Everything from the beginning of time is within us.
We are part of the universe.
Maybe just a small part.
Maybe for just a short moment.
But part of it none the less.
I’ve often wondered how our ancient ancestors came to understand the universe. Before physics, biology, psychology, chemistry brought a narrow sliver of understanding, there was so little to go on. And yet, almost all of humanity’s belief systems have an origin story of how the universe came to be. Babylonian Epsu and Tiamat, Gnostic Bythos and Sig, the Mauri Rangi and Papa or Egyptian Geb and Nut etc. etc. In some ways, it seems impossible that we could ever know our true origins — and yet so much time and effort has gone into defining it and once established, so much conviction has been held that each set of ideas were more accurate and more divine than the ideas of others.
Ancient cultures understood they were an integral part of the universe. Part of the whole. As such, it made perfect sense to them that whatever was within them, at their core, must also be at the core to the universe. They had little technology or tools to explore far beyond their own existence and place in the world, but they had all the tools necessary to explore their inner make up. They had not extricated themselves from nature and their environments in the same way that we have in our modern lives. They saw the interdependence, the inter-relationships between them and their environment and they understood how they were an integral part of nature. By understanding their natures, so they could understand nature around them. If they understood the nature of the world around them, then so they extrapolated that they could therefore understand the nature of the universe as a whole (both the bits they directly experienced and those they could only imagine).
Their cosmology, their ideas of how the universe was created, did not come from the big bang out — even though that’s how the stories were often told. Instead it came from within — self reflection, self understanding, observation of the natures of man and the natures of the physical world around them that led to an extrapolation to all of the knowable universe. The truths from which they deduced the hierarchies of the cosmos and the order of creation were not truths of scientific observation but truths of inner reflections. Psychological truths that revealed our fundamental sense of being.
We are part of the universe. We are part of nature. We are not separated, not different but an element within the whole. Whether before human beings existed or after they are gone, humanity will always be part of this thing. This expanding eternity. From the moment when nothing became something, that quantum ripple in the universe, we have always been part of it and will always be (or have been) a part of it. So much so, that how long we play that part seems directly linked to whether we find balance and harmony or whether we become antagonistic to it. It is bigger than us, so the more we separate ourselves from it, the shorter and less significant our role will be.
And this, for me, is why these origin myths feel important. The Aeons are the essences of the universe that like photons in a beam of light, shine through everything in that universe. They start with a fundamental understanding of the important energies that are within us, that are also within all that is around us and hopefully, all that is within the universe. They give us guidance as to the things that need to be united, brought together to find balance, unity and wholeness not just in ourselves but in the universe as a whole. Aeonology gives us a map to our connective tissues to our universe, to our fellow beings and our own sense of self. Of course they can exist independently and be thought of as separate, but this state is damaging and powerless. When brought together, when kept in balance and in unity, they give us not only a sense of wholeness in ourselves but a sense of wholeness within our environment and within the universe.
