cosmologies27

entire universe.
Because the scientific attitude dominates our view of the
universe and seeks (in some cases) to obliterate the idea of spirit,
we are in a great moral crisis. Our problem now is not necessarily
to create spiritual rites or churches or clans or study groups, but to
re-assemble our collective moral disposition. We are not merely a
cloud of buzzing individuals, each doing his or her own thing,
each person a tiny microcosm in him or herself.
If this system of human microcosms seems to us to be "real," it is
because the scientific approach has taught us that the individual
physical objects - in Hindu terms, prakriti - make up reality. But
we do not each invent our own personal moral and ethical
systems. Even in the most pragmatic sense, morality derives from
the needs of the whole. The whole, as all the ancient teachers
repeat, is the spirit. If we keep our attention fixed on heaven, the
whole universe, our moral attitude will be shaped by the
mountains, as the I Ching, again, suggests.
Feeding the starving in Somalia is a moral good, but perhaps we
call it good because the vestiges of moral understanding remain in
our minds despite science's insistence on the moral legitimacy of
the material world. Feeding each other is not good merely because
we have social responsibilities. It is not good merely because it
agrees with the communist belief that all people should be
clothed, fed and socially enfranchised. Nor is it good only because
it agrees with the capitalist belief that all people should have the
opportunity to clothe, feed and enfranchise themselves.
It is good because we have the inner sense that our social
responsibilities are moral responsibilities, and we know - from
ancient teachings still lurking in our consciousness - that our
moral selves reside on the edge of the divine world, that the
universe is all and one, interimmanent with itself, that we are all
in all, and that our moral responsibility - our virtue - is to foster
and return to that unity by our own dispositions, which are and
are reflected in our actions. In feeding Somalia, we feed ourselves.
In Ennead VI.9 Plotinus says, "Things here are signs." These
words teach us that the physical world has importance; we are
right to study it, scientifically and otherwise, because although far
removed from the divine, it is nonetheless of that same outflow.
Being unified in their spiritual origins, our physical needs are
interrelated, and so we are right to minister to each other's
physical needs. Science has helped us in this. But further, all that
is visible must grow into the realm of the invisible. Science has
hindered this growth by denying both its possibility and our
intuition that we are interrelated spiritually and, therefore,
morally.
If our cosmologies teach us that the physical world is all there is,
and that our destiny is to continue to take things apart, then our
moral natures similarly will come apart. But if our cosmologies
teach us that the visible parts of the universe are signs of the
invisible, spiritual reality, then we will reside at the edge of our
moral nature, and the whole universe.