Events

We are living in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. As more environmental damage is done, the means to repair it seems to be getting less. It is increasingly difficult to know what to trust in politics and the media. Spiritual traditions survive, but the authority they once had has passed to science and so it might seem that the idea of ‘The Sacred’ has disappeared.

But as science reveals more and more about the place of the earth in the cosmos there is a growing awareness of how precious our living world is and of how inter-dependent we are with it. Perhaps this is not only a scientific discovery but also the re-appearance of the sacred in a form fit for our times.

Scientific materialism and modern consumerism have led to a widespread loss of a sense of the sacred where Nature is regarded as dead and a resource to exploit for monetary gain. Correspondingly, the human being is understood in mechanistic terms, and the vision of transhumanism and technocracy is a future ‘upgrade of the human operating system’ where we are, in the memorably chilling phrase of Yuval Noah Harari, simply hackable animals. The very nature of what it means to be human is now at stake, and a recovery of a sense of the sacred with respect to both humans and Nature is now an evolutionary imperative. This entails resisting the transhumanist agenda of universal surveillance and control, and forging a beneficial relationship both with Nature and emerging technologies with human flourishing at the centre; also recognising the centrality of our transcendent nature that gives us access to deeper structures of reality. In the words of King Charles III, the watchword is Harmony.