David Peat

Pausing the Cosmos 199Every society has a foundation in shared values and meanings.Many indigenous peoples picture themselves as caretakers of the earth,with the natural world as a gift left in trust to them. Some societies areconcerned with maintaining a living connection with their stories oforigin. For them continuity is more important than change. Groupshave also been founded upon the ideals of compassion and love. Whatwill be the deep meaning of our new world?To a greater or lesser extent the values of Western society, the valuesthat have brought us to the dawn of the third millennium, havebeen based upon the ideal of progress; not only progress in terms ofthe accumulation of wealth, property, goods, and knowledge but alsosocial and human progress and its continued evolution. In these latteraspects we again see the Enlightenment dream that human beings canbe “improved” in a variety of ways.It is perfectly natural that change should take place in human affairsas it does in the natural world. The problem arises when thischange is understood only in a one-dimensional way, as related toprogress and, in turn, progress as something that can always be quantifiedand commodified. In this way progress becomes a goal in itself. Itis something we always need more of. Change in itself, rather than itsparticular content, is measured by the ways it contributes to, or delays,progress. But to view human culture with its art and music, its religionand human psychology, only through the perspective of “progress” isto impoverish our experience of the world.Notions of progress so permeate our Western way of thinking thatit is difficult to view the history of any subject without adding the glossof a linear ascension in time. Now the moment has arrived to suspendour immediate desire for progress and examine the whole structure ofthe society we have created, and the direction in which our world ismoving.The Vision ChangesOne step in that direction is acknowledging that our world is morecomplex than we ever imagined. In that sense, ultimate explanationsand totally objective observations may not really exist. Science has be-