The Awakening Universe

To tell the story of anything

is to tell the story of everything

Thomas Berry: We will be alienated from the universe until we have an adequate
story of the universe that tells the story of the human as well as the story of
everything else because it is part of the same ongoing process going thro a sequence
of transformative episodes.

Miriam: This idea of an emerging universe is very new. There is no culture, no

tradition, no sage, no prophet that could know what our generation is blessed to
know.

Tucker: When we begin to realise this tremendous sense of time that’s orienting us and
space that’s grounding us we are energized in a new way to take responsibility for the
planet and its eco-systems. In other words a response to the magnificence of cosmology
and the story is a responsibility to its continuity.

Swimme: The universe story shows how profoundly related we are. It shows that we
are involved with each other and have been for a long time. It is not that the earth was
assembled and then we were added to the earth and it was there for our purposes.
Rather, we came out of the earth.

Water, music

Commentary: For millions of years every morning on earth has dawned upon an earth of
greater biological diversity than the day before. In her endless journey around the sun our
sweet and generous earth has brought forth an ever increasing expression of complexity
and sophistication, of beauty and wonder.

Music

But now after eons of more and more, suddenly there is less and less. In a
geographical instant the vitality of our earth has plummeted. Every one of our vital life
systems is showing signs of a serious and precipitous decline, so serious that most
biologists now agree that we are in the midst of what they call of a mass extinction event.
The last time that happened was 65mill years ago when an asteroid ended the reign of the
dinosaur. Now the cause is an ‘us-teroid’. For it is the impact of human activity,
specifically industrialized, technological activity that is literally destroying our
planetary life support systems. Are we being alarmist, yes. Because the news is
alarming and alarms are meant to warn us of danger and to wake us up. It is time to ask
some serious questions like, what spell have we fallen under that would allow us to
destroy the very system upon which we rely for our own survival? And how do we break
that spell?
If we are going to find our way to a workable future, it might be wise to first go back to
the distant past. All the way back to what science currently views as the beginning of
everything.

Imagine nothing, not space, not darkness, not even a vast emptiness, but nothing.

Now imagine everything.

In a stupendous explosion of light heat and energy radiating out in every direction, the
universe erupted into existence 13.7 bill yrs ago.

Poet: We can see that everything that ever was, is or will be was compressed into a space
smaller than a seed, tinier than a tear, more miniscule than a molecule. All space, all time
and the potential for everything that would ever exist started as a single point and so also
everything that exists. So in a very real way science has discovered what indigenous
people have known all along. We are all one, we are connected, we all come from the
very same source.

Commentary: This massive fireball continued expanding eventually cooling enough for
the very first atoms to form.

Swimme: If the expansion were just a little slower the universe would have collapsed into
an enormous black hole. Or if the universe has expanded a little faster the universe would
have expanded just too fast for the galaxies to form and so we would have just dust. If we
altered the expansion of the universe just one millionth of 1%, the universe would have
collapsed. So what it suggests is that there is a profound Wisdom at work in the
universe

Commentary: Then in a cosmological wink of the eye a hundred billion galaxies swirled
into being.

Swimme: We didn’t know there were any galaxies in the universe 100 yrs ago. We
thought maybe there was just one. Now we realise there are a hundred billion. We are just
beginning to understand some of the dynamics of galaxies and to think that they actually
have intrinsically the intelligence or ordering power to bring forth all this elegance. The
galaxies themselves organize all this material and give birth to new stars. So when
scientists begin to look at the galaxies this way they realise they’re also something like a
living cell. That’s news! That’s another way of imagining our way into the universe

Commentary: And now these whirlpools of galactic creativity begin to fulfill their cosmic
destiny, as they each give birth to 100 billion stars
When these first stars reach the end of their life cycle they collapse in on themselves
and erupt into immense cosmic explosion, called supernovas
Poet: Thomas Berry refers to the supernova event as a cosmological moment of grace;
He calls it a great sacrificial moment because the death of the stars is what enables all
future life to develop. The supernova embodies, the process of death and rebirth, a
mythic moment .

Out of these clouds of stardust billion of second generation stars are born. One of them is
the star we call our sun and left over from the formation of the sun was a wisp of debris
which swirled itself into a necklace of 9 spinning planets, the jewel of which was the
swirling mass of molten larva that was to become our home, the earth.

Out here on a tiny planet suspended in perfect equipoise the force that set the galaxies
spinning, ignited the stars produced its next miracle, a universe within a universe. It was
the birth of life. Now this miraculous manifesting force began to clothe itself in biology,
expressing itself in increasing complex expressions of beauty and elegance.

Miriam: Earth as we see her now 5 billion years after that initial experience has arrived at
such a complexity, such a development, such a journey of that original fireball that she is
now alive in her own right. In other words the universe and earth has reached a
complexity in which earth has awakened into life and is alive.

Poet: Think about it! Everything that we see around us has developed from the boiling
cauldron of the early earth, a sphere of larva that miraculously gave rise to the sea and the
atmosphere and then life in its infinite expressions. As Brian Swimme says the earth was
once molten rock and now sings operas. All creativity and all consciousness arises in
some mysterious way from the depth of the earth itself

Commentary: Right into the heart of this immense celebration of biological creativity
the universe produced its next surprise, an upright tool-using primate with an opposable
thumb and a remarkable ability to reflect on its own existence, In essence after 14 billion
years the universe had created a way to become aware of itself.

Miriam: We are the universe reflecting on itself, the universe become conscious and
this changes everything.

Commentary: Human beings lived in harmony with nature for eons until they discovered
how to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. While most humans continued on in their
nomadic ways, some chose to settle in one place and in a mere 10 000 years they created
everything we now consider to be human history.

Many slides

Miriam: Why out of stardust has this come to be? Why birdsong, why green, why the
lushness of palm and the stability of cypress and the grandeur of the mountains, and why
the oceans with their billions of teeming life-forms? We are part of a journey so much
more than we can even imagine

Swimme: As we move into this new understanding we have a new identity of ourselves
as cosmological beings. Not just Americans, not just French, not just democrats, not any
small category. We are the universe in the form of the human and it’s true of everyone.
It’s an amazing new understanding of ourselves that is so profoundly inclusive and
everyone, everything is part of this. We discover as well a profound kinship that no
matter what being we are talking about on the planet, we are related; we are related in
terms of energy, in terms of genetics. We are all in one way or another, like a form of kin.
It’s overwhelming. This is just now coming into human awareness. It will take a lot of
reflection to embody this fully but it is a massive change in human consciousness.

Commentary: The universe arose and gave rise to the galaxies, the galaxies gave rise to
the stars, our sun gave rise to the earth and the earth gave rise to life and to all that we
are. And now it is causing us to awaken from our dream of lonely isolation so we may
rejoin the great community of life and take our part in this stupendous unfolding story. As
Thomas Berry says: this is our great work.