Attending Brian Swimme's recent evening talk at the Schumacher College was an inspiring and uplifting and unusual experience. The man is so passionate about the evolution of the cosmos, tracking its deep time origins, tracing lightly over the mathematics, physics and the utterly immense scale of the whole process. Simultaneously his joy in the discovery of the Universe as self, transmits a degree of grounded positivity that you rarely encounter in the public sphere.
Swimme's enthusiasm for the evolutionary process opens the mind up to the miraculous formation of stars, the majesty of collapsing and spiralling galaxies, the might of gravitational waves plus the stupendous distances involved at every level. His ecstatic delivery shames conventional science and scientists for their desiccated approach to their subjects.
One particularly evocative moment occurred when he distinguished between the planetary bodies in our solar system. He characterised the mass of Jupiter as a planet of gases a planet body, that you could literally travel right through the centre of the vapours and emerge intact on the other side. Contrasting this with Mars which he said was dead inert rock, totally lifeless solid and impermeable.
The earth lies between the two and is in a state of balanced turbulence, it is fluid with a flaky crust. The centre fluctuates between a gaseous and solid state the movement of the core magma drives the plates ultimately generating life, it is swimming in a constant state of disequilibrium. That life evolved out of these elements in Swimmes view was more miraculous than anything narrated or described in any of the Holy Scriptures.
He described the Sun as igniting 600 million tonnes of Hydrogen gas every minute turning 596m into helium, the missing 4m tons is emitted as light energy which is what nourishes the earth. He portrayed this as an act of cosmic generosity.
He vividly described that pivotal and poignant moment when the first unicellular organisms having run out of food sources, had to invent a completely novel way of extracting energy from the environment. They evolved to capture and convert the energy of a photon inventing the process of photosynthesis, indicating that even at this basic level of life some form of consciousness must have been operational.
Outlining the evolutionary developments from amoeba to mammal and then to human life, Swimme swiftly switched focus to the quantum, the quark and most elementary levels of material reality. He described the appearance and disappearance of trillions quantum particles as generated out of the all nourishing abyss and at its root a ‘space time foam’.
After this part of the talk had finished I put a question to Brian on why so many interpreters of Thomas Berry’s work seemed to over emphasise the community of the earth at the expense of the importance of human self reflective consciousness and consequently generate an antipathy toward human presence on the planet.
He gave me a very cute response and asked me what proportion of people on the planet were awake to the dangers I guessed at about to 2% and then as I started to change my mind but he stopped me! He then said the alarmist messages about the state of planet had a place and needed to be communicated, as not enough people were awake to the real dangers.
However the flip side was everybody needed to be awake the fact that we were at a time of great opportunity and possibility and this was also a crucial part of the picture. Funnily enough he said that Thomas Berry used to get very depressed about the state of the planet and it was left to Brian to have to cheer him up!!
No comments:
Post a Comment