CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 
 
One of the 10 most radical discoveries in human history is that of cosmogenesis, the narrative of how the expanding universe is evolving into stars, galaxies, life, and human consciousness. The challenge to this discovery is the thorny question of how human subjectivity relates to the evolution of the universe. Is there cosmic meaning in our ongoing efforts—like using memory and art—to record our experiences? 

Cosmologist and CIIS professor emeritus Brian Thomas Swimme’s latest book, Cosmogenesis, tells the story of how the new cosmology demolished his modern industrial mind, then slowly assembled a new mind, one rooted in the creative energies of our developing universe. In this episode, Brian is joined in a unique conversation with novelist and CIIS professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing Carolyn Cooke as they explore the impact of time-developmental cosmology and its potential to impact–and possibly transform–human consciousness. 

This episode was recorded during an in-person and live streamed event at California Institute of Integral Studies on November 17th, 2022. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel.

To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] [Applause] 

Carolyn Cooke: Wow, they really showed up. [audience laughs] It's amazing to be in a room with all of you and in a room with Brian for conversation again in person after so long. 

Brian Swimme: Yeah, it's great to be here. 

Carolyn: Welcome everyone. Your mentor, Thomas Berry, said, we live not in a fixed cosmos, but in a cosmogenesis. What is a cosmogenesis and why after 14 billion years is this news? [audience laughs] [Brian laughs] 

Brian: Well, you know, I like to think back to the first humans, so 200,000 years ago, 300,000 

years ago, and dwell on the fact that they had the same brain size, same nervous system, 

the same anatomy. I mean, they're indistinguishable at a biological level and they knew amazing things and they were curious, just like we are, looking up and seeing the stars at night, especially, like what's going on with that. I mean, they came up with ideas that helped them orient themselves in the universe. But it's inevitable you would live in a smaller time horizon because we can't see through time and so around the planet, there's a kind of what I would call a cozy cosmology.  

Things felt near at hand and wonderful, one African tribe, one of the members of the tribe was saying, well, what is your life about and he said, I live my life and I'm happy and God watches over me and enjoys watching me up there in the stars looking down. So, it's a cozy and warm, and then we discovered time. So that it blasted outside of any of our conceptions, and we haven't recovered at all.  

It's just suddenly we live on the planet Earth, there are 100 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy. We're one little speck and you have the trillions of galaxies and so suddenly the question of what does it mean to be human, why are we here and so forth, we're crushed by time. So, the difference is a cosmos, like the Greeks thought of it, a cosmos is a well-ordered world, a beautiful well-ordered world. Cosmogenesis is a world that's coming into existence and that fundamental difference is at the root of why we are struggling as a species today. That shut everybody up. [audience laughs] [Carolyn laughs] 

Carolyn: So, Brian, you're famous for telling the story of the universe in a way that sort of transcends disciplinary boundaries and invites everyone in and I think also for demonstrating how the universe comes alive in us. This book though is an auto cosmology arranged as a series of vignettes or epiphanies about your own intellectual life, development, and experiences. 

So, in that sense it mirrors what you call the time development mental nature of the universe. Could you talk a little about that and when you realized that you were going to have to tell the story not just of the universe, but the story of the storyteller?  

Brian: You know, I don't know exactly when it happened, but I was very happy in the story I got as a child. I was raised Catholic. So that was my first cosmology. I loved it. It was fantastic in many ways. I had a good experience and then when I went into a study of science in a university and graduate school, I just became completely fascinated with the universe that was revealed through science. But it was a way of immersing in the universe that was different from the first story of Catholicism.  

We can talk a long time about the differences, but one of them is that science is objective. So that was one of the great thrusts of the scientific enterprise is that it was freeing itself from errors and distortions that were coming from individual subjects. So, I devoted my life to this fantastic story that we discovered. It just overwhelms me. I've never lost that astonishment at living inside of a 14-billion-year event that's coming forth and it slowly dawned on me though that I had been taken in by the assumption that objectivity was reality. 

Subjectivity was epiphenomenal. That was one of the pivotal assumptions of the whole scientific enterprise. So that without even thinking about it, I thought of myself as telling the story of the universe out there as it is objectively, not from wish fulfillment or anything else. Then it slowly dawned on me that I was telling the story of the universe out there as if I weren't changing. So that I was the great knower about this flux out there and it finally dawned on me that I was the flux as well.  

So, I had to include, if I'm telling the story of the universe, I have to tell the story of my own development and then I realized that in my own development, my understanding of the universe was changing. So, I lived in a series of universes. There wasn't one universe. There were a series of unfolding universes and so that led me to finally realize that I had to tell the story of the storyteller. 

Carolyn: So, you call this genre in which the storyteller of the larger story is part of the story, 

auto cosmology. 

Brian: We called it that. [Carolyn laughs] We invented that. 

Carolyn: But you've gone ahead and produced the first, the kind of epitome of the auto cosmological work because it really literally is about the universe and I think in looking at your early development as a mathematician, one of my favorite parts of the book is your description of feeling the mathematical equations coursing through your body and so here is mathematics, which you're drawn to because it feels like fundamental reality and yet even then, you are prone to these human experiences of math coming alive in you, the universe coming alive through these equations, which is an experience. I don't know how many math courses there are at CIIS, but I would bet that the feeling of mathematical equations, Einstein's special law of relativity, we haven't felt it coursing through us. We haven't felt the universe building us. So, I wonder if you could just describe a little bit what that felt like and then your kind of revelation that that was a human experience and that was also real. Do you know what I mean? 

Brian: Yeah, that was a pivotal moment and that happened when I was a young professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. I didn't understand it. I didn't understand what was happening, but I knew it was somehow significant and- OK, this is the most technical part of the talk, right? So, we'll get through it. [audience and Carolyn laugh] So let me just give you a sense of it.  

So, we were working with, so a number of scientists at the University of Puget Sound, we were working with the stunning discovery by Stephen Hawking that in the expansion of the universe, there was an elegance to it that surprised everyone and to this day, we're still absorbed in the question of how to interpret that, that elegance. So, I had this experience, but just to give you a feel for how it started. So, we were exploring the equations that led to a surprising calculation made four years earlier by one of the world's foremost mathematical cosmologists, Stephen Hawking. His paper was a milestone in the history of cosmology.  

As with the arrival of any radically new idea in science, it ignited a period of wild activity 

leading to a riot of mathematical speculations. We were intent on joining the fray. Hawking asked himself a simple question. We now know that the universe has been expanding for billions of years. Would anything change if the initial expansion rate had been different?  

The vast pretension of the question gives a sense of why mathematicians develop an unshakable certainty that equations deserve reverence. Here is Hawking, one human on a tiny planet spinning about one star out of hundreds of billions in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one galaxy out of a trillion. Yet this little speck has the confidence to speak with authority concerning what the universe would become if he made a tiny change 14 billion years ago at the origin.  

Whence such confidence, this was the Pythagorean breakthrough that asserted numbers were real and mathematics formed the fundamental structures of the universe. This axial assumption led to Western science's conviction that with the magic of mathematics, human can discover the laws governing the vastness in which we find ourselves. We have discovered many of the laws, but just to take in the fact of this, I think the tiniest, tiniest amount of matter becomes convinced that it knows the patterns of the whole vast universe. It's an experience that's overwhelming and it can capture an entire civilization to the extent that we miss out on another dimension.  

But I just want to bring home that I've never lost my amazement at the reality of mathematics. No one understands fully why the universe has this mathematical structure and we were studying the initial singularity of space-time. The initial singularity of space-time is that moment when if you go back in time, if you follow the universe back in time, the distance between any two material particles goes to zero. In the equations, the distance between any two particles, so I'll take two for you, the Andromeda galaxy, two and a half million light years away, and Milky Way galaxy, if you go back in time, they both come together coalesce and enter into space smaller than an acorn. Now that's kind of hard to imagine. But the idea of following the mathematics, see where it leads us to and so this is where the whole discovery came from, by following the mathematics. So then, oh yeah, I wanted to give you a sense of this.  

So, what Hawking discovered was that the dynamics of the universe were not stable, that the slightest change in the dynamics and the structure of the universe that we know falls apart. I came up with, I love this image, a physical example of an unstable situation is a marble resting at the top of a smooth hill of glass. If the marble is perturbed even slightly, it will fall off the crest and roll away. The slightness of the perturbation has to be emphasized. If we imagine a sub-universe consisting of our balanced marble and a hummingbird a hundred miles away, a single sneeze from its tiny lungs would cause the marble to roll off its perch. But the point that was disturbing for the scientists was a slight change made a huge difference in the universe. So now we come to my moment. 

Here's my moment when I finally took this in and like Carolyn said, felt the mathematics 

coursing through me. Here it is and this is the last piece I'll read. Okay. Our seminar was following the pathways opened up by Hawking's trailblazing work concerning the instability of the initial singularity of space-time. So, there we sat. It was Sheldon's turn to present and though I and others had made the odd insights here and there, he was in command, which was common in our power dynamics. With his surprisingly nimble fingers, he filled five blackboards with chalky equations before slacking off. His original idea had begun to run out of steam. The scientists scattered about the amphitheater stared at the equations and a few of us tossed out suggestions for how his idea might be developed. Sheldon stamped out each of them. Soon there was only silence. Sheldon stood at stage left, his right hand on his chin, staring. He said nothing, but we knew he soon would. His mind was always teeming with ideas from some secret inner fountain.  

After more than 15 minutes of silent staring, my own mind began to roam. I found myself reflecting on the encompassing event itself. I realized that this moment was what I had dreamt of for so long. It was happening. I was actually working with the mathematics of cosmic evolution. That's what we were doing right here. Each of us absorbed in the equations of Einstein and Hawking, prowling around inside them to see what we could find. This was a moment involving a lineage of mathematics going back through Einstein and Hawking to Newton and Pythagoras. It was this entire mathematical lineage that enabled us to think these mathematical equations.  

A shift took place. It came to me that these equations as they existed now in my mind were the mathematical form of the early universe itself. This shocked me. I had been thinking of the universe's birth as something that took place a long time ago, which was certainly true. But here I was, 14 billion years later, thinking the equations of the expanding primordial plasma. From the perspective of the brain, this meant that the complex flow of electricity in my nervous system in complicated ways was somehow related to the equations of the early universe. If instead of thinking these equations, I had been sleeping or running, the flow of electricity would be different. It was an obvious conclusion. I suddenly realized that the nature of the early universe was shaping the flow of electricity in my nervous system because I happened to be reflecting on the mathematics of the beginning. I could not contain my excitement.  

Shel! Shel! Shel! I extended my arms to both sides. Even though I was loathe to break his concentration, it bubbled out. The instability of the beginning, what it really means is that we are deeply enmeshed in that moment. The slightest alteration of the initial dynamics and the whole thing blows up or collapses. That means that in a sense, we are right there at the beginning. It did not have to be that way, but it is that way. Those conditions then were profoundly necessary for the universe to cause our conditions now. Then and now coalesce. We are that intimately tied together, and we now know it. The words roared out at me. I was so excited I thought I had to say it again. Theoretically it could have been different, but it's not different. We live in a universe where the mathematical equations of the beginning are alive in us. If you alter them in any way, we wouldn't even be here. We would never have come forth. Those conditions at the beginning of time are exactly what they had to be for us to allow the mathematics of the universe to think inside us.  

If I had spoken in a calm and reasonable way, I might have avoided the unfortunate ending, but I was too hepped up. For those few instants, I had become a node where the mathematical equations of the beginning became aware of themselves. Why wasn't Shel saying anything? Another idea for explaining myself surfaced. This part is embarrassing.  

Using my index finger and thumb, I surrounded my lips in a small circle. Holding the skin in a small hole, I squeaked out the words. [in slightly muffled, pinched voice] I couldn't move my lips if our universe had a different origin. There would be no lips. [Carolyn laughs] Whenever my lips move, the dynamics of the fireball are there. My lips are right there in the initial explosion. The fireball is in my lips. [audience laughs] Sheldon looked at me with dead eyes. He was clearly bored. When I finished, he turned to his equations. Even then, when it was completely obvious I should clam up, I couldn't stop myself. [audience and Carolyn laugh] 

Shel, do you agree with anything I've said? He spoke without turning from the board. You haven't said anything. [Carolyn: Awww.] The silence that followed made my embarrassment worse. I tried to dispel the awkwardness. What, like this is just philosophy, I said? You're always telling us we need philosophy, Sheldon said. As he continued to stare at the equations, he spoke his final words. Here's the only philosophy I care about. With his outstretched hand, he touched the blackboard, his thumb slightly smudging the Riemann curvature tensor. 

Carolyn: [chuckling gently] Amazing.  

[audience claps] 

Brian: Thank you.  

Carolyn: And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the beginning of the end of the University of Puget Sound for Brian. Here and elsewhere, you offer a withering critique of shrunken industrial consciousness. It's really fun to laugh at Sheldon because it's so clear that he is seeing through the narrow lens, not the mathematics coursing through his body, but the cold sort of calculus of someone who is looking only at the language, the abstract language and not feeling it. You in contrast are a threat. I think one of the things is it's easy to look at the mathematician in his cold calculation and say he's a shriveled industrial consciousness. 

One of the things I've learned from teaching with you and talking with you and spending 

time with you is that I also have a shriveled industrial consciousness. Having learned that, I've had to try to change my consciousness and improve it and enlarge it. I'd like for you to talk a little bit about what that consciousness looks like and how we can go about enlarging our consciousness. 

Brian: One way to think about the human mind, now I'm criticizing myself. We have a subconscious assumption that the human mind has always been the same. I certainly did. Maybe the Homosapiens from 300,000 years ago didn't know as much as I did, but they had the same form of consciousness. That is a delusion. I think the first step out of being captured by modern industrialized consciousness is the recognition that the human mind has gone through fundamental transformations, not just learning more things, but changing in the very nature of its functioning.  

One way to take this in is to just compare us to chimpanzees. The chimpanzees have a fantastic mind, but early humans had basically the same mind. The difference at a genetic level between humans and chimpanzees is 1%. You can imagine at the branching point between humans and chimpanzees, it was the same mind. Over those millions of years, the chimpanzees have not left equatorial Africa. They're completely happy there. Why shouldn't they be? I'm not criticizing them, but the point is here we are slightly different, and we explode and go around the entire planet. Something really different is taking place.  

Then the question is, how can we think about the change in our minds, the change in our consciousness that is taking place now? A theory of mind's evolution that I love the most comes from Wolfgang Leidhold in his book The History of Experience, just published. He talks about what life was like for early humans in the caves. I just want to give you this one example of why humans were in the caves. I'm not talking about caves that humans lived in. These are caves that humans visited on a periodic basis, but some of them you had to go a mile down into the earth. There's no biologically obvious reason to crawl on your back in the dark for days to get down into this region. I would freak out. I've got claustrophobia. I would die. What was the compelling reason? There was no food down there. There were no sexual mates. What was it? They didn't leave any messages, but they did leave artwork. We have a way of interpreting what took place. Here it is.  

Some guy is sitting next to a cave wall, and what he's doing, he's putting dots and lines and squiggles. That's all he's doing. Dots, lines, squiggles, and all of a sudden, in the experience of those there, a horse leaps into existence. That transition from squiggles and dots and lines to an actual horse, that was such a thrill for the humans that they did this over and over again. Maybe they're religious overtones. I'm not denying that. I'm simply saying that they were in the process of developing what psychologists now call conscious recall. We are able to bring back events from the past in our imagination. They were activating a latent power in the human mind, the power of reproductive imagination. This was unknown in the animal world. All kinds of great things are happening mentally. We are in a moment when we are bringing forth another form.  

We can call it a cosmogenetic imagination, to give it a phrase. Another phrase is, and this really goes back to Thomas Berry, time developmental consciousness. It will be as different from modern industrialized consciousness as the move from chimpanzee consciousness to conscious recall. The whole book, really, is about the sequence of events in my life that were like breadcrumbs. By following them and articulating the experiences I was having, I came to feel that I had tiptoed into the shallows of this new form of consciousness. I could describe it, but the problem with that is that I could give you my best attempt. I could even be real humble and say I have very little idea, which is very true. But still, there's a bigger problem. If I start to describe it, then you will hear it in an objective way, as ideas out here. Whereas the whole point of the book is to give you the actual experience, not identical to my own, but my hope is that as you go through the process and experience what I'm experiencing, you will realize you've had many experiences like this. They simply haven't been noted as such. That's the power of symbols. By simply identifying them in my own life, I'm expecting that they will awaken in their own unique way in yours.  

Carolyn: That's maybe what auto-cosmology is. On one level, we were talking about this earlier, I think there are a few reasons you should read this book. One of them is that I think it's an example of this new form of consciousness in that it's overtly acknowledging the feeling of the universe coursing through your own experience. It's specific and vivid and I guess epiphanic. It's arranged through epiphanies, arranged through the patterns of conversation and thought and effort and intuition and synchronicity. We're changed by those experiences, but I think you chronicle the shift from seeing mathematics as real to becoming more alert to human experience as a reality, as a really fundamental reality and further, that human experience as you describe it in a funny, charming, vivid, detail-laden scene actually contains those same dynamics of the universe and to have the confidence that that's true in the same way that the cave painters of Lascaux suddenly discovered that their imaginations could look like a horse or could make a horse and incredibly that even the kind of artistic flourishes that seem very contemporary are just our reality. That art is a form of reality. It's a form of reality filtered through imagination, which isn't maybe everybody's idea of reality, but Brian and I have discovered that we're both fabulists, that truth is malleable in many circumstances. [Brian chuckles gently] 

So, the idea of this book, the other reason I think people should read this book, because I know a lot of you have taken courses with us in which we sort of try to bring together philosophy and art making, is that it's an incredible syllabus for a self-paced course in mathematics and quantum mechanics and philosophy and art making and imagination. I wonder if you could speak a little bit, I mean, the kind of obvious thing you talk at one point about Thoreau and Emerson and kind of, I look around at CIIS and it's so clear that you could kind of roughly divide people into Thoreauians and Emersonians. There are the ecological people, the people who are very concerned with Earth and the future of Earth and the geology of Earth and the climate of Earth and then there are the cosmic thinkers and there are the psychonauts and the people who are really concerned with out there and the imagination of the human. Those are just two examples, but there are so many important thinkers in the book.  

You bring in Alfred North Whitehead and his process philosophy, which you describe in terms of time developmental processes, right? So, I wonder if you could just speak a little bit, and the whole book is arranged as encounters with great minds of your time. But I wonder if you could just speak a little bit to a few of the thinkers who are most influential in helping you escape from your industrial consciousness. 

Brian: Yeah, one you just mentioned, Alfred North Whitehead, and just to tie his thinking into what we've been talking about, the question is, what's the ultimate reality? What is ultimate and what is secondary? So, Alfred North Whitehead said, outside of the experiencing subject, so we've been talking about my experience that I had that's dismissed as epiphenomena by my good friend Shel. But here's Whitehead, outside of the experiencing subject, there is nothing, nothing, nothing. So, Whitehead turns it upside down. That experience is the deepest reality, the ultimate reality and then what about the mathematics? What happens to mathematics then? Then another thinker that has meant a lot to me and others in our philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program is Eric Voegelin. Eric Voegelin is a German-American philosopher who had this amazing—he was writing fantastic philosophy, great stuff, a history of ideas, and then he realized suddenly that ideas were not ultimate. Ideas were not ultimate. Experience was. So that all of the ideas were meant to evoke experience and so that would be, that's I think what happened to me was, like in the book I talk about when I was just trying to find my way forward, I would be telling students, you've got to ride the mathematical equations. It's like, and I even said, it's like a magic carpet. The equations will take you places you've never been before, and no humans have ever been there before. I think that's actually true, even though I sound like I'm exaggerating. But now going back to my favorite humans 300,000 years ago, they couldn't count to three. They could not count to three. It's so hard to imagine. But counting was something that was invented or maybe they can count to three, but they certainly couldn't count to 12. At a certain point, all of that had to be invented. So, the equations we've come up with enable us to experience the universe in a fundamentally different way. 

So, in the courses that Carolyn and I taught together, we weren’t using mathematical equations. [Carolyn: Thank God.] But it amounted to a similar way in which by just thinking in terms of the context of a universe that hasn't yet arrived, we live in a universe that is arriving and has been arriving for 14 billion years. So, then the search is for what is emerging, what is arising. But the method we invented was what we call auto-cosmology. It's a blend between autobiography and mathematical cosmology. It's bringing these together and the actual process of writing and reflecting upon your experience is where you begin to feel the universe there acting. Of course it is. Its universe is acting moment by moment for sure. Every atom in our body is being held together by the strong nuclear force, the nuclei, the strong nuclear force. How many times in the last week have you given some thought to the strong nuclear force? Come on, raise your hands. I want to see. [audience and Carolyn laugh] But if I could turn the strong nuclear force off for one second, we would all volatize. We'd be smaller than dust. So, these powerful processes of the universe are now entering into consciousness and so our way was to reflection on our own experience.  

I just have to stop and say one more thing. If you wanted to be a world-class sprinter, you really wanted to go to the Olympics and you wanted to become a world-class sprinter, you'd make your way to Jamaica. They know how to bring forth amazing sprinters. If you are a writer or a philosopher or an artist that has a feeling for a cosmic sense, you should really enroll in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. If you're accepted in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, you've got to take a lot of courses with Professor Koch. Just blend these together, all right, and this is where the auto-cosmological genre in art is going to explode more than any other place on the planet. Take that, Harvard. [clapping] [audience and Carolyn laugh] 

Carolyn: I'm just noticing that Matt Segall is in the house and if you are interested in process philosophy and Alfred North Whitehead and a really kickass syllabus on philosophy for the spring, check out Matt Segall's class. What's it called, Matt? 

Matt: [from a distance, off mic] Process and Difference in the Pluriverse. 

Carolyn: Process and Difference in the Pluriverse. Yeah, I happen to have looked at it. It's an amazing-looking course and I think, speaking of a syllabus that kind of invites you to open up on different lenses and really, I think, move beyond the lone genius idea of writers and artists that I think that's part of our culture. That's part of our industrial culture that artists produce products of great value because they have genius, which is a quality that's found in very few people. The special people who possess it can produce these works and I think, you know, auto cosmology and Brian, I think your lens on the world is really that we all contain these dynamics of the universe. We all contain them. It's about finding them and so I think part of it is, too, allowing yourself the confidence in your own intuition, in your own human experience to see the value and beauty and particularity of that experience. I think the cave paintings of Lascaux are that, you know, the horse. 

Brian: Yeah, exactly. 

Carolyn: So that sense of, you know, like, what does it mean to know something, and you've said it's a question that's haunted you your whole life. What does it mean to know something? I wonder if you could talk about how your relationship to that question has changed over time. 

Brian: It may be just, maybe, it captured one change and that is, actually I'm going back to the switch from looking at things just solely objectively and dismissing the subjective. I had this really great experience. I was asked to give a talk down at UCLA. Oh, I shouldn't have said that. Now you'll be able to track down the scientist. Oh, well. [Carolyn laughs] But at any rate, and I met this amazing paleontologist who was actually the discoverer of the most ancient form of life on planet Earth. I'm like, you know, these are like sacred fossils and this guy found the oldest. 

So, I was thrilled to be able to meet him and talk to him and find out what it was like to find the oldest form of life on planet Earth. I asked it, unfortunately, the way I felt. [Carolyn laughs] I didn't just say, what was it like? I said, God, that must have been amazing! That must have been incredible, that moment. Can you talk about that moment? It was just the two of us, you know, in a room. He looked at me, you know, and I should have figured it out right then, but no and he said, well, I didn't feel anything. I said, no, but I mean, you felt something because this was the oldest form of life. I mean, you know, that must have been just to know that it was the oldest form. He looked at me again, and then he finally got it and he said, [clears throat] I want you to stare at dust 16 hours a day for eight years and tell me what you feel. [audience and Carolyn laugh] I kind of got it, you know?  

So, what I realized is that, you know, to sort of jump to the fullest, knowing something objectively is extremely important. But there's another form of knowing something, and that is what can be called heart-centered, you know, knowing. The essence of that is you know something because you love it. You love it and so that loving another is a communion event that enables a knowledge that is distinct, but equally important with objective knowledge. 

Carolyn: I love that. I hate to, I don't want to give away too much of your book because people have to read it, but there's the beautiful story you tell, sort of thinking about how we know differently. How do we know what we know and what does it mean to know something and how different people know in different ways and there's a beautiful story about three men. Each of them is carrying a stone to a cathedral. Remember that story? Can you tell that story? 

Brian: Yeah, yeah. It's a, I learned this from Thomas Berry, it's a medieval story. It's very famous and I think it pertains directly to our time. You have three people, it looks like they're doing the same thing, and you go up to the first one and you say, what are you doing? And he says, I'm carrying a stone and then you go to the second person, and you say, what are you doing? He says, I'm caring for my family, I get a salary. And you go to the third person and ask, what is it you're doing, and he says, I'm building a cathedral. So, in our society, the same kinds of answers can be given and one of our challenges is that we don't say, we don't go to the level of I'm building a cathedral. But as this form of consciousness grows, we will answer the question, I'm carrying a rock, I'm caring for my family.  

The third question is, I'm participating in the creativity of the universe and what is the universe creating? Many things, but right now what the universe is creating on planet Earth is a unified humanity. That is what, that's the ultimate meaning of our creative acts. It's easy to be nihilistic and pessimistic given the situation of our planet. That's why it's necessary to take a larger view. The early humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years, they lived in groups of a couple dozen and there's warfare and violence and all the rest, like anything else. But when these bands of humans encountered each other and reflected upon their experience, they came to the realization that they were fundamentally similar. There's a profound commonality they had and so then villages grew. You had an order that involved a much larger group of people. Then the same thing happened at another level. The villages grew into the cities, the civilizations and right now we are at that time when the nation states are discovering their commonality. So that participation in the creativity in every field of human endeavor, one way or another, is either hiding from the central creativity of building a unified humanity, ignoring it, or enhancing it. Every form of life is doing one of the three. 

Carolyn: Wow. Thank you, Brian. Thank you for that beautiful conversation. [Applause begins] 

Brian: Thank you, Carolyn.  

[Applause continues] [Uplifting theme music begins] 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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