Reading Brian Swimme’s book Cosmogenesis resembles how I imagine it feels to ride a rocket into outer space. Liftoff happens slowly, but as the ship gains momentum, gravity recedes and the thrill of the journey takes over. My advice to readers: Be patient, then savor the sweet ride you’re about to experience.
A morning in 2008 I was awakened in St. Louis by aftershocks from an earthquake in New Madrid, Missouri. I see and recognize how this has been a pathway to my journey into living in the Ecozoic Age.
When I first picked up Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe by Brian Thomas Swimme I knew I was in for a treat. As a master of story, Brian brings a perspective to science that makes it a joy to consume and easy to digest and leaves the reader deeply nourished.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Personal and Profound
A Poem
Modern science began with the myth of the machine. In only a few centuries, this worldview completely transformed the world, empowering our species to become a geological force on par with asteroids and ice ages. If Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry are right, science, through the insights derived from its own methods, has now entirely outgrown this mechanistic image of the cosmos.
Brian Thomas Swimme’s new book Cosmogenesis takes the insights of The Universe Story to a new level, providing a demonstration of the experience of cosmogenesis through a series of beautifully told personal stories. What emerges from these is an understanding of what scientists have come to realize: We live not in a fixed cosmos but in a cosmogenesis.
In Brian Swimme’s Cosmogenesis, Thomas Berry in conversation with Brian states:
“Come to understand you are not a scientist. You are not an American. You are not male. You are not even primarily a human. First and foremost you are a cosmological being.”
“Which means I’m . . . ?” Brian hesitated.
“The universe. In the mode of a human.”
Cosmogenesis is a true gift of a book! I say this for many reasons. I loved reading about Brian’s personal journey in the early years and was amazed at the similarities between his path since his first visit to the Chinook Learning Community (now the Whidbey Institute), and mine.
This review actually begins with one of Professor Swimme’s prior books, The Universe Story (1992), co-authored with Thomas Berry. I read that epochal reorientation of cosmic presentation for one of my classes at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and then wrote a review similar to this one.
A Poem
Cosmogenesis is the bold and visionary articulation of the new story whereby cosmos becomes cosmogenesis, the static becomes dynamic, the fixed becomes evolutionary in a process of development through time. As Brian’s mentor Thomas Berry proposed, the universe itself is the primordial revelation, and it has brought forth such sentient and intelligent beings as ourselves who are capable of knowing and of relationality with and within that same universe.
The necessary starting point for my engagement with your story of the universe and your powerful inclusion of yourself as image, exemplar, creation, witness, and agent of the universe that formed and called you is speaking to the most important thing that I believe we share in common. I have taken to calling it “the cosmic sense of life.”
Not since Augustine’s Confessions has a single volume captured such a momentous shift in the evolution of consciousness. This is not only an engaging memoir of a leading cosmologist, but an autobiographical coming of age story of the cosmos itself. It’s a new Confessions for the Ecozoic era.
A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. I sat in Visio Divina contemplative practice with this image and wrote this cosmic psalm.
On the day that I received the invitation to participate in this publication, I read of the successful launching of the Euclid telescope on a mission to make an immense 3D map of the cosmos to better understand dark matter and dark energy. It was reported that researchers know virtually nothing about these phenomena, which appear to control the structure and expansion of the universe.
Brian Swimme’s new book Cosmogenesis is of major importance in the emerging work of the Whidbey Institute. It revives vivid memories of Thomas Berry who taught here. It reminds us again that the universe itself is primary for understanding what human beings do next to secure our future. What is especially great about Cosmogenesis is Brian’s passion. He wants us to see what he sees, and to sense with him how great the mystery of our universe is.
We sometimes associate our deepest knowledge of nature with Indigenous sensibilities and wisdom. Ancient people experienced, and many Indigenous people today experience, intimacy with nature, a mysterious abiding cosmic presence in all, and that Earth in all its dimensions is alive. The “New Story,” is however, not only these sensibilities and understandings