Worldviews and wiring.
Consider the felt difference between these worldviews:
Materialist Cosmology: We live in a meaningless universe of competing matter, where survival depends on our ability to control and extract resources. Consciousness is an accident of chemistry, death is extinction, and ultimately nothing we do matters.
Sacred Cosmology: We exist within an intelligent, loving cosmos where we are fundamentally welcome. Our lives have inherent meaning and value, we are held by something larger than ourselves, and even death is a transition within a larger wholeness.
The relationship between these two dimensions of safety reveals something crucial: when our nervous system carries traumatic patterns, entertaining a sacred cosmology can feel threatening because it highlights the gap between our lived experience and the view of cosmic welcome.
Yet this same dynamic makes sacred cosmology a powerful healing tool. Within a materialist framework, our defensiveness makes perfect sense—of course we should be skeptical and guarded. But when we consciously adopt a sacred worldview, our defensiveness creates friction with the reality we’ve embraced, and this tension naturally draws us into intimate contact with whatever wounded material lives in that gap.
These worldviews generate entirely different nervous system responses. The materialist worldview creates existential anxiety—a bone-deep sense that existence itself is fundamentally unsafe. The sacred cosmology leads to a felt sense that we belong here, that reality can be trusted.
— Daniel Thorson
Full essay here:The Architecture of Safety
