Inside the Cosmic Mind: What is Revolutionary about this Book
What is revolutionary about this book? Coming from a top-down cosmology, it presents astrology as an ancient descriptive catalogue of the ordering principles of the ‘anima mundi’ or cosmic psyche.
Its alternative cosmology is more complete than that of astrophysics because it includes the non-material dimension of the inner world. The universe is seen by the writer as a living unity, a giant organism alive and conscious down to the smallest particle. All things in existence are encompassed by this one whole. Thus everything in the cosmos is inter-connected, and there is no separation between objects or minds.
The cosmic mind includes what we experience as the personal mind meaning we share in the consciousness of the cosmos. Mind and consciousness existed before matter, which was engendered in the course of evolution, rather than vice versa. The cosmos as a whole has not only a physical ‘body’ – its material parts – but like us has a non-material mental dimension and a psyche. In fact our minds can be seen as fractals of the universal mind.
Nested hierarchies are found in nature whereby smaller systems are contained in larger ones up to the largest system of all – the universe as a whole. In the same way this book proposes that the cosmos contains a nested hierarchy of minds. The cosmic mind as the largest unit includes within it the minds of the sun, of the biosphere, of the human collective and finally of human individuals. Characteristic of a nested hierarchy is that each system is complete in itself while being part and parcel of the larger systems in which it’s embedded. Thus our personal mind is part of, and so affected by, the human collective mind, and ultimately by the great cosmic mind.
Mind has two dimensions and with them both a male outwardly oriented function that acquires knowledge of the physical world, and a female inward-looking one whereby we experience the life of the psyche. And just as science defines the laws of nature that regulate the material world, so astrology defines the ordering principles of the psyche both cosmic and human.
The zodiac is a geometric matrix of twelve structural core Ideas or archetypes dwelling in the cosmic psyche, and mirrored fractally in each personal psyche. All the phenomena of life can be shared between their twelve categories of qualities. Therefore we conclude that the meanings astrology unfolds are intrinsic to the deeper organization of the cosmos. They derive from the patterning of ideas in the cosmic psyche, which however is not static but in flux – a flowing, open-ended, creative process.
Consequently the meanings of the astrological symbols and the rules of astrology can change over time. Only the mathematical ideas and geometric structures that give rise to these patterns in the psyche are eternal.
