Unveiling the Cosmos
// May 19th, 2009 // Leadership Development
I recently trained at Solution 2009 in Vienna, co-delivering with my old friends from Emersense and some great new additions, forming as deep and diverse a learning platform as I’ve been a part of. My first session for the conference was meant to be a paradigm shift in understanding. It aimed to provide a guided tour to some of the big questions in existence, to the world outside of ourselves- something like this…
Only bigger… I wanted the participants to realise that their story was far larger, far more connected that they had possibly imagined. That their story was truly universal and loaded with everything that implies. The vast structure and interconnection that we are part of can seem so vague and unspecific. I wanted to get beyond that to a glimpse of a place that moves beyond the rational understanding of what is, and into the awe of what we are apart of- and even simply- what we are. Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, expresses it perfectly in his journey of realisation- offered as reflections at the close of the “Beyond Belief” conference in ’06.
(Start at 4:05)
And from this perspective, with these different kind of eyes, I attempted to bring the audience to reexamine our world- and indeed ourselves. Astrophysicist George Smoot gave a TED talk that had struck me powerfully, pulling back the veil to reveal the design in the universe, for those of us with the inclination to see it. I borrowed heavily from his models and presentations, although I expanded into our planet, our history and our singular moment of existence.
It is a hard-line to walk between George as Scientist and Neil as Storyteller, and I probably hit too full an explanation before moving into introspective reflection and the later half of the session. Yet for me this is not just a tool to inspire awe, it is some of the greatest truth we can know. It is not just a metaphorical story, but a literal one, more intricate and complicated than can be imagined. And it is because of the fragility of our imaginings that I wanted to bring this content to the rather unsuspecting audience. It was because we were about to engage in deep self-discovery, that it seemed even more important to be well rooted in the real; to see our story as part of what we know the greater story to be, to see our conception of self in the context of the structure of our greater identity, to see our subjective limits and absolutes in view of true universals.
As Ibn Arabi writes, “Perfect knowledge of Reality involves seeing with both eyes, the eye of reason and the eye of imagination”.
