This version of the Cosmic Walk traces Creation’s story in a two-pronged approach:
a)Specific Stages identified with a particular date, based on current scientific knowledge.
b)Specific Energy-patterns that give shape and form to the unfolding story. I align these energy-patterns with the seven charkas, enduring features of all forms of embodied existence from the cosmos to organic creatures. In this version of the Cosmic Story, I link the energy patterns with specific dates simply as a way of naming and celebrating their existence.
In most versions of the Cosmic Story, only historically verified facts are cited. In this version I take the liberty of combining “logos” and “mythos” scientific fact and imaginative myth. I attribute equal importance to what I call the “stages” and the “energy patterns.” Evolution and Creation require both. Omit one, and the liberating power of the story is seriously undermined.
In narrating the story, it is important that participants have some experience of “walking the talk.” This can be done more easily outdoor. For indoor versions, one can trace the story with footsteps, or a long chord/string, or with a series of pictures along corridor walls.
Some further ideas can be gleaned from these link pages:
http://www.threeeyesofuniverse.org
http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/cosmic.htm;
http://www.thegreatstory.org/timeline.html.
Welcome to Creation’s Story
1. 15 Billion Years Ago: From the restless emptiness of quantum space, creative energy exploded, bearing all matter, all dimension, all energy, and all time. The temperature exceeded one trillion degrees centigrade, cooling sufficiently within one-thousandth of a second to produce the first elementary particles: electrons, protons and neutrons. The earth is still so radioactive from this initial explosion that its core is kept hot by continuing nuclear reactions, and all over its surface, many atoms are still exploding – in rocks and trees, and even in our own bodies!
2. 14 Billion Years Ago: Cosmic dust filled the creative vacuum, and still does to this day. Although largely invisible to the human eye, the dust channels waves and particles in the elegant dance of the sub-atomic world. The dust helps to weave the intricate patterns without which the story would have ceased billions of years ago.
3. 13 Billion Years Ago: The paradox of creation and destruction shapes the evolving rhythms and patterns of the young universe. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth became the inspiring process that would endow creation for time immemorial. Chaotic and destructive at times, and often baffling to the human mind, creation’s paradoxical wisdom continues to beget the wonderful world we all inhabit.
4. 12 Billion Years Ago: The first stars illuminate the enveloping horizon. Many of the early stars were intensely hot. They flared up and exploded in brilliant supernovas, each as bright as an entire galaxy. The force of those explosions sent heavier elements hurtling through space, condensing over millions of new stars, begetting in time the sun and planet earth. And to the stars we owe the ingredients of carbon-based life, without which none of us could savour the wonders of the night sky.
5. 11 Billion Years Ago: The seventh chakra, marking the gift of LIGHT! We celebrate the resilience of the creative Spirit weaving creation through the paradox of light and darkness, illuminating the mystery through which all creation thrives, enlightening our understanding of how creation works, and brightening our future with hope and purpose.
6. 10 Billion Years Ago: The sixth chakra, marking the gift of WISDOM! We celebrate the wisdom and intelligence which is innate to creation at every level of its unfolding story, the well-spring which endows everything in creation to act wisely for the good of the whole, and the source from which human intelligence also emanates.
7. 9 Billion Years Ago: The fifth chakra, marking the gift of COMMUNICATION. We celebrate creation’s potential to relate and communicate, to articulate the richness of its life and meaning – in a narrative imbued with complexity and wonder. Our human capacity for speech and word belong to creation’s innate potential to communicate and articulate meaning.
8. 8 Billion Years Ago: The fourth chakra, celebrating IMMUNITY and the capacity for right relating. We celebrate creation’s capacity for healthy and wholesome living, facilitated through mutually enriching relationships with the diverse creatures that constitute the canopy of universal life.
9. 7. Billion Years Ago: The third chakra, marking the invitation to mutual EMPOWERMENT. We celebrate the mutuality through which interdependence thrives, empowering every aspect of creation towards the realisation of its true potential, liberating freedom and hope for future possibility.
10. 6. Billion Years Ago: The second chakra, marking GENERATIVITY and erotic birthing. In a creation of prodigious fertility we celebrate the fruitfulness and creative abundance we see around us, and we give thanks for the pleasures and joys of sexual intimacy.
11. 5. Billion Years Ago: The base chakra, GROUNDING our presence in the earth and in the body. At every level of creation energy begets form, and all form assumes embodied presence. The cosmos, the galaxies, the earth, landscapes, persons, and bacteria are all embodied expressions through which the presence of living Spirit becomes grounded in creation.
12. 4.5 Billion Years Ago: Cosmogenesis irrupted in a new range of supernova explosions releasing a spiralling cloud of gas , which we now call the Solar System. One spiral in this new irruption, namely the Milky Way, was to become home to the planets and to the many stars that illuminate our night skies.
13. 4 Billion Years Ago: The Sun ingratiates creation. Born out of an explosion of 10,000 stars all at once, with a volume one million times that of our earth, the sun is earth’s primary source of heat and energy, of nourishment and vitality, for all earth’s creatures. Through the process of photosynthesis, the sun’s energy enters the food-chain, gracing every organism with nurturing abundance.
14. 3.8 Billion Years Ago: Our home planet, the Earth, is born. Uniquely poised relative to the sun’s influence on complex molecules, and endowed with a creative balance of gravitational and electromagnetic forces, Earth brings forth cosmo-genetic powers unknown in any other region of creation. Home today to millions of species, the Earth seems to be endowed with an infinite capacity for innovation and creativity.
15. 3.5 Billion Years Ago: The rich array of cosmic liquids and chemicals formed a new alliance, birthing forth the earliest life-forms: tiny bacteria that thrive even to our time. And from these simple organisms emerges the canopy of life-forms that adorns creation today.
16. 350 Million Years Ago: With flowers adorning the landscape, and trees towering above the earth itself, plants on earth and fishes abounding in the waters, the sea mammals move on to land, and the complexity of embodied life reaches a new apex of elegance and beauty.
17. 7 Million Years Ago: Africa gives birth to the Human Species. Evolving out of Africa humans inhabit the entire planet, bringing forth new mental and spiritual powers through which matter becomes conscious of itself. Evolution moves to a new spiritual threshold with humans, as a young species, still struggling to make sense of their awesome existence.
18. 39 Years Ago (1969): Humans visit another planet for the first time. Glancing back from their base on the moon, humans see the Earth as a blue-white pearl, illuminated by the Sun. This iconic image has changed our perceptions forever, inviting us to forego our addiction to power and reclaim our place as cosmic-planetary creatures whose essential vocation is to treat creation with the reverence and care it deserves.
Concluding Reflection:
"What is particularly striking is the lack of repetition in the developing universe. The fireball that begins the universe gives way to the galactic emergence and the first generation of stars. The later generations of stars bring into being the living planets with their own sequence of epochs, each differentiating itself from the rest. Biological and human history, with the ever fresh expressions of creativity, continue the differentiation of time from its beginning.
Indeed all 15 billion years form an epic that must be viewed as a whole to understand its full meaning. This meaning is the extravagance of the creative outpouring, where each being is given its unique existence. At the heart of the universe is an outrageous bias for the novel, for the unfurling of surprise in prodigious dimensions throughout the vast range of existence."
(Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p.74)
