The new story is a cosmological story of creation, told through our telescopes and microscopes, and articulated by our increasingly refined understanding of how evolution has led us along this 14-billion-year journey. It is therefore also the story of our place in the universe, and it brings with it nothing less than a radical transformation of human self-understanding. As the key narrator of this…
Category: Texts
Brian Thomas Swimme: The Forces of the Universe
“The cosmological forces of the universe pass through us second by second. To be aware of these forces is to touch an ocean of wonder.” Brian Thomas Swimme Brian Thomas Swimme’s Powers of the Universe was released by the Center for the Story of the Universe in September 2004 as an eleven-part DVD series. In it, Swimme first identifies a total of ten forces and patterns based on empirical observations…
Space walk
This ritual was created in the mid-1980s by Dominican Sister Miriam Theresa MacGillis of Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey, inspired by the “New Story” as told by eco-theologian and cosmologist Thomas Berry (1914-2009). The ritual is designed to offer participants an experience of the grandeur of cosmic time and space and cosmic creativity. The “Cosmic Walk” introduces us to a sequence of…
Charles Eisenstein: Forests and the Climate Crisis or Revolution is Love
“The reason our current system of material production is killing the world is that it has come to view it as dead. So what is there to love then?” Charles Eisenstein Charles Eisenstein’s thought-provoking new book Climate A New Story (North Atlantic Books, Berkley 2018), which ecophilosopher David Abram has described as indispensable, comes with a fundamental corrective to the current climate change scenario. The author warns…
The hidden life of trees: an interview with Peter Wohlleben
The German Peter Wohlleben (1964) is a type of enlightened forester who brought a new perspective on forests and trees and the meaning of forestry work. He sees the forest as a complex social organism in which individual trees communicate and cooperate with each other and together strive for the survival of the forest as a whole, which creates a cool and humid climate in which trees feel comfortable and can therefore live for a long time. Since…
Protection of old-growth forests in Germany – Peter Wohlleben
German Peter Wohlleben is a type of enlightened forester who brings a new perspective on forests and trees and the meaning of forestry work. He sees the forest as a complex social organism in which individual trees communicate and cooperate with each other and which therefore needs to be cared for as a whole. He understands trees as unique beings that feel pain, have memory…
The story of cooperative democracy or why we need a parliamentary citizens' council
Philosopher, publicist and cultural activist Jascha Rohr (born 1976) works as a consultant and coach. He studied philosophy, psychology and sociology in Trier and Oldenburg. In 2002 he founded the Permaculture Academy (Permakultur Akademie) and in 2008 he founded the Institute for Partizipatives Gestalten (Institut für Partizipatives Gestalten) with his partner Sonja Hörster, which is based on the concept of cooperative democracy. In 2012 he published…
A comprehensive vision of co-intelligence or how to make democracy intelligent
Evolutionary activist, founder and research director of the non-profit Institute for Co-Intelligence, Tom Atlee (b. 1949) has been focused on developing society’s capacity to function as a wise democracy since the mid-1990s. Since 2005, he has focused on the dynamics of “conscious evolution” – specifically the evolution of social systems. Atlee’s holistic vision of social change is based on a new understanding of wholeness and co-evolution…
Charles Eisenstein: Schools of Unification Technology
In this essay, American writer, philosopher, and cultural activist Charles Eisenstein (1960) develops a vision of transformative education beyond the traditional school system. He reflects on the possible deeper message of various intentional communities, ecovillages, soil institutes, and retreat centers as a new network of education, united by a common purpose to spread a new story of coexistence into the life of our civilization; he calls this nascent educational system “schools of unification technologies.”…
Center for the Study of Force Majeure or the Transformation of Our Civilization
The interconnected global challenges we face today clearly indicate that we are living in a time of profound crisis and a major civilizational shift that is related to the transformation of our entire planetary system. According to pioneers of ecological art, husband and wife Helena and Newton Harrison, the processes of entropy that we have set in motion during millennia of human civilization are culminating in most terrestrial ecosystems today in the form of unpredictable…