Brian Swimme's "Hidden Heart of the Cosmos" is filled with continuous revelations of the most simple, yet profound kind. After reading these 112 short pages I felt like I had been informed and educated in the most basic of ways. In effect, my perceptual imagination had been changed. Swimme is not only a master of content, but of form as well. Poet, mathematician, and cosmologist he writes with a lyrical style that is precise and inspiring.

He begins his book by explaining how consumerism, through the medium of constant immersion in advertising, has robbed us all of rich imaginations that by now can barely move beyond anything except fantasies of newly acquired possessions. In effect, we are unable actively, thoughtfully, or clearly to envision or participate in the world around us. We have no real sense of cosmology. These cosmological worlds range from our microcosmic neighborhoods to the large participation in the macrocosmic cosmos itself. "Advertisements are where our children receive their cosmology, their basic grasp of the world's meaning, which amounts to their primary religious faith, though unrecognized as such (170)." One cause of this chronic, modern ailment of alienation and rootlessness is an inability to see, feel, experience, or know directly those interconnected webs and lineages in which we are in reality so deeply embedded. As a cultural critic, Swimme goes on to say that consumerism has become the new religion of the modern age. "The fact that consumerism has become the dominant world-faith is largely invisible to us, so it is helpful to understand clearly that to hand our children over to the consumer culture is to place them in the care of the planet's most sophisticated preachers (19)." This perception of the world could come across as somewhat shrill in the hands of a lesser writer or thinker, but Brian Swimme's clear and concise prose prevents this.

From there Dr. Swimme goes on to point out that there are other areas in which our limited imagination is problematic and limiting. He shows that cognitively we all know that we live in a heliocentric solar system. Yet, imaginatively we have not made that shift. His thesis is that we are deeply impoverished in a wide variety of ways from this lack of accurate imagination. He gives the reader a series of visualization exercises that reconnects our imagination back to cosmological reality. The results are unbelievable. It is hard to explain why something so simple can be so profound. Swimme is able to move the concept of Immanence from the cool, cognitive plane to a deeply moving experience of burning cosmological reality. The turning of the earth within the solar system, around an overwhelmingly generous, ("The Sun, in each second, transforms four million tons of itself into light (41"), giant of a star/sun becomes a tangible, visceral constant for the realities of constant giving and selfless sacrifice. These ideas are not only the highest ethical principles, they are laws of physics and cosmology. The book builds on numerous observations such as these.

Toward the end of the book, Swimme takes on yet another great cosmological question. What was there before there was anything? What is before the "Big Bang?" Here is where we move even more fully away from discursive language and into the realms of deep paradox. After a careful and lucid description of current cosmological thinking about this state, Swimme ends up by saying, "The ground of the universe then is an empty fullness, a fecund nothingness (93)." Yet, this "empty fullness" is neither dead nor material; according to Swimme it seethes with the constant creative activity of "space-time foam." The implications of all this is that there is not a single point, one moment in time and in space that burst forth into the creative fullness of manifestation. That same ultimate moment of creative expression is not over, but occurring constantly. "From our cosmological studies we learn that we are at the center of the large-scale omnicentric expansion of the universe. From our quantum studies we learn that matter and energy emerge from the quantum potential. Taken together these two discoveries bring human understanding to a vista never before enjoyed: Each child is situated in that very place and is rooted in that very power that brought forth all the matter and energy of the universe (104)."

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos makes for an excellent and welcome addition to the growing dialogue between science and religion. This book is made accessible to high school students and a delight to teachers through concise, poetic, prose. For those who would like to supplement readings with other material, there is a video by Brian Swimme available for use. To learn more about this video and others look on Brian Swimme's web site I recommend Hidden Heart of the Cosmos very highly. There are several other books by this important thinker that also deserve reading. In particular look at The Universe is a Green Dragon (1984) and co written with Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era (1992). In 2000 The Unfolding Universe will be published.

review © 1999 by Tom Collins and RSiSS

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