Human cosmology

I’ve read enough cosmology* to get the impression that these physicists are very smart but are reaching the submicroscopic bottom of the barrel for explanations of the universe.  String theory with its vibrating superstrings and extra dimensions (“26 spacetime dimensions for the bosonic string and 10 for the superstring” -- Wikipedia).  Lawrence Krauss’s explanation of “a universe from nothing.”  If you think for a few moments about Existence Itself, it is impossible to get a sense of rationality, or even sanity.  How could it be eternal, with time having no beginning, ever, there always being an earlier time?  How could it have started?  -- from when?  How can there be the smallest possible thing?  Everything that exists must have some quality of substance and therefore smaller “parts.”  How can infinity be possible?  No one can actually conceive of pure endlessness.  But how could All be finite?  You reach the end, then what?  And as Leibniz (1646-1716) asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  No, none of it makes sense to the human mind, so I wonder at the conceit of the scientists who are atheists, who laugh at theists for their self-enclosed certainty about, and vague or circular arguments for, the existence of God.  (For example: The universe seems to embody chaos?  That’s what God deemed best!)

With all the reductio ad absurdum conceived by science, why shouldn’t the mirror analogue to the universe’s inexplicability and immeasurability – deity – be the best answer?

Unfortunately, I have been living with the sense that there is an even stronger support for the accidentalism of atheism: human psychology.  Good and evil, death of innocents, the eternal mystery of existence – one can imagine these as part of a Maker’s lofty art.  But to see the blueprint, template and branding iron of human neurotic and psychotic misery in the earliest months of womb and child-life, that in time produce not merely physical limitations but limitations of the heart and the spirit – is to question a divine anything.

Though we are holistic – mind and body a complex identity – psychic injuries are different from physical ones.  Needing corrective lenses, or a walker, or insulin or a colostomy bag, a person may continue to thrive from the buoyant energy of a healthy happy childhood.  But as our psychology is the thematic substrate of our life – our capacity for meaning and our meaning of meaning – the love injuries that occur in the crucible of early development are the alpha and omega: immanent until the moment, at the end, we rage or whimper against the dying of the light.  They are the “superstrings” that vibrate, beneath everything, through our time.

We can prove it to ourselves – that we are what we were – though it’s quite hard to do without desire and practice.  Feel the body-mind emotion-sensations – what Gendlin** calls the “felt sense” – that are evoked by most any image or concern or memory or question in your life, without labeling them, without making thought or attitudinal conclusions about them.  To deepen the process, tell yourself to dissolve the floorboards beneath you, on which your adulthood rests, so that you and your history become a unity.  Sink down through the sands of your time.  Let a recondite but real sensation tell you its meaning, as best you can read it.  In time, maybe “in no time” if you are versed in the process, you will feel your child self.  There may be a possibility of feeling your infant or baby self.  Try to accept that it’s who you are.  Then, feel how this archaic feeling is, even now, within your attitudes about yourself, about others, about “life,” about your past and your future.  Feel how it and others have created your universe’s size, its brightness, its viability or its moribund state.  See that the sober or desperate conclusions of your life are based in these elements formed in childhood.

There are different kinds of optimism within pessimism.  Therapy can help heal injuries, even very old ones.  Present sensations – smell a cinnamon roll, feel love, deposit a paycheck – can seem to take precedence over the younger template ones.  But many people cannot overshadow their injured roots as their seeds were planted and germinated in unnurturing soil.  As the tree grew, the more precarious it became until at its height, it foundered.  Alpha and omega – but not in the way we think of God.

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* (The popular writings, without the math.)
 

** Eugene T. Gendlin, PhD, Focusing, 1978.