Wildness and discipline as the double-helix spiral at the heart of creation

Can education help us to learn how to hold the necessary balance of wildness and discipline in our hearts and minds?

I want to think more deeply about Thomas Berry’s insights on the importance of “wildness”—to the universe, and to humanity as an integral part of the universe and the Earth community.

Berry contrasts wildness with “discipline,” and says that “The wild and the disciplined are the two constituent forces of the universe, the expressive force and the containing force bound into a single universe and expressed in every being in the universe.”

A hurricane, he says, is not “simply turbulence. Rather, it “has its own inner discipline. It is itself a response to the needs of the region.”

Wildness and discipline coexist in a “mysterious balance” in which “the universe and all its grandeur and all its loveliness become possible. Exactly here the presence of the sacred reveals itself.”

Berry says that the wildness within each constituent member of the universe, including each member of the Earth community, Gaia, “is a creative spontaneity that is its deepest reality, its most profound mystery.”

Creatively, spontaneously, each cell in our body and every particle in the universe goes about its business of renewal. Each of us exists thanks to the wild creative spontaneity of the burning Sun, the photosynthesis of the plants, the teeming activity of the uncountable microbes that do their composting dance in Earth’s soil.

“We are not here to control,” Thomas Berry says firmly. We are here to participate, with “a sense of wonder,” in the “universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being….We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world about us.”

Berry concludes that “the natural world demands a response that rises from the wild unconscious depths of the human soul.” This response, he says, “must have a supreme creative power.”

In contemporary times, our creativity is too often channeled towards efforts to control wildness. Whether in people, animals, viruses or weather, wildness is considered unacceptable behavior that must be brought back under human technical control.

We have been very creative in our development of techniques of surveillance, imprisonment, medication, and eradication.

The weather poses more of a problem, but our engineers are on it—can we block the sun by seeding more clouds? Can we inject surplus carbon into the core of the Earth? Can we finally figure out how to mimic the nuclear fusion of the Sun?

The problem is that these techniques seek to control symptoms of unbalanced wildness, rather than inquiring into the underlying causes of the imbalance.

It’s pretty clear that locking up a criminal or banning a drug cannot turn the tide on the epidemic of violence.

In fact it seems that the more tightly we try to control our innate, spiritual wildness, the more explosive the physical manifestations of imbalance will become.

And the more we clamp down on wildness in the physical world, for example by eradicating species and destroying beautiful landscapes, the more despairing our spirits become, leading to a double-helix spiral of imbalanced, out-of-control spiritual and physical violence.

For Thomas Berry, “the spiritual and the physical are two dimensions of a single reality that is the universe itself,” and “there is an ultimate wildness” in this sacred unity that cannot be controlled or contained by the human mind.

Instead, we need to learn how to befriend this wildness and use it as a source of positive, life-enhancing creative energy. Each of us must learn to hold this “sublime dimension” in our own hearts and minds—the balance between wildness and discipline in the universe.

Berry calls the counterbalance to wildness in the physical world “gravitation,” the force that pulls elements together and holds them in disciplined harmony.

In the spiritual world, the counterbalance could be called Love.

We humans, as the conscious participants in the unfolding story of the universe, need to tap intentionally into our innate “creative spontaneity,” which both partakes of the wild exuberance of the creative universe and holds the disciplined center around which all the joyful members of the Earth community can dance our celebration of life.

This dance plays out in the field of education as profoundly as everywhere else. And so, my questions arise:

·      What would education look like if it did not clamp down creativity through excessive control, but instead was able to hold a balance of “disciplined wildness” for every student?

·      What would education look like if it reinvented itself as an inquiry into the spiritual and the physical as two dimensions of a single reality?

·      What if the wild, violent physical crises of our time, from gun violence to hurricanes, from forest destruction to chemical poisoning, were understood as intimately intertwined with spiritual crises taking place at a soul level?

·      Could love provide enough of a gravitational counterforce to these physical and spiritual symptoms of imbalance to positively reorient human relationships—with each other and with the Earth community?

·      Is the great work of our time really to tap into and express the “primordial flaring” of Love at the heart of the universe?

·      And can this only be done, as education can only be done, one heart and one mind at a time?

Spiral galaxy; image from the Hubble Space Telescope.