Cosmosophia

Confronted with global warming, economic injustice, and a profound sense of meaninglessness, many in the modern world have come to the conclusion that we are at a turning point in human history.  Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth offers a fresh approach to the crisis of the modern industrial world, emphasizing the worldview that provides us with our core values and basic assumptions about reality.

Cosmosophia takes the reader on an extensive historical journey through the ideas and worldviews that have shaped the West, as well as a journey around the world to explore the various mystical traditions that could provide alternatives to the Western worldview.  Ultimately, it is argued that the unique challenges of today’s world cannot be solved through a return to the ideas of the past—or even through mere ideas at all—but by a deep mystical re-connection to our world and the creative, imaginative process of telling a new myth that integrates our mystical traditions and modern science.

This book develops a new discipline, “cosmosophy,” which seeks to reconcile the individual and the whole through the wisdom of the cosmos.  Central to this work is the notion that wisdom is not the creation of the human, or deposited into the world from above, but the way the Universe creates meaningful, compassionate relationships.  The human is called upon to find the specific human expression of this wisdom at this moment.  From this discipline, a new mythic and symbolic framework has been created, “cosmosophia,” which integrates the insights of the cosmologies and mystical philosophies of the wisdom traditions and modern science.  Any worldview is based on certain basic assumptions about reality that a particular culture makes.  In modernity, these assumptions or core metaphors have led us to see our world as corrupted or dead.  Cosmosophia is a new set of metaphors upon which a worldview can be created that treats the cosmos as ensouled, alive, or sacred.

Finally, Cosmosophia begins the process of telling a new myth.  It is central to the argument that the way in which the members of a culture understand their relationship to the world is defined not by facts about the world, but the story we tell about it.  A story invites us to participate.  The mythmaker is the artist who tells these great stories.  Using the most recent insights of science as well as drawing from various mystical traditions, a new myth is proposed based upon the symbolic framework of cosmosophia.

Cosmosophia is the winner of the highest honor (Gold) of the Independent Publisher Book Awards in the religion category and the Nautilus Book Awards Gold Medal in the science and cosmology category.  To buy the book, click here.