Brian Swimme Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans.

Brian Swimme
Every moment we're making decisions. If you want to understand the universe as a whole you'd have to include all those decisions including our own lives so that even in the future our presence is going to be felt one way or the other — so I think … our death as being — it's a death to a micro-phase self or a small self … it's a death into our larger self in that … this whole vast adventure is our larger identity.

Brian Swimme
With the appearance of the human, the coding process of life burst beyond the DNA molecule and began carving its information in stone!

Brian Swimme
Earth was once molten rock, and now it makes spaceships.

Brian Swimme
If you if you take Buddhism and Christianity and so forth there's a kind of battle — a subtle sort of struggle taking place because they're not standing in a common ground but … take the Earth or ecology then suddenly they can begin to explore what they have to offer. So I do think I do think absolutely that … there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context of planet and universe. I even think that as a matter of fact that … some of the central insights of the religions are more powerfully presented by what we know about the universe now then when they were first formulated.

Brian Swimme
The break-through moments are unimaginable until they happen.

Brian Swimme
The more I learn about light the more I realize, man, we don't know anything about light... It's just bizarre... a particle has it's own proper time which slows down as you speed up. But at the speed of light... there's no time. That's bizarre … that we can, right now, as you know, see — interact with the light that has come from the birth of the universe. So … from our point of view, that light traveled for 14 billion years but from the point of view of the light it's the moment of creation.

Brian Swimme
I think the discovery of nonlocality is touching in on the whole. So that these these seemingly separate events are somehow connected through the whole. … you have this larger enveloping field and we're, you know, just beginning to understand something about that... so I love that discovery although I don't think we're anywhere near really knowing what we've come upon.

Brian Swimme
There's a great phrase from Eric Jantsch … and he says, "these self-organizing dynamics are in every place in the universe, waiting at their marks". I love that phrase because you get that … the power for making water exists everywhere in the universe but the conditions have to be right. But if the conditions are right, then these self-organizing dynamics leap to it. So I think it's something like that, that the possibility for sentience has always been there but has been waiting for a chance to really display.

Brian Swimme
The primary challenge of this cosmological transformation of consciousness is the awareness that each being in the universe is an origin of the universe. "The center of the cosmos" refers to that place where the great birth of the universe happened at the beginning of time, but it also refers to the upwelling of the universe as river, as star, as raven, as you, the universe surging into existence anew. The consciousness that learns it is at the origin point of the universe is itself an origin of the universe. The awareness that bubbles up each moment that we identify as ourselves is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos.

Brian Swimme
I am convinced that the story of the universe that has come out of three centuries of modern scientific work will be recognized as a supreme human achievement, the scientific enterprise's central gift to humanity, a revelation having a status equal to that of the great religious revelations of the past.

Brian Swimme
What's evil for the hawk is the mouse because, you know, the mouse is quick and gets away but I did this one realization every scientist goes through at one point... if you gave the hawk power, the power of God, the first thing the hawk might do is to slow down the mouse. But then the hawk would lose it's speed. And then if you slow the mouse all the way down, so it can just barely move, the hawk would lose its flight. So that in a weird way the tension between those two say natural enemies is what gives birth to their beauty. So I definitely feel that the tension we have right now within the human community in particular — that those are ultimately going to be resolved with a deeper harmony and a deeper appreciation for one another.

Brian Swimme
I have a sense that something amazing is at work … I think our planet is actually moving into a time of profound harmony and fecundity and peace but whether that's going to take 600 years or 6 days I don't know. I mean, I think that as humans begin to take seriously... the planetary dimension of conscious self-awareness, then we will become homonized versions of natural selection — so that we will begin to make decision with the large scale dynamic of the planet in mind. So I see that we're actually entering into a transformation of the human species out of the modern period into this new era... It may take centuries... but like the past and it's catastrophes I think that's... what's taking place in the midst of so many hardships.

Brian Swimme