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Outside the Box, This and That

What’s so great about Brian Swimme?

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Brian and SuzanneAs anyone who has been tracking with me knows, Brian Swimme is at the top of my list of contemporary thinkers. I just came across this, which will give you a sense of why:

 Awakening to the Universe Story is Part 1 and The Divinization of the Cosmos is Part 2 of an interview from What Is Enlightenment? that came to be after
I heard the editor do a talk and told him about Brian.

This, from the Intro to the interview, is why Brian can matter so much:

In this interview with Brian Swimme, and through the research undertaken for that issue of What Is Enlightenment?, our understanding of the deep time evolutionary perspective that Swimme espouses was profoundly enriched and expanded.
And that helped to shift the philosophical ground here.

There does not seem to be any link to this highly recommended intro,
but here’s my saved text:

Two centuries ago, the German idealist Friedrich Schelling wrote: “History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self- disclosing revelation of the Absolute.” A forerunner of evolutionary theory, Schelling’s philosophical project was
to reconcile the fundamental dualities of life into an all- encompassing and evolving unity. Though he was addressing evolution in the context of human culture, two hundred years later, as a result of the recent discoveries of astrophysics and astronomy, evolution has been elevated to the cosmic realms of the galaxies. It is now commonly known that we live in a vast and evolving universe. While many of us are aware of this, according to mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme,
our awakening to the truth of that fact may actually represent the most significant shift in human consciousness in two million years.

Swimme is a leading proponent of the “Universe Story,” the deep time developmental perspective that he brings forward in this two-part interview on both his own work and that of French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The far-reaching significance of this cosmological perspective is why I’ve selected the spring 2001 interview with Swimme for our fifteenth anniversary issue of What Is Enlightenment?

A specialist in the evolutionary dynamics of the cosmos, Brian Swimme is on a mission to make us aware of the miraculous fourteen-billion-year evolutionary process of which we are a part. He is calling us to “reinvent” ourselves, to redefine what it means to be human in an emergent universe. The paradigm shift we must make, he believes, may be more challenging and more significant than any that has occurred in the course of human history. Evoking the vast panorama of cosmic becoming, he arcs back through deep time and then forward again, dissolving everything we know as real and relatively permanent into
a morphing, unfolding, infinitely creative process. In that,
he challenges us to cognize the fact that we are citizens not just
of our communities or of our nations or even of planet earth. We are citizens of an evolving cosmos. And our conscious awareness of that places us in a far more implicated relationship to ourselves, to the entire web of life on this planet, and to the future.

For Brian Swimme, whose understanding has been deeply influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955),
the interface between science and spirituality holds a particularly potent significance. Teilhard believed that the evolving universe and the Divine are one. All dualities and traditional antipathies—between science and religion, matter and spirit, the physical and the metaphysical, God and the universe—are ultimately reconciled and subsumed into the scientifically verifiable reality of cosmic evolution. And that objective reality applies to us human beings as well. As Teilhard said, “I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is in process of becoming.”

In this interview with Brian Swimme, and through the research undertaken for that issue of What Is Enlightenment?, our understanding of the deep time evolutionary perspective that Swimme espouses was profoundly enriched and expanded. And that helped to shift the philosophical ground here at WIE.
It became increasingly apparent to us that the spirituality of
the twenty-first century has everything to do with the cosmic evolutionary process that we are part and parcel of. Indeed,
as we comprehend our place in a swirling, unfurling universe,
it makes sense that the spiritual quest, the quest to understand who we are and why we are here, would be seen in an entirely new light. But what exactly is that new perspective? And how might it affect the way we relate to our own lives and to human life itself? Those were the questions driving us as we stepped into a fast-moving evolutionary current for Issue 19 and began to peer a little more deeply into what the future of the spirit, and the spirit of the future, might hold.

Here’s my affiliate link to buy The Universe is a Green Dragon,
my favorite book: http://tinyurl.com/28uql4b

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This and That

Is Time Speeding Up?

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I was turned onto a site by listmember Bill Casey. If you want to quit your day job and get lost in internet info, have a look at http://www.pagenews.info, the site is run by Peter A. Gersten Esq., former Director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS).
I particularly picked up on one piece about the sense of time speeding up. It always bothers me when people speak of that, since it defies the laws of physics. I am not married to lawfulness across the boards, but there are limits to how far my mind will stretch and that idea is challenging. But, when I read this, about the Mayan calendar, I got some sense of how to interpret that idea to fit into the reality I know.

2012 – Are We on a Schedule to Cosmic Consciousness?

Here’s an excerpt:

I sense an acceleration going on; that time itself seems to be going faster each year, and most people I talk to have the same view. But is it really time that is speeding up? Here’s an analogy that may explain the relationship:

Imagine a ball rolling across a level surface, the distance it travels each second would be constant, apart from the effect of friction

– this is a linear approach that is similar to how we perceive life. However, if the ball were dropped from the top of a tall building, in the first second it would travel thirty-two feet. But the time it would take to travel the next thirty-two feet would be less than half a second as its speed would increase exponentially because of the accelerating force of gravity.

If you were a microbe on this ball, you might therefore conclude that time is speeding up. In this case it is not time that is speeding up, it is the distance traveled that is increasing each second. In a similar way, evolution is also exponential and time is not speeding up, but the number of events occurring in each year is increasing: It took two billion years from the origin of life to the creation of cells and just fourteen years from the PC to the World Wide Web!

To demonstrate the exponential nature of evolution, astronomer Carl Sagan imagined a cosmic calendar (Video is above) in which one year represented the whole of history from the start of the universe (big bang) until today. His powerful conclusion was: “We humans appeared so recently that our recorded history occupied only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.” When this type of acceleration is plotted on a logarithmic scale, as was done by futurist Ray Kurszweil, the pattern unfolds as a straight line with events increasingly faster and faster. Author, Ken Wilber suggests that this scientific view of history as mere evolution suffers one great defect: “It cannot explain or even suggest the meaning of this going somewhere. Why evolution – What is the purpose of history?”

However, an alternative with striking similarities to the scientific version of evolution is the Mayan Calendar which provides not only a context and a structure supported by history; it suggests a meaning of divine importance. The interpretations developed by Carl Johan Calleman, an internationally recognized authority in Mayan history, detail this inspiring viewpoint and provide credible evidence of its validity.

Pyramid

According to Calleman, the Mayan Long Count is not a calendar of time, but is believed to be a sacred schedule of energy for the evolution of consciousness through time. Its date of creation is unknown in the mists of centuries BC. It is a schedule of incredible mathematical precision in which time accelerates in each of nine overlapping epochs.

They cover from the ‘big bang’ billions of years ago until ending on the same date: 28 October 2011. Each new cycle commences with a distinct leap, a quantum jump, into an expanded form of consciousness which develops and matures toward the end of that cycle. The nine epoch with their significant starting events are shown in the diagram below.

The first cycle of the nine, labeled the CELLULAR CYCLE, puts the start of the universe – the big bang – at 16.4 Billion years BC. This is remarkably close to the current expert estimate of 15 Billion years. Over this vast period the galaxies and solar system were formed, eventually followed by the emergence of cellular life by 1.26 Billion years BC.

To give an idea of acceleration nested in these cycles, 95% of the time passes before the next cycle is initiated. Each successive cycle is exactly twenty times faster and twenty times shorter than the one below. (The mathematical duration of each one equals 13 X 20x years, where x reduces each cycle.)

Finally, the last cycle, optimistically named the COSMIC CYCLE, will start 10 February 2011 and last only 9 months.

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