A long time ago, Brian Swimme said this to me:
"You and I are pointed at the same thing – to create a raging forest fire of love, to sweep us forever out of this deadening sadness of egos and superficiality."
Hands down my favorite book is The Universe is a Green Dragon. And Brian Swimme is right up there, with my family, as a favorite person. After I devoured my copy, in the 1980s, it became the inspiration for my life. It gave me a picture of what humanity is all about so I could find my place, including appreciating the privilege of being human. That’s the winning attitude, appreciation, and when Brian Swimme expresses his he is so clear and compelling that you go on his ride.
When Hubble showed us we were in an expanding universe it required a different creation story. We’re not in a fixed cosmos on a dead planet, but since we are so interrelated with our complex gears all enmeshed it’s hard to change course in the direction a new story would give us where we’d care about each other as much as we care about ourselves.
Reading this is the reason for this post:
The Universe Is A Green Dragon
Reading the meaning in the cosmic story
In these excerpts from Green Dragon, you get its essences. However, every sentence in the book is a gem and after you digest the short version I don’t think I’d need to encourage you to get the whole book for a lot more pleasure ahead.
Reading the meaning in the cosmic story is still too long to cut and paste so please hit the link. Do the world a favor and read it. Get yourself initiated, if you aren’t already, into being aware that, “Our revolution in thinking dwarfs Copernicus’s announcement that the Earth travels around the Sun.” I think Brian Swimme could go down in history as a seminal figure and I feel so fortunate to have discovered this shortened version of Green Dragon so I could deliver a big piece of his enormous heart in a little package to you.
Here are some key thoughts:
This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence, and life. And all of this is new.
Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world.
The glory of the human is also the difficulty of the human. Precisely because we are able to feel such beauty, we are simultaneously vulnerable to the addiction of fanaticism in any of a million forms.
The way to break an addiction is to break out of a limited world view. Break out of egocentricity. Break out of ethnocentricity. Break out of anthropocentricity. Take the viewpoint of the Earth as a whole.
If you go on the secondary market to buy it and don’t find Green Dragon books at a great price it’s because I’ve bought them all. I’ve lost count but I’m past 2,000 of them, where I keep a stash to give to nears and dears and as tips to delivery people. (Here’s a tip for you. All books on the used market are on https://bookfinder.com.)
After you read Green Dragon, get Brian’s new book, Cosmogenesis, which is the bookend for it. Green Dragon is “the story” and Cosmogenesis is Brian discovering the story. Here’s a post where I read the last few paragraphs of Cosmogenesis that’s “a brilliant evocation of the understanding that will shift us into the world we want to be in.”
Have I mentioned how good it would be if you all read Reading the meaning in the cosmic story? Seriously. Let’s us be a thinking unit that’s contributing to the noosphere, the thinking layer of Earth that’s being fleshed out now!
With most subscribers being carried over here from when I was using Constant Contact and not being familiar with the Substack world, I get direct replies to each post that I’d prefer to get here so we can have the conversations I’ve been trying to generate. It’s simple to sign up. First-timers to Substack will need to create an account.
He is a true inspiration and visionary. And so are you. Adonnah
Wow. That really really resonated with you. Amazing. What is needed is not only a new story, but how it is read and shared. And clearly you read it and your sharing of it is vibrant!