Season 6

Season 6, Cosmology

The first sentence of the story, the first sound, the opening shot. I started a preface to cosmology, a draft introduction, a test to see what I wanted to talk about. What clarity did I find?

Young Joe attends a shamanic workshop. Everybody is in skins, it's a primitive tribe in a cave perhaps, there's a fire burning, smoky. The guide speaks in lost tongue, (grunty). There are subtitles. Claymation? Animation? Simple set and actors?

"Whether we recognize it or not, we each have a personal cosmology, an assortment of beliefs about how reality is constructed and functions.

What we experience is influenced by our beliefs. If I believe I am loved, then I can feel loved, even when there's some evidence to the contrary. Proposing that personal cosmologies determine internal realities, eg emotions and physiology, is likely not controversial. Asserting that cosmologies can influence external reality might be, at least for some of our friends at this spacetime locus.

Cosmologies could feature a creator god who hears and answers prayers, or perhaps the natural world as a complex skirmish between biological machines. The Earth could be spherical or more like a disk. Some people are chosen and others damned.

A hard science cosmology might assert that beliefs should tightly correspond to what can be repeatedly observed in controlled conditions. If cosmologies can shape external reality, the sane criteria for evaluating beliefs would not be are they accurate or true, but are they useful? Do they instantiate a desired reality? What, for that matter, do I desire?

There's no point in offering y'all a persuasive philosophical tour de force. We have demonstrated that an elegant cosmology can shape external reality. We have discovered, borrowed and crafted a cosmology that is useful, pragmatic. Beliefs that get the job done. Consider... by gently aligning with an efficacious cosmology, we can learn to instantiate stuff - things, situations, connections. Anything.

There's a rub. We can only offer hints, runes and tunes about useful cosmologies. We can't tell you what to believe, you must tell yourself. Becoming magic requires desire. A suspension of disbelief as the storytellers say, [cinema]. That's the premise in a nutshell. We'll convey one idea in a thousand different ways. If you want to hear, you will."

["We" is the pronoun of fullness.]