Brian Swimme and the Cosmic Story
Almost every culture has a story of how the world began. There is the Babylonian tale of the sea goddess torn in two to make heaven and earth, the Genesis account of the seven days, the Hindu hymn that asks whether even the gods know how it all happened.
In the last century, science has given us a story of its own. It tells us that about 13.8 billion years ago, space and time began to expand from an extremely hot, dense state. It tells us that the first atoms formed, that stars burned and exploded and made the heavier elements, and that those elements became planets and eventually living things.
The question some thinkers have asked is whether this story, which belongs to all of us, can also be a story we live by.
A Cosmologist with a Mission
Brian Swimme is an American mathematical cosmologist who has spent his career trying to answer that question. He earned his doctorate in gravitational dynamics at the University of Oregon in 1978 and went on to teach at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Early on, he met a Catholic priest and cultural historian, Thomas Berry (1914–2009), who called himself a "geologian," a student of the Earth. The two became collaborators.
Swimme's first popular book was The Universe Is a Green Dragon (1984). Together with Berry, he wrote The Universe Story (1992), whose subtitle names its theme: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era. Later came The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (1996) and, with the scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (2011), which was also made into a film.
The Flaring Forth
Swimme's phrase for the Big Bang is the "primordial flaring forth." It is a poetic expression, and it also carries a useful correction. The Big Bang was not an explosion in a pre-existing space, like a firecracker in a room.
It was the expansion of space itself, and it continues today. Swimme's way of telling the story tries to convey the sense of wonder and scale that the numbers leave out.
His tale moves through the formation of galaxies, the birth of the Sun, the beginnings of life on Earth and the rise of human awareness. The theme is that the universe has a history, a story that unfolds over time, and not just a set of laws.
Three Principles
In their book, Swimme and Berry propose that three tendencies show themselves at every stage of this history. They call them differentiation, subjectivity and communion.
- Differentiation is the tendency toward diversity. The cosmos does not make one kind of thing but endlessly many: elements, stars, species.
- Subjectivity is the inner dimension of things. Every being, they say, has an interior, and in living creatures this becomes feeling and, in humans, reflection.
- Communion is the tendency toward connection. Everything is related to everything else, from the pull of gravity to the web of an ecosystem.
These are philosophical proposals, not results of physics. They are ways of reading the story and not statements that can be tested.
The Universe Becoming Aware
One of Swimme's best-known themes is that human beings are the means by which the universe reflects on itself. The thought is not new. The astronomer Carl Sagan expressed a similar sentiment in the 1980 television series Cosmos, when he said that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
In Swimme's version, the stress is on meaning and responsibility: if we come from the universe, then our awareness and our care for the Earth are the universe's own.
The connection to ecology is strong. Berry called for a new era, the "Ecozoic," in which human beings live in a mutually beneficial relationship with the Earth, and Swimme has taken up the call.
Questions and Limits
The work has its critics. Some scientists object that attributing a direction, inner life or purpose to the cosmos goes beyond the evidence. Science describes how the universe has changed, they say, but it does not tell us that it aims at anything. Others find the language of sacredness vague, or think that a single shared story ignores the differences between cultures and their own creation accounts.
Supporters answer that Swimme does not claim to be doing physics. He is doing something closer to philosophy and storytelling, offering a frame in which the findings of science can have human meaning. It is wise to hold both views: to enjoy the story and to remember which parts come from observation and which from interpretation.
Closing
For most of history, people have found their place by looking at the sky and telling stories about it. The story told by modern cosmology is stranger than any ancient myth, and it happens to be, as far as we can tell, true in outline.
Swimme's invitation is to let it work on us as myths once did, and to feel, on a clear night, that the light we see is part of a long tale in which we also have a role.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Teilhard de Chardin and the Omega Point
- Lynn Margulis and the Symbiotic Earth: The Hermetic Gaia
- Arthur Koestler and the Roots of Coincidence
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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