Knowing and unknowing in the 21st century – in search of new narratives

Knowing and unknowing in the 21st century – in search of new narratives

“ ... for this enigma [of life] he finds partial answers—each story he tells is one— yet each answer, each story, uncovers another question, and so he is continually failing and this failure maintains his curiosity. Without mystery, without curiosity and without the form imposed by a partial answer, there can be no stories—only confessions,3

communiques, memories and fragments of autobiographical fantasy which for the moment pass as novels.”  (John Berger A Story for Aesop1)

We are in the throes of an unprecedented catastrophic crisis: spiritual, productive, financial, economical, ecological; endemic conflict and war. I am convinced that this crisis will lead to unavoidable social collapse on a global scale. Inarguably the crisis is due to our modern narratives: our core perspective that humanity is separate and apart from nature; our hubric vision that through reason and technology we can dominate and control nature; our illusion that we can have unrestrained growth on a finite planet – an illusion that is the foundation of our capitalistic drive to commodify every social relationship. This modern narrative underpins our postmodern world.

Buddhist and other spiritual traditions assert that insight into the emptiness of self can only be gained experientially; kenosis (self-emptying) cannot be reached through intellectual assent. An authentic experience of kenosis could launch one along a trajectory from egocentric, to anthropocentric and beyond to ecocentric. I speculate that an authentic experience of kenosis could be reached through a nontheistic apophatic exercise; an apophatic exercise akin to Denys' exercise or the Brahmodya competition, but one that challenges our modern narratives and philosophical constructs. What would such a contemporaneous practice be like in our postmodern world?

While I am convinced that social collapse is unavoidable, I believe that there is hope for the present and for the future. There is hope if we can create new narratives. There is hope if we can create a new mythos that decenters the individual, decenters the species and reconnects us to the sacred; an immanent sacred in the mundane world, not a transcendent sacred “within” or “out there”. We are the stories that we tell and the stories that tell us. With these new narratives and a new ecocentric mythos we can live as beings of this world connected to it and dependent on it, rather than as disenchanted

1 http://www.raleighcharterhs.org/faculty/sbusonik/BergerStoryForAesop.pdf

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beings in this world striving to dominate it and transcend it.