The Living Universe Story, Part One

This story appeared on DavidKorten.org in February, 2026. We are sharing it in four parts. Subscribe to David Korten’s newsletter at davidkorten.org.

We humans live by the stories by which we know each other and our relationship to the people and place where we live. This includes stories that answer three primal questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? And what purpose are we here to serve?

The answers the people of any given society give to those questions shape what that society values and preserves as sacred, what it builds, how it governs, and what of its resources it considers surplus and available to consume. These varied and often conflicting stories of sometimes competing cultures define the world we ultimately contribute to creating together.

Think of the more powerful of these stories as operating instructions that shape how human societies organize power, distribute resources, and respond to feedback from the living world. To understand why the extreme concentration of power and privilege in modern human societies of the most recent thousands of years threatens human viability, we must understand the deep conflict between the story that guides the organization and management of most modern societies and what we are learning about how healthy living systems function.

Think of the emerging story as a new and more detailed and insightful version of a very old story. It is the story of processes of self-organization that span millions of years currently being crafted as the product of a shared inquiry among scientists, theologians, systems thinkers, economists, indigenous leaders, and movement builders—often from very different starting points. The elements of the inquiry are converging on a common insight: that the universe is alive, relational, and participatory, and that human responsibility centers on finding our place of service to that unfolding.

Think of the emerging story as a new and more detailed and insightful version of a very old story.

My own thinking on this emerging story has been shaped most deeply by the work and personal companionship and guidance of Thomas Berry, Marcus Borg, Puanani Burgess, John B. Cobb, Jr., Riane Eisler, Willis W. Harman, Frances F. Korten, Frances Moore Lappé Donella Meadows, Joanna Macy, Mae-Wan Ho, Elisabeth Sathouris, and Brian Swimme, among many others with whom I have the privilege of engaging in this inquiry.

For most of the human experience, societies lived within cosmologies that understood the universe is alive, purposeful, participatory, and deeply interdependent. Humans are participants in, and dependent on, a larger community of life, embedded in reciprocal relationships with Earth and one another. Indigenous teachers emphasized that these cosmologies were not abstract belief systems, but lived practices grounded in place, ancestry, and responsibility to future generations.

The universe is not a finished product. It is engaged in a living, self-organizing process of becoming.

The ancient stories did not deny conflict or suffering. They acknowledged the human capacity for violence and excess. But they placed such tendencies within a moral universe that demanded restraint and accountability. Power was legitimate only insofar as it served the continuity and well-being of the whole.

With the rise of powerful empires followed by mechanistic science and industrial capitalism, a different story came to dominate human understanding. We came to view the universe as inert matter governed by impersonal forces. We divided between religious teachers who spoke of an all-powerful God who ruled from a distant place called Heaven and scientists who studied mathematical relationships devoid of intrinsic meaning or purpose. The religious story put power in God’s hands and called on humans to pray to him for his favor. The mechanistic story of science granted humans extraordinary material power expressed through unprecedented technological advances.

Both stories severed feedback loops essential to the health of living systems. By legitimizing separation, both stories normalized domination. By obscuring participation, they enabled the concentration of power and privilege without accountability to the larger whole.

The resulting crises—ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, economic inequality, and political instability—are not accidental. As Donella Meadows repeatedly emphasized, they are the predictable consequences of systems designed to reward short-term gain by the few while suppressing feedback from the living world.

To move beyond these crises requires more than technological innovation or policy reform. It requires a renewed cosmological story—one grounded in contemporary science and resonant with ancient wisdom—that restores participation, responsibility, and belonging as central features of reality itself. Within science, the older wisdom of sacred relationships has begun to stir again. Relativity theory has revealed that space and time form a single fabric. Quantum physics shows that the act of observation shapes the observed. Ecology frames life as persisting through webs of reciprocity and feedback. Systems theory demonstrates that wholes generate properties that cannot be reduced to their parts. Evolutionary biology, transformed by the work of Mae-Wan Ho and Elisabeth Sathouris among others, found that cooperation and symbiosis are the engines of complexity.

Out of this convergence, a new understanding is emerging: the universe is not a finished product. It is engaged in a living, self-organizing process of becoming. Everything that exists participates in the creativity of the whole. The boundaries between matter, life, and consciousness are blurred in ways we are only beginning to recognize, let alone understand. In this unfolding story, the “Living Universe Story,” the cosmos itself is the primary sacred reality.

Humanity is not the purpose of creation. Rather, we are care takers and instruments of the growing self-awareness of the cosmos as it continues unfolding.

Before the rise of mechanistic thinking, many societies lived within cosmologies that embedded limits, reciprocity, and moral accountability directly into their understanding of reality itself.

This is more than a scientific paradigm shift; it is a spiritual reawakening. The universe is not a collection of objects. Nor is it the creation of an all-knowing, all-powerful God in Heaven. Rather it is, in theologian Thomas Berry’s words, “a communion of subjects.” We are not separate observers; we are the universe coming to know itself more fully through human consciousness. This realization restores a sense of meaning long exiled from modern thought. It invites awe rather than arrogance, participation rather than possession.

The story we tell about the world sets the boundaries of our own understanding and response. When we imagine ourselves alone in a dead universe, we behave as orphans. When we imagine ourselves as the children of an all-powerful God who gifted us the Earth to exploit in whatever way may please us, we pray to him to protect us from the consequences of our exploitation of that gift. When we remember ourselves as children of a living Earth, we act as kin to one another and Earth.

Institutions born of the old stories cannot endure within the new stories. They must be transformed or replaced by systems aligned with an understanding of life’s interdependent regenerative flow.

Our human work of this time is to live into that emerging story: To hear again the voice of a living universe speaking through wind and water, forest and star, and through every human heart that remembers its origins. To understand how this new story can guide our now self-endangered human society. We turn now to the deeper roots of our varied cosmologies and the ruptures in our ties to creation’s unfolding that set us on our current self-destructive path.

Before the rise of mechanistic thinking, many societies lived within cosmologies that embedded limits, reciprocity, and moral accountability directly into their understanding of reality itself. It is to those ancient cosmologies—and the wisdom they still hold—that we now turn. But first a brief interlude to address privilege as a defining barrier to successful transformation.

Privilege as a Pathology in Participatory Systems

Living systems — cells, organisms, ecosystems, and societies — persist through flows of energy, materials, and information regulated by feedback. Their long-term viability depends on feedback loops that distribute resources according to functional contribution and ensure that decision-making authority remains coupled to responsibility and consequence.

No being stands outside the systems that sustain it. Every action contributes to the organization of the whole—either reinforcing life-serving patterns or accelerating depletion and breakdown. From this perspective, the privilege enjoyed by royalty and the obscenely rich in human societies is not merely an ethical concern. It is a signal of serious systemic malfunction.

Pathology emerges when a subsystem of one or more individuals gains disproportionate access to resources or control while becoming insulated from the negative consequences of its actions. Such insulation suppresses corrective feedback, impairs learning, and often leads to cascading failure. The crisis to which humanity’s Imperial Era has led is a direct consequence of systemic privilege enjoyed by the few.

When participation is reciprocal, systems learn and adapt. When participation of an individual or alliance of individuals becomes insulated from the consequences of their choices, feedback weakens and dysfunction accumulates. This is a predictable failure mode. What appears as success to the privileged with the power to make the decisions is actually an indication of predictable systemic failure.

In modern human societies, privilege functions as insulation from consequence. Those who benefit from concentrated wealth, power, and status are often shielded from the ecological and social effects of their decisions. Costs are displaced onto others, onto ecosystems, or the future. This represents a moral failure of the individuals. Even more, it is a system failure. The system may continue to function for a time, but its capacity to regenerate erodes.

Those who benefit from their personal actions bear responsibility for sustaining the conditions that make the benefit possible. Genuine freedom does not arise from exemption from consequence. It arises from participation in systems in which all participants work together to meet their individual needs while honoring ecological limits. In mature participatory systems, privilege does not need to be redistributed. It needs to be eliminated.

If non-human living systems have adapted to this imperative for literally millions of years, why do human societies repeatedly organize themselves in ways that violate the operating logic of living systems? Badly flawed stories served a few of us well until fairly recently. Hope lies in an emerging synthesis of old and new stories, which this paper explores.

The Reemergence of Ancient Cosmologies

Long before the rise of modern science, human societies across the world understood themselves as participants in a living, purposeful cosmos. Every mountain, river, and star was alive with presence; every species carried its own wisdom and role in the great web of existence. Creation was not an event in the distant past, but an ongoing living process renewed with each season and each breath.

In many Indigenous traditions of the Americas, Earth is recognized as Mother—not metaphorically but literally, as the source and sustainer of life. The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address begins by giving thanks to the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, moon, and stars—each honored as a member of the community of life.

In the Aboriginal traditions of Australia, the Dreaming describes a world continually sung into being through story and ceremony. In the Vedic and Upanishadic traditions of India, Brahman is the undivided reality of which all forms are expressions; the apparent separation of beings is a temporary appearance within a deeper unity.

In such a world, wealth is measured not as an accumulation of things, but in relationships of caring, obligation, and belonging.

As Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and theologian, and Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, have articulated, these traditions understood the universe not as inert matter, but as a communion of subjects—each with its own agency and role in sustaining the whole. Reality was experienced as relational rather than atomistic, processual rather than static, and meaningful rather than indifferent.

Across cultures, these cosmologies embedded limits, reciprocity, and responsibility directly into their understanding of reality. Human well-being depended not on domination, but on right relationship. To act was to affect the whole, and to affect the whole was to invite response.

Despite their differences, these ancient cosmologies share key features. They recognize that the cosmos is alive and imbued with meaning. Humans are part of a larger community of beings, meant to serve, not to master. Reciprocity and restraint are essential to living well. Time is cyclical or a spiral, not a one-directional march of “progress.”

In such a world, wealth is measured not as an accumulation of things, but in relationships of caring, obligation, and belonging. Rituals of gratitude and gift exchange reinforce the sense that life is a shared blessing, not a private possession. Rights are balanced by responsibilities; freedom is understood as a capacity to fulfill one’s role within the whole.

These ancient stories did not deny conflict or suffering. They acknowledged the human capacity for violence and excess. But they placed such tendencies within a moral universe that demanded restraint and accountability. Power was legitimate only insofar as it served the continuity of life.

Over time, however, modernization brought the pressures of population growth, resource depletion, competition, and organized warfare gave increasing power to those who could mobilize violence and control. Divine kingships, priestly castes, and imperial armies shifted the center of gravity from local reciprocity to centralized authority. The gods merged and moved ever farther into the sky; the sacred became increasingly associated with a remote, transcendent all-powerful God; and the Earth itself gradually lost its status as a subject of reverence.

Still, the older sense of a living cosmos never disappeared. It survived in the teachings of prophets and poets, in monastic and mystical traditions, and in the practices of Indigenous peoples who resisted incorporation into empires. In every age there were those who insisted that the universe is more like a sacred story unfolding than a machine running down; that our lives have meaning deeper than that conferred by any God or existing human institution.

As we confront the crises of the 21st century, these ancient insights are returning to the foreground. But they are not simply being revived; they are being woven together with modern science into a new, more comprehensive story of reality, an integral spirit cosmology.

Read Part Two…