Core Concept: Cosmology

The first in a new series of core concepts that guide a new mythology for being human in a time of profound upheaval and transformation.

Enjoy this 8-minute read or listen to the audio recording here.  

The ultimate source of everything is a uniform, infinite, conscious emptiness with a longing to know and experience itself. Movement, light, and matter come into being as this conscious force vibrates with the tension between what is and what is desired until something new emerges. This is the trinity, the law of three, necessary for all creation: positive intent, negative resistance, and the neutralizing force between them that bursts into existence.

This creative process cascades down and out from the subtle and ephemeral to the more concrete and tangible through dimensions of possibility, thought, emotion, vitality, and finally physical matter. All creation myths tell some version of this story whether personified, metaphorical, or scientific. The Big Bang created light from darkness, galaxies from clouds of matter, solar systems around stars. God creating the world in 7 days – light, land, animals, and humans.  Energy cascading from the holy trinity down through the 7 sephira in Kaballah (and 7 chakras in the body). Brahma emerging from the void via the three gunas: creating, sustaining, and destroying. Land, animals, and humans emerging from the elements in indigenous traditions.

This movement of coalescing energy formed the world as we know it and continues to create through everything that exists. Each element and species, and each individual within those groupings, is animated by this energy to fully experience and express its essential nature. Rivers, hillsides, otters, beetles, and humans are all defined by specifics gifts, longings, and limitations that unfold in relationship with everything else that shares their daily reality. Each individual is on a unique, unrepeatable journey of manifestation in its specific time and place.

This journey contains both physical and metaphysical elements. The lizard must learn how to regulate its body temperature and how to hunt without being eaten itself. It learns and adapts to its environment and the creatures within it so it can survive. When not engaged in these activities – and perhaps sometimes during them – it dreams. It dreams in its own unique way about who it is in relationship with its environment. It gives itself fully to that experience until its final breath. And then its body becomes food that fuels others’ journeys.

In the same way, we learn how to survive in the unique time and place into which we’re born. We learn to clean and feed our bodies, stay safe and warm, form relationships with others, and either forage for food or find our niche in a capitalist economy. These beliefs and habits make up our ego, the personality necessary for us to navigate our world. When not engaged in these activities – and perhaps sometimes during them – we dream. We dream of who we are, who we might be, how the world is and how we might influence or serve it.

This dream world touches back into the higher dimensions of vitality, feeling, thought, and causality, which are realms as real as our physical world and populated by more subtle entities of higher vibration. Some of them had a body they have left behind – ascending back to source or waiting for their next incarnation. Some of them have never had a body and exist as archetypes, ideas, orforces. Some are entities of creation and some of destruction. Some are universal and some are deeply personal. They are ancestors and spirit guides, angels and demons, ghosts and gods.

Each thing that exists on the physical plane has traveled through and is in relationship with all the higher dimensions, whether or not it is consciously aware. It longs – to the extent its body and psyche are able – to both fully manifest in the world and to return to its source. The prairie dog forages and mates – consuming and populating huge swathes of plains – and retreats into its burrow to regenerate. Its body is wired for both expansion and for decay – each in their own time.

We, too, long to experience the world and express what we are as fully as possible. And we long for unity, for a return to the central hearth of life. These longings guide our bodies through natural functions and impulses: grab that peach, get close to that person, run from the loud noise, hide away when ill. These longings also inspire us to create art, invent technology, build empires – all within the limitations of our personal abilities and the societies we live in.

In this way, there is both a downward, outflowing energy of creation out through us into the world, and an upward, inflowing energy of contraction gathering us inward back toward our unifying source. Balancing these dual forces of inward and outward flow is a key component of mastering being human – regardless of the time and place into which we’re born. We must learn how to survive in our community and we must learn how to be authentic. We must honor the energy that wants to explore and experience, and the energy that folds inward toward peace and serenity. We must understand that existence is infinitely diverse and ultimately all made of the same substance.

When we hold the tension between these poles – when we are still within the pull to engage and withdraw, to belong and self-actualize, to understand and be lost in awe – our minds and bodies begin to vibrate with the same creative trinity that created the cosmos. By balancing the energies of expansion and contraction, inhale and exhale, creation and destruction, we experience the divine, sustaining Truth at the source of all existence. We become agents of creation, vessels for something truly new to rise through us. We solidify our bodies as masts in a world of chaos – strong enough to encounter and incorporate more of what is timeless and true instead of simply hunting, defending or rejecting in a bid to survive.

Human beings are consciously hybrid beings – born of primal survival instincts and seeded with self-reflective awareness able to trace our roots back to the timeless. Sustainable cultures are founded on laws and ethics that help us keep these energies in balance – cultivating landscapes for food without destroying them, honoring the ancestors who birthed and continue to guide us from beyond, sharing stories that honor individual gifts and longings within a network of reciprocity. Life is not something we master, but something we serve; not a monologue, but a dialogue with everything around and within us.

The best spiritual practices teach us how to contact the other worlds we’ve forgotten, how to converse with and become the plants, animals, elements, and spirits around us. These remind us who we are, where we’re from, where our true power lies, and how to live in right relationship with the rise and fall of it all. If we do not learn and practice this, we become identified with physical realty, with our bodies and cravings as all there is. Self-gratification and comfort become our purpose, and we become terrified of loss and death.

So take a moment to notice the feather that floats down to you as you struggle with an important decision. Place it on an altar with earth, water, and fire. Imagine what it would be like for your shoulder blades to expand into wings that carry your weightless body high above the ravine, and trust that we do not need to control the weather. We can see, as Falcon does, how far the earth stretches out in all directions away from our tiny cares. How we may even be able to fly high enough to pierce the translucent skin of sky and burst into a realm beyond death. And when you land back in your life, notice how you might see your struggles in a whole new light.

Nancy