The Awakening Universe Colleen

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.