Brian Swimme (born 1952) is a mathematical cosmologist, professor in the Department of Cosmology, Philosophy, and Consciousness at the California Institute for Integral Studies, and director of the Center for the Story of the Universe. He studied mathematical cosmology at the University of Oregon and worked at the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in New York, where his teacher and mentor was the theologian and cosmologist Thomas Berry, who introduced him to the Teilhardian philosophical and cosmological tradition. Swimme and Berry co-authored The Universe Story (1992), a seminal work in the "new story" evolutionary cosmology, of which Brian Swimme is now the chief spokesman. Swimme is the author of The Universe Is a Green Dragon (1984), The Hidden Hearth of Cosmos (1996), and co-wrote the screenplay (with Mary Evelyn Tucker) for the documentary film Journey of the Universe (2010). This text is an excerpt from Brian Swimme's book The Hidden Hearth of Cosmos / Humanity and The New Story. Orbis Books, New York 1996, pp. 38-42; translated by Jiří Zemánek.
“Human nobility is possible only because at the center of the solar system, the magnificent generosity of the star pours out free energy day and night, without ceasing, without difficulty, without the slightest hesitation. That is the way of the universe. That is the way of life. That is the way in which each of us connects to this cosmological family tree, accepting the gift of energy from the Sun and transforming it into creative action that allows our community to flourish.”
"The beautiful living Earth is propelled like a feather by light around the immense roaring bounty of the Sun."
Brian Swimme
Some researchers, and even otherwise respected scientists, make the mistake of claiming that 20th-century science has proven Copernicus wrong. Not that the medieval geocentric model of the universe is correct; rather, both models—the geocentric model and Copernican heliocentric model—are wrong. The argument for this is as follows: Copernicus believed that the Sun was the center of the universe, but we now know that the Sun is just one of trillions of stars in the universe, none of which are qualitatively different from the others. So Copernicus’s view cannot be correct.
This argument is certainly sound on the surface, for it is certainly true that Copernicus had no idea how vast the universe was. The data at his disposal limited his thinking to a much smaller cosmos, and he would doubtless have been astonished to learn the dimensions of the universe with which we are concerned today. But a still more important thing, which has completely disappeared from our attention as a result of this line of reasoning, is that Copernicus discovered that The Sun is the center of the dynamics of our solar system. Nothing we have learned about the universe since Copernicus' death has changed this truth in the slightest. (…)
Five centuries after the death of Copernicus, our continued meditation on the universe has led us to a still deeper understanding of the significance of the way in which the Sun is situated at the center of our solar system. We have already touched on this question when we mentioned the dimensions of the Sun. The Earth represents only a tiny fraction of the Sun's mass—a mere millionth of its volume. The Earth and the other planets are but fragile clouds floating silently through space, bathed in the radiance of our star. People with a cosmological education should internalize this truth and should feel it directly, both physically and imaginatively.
However, this discovery has to do with energy. Through a detailed understanding of atomic and nuclear physics, we have learned something never before suspected, even by the greatest thinkers in all of human history, including Copernicus himself, Galileo, Aristotle, Confucius, and Plato, and all the others. Every second the sun transforms four million tons of itself into light. Every second a huge chunk of the sun disappears and is transformed into radiant energy that surges in all directions into space. You may have watched a candle burn out or seen a tree consumed by flames that left only ashes behind; yet nothing in our human experience can compare to this supernatural radiance that daily consumes an ocean of matter.
The ancient Greeks expressed their deepest truths through poetry and myth, and in this way they have bequeathed to us the stories of Apollo and Hephaestus, Aphrodite and Athena, or Zeus. If we were at the same level of human consciousness, such myths would allow us, as they did to the Greeks, to enter into a rich relationship with the forces of the universe. But today these myths no longer have this effect on us. Precisely because these stories are no longer literally true in their description of the universe, psychologists like CG Jung and others have freed them from the rubble of history and are explaining their psychological meaning to us today. We are therefore condemned by our scientific knowledge to understand these stories as truly “myths,” that is, as fictions, as clever ways in which we can internalize certain psychological truths.
So when we approach the reality of the massive transformation of the Sun into energy we find ourselves in an almost insoluble situation. We have no myth or poetry to enable us to grasp this transformation. (…) This wasteful and monstrous discharge of energy is so foreign and alien to us. Whatever it is, it is infinitely remote from us. It is yet another hostile truth about an inhuman universe, and we are, as a result, unknowingly committing the modern misfortune of closing ourselves off from the universe. But there is another gateway through which the cosmological imagination is directed towards a new synthesis of science and religion. In the case of the Sun we have a new understanding of the cosmological meaning of sacrifice. The Sun is giving itself up every second to become the energy that we eat with every meal. We rarely think about this fundamental truth of biology, and yet its spiritual significance is supreme. The sun is transformed into a stream of energy, which, through photosynthesis, is transformed into plants, which are consumed by animals. This means that for four million years people have been feasting on the sun's energy stored in the form of grain, corn or reindeer, while the sun died every day as the sun and was reborn as vitality, as the life of the earth. So these solar flares are in fact the very energy of the great human initiative. And each of our children must learn the simple truth that they are the energy of the sun. And we adults should organize our affairs so that the faces of our children shine with the same dazzling joy of the sun.
During the modern era, when materialism began to dominate, proposals like this would have been dismissed as “mere poetry.” We simply failed to recognize that the real energy that flows through our respiratory and nervous systems was given to us by the Sun and that our own vitality is a natural evolutionary development of its vitality. Therefore, instead of bringing our children and youth to the Sun, we cut them off from it. (…) These insights were abandoned as a result of our own beliefs that the universe is just a collection of dead objects, and so it has been passed down from generation to generation throughout the modern world.
In the cosmology of the new millennium, the extravagant gift of energy by the Sun can be seen as a powerful manifestation of a fundamental impulse that runs through the entire universe. In a star, this impulse manifests itself in a constant, uninterrupted release of energy without any condition. In the human heart, it is felt as an urge to dedicate one's life to the benefit of the greater community.
In a culture where cosmology truly lives, children are taught about the Sun and the Moon, the rain and the starlight, the salmon's migration and the periwinkle's shelter. It is so long since we modern people have lived in such a world that it is difficult for us to imagine it, but right now we can begin to imagine what it might mean for our children and for our children's children. (…)
If we burn brightly today, it is only because the same energy burned brightly a month earlier as the Sun. Even if a single breath of our energy is dissipated, everything must be replenished again by the Sun's gift of fire. If the Sun were to suddenly stop its transformation into energy, all plants would die, along with the Earth's temperature plummeting hundreds of degrees below zero. Without the replenishment of the Sun's energy, all those hot molecules in our veins and bodies would cool, while we and everything else would harden like frozen dust.
The story of the Sun culminates in the story of the human family, in the story of those men and women whose lives have shown the same generosity and whose sacrifice has enabled others to achieve their own fulfillment. If cultures have admired such people for ages who gave their energy so that others could live, we are only now intuitively recognizing that these people were true to the nature of the energy that filled them.
Human nobility is possible only because at the center of the solar system, the magnificent generosity of the star pours out free energy day and night, without ceasing, without difficulty, without the slightest hesitation. That is the way of the universe. That is the way of life. And that is the way in which each of us connects to this cosmological family tree, accepting the gift of energy from the Sun and transforming it into creative action that allows our community to flourish.