The 14-billion year evolutionary journey of the universe, and of us, and all of life, is the updated creation story for our transitional times, courtesy of many contributing disciplines of science. May this renewed identity as “cosmological beings” help guide our path forward. In his new book Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe, Brian Swimme traces his personal evolutionary journey with the deconstruction and reconstruction of his own worldview. We see and feel the impact and appeal of a “cold dead machine, of lifeless matter,” that is revealed instead as one replete with life; its evolutionary journey governs our own, collectively and individually, for “matter, in its very structure and dynamism, generates life”. in answer to that eternal question, are we alone? Brian’s mentor and collaborator, the late Thomas Berry noted, “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
Brian Swimme is co-founder and Director of the Center for the Story of the Universe and the Third Story of the Universe at Human Energy, a public benefit organization, and a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and host and co-creator of PBS’s Journey of the Universe. He returns on September 17 with Monica DeRaspe-Bolles, co-writer of The Story of the Noosphere, a series of short videos “exploring the ways humanity is building the nervous system of a super-organism.”