In praise of Brian Swimme

He can lead the way to deliver us from evil

Last week, in my summary of two years on Substack, where I’ve been a lone voice writing about how we-the-people can use our power to save ourselves in a world where the very existence of humanity is threatened, one major element was Brian Swimme supplying a new story of who we are and what we are doing here. When The Republic of Letters, here on Substack, asked, “What’s The Best Thing You Read In The Past Year?,” this is what I wrote about Brian’s book, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe, that’s an autobiographical account of the journey he took in getting tuned into what has been worshipped since the period of the great avatars and has new story elements thanks to scientific discoveries that need to be taken into account.

Here’s what I submitted:

To start with, in reporting about Brian Swimme’s civilization-changing book, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe, I took dictation from The Intelligence, a wise guide I occasionally consult with:

It was 2,500 years ago when religions that still hold sway formed around what some avatars understood. The period you are in now is as revolutionary as that one was, and this time Brian Swimme is your avatar. As Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.”

You are godlike creatures. That’s it. And you have technological skills where you are good enough at manipulating matter to be able to exterminate yourselves. That’s why the time is now for the new understanding, that you’ll get from Swimme, that would have you caring about each other as much as you care about yourselves.

We even may thank the orange man. You are blindly heading for a cliff, like those frogs in boiling water, and he has detonated your roadway so you can’t keep on it as is. He is the hands-down winner in a category of worst person in the world, and, in practicing the Christlike way, you can love him for forcing you to recreate the fundamental ways you operate your world.

From my ordinary state of consciousness, back to Cosmogenesis…

I was a rabble-rouser for a higher order of thinking, where war would be inconceivable, when I read Cosmogenesis – twice – and got a guidebook for a loving universe. Reading it you get the sense that you aren’t in the universe but you are the universe, that has designed us for magnificence, and how valuable this understanding is for the empowerment it gives us to deal with the peril we are in from what nature is delivering.

Now, where did information about humanity’s magnificence come from? Brian Swimme was born with a passion for understanding what the cosmos is up to, and in 1984 he wrote a brilliant book that reflected what was derived from discoveries that were made by the Hubble telescope in 1920. Hubble showed us that the universe is one living, evolving entity. The prevailing story of a fixed universe with Earth being here for our use, where we’re sinners needing redemption, does not fit with a universe that’s expanding and evolving, and The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story delivered an all-encompassing story of us in the evolution we are part of.

In Green Dragon, which is a dialogue between Youth and Thomas, a sage who answers Youth’s questions about life, Thomas is modeled after Thomas Berry. He is the real-life character in Cosmogenesis who inspired Swimme’s understanding about the magnificence of who we are as sacred creatures whose task is to evolve. Given that the possibility of humanity going extinct is a subject now, the most helpful thing we could do would be to get tuned into the implications that Cosmogenesis makes clear. If we think we are lowlifes struggling in an unchanging, indifferent universe we aren’t in the reality where we are the magnificent creation, that still is developing, of a 3.8-billion-year process of evolution. The beauty of Cosmogenesis is that the reader gets to that understanding by following Brian Swimme as he arrived at it. While telling the story of the storyteller, Swimme gives us the story of the universe that needs to become the creation story we all tell.

Here's our author, from Cosmogenesis:

“The axial age refers to the time twenty-five hundred years ago when some spectacular personalities came forth and established the spiritual forms of our major civilizations. Confucius, the Hebrew prophets, Lao-tzu, Pythagoras, Buddha. All of them in the same century. I believe we are in a similar moment. This new axial age will concern not just one region but the entire planet. A new form of mentality is emerging, one inaugurated by the discovery of cosmogenesis.”

“The greatest discovery of the last four hundred years is the time-developmental nature of our universe. Scientists have come to realize we live not in a cosmos but in a cosmogenesis, a universe developing from a primordial simple state into ever more complex states.”

“What does it matter to me if Mary gave birth to God thirteen hundred years ago if I do not give birth to God every day.”

“By granting humans the power to accumulate knowledge, the universe was bringing forth a planetary mind.”

“To be honest, it was not just that I had forgotten, I had tricked myself into thinking cosmology was the story of how things ‘out there’ evolved through time. But then I realized I was one of those things, that I was evolving, that I was as much a development of the universe as were stars and galaxies.”

“Cosmogenesis is certainly among the ten most significant ideas in human history. It dwarfs Copernicus’s discovery that the Sun is the center of the solar system.”

And here are some of the accolades about Cosmogenesis by reviewers:

“Swimme describes how the impact of this new story deconstructed his mind then reassembled it, offering us a glimpse into how cosmogenesis has transformed our understanding of both the universe and the evolution of human consciousness itself.” ––Counterpoint Press

"Cosmogenesis is the most clearly and convincingly told story of the origin of the universe I have ever read. But that’s not all that makes this an essential read. If humanity is to escape the stranglehold of the lonely, king-of-the-mountain materialism that licenses planetary destruction, it will be when we tell a new story about who we are and how we come to be in the universe expanding around and within us." ––Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising

"Cosmogenesis is one of the most remarkable stories of our time -- not simply a page turner, but a life changer. We follow Swimme’s journey of studying science as an academic field to embracing cosmology as a lived experience. In reading this you will be transformed as you enter into new ways of becoming alive in the universe." ––Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, author of The Philosophy of Qi

Enjoy some bonus material from my Brian Swimme collection:

• Playlist of Substacks where Brian is prominent

• My Substack on the publication of Cosmogenesis

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Here’s me in Substack Notes. I urge you to have a look at comments I’ve made to get immersed in the unique point of view I argue for.

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