From Cosmologist Brian Swimme

whose teaching has been a major part of the inspiration of PaGaian Cosmology.

The universe began as an eruption of space, time, matter, and energy out of all-nourishing abyss, the hidden source of all creativity. The universe began as a titanic bestowal, a stupendous quantum of free energy given forth from the bottomless vaults of generosity.(p.110 The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos)

The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion. (p.48 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

When you look at the moon, you are absorbing the moon just as the ocean absorbs minerals … your particles are new in the sense that they have absorbed something from the photons and entered a new state of being. … This means that when you stand in the presence of the moon, you become a new creation. The photons interactions have entered into the quantum state of your entire ensemble, and you are, through these interactions, a moon-person. It is not something you have, an image or an object, so much as it is something you become … There is no separate self ‘having’ this image; rather, your totality is permeated with the moon’s presence, and this totality, in refecting upon and within itself, exists in a new awareness: the awareness of the moon. You are the self, you are the moon … that is what cosmic sensitivity means for the human.”  (The Universe is a Green Dragon, p.91-93)

What life did when it created the human was to take infancy, stretch it out, and call it a species. We are constantly within the creative movement and exploration of a mammalian infant. This is called neotyny. The deep dynamic of the child is at the core of biological creativity. (The Canticle to the Cosmos, DVD #8 “The Nature of the Human”)

 We awake to a universe permeated with allurement, and our most primal desire is to become this allurement. (p.55 Green Dragon) The bonding simply happens; it simply is. The bonding is the perdurable fact of the universe and happens primievally in each fresh instant, a welling-up of an inescapable togetherness of things.  (p.25 The Universe Story)

When we reflect on the labour required for our life, reverence naturally wells up within us. Then, in the deepest regions of our hearts, we begin to embrace our own creativity. What we bestow on the world allows others to live in joy …. What creatures, what living beings, what persons will follow us, entering life and the great mystery of love precisely because of our work? (p.61 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

When you walk into a forest, learn to tremble with the magnitude of what you are about, and you will never walk out. (p.95 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

The denial of loss is the refusal to enter into the sacrificial event of the universe … it is an ongoing sacrificial event. If loss is embraced, every moment of our lives is understood as disappearing into the ongoing story of the universe. Our creativity is energizing the whole. (p.23 Canticle to the Cosmos Study Guide)

The ultimate source of all that is, the support and well of being, is Ultimate Generosity. All being comes forth and shines, glimmers and glistens, because the root reality of the universe is generosity of being. That’s why the ground of being is empty: every thing has been given over to the universe; all existence has been poured forth … because Ultimate Generosity retains no thing … We are Generosity-of-Being evolved into human form. (p.146-147 The Universe is a Green Dragon )

For so long we’ve considered the Earth as just a big dead ball of dirt. It shocks us nearly out of our minds when we discover we’re involved within something that moves. Copernicus said the Earth moved: he meant that it moved around the Sun. When we say the Earth moves, we mean the whole process is alive. The Earth moves. In a sentence that is the heart of our cosmic revolution. (p.135 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

It’s a matter of intimacy: the closer we get to an understanding of the dynamism of the integral Earth, the more obvious it becomes that the four and a half billion years of terrestrial evolution resembles one vast embryogenesis. Something is developing, hatching, unfolding, and we are the self-reflexive mind and heart of the whole numinous process. (p.133 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

Remember the stupendous achievements of our unfolding universe …. reflect on your own life. What were the central moments to be remembered … Bring all these moments of awe, or difficulty, or endurance, or nobility into your present, and you will be already remembering in the way that you must. (p.108 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

Our reverence for life’s preciousness and fragile beauty is our gift to the universe … to see it, to feel the moment, to speak it, to celebrate its truth. (p. 116 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

The universe is one huge celebration – expanding, exuberantly rushing away from a centre with news of that centre .. it is the innate urgency of Being to unfold. (summarised from p. 144-145 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

Fires from the beginning of time empower you right now – this instant. What you are thinking and feeling this very moment is possible only through the cosmic fire. Your entire nervous system is rich in this fire. (p.169 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

When I say that the universe is the principal moral authority, I mean by this the manner in which we are taught the value of the earth. The elements were bestowed on us by the stars, the complex compounds given to us by the young Earth, the informed sequences of the genes by the microorganisms, our limbs and organs by advanced life forms, and the linguistic symbols carrying our thoughts and feelings by the human venture. We could not see without the work of those who shaped the eye; could not hear without the work of those who shaped the ear. The Universe created these gifts, lavishing them upon us; our first and deepest response is infinite gratitude. (p.170 The Universe is a Green Dragon)

The switch out of an attitude where the human is the center of everything, to a biocentric and cosmocentric orientation where the universe and the Earth are the fundamental referents, is the radical transformation that we are presently involved with. It is disruptive. (The Universe is a Green Dragon, p. 107)

What we eventually discover in our passionate remembering of the galactic, terrestrial, biological, and human stories is that a study of the universe is a study of self. (The Universe is a Green Dragon, p. 109)

(The Universe is a Green Dragon, p. 109)

REFERENCES:

Swimme, Brian. The Universe is a Green Dragon. Sante Fe NM: Bear & Co., 1984.

Swimme, Brian & Berry, Thomas. The Universe Story. Harper Collins,1992.

Swimme, Brian. Canticle to the Cosmos. DVD series

Swimme, Brian. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. NY: Orbis, 1996