Unfolding

Unfolding (beldunai, literally 'fold-beginning') is the concept in the cosmology of the Corps that aims to explain why things change and how change helps distinguish things in the world. It can also be glossed as 'unfurling' or 'flowering' or 'evolution'. Humans are part of, can observe, and even participate in the Unfolding. They are not capable of transforming its broader patterns, but can, at the scale of a lifespan, play their part and shape its individual channels and grooves. Different theologians and poets have understood the Unfolding as the cracking of a cosmic egg, the blooming of a flower, or the shimmering of a curtain of light (the aurora). The Unfolding is unpredictable - as life itself - but its patterns can be understood once they occur. The growth of the body (i.e., from fetus to child to adult) is the individual’s expression of the Unfolding. Bodily death is not the end of the Unfolding, but merely a point of disjunction or inflection in the course of any given pattern.