Gaia’s Own Journey: Unity in Diversity
by Jude Currivan PHd.
One of our most venerable of wisdom traditions, the Chinese I Ching, tells that: ‘in the beginning was the one, the one became two, the two became three – and from the three, ten thousand things were born…’.
From the potency of its unified oneness, our Universe realizes itself through its universal informational ‘alphabet’ of just two letters; zeros and ones. This simplest of differentiation then combines, imbuing innate meaning into all the diverse expressions of the relational two-nesses of energy-matter and space-time.
From its beginning, our Universe has evolved from this foundational simplicity the complexity of the I Ching’s ‘ten thousand things and more…’ From the genesis of its first moment, it was poised and expectant with all the potency of its evolutionary diversity.
Ancient Wisdom Traditions
Another wisdom tradition, that of the ancient Greeks, intuitively perceived the fundamental nature of number, geometry as number in space and music as number in time, all underpinning their cosmology in a four-fold quadrivium of knowledge. Throughout Gaia’s story, the harmonic and resonant relationships and universal patterns of these teachings are now being newly appreciated as playing all-pervasive roles in the story of our planetary home and her Universe.
As a creative and finite emanation of an infinite and eternal Cosmos, the manifestation of our entire Universe through its continuing Big Breath, also reflects the ancient Vedic perspective of the Breath of Brahman. The Upanishads, a series of discourses between seers known as rishis and their students, in ancient India, sets out an integral philosophy of the unified nature of reality and all-pervasiveness of consciousness.
The profound insights of these ancient scholars, are being re-appreciated by ever-more discoveries of leading-edge science. Even more vitally so, the living lore of Indigenous peoples who have never forgotten the innate web of life that encompasses the whole Cosmos, is now being honored as offering experiential guidance to heal our collectively dis-membered relationship with Gaia.
Gaia's Own Journey
For the last 4.5 billion years of our Universe’s evolutionary journey, Gaia has continued the emergence of ever greater complexity and diversity through the innate, dynamic and in-formational interconnectedness and collaboration of her entire ‘gaiasphere’ comprising her planetary geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere – and biosphere. Pulsed, not by passive continuity, but proactively by change and challenge, the evolutionary emergence of her biological children has not only survived but flourished.
Gaia’s innate nature is far from equilibrium and the intricate collaborations of her gaiasphere are perpetually dynamic. Yet, she has managed the extraordinary feat through all this time, of not only providing a planetary home for her organic children, but opportunities for them to explore, communicate, learn and grow in complexity, diversity and individuated self-awareness.
Over this time, she has dealt with our sun, Sol, radiating some thirty percent more brightly than when she became a young planetary mother. Yet she has succeeded and, despite the immense trials of regulating the interlocking and themselves evolving cycles of her entire gaiasphere…
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