The Cosmic
Walk
This version of
the Cosmic Walk traces Creation’s story in a two-pronged approach:
a) Specific Stages identified with a particular date, based on current scientific knowledge.
b) Specific Energy-patterns that give shape and form to the unfolding story. I align these energy-patterns with the seven charkas, enduring features of all forms of embodied existence from the cosmos to organic creatures. In this version of the Cosmic Story, I link the energy patterns with specific dates simply as a way of naming and celebrating their existence.
In most versions of
the Cosmic Story, only historically verified facts are cited. In this version I
take the liberty of combining “logos” and “mythos”
scientific fact and imaginative myth. I attribute equal importance to what I
call the “stages” and the “energy patterns.” Evolution and Creation require
both. Omit one, and the liberating power of the story is seriously undermined.
In narrating the
story, it is important that participants have some experience of “walking the
talk.” This can be done more easily outdoor. For indoor versions, one can trace
the story with footsteps, or a long chord/string, or with a series of pictures
along corridor walls. Some further ideas can be gleaned from these link pages:
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Welcome to Creation’s
Story
1. 15
Billion Years Ago: From the restless emptiness of quantum space, creative
energy exploded, bearing all matter, all dimension, all energy, and all time.
The temperature exceeded one trillion degrees centigrade, cooling sufficiently
within one-thousandth of a second to produce the first elementary particles:
electrons, protons and neutrons. The earth is still so radioactive from this
initial explosion that its core is kept hot by continuing nuclear reactions,
and all over its surface, many atoms are still exploding – in rocks and trees,
and even in our own bodies!
3. 13
Billion Years Ago: The paradox of creation and destruction shapes the
evolving rhythms and patterns of the young universe. The cycle of birth, death
and rebirth became the inspiring process that would endow creation for time
immemorial. Chaotic and destructive at times, and often baffling to the human
mind, creation’s paradoxical wisdom continues to beget the wonderful world we
all inhabit.
4.
12 Billion Years Ago: The first stars illuminate the enveloping
horizon. Many of the early stars were intensely hot. They flared up and
exploded in brilliant supernovas, each as bright as an entire galaxy. The force
of those explosions sent heavier elements hurtling through space, condensing
over millions of new stars, begetting in time the sun and planet earth. And to
the stars we owe the ingredients of carbon-based life, without which none of us
could savour the wonders of the night sky.
5.
11 Billion Years Ago: The seventh chakra,
marking the gift of LIGHT! We celebrate the resilience of the creative Spirit
weaving creation through the paradox of light and darkness, illuminating the
mystery through which all creation thrives, enlightening our understanding of
how creation works, and brightening our future with hope and purpose.
6. 10
Billion Years Ago: The
sixth chakra, marking the gift of WISDOM! We
celebrate the wisdom and intelligence which is innate to creation at every
level of its unfolding story, the well-spring which endows everything in
creation to act wisely for the good of the whole, and the source from which
human intelligence also emanates.
7. 9 Billion
Years Ago: The
fifth chakra, marking the gift of COMMUNICATION. We
celebrate creation’s potential to relate and communicate, to articulate the
richness of its life and meaning – in a narrative imbued with complexity and
wonder. Our human capacity for speech and word belong to creation’s innate
potential to communicate and articulate meaning.
8. 8 Billion
Years Ago: The
fourth chakra, celebrating IMMUNITY and the capacity
for right relating. We celebrate creation’s capacity for healthy and wholesome
living, facilitated through mutually enriching relationships with the diverse
creatures that constitute the canopy of universal life.
9. 7.
Billion Years Ago: The third chakra,
marking the invitation to mutual EMPOWERMENT. We celebrate the mutuality
through which interdependence thrives, empowering every aspect of creation
towards the realisation of its true potential, liberating freedom and hope for
future possibility.
10. 6. Billion Years Ago: The second chakra,
marking GENERATIVITY and erotic birthing. In a creation of prodigious fertility
we celebrate the fruitfulness and creative abundance we see around us, and we
give thanks for the pleasures and joys of sexual intimacy.
11.
5. Billion Years Ago: The base chakra,
GROUNDING our presence in the earth and in the body. At every level of creation
energy begets form, and all form assumes embodied presence. The cosmos, the
galaxies, the earth, landscapes, persons, and bacteria are all embodied
expressions through which the presence of living Spirit becomes grounded in creation.
12.
4.5 Billion Years Ago: Cosmogenesis irrupted in a new range of supernova explosions
releasing a spiralling cloud of gas , which we now call the Solar System. One
spiral in this new irruption, namely the Milky Way, was to become home to the
planets and to the many stars that illuminate our night skies.
13.
4 Billion Years Ago: The Sun ingratiates creation. Born out of an
explosion of 10,000 stars all at once, with a volume one million times that of
our earth, the sun is earth’s primary source of heat and energy, of nourishment
and vitality, for all earth’s creatures. Through the process of photosynthesis,
the sun’s energy enters the food-chain, gracing every organism with nurturing
abundance.
14. 3.8 Billion Years Ago: Our home planet, the Earth, is born. Uniquely poised
relative to the sun’s influence on complex molecules, and endowed with a
creative balance of gravitational and electromagnetic forces, Earth brings
forth cosmo-genetic powers unknown in any other
region of creation. Home today to millions of species, the Earth seems to be
endowed with an infinite capacity for innovation and creativity.
15.
3.5 Billion
Years Ago: The rich
array of cosmic liquids and chemicals formed a new alliance, birthing forth the
earliest life-forms: tiny bacteria that thrive even to our time. And from these
simple organisms emerges the canopy of life-forms that adorns creation today.
16.
350 Million
Years Ago: With
flowers adorning the landscape, and trees towering above the earth itself,
plants on earth and fishes abounding in the waters, the sea mammals move on to
land, and the complexity of embodied life reaches a new apex of elegance and
beauty.
17.
7 Million
Years Ago:
18.
37 Years Ago
(1969): Humans
visit another planet for the first time. Glancing back from their base on the
moon, humans see the Earth as a blue-white pearl, illuminated by the Sun. This
iconic image has changed our perceptions forever, inviting us to forgo our
addiction to power and reclaim our place as cosmic-planetary creatures whose
essential vocation is to treat creation with the reverence and care it
deserves.
Concluding Reflection:
What is particularly
striking is the lack of repetition in the developing universe. The fireball
that begins the universe gives way to the galactic emergence and the first
generation of stars. The later generations of stars bring into being the living
planets with their own sequence of epochs, each differentiating itself from the
rest. Biological and human history, with the ever fresh
expressions of creativity, continue the differentiation of time from its
beginning.
Indeed all 15 billion years
form an epic that must be viewed as a whole to understand its full meaning.
This meaning is the extravagance of the creative outpouring, where each being
is given its unique existence. At the heart of the universe is an outrageous
bias for the novel, for the unfurling of surprise in prodigious dimensions
throughout the vast range of existence.
(Brian Swimme & Thomas
Berry, The
Universe Story, p.74)