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  • In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, is ousted by his brother and exiled to an island. With the help of a friend, Prospero manages to take with him his beloved library.

    Prospero, like his creator, lived in a time when boundaries between disciplines were not as rigid as they are today. Prospero's books would have dealt with the cosmos—spiritual and material, inner and outer—as a whole.

    In this blog, I try to do the same. I'm not Prospero, just a student rummaging through his library and writing in the margins. Prospero's Books is a blog about seeing the world as a whole, by looking at

    • signs, especially the relationships between signifiers and what they signify
    • stories, especially big-picture stories, such as myths and the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce
    • systems, especially complex, nonlinear systems
    • spirit, especially as understood by the Christian and Western esoteric traditions

    Welcome! Please join the conversation.

    —Kenneth W. Davis

    (Note: Although I admire Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books, this blog is not directly about that film. )

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« Wonder makes us fall to our knees | Main | Meditations on the Tarot 6: The Lover »

23 July 2008

A vast freedom we have not known since Newton

Newton-WilliamBlake From Stuart A. Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred, which I've just finished and recommend highly:

If we reinvent the sacred to mean the wonder of the creativity in the universe, biosphere, human history, and culture, are we not inevitably invited to honor all of life and the planet that sustains it? As we unleash the vast extinction [that] accompanies our global ecological footprint, we are destroying the creativity in the biosphere that we should rightly honor . . . .

Can I logically "force" you to see the sacred in the creativity in nature and join in basing a global ethic on that sacredness? . . . No, I cannot logically force you. But I can invite you. The very creativity in the universe, the wholly liberating creativity in the universe we share and partially cocreate, can invite you, for that creativity is a vast freedom we have not known, since Newton, that we shared with the cosmos, the biosphere, and human life. Accepting that invitation, while recognizing the evil we do and that happens, may be wise for us all (275-76).

Posted by Kenneth W. Davis in Books, Cosmos, Environment, Evolution, Science, Spirit, Systems |

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