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“The earth was once molten rock and now sings operas.”
Brian Swimme
“Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun.”
Brian Swimme, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era--A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos
“It was out of the dynamic of cosmic celebration that we were created in the first place. We are to become celebration and generosity, burst into self-awareness. What is the human? The human is a space, an opening, where the universe celebrates its existence.”
Brian Swimme, The Universe Is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story
“the universe began fourteen billion years ago with the emergence of elementary particles in the form of primordial plasma, which quickly morphed into atoms of hydrogen, helium, and lithium; a hundred million years later, galaxies began to appear, and in one of these, the Milky Way, minerals arranged themselves into living cells that constructed advanced life, including evergreen trees, coral reefs, and the vertebrate nervous systems that humans used to discover this entire sequence of universe development.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“In a culture in which cosmology is alive, children are taught by the Sun and Moon, by the rainfall and the starlight, by the salmon run and the germinating seed.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story
“The challenge of our time is to develop an imagination that can see beyond the chaos to the creative processes at play in our world. A different form of humanity is coming forth, one that seeks to live in harmony with the entire Earth community.”
Brian Swimme, The Story of the Noosphere
“attracted the rock’?” I asked. “The rock and Earth together create the attraction, yes. Attraction is the universe acting.” “Acting?” “Yes. The universe itself is the source of this attraction,” he said. “The universe is like a person?” “No.” With some irritation, he shook his head. “What I’m saying is not complex. Bring to mind all that the universe has assembled. That activity on the part of atoms and stars and galaxies didn’t just happen. It was brought about. The rock and Earth are attracted to one another because they find themselves in a field of attraction that they—and the universe—give birth to.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“Astonished by this emergence of symbolic consciousness, these early humans invented rituals with singing and dancing”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“We have been separating like this for billions of years. Now, for the first time, this is noticed by someone on Earth. You. You can now think the universe. You alone know that all of us, all the millions of galaxies you can see and all the billions you cannot see, all of us have been rushing apart since the beginning of time.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“But the rock’s existence was outside of the reach of the theory.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“of his travels. I knew something had taken place. Not until weeks later did he tell me about meeting you.” “He senses the presence of a one-time event,” John said. “One of your ‘windows of creativity’ is opening. All the elements are here now. Riverdale Center with its community of brilliant seekers has become the womb for a new vision. We don’t have a name for it yet, but that will come.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation with the universe?” Something inside me came alive when I read this. Something personal. Couldn’t we find our way to an original cosmology?”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“For those few instants, I had become a node where the mathematical equations of the beginning became aware of themselves.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“The instability of the beginning. What it really means is that we are deeply enmeshed in that moment. The slightest alteration of the initial dynamics and the whole thing blows up. Or collapses.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“When Margaret decides to shape her energy into becoming a lawyer, the fireball and the galaxies and the living cells are all there, holding this region of the universe steady so that a new potency can be actualized. Thus it is that we can say, with full accuracy, that the universe intends to become a lawyer in the particular form called Margaret. Margaret’s own intentions are the last in a long line of intentions going back to the beginning of time.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“we were able to listen to the story these ancient photons tell. “That’s why mathematics exists,” I said. “And philosophy. And ideas in general. Ideas are how humanity evolves. The ideas of mathematical science enable us to discover the universe, which leads to change. It’s exactly what happened with Copernicus. Think of how different contemporary humans are compared to what was going on in the Middle Ages. All of that came from discovering that Earth was a planet spinning around the Sun. “It’s the”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“Particularly remarkable was the delicacy Hawking discovered. The size of a perturbation that would lead to these drastically different outcomes needs to be only one part in ten raised to the sixtieth.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“relativity physics”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“filling page after page with equations, not bothering to prove any of the transitions but simply articulating how I intuited things might go. Later on I could return and see if my guesses could be proven mathematically. For now, it was all intuitive hunches.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“Sitting next to me in the smoke of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness was Emerson’s great-granddaughter, now carrying forward his work.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“The songs of galaxies the farthest away were singing in the lowest octaves. He, and he alone, was experiencing this. Because the universe is expanding. He must have repeated that phrase over and over. He repeated it over and over because he was torn in two different”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“twenty-five hundred years ago.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“wrote: “The mathematical structure of the cosmic microwave background.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“We don’t need to. It’s happening. But we can join this movement in a deeper way by reflecting on our experiences of the universe at work in us. The memories begin to surface as soon as we ask the question.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“claimed that by the early nineteenth century, only three major areas on Earth had escaped significant contact with Western civilization: the immense tropical forests of central Africa, the vast plain of Mongolia, and the mountains and rivers of the Pacific Northwest of”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“New human experiences led to the transformations of humanity. In our situation today, this would mean direct experience of a developing universe.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“To take this in, you need to ride inside the mathematical symbols.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“Nature for most theologians is only a philosophical concept. They are not speaking of gravity, or natural selection, or the strong nuclear interaction, or any of the other major discoveries scientists have made concerning the universe.”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“That colossal sphere transformed itself into the stars and galaxies and everything else in the known universe.” I came to my answer to Oona’s question. “As this sphere moves forward in time, it evolves under the action of expansion and contraction. That is, as the sphere continues to expand, particular subsets are pulled together via the attraction of gravity. This dual action of expansion and contraction set in motion the creativity that has given rise to every existing entity in the universe. “If you want to know the meaning of life, look at your hand. Energy flows through your skin and bones without which you would freeze to stone. That flow of energy in your hand came from the beginning of time. Your hand grew out of the colossal sphere like a flower rising up from topsoil. No one in the history of humanity knew that the expansion and contraction of the universe transformed primal atoms into stars and galaxies. Nor did any person know the quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity that govern this sphere of”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“The great breakthrough of Einstein’s work is his assertion that gravitational attraction comes not as an external law imposed on the universe but from the objects themselves. Though the mathematical equations are complex, the interpretation is straightforward. Space is imagined as malleable, and matter is pictured as having the power to bend, dent, and curve space. A two-dimensional analogy would be a vast plain made of a rubbery material upon which various objects like stars and galaxies rested. A single star would make a dent in the rubber surface, a single galaxy would make a deeper dent, and a cluster of galaxies would make an even deeper dent in this imagined surface. In this way each of these objects was a creator of gravity. Einstein’s theory asserts that objects move along geodesic pathways that are determined by the curvature of this rubbery surface. If a rolling marble happens upon a dent in the surface, it will roll downhill toward whatever is causing the dent. If the marble happens to be moving quickly, it will slide toward the bottom of the dent but will have enough speed to carry it up and out of the indentation. Applied to my situation there at the lip of the Fraser River in British Columbia, my rock was sliding down to Earth because of the dent Earth made in the rubbery fabric of four-dimensional space-time. This cosmological dynamic received a succinct summary by John Archibald Wheeler, one of the main developers of Einstein’s theory, who said, “Matter tells space-time how to curve and curved space-time tells matter how to move.” The precision of prediction is astonishing. By plugging into Einstein’s field equations the values for the mass of my rock and of Earth, one can predict with highest accuracy the pathway the rock travels when released. Einstein’s work holds not only for the movements of rocks dropped on Earth, but for planets revolving around the Sun, for the Sun revolving around the Milky Way galaxy, for the Milky Way pinwheeling about Andromeda, and for the Virgo supercluster of galaxies soaring through”
Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

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