I often think that one needs a really healthy dose of imagination or image realizing abilities to understand complex relationships. Perhaps, this is only in the case of those with eyesight that is colonically rich!?
My main point to make this morning is that 'modern man' is not modern at all. Ancient man had a non-linear cross that our linear cross derives from. We today have mostly branched off into what falls into my small bucket of 'linear musings'. It's a curious oddity that we have so much progressed in understanding romantic or Romanized linear relationships with so little understanding of non-linear relationships. We use symbolism as contained in our letters and words, which make up sounds and sentences, which then get added together to form paragraphs and paragraphs of hopefully reasonably well-expressed logic.
This is all very fine and good, but is it really modern. In doing all this, what we may miss is that very cute baby in the bath water, which we throw away. That is because modern is our way of expressing progress along a path that we mentally conjure up to express our satisfaction that we have a form of positive evolution going on. But are we really modern?
Guys, it is just possible that the boat has already been here, or been built, and has gone. We may be the left behinds. I just say this to get one's brain cells activated. It is a reasonably pleasant day outside, but still too cold to enjoy a walk in a meandering sort of way. That I like to do here,and now, in my world of blog.
Meanderings on Leaves
We have very little to go on by way of words coming from the ancient people who used to live where I am sitting right now. Yes! There were people here on this cosy hill overlooking a beautiful valley populated with wandering sheep and many other creatures it would be pointless to list. In case you were wondering what part of the world I am in, may I say that I am abiding in Somerset, England.
The early people that lived here knew plants much better than I. In particular, they understood much more about trees. By looking at trees and the relationships of trees to the world around them they understood much more than 'modern man'. I say this because, they used the leaves of trees as a way to convey complex ideas. They would save a variety of leaves in a basket and when they wanted to tell someone something important, they would select those leaves that conveyed the idea. They would amass a small handful of leaves and organize them in sequence and putting them between fore finger and thumb hand them over to the person with whom they wished to communicate.
The reaction would be as great as the written word. On occasion love making would ensue or a fight would break out with jaws damaged and feelings hurt. But, it remains that by using ordinary leaves that they could find locally in the woods they were able to record considerable 'paragraphs' of emotion and expression. We have some idea of what the leaves spoke, but much of what we have are guesses. Nevertheless, the people hereabouts used leaves to record and communicate, and they would have done so very easily and effectively.
That is not to say that they did not have spoken words. Yes! They probably, almost certainly, spoke English! "Rubbish," you say! "I don't believe you," you add, shaking your head. I smile and think to myself, "There goes another linear modern man, thinking without thinking."
The Forest that the Leaves Symbolized
Often its difficult to see the forest from the trees. If my memory serves me correctly, Arthur Koestler wrote that the image of a tree with its roots represented the fourth dimension. He coined the term 'holon' and a term for a configuration of 'holon' he referred to as a 'holonarchy'. What you see when you look at a tree is what life is all about. Life and society is organized, or organizes itself, as a holonarchy. This is true of all forms of structures including those we often do not think of as living, such as particle structures.
The economists Kenneth Boulding and Jeffery Stamps saw the economy and other social structures in this way and gave a name to their concept, calling it a 'holonomy'. They were thinking of a social structure, but the ancients when they thought of a holonomy were thinking of a mathematical structure, much like what is found in advanced differential mathematics. From the idea of the holonomy of structures comes the idea of the non-linear cross.
The Holonic Cross and the Non-linearity of Ancient People Who Lived Here
If you think that the people of ancient times were not modern, forget this notion very quickly. We are the ones that are not clued in. We are so not modern that we are backward in comparison to my ancient people, the one's that lived right where I am sitting right now. And, they were here almost 2,000 years ago. I write about their lives in my adventure and mystery story Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern.
The holonic cross was very familiar to many of the people who lived in England at the time of the Roman invasion in 43 AD. The problems of gathering information about the thought processes of people of this period are well known. These people have no voice and are the forgotten tragedy of ancient time. It is almost as if they did not exist. Their influence on the Roman and subsequent world is not understood nor estimated. One might say that they were marginalized which is precisely what the Romans wished to do with them. Understanding, expressing, and feeling for such margins and marginalized people, however, is the work of the artist, and what I see as my present enjoyment. Bringing them into our fold of comprehension makes them more real and gives us a way to empathize as to their plight. What we do for the least of them is what we can do for others.
I was initially drawn to the holonic version of the cross appearing on ancient objects because it is an interesting non-linear art form. More recently, I have tried to understand what it meant. The process of interpretation has led me to what I consider modest speculations with relatively high probability. These are not certainties, but probabilities given the physical evidence before me. When I donn my artist hat, I depart from the world of certainties and enter the world of modest speculation. This does not mean that what I am saying is fiction though I will call it fiction, because I am aware of the need for verification, fact is pretty close to fiction until it is verified. One accepts and enjoys such fiction because one lives in a world of uncertainties. If one needs certainties then go far away. There are none!
The Void
How did the ancients understand the void and the non-linearity of existence?
Cosmic scientists speculate that the universe that earth belongs to is expanding into the void of nothingness and nothing to resist pressure 'our world' coming at it at an accelerating rate. What is not so clear is how fast we are ourselves expanding. My speculation is that we are also expanding at an unbelievably fast rate. My idea is that our expansion enables us to experience motion, or ease of movement. This we relate to and about in a relative way and call time, or we may even call it spacetime when we realize that time is an abstraction of our imagination. There is something else, many things, but in my view it / they is / are not time.
The idea of time belongs to the physical world and cannot be truly measured depending as it does on relative speeds. Our reality is a mixture of physical and non-physical worlds interacting in a meaningful way. If you did not understand what I just wrote, do not worry, you don't really need to, unless you are exploring possibilities.
The notion that a God used time in creating the world that we inhabit is non sense. It is a conceptual abstraction used by teachers to convey an idea since teaching about a non-time world is so difficult. Would you not agree!?
What created our world did it in such a way that all the pasts, presents, and futures were created all at once. Can you imagine yourself as travelling within this world. You think that you are an effective part, but you do not really control anything. What will be will be! Ouch! Stop surrounding me with those awful thoughts. Give me a chance, I can explain!
First understand that non-linear thinking is probably very different from the thought processes that you are familiar with.
Purpose in the Void
All the purposes of a universe are the end result of a universe. What the universe ends up as is its end result. Your purpose in the universe is part of what the universe becomes, but you are only a little branch and circle in a very large tree. For the most part, the universe is so large that you feel that can have little impact on it. That is despite your ambitions, you feel that you are effectively ineffective as far as the purpose of the universe. You feel that you contribute nothing of substance to its purpose, but you may understand that you contribute purpose to its purpose. What does this mean?
It means that your impact on the universe is enormously disproportionate to your scale of effort, or so you think. In non-linear mathematics, this is referred to as the butterfly effect. You wag your tongue and the result is an end result very much greater than you can ever imagine in terms of scale. So it is with your existence within the universe. You are of much grander proportions than you can ever imagine. Even breathing for less than a full second has a major impact on the direction of matter within the universe.
The problem we have, however, is that impact on a physical level may be much less than the impact on other levels. This is because we belong to powerful worlds, 'universes', that are interlaced and interact with one another.
To extend the purpose of the world in a meaningful way, you need to develop in an abstract or non-linear way. This is a difficult concept to grasp since we are so used to thinking our effectiveness and purpose arises from what we actually do as compared to what we actually think. The reality is, however, that we have much greater impact by what we think than by what we do. The reason is the butterfly effect of thought within ourselves. We think that we can extend our influence by taking action, but we frequently forget that we need to harmonize our thought with our action if our action is to be effective.
In other words, it is not our actions that cause purpose, but the direction of our actions. For example, in history, had the Roman soldier not destroyed the culture that he did not understand because he thought better of doing so, the outcome would have had greater purpose than mere destruction. Think in the abstract before you act. See the purpose of action before you do something. If you do this, your actions will have greater purpose than destruction. The reason is that purpose in the grand scheme of the universe derives from extension rather than exclusion or destruction of things that embody a higher or more constructive 'non-linear' purpose.
The Circle or Curve Produced by Streams of Consciousness
Analogous to the water flowing in the streams of the beautiful local landscape, are the thoughts flowing in our minds. Like water flowing from springs downstream and collecting in pools and lakes, our thought processes are connected like strings and crosses. The ancient mind understood that the relationship between the brain and its workings were very much like the landscape and the flow of rivers through the landscape. This appears in their art.