Brian Thomas Swimme (born 1950) is a mathematical cosmologist, director of the Center for the Story of the Universe at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, and currently a leading representative of the epic cosmology of evolution, which views the evolution of the universe as one continuous story and examines how we humans fit into this grand story and what role we play in it. This new cosmology was born from the collaboration between ecotheologist and cultural historian Thomas Berry and Brian T. Swimme, who jointly published the seminal book The Universe Story in 1992. The excerpt above is from Swimme's book The Hidden Hearth of Cosmos (Chapter 7, The Large-Scale Structure of Space and Time, pp. 55-62), which was published under the title Skryte srdce kosmu by the Prague-based Malvern Publishing House. Translation: Jiří Zemánek. This excerpt was published under the title "Jak žit ve vesmiru" in the magazine Sedmá generace 2/2019, p. 62-67.
Our primary task as human beings is to live in the universe. In a superficial sense, of course, each of us lives in the universe, because we are all physically here. But in an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional sense, most of us live somewhere else. It is indeed a strange situation, but it is a deformation that humans have undergone again and again throughout history.
Sophocles gave a study of this interesting possibility of splitting life in his drama The King. Oedipus. It is the story of a man who one day arrives in a kingdom and, through an unfortunate series of events, ends up killing the king and marrying the queen, completely unaware of the terrible truth that the king is his father and the queen is his mother. (8)
We can say that although Oedipus was proclaimed king of Thebes, he did not actually live in the Theban kingdom. Because to live in a kingdom means to live in proper relationship with the members of the kingdom. However, Oedipus was not in proper relationship with anyone: he was the husband of his mother and the murderer of his father. And yet if someone were to ask Oedipus whether or not he lived in the Theban kingdom, he would think that the questioner was crazy, because where else could he be?
But in the deeper sense of his own understanding of his leading role in Thebes, Oedipus was not a member of the kingdom; he was a disgrace to the kingdom. We too think of ourselves as living on Earth. But in reality we do not live on Earth as true members of the earthly community. Neither in our activities nor in our understanding of ourselves and the Earth are we simply not members of earthly life. We live in this split state – we think we are members of the Earth and we do not realize that we are actually its destroyers.
A simple way to touch the sharp edges of this gaping hole in our consciousness is to take the “local universe test.” You should try it sometime, it’s easy. Just invite someone who lives twenty or thirty kilometers away and has never been to your house to come visit you. You can give them verbal instructions over the phone on how to get to your house, but you have to follow this rule: you can point to anything in your instructions except human creations.
You can point out hills or oaks, constellations of stars in the night sky, lakes, ocean shores or caves, planetary positions or any ponds, trails or prairies, the sun and moon, precipices, plateaus or waterfalls, headlands and estuaries, high cliffs, forests, bays, streams and creeks, swamps and dead branches of rivers, and so on. Whenever your friend gets stuck somewhere, he can call you on the phone for further instructions, but the principle is that he must describe his location to you without referring to any human creation. Do this test a few times and you will immediately learn how we, like Oedipus, do not really live within the earthly community.
Where do we live? In a physical sense, we live in industrial artifacts designed to keep us “inside” and the universe “outside.” That is why the main concerns of our hearts and minds are almost exclusively focused on the demands of life in these industrial agglomerations. The American mind of the late 20th century is a strange mixture. There are some good ideas floating around, but they are mixed with the worst trivialities that trample the soul. It is depressing to realize how easily any of us can talk endlessly about completely insignificant matters, and yet almost all of us turn into concrete walls when asked the simplest questions about our actual life in the universe—such as, “What kinds of life live in your backyard?” Our eyes and hearts are so crowded with the demands of the consumer world that we rarely notice the most basic contours of the place we live in.
Our children can reproduce dozens of short commercial melodies, yet they cannot tell the song of a lark from that of a thrush. Our preschoolers, even before they can speak, can recognize the logos and symbols of many of our companies, yet few, if any, can draw insects or trees, flowers, or mammals from the place where they live. The great cosmic event in our children’s lives each year is the sequence of rhythmic scenes that explode spring into being. But the odds of finding one child, just one child, who knows and celebrates this wonderful rebirth of life are much smaller than the odds of getting into the headquarters of Nintendo or the Sega Genesis (9) and convince them to stop spreading disgusting violence into our children's lives through their video games.
Here, at the very end of the millennium, we are taking the first steps into the future, one step at a time. We cannot stop the destruction of the land, animals, and children with a single decision, but with a single decision, we can begin to find ways to unite our own energies with the creative, regenerative, and healing efforts already underway in the world today. As for our children, we cannot snap our fingers and transform their education from industrial to ecozoic, by which I mean an education that initiates our children into the journeys of the universe. We cannot continually eliminate all the nonsense and toxins and instead provide our children with the knowledge and information that are essential for their planetary future. But we can begin to change things. But we can begin by putting our children and ourselves into space. We can begin by showing them that they are part of big pictureand that in the cosmic activity by which they are surrounded on all sides they have their place and their role. In time, if they are lucky, they will eventually learn to look upon all things in the world, even the briefest breath of the tiniest mosquito, as woven into one vast, coherent whole.
Here's how to get started. Get someone to show you where the constellation Sagittarius is, and then take a small child outside and focus your attention there. As you do this, you will be looking into the very center of the Milky Way galaxy, the axis around which all three hundred billion of its stars rotate. When we introduce young people to our galaxy as a whole, and when we allow them to see themselves as living beings who are part of this vast galactic process, they will embark on a profound journey into a much larger context in which they can discover the true meaning of their lives. By beginning to recognize the sacred direction to the center of the galaxy and returning to it again and again, they will become part of a powerful process that will allow them to slowly and involuntarily begin to think of themselves as more than just political and economic entities. They will discover that they are, first and foremost, cosmological events. (10)
In terms of light, we are just under thirty thousand light-years from the center of our Milky Way galaxy. A light-year is a measure of distance, the distance light travels in one year, which is about 9.6 trillion kilometers. For example, light traveling from the center of the galaxy at nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second has arrived here today after having been flying in our direction like lightning for the past thirty thousand years. So as you gaze toward the constellation Sagittarius tonight, remember that some of the photons of light that have just arrived at you left the center of the galaxy when giant woolly mammoths roamed the North American continent. These photons were created in those long ago times when Paleolithic Indians worshipped and hunted these gigantic animals. Saber-toothed tigers also hunted mammoths and hunted them for another twenty thousand years before they finally disappeared completely in a stunning extinction event. And at every moment of the saber-toothed tigers' existence—as generation after generation practiced their way of hunting, mating, sleeping, and tracking mammoths—photons from the center of the galaxy silently flew through space on their way to us.
When a child looks into the center of the galaxy, they need to remember woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and Paleolithic Indians, and the short time it took for our civilization to explode onto the scene. All that vast amount of time was necessary for photons traveling at the speed of light to reach us tonight—as we gaze into the center of our galaxy.
If we do not live our lives with at least some cosmological awareness, we risk disintegrating into tiny worlds. We may be deceived into thinking that our lives are lived within political entities such as states or nations; or that our main concerns and interests are tied to the economic realities of a consumer lifestyle. In reality, we live in the midst of immensity and are intrinsically woven into a great cosmic drama. Economic and political interests are of course of real importance, but children must understand that any meaning and value of these interests are ultimately derived from that all-encompassing matrix that contains us and from their deepest meanings. To be out of touch with this cosmological context is to risk living within a narrowed and distorted version of reality, such as happened to Oedipus.
In addition to pointing toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy, there is one other orientation we can provide our children, and that is the Andromeda galaxy. If you direct your child’s gaze toward the constellation also called Andromeda, they will see a faint streak of light that is unlike any other star. With an average pair of binoculars, you can even see a spiral structure in this streak of light. This is the farthest horizon the human eye can see. This is the Andromeda galaxy, which is slightly larger than our Milky Way; its light comes to our eyes from a distance of 2.5 million light years.
Something is happening deep within the soul of the child who stares intently at this speck of light, recognizing it as a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars. Something is happening within him—a vast space is opening up within him in psychic harmony with the galactic vastness. This speck of light has taken millions of years to reach the eye of this child, and that eye is now part of the being who knows all this. As the child begins to realize the vast dimensions of this experience, his inner world opens up as the light enters him.
2.5 million years ago, humans first discovered the use of tools, entering a new way into the long drama of cosmic domination. On the day these first humans made their first tools, light exploded far out from Andromeda, as it always did. But this particular light had an extraordinary destiny, for as it roared away from Andromeda and sped toward the Milky Way, these resourceful humans continued to develop their tools, their minds, their sensibilities, and their understanding of the world, until finally, 2.5 million years later, they discovered their place in the space and time of the universe; just in time to take their children out into the night to catch and admire the same photons of light that had left Andromeda so long ago. To look at the Andromeda galaxy is, of course, to enter galactic vastness, but it is also to enter a new consciousness of time in terms of our human adventure. The human journey is as vast in time as these two galaxies are apart in space.
Andromeda and the Milky Way are large galaxies that slowly rotate around each other.
Each of these is orbited by about a dozen other galaxies. The best-known satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way are the Magellanic Clouds, the Fornax galaxy in the constellation of the Furnace, and other dwarf galaxies in the constellations of Draco and Sculptor. (11) For the galaxies that accompany Andromeda, we only have very dull names, such as M 32. (12) We have so little experience with these galaxies that we have not yet been able to give them proper names. Before the beginning of the 20th century, we did not even know that there were other galaxies in the universe besides the Milky Way, so naturally it took some time before we moved beyond simply assigning numbers to individual galaxies.
The megasystem, which consists of the Milky Way, Andromeda, and all their satellite galaxies orbiting them, has evolved over several million light-years and contains at least half a trillion stars; astronomers call it the Local Group of Galaxies. (13) This name is rather humorous and sad, but we can consider it a temporary designation that will soon be replaced by a name that the poets of the 21st century will come up with when they become familiar with this new story of the universe.
Our Local Group of galaxies is just one satellite of an even larger system. Just as the Earth revolves around the Sun, so too does our Local Group of galaxies revolve around a central hub called the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. It is a gigantic cluster of more than a thousand galaxies that lies 53 million light-years away. (14) Our Local Group of galaxies, along with hundreds of other galaxy clusters, orbit the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. When we consider this entire galactic supercluster system, with its thousands upon thousands of galaxies—each of which may contain ten million intelligent planets—our primate minds begin to melt. It was not long ago that we were swinging from tree branches across a forest, our main task being to grasp the next branch. Today, all we can do is contemplate the immensity of this Virgo Supercluster of galaxies, consisting of many clusters of galaxies. (15)
If we can now imagine this immense galactic supercluster as a single white dot, then the universe as a whole is composed of ten million such dots, floating, fluttering, and swirling through cosmic space like apple blossoms when a gust of wind in early spring releases them from their branches and carries them upward into the blue sky.
Footnotes
8) The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud explained this Oedipus story as part of psychoanalysis as the so-called Oedipus complex; it refers to the son's affection for his mother with an aggressive relationship with his father.
9) Nintendo, in Japanese Nintendó kabushiki-gaisha, is a Japanese company that manufactures and distributes video games and game consoles; another Japanese company, Sega Genesis, also known as Mega Drive, has the same focus.
10) Cultural historian and cosmologist Thomas Berry, friend, mentor, and longtime collaborator of Brian T. Swimm, argued that we humans are primarily cosmological.
11) In addition to the galaxies listed above, the Milky Way satellite galaxy system also includes other dwarf galaxies such as Canis Major, Sagittarius, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Sextant, Keel, Leo I, Leo II and others.
12) M32, also known as Messier 32 or NGC 221, is a dwarf elliptical galaxy in the constellation Andromeda.
13) The Local Group of Galaxies contains more than thirty galaxies and other celestial objects with a diameter of more than ten million light-years. It has a dumbbell shape and its center of gravity is located in the space between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.
14) The Virgo Cluster (or Empire of Galaxies) contains about 1,300 known galaxies and is estimated to contain as many as 2,000. This galaxy cluster forms the core of the Local Supercluster of galaxies, which also includes the Milky Way.
15) The Virgo Supercluster (Local Supercluster) contains at least 100 galaxy clusters and groups of galaxies, including the Local Group of galaxies with the Milky Way. It is approximately 110 million light-years across and is currently thought to be an outgrowth of a much larger supergalaxy, which astronomer Brent Tully has named Laniakea, a Hawaiian term meaning the Vast Sky. Laniakea measures 520 million light-years across and contains 100,000 galaxies.