Book one-on-one story sessions hereRead this as an article, and share your thoughts hereLet’s open with a poem.Now is the TimeNow is the time to rememberthat our green globe is the best-dressed in the balllit through with organic filamentsbombastic living miracles. Now is the time to turn off the engine and set down exhaustion into lakes that remain and bask foraninfiniteinstant.Now is the timeto bea miracletoo. Cosmology: It’s a Heck of a WordIt is! It’s up there with ontology and epistemology, the kind of word that opens us up to broad ways of thinking. It’s an account or theory of the origin of the universe. Along with that view of its origin, cosmology implies principles and beings who govern our universe. In story terms, we can say that the cosmology of a story is the largest conceptual framework, in which are nested the smaller frameworks. It's the largest explanation, the largest context, like the shell of the story egg. Or perhaps a better analogy is that cosmology is the bedrock which influences the chemistry of all the layers of soil, up to and including the topsoil. You see, cosmology speaks of the background of the story, but it also infuses each part of the story. It gives the big why’s and who’s and how’s of the story world, in which all smaller stories must take place. We live in stories.In popular scientific cosmology, we have the Big Bang and the theory of evolution. For those who live in that view, their daily lives are nested within that bigger picture. Most other cosmologies are more personal, in the sense that there are beings who were and are involved in creation. That could be gods, the spirits of planets, animals, creators who create with clay, and more. There is a great variety. For those who are within those cosmologies, their daily lives are nested within this larger context. Cosmology in HinduismHindusim is varied to say the least, but there are trends. The branch of Hinduism that I studied and practiced was Bhakti-yoga, or Gaudiya Vaisnavism. It holds a personal cosmology, with all creation originating from a divine being, or rather, two divine beings, masculine and feminine. After the initial creation, those divine beings had a hand in subsequent sub-creations. The big creation is where Divinity arranged the soup of matter into planets and stars. In the sub-creations, planets are populated with beings, and in further sub-creations, there are more beings, all within a universal governance with strata of gods, all the way to the top. There are variations of this cosmology, within India and the larger area around her. It is as though the conceptual egg is multidimensional, existing in various ways for different people, yet with a common essential form. I’m afraid that’s the best metaphor I can think of now. I’m open to suggestions!What are the variants? Some speak of Vishnu as the supreme originating deity. Others speak of Shiva, or Shakti. Some forego personal origins and say that the universe came from a void, or from an all-pervasive energy. Early Buddhism entered the scene with a teaching of interdependent causality, which you might roughly say means, everything causes everything (though there are greater concentrations of causality).Jostling CosmologiesIf each of these cosmologies were a person, they’d often be bickering, and in fact the world is full of jostling cosmologies. If you hear two people making different claims about whether life came from matter or spirit, whether there was a big bang, whether creatures evolved from the ocean or were created in some other way, or perhaps both—you’re witnessing jostling cosmologies. However, within a given story, we tend to find a single cosmology, a single world-view about the origin of things. From there comes the ontology of that world: what the story allows to be true. (Thanks to Sarah Kerr for that framing). In a given story, the cosmology may be spelled out or implied. It may be assumed to be the same as dominant modern world-views. In any case, there’s always a cosmology. Let's use Lord of the Rings for an example, because the cosmology is spelled out clearly, at least if you get into the Silmarillion. Here it is: in the beginning there was one singer; from that singer came many singers. With their combined voices they created celestial harmonies. Then, one of those singers began to sing in disharmony; kicking off the troubles of creation, much as Lucifer did when he rebelled against the Judeo-Christian god. From there come Elves, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits. And in a particular place called the Shire, in Bag End, there’s Bilbo!Cosmology is the biggest layer. Within that we have nested layers, and within all of that we have the actions of our characters, or, in our lives, ourselves. Worlds Within WorldsWithin the cosmology of a story, nested inside, lie other layers of explanation. We've been talking about big picture cosmology—the origin of the universe and such—but thought of any scale has ...
