1. The universe, the solar system, and the planet Earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that mystery whence all things came into being.

2. The universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically-related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of Earth is especially clear: each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being of the planet.

3. From its beginning, the universe is a psychic as well as a physical reality.

4. The three basic laws of the universe at all levels of reality are differentiation, subjectivity  and communion. These laws identify the reality, the values and the directions in which the universe is proceeding.

5. The universe has a violent as well as a harmonious aspect, but it is consistently creative in the larger arc of its development.

6. The human is that being in whom the universe activates, reflects upon, and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness.

7. Earth, within the solar system, is a self-emergent, self-propagating, self-educating, self-governing, self-healing, self-fulfilling community. All particular life systems in their being, their sexuality, their nourishment, their education, their governing, their healing, and their fulfilling must integrate their functioning within this larger complex of mutually dependent earth systems.

8. Genetic coding is the process through which the world of the living articulates itself in its being and its activities. The great wonder of the creative interaction of the multiple codings among themselves.

9. At the human level, genetic coding mandates a further trans-genetic cultural coding by which specifically human qualities find expression. Cultural coding is carried on my educational processes.

10. The emergent process of the universe is irreversible and non-repeatable in the existing world order. The movement from non-life to life on the planet earth is a one-time event. So too, the movement from life to the human form of consciousness. So also the transition from the earlier to the later forms of human culture.

11. The historical sequence of cultural periods can be identified as the tribal-shamanic period, the Neolithic village period, the classical civilizational period, the scientific-technological period, and the emerging ecological period (Ecozoic Era).

12. The main human task of the immediate future is to assist in activating the inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth community in what can be considered the emerging ecological period (Ecozoic Era) of Earth development.

Used with permission of Thomas Berry

(This list also appears in Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology, ed. By Anne Lonegran & Caroline Richards, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, CT, USA, 1988, pgs 107-108)
 

By Thomas Berry

Handout in the library of Santa Sabina Conference Center, San Rafael, CA, 2004.
 

The transformation to the Ecozoic Era is a global phenomenon. It affects all humans, all species, all continents, all waters, all gases, all lands. How can the translation continue, past human language, to be experienced by the Earth community in toto? This is our Great Work.

The “translate” button is below the moon phases on the right side of the page.

I would be very glad to have feedback from you native readers of other languages as to how true the translation is into your language. Do the often-nuanced Ecozoic ideas permeate through the translation?

Earth created the human creature and endowed it with certain capacities, like language acquisition and creation, problem-solving for survival, bonding with friends and family, as well as its physiology.  For the last 12,000 to 50,000 years, maybe longer, we have been the same physical species. A baby born in one time frame who was transferred by a magical time machine to any other, including our present day, would grow-up as a native, as would we if we were transferred to another time. There would be no difference in capacity or appearance.

Yet, there have been thousands of variations within our human family over time: thousands of cultures and sub-cultures, thousands of languages, thousands of meaning-systems, thousands of interpretations of reality, thousands of ways to survive and thrive within the Earth community. This variety of ways to survive and thrive is what I understand Thomas Berry to mean when he refers to "ways of being human" or "modes of being human".

Because we are born physiologically immature (having to do with the relationship between baby's cranium & brain, mom's pelvis, and our bipedal nature) – I heard someone call it being "born half-cooked" – we are completed by the family and culture into which we are born. Each historical era, each culture, each family, often each generation, invents itself. We humans are self-inventing creatures, to a great extent.

Because we invent ourselves, we also REinvent ourselves. Within the limits given by evolution, we can be whatever we want to be as a species, live wherever we want to live.

By conscious and unconscious action our current "way of being human" is causing irreparable harm to and diminishment of the Earth community, ourselves and the very things, systems, and beings upon which we rely for our survival and thriving as a species.

Thus we must "reinvent the human" by drawing upon our evolutionary capacities to create new cultures, sub-cultures, languages, meaning-systems, interpretations of reality, and ways of surviving and thriving.

It is to this Great Work, the reinvention of the human family, that the section "Reinventing the Human" (and the whole site, really) is dedicated.