Focus | from the Editor

In 1980 I watched a dark-featured man with bright eyes stride past my Manhattan office in order to meet with his literary agent, my boss, in the bigger office down the hall. The man was astronomer Carl Sagan, and thanks to him the word “Cosmos” was at last on everyone’s lips, due to his TV series of that name seen by a half billion people around the world.

What is a cosmos? To Sagan, it was the universe and all it contains—“billions and billions of stars,” in his popular phrase—but cosmos can also refer to a level of organized being, as in the traditional consideration of humanity as a “microcosmos.” To speak of multiple and mysterious cosmoses is today more common, with the theory of the multiverse and the growing recognition that our cosmos may be fundamentally resistant to logic and measurement. As former National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins says here, you can “step out of the …limits that science insists upon, and there are other ways of knowing the truth.” An inspiring witness to these ways can be found in this issue in Paramahansa Yogananda’s epic poem “Samadhi.”

Sufi teacher and author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee returns to these pages with a powerful meditation on our relationship to time and season in the cosmos, and he is joined here by another esteemed Sufi, Kabir Helminski, who emphasizes attention as a path through our challenges. From this magazine’s editorial director, Tracy Cochran, there is an opening essay on our relationship to the cosmos, and from spirituality writer Andrew Harvey, a look at various intelligent beings—wolves, whales, octopi—with whom we share our world.

Our kaleidoscopic look at the cosmos reaches back to a gem from two centuries ago, Drops of Water, by pioneering woman science writer Agnes Catlow, who takes us on exciting foray into the microscopic, and forward to a speculation by bestselling science writer Brian Swimme  as to the ultimate aim and meaning of the universe.

May this issue of Parabola help all of us to understand our own lives in this sacred Cosmos.    

—Jeff Zaleski