Cosmos in The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos by Swimme - Book Report/Review Example

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, by Brian Swimme In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme offers readers a reflection on the cosmos, the birthplace of the universe, and the nature and destiny of humanity. His clear and poetic style makes this book a worthy, enjoyable and accessible reading to young people and adults. According to Swimme, we have had the truth about the universe’s birthplace in front of us, and we have been unable to see it or recognize it. Science has enabled us to know what was around us by means of a long process of inquiry. The discovery of the birthplace of the universe (fifteen billion light-years from the Earth) is considered the most significant discovery of the twentieth century. The entire scientific enterprise can be characterized as the development of sensitivities and ideas necessary to become more fully aware of what is happening all around us. Seen in this perspective, the discovery of the birthplace of the universe is a four-million-year learning event (Swimme, 1996, p. 1). In the present-day times, we face the challenge of identifying the meanings such discoveries have for human existence. It has become essential to integrate science’s understanding of the universe with more ancient intuitions concerning the meaning and destiny of the humans. This would be an opportunity to conciliate science, cultural tradition and religion. We are challenged here with understanding the significance of the human enterprise within an evolving universe. Upon our success in meeting this challenge rests the vitality of so much of the Earth Community, including the quality of life all future children will enjoy (Swimme, 1996, p. 3). The enterprise of cosmology –that is, the exploration of the origin, development and destiny of the universe– started at the beginning of humanity. As humans, we require a cultural orientation. “We are not given a fixed and final form to our orientation in life but must discover and deepen this orientation through the process of psychic development” (Swimme, 1996, p. 9). We have many different answers to the question “What does it mean to be human in this universe?” Brian Swimme proposes us to reflect on this issue, which has implications for our daily life, our family and our role in communities. From the primitive cave dwellers, people have marveled at the mystery of the cosmos, and created explanations for its origins and essence. However, Swimme points out that modern humanity might be the first culture to ignore the primordial tradition of celebrating the mysteries of the universe. Swimme argues that our religions deal with the deep questions of meaning in the universe, in a context fixed in the time when the classical scriptures achieved their written form, instead of worshiping or contemplating in the context of the universe as we have come to know it over the last centuries. The fundamental role and meaning of humanity and the universe is not treated significantly in science education. Science is assumed as concerned with facts, whereas religion considers the concept of meaning and values. The Scientific Revolution determined the separation between scientific knowledge and religion. The first one has contributed to a view of the universe as a dead machine, and religion has debated oscillated between fundamentalism and skepticism. Brian Swimme aims for a new consciousness, the age of integration that the current cosmology is calling for. Expressed within the context of the dynamics of the developing universe, the essential truths of religion would find a far vaster and more profound form. The recasting would not be a compromise nor a diminution nor a belittlement; it would be a surprising and creative fulfillment, one whose significance goes beyond today’s most optimistic evaluations of the value of religion (Swimme, 1996, p. 12). In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Brian Swimme makes several points about the dangers of ads. They influence our cosmology, since ads create in us dissatisfaction for our lives, which can only be solved by consuming more and more products. The analysis offered by Swimme is revealing as well as alarming. In ancient times, children have historically learned their place in the world. But now our children receive their cosmology from ads, and, when they are adults, they are forced to think that we exist just to work at jobs in order to earn money destinated to buy products. This could be thought as the ultimate meaning of human existence. Therefore, this modern culture has replaced authentic spiritual development with the materialism of the advertisement. 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 religious preachers (Swimme, 1996, p. 19). Brian Swimme makes us question our attitude toward ads. We have criticized some, admired others, let us guide for their promises or ignored them, but we have not thought about the worldview which ads are implanting in our society. Ads are a powerful bombardment that affects our society, and there we could find an explanation for the moral and ethical problems we face nowadays. If we come to an awareness of the way in which the materialism of the advertisement is our culture’s primary way for shaping our children, and if we find this unacceptable, we are left with the task of inventing new ways of introducing our children and our teenagers and our young adults and our middle-aged adults and our older adults to the universe (Swimme, 1996, p. 19). Consumerism, by means of this constant immersion in advertising, has taken away the richness of human imagination. Swimme argues that this limited imagination is cognitively problematic, and he proposes some visualization exercises which reconnect imagination back to cosmological reality. Swimme deals with consumerism from a cosmological perspective, and he gives readers a hope based on the awareness of cosmological reality, and our role as humans in the universe. He proposes us to tell our children a new story, which integrates scientific phenomena, our knowledge of the universe, and the presence of God. Although we are suffering the effects of ads in our cosmology, this new story of humanity would benefit younger generations and, by extension, our future society. Personally, I feel identified with the statements in The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. As a mother of a twenty-year-old child, I am concerned about the loss of moral values in our society, the growth of a pessimist or indifferent worldview, and the lack of consciousness on the planet we live. Brian Swimme has taught us that integration between science and religion is not only possible, but also desirable for our understanding of the universe. In this sense, Swimme’s book has demonstrated me that we can improve our world from the standpoint of science or religion, from our role as parents or workers, and there are new and old questions that modern philosophy has to consider. Reference Swimme, B. (1996). The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan W. Watts The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan W. Watts, deals with the problem of anxiety and insecurity that has arisen due to the conflict between science and religion, and the loss of spiritual certainty caused by it. The worth and meaning of existence has been based on the belief of a future beyond our life in this world. Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees –unless there is an eternal order and eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death (Watts, 1951, p. 13). Watts analyzes the feeling of insecurity that dominates our time. Long-established traditions of family, social life, government, economic order and religion have collapsed in the course of a century. More than fifty years after the publication of The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts’s statements are up-to-date, because he expresses the anxiety caused by this loss of certainties. “As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time” (Watts, 1951, pp. 14-15). Happiness seems to depend on a future to which people can look forward. This notion of future refers to a “good time” we can have tomorrow, as well as an eternal life after death. Although the belief on an everlasting life is decaying, the thought of a definitive and unavoidable end of our lives takes away the meaning of living. On the other hand, the concept of an ephemeral happiness conformed by many “good moments” cannot be fully enjoyed if there is no promise of more. According to Watts, the problem is to place happiness in our future, beyond our grasp. If we have fear of our future, or we believe that there will be none, then we are invaded by psychological insecurities. As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity –in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right (Watts, 1951, pp. 15-16). During the nineteenth century, there was a big conflict between science and religion. The authority of science displaced the authority of religion, leaving an increasing skepticism on spirituality, which affected religious beliefs. The influence of this skepticism has caused a prevailing mood of this age, according to Watts. Scientific knowledge cannot prove God’s existence, and the results of the scientific position have been deeply disturbing and depressing for most people. Therefore, our age is characterized by frustration, anxiety, agitation and addiction to “dope”, understood as a high standard of living that brings a complex stimulation of the senses, and distracts us from the insecurities of life. To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work (Watts, 1951, p. 21). I have witnessed this situation during my twenty-year experience working for IBM. The job is for most employees just a means to earn money in order to buy products, that are going to give them relief for a while, and then it is necessary to buy more and more to keep the pleasure that allow the evasion of all the uncertainties which create anxiety in our lives. However, the frustration does not disappear, because people do not know what to do, except working. The distinction between belief and faith is essential in this context, because it enables Watts to offer readers a new path. According to this author, belief is the insistence in a desired truth. The believer wants the truth to fit in with her/his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is nor self-deception (Watts, 1951, p. 24). We believe in order to feel secure, but faith would allow us to live with the insecurities. Alan Watts takes the example of the Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, with the aim of proposing ways of an acceptance that will enable us to deal with anxiety and insecurity. Our wisdom would be to concentrate on the positive aspects of life –our capacities to reason, hope, create, and love–, and to accept the doubts and questions that we cannot answer. Watts conciliates the conflict between science and religion by stating that both talk about the same universe with different kinds of language. Science has to do with the past and the future. Its description of events tells us how things happen by providing us a detailed account of what has happened, that is, science needs to know the past in order to predict the future. Religion, on the other hand, refers to the present, although we could have the impression that religion is more concerned with the past and the future. Religion is not a system of predictions. Its doctrines have to do, not with the future and the everlasting, but with the present and the eternal. They are not a set of beliefs and hopes but, on the contrary, a set of graphic symbols about present experience (Watts, 1951, p. 136). Innumerable phenomena studied by science cannot be experienced with the senses and they are not present to immediate experience. Watts mentions examples such as the entire past, gravity, the nature of time, and the weights of planets and stars. These “invisible” phenomena are inferred from immediate experience by logic, and they constitute explanations of observed events. Watts states that God is exactly the same –“a hypothesis accounting for all experience” (Watts, 1951, p. 139). I have experienced both sides of this issue: science, because I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, and religion, because I continued my education in the Marist Adult Education Program Orientation, a Catholic education program. Watts’s statements are inspiring, because he uses a philosophical reasoning to explain and offer solutions to the anxiety of our lives. The Wisdom of Insecurity may be considered an interdisciplinary book, since it deals with philosophical, psychological, religious and scientific topics. It is a book full of hope for life, and it motivates readers to hold an open-minded attitude. Our lives do not become meaningless because death exists, in the same way a musician does not play a symphony in order to get to the last note. Our lives are meaningful in the present, and Watts encourages us to be wise enough to enjoy them in spite of insecurities. Reference Watts, A. W. (1951). The Wisdom of Insecurity. New York: Pantheon Books. Read More