Cosmologist Brian Swimme, in an interview he gave to EnlightenNext magazine a few years ago, posited the idea of kindness and compassion being far more than biological characteristics. He implied that what we know as compassion is some sort of universal constant that manifests as love and kindness in biological organisms.
Well, when we use words like compassion, we tend to limit them to the human world. And part of this goes back to what I said before, that we think of the rest of the universe as being stuff, and we don’t use words that are spiritual or warm or emotional concerning them. The scientific tradition has always called that “projection”—projecting your own qualities upon the universe as a whole or upon nature. And that’s supposed to be a terrible thing to do. But I think that’s breaking down as we begin to realize that it’s all one energy event. It’s one journey, one story, so that the qualities that are true of the human are in some way or another true of other parts of the universe. So I talk about compassion as a multilevel reality. It’s not just something that’s true of humans.
My interpretation is this. I think that gravitational attraction is an early form of compassion or care. If there weren’t that kind of care at the foundation of the universe, there would be no formation of galaxies—and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. This care or compassion begins to show up in the organic form when you have a bond developing between a mother and her offspring. You know, for a long time, there’s no bond. There’s no care—at least no visible way of seeing care—for instance, with bacteria. They replicate. There could be care there, but we haven’t recognized it yet. But by the time you get to mammals, two hundred and twenty million years ago, you have this bond between the mother and the child. That arrives as a genetic mutation. But because of that, the offspring have a higher chance of surviving. So that mutation then spreads and starts to characterize the entire population. That’s just the bond between a mother and an infant. Then other bonds develop between siblings, and they have a higher chance of survival. All of what I’m saying fits into Darwinian biology. This isn’t outside of mainstream science. What it says is that the dynamics of Darwinian biology favor the appearance of compassion. It shows up between mother and child. It shows up between siblings, and it even develops between kin groups. And it starts to spread.
via Brian Swimme: Awakening to the Universe Story.
This is the closest anyone (in my readings) has come to giving a scientific colour to the idea of love being a characteristic of God. The idea, simply put, is that “love” is something all-pervading. The force that keeps you living with your partner is the same force that keeps planetoids in orbit around each other. Think about it. What a grand idea!
