Now, for me, his thinking allows for some guidance in terms of our work. I believe, and I said this very respectfully to Clare Graves because I respect his work, that something was missing in his work, and that is the emotional territory. I believe that every one of the stages, the beige, the purple, the red, the orange, etc., is characterized by a particular emotional setting. If you miss that, then it looks like the transformation is just an intellectual process which I don’t think is the case. Most crises that we have, in order to move to the next level or to regress to the previous one, are emotional crises, at least in my experience of teaching.
Bill. Where he would capture some of the things you’re talking about is the movement through those stages where there’s a loss of the sacred and the movement toward secularization. There’s a point you made earlier which I think also is quite profound, which is the loss of the biological and the notion of the earth as being mechanistic rather than biological. Tell me something about biological and spiritual because there seems to be the ghost of Teilhard de Chardin (1959) all over the place regarding the interplay between the biological and sacred.
Julio. That, I think, opens the field for further thinking, and it’s interesting that these ideas came from a Catholic thinker, which is very unusual.
Bill. And Teilhard de Chardin got drummed out and his work couldn’t be published for about 20 years.
Julio. Exactly. Remember that we haven’t seen much concern for ecological issues from the official church, for whatever reason. But not only did Teilhard de Chardin speak of it, I think there are two or three people that opened new territory with their thinking. One was a woman that we tend to miss in history—the woman who wrote Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962). By speaking the way she did, Rachel Carson challenged the status quo of science that was, at that moment, absolutely unchallenged.
Second, you have the British thinker, James Lovelock (2000), who spoke about Gaia. When Lovelock spoke about Gaia, he made a very simple statement. He said that life, that Earth, can be under stood as a living entity. There are signs everywhere pointing to that and yet people say- how can you think that the planet is alive? Again, any interpretation that challenges the status quo, in this case the mechanistic interpretation, is ignored. But he kept pointing to that. From another perspective, he said that there are trends that point to us heading into a serious crisis, and we need to pay attention. So, you have two, Rachel Carson and James Lovelock, offering big paradigm shifts.
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