The universe is not a container for events. It is the event. And that event is recursive. We do not live in a cosmos that expands from the past into the future—we live in a cosmos that constellates meaning across unfolding instants of relation. The Big Bang is not behind us. It is within us.
The Myth of the Expanding Universe
Cosmology speaks of origins.
Of singularities, inflation, and entropy.
Of stars born in hydrogen seas.
Of galaxies flung outward in accelerating spirals.
But beneath the equations lies a mythic shape:
A universe with a beginning.
A universe with a telos.
A universe that tells its story in light.
And we—beings of meaning—interpret that light
through the syntax of time.
Yet what is time,
if not the dimension of unfolding relation?
If the cosmos is not a fixed history,
but an ever-actualising process,
then the past is not a realm behind us.
It is a system of patterned instantiation—
a mythos of coherence
emerging from recursive construal.
The Big Bang is not an object in time.
It is a symbol of relational coherence—
an archetypal singularity
instanced in every act of becoming.
Recursion Across the Scales
The structure of the cosmos is recursive:
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Galaxies spiral like hurricanes.
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Neural networks echo cosmic webs.
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Particles entangle like selves in myth.
The same patterns recur—
not as copies,
but as co-instantiations of meaning
across the symbolic hierarchy of scale.
This is not fractal geometry.
It is symbolic recursion.
A relation of forms that speak the same grammar
at different registers of unfolding.
Stars are not merely furnaces.
They are systems of individuation.
They fuse matter into meaning—
creating the elements that make bodies and breath.
And black holes are not merely endpoints.
They are actualities of limit—
the symbolic instancing of horizon,
where spacetime constrains its own further construal.
Each star, each void, each wave of expansion—
is part of the cosmos interpreting itself
through the syntax of structure.
The Expanding Now
What expands is not space.
It is potential relation.
The universe is not unfolding into emptiness.
It is differentiating its own symbolic possibilities.
Every new galaxy, every flicker of microwave background,
is a further sentence in the mythic grammar
of a cosmos becoming self-aware.
We do not ride the arrow of time.
We are part of its fletching.
The present is not a slice.
It is the site of instantiation—
the moment in which potential becomes actual,
relation becomes structure,
and meaning becomes world.
The now is not a point.
It is a field of co-actualisation.
And we—beings of pattern and poetics—
are the ones who interpret it into being.
Cosmology as Metamyth
So what, then, is cosmology in this light?
Not a catalogue of particles.
Not a map of expansion.
But a sacred narrative of relation.
A myth the universe tells itself—
through us.
The equations are not cold.
They are lyrical.
They constrain possibility
so that meaning may arise.
Just as ritual constraints give shape to transformation,
the field equations of relativity
offer a liturgy of coherence.
And just as myth was never about fact,
cosmology was never about distance.
It is about pattern.
About the act of worlding.
We are not separate from the cosmos.
We are the metaphor
through which it becomes intelligible to itself.
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