musings and tales

Musings, … from the realm of pure ideas.

If you put a cross in a circle, you get four quadrants. The picture with this song is a Hopi version of this symbol.

Correspondences can be made with the four elements, the four directions, and so forth. I have written, for example, that the people of the circle (indigenous folks), are noted in the Hopi Prophecy also as the Younger Brother. These are the Earth Religions. The Cross is representative of the Elder Brother, in the same Prophecy.

With the circle, the wisdom of community can be represented; and, from the cross we have the wisdom of the individual.

The Cross has lines, and gives us one vertical, and the other horizontal. The vertical gesture can be seen as representative of the higher and lower tasks of the I, in pursuit of individual development. The horizontal gesture is in the social realm, and involves our relationships to the Other.

Switching gears …

Ursula K. LeGuin’s book, “The Dispossessed”, has as its central character a physicist, seeking to create a physics involving linear time, that would include a physics of the simultaneous, aka: the Now.

Using our wonderful symbol, imagine the horizontal line as involving before and after, or together with the vertical: before – now – after. It is easier to imagine the linear gesture, our biographies make that necessary. The vertical gesture is a kind of tower of Nows:

now

before – now – after

now

Before and After takes place in the physical ethereal (space and time). Now takes place in the astral spiritual (a time-less realm, which is also the gate of generation, out of the unformed and uncreated).

Lately in these Facebook venues, we have been receiving tales of karmic reincarnation, particularly of spirits that history remembers from the time of The Incarnation, and seem to be present now, in the time of the Second Becoming [Nicolaas Vergunst]. Great stories from that time are also remembered and some aspects appear in all religions, after a fashion. [Brad Knight]

Rudolf Steiner calls the original Christ Event: the Turning Point of Time. Today might be called an Echo of that Event, and musical adjectives can enrich the picture. All the nows and befores and afters are mirror images of that primeval singularity.

The before captured in Genesis is not the temporal locus of the Act of Creation. 2000 years ago was the Central Now. Imagine waves of meaning, going both into the before and after of linear time.

Each line in the symbol meets the circle at their endpoints. Each line opens in two directions, the center leaving a two petaled flower in four directions.

In projective geometry we find the idea that a line going to infinity on the left, will return from the infinity at the right. The other – vertical gesture – is the same ….the stack of Nows also being infinite, every line upon reaching the plane at infinity essentially eats its own tale.

Let us now complexify the symbol, by noticing that a two dimension circle can also represent a three-dimensional sphere. All manner of spheres are recognized in occultism. Planets are spheres. The tiny particles of today’s physics were first imagined as spheres, although the idea of string theory can seem “linear”, in a way.

The orbits of the planets are almost pure spheres, having an elliptic form, with two point centers. The movement of the whole planetary system is kin to a vortex, for there is circular and elliptical movement around a forward axis of motion.

A single drop of water, once separated from the stream, shapes itself into a purely spherical form. Falling lets us be free, in a way in the field of gravity – the drop moves within the fall, in the form of a sphere. Weightlessness in machines in orbit around the planet is due to objects “falling around the earth”.

Projective geometry is built out of three elements: point, line, and plane, and escapes the need for measure. A point is an idea, without a there there. A line is pure extension partially seen, while the infinite plane disappears into boundlessness. The Mother is the mystery of gravity, with its manifestation being point centered, while the Son is the mystery of levity, with its manifestation being “centered” in the periphery.

Between the pure point, and the boundless plane lives the spherical. This latter spherical aspect disappears into the point and the plane. A sphere with a zero radius is a point, and a sphere with an infinite radius is a plane.

Rudolf Steiner: “Think on it: how the point becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou understood how the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again, for then the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite”

Is there a primal “now”, a first One? If I drop a rock into still water, circle like waves spread out in all directions.

Steiner points to spheres of planetary evolution: Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. According to Tomberg, there is no movement in this Saturn warmth. It just is. Then there is division, from wholeness. An effect of the mystery of the One, is the Two (Father and Mother = one and many). They then birth the Son, who according to Tomberg sacrifices movement into stillness, giving an axis “point” enabling the warmth to move and thus complexify.

These ideas have to be presented in linear time form. Or, being becoming. In the Sun/earth, the Son creates space from time. In the Moon/earth, the Mother creates form and order from space. In the Earth/earth, the many individualize – form and order born in a sea of chaos.

The archetypal individual – the Son – appears in linear time and space. Given that the linkage One-Father-Mother-Son is itself a unity, the temple of Nows is timeless and spaceless, …

Consider the Sphere of the Earth today. Eight billion personalized spheres of life and thought.

From the point of view of the Temple of Nows, each individual is a sacred blossoming flower. The many of the earth, including that which is not “human”, if imagined from space, is a fertile garden of becoming. The next Now is always not yet; and, in spite of our knowledge, we don’t really ever know that What’s Next.

Each biography is, obviously and dangerously, a tabla rasa open to our personal influence, for which we are responsible.

Within our personal matter-based consciousness, to experience, we are the invisible point center, and the sense world the boundless periphery. Pure spiritual experience, on the other hand, sees the All from the totality of the Periphery. This state of being is the fabled Akashic Record.

According to Barfield, the I only appears after the Incarnation. In terms of this poem, the radiation of meaning into the before shows a humanity yet to be individualized. We were members of communities in the before. In the after we are becoming a community unto ourselves.

The sum of our Nows is the Holy Grail.

Dornach Tales

Around 1917, a gypsy camped near the original Goetheanum. He found work as a day laborer, and with his wife and two daughters he would sit around the campfire, in their last hour or so before bed. He would play some pipes, he’d made himself from bamboo, and the ladies would sing and practice their harmonies.

There was one moonlit night, when a tall figure stopped by. They talked together about Moon wisdom, and its dangers, for the Rites of the Mother tended to increasing wildness, not just of mind and soul, but of body as well. The man spoke of a friend, a herbalist, who also knew some Moon wisdom, mostly for healing, and not so much for magic and dance.

They talked of the future, and the gypsy brought out his hand-drawn deck of tarot cards, and reading them he said to the man that they would meet again on the cusp of the Third Millennium.

While they spoke a Wolf came near, and when invited came into the circle of warmth and light, where She was offered a share of the evening meal.

She declined, although the offering was well given, and the symbolism important.

The gypsy and the man found themselves drawn into Her eyes, and together dreamed the Song of Her Heart. The two wept then at what they were shown. Such Sorrow at their weaknesses, and Such Joy at Her Forgiveness.

The three women had not looked, but felt drawn to song, wordless tones that seemed to call forth a breeze, that played with the weavings of the fire.

The Wolf then rose, and turned Her back on the fire, leaving an image in the weavings, of a time when this place was cursed, so lost in words written at pages, that would themselves be lost in libraries, while meanwhile all Her Truths were in the living trees, and forests and clouds and storms and sky-wonders, … not in books.