The  Resurgence  of  Cosmic  Storytellers

Brian Swimme

We find ourselves in a world with 50,000 nuclear warheads, with ecocide underway on every continent, with massive starvation and torture and cruelty. How do we get out of this? How do we make our way into health and vitality? My proposal is that we tell stories. In particular, we must tell the many stories that make up the great cosmic story. This storytelling activity may be the most important political and economic act of our time.

I understand how superficial such a remark might seem. Stories are told to children to put them to sleep. Stories are what we put on TV to help us forget our harried day at the office. Stories are make-believe, whereas The Wall Street Journal is what the world is really about. But there is a different and deeper story, one we rarely encounter in our mechanistic, patriarchal, materialistic, consumer-oriented culture.

A cosmic creation story answers the questions asked by children. Where does everything come from? Why do things die? Children want to understand their place in the universe. They wonder about their roles. They have an inherent need for a cosmic story...

Though all civilizations and cultures told themselves stories, none of the industrial countries taught cosmic stories. They focused entirely on the human world. The universe and the Earth were only backdrops. The oceans were large, the species many, but these immensities were just sets on the human stage. All our disasters today are directly related to the fact that these cultures ignored the cosmos to focus on the human. Our use of land, our use of technology, our uses of each other, are flawed in a million ways but all are fundamentally due to the same mistake made at the start of things. We have failed because we were never initiated into nature’s sacred activities. We have failed because we have no

cosmic story...

Instead of poets, we have had one-eyed scientists and theologians. Neither of these high priests nor any of the rest of us has been capable of celebrating the cosmic story. It is no wonder then that all of us are sick and disabled, that the soils have gone bad, that the sky is covered with soot, that the waters are filled with evil. Because we had no celebrations inaugurating us into the universe, the whole world has become diseased.

Brian Swimme

storyoftheuniverse.org