Cosmology inform psychology. What we believe about the universe’s nature and purpose, if any, affects our base understanding of our own purpose and nature.
Before getting into a “nature versus nurture” digression, I simply want to say that the debate has been roundly dismissed as too reductive to be useful. Humans have a nature that is enculturated and those factors are constantly interacting with each other and pushing personal and collective evolutions.
Cosmology, then, is one of those cultural factors that comes out of an observation of the nature of the cosmos and the human, but also leads to teachings and practices that shape both the human and nature.
Mainstream religions appear to have a fairly established, unshakeable cosmology to those of us who do not pay very close attention. It is easy to paint with a broad brush and say, for example, Christianity has a very specific cosmology that one can understand by reading the Bible and taking it literally. This is, of course, specific to one subset of Christianity. Over the millennia in which the followers of Christ have been active, thinking about the nature, purpose, and direction of the universe has been itself unfolding and changing, with conflicts and deliberation within and between sects.
In my early days as a spiritual seeker, I wanted to know the Truth about the universe. I still, in fact, feel that as a desire, though increasingly I see that as a very costly desire that does not necessarily lead one to have a happier, healthier, or wealthier life of itself. My Catholicism of origin provided one particular cosmology that included teachings which appeared to exclude me, and I went on a path of spiritual seeking—looking at many religious and philosophical frameworks to find what teachings they had to offer.
Here I’d note—each religious and philosophical framework arises from its own unique history and cosmology, often coming from a specific cultural, historic, and geographic framework, and responding to the needs and adaptations of those peoples. The belief that one could look at multiple frameworks and find a meta-narrative of “universal” spiritual truth is, itself, a position that comes from a Western cosmology.
Not only a Western cosmology, but one that is hard now to separate from the political needs of empires. The early Romans would take the indigenous gods of the lands they invaded and bring those gods to Rome, formally declaring that the conquered peoples’ gods are now also Roman gods. When Christianity became the dominant Roman religion, the Catholic church modified this practice by incorporating indigenous practices, images, and deities into its own framework in a multiplicity of ways. Some now laugh and say that Christianity has all these “pagan” practices, like decorating evergreen trees at Christmastime, unknowing. This was by design. The Holy Roman Empire blended its culture with its conquered peoples’ cultures.
After the Enlightenment, when Western minds became convinced there was a universal truth that we could arrive at through reason and science, the practices of empire shifted from that of adopting and blending to instead imposing and forcing assimilation. The cosmology became that Christianity or Western Science were the “truth” and it was beneficial to the conquered peoples to have their “primitive” practices erased and replaced with this framework.
Later reactions to this erasure of indigenous cultures that were unwilling to break entirely from the dominant mold instead shifted toward the rhetoric of universal truths that transcend cultures, and conveniently those universal truths tended to correspond to Western ideas and practices. Jung’s theory of the archetypes and collective unconscious is one such model, which was at its time radical in its willingness to consider indigenous and non-Christian myths as equally valid with Christian myths, but also in some ways became problematic as people inspired by the theory started to create correspondence charts and argue that all female-bodied goddesses of sex and love across history and culture were all basically the same sort of homogenized Venus archetype.
In truth, these practices are of benefit to the dominating cultural group. The practice of homogenizing multiple goddesses to a Venus archetype is not so much damnation of archetypal theory, which I find far more nuanced in practice, as it is the homogenizing and assimilating needs of modern empire. To strip away multiplicity, pluralism, and conflict is to make a diverse set of peoples more manageable.
To believe one group with political, economic, and military superiority has a universal belief system or structure that needs to be brought to ignorant people is to override those peoples’ particular cosmologies that teach them that their relationship with their land, language, and practices are deep and sustaining and worth protecting at all costs. Thus when a white developer wishes to build on a piece of land sacred to indigenous people, for example, their claims to meaning, rooted in their own cosmologies, get ridiculed or pushed aside in favor of the need for profit, or growth.
Sadly, the loss of a cosmology rooted in connection with the divine or with the natural world has left the primary driver of Western culture as essentially profit and growth at all costs.
Some of us are prone to inhabiting multiple cosmologies, or required to cultivate their own from the multiplicities available. This has been my experience for the past ten years, still believing in a transcendent “Truth” that I could find in every spiritual tradition, even knowing the limitations and problems of that. I feel a constant tension of sensing contradictions within different cosmologies and attempting to reconcile them within and for myself. This is along with being a white Western man who believes that the scientific method is a valid and useful form of inquiry into the nature of the physical world, though not as useful as phenomenological inquiry when one wishes to explore the realm of meaning and psychology.
Cosmology is of particular interest to me for those who do any kind of deep spiritual work and seeking of gnosis, the knowledge of spiritual mysteries. People who want to be dismissive of others’ cosmologies often imply that all other cosmologies are “made up,” invented, without fully appreciating that all cosmologies are made up. But “made up” implies a certain slapdash lack of discipline that does not really create an effective, compelling cosmology.
Insofar as it applies to a spiritual worldview, we live in a field of mystery in which most contact with the intangible, ineffable dimensions of reality occur through the medium of the imagination. Far from being easy to dismiss, the imagination has enormous power over our bodies and lives. Imagine arguing with your partner, and before long you’ll find your body tensing up in stress. Your body reacts to the imagined scene as though it’s truly happening. More interesting, though you might be imagining both sides of the argument, you might notice that not everything you imagine comes from conscious deliberation. You don’t sit and think, “What might my partner say in this situation?” Your imagined partner comes up with responses almost on their own.
Much spiritual work relies upon and deepens this capacity of ours, to envision or en-sense scenes and occurrences that are not physically happening to us. Such daydreams are the shallowest level of this capacity, closest to the ego consciousness, but the capacity extends into our unconscious dreamstates where the content arises wholly on its own without our intentional directing. As those who work with their dreams can attest, these seemingly random images and events often communicate their own kind of meaning, a broader and deeper perspective lacking from the waking ego awareness.
Between the shallow daydream and the unconscious dream is a state that is called trance in certain Neopagan traditions. Being in trance is like being Alice in Wonderland; the waking ego retains its consciousness and coherency but moves into a world of intriguing beings and fantastic scenes that are so suffused with meaning and depth as to be almost inscrutable except upon reflection. Those met in the trance journey offer profoundly important insights, some of which are easy to apprehend, some of which take years and years before they finally make sense.
For some, the trance state is being in the deep unconscious of the Self. Others believe they are out of the personal Self and in the transpersonal realm, interacting with autonomous beings. I think this is the realm in which the personal contents of the Self interface with those ineffable realms.
It is as though we approach the unknowable mystery of reality with a set of plastic action figures that correspond to our best guesses of the personalities contained within that unknowable mystery—guesses which may have emerged from traditions passed along for centuries, the wisdom of teachers, our own dreams, our popular cultures. The figures are our cosmology. Perhaps for a time we play with the toys ourselves, having conversations with them and miming responses that come from a profound but still personal part of ourselves that we could not access any other way. (Raven Kaldera originated the idea of internal mental “sock puppets” that one speaks with in lieu of the actual gods, a metaphor that I am adapting here.)
At a certain point, however, the figures begin to move and speak themselves. Or figures we didn’t consciously bring show up. Or the figures explain how they’re actually the wrong action figures, or need to be modified. This is the moment when something greater than our waking egos, perhaps greater than the Self itself, have finally noticed us and decided to work with us, using the cosmological language we have available. Superman might show up to dispense wisdom, but it does not necessarily mean Superman is a real god. It may mean that whatever qualities you associate with Superman are meaningfully related to whatever entity or part of self is showing up as Superman. Too stringent an adherence to an inherited model may lead one to rigidly ignoring important gnosis that wants to come through when the toys come to life and begin giving you information that goes against what you’ve been taught.
In my early days, I thought the kind of traditions that were formed entirely out of spiritual wisdom and revelation were the valid ones, and those that appeared to be constructed from pre-existing models such as the Tree of Life were more fake. I’ve since come to think that was a limited and unfortunate view. For spirit communications are notoriously vague and misleading, and simply receiving information from a spirit does not guarantee that the the information is relevant, usable, or even that the spirit knows what they’re talking about.
Having a clearly defined model does seem to help us focus our inquiry and frequencies to invite only the kind of aid and information that corresponds to the specific issue or topic we want to work with. In Western esoteric traditions, a wand is a symbolic tool of fire in some traditions and a tool of air in other traditions. Contemplation reveals that in some ways the wand meaningfully teaches us something about air, or meaningfully teaches something about fire. The blade, similarly, offers us meaningful but different lessons about air or fire. Finding the “correct” tool for the element is less important than sincerely engaging with the associations one has, so that those toys have a language we understand that they can use for communication.
It is the practice of holding a wand with the intent of it being a tool of fire, with the further intent of Fire corresponding to qualities such as will, vitality, purpose, and value, that makes the tool psychologically and spiritually effective. In the book It, the children of Derry are able to defeat a monster who uses their fears against them by harnessing imagination and intent with confidence. The original movie shows this when one of the children sprays his inhaler at the monster while saying, “This is battery acid you slime!” In doing so, he hurts the monster.
This touches the polarities of meaning and meaninglessness. In a sense, this piece of stick is meaningless until infused with meaning. Yet rational and scientifically minded folks, as well as those who believe there is objective Truth that is knowable and unitary, might see this as a sign that the stick remains meaningless. If its meaning is conditional, how could it be valuable? Yet if there is only one correct meaning known to a small group of elect, that too seems lacking in value for the rest of us.
My thinking these days is that the world of inner meaning, both psychological and spiritual, follow different laws than the world of outer objects and relationships. What is true internally—if I believe something hard enough, it can change my consciousness to experience it as though it were true—does not work on the external level, where we have to do more work to manifest a reality, and that manifestation is subject to so many variables outside control.
Where I see errors between the psychospiritual on one hand versus the materialist-rational on the other hand is believing that either the inner laws or the outer laws must be true. If waving a stick in the air could not generate a physical fire, then it must not be true that there is an inner meaning of Fire that one can evoke. Simultaneously, so much spiritual bypassing is about believing that changing one’s inner experience will automatically and universally lead to material changes in ways that do not really work for most people in the world.
That said, invoking qualities of Fire in my self, or praying to my god for their strength and support, makes a material difference within my experience of self and the world, which may lead me to show up differently. Strange acausal experiences occur, which Jung called “synchronicities,” that feel as though they are confirming and guiding my inner experiences in a way that feels like a larger intelligence is organizing my life. There are moments when the inner and outer worlds blur, and yet I wonder if that blurring arises when we have clearly delineated the boundaries between the two and learned the proper skills and interventions for each.
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