A Call for an Earth-Honoring Worldview

by Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD, Visiting Scholar to The New School at Commonweal

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On June 9^th, 2025, I arrived at Commonweal as The New School’s first visiting scholar. It was an honor to be there, and to be given time to know more about the remarkable transformative work I had heard about for decades.

As I drove north—a trip through memory lane of 11 years of having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Southern California—I considered the question I brought: What would be needed for assembling a healing, humane, and Earth-honoring worldview for our difficult time?

Although we don’t talk much about worldviews, their influence is immense. Whether personal or collective, a worldview is our guiding story about who we are, norms and values, goals and traditions; about where we belong, why we are here, and on what sort of planet in the cosmic depths.

In some ways, “worldview” is a modern coinage (by the philosopher Kant) for “mythology.” Kant’s word was weltanschauung: literally, “world” + “view.” How do we grasp the whole of being? We can’t, but we can tell big stories about it. The wisest among us remember that these stories are working fictions, not absolute truths.

One such story is that technology will save the world—pesticides, habitat destruction, and nuclear bombs aside. Another story is that returning to traditional religion will save our souls; never mind that the largest “religious” group in the United States, the “spiritual but not religious,” has been swelling for decades. According to yet another story, we will all be better off—especially men—if a political father figure makes all the big decisions for us.

Worldview sorting is no mental game. Our failing worldviews are damaging us and wrecking our world. In my initial Commonweal presentation “Land All Around Us: Using Imagination as a Tool of Wisdom and Transformation,” I suggested that we might need some kind of worldview therapy or healing. Michael Lerner distinguishes between cure and healing. When we cure an infirmity we eradicate it: nice when possible, but often not. Healing has more to do with moving toward wholeness, even in the midst of dying.

Part of this cultural healing could be collaboration on anew worldview adequate for today. Where is the call for it?

Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and other important scholars have discussed the need for a new Big Story rooted in ecology and modern cosmology. Surely, the findings of these disciplines must be part of any workable worldview.

However, there are problems. One is the question of who gets to tell the Big Story. In the West/Global North, Christianity was purportedly the former Big Story, but it never came close to including everyone. Today in the United States, clergy are resigning or refusing to call themselves Christians any longer because the open-hearted Christianity they grew up in has mutated. Grand narratives imposed from above always marginalize.

Another problem comes with absolute belief. If your hard-held beliefs and mine collide, whatever their content, we inevitably collide, even violently. Belief also has a way of diminishing curiosity. As Frank Herbert wrote in his Dune novels, “The mind of the believer stagnates” when inquiry succumbs to authority. The already certain can’t learn. A worldview based on belief or the striving for certainty invites divisiveness while crushing symbols and metaphors, intuitions, and felt meanings under the wheels of an unforgiving literal-mindedness.

A third problem has to do with an absence found in both patriarchal religion and its stern offspring, scientism. Where is the voice of the land and its other-than-human creatures? Where is the invitation into the Great Conversation with these beings? A worldview that fails to ask such questions suffers from anthropocentrism, a condition that ecopsychologist Jeanine Canty compares to cultural narcissism in her book Returning the Self to Nature.

As depth psychologist Susan Grelock-Yusem and I discussed during “Dreaming the Soul of the Earth: Re-imagination as a Remedy for OurTimes,” we usually think of the land as a backdrop to human affairs. By contrast, places and their creatures show up in ancient tales as vital characters in the story. What do hills and fields say? Streams and rivers? Geology? How do all these and other eco-presences show up in our moods, our struggles, even in our dreams? And what are our tools, homes, and roads trying to tell us?

As a founder of terrapsychology, the study of how the things of the world live in us, I’m interested in how imagination, story, and creativity let us tune in on all this. Imaginative modes of consciousness allow us to perceive places, beings, buildings, and the elements, normally considered mute objects, as speaking presences. They live within us even as we partner with them every day.

These world-populating presences often appear spontaneously as imaginal figures and characters who address us in fantasy, fiction, symptom, and dream. In Restorying Our Lore, the dissertation for my second PhD, I traced a tradition of “imagiknowing”—using imagination as a tool of wisdom and transformation—from ancient Egypt onward. When we work with dreams, when we explore the symbolism in our symptoms, when we as authors talk with “our”characters, we enter what my own fiction calls the Dream vale, the realm of living imaginal presences. They have a lot to say that the conscious mind knows nothing about.

How might imagiknowing, the stories and wisdoms it gives rise to, and tending the living presence of place help assemble a worldview that centers Earth, humaneness, justice, equity, reenchantment, participation, and imagination?

When employed this way, imagination works as a rainbow bridge joining dimensions of experience we normally hold as separate: self and world, higher and lower, fictional and real, past and future. The lore we create can fuel new guiding stories for how to live with ourselves and one another on our troubled but still beautiful home world. Perhaps this kind of “loreology” or “worldview therapy” could help build a mythology for our time.

Commonweal is a natural choice of partner for such explorations. It serves as an Earth-honoring hub for visionaries and diverse voices, all concerned with how to heal our world and ourselves with it. Commonweal recognizes that making good change depends on building good relationships. The lone hero-genius model of change is outdated and never worked well to begin with. We are the cavalry.

Let’s replace those tiresome hero-driven stories with the three principles that inform the work at Commonweal: kindness of heart, consciousness of mind, and dedication to service.

We might also consider what a new kind of creative, visionary, and reflective change agent for our time might be like. Not everyone is called to the activist path, yet all of us can respond deeply to what our time asks of us. What sort of Pronoianwisdom—the wisdom in our skills, practices, healings, and deep probings—wants to be shared?

Here are two more questions to sit with:

• How am I called to respond deeply and soulfully to our turbulent time?
• Might that response include joining others to weave into being a new worldview? What a creative and reenchanting community that would be.

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Craig Chalquist, Ph.D.,Ph.D. is program director of Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation at National University. He presents, publishes, and teaches at the intersection of psyche, story, nature, reenchantment, and imagination, including the book Terrapsychological Inquiry, the Animate California Trilogy, and the hopeful Lamplighter Trilogy. Visit Chalquist.com.

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