It is returning, at last it is coming home to me—my own Self and those parts of it that have long been abroad and scattered among all things and accidents.
—Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The modern mind has long assumed that there are few things more categorically distant from each other than “cosmos” and “psyche.” What could be more outer than cosmos? What more inner than psyche? But today we are obliged to recognize that, of all categories, psyche and cosmos are perhaps the most consequentially intertwined, the most deeply mutually implicated. Our understanding of the universe affects every aspect of our interior life from our highest spiritual convictions to the most minuscule details of our daily experience. Conversely, the deep dispositions and character of our interior life fully permeate and configure our understanding of the entire cosmos. The relation of psyche and cosmos is a mysterious marriage, one that is still unfolding—at once a mutual interpenetration and a fertile tension of opposites.
It seems we have a choice. There are many possible worlds, many possible meanings, living within us in potentia, moving through us, awaiting enactment. We are not just solitary separate subjects in a meaningless universe of objects upon which we can and must impose our egocentric will. Nor are we blank slates, empty vessels, condemned to playing out passively the implacable processes of the universe—or of God—or of our environment, our genes, our race, our class, our gender, our social-linguistic community, our unconscious, our stage in evolution. Rather, we are miraculously self-reflective and autonomous yet embedded participants in a larger cosmic drama, each of us a creative nexus of action and imagination. Each is a self-responsible microcosm of the creative macrocosm, enacting a richly, complexly co-evolutionary unfolding of reality. To a crucial extent, the nature of the universe depends on us.