Since the French revolution the measure of the world has been man himself. Before that time, stretching into the ancient past, the measure of the world was the relationship between man and the earth itself. These were qualitative relationships rather than quantitative. The energy lines, or lay lines, are a relationship of the investigator and the earth in which the primal relationship of direction is supplied by the situated human in relationship with the world as emergent. Thus the vesica piscus emerges as the framework for the measures of the world because it is oriented as the relationship of the rising sun and man the viewer.
The ambiguity of the world relationship becomes clearer when it is not “replaced” by an arbitrary (sacred space) measure but when it is “lived”. To take up with the envelope of our focus, the unknown, is different from taking up with our focus, the known. When we take up with the known we leave unexamined the unknown, but when we take up with the unknown we reexamine even the known.
We cannot take up with the unknown as yet another soon-to-be-known. We cannot reveal the unknown by using an apriori paradigm (a system of the known). We can only reveal the unknown experientially (and, it will be suggested, that is how we can reveal the known as well.) The cognitive is but the shadow of the experiential, as it tries to replace the relationship of the experience with itself as center of the world…sort of a bad faith that slips in dogma to replace an orientational relationship.
Relationships orient us.
“Irrationals” are the relationship between two numbers, between two “gatherings” (things). Without the “relationship between two” nothing exists (the arguments that “nothing exists” arises from an isolated and alienated mind…t’is nihilism)
Symbolic logic depends upon the gutting of the thing, the reduction of the emergent to the thing thought.
The relationship of the present is itself a “gathering” long before we intellectually try to save ourselves by thinking of it as “two” or more. (see above).
Past as Present… Discussion of memory as not a past separated from the present but in fact part of the present itself, indeed the forms and architecture of present IS the past as concluded by thought. These forms are not illusions but are in fact our collective inheritance. (How would we live without our inheritance?)
How does this inheritance “fit” the present? Do these forms successfully real-ize (to make real) the emergent, or do these forms suppress (press under) the emergent in favor of itself…form for form-sake?
So What????
1. To find ourselves in the world means that we are oriented by the relationship with the world we experience. Try as we may we never find ourselves in some abstract notion of the world, unless we lose our orientation. We are never, except in our thoughts, “on the map” at such and such of coordinant; we hold the map in our hands while we stand on the earth, and it is that “standing” which gives us direction and the other “qualities” so essential for life.
I was once “lost” in a forest with a friend who declared that we were safely on the map he was holding, and he pointed to the spot. But we remained “lost” for a few hours. We “found” ourselves by following the terrain and “gut feelings” until we reached a human community, whereupon we promptly “lost” ourselves again
The living relationship we have with the world before us is eternally a mixture of the known and the unknown. That relationship constantly informs, sustains, or destroys every idea or paradigm we may have about anything here. Everything “known” is such only by virtue of that changing relationship. By constantly turning toward that living relationship we are able to awaken to the reality that lies beneath and beyond our presumptions.
I “knew” more when I was young and full of my own will and plans. Now I depend more upon the will (and patience) of the moment .
The living relationship, rather than the thought relationship, is the mysterium toward which we turn when we are confident. We turn away from that mysterium (our living connection) and toward our previous demystifications when we are less confident and in doubt. By opening toward that pre-existing relationship, we exhibit a faith that that relationship will provide the direction and meaning we so need to live our lives.
Science based upon the faith we exhibit when we turn toward the world relationship is different from the science based upon doubts about that relationship, doubts which substitute paradigms (thoughts) and certainty for sense (considered illusional). Doubts about that apriori relationship have yielded certainties that reality is “nothing but” subjective or objective and that the relationship does not exist (world alienation).
Adam “knew” Eve but not because she fit some “known” physiological, sociological, or psychological study. And since we fantasize that the first man was not redeemed and had no “inner” life he could not have “known” her or anything else in any kind of in-sight.
If he truly knew her he would have remained mystified.
Originally to “know” meant “to see”(gno) in all its troubling ways.
By remaining open to that relationship, the stone-age peoples of the world, from Bali to Greece, even Briton and Central America, were able to map the orientation lines of the planet. They did not substitute a conceptual scheme, or “map”, for the experience of this orientation but nonetheless established their sacred sites where these orientation lines crossed. These orientation lines are not arbitrary, nor are the measures that pace them off, but follow precisely the “interest” supplied by the mysterium.
Seeking to “bring heaven and earth together” they listened and looked for the interest heaven and earth had for each other. They had to follow the earth’s “interest” and that of the heavens.
When I was young I became fascinated by the geometrical patterns I noticed in maps locating ancient temples in the Mayan world. Later I discovered the precision of the world’s measurements and the importance of the inch, foot, cubit, rod, furlong, standard mile, nautical mile, acre, hectare …indeed every one of the ancient measures including the ones from every culture.
At the root of the world’s ancient geography is a sacred geometry based upon the living relationship found in our “standing” in the world and not by the machinations of some elite group of people (though later, and especially in our own time, that would be the claim made by people troubled by their own doubts.) The lived relationship by which we orientate ourselves in the world is the template by which the sacred geometry is known as the vesica piscus, and it was this template which determined the sacred sites of the world..
Relationship is Quality. Quantity arises when the relationship is severed into two or more parts. By its own logic that “severance” eventually “equalizes” every part so that whatever quality (meaning) there was in the relationship is replaced by the “meaning” arbitrarily advanced by this dismemberment. This dis-membrance or severance is the way the mysterium becomes fundamentally meaningless in the modern world.
Quality is an aspect of the lived relationship. Meaning arises in-the-world. And not “out of our minds”.
Modern man tends to regard his own age as vastly superior to the times of the past. He believes that our knowledge systems are vastly superior to those of the past, especially the ancient past. And yet these studies show that ancient man, perhaps even in the stone age, engaged an extremely sophisticated ….
Paradigms, of their nature, are lived. They become part of the lived experience although their impact is increasingly that of alienation, the experience of severance.
Energy Lines
“…perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe is a unit of cognition that shamans live by. They see how energy flows, and they follow its flow. If its flow is obstructed, they move away to do something entirely different. Shamans see lines in the universe. Their art, or their job, is to choose the line that will take them, perception wise, to regions that have no name. You can say that shamans react immediately to the lines of the universe.”
Castenada, Infinity p124
All creatures “see” and follow energy flows. All energy flows take everyone to regions that have no name, which is why the adepts are said to be the laziest and most simple of life forms because they do not put up resistance to that which must be done. Rather than re-act, life and energy flows are one and the same….DWPatten
The universe at large is composed of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments. Those energy fields arrange themselves into currents of luminous fibers, streams that are constant, perennial forces of the universe, and these currents or streams of filaments that are related to the recapitulation are called the dark sea of awareness.
Castenada, Infinityp147
Dark because fundamentally unknowable…. DWP
At issue is the habit of speaking of consciousness as being separate from “the universe at large” or as being different from energy, i.e. emergent “energy fields”.
The ancient world was very interested in energy fields and it is not a stretch to grasp that their measurement system and placement of their important sites follow various energy flows.
Moderns will wonder what an energy field might be because we have lost our cognitive connection with the lived relationship even as we have remain subjected to their powerful influences. The modern idea has been that if we haven’t thought of it, it doesn’t exist.
“Cognito, ergo sum”
At issue is “how can we know of the unknowable unless it is fundamentally knowable.”
The antiquity of temples, like the antiquity of consonant values of which they are an expression, are legend and considered important even today. And yet the sense of the modern world is that in antiquity temples were placed rather arbitrarily, much like our own political process of value allocation. This is kind of a projection backward in time of our own rootlessness and sense of the arbitrary. But there is evidence that these choices were very carefully researched and that the energy lines became the world grid of most peoples, if not all, of the early world.