Cosmic Conversations: Dialogues on the Nature of the Universe and the Search for Reality
by Stephan Martin. New Page Books. 2010. 287 pages. Paperback. $16.99.
We humans have been trying to understand the cosmos since prehistory and we will keep inquiring well into the future, according to astronomer Stephan Martin. He presents interviews with 20 thinkers, each of whom speaks about the cosmos, but from a spiritual rather than a scientific or materialistic standpoint.
• Brian Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies cosmologist, finds deep truths about the cosmos within the languages of the Hopi, Navajo, and other indigenous peoples. English, he says, is embedded with Newtonian perceptions of reality. Researchers now know that the universe does not conform to Newton. English does not have the words to describe it. But many indigenous peoples’ languages do.
• Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, notes that the universe has been evolving since its inception. She adds that the evolution may be accelerating, and that we are active participants: We can either self-destruct or ascend and become a universal species.
• Media activist Duane Elgin speculates that the universe is regenerating and recreating itself anew at astonishingly rapid speeds. Our purpose, he says, is to keep evolving with it by growing progressively in self-knowledge.
Other interviewees include astronaut Edgar Mitchell; Peter Russell, author of The Global Brain; and the Rev. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World.
In Cosmic Conversations, scholars of any field might find material relevant to their concerns.
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