Why did Homer call it a wine-dark sea?
Do we need a new story?
Was the sea red? Or the wine blue?
For years, I thought I just lacked the imagination to understand the meaning of “wine-dark sea.” Turns out that, for Homer and his contemporaries, blue did not exist. Presumably, he saw blue … the sky was there, water was there … but, he didn’t seem to have a word for the color.
Substacker,
who writes The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything discusses this issue in a fascinating post about the development of color language. His bottomline is that it was a problem of linguistics … the words for color had not emerged in that 2800 years-ago-world.So, the point of all of this is? Language spirals: people change … our ability to talk about what we know changes. As our talk changes, we change, thus the world changes. What is our role in this talking about and changing of our world?
We know more now than we did two or three thousand years ago; however, we’re still telling some of the same stories. For example, the Genesis story tells us how we got here in seven days (metaphorically, of course, because even the idea of a “day” didn’t exist until after Day 1.) Let’s borrow Wikipedia’s recap of the creation story … with the 7th day being Divine Rest:
That story has served us well … at least until recently when we’ve been able to use our technology to actually see more of the Universe. The images and scientific breakthroughs we’ve made are rapidly and dramatically changing and expanding our story.
By now, most of us are basically familiar with the Big Bang theory, which explains the creation of the Universe as the result of an explosion of a single point which launched star stuff and energy into the emptiness. Since this makes little since at least to my average human mind, we’ve tended to think of the Universe as “all that stuff out there” and that, somehow over a great deal of time, life just emerged and evolved into big-brained US, at which point, we took over managing all that other stuff. (Aside: we could use an upgrade in our management skills.)
Our wisdom traditions that focus on a supreme creator are much more comprehensible than the idea that some anonymous floating bit of matter exploded into all there is … especially when one explanation is that it … the Universe … might have had a purpose, possibly even a “mind.”
And, yet … our deep space probes and the growing mountains of scientific discoveries are piecing together a story that, while new, resonates with with much of the old traditions.
Recently, I have become fascinated with cosmogenesis, the new story about the whole of everything … including every aspect of the seen and unseen, known and unknown, all wrapped up in the word Universe, which expands in mystery, astonishment, and beauty with each new revelation.
The Big Bang didn’t “create” the Universe with a clearly stated plan as outlined in Genesis. Rather, it exploded raw material into the emptiness along with (apparently) some operating guidelines (or laws). This combination of matter, energy, guidelines and 14 billion years has produced stars, planets, galaxies, life and US.. All of that plus whatever we haven’t discovered yet makes up our evolving UNIVERSE. While we humans are a living, evolving part of the Universe, we don’t seem to have a clear vision of our role in this story.
This mystery calls to me, invites me to come sit a spell with it and write about it.
The backstory of this fascination.
My early life tempted me with sparse crumbs of both religion and science … just enough to be intrigued and confused by both. One summer when I was about ten, I went to a church tent revival. I was old enough to have questions, young enough to be told to just pay attention to the teaching. I remember only one message from that revival, one that seems rather odd for that more solidly doctrinaire time and place. What I took away was that there is no conflict between science and religion; the conflict lies simply in the interpretation of each. For some reason, that idea set me free to be curious about both science and religion and look for truth and meaning wherever I might find it.
When the Big Bang entered popular thought, my question was always: what banged? Recently, I’ve put that question aside as a mystery beyond my pay grade and, as far as I know, the pay grade of any other sentient being currently sharing the universe with us. What is more interesting to me, is to understand what we know about who we are, how we got here, why we’re here, and what to do now, especially since we seem to be rapidly making a mess of billions of years of life evolving here on Earth.
Sentient beings, at least the ones we’ve come to call humans, have been searching for answers to those questions since our beginning. Without confirmable answers, we’ve made up stories, myths, philosophies, religions, and science, which carries the complication of proof of concept.
Science was born in a commitment to weigh and measure, test and revise, and dig deeper into the fundamentals of our questions. As our technology improved, some theories fell by the wayside and some carried on, validated for the time being by the precision of our findings. From these findings, a new story is emerging, one that builds on our wisdom traditions as well as the amazing voyages of discovery being done by our space probes, including the NASA Mission: Ullysses, briefly discussed in this video:
We just happen to be living at a time when science is rhyming with ancient wisdom to create a new understanding of why we’re here.
I have wondered why this whole Cosmogenesis idea was ringing so loudly for me and then remembered one moment buried in my youth.
It was the summer after my freshman year in college and I was concerned about money and how to pay for my next year of college when I had already blown my scholarship.* In other words, I didn’t have my head in the stars; my main concern was financial.
A friend was visiting and we had gone to a concert in the park in St. Louis on a starry night which prompted one of those young conversations about the immensity of the Universe. I remember a flash of insight about that immensity, a feeling of connection. However, it was gone in an eye-blink and by the next day, only the vaguest trace of it remained, but I knew “something” had come, visited for a moment, and then left again, leaving a void.
Over the years, this feeling of having lost something occasionally returned, however, it wasn’t until I was on my second reading of Brian Swimme’s Cosmogenesis that I recalled that moment and once again felt that connection to something niggling but still unnameable.
How does something come out of nothing? We don’t know … yet … however, Thomas Berry says, “ … this only reveals the limits of language. We are here approaching an Ultimate Mystery, something that defeats our attempts to probe and investigate.”
And, why is all of this important?
According to Thomas Berry, the Universe isn’t just what is at the present moment; we … we creative, sentient beings … we humans … are influencing what is and what will be.
Is there room for god/God in all of this? Again, that question is outside my puny scope of understanding. We have a role in the evolution of the Universe … that does not rule out other forces also having a role. However, we can only advance step-by-step into the light as it advances before us.
This is just an announcement of my intention to follow these bread crumbs and write about cosmogenesis, primarily at this point from books. Here’s the bookshelf so far and I’m definitely up for suggestions for more reading.
If anyone else is on this path, I’m up for collaboration, book chats, etc. Just let me know. And as a reminder, Brian Swimme will be at a workshop in September at Chartres. Click here for more info.
*It amuses me to be reading physics for pleasure since the above referenced trashing of my scholarship came, in part, when I was barely able to eke out a C in my freshman year “physics for dummies” class.
"What's amazing is that everything in the Universe does have a role;
everything has a certain creative mission to accomplish.
To discover one's authentic role can require a lifetime, or it can come in an instant.”
— Brian Thomas Swimme
Oh, the places you will go... Thanks for letting us tag along on your journey.
“Our wisdom traditions that focus on a supreme creator are much more comprehensible...” Indeed. And it’s part of the function of each myth to help us comprehend some aspect of the nature of “everything.” Unfortunately, the term “myth” seems poorly understood by many to mean fiction, or misunderstanding, and seems to have been taken as history by others.
“...no conflict between science and religion...” Francis Collins, the lead scientist on the Human Genome Project, was brought up by atheist parents. He had a born-again experience and adopted Christianity. His take on science in general and evolution in particular is that it’s just God’s way of accomplishing things.
I’m curious about Swimme’s book. There are reviews that say things like “Page after page one is treated to every step of the author’s daily activities, from what meal he ate to what gas station he stopped at.” Would you say that Swimme managed to work the details of life convincingly into the big picture, or does he belabor those details?