TWO SUITORS: A PARABLE     

     Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe. But for the purposes 
of this thought experiment, let us imagine that you are not the disenchanted 
mechanistic universe of convetional modern cosmology, but rather a 
deep-souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative 
intelligence. And imagine that you are being approached by two different 
epistemologies - two suitors, as it were, who seek to know you. To whom 
would you open your deepest secrets? To which approach would you be 
most likely to reveal your authentic nature? Would you open most deeply to 
the suitor - the epistemology, the way of knowing - who approached you as 
though you were essentially lacking in intelligence or purpose, as though you 
had no interior dimension to speak of, no spiritual capacity or value; who 
thus saw you as fundamentally inferior to himself (let us give the two suitors, 
not entirely arbitrarily, the traditional masculine gender); who related to you 
as though your existence were valuable primarily to the extent that he could 
develop and exploit your resources to satisfy his various needs; and whose 
motivation for knowing you was ultimately driven by a desire for increased 
intellectual mastery, predictive certainty, and efficient control over you for 
his own self-enhancement?     

     Or would you, the cosmos, open yourself most deeply to that suitors who 
viewed you as being at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as 
permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, 
as endowed with spiritual depths and mystery, as he? This suitor seeks to 
know you not that he might better exploit you but rather to unite with you and 
thereby bring forth something new, a creative synthesis emerging from both of 
your depths. He desires to liberate that which has been hidden by the 
separation between knower and known. His ultimate goal of knowledge is 
not increased mastery, prediction, and control but rather a more richly 
responsive and empowered participation in a co-creative unfolding of new 
realities. He seeks an intellectual fulfillment that is intimately linked with 
imaginative vision, moral transformation, empathic understanding, aesthetic 
delight. His act of knowledge is essentially an act of love and intelligence 
combined, of wonder as well as discernment, of opening to a process of 
mutual discovery. 
To whom would you be more likely to reveal your deepest truths?

     This is not to say that you, the universe, would reveal nothing to the first 
suitor, under the duress of his objectifying, disenchanting approach. That 
suitor would undoubtedly elicit, filter, and constellate a certain "reality" that 
he would naturally regard as authentic knowledge of the actual universe: 
objective knowledge, "the facts," as compared with the subjective delusions 
of everyone else's approach. But we might allow ourselves to doubt just 
how profound a truth, how genuinely reflective of the universe's deeper 
reality, this approach might be capable of providing. Such knowledge might 
prove to be deeply misleading. And if this disenchanted vision were elevated 
to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos 
upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, 
a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower 
and known.

RICHARD TARNAS, COSMOS AND PSYCHE.