Brian Thomas Swimme - Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe

Cosmogenesis is not only an engaging memoir of a visionary cosmologist, but an autobiographical coming-of-age story of the cosmos itself.

Sean Kelly, Ph.D., author of Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation and Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era

A love story beautifully told about the storyteller and his vocation, his wife, his mentor Thomas Berry, the universe, and us. Wonderful snapshot moments enliven the soul and imagination and tell the valuable and vulnerable story of the price paid for coming to ones vocation. At the same time, the storyteller heralds a new direction for humanity, freshly empowered by our role as cosmic beings in a sacred process of cosmogenesis, where our vocations, too, become love stories born of our sacred origins.

Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, and The Tao of Thomas Aquinas

An immediate antidote to shrunken consciousness, Cosmogenesis will enlarge your conception of what a human is for. Swimmes riveting auto-cosmology offers a direct, repeatable experience of intimacy with the universe.

Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution and Amor and Psycho

As a theoretical physicist interested in the wider cultural and spiritual implications of modern science, I have long been a fan of the work of Brian Thomas Swimme, who has a particularly inspiring take on the standard scientific paradigmthat the universe is not just something to be theoretically understood but something we can have an experiential relationship with. In his newest book, Cosmogenesis, he intermingles his description of the development of his ideas with his own very personal history. Poignant, epic, and fascinating, it is quite simply a joy to read.

Professor Jonathan Halliwell, Department of Physics, Imperial College London

Cosmogenesis is a remarkable story threaded into the dynamic unfolding of our emerging universe. The weave here of poetics, spirituality, and science is exquisite. Swimmes narration will carry you along in his poignant journey toward universe-as-teacher. You will discover your personal entry into a cosmos speaking through you.

John Grim, Yale University, coauthor of Ecology and Religion

Cosmogenesis has the gripping intensity of a mystery thriller and the Socratic seriousness of a truth quest. In the pages of this book, the staggering epic of a fourteen-billion-year evolution is told via a steadily accelerating drumbeat of revelations. Both remarkably accessible and irresistibly seductive, this transformative work augurs spiritual rebirth at a planetary scale.

Louis G. Herman, author of Future Primal

What a wonderfully engaging book Brian Thomas Swimme has given us! So spacious and expansive, even cosmic, yet down-to-earth and deeply human. The lightness of touch, the exquisite care for detail, the honesty, the self-deprecating humor: every scene is described with such Salinger-like vividness its as if it is taking place now before ones eyes. At one level, Cosmogenesis is a model of how to communicate epoch-shaping scientific and philosophical discoveries while narrating the unfolding drama of ones own life story. But at a deeper level, it is the gradual revelation of how the life of the individual and the life of the cosmos are fundamentally intertwined within a single journey of self-revelation.

Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

In Cosmogenesis, Brian Thomas Swimme revisits the personal stages of his journey of discovery from his beginning as an academic mathematician to his exceptional bursts of insight that comprise his truth quest as a cosmologist. For Swimme, these insights inaugurate a new multi-civilizational Axial Age whose recognition will come sooner than the original one twenty-five hundred years ago, since the explosive natural and political crises syndromes are global and do not allow for much delay.

Manfred Henningsen, emeritus professor of political science, University of Hawaii at Manoa

In Swimmes sweeping and beautiful memoir of a life in search of truth, the reader is witness to a remarkable feat of intellectual alchemy. As our protagonist reaches ever deeper for the genesis of the universe, as revealed in the mathematics of his native tongue, he uncovers a subtle, stunning truth. The universe out there is intricately and intrinsically tied up with the universe in here. Swimmes storytelling skill shines brightly in this unique intellectual journey, complementing the extraordinary words of, and the authors engaging encounters with, many of the great minds of the last century. Cosmogenesis is a monument to mystic chords of natures memory whose notes join both consciousness and cosmos in the story of creation. May we all be lifted by the soaring, resonant voice of this cosmic bard and learn to sing in harmony with his hymn to the universe.

Carter Phipps, author of Evolutionaries and Conscious Leadership

Cosmogenesis is the most clearly and convincingly told story of the origin of the universe I have ever read. But thats not all that makes this an essential read. If humanity is to escape the stranglehold of the lonely, king-of-the-mountain materialism that licenses planetary destruction, it will be when we tell a new story about who we are and how we come to be in the universe expanding around and within us. Cosmogenesis is a powerful telling of that story.

Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising

This is a brave, paradigm-shifting, and page-turning book; vulnerable and intimate, vast and lyrical. By sharing the challenges and breakthroughs of his own personal story in the style of an auto-cosmology, Brian Thomas Swimme impactfully reveals epic twists and turns of the Universe Story. Powerful storytelling throughout evokes a new and much needed cosmology that meaningfully brings together subjective lived experience and recent scientific discovery.

Jane Riddiford, author of Learning to Lead Together: An Ecological and Community Approach and cofounder of Global Generation

Cosmogenesis is one of the most remarkable stories of our timenot simply a page-turner, but a life-changer. We follow Swimmes journey of studying science as an academic field to embracing cosmology as a lived experience. In reading this, you will be transformed as you enter into new ways of becoming alive in the universe.

Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University

Modern science began with the myth of the machine. In only a few centuries, this worldview has completely transformed the world, empowering our species to become a geological force on par with asteroids and ice ages. If Brian Thomas Swimme and Thomas Berry are right, science, through the insights derived from its own methods, has now entirely outgrown the mechanistic image of the cosmos. The universe, it turns out, is a green dragona creative process rather than a finished product. Swimmes autobiocosmological narrative is, in one sense, the exemplar of an ancient genre counting Augustines Confessions and Dantes Divine Comedy among its antecedents. But in another sense, Cosmogenesis changes everything: in place of a separate creator God who designs and judges creation from afar, there is pervasive creative attraction luring the universe beyond every settled order; and in place of a static hierarchy of planetary spheres, there is a nested sequence of evolutionary phases. The human is not the end of this stupendous process but a crucial turning point. Conscious, self-reflective creatures now hold the fate of Earth in their hands. Swimmes book serves as a call to adventure to all those ready and willing to meet this moment by becoming cosmological beings.