The Universe is the Word

"Listen to this. Space and time shoot out from a point. In a matter of seconds, a universe is formed. It expands and expands. It slows down, it speeds up. And then, in some remote corner, it drops a speck of consciousness. It spills a little subjectivity. A touch of soul. Weird, eh?" (from The Story of Everything, Chap. 25)

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme was working his way through a Greek salad when Thomas Berry suddenly said, "You scientists have this stupendous story of the universe. It breaks outside all previous cosmologies. But so long as you persist in understanding it solely from a quantitative mode you fail to appreciate its significance. You fail to hear its music."

An ear for the music led to a long collaboration between Swimme, now 58, and Berry, 94. Swimme established the Center for the Story of the Universe in California and the two co-authored The Universe Story in 1992. That's what the New Story was now called.

According to the authors, no book tells this story. No humans do. The text is nature itself. We are to read what's being said "by the galaxies, by the birds, by the Earth, by the winds, by the stellar explosions, by the fossils, by the rising and falling of mountain ranges, by the children of every species." These make up the Word.

Nature's text tells us that the cosmos has unfolded. From its original "flaring forth" it has gone through a series of stunning transformations, leaving atoms in its wake, then galaxies and stars and solar systems, then living cells and thinking selves. Each of these emergences was a decisive moment in the story. By reasons of its significance (look what it led to!), each was also a spiritual moment.

The unfolding had direction, "intention" even. It seems to have "aimed," for example, at greater differentiation. It's produced many different notes from a single one, all manner of Matter and Life from a hot and homogenous soup. Atoms and asteroids and ants, zebras and zucchini and Zen. It has related these different notes to each other. Atoms to atoms, zebras to zebras, cells to cells, selves to selves, you to me. The relationships, say Swimme and Berry, are based on attraction. They represent a kind of communion.

Selves like you and I illustrate a third direction of the unfolding: autopoiesis and subjectivity. Things in the universe organize themselves. Relate enough notes to each other and you get a melody. Increase the complexity and you get a symphony. The notes in the universe do it on their own. The more complex something gets, the more of an interior it develops--the more of a self, the more consciousness. In a human brain (the most complex object there is), a symphony isn't simply notes registering. It is an inner depth of subjective feeling.

Words like "communion," "self," and "subjectivity" are not standard cosmological fare. They are echoes of the music Berry once heard in a meadow. They are the stuff of spirit, not science. And it will take both, say the authors--science and spirit--to save our planet from the "technozoic" crisis that is leading to its devastation. An "ecozoic" vision is needed, a single story that tells of the universe as "a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects." Swimme and Berry ask us to reset priorities: "The well-being of the Earth is primary. Human well-being is secondary."

P.S. A scientific take on the direction of the universe appeared in the June issue of Scientific American--here. Keep your eye out next year for Brian Swimme's documentary film called Journey of the Universe. Next week I'll tell you about the pastor, the atheist, and the Great Story.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

What Happened in the Meadow

"I think I know," she said. "When the dust was ready, Spirit . . . like . . . breathed into it." "But how did Spirit get there?"

"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)
 

Up until now I've been distinguishing Old and New Stories by asking how they begin. With an eternal Spirit, who creates Matter and Life? Or with Matter, from which emerge Life and Spirit?

In the New Story Spirit comes at the end. But therein lies a conundrum. Shouldn't something that emerges late in a development be present in what comes early--as a potential, say, or a seed? Hearing the New Story, a girl named Dawn concludes that Spirit was always in the cosmos. It was simply waiting to appear. Philosopher Friedrich Schelling thought of Spirit as "slumbering" in nature, only to awaken in mind and finally realize itself as Spirit.

There exists today a kindred cosmology. It's been called the New Story or the Universe Story or the Great Story. The names are interchangeable. As part of an organized movement, this cosmology seeks to redeem our ecological crisis. Spirit is inherent in Matter, it says; the universe has been sacred from its inception.

You can trace this cosmology back to North Carolina, where an 11-year-old boy crossed a creek into a beautiful meadow he had never seen before. A "magic moment" there (it seems to have been a mystical experience) proved decisive. He left with a simple idea that he carried for life. "Whatever fosters this meadow is good. What does harm to this meadow is not good." The year was 1925, and the boy's name was William Berry.

William changed his name when he entered the Passionist order of Catholic priests nine years later. He became Thomas in honor of Thomas Aquinas. After his ordination, he embarked on a remarkable education. First, a doctorate in western intellectual history, then a trip to China. He began teaching Asian religions in the United States and wrote books on Buddhism (1966) and the Religions of India (1971). Confucianism stood out for him because it expressed an "intimate relationship between the cosmic and the human." To the Chinese, he said, the human being is the "understanding heart" (hsin) of the entire universe.

Berry also developed an empathy for small indigenous religions and published a number of articles on native Americans. He found in these traditions a deep reverence for the land and all that lived on it, and a recognition of our dependency on it. Native people were a link to the meadow.

But the world had lost that link, and so at the age of 64 Berry called for a New Story of the cosmos. He published his summons in 1978 as the opening essay in a series on the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It later became a Sierra Club book called The Dream of the Earth (1988). Evolution, said Teilhard and Berry, was not just a condition of life on earth; it was a condition of the universe. The cosmos isn't static and neither are we. Rather, we are part of a living, breathing cosmogenesis, sacred from the beginning, Spirit lying in wait.

Next week I'll tell you more about Berry's New Story and how it became the Universe Story. But right now the sun is shining outside my window, and I'm thinking it's time to find myself a meadow . . . and wait. Berry's was covered with thick grass and white lilies. Crickets were singing on that decisive day, woods were swaying gently in the distance, clouds floating across a clear blue sky. Says Berry, "It was a wonder world that I have carried in my unconscious and that has evolved all of my thinking." Something happened there.

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