Well, welcome Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Thank you for that film. It's funny, when I introduced it, I said something about the program being about spirituality and science and immediately as I sat down, I thought, "Urgh, I bet half people in the audience are going to be ruined by that because they're going to think it's a movie about creationism or something like that." And I was thinking that it is so difficult to say those two words together in any way and not have it just congeal people in some way. So I think, so while watching it, I remembered exactly why I love this film. Because it's different from Cosmos is really subtle but profound, because you present the idea that that life at its core is an emergent property. It's not something that's an accidental property that happens in a mechanistic way in the universe, and the universe is sort of like this dead space where we're just sort of this anomalous thing that happened. It's sort of, it's an emergent property, complexification, self-generate, self-organizing. That's all part of what is the universe and that's a really deep difference. So talk about that. Big question. First of all, thank you, Brian. It's our third time here and Brian's questions are always so stimulating for us and thank you all for coming out tonight this beautiful spring evening. I think one of the reasons we made this film is right along the lines that you highlight. And everything I'm saying is really resting in mystery. I'm not suggesting we have answers here or even that science has answers. And if we're a little more open along those lines, the hubris on all sides is really quite astonishing when we realize how little we know. But what I want to pick up on is your point that we took 10 years to make this film. And before that another 20 years working with scientists Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme is a cosmologist of the early universe. And we spent summers working with scientists to glean the facts. But the facts don't feed the soul. The facts don't feed the human spirit. They're marvelous and they can engender awe and wonder and beauty. But the facts as we were trying to weave this into a story was picking up on metaphor, human imagination. Where does it grab the human imagination to feel that connection to a 14 billion year universe? So it's fact with metaphor, and then with this very charged word, the potential for meaning, or the exploration of meaning. So every chapter in this book, scientific fact, metaphor, a suggestion of meaning. Everything's a suggestion. So there's a deep structure here. There's a deep respect for science. Even our grandparents had no idea of the age and complexity of the universe. We're the first generation to really imbibe this, to begin to drink it in, to have it become muscular, if you will. And this is the first telling of the epoch of evolution in film form. And that means we hope it will be told around the globe in various forms, because it's a story, a story of the universe itself that may bring us together as a planetary people. One of the reasons why it really feels totally right for this series as well is that it's life and it's consciousness that's so deeply embedded in the universe in some way, that that's really that essential. And the way you beautifully come back and have consciousness being the thing which we now have to take charge of in some way. Yes, we are changing everything through the exercise of this sort of abstract symbolic use of our consciousness, is really profound idea and it sort of brings full circle the power of this story. I mean, it's not a question, it's really a comment. I'm wondering actually your experience with this film, it's treading a path that's so razor's edge. So what has been your experience with it in that way. I just want to say one quick thing and then have John jump in here too, about the razor's edge. Well, so the Razor's Edge are, one of our great producers, David Kennard, who worked on the Cosmos series with Carl Sagan and he said, "You're going to go down this river and from both sides you're going to be shot at probably by science in its mechanistic form and by religion in its maybe more fundamentalist form." That's the big division that we're experiencing in our world, not just in our country, but in our world. And so the question is every word in this film and book was very carefully chosen. But nobody thinks of science as being ideology like religion. We're very quick and we understand what's fundamentalist when you look at a religion. But when we look at science we say, "Well, science they know what they're talking about." That version is, it makes sense. Why do they need the humanities? Why do they need-. I sense that at the heart of this scientific enterprise is the capacity to self-examine and as Karl Popper called it, "Falsify" so that science it opens itself to constant change. And religion is perceived then as fixed, doctrines, dogma. Actually when Mary Evelyn and I met in the mid to early 1970s, we met at Fordham University and I stayed on there to do a dissertation with Thomas Berry and Mary Evelyn went on to Columbia and did a dissertation in their East Asian languages and cultures. And so Mary Evelyn is particularly oriented towards East Asia, Asian religious traditions and I've studied with indigenous people. And so, it was in our meeting with Thomas Berry that he posed for us the central driving dilemma of our lives. Namely, the emerging environmental crises. How do we live in relationship with this earth that's not just sustaining? Sustainability has all of these implications for us nowadays and certainly positive. But as Mary Evelyn will say sometimes, "We don't want a sustaining relationship between ourselves, we want a flourishing relationship." So that was the challenge that we saw, Brian. What could we in our work as historians of religion, what could we do to meet this challenge? And then I'll speak for myself. In my encounter with religious traditions, for example, I study out in Montana. I come from North Dakota and I have gone back out to Montana to study with Crow people. And one of the things I was especially concerned to experience and understand was their story of themselves. And as I studied with Crow families, I got a very clear story of their movement out of the, actually the region of North Dakota. They broke from the Hidatsa people and they went on a big journey. They're exodus people, the Crow people. I learned this story. And then I spoke with another elder and it was a slightly different story. And a third elder, again a different- similarities were there, but it was a different telling. And I spoke with the archivist who happened to be our Crow sister and she looked at me like I was just a little slow. And she said every family has the right to tell this story in their own way. And it dawned on me then that religions themselves have been boxed in this way. Religions have problems. I mean we, when we talk about religions in these contexts, problems have to be set right out there to set religions up as paradisal, as pointless. We know the problems but they also have promise and I think part of the promise is this capacity to narrate and it's an emergent, it's a self-organizing narration too. So in that sense, science and the oral narrative in religious traditions, they interweave rather than simply separate from one another. If I could just pick up a point, Brian Swimme who's been a friend for almost 40 years. His father is native from the Pacific Northwest, so he has some great deal actually of that knowledge, but he also was trained as a scientist, a PhD University of Oregon. And I wanted to pick up on your point of science and ideology, because even for Brian, going through an academic program and then starting to teach and realizing, "I'm going to be teaching mechanistic science the rest of my life." And he left that particular path. He teaches at a graduate institute in San Francisco now which is tremendous. But I think the struggle coming back to the struggle, is an ideology that is very much present at our wonderful school of the environment. We're delighted, we feel blessed to be at Yale because the students are so fantastic, our colleagues are wonderful. But there is an ideology of the story of evolution, which they wouldn't even call a story has no purpose, no meaning, is an accident, have a nice day. And this has really created I think, both in academia and well beyond, a Schizophrenia, because purpose isn't necessarily coming from the traditional religions as it was in previous times. And our young people in particular are struggling for, how do they connect? How do they see themselves as part of it? So this is one one telling of that story. I went to a Stone Barns program last week that was all about microbes and microbes in your gut and and microbes in the soil. And what was interesting, is it was talking about these two different narratives actually that are going on. And one is that for 150 years the narrative about soil fertility is that you just needed to add nitrogen. It was all mechanistic, it was all chemical, that was it. And the narrative that's just grown up in the last 20 years, really, really recent is that, it's actually the microbes in the soil that make for soil fertility. And that was like totally new, and that had to fight its way against this very mechanistic telling. So it feels like through all of these different narratives going side by side, I think that's one of the reasons why I like this film for this series, because I think people who who are involved in this movement, for lack of a better word, are looking for what you're talking about. They're looking to see, they're looking at the idea that, what is consciousness? And where does that take us? And why do we, and you need to live with something in that. It's not enough to say that we just arrived here. It's not that it's not enough to say that we arrived here by accident, because we're not looking for excuses, you're not looking to impose a phony story. It just doesn't feel like it's full, in the most basic way. And like you're saying, a story that posits life as being totally accidental and purposeless, it's a very bleak telling but it also doesn't feel, it feels strange to imagine a universe that didn't have life at all that existed for 14 billion years and the accident was didn't happen. That's a very odd thing to imagine. I'm reminded of a very happy moment in my life when I had the occasion to go to Mindanao in the Philippines, and to spend a month with a well-known tribal group, the T'boli people, in that region. And in that setting, I've heard the singing of the Tudbulul, an eight day singing of their emergence myth, the story of who they are as a people. And near the beginning of that story, is the death of a major culture hero and androgynous person, his/her decomposition and a small little bird, the Toti bird, took part of the flesh and spread it out. And that's T'boli understanding of soil. And it was in that, hearing that story and the reflection upon soil by people who have been in that place for how many thousands of years and their reflections upon themselves as a people. And of course, it's a very long story but this was a seminal moment in the story, because these are an agricultural people. And their sense of soil, I find only recently have we come to the same type of living in response to the reality, rather than simply managing it. We talked about before we came on, before about the whole idea that in Western culture you don't even have a life force as a concept. I mean, you're very deep into Eastern philosophy, and you're more indigenous but that's always part of an understanding, is that there's a life force. Absolutely. The traditions of East Asia that I study, China and Japan, and so on. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the word Chi, Which is matter energy. Many of you probably practice Tai Chi and Qi Gong, and I do Qi Gong. And the Chinese medical arts, are all about getting that flow of Chi and if it's blocked, illness can arise. So the Chi is throughout the universe. It's the flowing life giving force, a vital energy, if you will. Matter, energy as one entity. The character is one character, just as the character in Chinese for mind and heart is one character and the human is that conscious, loving being that completes the whole universe, that is their cosmology. They call it heaven, earth, and human. The universe, earth, and human. So the conscious reflective. And chi actually runs throughout the universe? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It runs through everything. Continuity of being. Yeah. So we had this really marvelous moment. We showed the film a couple of years ago, seven times in China, seven different places, Beijing, Dalian, Harbin and down to Shanghai. And when we were in Harbin, at the Harbin Institute of Technology, the dean had invited us. And it was a auditorium about this size and he said, "There'll be about 100 students" almost twice as large, "be 100 students who have good English." We didn't have a Chinese translation. We walk into this hall, there's 400 students packed into it and they're buzzing and talking and that lovely Chinese sensibility, when we walked in they sat, they stopped talking and they looked and began to clap. It's just this lovely welcoming of the teacher. So typical pattern, a few words, introduce ourselves, show the film and then have a discussion. And the dean stood up and, "Let's have some questions," he said, and this student stands up over on the side and this student says, "You two were introduced to us as married. You know what love is. Tell us what love is, and tell us how we know love when we experience for someone else." And then the kicker, "How did love come out of the universe?" And you can see, it's coming out of this cosmology where heaven, earth and human and the love dynamic is that integral glue between. And I'll write on the board in China some of these characters because we end the film, there is a lot built into this film of the various world's religions, inter-connectivity and Buddhism but in Confucianism in particular that I studied this notion, at the end of the film Brian says, what if we imagine ourselves as the mind and heart of the universe? What does that mean for our consciousness, connectivity and responsibility. It's like the reverence that this draws out calls us to responsibility for its continuity. But that these are the deep emotions that the Chinese sense. This isn't cerebral, this philosophy is very much about inter-connectivity. Go ahead. Well is this then, Brian, part of what you are exploring also. You're saying that this Chi, this connectedness is not simply cerebral, it's emotional and it's striking that in the scientific perspective, emotions are suspect. They can be studied of course and we should understand them but involved in our interpretation of the world, they're suspect. Yes, I mean it's fascinating, I mean it's really remarkable that you go to a doctor, and a western doctor has no sense that there is something else beside a purely mechanistic understanding of the body that there isn't a central force that is really animating you in some way. And it's so beautiful to encounter traditions again that have their own particular expression and we can challenge the narrative on a number of factual basis but there is also a realization, for example, the Navajo people, or Diné people as they call themselves. They talk about Hozho, beauty at the heart of reality, and Hozho or beauty then is threaded through all of reality and the world then is constantly manifesting its Hozho to us. And we, according to the Navajo align ourselves, we bring ourselves into alignment and we're constantly falling out of alignment in Hochxo or with that disrupted. So this Navajo sand paintings and what we call their religion which I find a word in this context is not that helpful. It's more like a life-way, the hold, the practices, the ritual, the wisdom of the tradition is to realign, bring Hochxo back to Hozho and see that radiant beauty. But when they tell the story what is Hozhoni. What is it walking in beauty way? For them it's wind. Wind is the feeling of the radiant beauty of reality. The life force blowing through things. You must have shown the film to Native American audiences as well. What's the response been in that way? Well the most interesting response I think and this is a paid commercial advertisement, now. We have the third part of this trilogy is these wonderful interviews Mary Evelyn did. It's four disks and they're 20 minute each. They're like this tongue-tip taste with 10 scientists and 10 environmentalist and among the environmentalists, are two Navajoa and their separate interviews. And I forget the Navajo gentleman's name. David Begay. David Begay. It starts so slow, for the Navajo, words are a breath and speech and thought are also integrated. So, if you just speak loudly and a lot, you are literally draining yourself of beauty. So this reflection upon he starts so slow and by the end of this interview, you can feel his passion, even his speech is faster but he is totally within a Navajo framework reflecting on Journey of the Universe. And that's really been our hope, Brian. Is not again, Mary Evelyn mentioned, this is not the telling. This is a telling. I mean you can feel when David Begay is speaking, the stars are our ancestors and all cultures understood this as we said in the film. So, this sense, by the way, of telling the story but also being respectful for other stories. We did a conference up at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York where the morning was NOVA and NASA scientists telling a science story and then in the afternoon we had historians of religion and theologians. What is the response from a Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Asian, Indigenous perspective. That's all online on the website, Journey of the Universe. But then we had a big conference at Yale because one bishop said to me, where is God here? Yes, it's not a word that I inhabit because it's too big, it's too huge and it's been so confined, I think. But so anyway, you got to be a little like what? As we said in Costa Rica, we showed it in Costa Rica and we have a Spanish version of it and someone asked that question and the woman got up in the back and she said everywhere. Like there's a divine milieu as Teilhard de Chardin would say. So, the point was we did a conference at Yale and this was Christian responses to journey of the universe and the conference was living cosmology and that book has just come out and so this to say all these different Christian traditions, Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical, Quaker and so on, they are going to have their own unique and powerful response, and it was an explosive conference, 400 people. So, people are interested in engaging with their tradition and this big story. And just briefly one recent manifestation of this felicitous articulation of the moral dimension of environmental concern is in this Pope's encyclical, Francis did this encyclical Laudato si' and it not only lays out the environmental problem, but it goes to cosmology then and it links social justice with ecojustice and that is a powerful. In cosmology is again the bridging between them. So, terribly surprising and refreshing and exciting when that came out in that kind of force. Very much so.
