Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies

Book Excerpt

Excerpted from:

The Universe Is A Green Dragon

by Brian Swimme

WHAT I PRESENT in my book is the overall picture of the cosmic creationstory, told in a single evening's conversation. This article gives excerptsfrom that conversation, particularly from the first half.

I call the two speakers THOMAS and YOUTH. By THOMAS I want to honor ThomasBerry and the cosmological tradition he celebrates, stretching back fromErich Jantsch and Teilhard de Chardin through Thomas Aquinas to Plato. Theidea to present the new creation story in the form of a conversation originatedat the Broadway Diner in New York City. I was working my way through a Greeksalad, when Thomas Berry suddenly said: "You scientists have this stupendousstory of the universe. It breaks outside all previous cosmologies. But solong as you persist in understanding it solely from a quantitative modeyou fail to appreciate its significance. You fail to hear its music. That'swhat the spiritual traditions can provide. Tell the story, but tell it witha feel for its music."

I call the other human YOUTH to remind us that the human species is theyoungest, freshest, most immature, newest species of all the advanced lifeforms in the planet. We have only just arrived. If we can remain resilient,if we can continue our questioning, our developing, our hoping, if we canlive in awe and in the depths of wonder, we will continue moving into theonly process that now matters - our authentic maturation as a species. Itis in this way and only this way that we will enable the Earth to bloomonce again.

CREATIVITY: PRIMORDIAL AND PERVASIVE

YOUTH: Why do you say the universe is a green dragon?

THOMAS: I'm a storyteller. Besides, it seems an appropriate wayto begin the new story of the cosmos.

YOUTH: But why say it's a green dragon when it obviously isn't?

THOMAS: I call the universe a green dragon because I want to avoidlulling you into thinking we can have the universe in our grasp, like astray dog shut up in its kennel. I want to remind us of this proper relationshipas we approach the Whole of Things.

On the other hand - and here is a second reason for the green dragon- we have learned things in our scientific explorations that completelytransform our understanding of the universe. Our revolution in thinkingdwarfs Copernicus's announcement that the Earth travels around the Sun.It is outrageous to compare the universe to a green dragon, I know, butI hope this will express some of my astonishment at what we now know aboutthe universe. The inadequacy of the dragon image is that green dragons aremuch too commonplace to indicate the radical nature of what we have learned.That's how limited our language is.

YOUTH: Where should we start?

THOMAS: At the beginning. We need to start with the story of theuniverse as a whole. Our emergent cosmos is the fundamental context forall discussions of value, meaning, purpose, or ultimacy of any sort. Tospeak of the universe's origin is to bring to mind the great fire at thebeginning of time.

Imagine that furnace out of which everything came forth. This was a firethat filled the universe - that was the universe. There was no placein the universe free from it. Every point of the cosmos was a point of thisexplosion of light. And all the particles of the universe churned in extremesof heat and pressure, all that we see about us, all that now exists wasthere at the beginning, in that great burning explosion of light.

YOUTH: How do we know about it?

THOMAS: We can see it! We can see the light from the primevalfireball. Or at least the light from its edge, for it burned for nearlya million years. We can see the dawn of the universe because the light fromits edge reaches us only now, after traveling fifteen billion years to gethere.

YOUTH: So we're in direct contact with the origin of theuniverse?

THOMAS: That's right.

YOUTH: I can't believe I didn't know this.

THOMAS: Scientists have only just learned to see the fireball.The light has always been there, but the ability to respond to it requireda tremendous development of the human senses. Just as an artist learns tosee a lakeshore's subtle shades and contours, the human race learns to developits sensitivities to what is present. It took millions of years to develop,but humans can now interact with the cosmic radiation from the origin ofthe universe. We can now see the beginnings of time - a stupendous achievement.

YOUTH: It's amazing.

THOMAS: Most amazing is this realization that everything thatexists in the universe came from a common origin. The material of your bodyand the material of my body are intrinsically related because they emergedfrom and are caught up in a single energetic event. Our ancestry stretchesback through the life forms and into the stars, back to the beginnings ofthe primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfoldingof matter, mind, intelligence, and life. And all of this is new. None ofthe great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, or Aristotle,or the Hebrew Prophets, or Confucius, or Thomas Aquinas, or Leibniz, orNewton, or any other world-maker. We are the first generation to live withan empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humansto look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies,the birth of the cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forgedwithin this new story of the world.

YOUTH: But what about my future? What difference willit make for me?

THOMAS: To begin with, you will have to embrace your creativepotential. The universe has unfolded to this point. It has poured into youthe creative powers necessary for its further development. The journey ofthe cosmos depends on those creatures and elements existing now, you amongthem. For the unfolding of the universe, your creativity is as essentialas the creativity inherent in the fireball.

YOUTH: How can this be so? What do humans add that is actuallynew?

THOMAS: The human provides the space in which the universe feelsits stupendous beauty. The universe shivers with wonder in the depths ofthe human. Do you see? Think of what it would be like if there were no humanson the planet: the mountains and the primeval fireball would be magnificent,but the Earth would not feel any of this. Can you see the sadness of sucha state? The incompleteness?

I sometimes think the primary deed of a parent is to see the beauty andgrace of children. Children are magnificent, gorgeous beyond telling. Theythemselves have no idea of what beauty they embody. Can you see the tragedyof a child with no one to feel and cherish its beauty? No one to fall inlove with this magnificent creature? No one to celebrate its splendor?

The cosmos is the same: humans can house the tremendous beauty of Earth,of life, of the universe. We can value it, feel its grandeur.

YOUTH: But what can I do? How am I supposed to help out?

THOMAS: Don't get impatient. You have to learn first. Just momentsago the presence of the universe's origin was unknown to you. Be patient,for there is certainly specific work waiting for you. Or did you think theuniverse went to fifteen billion years of work to create you if there wasnot a particular function that you - and only you - could do? The creativepowers residing in you will be evoked in time for the work they were createdfor.

YOUTH: What creative powers?

THOMAS: We can not say until they show themselves. Not even youcould know yet.

YOUTH: But where do they come from then, if even I don't knowwhat they are?

THOMAS: From the same place that everything comes from. From thesame place out of which the primeval fireball comes: an empty realm, a mysteriousorder of reality, a no-thing-ness that is simultaneously the ultimate sourceof all things.

YOUTH: Now wait a minute -

THOMAS: I realize how strange it sounds. But there is little wecan do about that. I'm speaking here of something that has recently beenencountered empirically. In the language of physics, we call it quantumfluctuation. Elementary particles fluctuate in and out of existence. Whata strange realization! Don't think that physicists have any easier timeof it than you! Elementary particles leap into existence, then disappear.A proton emerges suddenly - where did it come from? Who made it? How didit sneak into reality all of a sudden?

We say it simply leapt out of no-thing-ness. There was no particle, thenthere was. I am not speaking here of the manner in which mass and energycan be transformed into one another. I am speaking of something much moremysterious. I am saying that particles boil into existence out of sheeremptiness. That is simply the way the universe works. We have to get usedto it. We didn't construct it; we just find ourselves here. If elementaryparticles are going to come leaping out of mysterious realms, then that'sthe way it is.

I say no-thing-ness. Or emptiness. But this only reveals the limits oflanguage. We are here approaching an Ultimate Mystery, something that defeatsour attempts to probe and investigate. There was no fireball, then the fireballerupted. The universe erupted, all that has existence erupted out of nothing,all of being erupted into shining existence.

While this perspective is new within the traditions of science, fromanother point of view we are arriving at an understanding that was deeplyappreciated during the classical religious period of humanity. Thomas Aquinasand Meister Eckhart in the Middle Ages of Europe grasped intuitively thatemptiness is the source of everything. This realization is echoed in thelife and teaching of Buddha, who understood that all put-together thingsarise from emptiness and exist inseparably with emptiness.

YOUTH: Do physics and Christianity and Buddhism say the samething?

THOMAS: Nothing that simplistic can be said. The situation isthis. The creation story unfurling within the scientific enterprise providesthe fundamental context, the fundamental arena for meaning, for all thepeoples of the Earth. For the first time in history, we can agree on thebasic story of the galaxies, the stars, the planets, minerals, life forms,and human cultures. This story does not diminish the spiritual traditionsof the classical or tribal periods of human history. Rather, the story providesthe proper setting for the teaching of all traditions, showing the truemagnitude of their central truths.

We have a vast new empirically grounded story of the universe, one thatexplodes beyond any previous telling of reality, one that encompasses allpeoples because it is rooted in concrete experience. Within this emergingstory, each tradition will flower beyond telling in fruitful interactionwith the rest, and together we can continue our journey to our fullest destiny.

YOUTH: What is our fullest destiny?

THOMAS: To become love in human form.

YOUTH: Love? I thought we were talking about science and religion.And emptiness.

THOMAS: Yes, that's right. The journey out of emptiness is thecreation of love.

YOUTH: I'm confused.

THOMAS: By what exactly?

YOUTH: Well, by love. What do you mean by love?

ALLUREMENT

THOMAS: In order to approach love, we must start with our common context,the emerging universe in which we find ourselves. If we want to learn anything,we must start with the cosmos, the Earth, and life forms.

Love begins as allurement - as attraction. Think of the entire cosmos,all one hundred billion galaxies rushing through space: At this cosmic scale,the basic dynamism of the universe is the attraction each galaxy has forevery other galaxy.

YOUTH: But isn't that gravity?

THOMAS: Gravity is the word we use to point to this primaryattraction, but no matter how intelligently we theorize about the consequencesof this attraction, the actual attracting activity remains a mystery.

YOUTH: Are you saying that this attraction is love?

THOMAS: I'm certainly not saying that gravity is human love,but what I am saying is that when we look at love from a cosmic perspective,we see attraction operating at every level. And everywhere, this attractionis as mysterious, as basic, as the allurement that we call gravitation.

YOUTH: So what you are saying is, a galaxy exists within attractionand so do I.

THOMAS: The great mystery is that we are interested in, attractedto, anything whatsoever. Love begins there. To become fascinated, to feelallurement, is to step into a wild love affair on any level of life.

Then we discover not only that we are interested, but that our interestsare entirely our own. We awake to our own unique set of attractions. Sodo oxygen atoms. So do protons. The proton is attracted only to certainparticles. On an infinitely more complex level, the same holds true forhumans: Each person discovers a field of allurements, the totality of whichbears the unique stamp of that person's personality. Destiny unfolds inthe pursuit of individual fascinations and interests.

YOUTH: But it almost sounds self-centered. Where do othersfit in?

THOMAS: By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universetogether. The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion. Surprised?Let's experiment:

Bring to mind all the allurements filling the universe, of whatever complexityor order: the allurement we call gravitation, that of electromagnetic interactions,chemical attractors, allurements in the biological and human worlds. Here'sthe question: If we could snap our fingers and make these allurements -which we can't see or taste or hear anyway - disappear from the universe,what would happen?

To begin with, the galaxies would break apart. The stars of the MilkyWay would soar off in all directions, since they would no longer hold eachother in the galactic dance. Individual stars would disperse as well, theiratoms no longer attracting each other but wandering off in all directions,releasing core pressure and thereby shutting down fusion reactions. Thestars would go dark.

The Earth would break apart as well, all the minerals and chemical compoundsdissolving, mountains evaporating like huge dark clouds under the noon sun.And even if the physical world retained its shape, the human world woulddisintegrate just the same. No one would go to work in the morning. Whyshould they? There would be no attraction for the work, no matter what itwas. Activity would cease. Did scientists once find the universe interesting,staying up nights to reflect on its mysteries? No longer. Did lovers chaseeach other in the night, abandoning all for the adventure of romance? Neveragain. All interest, enchantment, fascination, mystery, and wonder wouldfall away, and with their absence all human groups would lose their bindingenergy. Galaxies, human families, atoms, ecosystems, all disintegratingimmediately as the allurement pervading the universe is shut off. Nothingleft. No community of any sort. Just nothing.

YOUTH: That's an amazing experiment.

OUR DESTINY AS ENCHANTMENT

THOMAS: It underlines the primary result of all allurement, which isthe evocation of being, the creation of community. All communities of beingare created in response to a prior mysterious alluring activity. Now youcan understand what love means: Love is a word that points to this alluringactivity in the cosmos. This primal dynamism awakens the communities ofatoms, galaxies, stars, families, nations, persons, ecosystems, oceans,and stellar systems. Love ignites being.

We awake to fascination and we strive to fascinate. We work toenchant others. We work to ignite life, to evoke presence, to enhance theunfolding of being. All of this is the actuality of love. We strive to fascinateso that we can bring forth what might otherwise disappear. But this is exactlywhat love does: Love is the activity of evoking being, of enhancinglife.

YOUTH: Now, this is human love you are describing?

THOMAS: No, no, no. You must begin to see this activity as basicto the universe. Consider a star. In its core, helium, carbon, oxygen, silicon,all the elements up to iron are created in blazing heat. If a star is ofsufficient size, after billions of years it explodes, creating all the restof the elements, sending them off into the universe. Our own solar systememerged from material of an exploded supernova, creating the planets andtheir many elements. Minerals and life forms are created out of supernovaexplosions.

Think about it! When you breathe, you breathe the creations of a star.All the life you will live is possible because of the gifts of that star.Your life has been evoked through the work of the heavens, do you see? Thestar emerges out of its own response to allurement, then evokes the lifeof others. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the compounds out of whichwe are composed: all creations of the supernova.

Drawn into existence by allurement, giving birth, then drawing othersinto existence - this is the fundamental dynamism of the cosmos. In thiswe can see the meaning of human life and human work. The star's own adventurecaptures the whole story. It is created out of the creations of the fireball,enters into its own intense creativity, and sends forth its works throughoutthe galaxy, enabling new orders of existence to emerge. It gives utterlyeverything to its task - after its stupendous creativity, its life as astar is over in one vast explosion. But - through the bestowal of its gifts- elephants, rivers, eagles, ice jams, root beer floats, zebras, Elizabethandramas, and the whole living Earth, become possible. Love's dynamism iscarved into the principal being of the night sky.

YOUTH: Are you saying that the star is aware of what it isdoing?

THOMAS: Well, yes and no. But let's think about it a moment. Weare the self-reflexion of the universe. The universe is aware of itselfthrough self- reflexive mind, which unfurls in the human. We allow the universeto know and feel itself. The creative work of the supernovas existed forbillions of years without self-reflexive awareness. That star could not,by itself, become aware of its own beauty or sacrifice. But the star can,through us, reflect back on itself. In a sense, you are the star. Look atyour hand - do you claim it as your own? Every element was forged in temperaturesa million times hotter than molten rock, each atom fashioned in the blazingheat of the star. Your eyes, your brain, your bones, all of you is composedof the star's creations. You are that star, brought into a form oflife that enables life to reflect on itself. So, yes: the star does knowof its great work, of its surrender to allurement, of its stupendous contributionto life, but only through its further articulation - you.

When we deepen our awareness of the simple truth that we are here throughthe creativity of the stars, we begin to feel fresh gratitude. When we reflecton the labor required for our life, reverence naturally wells up withinus. Then, in the deepest regions of our hearts, we begin to embrace ourown creativity. What we bestow on the world allows others to live in joy.Such a stupendous mystery. . . !

YOUTH: Am I then to become like a star?

THOMAS: In its pursuit of allurement, yes. In its complete immersionin the work at hand, in its identification with the activities of arousingbeing, yes. There are so many beings you can emulate: the simplest prokaryoticorganisms struggled ceaselessly and with stunning success, altering thenature of the Earth permanently. They roamed through life and hatched thoseseeds of power we call genes. Who could have created them if they had not?We have no talent for that kind of work. We carry their achievements inour bodies. All the hundreds of thousands of genes in our bodies that enablesuch lambent beauty to delight the planet were handed to us by these primitivecreatures. Your gratitude includes them. Your life emerges through theircreativity.

YOUTH: But they didn't know what they were doing I don't seehow I can be grateful to them for their mindless behavior.

THOMAS: Do you know what you are doing?

YOUTH: More than they.

THOMAS: I would hope so, yes. Unless their labor was in vain.But do you know what you are doing when you find Shakespeare so fascinating?Do you know what's happening, in a cosmic sense? Can you explain to me quitesimply why humans find mountains magnificent beyond capture in language,why they risk their lives to be up there on angular planes of granite?

YOUTH: Well, no. Not in any ultimate sense.

THOMAS: Then you share the same cosmic ignorance with the microorganismswho created the informed sequences of nucleotides we call genes. Neitheryou nor they understand why the cosmos should glimmer with beauty, drawingforth our deepest efforts. The simple truth is that we do pursue the fascinatingbeauty that surrounds us.

EVIL FROM COSMIC RISK

YOUTH: This is all so idealistic. I mean, sure there is beauty, butlook at the way that everything is so fouled up now. Here we are on theverge of blowing up the Earth. Why is it so bad? Why are we so violent?Why can't we just avoid all this suffering that we see everywhere? Are peopleignorant of all this stuff you're talking about? Or is it something else?

THOMAS: To begin with, understand that humans are not unique inhaving to suffer. Nor are humans unique in being violent. We live in a violentuniverse. Violence fills the cosmos in various forms, and human violenceis only one of these. Violence is a universal fact, but not the dominantfact of the universe. The great mystery is not violence, but beauty. Wenote the violence, all the more amazed that such stupendous graciousnessand beauty should exist anywhere at all.

YOUTH: But where does violence come from?

THOMAS: Destruction has its roots in the allurement permeatingthe universe. Allurement is the source of all activity, even destructiveactivity. The star, responding to allurement, destroys itself. No one comesfrom the outside to demolish the star. The star implodes, smashing itselfinto a trillion parts - its journey ended. Such tremendous violence, yetsee the graciousness of hundreds of billions of stars swirling in the galacticdance.

The biological world knows all sorts of violence. The same urge thatdraws the lion to the river for water draws it on to kill the wildebeest.Insects are so intent to stretch forth and explore the world that they willdevour their own parents if they can not find other food. Fascination withliving, the enchantment of being alive, the beauty of the surrounding world- all these draw creatures into violent acts and into the destruction ofbeing, but after four billion years of life on Earth, what beauty has blossomedforth! There is danger in the natural world, a constant challenge, excitement,violence, risk, and terror, but out of this emerges the wonder of the Earth.

With the human a new quality of violence enters the Earth system, onecoming from the power of self-reflexion. This new awareness is a risk aswell as an achievement of the life process. In a sense, the earth woundeditself when it took on self-reflexive sentience: there appeared new powersof creativity, new dangers of destruction. The question hanging in the solarsystem today is this: Will the Earth benefit in beauty by risking humanself-reflexive awareness? Or will the Earth suffer a new and permanentlycrippling violence?

That we have brought a new level of violence to the Earth is clear. Wehave multiplied extinction rates many times over. The best estimates nowshow that the Earth loses a species every twenty minutes. We are soakingall life forms with poisons, changing rivers into lethal sewage, and hurlingmillions of tons of noxious gases into the respiratory system of the Earth.As scientific as we claim to be, we have yet to realize that babies do notcome from storks. The simplest, most empirical fact is that babies of everyspecies are created out of soil, air, rain, food, and rivers. If we changeall of these into poison, we must accept the fact that we change our unborninto poison as well. What materials will be used for their arms but theminerals of the poisoned continents? Of what stuff will their eyes be fashionedbut the water of our lethal rivers? What will those wet fleshy brains bemade of but noxious gases and acid rain?

Can Earth sustain our violence? Can a great beauty grow from the ruinswe leave? Concerning this question, it is important to understand the temporalnature of the Earth's creativity. The Earth at one time was able to createlife, but that time has gone. The first life forms consumed the very conditionsthat enabled life to emerge. The fertility of the Earth is different now.If the higher life forms disappear, they can not be re-created. When lifeforms vanish, they vanish forever.

YOUTH: But why has there been such a jump in violence withus? Why couldn't we blend in the way other species blended in?

THOMAS: This is the danger of self-reflexive awareness, what Imean when I say Earth in a sense wounded itself by allowing self-reflexionto emerge. The human is dangerous precisely because the universe is sublime.Here is the real question: "Can the cosmos survive the vision of itsown beauty?" Can the Earth continue to create beauty once it has createda mirror to this beauty? Can the Earth continue to organize its unfoldingonce its depths of eros have been tasted, their sweetness enjoyed?

YOUTH: You're saying that beauty and allurement are at theroot of all evil activity?

THOMAS: Yes.

YOUTH: Then what goes wrong?

THOMAS: Humans are easily addicted to beauty, even a clouded visionof it, and we can not break the addiction. Our agricultural processes poisonour water and destroy four billion tons of topsoil on the American continenteach year, and still we keep at it. We are captivated by our consumer lives,addicted, and apparently nothing can break through. Unable to see the simplesadness of our way of life, sunk into our addictions, we overstuff our homesand garages, carrying on, unmoved by the smoke rising over the burnt-outlives of fifty other nations and a million other species. The American mindresembles a glove compartment, jammed tight with useless junk that no onepays any attention to until we consider cleaning it out; and even then,even as we wonder why we so needlessly clog up our lives, unable to partwith it all, we just jam it back in its place.

The way to break an addiction is to break out of a limited world view.Break out of egocentricity. Break out of ethnocentricity. Break out ofanthropocentricity.Take the view point of the Earth as a whole. In every fascination, in everyallurement, include the vitality of the Earth. You are the Earth, too. TheEarth is not different from you. This planet bloomed through millions ofyears and arrived at the stupendous achievement of self-reflexion. She surpassedherself, shivering with joy at the thought of housing a creature throughwhom her depths, her beauty, her majesty could be cherished in a new intensity.Imagine Earth's astonishment to see us attempt to satisfy ourselves by transformingthe Earth into throw-away tinsel, most of it noxious to all forms of life.Imagine the hilarity and pathology of a civilization devoted to stackingup this stuff, instead of plunging into the joy that has been prepared overbillions of years.

YOUTH: Then why didn't the Earth bring forth humans who wereborn free of our liability? You say our minds fixate on partial visions,that we forget the whole, the Earth, that we become addicted. Why didn'tthe Earth avoid all the destruction we inflict?

THOMAS: Our task is to explore, to celebrate and delight in thedepths of the universe. To enter this work often involves tremendous suffering.You ask, "Why can't we be excused from our destiny?" We can beexcused from this task only if some other species accomplishes it for us.Does this option appeal to you? To have something else do the work of thehuman? To suddenly have no worth or value whatsoever for the whole? In thatcase, why would the universe bother with us at all? We would have nothingto contribute. We would be, at best, only troublesome stowaways on the greatcosmic journey.

The history of life can be understood as the creation of ever more sensitivecreatures in a universe where there is always another dimension of beautyto be felt and savored. Think of yourself that way, as a supreme power ofsensitivity surrounded by magnificence.

The paradox is this: the greater your sensitivity, the more unbearablethe tension. It is much easier to latch onto just one of these allurements,making it the whole. Anyone who grabs a sliver of beauty and insists thatit is the whole becomes a fanatic, workaholic, cynic, fundamentalist, ordrug addict.

To break the tension of living in a universe rich in allurements is tomove toward the needless destruction of pursuing a partial vision. The gloryof the human is also the difficulty of the human. Precisely because we areable to feel such beauty, we are simultaneously vulnerable to the addictionof fanaticism in any of a million forms.

YOUTH: Then every destructive act comes from responding tobeauty?

THOMAS: Ultimately, yes. The starting point, the first link inthe chain, is an act of destruction resulting from a craving that disregardsthe whole story and the vitality of the whole. Destructive acts are thenlinked through generations as one violence is transmitted and compoundedinto other violences. These chains of misery can stretch through millionsof years, binding up whole societies in torment. In this way, needless destructionis a response to evil that has been handed down. Parents inflict the self-contempt upon their children in physical and psychic abuse, who in turnproject their self-hatred onto others and their own children. The Earthsuffers under the weight of accumulated misery and pathology, all of whichhas its ultimate source in acts of egocentric craving. Think of all thissuffering, not only human feeling but the torment in so many many realmsof the planet! The magnitude of the Earth's adventure staggers the humanimagination!

YOUTH: Is there no end to it?

THOMAS: Each individual person has the power of participatingin the transformation of the whole Earth. The evil that reaches you afterso many millions of years of existence can be absorbed and transformed.You have the power to accept the suffering, to refuse to pass it on to another,to forgive, to end the needless torment, and, most of all, to transmuteevil into energy for the vitality of the whole.

WE ARE DRAGON FIRE

This power of transformation is just one aspect of the creative firethat was there in the primeval fireball, in the extravagant generosity ofthe supernovas, in the persistent creativity of biological systems. Thatwhich created all of this now desires our creativity, commitment,and labor, our delight in entering with full awareness the cosmicstory. The mountains and oceans, stars and life forms - all recipients ofthe same generosity, contributors to the unknown future culminations ofour work - all tremble with the same power. Given a finite number of daysin which to live, a particular store of primordial fire with which to work,who could deny that all that matters is contributing to the awesome workof fashioning the universe?

And that's why I condense our contemporary cosmological scientific storyof reality by saying that the universe is a green dragon. Green, becausethe whole universe is alive, an embryogenesis beginning with the cosmicegg of the primeval fireball and culminating in the present emergent reality.And a dragon, too, nothing less. Dragons are mystical, powerful, emergingout of mystery, disappearing in mystery, fierce, benign, known to teachhumans the deepest reaches of wisdom. And dragons are filled with fire.Though there are no dragons, we are dragon fire. We are the creative, scintillating,searing, healing flame of the awesome and enchanting universe.