Cosmology

awash with birdsong and the scent
of blossoms - trees
squeezing out lime

green leaves - neither the crescent
moon nor
the morning star

hesitate to submit
to this late April dawn
this gradual

rising that births
through shimmering
petals of light every

living thing ...

Pretty much every religious tradition - modern science included - has a cosmology: a story of the origin of the universe, of how it all began. I find these fascinating to explore: the "Big Bang" theory, God breathing ripples onto the surface of the lake of the World, Yang Qi and Yin Qi emerging from the Tao - to name just a few.

If we shift our focus from the very large and abstract to the more immediate, we can consider "cosmology" in terms of the creation of our moment-to-moment experience. How is my world created - or how is it that I create "my world" - from breath to breath, or thought to thought, within the various fields of my perception? And if we shift our focus again, to the really small, we could ask the question: in their essence, what are the various things of my world made of? And here, again, the answers vary widely: from quarks to qi (chi) to Pure Consciousness to strings - to name just a few.

Finding a connection between cosmology in its largest sense and in its most micro sense has of course become the Holy Grail of modern physics. In support of their search for a unification between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, physicists build electron accelerators and spend long hours working out mathematical formulas. For practitioners of Taoist Inner Alchemy, these various experiments - acceleration of electrons, explorations of the eleven dimensions, etc. - all take place within the laboratory and elegant universe of our precious human body.