Review of the Universe Story
by Richard Askwith

Have you ever been into something strongly, put it aside for some reason, and then found it impossible to begin
again? Just a rhetorical question. I know the answer.

This happened with The Universe Story., by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, which Annemarie provided to me on my 
birthday last year. Not that I quit reading it and put it aside. Actually I read it quite steadily and finished 
it months ago. But providing some feedback became one of those things which somehow wasn’t happening.

I certainly appreciated reading The Universe Story, which is a passionate and thorough and scientific/history book 
filled with many fascinating facts, some of which I even wrote down because I knew for sure I would come to doubt 
my recollections. Such as that a spoon full of earth contains an estimated 50 billion bacteria, or that our sun 
is one of the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way, the Milky Way itself being one of a hundred billion 
galaxies. I’m sure if I told someone of those kinds of facts without the book or any written notes, I would think 
“It couldn’t be ‘galaxies’. It must be stars” or “Maybe it was a hundred million…not a hundred billion”.

But amazing as those facts are they are the stuff of the Discovery Channel and frankly heard before.

But the book went beyond the Discovery channel because of its many insights, as opposed to facts, and by its scope of 
starting at the big bang and continuing on through the evolution of human civilization. These guys (the authors) 
are serious about humans being part of the universe, although obviously a tiny, tiny part (a mere two and a half 
million years for humanoids, 500 thousand for homo erectus, 400 thousand for Lucy, 200 thousand for homo sapiens, 
40,000 for north and south America, 11,000 for modern humans, and 140 years for the Republican Party [actually 
The Universe Story didn’t mention Republicans]), and therefore they didn’t separate human history from the 
cosmic history.

This idea of seeing that humans are in fact not distinct from nature is not exactly new, but it still constitutes the 
way the vast majority of we humans think about ourselves. Because of our societal view, with which we are 
surrounded and influenced, it was helpful to read this book emphasizing how completely wrong and harmful that 
erroneous view is.

This book certainly rings the alarm bell in familiar areas such as the disastrous effects of overpopulation, 
deforestation, elimination of entire species, and our insistence upon unrestrained so called progress which is 
really unrestrained pillaging of non human life forms with no thought for the consequences. However this book is 
not a gloom and doom thing, and the authors don’t just see the unity as the end conclusion, but rather as a basis 
for examining where we are going and what we might do or want to do in the future.

They notice the unity of nature in quite scientific terms, but the attractive aspect of this book is they absolutely 
do not consider scientific occurrences as bereft of emotion or passion or other “human” qualities. They see 
science as the study of far more than mathematical equations, and as not divorced from beauty and suffering.

For example, they discuss the laws of thermodynamics to enhance our understanding of the sources of violence, and say 
the sources of violence are resistance, energy and dreams, instead of resistance, entropy (which energy 
inevitably produces) and autopoiesis or epigenetics. This is helpful because then I can see that violence, also 
known as change, so often comes from dreams (thoughts of or desires for integration, communism, gay rights or you 
name it), resistance to those dreams, and energy for the dreams. I can see that yes, my human issues and impulses 
are at one with the effort of the acorn to break through the resisting earth and transform itself into a tree.

For another example they say the causes of evolution are genetic mutation, natural selection and conscious choice. I 
find that compelling. It seems a better way of speaking of evolution than to say the causes of evolution are 
merely genetic mutation and natural selection, because limiting evolution to those two factors doesn’t say 
anything about why the selection or mutation occurs. Of course, conscious choice doesn’t mean conscious in the 
way humans are conscious. But certainly, it seems to me, evolution is conscious in the sense that the choices or 
mutations have a purpose, albeit a purpose beyond the human ken but within the human ability to notice.

Bringing science out of the lab, and into a story, emphasizes or gives weight to the idea that we humans are 
inextricably a part of nature, not an aberration from nature where we…but nothing else …can possibly think. Where 
we, but nothing else, can possibly plan.

An unusual and helpful message of the book was the idea that this universe is not, in fact, a series of ever renewing 
cycles, such that humans have usually thought. Certainly the seasonal changes we experience as earthlings make it 
seem that way, and philosophers such as Buddhists have for a long time believed that human existence in 
particular is cyclical, and we come back in different incarnations again and again and again. But really, with 
what we now understand better about the universe, it seems much more accurate and helpful to think of the 
universe, and our own lives, and certainly this earth upon which we move, as an irreversible series of 
transformations. This brings a certain gravity to what we are doing more than spinning in a squirrel cage. What 
we are will not continue forever or even for long. Although at first glance that seems somewhat depressing, the 
opposite is true because we have a real part in this universe and what we do has consequences which in fact are 
irreversible and therefore not redundant or lacking in meaning. Further, we are not doing it alone because we are 
an integral part of the universe or nature. As Thomas Berry famously said (or words to this effect) “The universe 
is not a collection of objects. It is a communion of subjects.”

So thank you, Annemarie. I appreciated it.

Trailer for Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home from Tribe of Heart on Vimeo.