Dead or Alive
A Tale of Two Cosmologies
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Dead or Alive
My parents were both Mormon — or, more accurately, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (You can see why we tend to embrace the nickname.)
When I was 2, they split up and my mom raised me. She was and remained a devout member of the Church. A believer.
What does it mean to be a believer?
It means to consciously accept and profess a specific set of cosmological truth-claims. Stuff like the existence and nature of God, and how and why human beings got started on Earth. At its most basic, a cosmology is a wide-angle lens through which to look at your whole experience of life. What is real? What is not? What is good? What is not?
Who are all these people? Do they matter? Why?
Why?
Also, side note, where did all this stuff come from?
We tend to use the label “believer” on people who self-identify as religious. But the truth is we’re all believers. Even people who say they don’t believe anything are only saying they believe something other than what they think everyone else believes. Nobody doesn’t have beliefs.
A (mostly) coherent set of beliefs is called a cosmology, or, in other words, a working theory of the universe and reality. On an individual level, there’s a lot of variance and internal contradiction. On a cultural level, there are narratives that catalogue and define competing systems of belief. These tend to exert powerful influence upon individuals, to the point that almost everyone winds up adopting whichever one happens to be most dominant within their community.
Most of us are caught in the middle of a war between two cosmological paradigms: Dead or Alive.
Let’s start with the Dead Cosmology
This is the one we’re all familiar with. It’s the product of nearly four hundred years of what I am going to call Scientism - the dogmatic insistence that “Science” has or soon will answer all important questions.
Our current, culturally dominant Dead Cosmology got started with the early Enlightenment, when people started to think maybe there was a better way to understand the material fabric of reality than the (often) unhinged stories and superstitions of their ancestors.
Perhaps the Sun, for instance, doesn’t revolve around the Earth?
Perhaps rain isn’t the tears of sad gods?
Etc.
One of the side-effects of this cultural dominance, by the way, is the ease with which we straw-man the alternatives. But I don’t want to get carried away.
The point is easy — by the time Nietsche pronounced God as Dead, he was only making an observation of something that had been true for quite some time. Scientism was already the dominant religion in the West, which was the dominant culture in the world. The old gods, so-called, had already been driven to the corners, vestigial limbs sensed only by the unwashed and unenlightened.
Here are some of the truth claims of the Dead Cosmology:
Existence started with a Big Bang.
The laws of physics basically dictate everything.
God-claims are just lazy explanations for things Science hasn’t figured out yet.
Nothing happens that cannot be materially measured and, with enough data, predicted.
There’s no such thing as a soul, or a spirit, or whatever. You are your brain, and when it dies, that’s it. Bye-bye. Death is the inevitable end of all things.
The universe is vast beyond comprehension (except by Very Smart People, who try hard to help us understand), but it is also just made of different kinds of rocks.
The likeliest explanation of how humans got going on the planet we call Earth is that it was a caprice of chance, a manifestation of the eventual inevitability of every improbability.
There’s still a lot we don’t know, sure, but it mostly has to do with how the vast universe is shaped (a donut, maybe?), and some funny business with quantum particles which, if we’re being reasonable, are way too small to be more than academically interesting.
Life has no objective meaning. Humans are neat because they are meaning-makers. But no, there is no such thing as Right and Wrong, except insofar as people can mutually agree on some things, like for instance it’s Wrong to cause pointless suffering, except watch out for Utilitarians, who might press you on the meaning of the word “pointless.”
There’s no such thing as God.
There’s no such thing as Ghosts.
There’s no such thing as UFOs.
In this model of the universe, by the tenets of this Dead Cosmology, the best explanation for any phenomenon that seems not to fit within it is the propensity of human brains to make shit up.
This, I should emphasize, is a fabulously compelling argument. We have very good imaginations, to the point that most of us spend hours every single day vividly hallucinating all sorts of wildly unreal things. It’s called dreaming, and the boundaries that contain it are pretty permeable.
If there’s one thing, frankly, that Science has taught us, and that we should absolutely not doubt, it’s that, as arbiters of reality, we are tragically and comically unreliable. And even when we’re trying our hardest to be objective, our minds are so clogged with cognitive biases that it’s a wonder there’s room for any truth at all.
Once you’ve accepted this (as we all should, as we all must!), you have found a very convenient explanation for anything that seems not to fit within the Dead Cosmology. You simply apply Occam’s Razor — is this proof that the entire Western idea of material Scientism is wrong, or might someone be misperceiving reality? Might someone be seeing something that isn’t really there? Might someone have made some assumptions that aren’t, well, entirely justified?
See, how seductive this way of thinking is.
See, how hard it is to argue against.
Thus, the Cosmology of Death has reigned supreme in the Western World for generations. From Descartes’ Discourses on rational thought and systemic doubt, to the secularist political regimes of the 20th century.
To dispute the authority of this cosmology would seem to dispute the incalculable value it endowed the world. I would not prefer to wind back the clock on science and technology, and my first love was the pure language of math.
But as with most progressive movements, the Enlightenment came at great cost. While the minds of humanity awoke to the principles of science and reason, they also darkened to the vitality of spirit that animates the substance of all life.
The world died under the scrutiny of our carefully calibrated instruments.
But something is happening...
When you poke at a dead thing persistently enough, sometimes you find out it isn’t really dead after all.
Over the past year, there’s been talk of a Vibe Shift. Most of the people who use this term are using it in cultural and political contexts. But I think it’s also a useful term to describe another emergent phenomenon, which is that more and more people are rejecting strict materialism, aka the Dead Universe Cosmology.
Probably you’re aware of at least one of these things:
A resurgent interest in religion
The rising popularity of paranormal subjects, like ghosts
The growing scientific support of “psi” phenomena
A preponderance of UFO/UAP sightings and encounters
Alternative theories of consciousness
The admission of leading scientists in quantum theory that the fabric of reality is fungible
Mounting archeological discoveries that suggest human history is a lot stranger and more ancient than we’ve been taught
This is a list that could run on much longer, but I think the point is made.
The former gate-keepers of consensus reality are not happy with this development, They tend to call the groundswell of interest and attention to these ideas “dangerous” and “destabilizing.” They’re not wrong. In a chaotically decentralized information ecosystem, every pound of truth is going to come mixed with about ten million pounds of bullshit.
So there are big, thorny problems of epistemology to wrestle with. To those who still cling to the Dead Universe Cosmology, with its stately, crumbling institutions of truth-setting, these problems are indeed existential. If not colleges and universities and blue-chip newspapers, how will The People be Informed?
But if the Universe is not Dead, but is in fact Alive, then there may be solutions to epistemological problems that do not originate in traditional institutions.
In other words, revelation might be real.
So, too, might be the alchemical potential of two or more truth seekers in earnest dialogue.
A Living Universe is wild and mysterious and full of peril, but the canon is open. More will be revealed.
When?
It doesn’t matter. In a Cosmology of Life, death is not the end.
If that sounds too woo to you, it just means you are still in the thrall of a Dead Cosmology. You still believe in an existence dictated by deterministic particles. I encourage you to let go of that safe and stultifying paradigm. It may be frightening, but it is not impossible. And on the other side, possibility blooms infinitely.
I choose life
For most of my adult life, the philosophical black hole of materialist scientism drew me toward an event horizon beyond which no meaning or hope could escape. The more I became convinced of its truth, the more I hated and feared it. Many of the greatest minds of the past several centuries had stared into that abyss, and concluded that consciousness was a such a cruel accident of cosmic caprice that suicide might be the most reasonable course of action.
I am not one of the great minds of this or any other century.
Thankfully, I found other great minds, apostates to the dominant materialist worldviews. People that had found and could demonstrate a way to properly balance the rigors of intellectual integrity with spiritual humility.
As is common to the phenomenon of perception, once I started to see evidence of Life piercing the rigid doctrines of death, I started to see it everywhere. In the clarity of hindsight, I can see that to approach a philosophical black hole is to be almost literally blinded by it. The sheer number of things that escaped my perception before astonishes me now, even as I become increasingly convinced that my own perceptions are so limited that they are virtually non-existent.
The great change that has taken place over the past several years is that I have begun to sense, in a way that is difficult if not impossible to describe, that there is much, much more going in this world than can be seen, heard, or touched by most people most of the time. And I’m not talking about the stuff we can only measure with sensitive instruments. I’m talking about a great thrum of life and will beyond the detection of even our most sophisticated technology.
Both contributing to this sense, and retroactively supporting it, are an unending avalanche of anecdotes and anomalies. There is a river of evidence for a Cosmology of Life. But it it is a river that cannot be banked and directed by our narrow understanding of it, even as any one of us is free to draw near and drink from the flow.
All my life, I’ve learned the Cosmology of a Dead Universe. Now, finally, I am beginning to understand that its very fabric vibrates with Life. It’s like we got so focused on the skin of an elephant that we forgot the rest of it was inside.
There’s no good way to conclude this post because there are no conclusions. Only more questions and more revelations, branching out in compounding fractals to infinity.
Contra the great, sad minds of “Enlightened” centuries past, it is good to be alive.
Gods, Ghosts & UFOs
If all this hits you anything like it hits me, then you should go check out
, where I’ll be exploring all of the above (pun intended) with my good friends Mallory Everton and Tom Maxwell.Be sure to say hi if you stop by.
Thank you for this piece, definitely one of my all-time favorites! The canon is open, thank God!
We can’t possibly understand, and yet it is in our nature to try.