Cosmology Building
Kinds of Cosmology
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
"Now I need to delve into your concept of cosmology. I may think I know its meaning, and may not. Or may not understand the word as you do. If you don't mind, an example? Or more explication. I do like your descriptions of of what they mean to you :)"
Thanks.
Very grateful.
A cosmology is a story that tries to create order out of the variety of existence.
It tries to create order order on the largest scale possible.
Broadest Classifications : Scientific, Religious and Philosophical
This narrative could be created through efforts to measure and speculate about the physical structure of the universe and its development-scientific cosmology.
It could be based purely on narratives unique to a particular culture but which share some underlying ideational relationships with those from other cultures-religious cosmologies.
It could be developed through efforts to think through logical, as different from imaginative (religious) or quantitative (scientific) relationships about the universe-philosophical cosmologies.
These general outline of cosmologies is largely heuristic, because the categories often overlap.
Public, Private or a Combination
Cosmologies may also be public or private or a combination of both.
Public cosmologies are cosmologies that groups of people identify with, understanding them as reflecting reality to a significant degree.
The best known of these are religious and scientific cosmologies, some of which have a global appeal on account of the geographical distribution of their adherents.
Private cosmologies are cosmologies identified with by individuals or by groups of people who do not see them as reflecting reality at the same level of authority as the adherents of the public cosmologies do.
Examples of these are the cosmologies developed by imaginative writers.
Some of these are adaptations of public cosmologies, developing these cosmologies by elaborating on them in unique ways.
One of the best known examples of this, perhaps the best known, is Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, which reimagines the world as understood by medieval European Christianity in dialogue with the Greco-Roman world.
A cosmological construct which is even more private than that Dante, and is largely original, is that of William Blake, who declared " I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's" suggesting the power of a cosmology to shape a person's words, with greater or lesser degree of expansiveness or constriction.
A very impressively constructed private cosmology and largely original in structure is J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth universe.
J.K. Rowling's world in the Harry Potter series also demonstrates significant features of a cosmology.
Cosmological Narrative
The character of cosmology as significantly storytelling becomes evident in comparing the way imaginative writers reshape existing cosmologies into new forms, or create new cosmologies out of diverse materials.
A striking example of the creation of new cosmologies out of diverse materials is the Mahabharata, the massive epic sequence central to Hinduism. The panoply of characters from humans to fire understood as an entity, even an amorous one, is amazing.
Another example is the fantastic reimagining of the Jewish scriptures by the writer of the Zohar. A couple of religious teachers walking to their destination encounter a humble merchant(?) who proceeds to say strange things that make no sense, until they realise the humble merchant is speaking in symbols of the hidden mysteries of the Torah. The text expounds later on the creation of the universe from a darkness from which various lights emerge.
Isaac Luria enriches this imaginative tradition by visualising the creation of the cosmos in terms of ten spheres into which the divine light is poured, the lower seven spheres bursting under the intensity of the divine light, leading to the chaotic mixture of good and evil that constitutes the universe we know it, the sparks of the divine light being trapped within the matter of our world constituted by the shattered vessels , our duty being to liberate the sparks of light to return to their divine source, an act of reintegration that enables cosmic wholeness.
What of Ibn Arabi and the Youth he encounters while circumambulating the Black Stone, the Kabaa, the geographical centre of Islam? The Youth who is the knower, the knowing and the known- to paraphrase my unclear memory of this, though I think Arabi might have been speaking more of a vision than of a purely imaginative construct.
One could go on and on, but also note that some of these accounts are about what people really experienced and the boundaries between construction and actual experience are difficult to draw.
A striking example from scientific cosmology is Tian Yu Cao's imaginative effort to posit Nothing as the origin of the universe through deductions from scientific cosmology in "Ontology and Scientific Explanation" in Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science, of the idea that Nothing existed before the Big Bang , an idea which resonates with Kabbalstic and other views which posit the ultimate source of the universe in related terms-Ain Spoh-the Unknown-Kabbalah-the Void-Buddhism-although the reasoning process used by Yao and the religious thinkers are related but not identical. They all try to push to the ultimate limits of human comprehension and end up with the paradoxical idea of nothingness as a positive quality responsible for cosmogenesis.
I am convinced the history of cosmological creation suggests basic processes that may be learnt and adapted.
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
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