Loving the World as Our Body

Acclaimed author David Loy explores what has gone wrong with humanity and how we can fix it. Humanity’s survival instincts worked great back when humans were few, primitive, and had to fight against the entirety of nature to survive. But those same instincts proved disastrous once humans began to organize themselves into complex societies. How did we manage? We developed moral and ethical frameworks that kept societies functioning for centuries. But now, in the modern era, those frameworks again have proven unsatisfactory—rigid, inflexible, and often unable to accommodate new information and ideas. So some of us have turned to secularism and scientific progress, which have resulted in awesome technologies—many of which improve our lives immensely, but some of which threaten our existence. E. O. Wilson sums up our quandary: “The real problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Where do we go from here? David Loy describes how today we are left with three primary worldviews competing for our allegiance. The first has the most adherents and includes traditional religious versions of cosmological dualism, including the promise (or threat) of individual post mortem salvation (or damnation). The second is secularism, supported by the physical sciences and offering a naturalistic understanding of the world that does not support any spiritual or afterlife transcendence. The third worldview regards the earth and its creatures as sacred, without the need for a “higher reality” to have created them. Humanity is one of the manifestations of a self-organizing cosmos that, according to some versions, is evolving to become more self-aware. According to this nondualist paradigm, everything is a manifestation of the sacred, which we can experience when we wake up from the delusion of being a separate self in an objectified world. This third view is our way out of the quandary, and Loy shows readers how this nondualist view has actually been with us longer than we think: within the more esoteric views woven through and among a wide variety of otherwise traditional religious traditions. Table of Contents Introduction What We Can Learn from Our Evolution An Inevitable Certainty Sexuality Beyond Freedom and Determinism How to Be an Ape Altruism and Tribalism Self-Domestication Civilization Religion Why Our Evolutionary Psychology Matters Today What We Could Have Learned from Our Religions The Axial Age Script/ure Transcendence The Birth of the Axial Age The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Why This Matters What We Need Today Shamanism Judaism Christianity Islam Vedanta Buddhism China Waking Up to the Dream Conclusion Touching the Earth Notes Index About the Author