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The Awakening UniverseTo tell the story of anythingis to tell the story of everythingThomas Berry:

We will be alienated from the universe until we have an adequatestory of the universe that tells the story of the human as well as the story of everything else because it is part of the same ongoing process going thro a sequenceof transformative episodes.

Miriam: This idea of

an emerging universe

is very new.

There is no culture, notradition, no sage, no prophet that could know what our generation is blessed toknow.

Tucker: When we begin to realise this trem

endous sense of time that’

s orienting us andspace

that’s grounding us

we are energized in a new way to take responsibility for theplanet and its eco-systems. In other words

a response to the magnificence of cosmologyand the story is a responsibility to its continuity.

Swimme:

The universe story shows how profoundly related we are.

It shows that weare involved with each other and have been for a long time. It is

not that the earth wasassembled and then we were added to the earth and it was there for our purposes.Rather, we came out of the earth.

Water, musicCommentary: For millions of years every morning on earth has dawned upon an earth of greater biological diversity than the day before. In her endless journey around the sun oursweet and generous earth has brought forth an ever increasing expression of complexityand sophistication, of beauty and wonder.MusicBut now

after eons of more and more, suddenly there is less and less

. In ageographical instant the vitality of our earth has plummeted. Every one of our vital lifesystems is showing signs of a serious and precipitous decline, so serious that mostbiologists now agree that we are in the midst of what they call of a mass extinction event.The last time that happened was 65mill years ago when an asteroid ended the reign of thedinosaur. Now the cause is an

‘

us-teroid

’

. For it is

the impact of human activity,specifically industrialized, technological activity that is literally destroying ourplanetary life support systems.

Are we being alarmist, yes. Because the news isalarming and alarms are meant to warn us of danger and to wake us up. It is time to ask some serious questions like, what spell have we fallen under that would allow us todestroy the very system upon which we rely for our own survival? And how do we break that spell?

If we are going to find our way to a workable future, it might be wise to first go back tothe distant past. All the way back to what science currently views as the beginning of everything.Imagine nothing, not space, not darkness, not even a vast emptiness, but nothing.Now imagine everything.In a stupendous explosion of light heat and energy radiating out in every direction, theuniverse erupted into existence 13.7 bill yrs ago.Poet: We can see that everything that ever was, is or will be was compressed into a spacesmaller than a seed, tinier than a tear, more miniscule than a molecule. All space, all timeand the potential for everything that would ever exist started as a single point and so alsoeverything that exists. So in a very real way science has discovered what indigenouspeople have known all along. We are all one, we are connected, we

all come from thevery same source.

Commentary: This massive fireball continued expanding eventually cooling enough forthe very first atoms to form.Swimme: If the expansion were just a little slower the universe would have collapsed intoan enormous black hole. Or if the universe has expanded a little faster the universe wouldhave expanded just too fast for the galaxies to form and so we would have just dust. If wealtered the expansion of the universe just one millionth of 1%, the universe would havecollapsed. So what it suggests is that

there is a profound Wisdom at work in theuniverse

Commentary: Then in a cosmological wink of the eye a hundred billion galaxies swirledinto being.Swimme: W

e didn’t know ther

e were any galaxies in the universe 100 yrs ago. Wethought maybe there was just one. Now we realise there are a hundred billion. We are justbeginning to understand some of the dynamics of galaxies and to think that they actuallyhave intrinsically the intelligence or ordering power to bring forth all this elegance. Thegalaxies themselves organize all this material and give birth to new stars. So whenscientists begin to look at the galaxies this way they realise they

’

re also something like aliving cell.

That’s news

That’s

another way of imagining our way into the universeCommentary: And now these whirlpools of galactic creativity begin to fulfill their cosmicdestiny, as they each give birth to 100 billion starsWhen these first stars reach the end of their life cycle they collapse in on themselvesand erupt into immense cosmic explosion, called supernovas

Poet: Thomas Berry refers to the

supernova event as a cosmological moment of grace

;He calls it a great sacrificial moment because the death of the stars is what enables allfuture life to develop. The supernova embodies,

the process of death and rebirth,

amythic moment .Out of these clouds of stardust billion of second generation stars are born. One of them isthe star we call our sun and left over from the formation of the sun was a wisp of debriswhich swirled itself into a necklace of 9 spinning planets, the jewel of which was theswirling mass of molten larva that was to become our home, the earth.Out here on a tiny planet suspended in perfect equipoise the force that set the galaxiesspinning, ignited the stars produced its next miracle, a universe within a universe. It wasthe birth of life. Now this miraculous manifesting force began to clothe itself in biology,expressing itself in increasing complex expressions of beauty and elegance.

Miriam: Earth as we see her now 5 billion years after that initial experience has arrived atsuch a complexity, such a development, such a journey of that original fireball that she isnow alive in her own right. In other words

the universe and earth has reached acomplexity in which earth has awakened into life and is alive.

Poet: Think about it! Everything that we see around us has developed from the boilingcauldron of the early earth, a sphere of larva that miraculously gave rise to the sea and theatmosphere and then life in its infinite expressions. As Brian Swimme says the earth wasonce molten rock and now sings operas.

All creativity and all consciousness arises insome mysterious way from the depth of the earth itself

Commentary: Right into the heart of this immense celebration of biological creativitythe universe produced its next surprise, an upright tool-using primate with an opposablethumb and a remarkable ability to reflect on its own existence, In essence

after 14 billionyears the universe had created a way to become aware of itself.

Miriam:

We are the universe reflecting on itself, the universe become conscious andthis changes everything.

Commentary: Human beings lived in harmony with nature for eons until they discoveredhow to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. While most humans continued on in theirnomadic ways, some chose to settle in one place and in a mere 10 000 years they createdeverything we now consider to be human history.Many slidesMiriam: Why out of stardust has this come to be? Why birdsong, why green, why thelushness of palm and the stability of cypress and the grandeur of the mountains, and why