Cosmogenesis Quotes

“the universe began fourteen billion years ago with the emergence of elementary particles in the form of primordial plasma, which quickly morphed into atoms of hydrogen, helium, and lithium; a hundred million years later, galaxies began to appear, and in one of these, the Milky Way, minerals arranged themselves into living cells that constructed advanced life, including evergreen trees, coral reefs, and the vertebrate nervous systems that humans used to discover this entire sequence of universe development.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“For two hundred thousand years, the light from the origin of the universe had bathed us, without any awareness on our part, but then, via the power of thought, the entire fourteen billion years of creativity came alive in Hubble. The whole story had always been there, showering down on us, but so much had been required to develop the mental space to allow it in. Now that a pathway had been constructed into our awareness, we would be changed forever. That’s what I needed to get across. Give them one whiff of that and watch them go wild with wonder. I would make this a moment they would not forget.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“a universe expanding in all directions. A universe expanding in all directions will stretch out all the waves of light coming from the galaxies. Hubble was experiencing this directly. He had found himself in the midst of these stretched-out waves as would be the case in an ever-widening universe. In one silent, thunderous instant, the developing universe surfaced in Hubble’s mind. He had knitted together observations and calculations. The songs of galaxies the farthest away were singing in the lowest octaves. He, and he alone, was experiencing this. Because the universe is expanding. He must have repeated that phrase over and over. He repeated it over and over because he was torn in two different directions. Out of habit, he perceived change as something that happened to objects in the universe. But the data were whispering a truth radically different. They were suggesting that the universe as a whole was changing. Light from the more distant galaxies was stretched to lower frequencies because galaxies were rapidly expanding away. The experience was breaking apart structures of his mind, transforming his understanding of his placement in the universe. In my imagined reconstruction of the event, Hubble next positioned the Hooker Telescope so that he could view, at the same time, two different galaxies. One of them ten times as far away as the other. Checking his data, he found that the distant one was expanding away from him ten times as fast.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“We have been separating like this for billions of years. Now, for the first time, this is noticed by someone on Earth. You. You can now think the universe. You alone know that all of us, all the millions of galaxies you can see and all the billions you cannot see, all of us have been rushing apart since the beginning of time.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Imagine him locating another galaxy, twenty times as far away. Checking its number, he found it was expanding away twenty times as fast. Another galaxy was found to be expanding fifty times as fast. Another, one hundred times as fast. The concept of number had appeared long ago in human history, and Hubble was now using it to wade into a first understanding of this order in the universe. Georges Lemaître’s imaginative theory was verified in Hubble’s concrete experience. The data from the trillion galaxies was harmoniously interconnected because at the beginning of time there was”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“The songs of galaxies the farthest away were singing in the lowest octaves. He, and he alone, was experiencing this. Because the universe is expanding. He must have repeated that phrase over and over. He repeated it over and over because he was torn in two different”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“In that moment, he became the first human to know, in a direct and empirical manner, that we live in a vast ocean of galaxies.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“We live in a universe where the mathematical equations of the beginning are alive in us. If you altered them in any way, we wouldn’t even be here. We would never have come forth. Those conditions at the beginning of time are exactly what they had to be for us to allow the mathematics of the universe’s beginning to think inside us.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Hawking focused on the ISST, the “initial singularity of space-time.” This “initial singularity” receives its name from a breakdown in Einstein’s equations when we use them to travel conceptually back in time.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“This was the Pythagorean breakthrough that asserted numbers were real and mathematics formed the fundamental structures of the universe. This”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“has been expanding for billions of years. Would anything change if the initial expansion rate had been different?”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“The universe itself would have to tell us what it was about.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“After thousands of years wondering over the origin of the universe, we found that trillion-degree event that had blazed with such an intensity we can still sense it, still touch it, now in the form of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the universe’s birth.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“surface in the human imagination. Our universe had been creating itself for billions of years and suddenly, through the work of a handful of human beings, the universe found a way to reflect on itself, on how it had developed over billions of years.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“will be the same with our discovery of a time-developmental universe, a universe that develops through time from plasma to galaxies to living planets to human consciousness. We will witness our minds restructuring themselves as we learn to think and live in alignment with universe creativity.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“was delirious with these new possibilities. To be invited into the thrilling work of constructing a world philosophy, to be in contact with the major intellectuals they’d already drawn in, to be ensconced in the cosmological tradition Ralph Waldo Emerson had begun.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation with the universe?” Something inside me came alive when I read this. Something personal. Couldn’t we find our way to an original cosmology?”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Sitting next to me in the smoke of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness was Emerson’s great-granddaughter, now carrying forward his work.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“claimed that by the early nineteenth century, only three major areas on Earth had escaped significant contact with Western civilization: the immense tropical forests of central Africa, the vast plain of Mongolia, and the mountains and rivers of the Pacific Northwest of”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“We are interested in making a grant either to you or your university,” she said. “My wife, Ruth Forbes Young,” Arthur said, gesturing toward her. “What’s this?” I asked. “I want to enlist your services.” She leaned toward me, her thinning hair falling forward. “Arthur’s theory is what the world needs to escape the hold of materialism. The low level of humanity’s consciousness mixed with nuclear weapons is a dire state of affairs. Our question for you is this. Are you in?” I laughed, confused.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“His first major project was to invent a new flying machine. He sent one design after another aloft, many of them blowing up, and with each experiment the team refined its ideas. He worked in a mad sprint for the glory of being the inventor of the first helicopter. But there was much more at stake. This was the late 1930s, with a looming crisis in Western civilization. Arthur Young’s research had strong competition. A group of Nazi engineers was striving toward the same goal of providing its military with the world’s most advanced aircraft.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Bell helicopter,”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Teilhard had speculated on the overall nature of the universe, and our teacher, a Jesuit like Teilhard, thought we should know his vision.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Earth’s life and to guide Earth’s evolution. Though many regarded this as the final victory in our long struggle with nature, it led to a breakdown of the ecosystems and a call for a new era of humanity.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“The classical era, beginning five thousand years ago, saw the emergence of the theoretical mind, out of which came forth writing, currencies, philosophies, cities, and empires.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“A different life emerged twenty thousand years ago with the discovery of seeds and agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had lived in the same life patterns for a hundred thousand years before making the dramatic decision to tie themselves to a particular piece of land. In the past they had hunted the forests and fished the rivers; now they domesticated animals and forced the rivers to nourish their seeds. After many millennia living in bands of a few dozen people, they settled into villages with populations in the thousands.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Astonished by this emergence of symbolic consciousness, these early humans invented rituals with singing and dancing”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Their aim was to speculate together on whether or not humanity was at the edge of a new planetary culture, one where the meaning of the universe would arise out of an interaction between cutting-edge mathematical science and more ancient mystical insights.”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Among these, one stood out, the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson who explored a Pythagorean vision of the universe in his many books. To deepen his research, he created the Lindisfarne Association, housed in Manhattan’s Church of the Holy Communion, which”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

“Something had been torn away. A level of subconscious certainty. I knew the equations of mathematical cosmology, but had I ever actually experienced something like music created by the universe? Denise’s pregnancy had been transformative. Had I ever been transformed like that? Transformed by an experience of the universe?”
― Brian Thomas Swimme, Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe