic pattern. He examines the ancient vision of the living cosmos from its roots in the “world soul” of the Greeks and the alchemical tradition, to its eclipse during the Scientific Revolution, to its return today. He explains how the mechanistic worldview led to humanity’s profound sense of alienation, for if the universe only functioned as a machine, there was no longer any room for genuine creativity or spontaneity. He shows how this isn’t the case and how, even at the molecular level, natural systems engage in self-organization, self-preservation, and creative problem solving, mirroring the ancient idea of a creative intelligence that exists deep within the heart of nature.
Revealing new connections between science, religion, and culture, Fideler explores how to reengage our creative partnership with nature and new ways to collaborate with nature’s intelligence.
- Sales Rank: #725183 in Books
- Published on: 2014-11-20
- Released on: 2014-11-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .50" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
“If humanity is to survive, David Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World provides us with the map for restoring our own souls and those of the planet with brilliance, clarity, and a love for human life and the life of nature.” (Sim Van der Ryn, coauthor of Ecological Design)
“David Fideler is a scholar and thinker of the first rank, and this marvelous book presents his profound historical, scientific, and philosophical expertise in a brilliant synthesis that is accessible to everyone. It is a beautifully written and wide-ranging guide to the history of the soul of the world. Drawing together threads from every field of human endeavor, from theology to poetry and astrophysics to biology, it is the most exciting, uplifting, and optimistic exhortation to engage with and restore the magical world around us that I have read in a long time.” (Tom Cheetham, Ph.D., author of All the World an Icon)
“Restoring the Soul of the World goes beyond the goal of ‘sustainability’ to a new vision of our role here on Earth as renewing and regenerating a world that we feel emotionally committed to and want to care for and understand from a long-term view. This book is optimistic in the best way--based not just on hope or determination but on science, on an exciting array of successful solutions, and a daring kind of spiritual freedom rooted in the cosmos. This outlook could transform the world.” (Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, authors of The New Universe and the Human Future)
“Restoring the Soul of the World is the most far-reaching book available on more profound ways of understanding how we are connected to the cosmos. David Fideler reveals previously hidden traditions and ways of understanding ourselves and nature, exploring our relationships to nature’s intelligence as no one has before. A classic: you need to read this book.” (Arthur Versluis, professor of American Studies at Michigan State University)
“In Restoring the Soul of the World, David Fideler highlights the paradigmatic foundations of seemingly intransigent religious, scientific, and economic beliefs. But he then takes the crucial--and all too rare--step of interpreting and integrating these histories to illuminate a path forward. He pragmatically demonstrates how models of regenerative strategies can be found all around, and that restoring the soul of the world begins with becoming attuned to the cycles and patterns of a living universe.” (David McConville, chairman of the board of The Buckminster Fuller Institute)
“In this timely and absorbing book, David Fideler traces our long relationship with the world soul, chronicling how our experience of the spiritual power of nature was lost in a mechanized world. Yet Fideler brings real hope. Drawing on recent scientific discoveries and solutions, he envisions a way for humanity to collaborate in a ‘living but damaged paradise.’ This book will help many people take heart.” (Tracy Cochran, editor for Parabola magazine)
“Restoring the Soul of the World is a wonderful book. I challenge anyone to read it intently and not feel the presence of the anima mundi or hear the hum of the music of the spheres. David Fideler is an inspiring guide on an enlivening excursion through the intelligence of nature. He brings together heart and mind in an alchemical fusion uniquely his own.” (Gary Lachman, author of The Caretakers of the Cosmos)
“Restoring the Soul of the World is a timely rallying call to reimagine our relationship with our world, our culture, and our cosmos. Through a masterful overview of the history of forgotten knowledge, Fideler reveals the unsuspected connections between ancient thought and the cutting edge of contemporary natural science.” (Leon Marvell, author of Transfigured Light)
"Dr. Fideler focuses on the inroads that have been made in working with living organisms to clean up toxic wastewater and regenerate entire ecosystems. His vision is for us to participate creatively in cultivating all life and restoring the beauty, fertility and resilience of nature." (Nexus, December 2015)
“At the dawn of the twenty-first century, many people are searching for meaning in their lives. Something is missing, and we seem incapable of putting a finger on it. Fideler’s book does not complete the puzzle; however, it does provide a critical piece that can help us find our way forward by employing the wisdom of the ancients. It is time for humanity to look beyond lame science and blind religion to find an answer for the common causes of humanity and the well-being of our ecosystem. Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World draws upon the wisdom of the past to create a reasonable path forward--a path that begins with the restoration of our relationship with our living, intelligent, and sacred cosmos.” (Traditional Stoicism, Chris Fisher, March 2016)
About the Author
David Fideler holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and the history of science and cosmology. A recognized authority on the Pythagorean school, he is the editor of The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library; author of Jesus Christ, Sun of God; translator of Love’s Alchemy; and editor of the humanities journal Alexandria.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 10
The Mirror of Nature
Modern Cosmology and the Reanimation of the Universe
You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will always come back.
--Horace
Lost in Starlight
It’s a dark, moonless night in early June. To escape the light pollution of my native town, at least once a year I make the pilgrimage north to the pristine, dark skies of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on the shores of Lake Michigan. There I rent a cottage at the Shady Shores Resort on the bank of Little Glen Lake and spend the days walking exquisite trails that lead to overlooks hovering hundreds of feet above Lake Michigan. At night I pack up my telescope and head out to a favorite observing site.
Twilight has past and darkness has fallen. Silhouettes of pine trees hug the horizon, illuminated by starlight. They punctuate the skyline and bridge the Earth to sky, a comforting reminder of where I stand on the face of our living planet. The night itself is deep and laced with mystery, extending off into the trees and countryside, and extending out endlessly into the infinite depths above. It’s early in the season so my activity is greeted by the song of some crickets, but not by the full-blown insect chorus of the late summer.
In the sea of darkness I seem isolated and exposed; a shuffle of activity making final preparations under the glow of a red flashlight. The telescope itself is large, extremely heavy, and rock solid. Having mounted it firmly on the tripod, I’m making the final electrical connections. The telescope is motorized and has a 64,000 object database. Now that it’s plugged into my car’s electrical system, I need only type a few keystrokes into the hand-controller and the telescope will slew across the sky, center any selected object in the field of view, and emit a beep--a wordless indication that observing can begin.
Before pressing any buttons, I look up and around, amazed by the vista. . . . Heaven and Earth are bound together by one luminous glow, the combined illumination of millions and millions of stars in our home galaxy. As I trace the textures and curtains of the vibrant tapestry through binoculars, the boundaries of daylight consciousness dissolve. My soul, my mind, and even my body are adrift, embraced and engulfed by the pulsating star stream. Like the words of the poet Kenneth Rexroth:
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
At this time of year it’s impossible not to explore the rich starfields by the constellation Sagittarius. Shaped like a giant teapot, Sagittarius is climbing higher in the south. From the spout of the teapot emerges the hot, white steam of the Milky Way, a particularly brilliant and shining starcloud. . . . Right off the tip of the giant teapot is the heart of our own Milky Way Galaxy, some 25,000 light-years away. Encircling this core are the billions of stars that make up our galaxy and through a medium-size telescope you can see endless wonders. The region is rich in star clusters and contains the awesome Trifid and Lagoon nebulae, glowing clouds where new stars are coming to birth. But just as striking are the dozen or so globular clusters that you can see orbiting the central hub of our galaxy. The globular clusters are tightly packed spheres of ancient suns, each one containing between 500,000 and a million stars. Through a telescope they are a stunning sight, like countless diamonds huddled together in a sparkling, shivering orb.
Like the Roman god Janus, technology has two faces. On the one hand, technology separates and insulates us from the world. Because of the effects of technology, I am no longer able to experience the deep beauty of the sky and the Milky Way in my hometown. On the other hand, thanks to technology I am able to gaze into the deepest heart of our galaxy from my northern hideaway and actually understand what I’m looking at. Science and the development of technology go hand in hand, and the ever-increasing precision of technology has allowed us to gaze ever deeper into the microworld of the atom and the macroworld of the greater universe. And in the process, our observations and insights have increasingly eroded the premises of the mechanistic worldview. In fact, modern physics has proved that every major assumption of Newtonian science was flawed or incorrect.
It is no exaggeration to say that we are living in the wake of a cosmological revolution, for the most astonishing scientific discoveries of all time have been made only over the past one hundred years. These discoveries, made in astronomy and physics, have completely changed our understanding of the nature of matter and humanity’s place in the seemingly infinite cosmic tapestry. While this revolution is far from over, as philosopher E. A. Burtt pointed out, a cosmology or world picture is a civilization’s most vital possession, for our worldviews affect the way that we understand our relationship to the world and other people. As he wrote, “In the last analysis, it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever.” If the mechanistic world-view had implied that matter was dead and humanity was essentially distinct from nature, that viewpoint had inevitable social and ecological consequences. Now under the spell of the new discoveries, matter itself has returned to life. Nature can no longer be seen as a static, unchanging machine, and we now understand that all living beings are deeply interconnected, having emerged from the unfolding tapestry of the evolutionary universe. By necessity, as this vision becomes more deeply assimilated by society, it will affect the way that we envision human nature and relate to the world in the twenty-first century.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Live according to Nature
By Christopher Fisher
“We have the greatest technological knowledge of any civilization, but we have forgotten what it means to be alive in the world, to be alive in a living universe. Yet without this living connection to the world, our lives become trivial, routine, and mechanical. Being cut off, we start to wonder about the meaning of life and raise other abstract questions, while meaning itself is an experience of being bonded to the world and others at the very deepest level.”
With that thought provoking opening, David Fideler embarks on a journey which has one goal in mind. His mission is to restore a soulful respect for our world by reacquainting us with the spiritual essence of our intelligent, living cosmos, which was “pushed underground with the mechanistic worldview.”
Restoring the Soul of the World educates, inspires and challenges the reader as it weaves a path from ancient times to a vision of the future. Fideler draws on his rare breadth of knowledge to tell the story of human conquest over nature and the subsequent disconnection from her which now threatens our psychological well-being and future survival. Ideas have consequences; that becomes evident as Fideler traces the historical chain of thought which separated us moderns from our ancient ancestors, who gained insight and inspiration from their intimate relationship with nature. For the ancients, the world “was alive, numinous, and sacred—animated by a living spirit. And they were part of that world. Every part of creation spoke to them—brooks, trees, and mountains—and they responded appropriately with myth, story, and song, in a vital spirit of participation.”
The ancients Fideler refers to are pre-historic hunter gatherers. Instead, he points to those who laid the foundation of Western civilization—the Greeks. They “saw life and divinity in all things. Deeply moved by the order and beauty of nature, the ancient thinkers set out on a quest to understand the cosmic pattern and our own relation to it.” Ironically, as the author makes clear, this picture of “the cosmos as a living organism with which we are bound in vital participation” was maintained by the greatest thinkers in the West until it was replaced by a mechanistic view of the universe during the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only then, did the West lose its connection with the living cosmos.
Fideler is not engaging in romantic historicism; this is not a back to nature diatribe, which bemoans the evils of modern science. Quite the contrary, Fideler relies on a scientific understanding of nature to restore our environment. However, he submits we must restore our relationship with the living cosmos first. Only then, he suggests, will we stop viewing nature as a “mechanized, objectivized, and conceptualized system” and start learning from her genius. Without being alarmist, Fideler points out there is no time to waste. Rapid human growth has already made “sustainability” strategies untenable. The survival of our species now depends on learning how to “biomimic” the regenerative and restorative processes of nature herself. We must heal the damage already done to nature as we simultaneously learn to do no more.
Readers who are interested in Stoicism will discover many gems in this book. Fideler makes reference to the Stoic theory of an intelligent cosmos. “For the Stoics, the entire universe was a living organism, synonymous with God, and permeated by a vital, animating spirit. This spirit or pneuma, like everything else, is ‘material,’ but at the same time intelligent and dynamic.” Moreover, he employs Stoic concepts like, living in accordance with nature and cosmopolitanism as tools to restore our connection to the cosmos. He understands, as the ancient Stoics did, there is a correlation between our relationship with the cosmos and our relationship with our fellow humans. This book is not explicitly about Stoic theory or practice; nevertheless, I think everyone attempting to practice Stoicism as a way of life will benefit from reading it. Fideler offers the best short description of Stoic physical theory I have read (pp. 60-1).
Many books entertain us and are quickly forgotten, good books educate us and are occasionally remembered, great books challenge our worldview and motivate us to act. We don’t forget them because we can’t; they infiltrate our consciousness and become life changers, and occasionally, if widely read, world changers. Restoring the Soul of the World could be such a book. Fideler does not rely on Pollyanna sentiments to inspire environmental action; such feelings often fade quickly. Instead, he relies on the age old Stoic concept that we must change our thinking to change our behavior. We must restore respect for our living cosmos. Until we appreciate her as a living intelligent organism, we will continue to exploit her as a resource. Fideler gives each of us a personal motive to do so: therapy for our own soul through reconnection with the soul of the cosmos.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century many people are searching for meaning in their lives. Something is missing and we seem incapable of putting a finger on it. Fideler’s book does not complete the puzzle; however, it does provide a critical piece which can help us find our way forward by employing the wisdom of the ancients. At the very heart of our environmental problem is a spiritual problem. We are separated from nature by a mechanistic worldview which obscures the divine order within the cosmos. Science is not the cause of the problem. It is the mechanistic interpretation and commercial application of science, absent any soulful reverence for Nature, which created our current spiritual and environmental catastrophe. As Fideler points out quite clearly, there is no fundamental antipathy between scientific discovery and spirituality. In fact, many of scientific theories and discoveries which engendered our modern age came from deeply spiritual thinkers. As Einstein famously stated, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
It is time for the lame and blind to join forces for the common causes of humanity and our Mother, Nature. Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World may bridge the divide between modern science and the intelligent cosmos of the ancients. Such a bridge is essential to restore the relationship between us and the living, intelligent cosmos, of which we are each a fragment.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Mind Awakening
By V. Marshall
This is a mind bending book; David Fideler manages to provide an avenue for a new way of thinking. Here he combines ancient history, classic philosophy, science, mathematics and theology to expand our thought process about the state of our world today. He asks us to re-examine the teachings of some of the greatest thinkers and theorists throughout history. We step outside our conditional thinking and instead begin to view life on earth from a state of removed humility, one in which we consider our absolute insignificance as individuals and instead see our existence and humanity tied to the whole. We examine the vastness of life, open ourselves to a more considerate way of existence and place our tiny selves into a collective, living universe. We contemplate how we exist as a part of a world that was created, functions and continues only through our acceptance of the laws of interconnectedness. Fideler’s book is definitely one to encounter not just once but over and over again. It takes away the everyday cynical, selfish world and replaces it with something that gives our breath a purpose.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Great read and sensible solutions
By M. O. Conner
Fideler’s book is no New Age milquetoast work that browbeats one with guilt and demands widespread poverty as a solution. It draws from the wisdom of the greatest thinkers in history, as well as sensible science. The solutions to heal a dying planet are and have always been in front of our eyes—involving a benign shift in consciousness and dynamic thinking, in a very reachable goal of making humanity once and for all the caretaker of the cosmos.
The book also offers an excellent historical arc on how humanity became enemy of nature (and in turn enemy of itself), creating the very machine it sought to escape from. From Plato to Newton, from Hermetic philosophy to Utilitarianism, it is a sorrowful journey into an oblivion that can be reversed if we learn to once again become co-creators and co-redeemers with the universe and its boundless imagination. This is not as mystic or whimsical as it sounds, as Fideler provides ample evidence there were epochs in which the human race thrived and lived in freedom alongside nature.
And didn’t have to live in guilt or live in poverty at all…
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