Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

by Brian Swimme

The host and co-creator of PBS’s Journey of the Universe, and an award-winning professor of evolutionary cosmology, Brian Thomas Swimme offers a fresh look at how the rich collision between science and spirituality has influenced contemporary consciousness

The discovery that the universe has been expanding from its fiery beginning fourteen billion years ago and has developed into stars, galaxies, life, and human consciousness is one of the most significant of human history. It is taught throughout the world and has become our common creation story for nearly every culture. In terms of the universe’s development, we humans are not only economic, religious, or political beings. We are instead all cosmological beings.

If cosmogenesis is one of the greatest discoveries of human history, it has to have a profound impact on humanity. And yet, most science books do not explore the effects cosmogenesis has on our minds. Cosmogenesis narrates the same cosmological events that we agree are fact, but it offers a feature unique to all other writings on this topic: It tells the story of the universe while simultaneously telling the story of the storyteller.

With Cosmogenesis, Swimme tells the story of how his mind was deconstructed by the impact of this new story and then reassembled, offering a glimpse into how cosmogenesis is transforming not only our understanding of life as we know it, but the history and evolution of human consciousness itself.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Philosophy, Religion, Memoir

336 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2022

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

…it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.

--------------------------------------

We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.

Cosmos - The universe seen as a well-ordered whole; from the Greek word kosmos ‘order, ornament, world, or universe’, so called by Pythagoras or his disciples from their view of its perfect order and arrangement. – from Oxford reference

Genesis - Hebrew Bereshit (“In the Beginning”), the first book of the Bible. Its name derives from the opening words: “In the beginning….” Genesis narrates the primeval history of the world - from the Encyclopedia Britannica


Brian Thomas Swimme - image from Journey of the Universe

So, Cosmogenesis means, at its root, the beginning of everything. Diverse cultures have come up with diverse understandings of how everything came to be. Where Swimme differs is in seeing the genesis, the beginning, the creation of everything as an ongoing process, not a one-off in deep history.

Cosmogenesis tracks Swimme’s journey from math professor to spokesman for a movement that seeks to rejoin science and spirituality. The stations along this route, which runs from 1968 to 1983, consist of people he considers great minds. He gushes like a Swiftie with closeup tickets to an Eras Tour show over several of these genius-level individuals, while relying on his analytical capacity to note shortcomings in some of the theories some others propose. Swimme mixes his approach a bit. It is in large measure a memoir, with a focus on his intellectual (and spiritual) growth, along with descripti0ns of the places where he lived, taught, and studied, and the people who inspired him, providing some background to the theories and ovbservations to which he is exposed.

A mathematics PhD, with a long and diverse teaching history, he grounds his work in the scientific. But he does not separate the scientific from the spiritual, from the human. In his view, we are all a part of the ongoing evolution of everything, noting that every subatomic part that make up every atom in our bodies, in our world, was present at the Biggest Bang, then was further refined by the lesser bangs of supernovas manufacturing what became our constituent parts. Even today, we bathe, wallow, bask, and breathe in radiation from that original event. It may have occurred fourteen billion years ago, but in a measurable way it is happening still. And we all remain a part of it.

There is a piece of Swimme’s material-cum-spiritual notion that I found very appealing. I have experienced an ecstatic state while perceiving beauty in the world. On telling my son about one such, I remarked that it was like a religious experience. He answered, “why like?” Swimme recruits like experiences to bolster the connection between the humanly internal and the eternal of the cosmos.

Bear in mind that Swimme grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him. There is a strong incense scent of religiosity to his work. Not saying that Cosmogenesis is a religion, but I am not entirely certain it is not.

As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.

I had a very different response to the religious world to which I was exposed as a child through twelve years of Catholic education. There was no connection for me between the Mass and the sacred, whatever that was. Mass represented mostly a burden, a mandatory exercise, communicating nothing about layers of experience beyond the material, while offering hard evidence of the power of institutions to control how I spent my time. I did not, at the time, understand the community building and reinforcing aspect to this weekly tribal ritual, separate from the religious content.

I believe that what we think of as spiritual or spectral is the reality that lies beyond our perceptual bandwidth. The ancients did not understand lightning, so imagined a god hurling bolts. With scientific understanding of lightning, Zeus is cast from an imagined home on Mount Olympus to the confines of cultural history. Science expands our effective, if not necessarily our physical, biological bandwidth, and thus captures, making understandable, realities once thought the domain of imagined gods. But what of feeling? The ecstatic state I experience when witnessing the beauty of the world, is that a purely biological state, comprised of hormones and DNA? Or do we assign to that feeling, which can be difficult to explain, a higher meaning because of our inability to define it precisely enough? And, in doing so, are we not following in the path of the ancient Greeks who assigned to extra-human beings responsibility for natural events? So, I am not sure I am buying in to Swimme’s views.

It is, though, something, to pique the interest of people like myself who have rejected most forms of organized religion, particularly those that focus on a human-like all-powerful being, (see George Carlin’s routine re this. I’m with George.) but who hold open a lane for a greater, a different understanding of all reality. Where is the line between the material and the spiritual? How did we come to be here? Evolution provides plenty to explain that. But we still get back to a linear understanding of time as an impasse. If the (our) universe began with the big bang, then what came before? Einstein showed with his special theory of relativity that time is not so fixed a concept as we’d thought. Things operate at different speeds, relative to each other, depending on distance and speed. Who is to say that there might not be more fungability to our understanding of time, maybe even radically so? In a way, this is what Swimme is on about, ways of looking at our broader reality, at our origins and ongoing evolution, (not just the evolution of our species, but of the universe itself) through other, more experiential perspectives, (a new Gnosticism?) while still including science.

Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.

Overall I found this book brain candy of the first order. Take it as a survey-course primer for the theory he propounds. There are many videos available on-line for those interested in going beyond Cosmo 101. So, Is cosmogenesis one of the ten greatest ideas in human history as is claimed here? That is above my pay grade. Some of the notions presented here seemed a bit much, but there was enough that was worth considering that made this a satisfying, intriguing read. Suffice it to say that it is a fascinating take on, well, everything, and can be counted on to give your gray cells, comprised of materials that have been around for 14 billion years, a hearty jiggle at the very least.

Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy.

Review posted – January 13, 2023

Publication dates
----------Hardcover - November 15, 2022
----------Trade paperback - December 12, 2023

I received a hardcover of Cosmogenesis from Counterpoint in return for a fair review.



This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages

Twitter and Facebook do not appear to have ever been used you might also try

Interviews
-----Deeptime Network - Brian Swimme -- What's Next? Planetary Mind and the Future - video – 1:12:41 – from 6:50
-----Sue Speaks - SUE Speaks Podcast: Searching for Unity in Everything - podcast - 31:27

Items of Interest from the author
----- The Third Story of the Universe
-----A Great Leap in Being - 28:56
-----Human Energy - Introduction to the Noosphere: The Planetary Minds
-----Journey of the Universe

Items of Interest
-----San Francisco Chronicle - Science doesn’t cover it all, author Brian Thomas Swimme explains
----- George Carlin on religion

[Beth Haynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting intellectual biography. Well written and fun to read. I just am underwhelmed by his epiphany which is the main theme of the book.
For centuries human beings considered the cosmos fixed, unchanging. With the advent of the Big Bang theory and evidence of an expanding universe, we now should think in terms of an ever evolving, creative cosmogenesis - with human consciousness the current pinnacle. Swimme never defines his terms, allowing him to posit things like the universe "knows" and has intentions.
By trying to keep it a story, for me, he has sacrificed intellectual rigor.

[Jack Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cosmogenesis, An Unveiling Of The Expanding Universe, Thomas Swimme, 2022
Religions are Mythologies, Mythologies are guides that instruct individuals on how to live their lives, how to relate to others, that guide societies on how to relate to their environments and other societies. When mythologies no longer relate and respond to new knowledge and environmental circumstances, societies become non-functional. Joseph Campbell, noted mythologist, once made the metaphorical comparison between mythologies and computer software; when a new more advanced computer is introduced, software adapted to the older model is dysfunctional. Mythologies that applied to the circumstances, knowledge, and environments of older societies become dysfunctional when applied to those of newer, different more advanced societies. One could ascribe some or most of our current societal defunction to this exact phenomenon. All the major religions of the world had their genesis between 1200 and 3000 years ago. In that period, it was assumed that the earth was the center of the universe and that humans were special, created in the image of God and separate from other so-called lower life forms. In the past century scientific information and knowledge has exploded and transformed our view about our origins and our place in the universe. We are no longer at the center of the universe but live on a small rocky planet in a solar system, part of a galaxy of 100 billion stars which is one of 100 billion galaxies. We are the products of a cosmic evolution that has unfolded over the last 13 billion years. We humans are the outcome of a 3-billion-year evolution of life on earth, intimately connected to the other life systems which sustain our existence. Genesis is the creation story told in the bible. We now know this story is at best a metaphor and at worse a mistaken guide to our relation to the universe and the living ecosystem around us. Cosmogenesis is the name of Brian Swimme ‘s latest book. It traces the thought evolution of an individual trying to construct a new story, a new mythology, a new religion that relates to our current knowledge and circumstances, to create individual and societal knowledge to correct our current destructive course toward ecological disaster.
Much of the book could be compared to a Platonic dialogue between the author, Professor of theoretical physics and mathematics and Thomas Berry, Dominican priest, cultural historian and scholar of the world’s religions. You might guess that Berry was not your ordinary Catholic priest but a truly original thinker willing to confront the faults and fallacies of his own religion. Can a new spiritual order come out of the scientific knowledge of the last 400 years?
Berry states: “What we have largely forgotten is the most fundamental mode of revelation, the cosmological. The universe, along with planet earth, both in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence, constitutes the primary revelation of the ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being. The universe’s revelation is primordial. The most spectacular unveiling since the birth of the universe is the supernova explosion. In the twentieth century we have learned that chemical alchemy takes place at the core of every star. The creativity of stars is the one and only way carbon is constructed in the universe, which means that each carbon atom in our bodies, without exception, came from a star. There were no carbon atoms in the primordial flaring forth of the beginning of time. Only through stellar alchemy could carbon, with all its potencies, appear. Humans flower forth from the supernova explosion like roses from a rosebush. We need to relate to this release of elements as we would to a gift. A gift that enabled life. Did the universe ask us to pay for this? No. Have we done anything to earn this cosmic gift? No….. Our frozen imaginations struggle to see stars as bestowers of grace because we are convinced, they are objects. While it is true that our ancestral stars did not know they were giving birth to us, it is wrong to say stars do not know. They do know. They know how to create carbon, silver, boron, and calcium. They know how to participate in the ongoing development of the universe. They know how to fulfill their role in this spectacular process. The central revelation of the supernova is its irreversible gift-giving. Irreversible because the star uses its energy to fashion the elements, and once that energy is used, it is not restored. The gift requires the stars death. Though it is a one-time endowment from the star, it is an ongoing gift-giving from the universe. Scientists estimate that with the passing of each second another star has exploded and is disbursing its treasures. This extravagant gift-giving is the spirituality of the universe. It is a form of cosmic love that enables the future to emerge. Our ancient epics extol humans who give their lives for the well-being of the community. Even if these authors knew nothing of supernovas, they were intimately aware that the universe values generosity. The generous personality is the human mode of a supernova’s extravagant gift-giving. What I have to offer in terms of faith is simple in the extreme. My trust is in a star’s bestowal of grace.”
So Cosmogenesis, a new creation story based on recent scientific knowledge, a knowledge that imbues the universe with spiritual purpose and direction, a story that connects us to the existing and unfolding miracle of the physical reality and the life around us. The Egyptians worshiped Amun Ra, the sun god. They understood it was the bestower of all life on earth. Indigenous hunter-gatherer societies believed in and respected the spirituality of all life, especially the life that sustained their existence. Can western societies be weaned away from a human centric exploitive view and ultimately destructive pathology or come to a view of the cosmos where humans are part of and intimately connected to all life on the planet? The answer will just possibly determine our ultimate fate as a species
As Swimme eloquently states: “Rooted in the birth of the universe, humans are cosmic persons drawn toward the future by their fascinations. Each of us can learn to feel ourselves as cosmic persons, can learn to feel our bodies absorbing fourteen billion years of creativity as we awake each morning with quanta energy coursing through us from the primordial burst. Even in this moment now, carbon and oxygen from stars five billion years ago are assembling themselves as us. Our forms of thought, our layered perceptions of the world, all of these were invented by our ancestors and have become us. We are the entire monumental flow of events in the form of a human being. Astounded by our complex foundations in time, we wonder over the future, over what is coming. We live in a sea of time that perpetually creates itself anew precisely because the universe is unfinished. The ultimate ecstasy for humans is to participate in cosmic development….. The universe rests on relationships. The first elementary particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons deepened their relationships and gave birth to a trillion galaxies. These particles constructed the galaxies by doing one thing: deepening their relationships. This mysterious synergy happened again with the emergence of life. Unicellular organisms, each one smaller than the sharp end of a pin, entered into relationships with each other and ended up constructing lions. There is great mystery. In relationship with another, your deeper identity is ignited. Only by entering into communion with someone outside yourself can you find your true self. Tiny, tiny individual cells deepened their relationships, united, evolved through time, then flew through the moonless night as great horned owls. In our universe, ultimate creativity rests upon the union of things. Humans took this magic and ran with it. Genetically, we are practically identical with all other apes, but we found ways to deepen our relationships, which brought forth new capacities to see and to listen. Because of these new capacities, we can now hear the universe tell the story of how it created us, how each of us is a billion-year-old process…. When we look out at the night sky, we are looking out at what is looking.”
We do live in an extraordinary time in human history, a period where we have deciphered how the universe was created, what life is made of, where we as humans come from. When we absorb this knowledge. we look at the world and our place in it in a totally new way. We no longer have to rely on ancient mythologies and religions to tell this story. We now know that disseminating this knowledge is critical to our survival as a species. A Dominican priest by the name of Thomas Berry incorporated this knowledge into his belief system in the Catholic church. Can our existing systems of faith do likewise? JACK

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm of the generation that both mocked and took the poem Desiderata seriously. It was an attempt to give meaning to life, and define our place in the universe, especially with the lines, "You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. " And there we have just about the whole of Mr. Swimme's Cosmogenesis.

This book is the spiritual memoir of a mathematician/cosmologist who jumps into the swirling waters of science mixed with spirituality. It's a dangerous business because it's the stuff of which "the New Age" has been made, which in itself is a mix of magical thinking and just enough science to give a patina to what approaches quackery; and, cynical or sincere (Mr. Swimme is the latter) quackery is quackery.

The gist of Cosmogenesis is that the universe is somehow knowing in its evolution. As above, "...the universe is unfolding as it should." "As it should," is one thing in that one event follows another, but still a little semantically suspect. There is no should to the universe. It's unfolding as it is, and throwing should in there muddies thing up, but we "know what it means," in that general sense of we know what he's getting at. The same is true when Mr. Swimme attaches words like "generosity," to the universe, or has his mentor, Thomas Berry, call stars, "bestowers of grace," because humans are of the same chemical building blocks as stars. The phrase "cosmological intelligence," also get thrown into the mix. I get where they're going with this poetic language, but it lacks any of the precision that we expect of science - it even lacks precision as language. Messrs. Berry and Swimme know they don't have the language to verify their concepts, and so they call for a new language - what that will be they seem to be leaving up to the universe.

The other problem with this book as memoir is that Mr. Swimme is as irritating a seeker as Carlos Castaneda with his mentor Don Juan. Whining, groveling, upset stomachs, lack of confidence, inability to get the point, seem to be de rigueur for these guys. And, as there's not really that much to the concepts being unveiled the pages get filled with a lot of angst and travelogue. Mr. Swimme's not a bad writer - he just doesn't have that much to say.

Is there anything good about this book? Yes, the idea that we are not in the universe, but that we actually are the universe is intriguing (but not earth shaking.) As is the idea that we've been imprinted by all the thinking and creativity that has come before us , and the sooner we learn how to access what we already know the better off we'll all be - we may even survive the coming cataclysms. The understanding that the language - outside of math - to understand the universe hasn't been expressed. And the understanding of the fallacy that the equations are the thing rather than an explanation says a lot about how cosmologists exist outside the actual, and in the theoretical.

I wouldn't recommend this book, but I am going to take a closer look at Thomas Berry's work, as he seems to be the father of what Brian Thomas Swimme spends his time thinking about.

[Richard Ohlrogge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Swimme takes us on a personal journey in which he seeks to understand the mysteries of all that exists and how it might take us and our future existence down a path to a new way of being - a transformation. Much of what Brian discovers happens within the context of many conversations with Thomas Berry over time during the 80's and in their writings in the 90's. Here is a quote from the last chapter of the book in which he reveals the awakening necessary to become a "new person".

"The magnitude of the transformation had escaped me. Thomas had indicated as much in our first meeting at the Broadway Diner. He explained that taking in a new cosmology amounts to becoming a new person. It involves a change in the structures of our existence. I now knew what he meant. My experience listening to him would not fit into my former self. I had the same mathematical knowledge of the supernova explosion, but something other than the knowledge, something at the feeling level, had flowed in, unnoticed until yesterday."

[Nathan Hoyt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED LOVED LOVED the first part of the book where Swimme described the beauty and awe he had at the universe and even the mathematics behind it. I am in NO way a professional scientist, but it is certainly a hobby of mine. I too find space and the universe one of the most interesting topic to dive into. And Swimme described this in very eloquent words.

I was interested in the journey that Swimme took and some of the teachings of his guides. But unlike the first part of the book, I just couldn't connect at the same level with the rest of the book. I feel the author was attempting to carry me to the same enlightenment that he feels he came to, but I think I just couldn't keep up. Having said all of this, what I did catch I think I generally agree with. I can't say that my primary spiritual orientation is Cosmogenesis though.

I did have some sympathy for him living as a deep-thinking scientists in a world that just worked different.

[Scott Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a difficult read as the entire concept is difficult to understand. But at the end I understood better what he was getting at. It's hard to fathom but we are all part of the universe and derived from the universe which is still creating new life. His awakening is akin to people who go through a spiritual revelation and "find God" or are "saved." It is a mind-boggling concept. I just didn't see the need for so much of the book to focus on his journey to get there. Most of what I learned was in the last part of the book.

[Gil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know Brian has wonderful ideas about cosmology but this but really does not bring them through. The idea of making this more of a memoire of a sis white privileged guy over romanticizing his own life felt cringe at times. Not for oversharing but the banality of his memories. His cosmology is brushed to the side to make way for his thought about having thoughts. If you really want to experience his genius, the book is : The Universe Story
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...

[Jemma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing earth shattering. Kinda just a dude who is in awe of the universe, which is nice and all, but expresses that sense in somehow a both vague and repetitive way. Not a bad read just not something I’m beyond excited about. Also lowkey sees his wife as a baby making machine which sucks. But thumbs up for Hildegard of Bingen reference 😃👍

[Margie Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding

A must read for all humans so they, too, can come to realize our connection to the universe and why it is important we awaken and work towards taking care of it in a sacred and reverent way.

[Cherionna Menzam-Sills · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved reading this book. It feels like it has changed my life in some subtle way. The wisdom in these pages has the potential to support humanity in continuing not only to exist but to do so through embracing our inherent creativity.

[Rupantar Chakma · Rating 5 out of 5]

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[Jana]

Enjoyed it - learned a lot

[Michael Mitchell · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only nonfiction I've read that I could not begin to say what the author's point was. Ugh.

[Kristen Tharp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. It spoke to my mind, my heart, and my soul. We are one with all that is!

[Patty Kay]

What a Thrill!

I gave this book to my daughter. She teaches advanced high school math. But I told her that if she ever wanted entrance into my soul, Read Cosmogenesis!!!!

[Ben Greer]

This was not at all what I expected it to be but I still really enjoyed it! Crazy fast read

[Joseph Fajen]

This book gave me such a tremendous context for understanding how Brian Swimme's trajectory developed and how profound of an impact Thomas Berry had on him. Super inspiring!

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great. Authors to explore: Thomas berry, Alfred north Whitehead,

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled with the style and tone of this author’s storytelling. He zoomed in on street names and named every person, first and last names, disrupting the flow of the narrative. The stories lacked purpose or connection and I kept thinking of Annie Dillard’s quip in her book The Writing Life, “One would rather read these people, or lead their lives, than be their wives” (569).

Additionally, the lists and lists of male scientists and mathematicians that, according to Swimme, furthered the evolution of the universe ignored the vital role of poets and mothers who have witnessed the universe and have been writing about it for centuries. However, the beautiful ideas presented in this book - the relationship between particles and beings, the exploration of attraction and love, and the evidence that cheerios are made of stars and we hold the origin of the universe within our cells - is a profound and life changing reality. Marrying science and humanity brings evidence to what poets have been saying. This book needed to be 200 pages shorter.

[Courtney Henson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love being a nerd