Cosmic Ecology Programme

An exploration of the cosmic significance of humanity based on the natural philosophy of J.G. Bennett and drawing on multiple sources of science and spirituality.

Last run February 2022

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Introduction

Imagine a university that was dedicated to studying the universe as a whole, not in specialised pieces creating conflicting worldviews. Since humans on this planet are a component of the universe that would mean also studying the nature of humans on the planet earth and the wider system of universe. In this extended programme Anthony Hodgson will share a vision and a narrative of a cosmic ecology he has developed over a lifetime of research, drawing on many dimensions of the subject including science, history, spirituality and the arts.

About the Cosmic Ecology Programme

As we increasingly discover that the Anthropocene Era is not just a scientific concept, but a stark reality of humans that they are now acting on the planet at a geological scale and are themselves being acted upon by the feedback from the planetary systems, a terrestrial ecology is no longer sufficient to account for our predicament. Many of us are driven to seek for deeper meaning and find that the different special interests from which different authorities try to tell us what is going on, are no longer adequate. We have been holistically alerted by the image of the blue planet, but we do not have an equivalent holistic narrative of the cosmos that satisfies science and soul.

Some philosophical schools have stated the principle that if you wish to understand humanity, you need to understand the universe; and if you wish to understand the universe you need to understand humanity. On these grounds the programme is designed in in two parts. Part One is The Human Being in the Universe and Part Two is Universe in the Human Being.

In the first part the basic framing of a holistic concept of an intelligent universe will be described and the position of humanity in that context. It will integrate what we have learned from science and history with perspectives of dimensionality, levels of being and the complexities of energy transformation, concluding with a view of where we are in the planetary evolution. All this is supported by the introduction of new ways of thinking, reflecting and investigating ‘ordinary life’.

In the second part we will study the structure and nature of the human in the context of part one and the implications for practices of individual and cultural transformation. This draws on the tutor’s own study and practice of a range of self-development techniques from a range of spiritual traditions but emphasising their present and future relevance without their obscuring cultural accretions.

The programme is likely to challenge many prevalent belief systems and requires of the student their best capacity to suspend disbelief and make personal experiments in thinking, feeling and physicality. However, curiosity in the meaning and purpose of life, and especially the meaning of personal life, is the main prerequisite.

Anthony Hodgson – A little background

Anthony graduated in chemistry from Imperial College in 1958. After a short period of research he then qualified with a PGCE from the London University Institute of Education. His interest in cosmology, both scientific and traditional, led him to spend ten years with J.G. Bennett at his Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences at Coombe Springs. This was the period when Bennett was completing Volumes 3 and 4 of his magnum opus, the Dramatic Universe.

Anthony’s main research was into the possibility of designing educational processes anticipating the digital revolution that enhanced rather than diminished the capacity for consciousness, creativity and spiritual evolution. This work combined studying the unity of science, the then emerging systems science and educational technology accompanied in parallel with intense engagement with the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

After the death of Bennett and some further experiments in education with some of his followers, Anthony pursued a career as a free lance consultant combining facilitation with strategic thinking and scenario planning methods. In parallel he studied different spiritual traditions under a master who was seeking out the unity of spiritual development regardless of cultural and ethnic tradition. This period included pilgrimages to India, Egypt and Turkey.

On retiring from consulting activity Anthony helped the formation of the International Futures Forum, completed a doctorate in systems science and founded with colleagues, H3Uni – a university for the third horizon. This is in anticipation of the emerging Synergic Epoch identified by Bennett in his Volume 4 on the History of Humanity.

He has published two books in this area and published a number of papers in journals and handbooks on systems thinking, futures thinking and anticipatory systems in relation to consciousness.

This course is based on a personal challenge that Bennett left with him to carry out a synthesis of the spiritual and the scientific that built on his work. This covers a time line of sixty years It is impossible to condense a life time’s work which itself is based on the lifetimes work of many other amazing people. Nevertheless the course should provide an interesting story of where we are, how we came to be here, who we are and where we might be able to go next as an evolving humanity. Anthony sums this up as “My hope is that there are people who are looking for a worldview that faces the what Gurdjieff called ‘the terror of the situation’, and at the same time highlights the hopeful signs that we have the potential to choose a path in which our personal development and the planetary evolution are mutually supportive and deeply meaningful.”

The Exploratory Journey

The course is a journey of exploration of the cosmos and the place of humans in it. It is a kind of ‘Hero’s Journey’ in which you are invited to relax personal and cultural beliefs [Phase of Separation], explore new perspectives [Phase of Initiation] and reperceiving yourself and the world [Phase of Return].

Our vehicle for the journey is the spaceship of the mind, using the mind’s capacity to imagine worlds and visit unusual places. We need first of all to build this exploration vehicle. It has three main components.

Read the pre-briefing material

COSMIC ECOLOGY PART ONE– Human Beings in the Universe

Imagine a university that was dedicated to studying the universe as a whole, not in specialised pieces creating conflicting worldviews.

Since humans on this planet are a component of the universe, the earth and the wider system of universe should be included when we study humanity.

In this course, Dr. Anthony Hodgson will share a vision and a narrative of a cosmic ecology that he has developed over a lifetime of research. He will be drawing on many dimensions of the subject including science, history, spirituality and the arts.

Part 1 of this course is suitable for anyone trying to make better sense of life at this time of global crisis. It will also be of interest to anyone curious about the unity of science, the nature of spiritual search and development of new insights into the meaning of personal life.

Form of the sessions

1. From Terrestrial to Cosmic Ecology

Although ecology is now established as an essential planetary discipline, is it enough?

What if the Universe itself is intelligent and our limited beliefs have disconnected us just at the point where above all we need a higher level of integration? We need to extend our worldview through the three aspects of function, being and will.

2. Twelve Levels of the Universe of Observation

From the Hubble telescope to the electron microscope our view of the range of the stuff of the universe has dramatically expanded in the last fifty years. Yet these new facts are divorced from the meaning of what is out there. Reintroducing a modern view of levels of being provides a way of contemplating the vastness of the universe in one scheme.

3. The Qualities of Energy at Each Level

An evolving universe is doing work and this requires different qualities of energy for different universal levels. The energies of physics are an incomplete picture of the role of energies at every level. A different qualitative spectrum is needed without which we cannot understand transformation.

4. Pattern Thinking with Qualitative Systems

The universe is a greatly interconnected whole with immense diversity in these patterns of relationship. Understanding this requires a new kind of systems thinking that enables us to recognise the crucial cosmic patterns that shape existence and meaning. We have plenty of mathematics but little effective pattern language.

5. Reciprocal Maintenance and the Eight Cosmoses

The interconnections between qualities of energy go beyond just linkage but enable engines of transformations to take place between levels which can be seen as eight distinct but interlinked cosmoses each with is purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. This is the heart of cosmic ecology.

6. Transcending the Limitations of Space-time

Seeking balance and the risks of one-sided development. The difference between enlightenment and psychic power. The inner laws of transformation. Understanding that each aspect of our human nature requires its own kind of work for transformation to take place in a balanced way. Examples of eightfold perspectives in Patanjali Ashtanga Yoga, Tibetan Crazy Wisdom and Gurdjieff Fourth Way.

7. The Nature and Condition of Humanity

This new worldview now provides a context to re-examine the role of humanity on the planet, how it is succeeding and how it is failing, in a more complete way than simply a biological survival sense.

Perspectives beyond sustainability and regeneration are seen as crucial to the evolution of both humanity and the solar system as an sentient cosmic structure.

8. Cosmogenesis and Intelligent Evolution

In this world view the origin of the cosmos as describe by a ‘big bang’ is simply a glimpse into a much bigger potential pattern of the universe that is unfolding from an implicate to an explicate order in a way that cannot be accounted for through mechanism alone. Syntropy balances entropy in this unfolding and this originates from ‘big thought’.

9. An Evolutionary History of Humanity

With the preceding steps in place the history of humans over the last 10 to 15 thousand years can be located in a series of epochs of around 2500 years. Each epoch introducing a guiding pattern for towards the evolution of a planetary civilization. Each pattern took that time span to be realised. This realisation has been partial and distorted at every stage due to inabilities of humans to appreciate their wider ecology and the emergent hazard. We are on the cusp of a further wave.

My hope is that there are people who are looking for a worldview that faces the what Gurdjieff called ‘the terror of the situation’, and at the same time highlights the hopeful signs that we have the potential to choose a path in which our personal development and the planetary evolution are mutually supportive and deeply meaningful. Dr Anthony Hodgson, co-founder of H3Uni and creator of the Cosmic Ecology programme

Dr Anthony Hodgson, co-founder of H3Uni and creator of the Cosmic Ecology programme

COSMIC ECOLOGY PART TWO – Universe in the Human Being

Part 2 of this course explores a particular viewpoint that the intelligent universe is indeed a manifestation of supreme intelligence and that, within it and as part of it, we have choices as to our role. These choices lead to consequences for one and all. A key choice is whether to embark on search which requires that we individually undertake transformation beyond just improvement and seek the means to do that. Traditionally this has required travel and exploration. The problem today is that the ways of transformation are fragmented, scattered and often corrupted and often not contained in traditional media or social groups. Historical spiritual traditions have incubated various attempts to enable search but have become petrified in cultural forms and cults whether religious or scientific.

The course explores from my own decades of search what the underlying essentials might be that are beyond the cultural accretions. Cosmic ecology Part 1 is a help in setting the context of this task but not essential.

Fellow searchers joining the course are invited to share some of the ideas, practices and insights that have been discovered, tried out and, in some cases, fulfilled in this search.

Form of the sessions

The First Four Sessions introduce:

• Powerful Ideas

• Exercises of Engagement

• Review of Implications

1. Waking Up to Transformation

What prompts us to search beyond the ordinary life? Is it for happiness, truth, self-understanding, peace. Or through disaffection with the status quo, strange experiences or impact of meeting someone who ‘has something different’? We will explore the variety of starting points to begin our exploration.

2. Mapping Our Human Structure

What do we understand of the structure and nature of being a human? How well do I understand myself and the various forces at work in my being? What kind of a creature are we that would have the impulse to search for transformation rather than just self-improvement? What keeps us asleep?

3. Being Awake to be a Human Being

What determines our humanity? What are the characteristics of being truly human? How might our fleeting experiences of waking up be transformed into a more reliable, even permanent, state? What is the sleep we are waking up from? The general crisis of identity and identification.

4. Pathways of Spiritual Development – Past to Future

What have been traditional pathways of spiritual development and transformation in different traditions and are there now new ways emerging better suited to the emerging world conditions and our personal circumstances? Do different traditions transmit their prejudices as well as their value? How do we discriminate the true from the false? Are gurus, teachers, necessary?

Second Four Sessions:

These will be similar but with more emphasis on practice, personal feedback and coaching

5. Paying Attention and Self-Remembering

The nature of ‘work on oneself’. Attention, energy and practice. States of possible consciousness. Active, passive and spontaneous work. The problem of noticing when we are asleep, the issue of blind spots and our fragmented divided self. How does sleep and fragmentation show up in our daily experience?

6. The Sevenfold Way of Inner Transformation

Seeking balance and the risks of one-sided development. The difference between enlightenment and psychic power. The inner laws of transformation. Understanding that each aspect of our human nature requires its own kind of work for transformation to take place in a balanced way. Examples of eightfold perspectives in Patanjali Ashtanga Yoga, Tibetan Crazy Wisdom and Gurdjieff Fourth Way.

7. Working with the Sevenfold Way

An enneagram perspective on essential balance of practice derived from Bennett’s last work at Sherbourne International Academy. A range of practices and how to work with them in a flexible and adaptive way. Learning the difference between the active, the passive and the service of the higher evolution sometimes referred to as the Great Work.

8. Loving Creativity – The Next Evolution of Humanity

How the personal development we have been reviewing fits into the cosmic ecology and our quest for meaning and purpose. The longer-term evolutionary pathway and our potential role as forerunners. The science of Supreme Identity and Immediate Recognition, where identity and the universe cease to be separate, derived from the Anvikshi Vidya of Kashmir and the universal symbolic meaning of Dattatreya in Hindu Yoga