Integral ecology
Finally, the fourth, Integral Ecology comes form a new vision of the Earth. It is a vision that we inaugurated by the astronauts during the 1960’s when they were launched in the first manned rockets. They saw the Earth from outside the Earth. From there, their spaceship or the moon, as many of them testified, the Earth looks like a resplendent blue and white planet that fits in the palm of a hand or can be hidden by a human thumb.

From that perspective, the Earth and human beings emerge as a single entity. The human being is the Earth itself when one feels, thinks, loves, cries and worships. The Earth emerges as the third planet from a sun, only one among 100 billion in our galaxy, which in turn is one among 100 billion in our universe, a universe which could possibly be only one among millions of others which are parallel or diverse from our own. However, all of this came together with such precision as to permit our existence here and now. If it were not so, we would not be here. Cosmologists from the areas of astrophysics, quantum physics, molecular biology, in short, all of the Earthly sciences, advise us that the entire universe is in ‘cosmogenesis.’ This means that it is in genesis, being born and constituting itself, forming an open system, always capable of new acquisitions and new expressions. Therefore, no one is ‘ready.’ For this reason we must be patient with the global process, one with another and with ourselves because we humans are equally in a process of anthropogenesis in constitution and birth.

Three great phases of emergence happen in cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis: (1) Complexity and differentiation, (2) Self-organization and consciousness, (3) Reconnection and relation of all to all. From its very first moment, after the Big Bang, evolution has been creating more and more different and complex beings (1). The more complex they are the more they self organize, and the more they show their interior nature and posses more and more levels of consciousness (2) to the point of arriving at human self-consciousness. The universe, then, as a whole possesses spiritual depth. To be within the human, the spirit existed before the universe. Now it has emerged in us in the form of self-consciousness and the ability to love. The more complex and conscious one becomes the more one relates and reconnects (3) with all things making it so that the universe really becomes a “uni-verse,” an organic, dynamic, diverse, tense and harmonic totality, a cosmos and not a chaos.

The four existent interactions, the gravitational, the electromagnetic, and the weak and strong nuclear, constitute the principle directors of the universe and all beings, including human beings. The furthest galaxy finds itself within the influence of these four primordial energies, just like the ant that walks across my table and the neurons of the human brain with which I make these reflections. Everything remains reconnected in an open, dynamic equilibrium passing though the chaos, which is ever generative, because it favors new, an ever higher and more complex equilibrium, bringing forth order, rich in potentiality.