Our paradigm is increasingly at odds with itself as the implications of binary yes-no, black-white computer algorithms—the operating system of age—seem to clash with the uncertainty principles of quantum physics, string theory and the creative edge of science. If the Emmy-winning documentary “Journey of the Universe” (out on DVD) won’t heal our bifurcated consciousness, it’s at least an interesting conversation starter.
“Journey” was developed by its narrator, California Institute of Integral Studies cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme, and Yale historian of religions Mary Evelyn Tucker, and set on the Greek island of Samos. The location is a reminder that Earth is an island, and this particular elevation in the Mediterranean is especially significant as the birthplace of Pythagoras, who found harmony in the cosmos through mathematics, and Aristarchus, who realized that Earth was a planet revolving around the sun at a time when science and common sense deemed otherwise.
Samos is also a place where much of history still lives. Swimme walks into one of the island’s many Eastern Orthodox churches and points out their domed ceilings are painted with stars. The ancient Greeks thought stars were living entities, Swimme says, and modern science knows they were not far from the truth. We are all stardust, billion-year old carbon produced by the dynamic activity of stars in an every changing cosmos.
The dialogue between the findings of science and ancient wisdom is at the heart of “Journey of the Universe” as Swimme asks the “Where do we come from?” and “Why are we here?” questions. The science of the so-called “European Enlightenment,” in which the universe was imagined as a great machine and every creature in it a cog, has been supplanted by more organic metaphors. Swimme quotes physicist Freeman Dyson’s remark that in some sense, the universe must have known life was coming. This was not only true of Earth, ideally positioned to support the fruition of organisms. If the universe’s expansion in the moments after the Big Bang had occurred too slowly, the cosmos would have imploded into a vast black hole; too quickly, matter would have exploded into dust and chaos. Swimme lucidly describes the patterns biologists have found in organisms, a guiding sentience common to all life. We are made from the same genetic material as the animals that share our world, and yet we are different from them because of symbolic consciousness—our ability to represent our internal world externally through language and art, which magnifies our consciousness and enabled us to become a planet-altering species.
Alas, we have increasingly altered our planet in destructive ways. Wisdom is not inevitably a product of symbolic consciousness. A four-DVD companion set, “Journey of the Universe Conversations,” records a series of discussions among activists, physicists, economists and others on everything from ecological economics to “indigenous ways of knowing.” The topics are essential for anyone seeking to grasp a world endangered by the human capacity for catastrophe.
