The Cosmic Story by Brian Swimme and Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Sin is a rift that alienates you from yourself, from all others, from the cosmos and the whole cosmic reality, and from the divine within you and beyond you. And its opposite is the blissfulness of belonging.

[Cont. from page 1] ...

Brother David: If we are caught up in a human world and must break out into cosmology, how do we do this? One answer that comes out of the Christian context would be that there is the child in us that breaks out of the anthropocentric mold into the cosmic. That child is in every one of us, a child for whom the cosmos is alive and who does not think in strictly anthropocentric terms.

This morning very early I was down at the Esalen bath. A black cat is always around there; she’s called the bath cat. A little girl came in while I was patting the cat, and the little girl said, “After I have washed I will also pet the cat, but I don’t want to get her fur all messed up.” This is what I mean by being in touch, being in contact with the cosmic reality; it is in us but we don’t cultivate it, and I see it either as the child in us or as the mystic in us. Until quite recently mystics were special people. Only within the last decade has the idea been accepted that every person is a kind of mystic. This is a complete shift, and it has a tremendous impact on human thought.

From that starting point, we get a completely new religious language. Alienation is exactly the contemporary term for what one used to call sin. The English word “sin” is connected with “asunder,” with cutting asunder, creating a rift with reality. The religious traditions have said that sin is a rift that alienates you from yourself, from all others, from the cosmos and the whole cosmic reality, and from the divine within you and beyond you. And its opposite is the blissfulness of belonging. In our best moments, we experience this belonging as universal and all-embracing, and we attempt to keep these moments alive and live out their consequences as best we can.

Brian Swimme is a professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (Orbis, 1996), Manifesto for a Global Civilization (with Matthew Fox) (Bear and Company, 1983), The Universe is a Green Dragon (Bear and Company, 1984) and The Universe Story (Harper, 1992) which is a culmination of a ten-year collaboration with cultural historian Thomas Berry.

Brother David's biography

Originally "Cultural Sources of New Paradigm Thinking"
Reprinted from Revision: The Journal of Consciousness and Change
(Vol. 9, #1, Summer/Fall 1986, pp. 19-20)