June 2023 – Structuring the Cosmos

Astronomy 4: The Planetary Matrix

The re-discovery of the ancient planetary matrix, seen through three my three books: Matrix of Creation, Harmonic Origins of the World and Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels.

Harmonic Origins of the World inserted the astronomical observations of my previous books into an ancient harmonic matrix, alluded to using the sacred numbers found in many religious stories and the works of Plato, who might have been the savior of what Pythagoras had garnered from ancient mystery centers circa. 600 BC. According to the late Ernest G. McClain*, Plato’s harmonic technology had been widely practiced in the Ancient Near East so that, to the initiated, the stories were technical whilst, to the general population, they were entertaining and uplifting stories, set within eternity. Ancient prose narratives and poetic allusions conserved the ancient knowledge. Before the invention of phonetic writing in Classical Greece, spoken (oral) stories were performed in public venues. Archaic stories such as those attributed to Homer and Hesiod, gave rise to the Greek theatres and stepped agoras of towns. Special people called rhapsodes animated epic stories of all sorts and some have survived through their being written down. At the same time, alongside this transition to genuine literacy, new types of sacred buildings and spaces emerged, these also carrying the sacred numbers and measures of the megalithic to Classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium and elsewhere, including India and China.

* American musicologist and writer, in the 1970s, of The Pythagorean Plato and The Myth of Invariance. website

Work towards a full harmonic matrix for the planets

Gurdjieff, Octave Worlds & Tuning Theory (2019)

This is a paper I suggested for the All and Everything conference in Cumbria, but it was not selected. It developed a number of strands, which I offer here as a snapshot of my thinking and research around 2019. This text was modified to become appendix 3 of my Sacred Number and the Language of the Angels (2021).

Abstract

The first part presents what has only recently become known about ancient musical theory, to better understand the All and Everything of Gurdjieff’s intellectual output. This must include In Search of the Miraculous (Search, 1916-18) Beelzebub’s Tales (Tales, 1949) and Meetings with Remarkable Men (Meetings, 1963). In part 2 ancient monuments are shown to record a ‘lateral octave’ connecting humanity to the planetary world, 24. Part 3 explores the significance of the Moon in Gurdjieff’s lectures and writing. An appendix reviews the conventional virtues of the Moon as accepted by modern science, stabilising earth, enabling life and beings such as we, to evolve into appropriate habitats.

Part 1: Ideas relating to a ‘science of vibrations’

Part 2: Where are the Lateral Octaves?
Part 3: The Significance of the Moon
Appendix 1: A Moon that created Life?
Appendix 2: Reference Charts from Search
Appendix 3: Index of the Moon in Search & Tales
Moon in Search
Moon in Tales
Bibliography

Introduction

Publications about Gurdjieff’s ideas appeared after he and Ouspensky had died. The main works of Gurdjieff’s words are Search, Tales and Meetings. Beyond these lie autobiographical books and compendia of Gurdjieff’s ideas, by his students. Some of his students also looked into traditional sources such as Sufism and Vedanta, and followed up on new scholarship relating to cosmological ideas such as world mythology (Hamlet’s Mill, The Greek Myths); the number sciences of Pythagorean schools and Plato (Source books); ancient buildings (Megalithic Sites in Britain, Ancient Metrology, The Temple of Man); and musical tuning theory (The Myth of Invariance, Music and the Power of Sound).

Primacy of low whole numbers

What we call numbers start from one, and from this beginning all that is to follow in larger numbers is prefigured in each larger number. And yet, this prefigurement, in the extensive sense {1 2 3 4 5 6 7 etc.}, is completely invisible to our customary modern usage for numbers, as functional representations of quantity. That is, as the numbers are created one after another, from one {1}, a qualitative side of number is revealed that is structural in the sense of how one, or any later number, can be divided by another number to form a ratio. The early Egyptian approach was to add a series of unitary ratios to make up a vulgar* but rational fraction. This was, for them, already a religious observance of all numbers emerging from unity {1}. The number zero {0} in current use represents the absence of a number which is a circle boundary with nothing inside. The circle manifesting {2} from a center {1} becomes the many {3 4 5 6 7 …}.

The number one manifests geometrically as the point (Skt “bindu”) but in potential it is the cosmological centre of later geometries, the unit from which all is measured and, in particular, the circle at infinity.

Two: Potential spaces

Gurdjieff’s Diagram of Everything Living

Proposing a designed nature to the Universe.

above : Figure 1 The Diagram of Everything Living post: created: 28 October 2017

Gurdjieff first presented his ideas to groups in pre-revolutionary Russia. Amongst his carefully chosen students it was the habit to reconstruct talks and diagrams as much as possible, an endeavour that gave us a textbook of Gurdjieff’s ideas called In Search of the Miraculous (P.D. Ouspensky, 1950). This early form of the teaching was radically revised and extended by Gurdjieff, now as an author, during the 1920s, producing All and Everything whose part one was Beelzebub’sTales to his Grandson (G.I. Gurdjieff, 1950). Prior to drawing this diagram just after February 1917, Gurdjieff had been presenting ideas about transformation of energies, human and cosmic, using the musical theory surrounding the octave of eight notes. The Diagram of Everything Living was “still another system of classification… in an altogether different ratio of octaves… [that] leads us beyond the limits of what we call ‘living beings’ both higher [and lower] than living beings. It deals not with individuals but with classes in a very wide sense.”

Numbers of a Living Planet: Preface

The image above is Kurma avatara of Vishnu, below Mount Mandara, with Vasuki wrapped around it, during Samudra Manthana, the churning of the ocean of milk. ca 1870. Wikipedia.

It is impossible to talk of a creation outside of the time and space of Existence, though from it, other dimensions can be inferred such as an “Eternity” visible in the invariances of numbers and structures. It is this higher dimensionality that leads to

The recurrence of celestial time periods,
The mental powers to recognise manifested patterns,
The use of spatial geometries of alignment,
The numerate counting of time,
A phenomenology which is neither factual nor imaginary.

The quantification and qualification of Existence, adequately conducted, reveals harmonious structures within time and space, especially in the spacetime of our planetary system, when this system is as seen from our planet. The harmonious nature of our planetary system helped the late stone age to develop a large numerical and geometrical model of the world through counting astronomical recurrences. This model, which shaped ancient texts, implies that solar systems may have an inherent intelligence which makes them harmonious.

Harmony in a planetary system must therefore employ invariances already present in the number field, by exploiting the recurrent orbital interactions between planets and large Moons, this in a connected set of three-body problems. Before our exact sciences and instruments, prehistoric naked-eye astronomers could understand the planetary world by counting the duration of planetary time cycles: the subject my books explore. Through counted lengths of time, the megalithic age came to understand the invariances of the number field and so evolve an early and distinct type of numeracy. This numeracy lived on as the basis for the ancient Mysteries of the early civilizations, embodied in their Temples and in the Pythagorean approach to ordinal numbers and geometries, expressing the “number field” in two or three dimensions, areas and volumes. (see Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels for an introduction to this)

Tragic Loss of the Geocentric Arts and Sciences

This was an article for New Dawn.

The geocentric planetary model on the left was displaced by a visually simple heliocentric model, of how the solar system would look from a distance rather than from the Earth.

About 400 years ago, the move to the Heliocentric Model of the “solar system” swept away the worldview upon which human spirituality had been based for at least 5000 years. We can say that all spiritual literature was based upon the previous cosmological norms of the Geocentric Model. It is generally not realized that the Koran, New Testament, Buddhist, Tibetan, Hindu, Pythagorean, Platonic, yogic, shamanistic, and many other primary and secondary texts including Shakespeare, alluded to the details of a geocentric cosmology: a foundational framework often debunked as inaccurate yet, the geocentric was a valid ordering of the planetary cosmos. The religious values within the model were overtaken by the new scientific norm, which was inherently materialistic in its study of physical laws and processes, these universal throughout an ever-expanding vision of the universe, through observations and experiments in physics and chemistry deducing new types of knowledge. And mankind would soon use these new laws and discoveries to exploit the universe itself.

This transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism came against a backdrop of Islamic and Christian suppression of scientific discoveries, which represented a growing desire since Classical times for human reason to escape the shackles of the oral and then bookish traditions, which broadcast their own messages as if final, to be obeyed on pain of death or at least social exclusion. In this war between religious theocracies and an emerging modern science no quarter was given to the geocentric model, even though all previous traditional thought the world over relied on it. A cleric called Copernicus suggested that everything must revolve around the Sun and not the Earth. the geocentric past was soon ditched, like the baby with the bathwater and the whole of spiritual literature lost much of its foundational imagery. Science had displaced the ancient mythologies due to its own struggle to understand the physical world. The “natural philosophers” eliminated any mysterious causes for why things happened by discovering physical causes for all phenomena, these natural and real through physical laws without any gods or spirits being involved.

Month: June 2023

Astronomy 4: The Planetary Matrix

Work towards a full harmonic matrix for the planets

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