cosmologies26

"cosmology: The study of the universe as a whole."
- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

In the past four hundred years we seem to have permanently
cornered the philosophical problem of the one and the many.
Science, not only a method of inquiring into but a guiding
principle for understanding the nature of reality, has since the
1500s taught us to analyze details. "To analyze" means to break a
subject down into its constituent parts and then describe how the
parts work together. The emphasis is on the parts - the many. In
this view, the universe is many things adding up to one large
thing.
This was not the universe of ancient philosophers and religious
visionaries. Socrates, Buddha, Jesus and Plotinus, for example,
explained that the world only seems to be many things, but is in
fact only one thing which manifests itself in a multiplicity of
things. The One is first; this is most clearly explained in Plotinus,
who demonstrates powerfully that the material world of ten
thousand things is only the last fragments of the overflowing of
God, or the One, from a purely unified state into progressively
more separate, less unified, and therefore more fragmentary and
unreal, states. The many things are simply a concatenation of
appearances, or manifestations, of the single reality which gives
rise to them. In a loose sense this single reality is also Jesus'
Kingdom of Heaven, or Buddha's Nirvana.
When scientists shifted perspective in the Renaissance, deciding
that reality adds up from individual objects rather than flows
down from a great spiritual unity, they outlined a cosmological
view which would enable us to take better care of our material
lives. Science, indeed, has transformed human life. In the
twentieth century we can survive lethal diseases, grow food in
deserts, wipe out in a few minutes pains that in earlier ages would
have lasted days or a lifetime, and we can make journeys in a few
hours that earlier would have taken months.
But in taking better care of our material lives, something seems
to have gone wrong. It is not hard for some of us to guess (or
know) what it is. Now even some scientists are growing uneasy.
Recently, for example, science writers have noted that cognitive
psychology, while identifying numerous structures and parts of the
brain's mental activity, has bypassed, in its concentration on the
parts, its original inquiry: what is consciousness? Consciousness
being the whole, and science being the analysis of parts,
consciousness loses the attention of science.
In the past hundred years or more, most academic disciplines
have sought to become scientific in their methods. Everything
from molecular biology to literary criticism has taken to examining
material parts in order to find out how they constitute the whole.
Philosophy itself has become the study of how words mean - or
even, whether they mean anything at all - and religion has become
in many parts of the world a complex social welfare system, with
clergy as counselors and comforters of the sick. Neither
philosophy nor religion, in any general sense, concerns itself
primarily with questions about reality or God. They concern
themselves with individuals and their material needs.
The same is true of governments and ideologies: capitalism and
communism both regard economics as the prime basis for
decision-making, and in this way turn out to be two sides of the
same materialist coin. And nearly all institutions of moral
instruction, from philosophy to literature to religion, have
abdicated their responsibilities to define the parameters of good
and bad human behavior in favor of objective scientific

examination of material effects. The result of this abdication is a
moral climate which envisions each individual - each part - as the
creator and arbiter of his or her own ethical world, separate from
all other worlds. Where all worlds are separate, no individual
world has any particular responsibility toward another, and any
use of crack cocaine, automatic rifles, nuclear megatons or money
becomes, if so chosen by the individual, "the good," no matter
what its general effects.
Science itself is not the evil satan of the materialist modern age.
Science is a good thing: it provides the means for American troops
to put a halt to a horrible famine in Somalia. This is good.
Socrates, Plotinus and probably Buddha would approve of it.
But the problem is that feeding people is not the only good. The
material world, according to the ancient teachers, is not the only
world: people do not live by bread alone, but also by the spirit. In
fact, the ancient teachers tell us, a human being's attention is best
focused on matters of the spirit rather than matters of the world.
The world is whole, one, in a spiritual sense, and it's fragmented
and disparate in a physical sense. For this reason Jesus points us
toward the Kingdom of Heaven; Plotinus toward the One. "All
that is visible," suggests the I Ching, as interpreted by Richard
Wilhelm, "must grow beyond itself, into the realm of the
invisible" (Hexagram 51). The idea that spirit encompasses the
material world has been common to most or all of humanity, in
one form or another, for millennia.
But in the last four hundred years the scientific attitude, which
focuses attention on material reality, has not provided spiritual
guidance of any kind. Because the idea of "spirit" is essentially
unavailable to scientific analysis, many scientists have both
implicitly and explicitly denied its reality.
Science does not treat spirituality because, as we know from our
own experience and from the great spiritual masters, spiritual
activity is knowable only from the whole - by the one, not the
many. Working back toward the one, the real question is: what do
we need to do to be spiritual, here in our individual, incarnate
life? Science does not tell us this, but Buddha, Socrates, Jesus and
Plotinus do tell us: they all, in speaking of our spiritual natures,
speak first of our moral behavior. The fundament of a spiritual
nature is a moral nature. A nature which is morally good is hard to
analyze. Socrates never defined any of the virtues satisfactorily.
Jesus speaks of the necessity of faith, in a moral sense.
This is why the I Ching, the Bible, the Platonic dialogues, the
Vedas and the Enneads are literally about human conduct. The
moral state of a human being connects the material world to the
spiritual world. Plotinus describes the attention to heaven rather
than earth as a moral act because it is attention to the inner being,
the Soul - which has grown out of Mind, which has grown out of
God.
The I Ching instructs us in this cosmic fact: "The superior
man/Creates number and measure,/And examines the nature of
virtue and correct conduct" (Hexagram 60). Number and measure
are the foundations of the material world, and they are derived
from the stars and planets. The stars, in the ancient view, are the
visible edge of heaven. In creating number and measure, one
regards the workings of heaven, which is a way of saying that one
is behaving well. Heaven and human nature meet at moral virtue.
Our spiritual disposition depends on our moral disposition. And
our moral disposition is not our fulfillment of social duties, nor
our perfunctory attention to religious ritual, but as the ancient
teachers show over and over, it is our disposition toward the