The Cosmology of Not

The Before
As I talk about the Cosmology of Not in this work, I do so with three major themes in mind: the evolution of the Self, the evolution of humanity, and the evolution of the universe.
 
Evolution of the Self
When I think about my Self, I think about not just who I am now, but also who I have been in the past. I think about the journey I have taken to get to where I am today. I have made many mistakes. I have helped people, but I have also hurt many people, including myself. It’s hard to imagine, though, what I would do if I could do it over again. I’m not sure I would want that opportunity. Today, I love who I am and who I am still becoming. I still battle some demons and I still have to grapple with the Adversary of Self at times, but I have also found a loving guide in the Self – in my Self – to help me.
 
But there was an evolution to this Self. Just like you, the path I have walked to get here goes all the way back to my teenage years, my childhood years, my toddler years and keeps going back to when I was a baby, a fetus, embryo, zygote and even further back to the time I was just an idea of warm, light, active presence.
 
Our discussion of the Self in this work will begin before the Self was even a dream of being, and we will move up from there into the Landscape of Being where each living Self is today, working, eating, sleeping, paying bills, and trying to make it through day-to-day life.
 
This evolution of the Self we can also call the Cosmology of the Self.
 
Evolution of Humanity
Humanity shares a similar history to that of a Self. Humanity can trace its “Self” back in time to when humans did not realize that stars were actually suns. Further back, we find a time when humans thought that the forces of nature were supernatural beings which they called angles, demons, and gods. Further back in time, there was a time we could not even write. During this ancient time, we passed down information from one generation to the next using songs and stories. Even further back in time we were nomadic hunter-gathering animals wandering the forests and the plains in search of food. Even further back than that, humanity was a handful of unrecognizable mammalian creatures who were not even self-aware. Further back still, we were some kind of creatures who had just learned how to leave the sea and walk on dry land. Go back further and we were tiny primitive sea creatures. Before this, just like the Self, humanity, as “life itself,” was an idea of warm, light, active presence.
 
As we trace the Cosmology of Not, from the beginning to "the now," we will trace it along the lines of human evolution – from warm, light, active presence to the people we are now, moving around and interacting with each other across the Landscape of Being.
 
Evolution of the Universe
Finally, there is the universe we all find ourselves expanding with. The universe is everything around us, panning out into space for trillions and zillions of miles until all we see is hundreds of billions of galaxies all spinning around in some kind of cosmic dance that none of us can fully see from our vantage point on this little planet we call Earth.
 
The universe, like humanity and the Self, also has a past. Going backward in time, we imagine that billions of years ago the galaxies were just beginning to form. Before the galaxies formed there were incomprehensible amounts of matter and energy swirling around with space itself as it was all expanding “outward.” Looking further back in time we see this expansion outward was the result of some kind of unfathomably massive explosion of primordial energy. Looking even further back from this instantaneous explosion, we imagine the universe was a quantum singularity. Even further back before the quantum singularity, beneath the superstring, like humanity and the Self, we find the universe was an idea of warm, light, active presence.
 
I really have to go all the way back to before the beginning of the Self, humanity, and the universe in order to explain the Cosmology of Not. The reason for starting before the beginning will make much more sense after I explain what Not is. Suffice it to say, though, for this post, that the one commonality between the Self (each Self), humanity at large, and the universe, is that they all are different amalgamations of warm, light, active presence. This warm, light, active presence, when taken together, we can refer to as All. All is the opposite of Not. If we remove All, we have Not.
 
Not is simply “nothingness” but it turns out that it’s harder to describe nothingness than one might think. With this brief introduction to open the way, I think we’ll dive into the description of Not in the next blog post.

-- This post is excerpted from The Cosmology of Not & The Landscape of Being (Thomas Vaughn, 2024)