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Written by Bob Guyer
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Speculative myth and theory building, regarding the origins of the universe, are part of the scientific, philosophical, religious, and spiritual impulse of humanity. Logic, scientific inquiry, deep intuition, and imagination are the primary tools that we have available to create our ideas. One of the deep needs that understanding our origins fulfills is to set a context for understanding our lives that helps us create meaning out of our experience. Another major need that drives the quest for understanding the origin of things is to get closer to the mysterious power of creation and to be closely aligned with it.
Science begs the question with the big bang and religion is on shaky ground with origin myth when taken as a realistic description of the origin of things. Believe your own origin myth if it works for you, I am not trying to make that a bad thing, but I think it has little to do with our day-to-day lives and to the extent that it becomes overly important I think it masks a more obvious truth about our origins.
The obvious truth is that we can all trace our personal origins to our mothers. We all were born through sexual reproduction, a remarkable process in it’s own right. The undervaluing of this point of origin in favor of the search for a cosmological origin in the distant past strikes me as a primarily male anxiety regarding dependence on biological birth and interdependence with mother physically and emotionally for survival and the ability to thrive. It is in the period shortly before birth and after birth that the dual truths of separate existence and total interdependence are initially developed via personal birth and individuation. That halves of a person can be put together inside a woman’s body and come to life as a whole person who becomes more than the sum of the two halves of a person who made them is an amazing accomplishment.
Instinctively we think that the universe must also have been born or created. Every living creature and plant we see is born and also dies, so why not the universe. These living things, births and deaths didn’t come to be out of nowhere, the earth is the relatively stable, from a personal time frame of reference, context of life as we know it, but where did the earth come from? This is the point where the naturalist and the pragmatist parts of me see a good stopping place. We can all agree on this, make meaning out of it, and proceed to create a relatively reasonable life together on our planet that treats earth, and mother, with some help from father, respectfully as our point of origin.
What practical good comes of moving much past this point, enlargement of cosmological meaning is reassuring and enjoyable in a sense, but also speculative to the point that makes it a bone of contention between groups of people who have differing theories or speculative truths. Pushing the analysis of our personal origins back in time leads to a religious and scientific dead end where assumptions need to be made because reason and imagination enter into a hall of mirrors of infinite image regression. This leads us to the big bang for science, creation myths for religion and mystical speculation based on direct experience for the mystic. The question that is begged in all lines of inquiry is what came before that. If the answer is nothing, or God, we are in the same place we were before, an assumption.
What does this add to our experience and ability to live consciously and constructively? Why do many of us feel a need to push further back into the presumed chain of our origins to find a different starting point? I see four main needs driving us beyond the directly relevant earth and mother paradigm. Group boundary creation through cosmological myth making, power seeking, male origin anxiety, and intuitive knowledge that our consciousness is part of something larger than what we see (mother and planet) are the four most obvious factors that drive cosmological speculation.
Curiosity about how the world around us works, as a motive for scientific exploration of this issue, is a part of our collective human inheritance but not a compelling enough drive to explain why the cosmological level of things seems to have a compelling quality that arouses passionate interest.
Group boundary making, power seeking and male origin anxiety are all related. Intuitive knowledge of being part of something greater is an independent function based on the self reflective awakening of consciousness to know it’s self, as is scientific curiosity. Making a distinction between the sociological level, the intuitive level, and the scientific curiosity level, of the drive to recognize our origins is important in making constructive use of our drive to know more about where we come from.
The motives of group boundary creation through cosmological myth making, power seeking, and male origin anxiety are all interrelated and active in social dynamics. When a group forms a boundary to distinguish it from another group the boundary can have varying degrees of permeability. The more that boundary formation is driven by power needs relative to other groups the less permeable the boundaries will be. High degrees of force are required to make boundaries less permeable and force can be amplified by creation myths that attribute a high level of power to the origin source, high status to the members of the group, and big penalties for being on the wrong side of the group boundary.
Curiosity driven scientific and intuitive exploration of our ultimate origins are also important and legitimate and have less to do with immediate boundary formation and power dynamics and more to do with the urge to expand the scope of human consciousness.
I am curious about the ultimate origins of the universe but I don’t have a need to form a boundary that uses an origin theory as part of its boundary formation. Acceptance of the existence of the universe and our selves as we experience it is a decent starting place for creation of meaning. Any creation theory or myth is acceptable and is understood in the sense that it is speculative and part of the understandable urge to know more, form boundaries, align with power, and to expand the scope of human consciousness.
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Science Philosophy