Metanoia Mon Amour E-Book

Nicolás Gadda Thompson

• Herausgeber: Editorial Autores de Argentina
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 494

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Today, more than ever, we need to regain a certain clarity, to re-integrate knowledge, to converge in ideas, to return to Oneness. Sacred geometry and introspective psychonautics are lost arts that we must recover. Regenerative development and systemic thinking are new approaches that we must incorporate. Thinking Reality as networks that connect nodes, and not as isolated elements in linear sequence, is the most concrete basic proposal that the reading of this book offers us. Acting generatively as a consequence will be one of the most demanding and relevant challenges of our present time. It is on this basis that the following proposal is developed: to recover lost knowledge, to incorporate it into our mental frameworks and to integrate it with the exercise of modern science and the advent of new technologies. It is time to recognize the symbolic and, at the same time, pragmatic capital that we inherited from our ancestors, and it is also time to celebrate the talent and vocation of those who today are leading disruptive development in all fields of knowledge. This proposal is not just an exercise in historical or social vindication, nor an ode to novelty for the sake of novelty, but rather promotes the key guidelines for the design of a roadmap that will allow us to identify and apply the right solutions to the multiple challenges facing our overwhelmed humanity today. This book is intended for freethinkers of all ages, of all colors and from all corners of the globe; it is a wake-up call that comes from deep within, but it is also a call to action that aims at the most universal.

Leseprobe

NICOLÁS GADDA THOMPSON

Metanoia Mon Amour

The Era of Integration

Gadda Thompson, Nicolás Metanoia Mon Amour : The Era of Integration / Nicolás Gadda Thompson. - 1a ed - Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires : Autores de Argentina, 2024.

Libro digital, EPUB

Archivo Digital: descarga y online

ISBN 978-987-87-5232-7

1. Ensayo. I. Título. CDD A864

EDITORIAL AUTORES DE [email protected]

Índice de contenido

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Eagle and the Condor

Chapter 2 Love your rhythm. Return to the Unity.

Chapter 3 The Minotaur´s Embrace

CHAPTER 4 Intelligence in Nature

CHAPTER 5 The Cosmic Serpent

CHAPTER 6 Understanding, Conscience and Being

CHAPTER 7 The Mentality of the Universe

CHAPTER 8 The Silicon Alchemists

CHAPTER 9 The Hour of the Dolphins

Epilogue

ApEndiX 1 (TO THE IntroducTIOn)

ApEndiX 2 (TO THE IntroducTIOn)

ApEndiX 3 (TO THE IntroducTIOn)

A “movie style” friendship

ApEndiX 4 (FROM cHapTER 6, part 1)

ApEndiX 5 (FROM CHAPTER 6, part 2)

ApEndiX 6 (FROM cHAPTER 7, part 1)

ApEndiX 7 (FROM cHAPTER 9, part 1)

ApEndiX 8 (FROM cHAPTER 9, part 5)

ApEndiX 9 (FROM cHAPTER 9, part 6)

BibliograPHY

Dedicated to my daughter, Ainhara Bahía, and to the rest of the “newcomers” who will experience in their own flesh all that -unexpected and inevitable- that today is weaving the last chapter of our History, and maybe, just maybe, the beginning of something new.

If you cut a blade of grass, You make the universe tremble. CHINESE PROVERB

Introduction

Those rare nomadic scholars

A brief prelude to these chapters devoted to exploring the great movements and trends of the human spirit and reason in our fast-paced modern age.

Science would be ruined if it were to put competition above all else, retreating entirely into narrowly defined specialties. Those rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual well-being of the established disciplines.

"Chaos: Making a New Science”, by James Gleick

They say you need to practice at least 10,000 hours if you want to consider yourself an expert in something, anything. For the last 30 years of my life I have spent several hours a day reading, listening, reflecting and associating. My natural inclination to achieve a holistic view of life and its phenomena, eventually gave me a holistic view of life and its phenomena. This is my clearest expertise to this day, after well over 10,000 hours of practice. It has been my gateway to the realms of meaning and understanding. Through these, in alliance with compassion, I found my purpose. And with it, the impetus to write this book.

Ladies and gentlemen, current friends, past lovers, future and unnecessary critics, faithful detractors, suspicious admirers, damsels of the hall, damsels of the bedchamber, damsels of reverie and the little literate early childhood, it is time to introduce you to my latest literary chimera.

Without further ado, I leave you with "Metanoia Mon Amour" (The Age of Integration), a book that is itself an exercise in integration, which seeks to encourage readers to dilute their binary thinking -and thus transcend the illusion of opposites- through the combination of knowledge and the convergence of opinions. It is both an ode to, and an example of, what the ancient Greeks called metanoia: a learning excursion into 'the beyond'; undoubtedly profound; potentially transformative.

The book is full of quotations (often from the same authors in different chapters) as well as free and well-founded associations between the different themes addressed, with constant allusions to the importance of combining under rigorous -and not so rigorous- criteria, various epistemologies, current paradigms and avant-gardes as novel as they are millenarian.

Each era must shape its own idea of the human being, and elaborate its own “paideia” accordingly... On the one hand, we are different from the ancient Greeks: our circumstances are very distant. But we are still human beings, and a common essence beats in them as well as in us, far beyond particular circumstances... Our age, lucid in some ways, is clearly confused in others. The excess of information produces as much blindness as the lack of it, and generates much more noise, much more interference, mess, collapse... The great conclusions are obtained by relating concepts and data. When there is so much data, there is no one who can link them together to make a balanced and reasonable reading of them all. It is chaos. Human beings have never had so much information, and yet they have never known less who they are.

"Music of the Spheres", by Jaime Buhigas

This book has a (single? double? triple?) purpose. As we have been anticipating, the first of them -the heart of the subtitle- has to do with the concept of Integration: a maturing instance with respect to the last "postmodernist" chapter of our hyper-connected global Society that we have been since the last decades of the last century. Integration as a concept, an attitude and an action that is the result of maturing our propensity to "merge" everything with everything.

Even today I wonder whether postmodernism gave rise to a post-postmodernism, or whether we actually exhausted our postmodernity in the experimental fusion of artistic, culinary and technological disciplines and practices (among many others). It matters little here to set nomenclature or even to propose any new ones. My point is that integration is what is coming, or what is already happening; clearly, what has to happen.

Integration! Not homogenization. Nothing could be further away here than to trumpet the mediocrity of the indistinguishable.

It so happens that we have moved too far away from each other, ideologically, politically, socially, epistemologically. We have fiddled for too long with specialization, competition, mistrust and fear as drivers of management, all of which lead to human suffering.

It is time to return to unity, to meet again, to listen to each other, to work as a team and to co-create, co-manage and co-laborate. It is time to integrate our passions, desires and wills in pursuit of a chapter of our collective History full of new opportunities as well as new challenges.

"Metanoia Mon Amour" is not a manifesto, a Decalogue of conduct or anything so pedantic or solemn, but we can consider it a declaration of principles, as it speaks of my stance towards Reality and how I believe we can face it. This book is written for freethinkers of all ages; it is intended to be a wake-up call that comes from deep within, and a call to action that aims at the universal.

He who presses a little, grasps a lot

From a very early age we are taught to analyze problems and to fragment the world. Apparently this makes complex tasks easier, but we unknowingly pay an enormous price. We no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we try to see the big picture, we try to reassemble the fragments, to number and organize all the pieces. But, as the physicist David Bohm says, “this task is futile: it is like assembling the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. After a while we give up trying to see the whole... We tend to focus on snapshots, on isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems are never solved.”

From "A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science", by Michael S. Schneider

In 2008 I wrote an article called "The Age of Participation" (it appears as "Appendix 1" at the end of the book), where I celebrate the interaction between the content producer and his or her audience -no longer passive and expectant- that came with the advent of digital tools (nodes of creation) and the web, the global "neural" network that connects us all and turns the world's population (their connected brains) into the most complex physical structure in the universe (literally) that we know of.

Of course, there is a personal journey that led me from that article to this book: from the producer-consumer relationship (now bidirectional) to the need to integrate opposites and complementaries. The shift in consciousness, individual and collective, will happen when we move from merging to integrating and from competing to collaborating. And here I introduce in more detail the term that gives the book its title and (second) purpose: METANOIA.

Metanoia is a Greek word (, metanoien) very little known, much less used; sometimes, even under the umbrella of the best intentions, poorly defined...

More than 30 years ago Peter Senge mentioned it in his legendary book "The Fifth Discipline", one of the first serious attempts to put into words what today is beginning to form part of the socio-cultural DNA, whether we know it or not: the need to migrate from linear to systemic thinking. According to Senge, metanoia can be translated as "spiritual transformation, mental shift, change of focus, transition from one perspective to a more complex, essential or transcendental one. To grasp the meaning of metanoia is to grasp the deeper meaning of learning".

In the course of my "revisionist" period of the book, prior to submitting it to the publishers, I met Tomás, who told me the following:

In the case of "metanoia", it was used by unlettered people -including Peter Senge- as far back as Ancient Greece to denote some process subsequent to the precise metanoia (which should be called "postmetanoia" or "metanoidia"); conveyed with a reformative aspect (which we could call "metanoisia") and even repentance by the Catholic church: "metanoidelia", to mention one option.1

Peter Senge's interpretation of "metanoia" has a bit of etymology and lots of free imagination, ascribing to it qualities that the word itself does not contain. The problem here, and a discussion I have had several times, is that the unlettered vulgar defend the use of a term as more important than its true essence (which would attempt to destroy the nature of the language in question). And by "unlettered vulgar" I mean all those who, from the first use of the word metanoia, transmitted it without being a connoisseur of letters; only of words, today called "letrados" (literated), but in reality they should be "palabrados" (wordated, or something like that).

The truth is that the word metanoia, in its pure meaning, refers to the process before that of its colloquial uses; it describes the instance and course, the excursion of the mind into that beyond the known... It could be "the beyond", or even “where there is as yet no creation”.

Tomás Augusto Seeber2

Tomás makes an important clarification: metanoia has to do with the journey, not so much with the result. The word is used -or thought of- in reference to the transcendence achieved, "the deepest sense of learning", as good old Peter assures us. However, the etymology of the word -in fact, the etymology of the letters that compose it- emphasizes the process, the journey, the very act of embarking "where there is no creation yet".

I like this clarification because it has even more to do with the premise of the book, and the message it proclaims: to seek integration, that is, a deeper learning, facing metanoia, that uncertain excursion into the unknown. We'll see if we get there. That, as the poets say, is another matter.

Beyond the clarifications that I am obliged to make here for the sake of intellectual honesty, I adhere to Senge's words regarding the nature of true learning:

True learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we re-create ourselves and enable ourselves to do something we could not do before. Through learning we expand our ability to create, to be part of the generative process of life. Within each of us there is an intense hunger for this kind of learning.

Peter Senge

This book is an incitement to metanoia and a call for integration. That is why, I insist, the themes are interrelated, quotes from great authors abound, systemic thinking is the background music. I reflected a lot on the dangers of wanting to "cover too much" and end up "squeezing too little". I doubted the power of quotations as an engine of reflection, exchange and inspiration. It is still not clear to me whether the result lives up to my two purposes, or whether I achieved nothing more than an encyclopedic, pedantic and scattered reading... It will be up to you, dear readers, to answer these questions.

I am content to have tried, and to celebrate the talent of the giants who have lent me their shoulders.

With a little help from my friends 3

People who are not as experienced in a discipline do not have the knowledge to properly assess how easy or difficult something in that field might be. That's why magicians applaud different tricks than you or I might, and why comedians laugh at different jokes than we do. Their view of mastery allows them to appreciate the nuances of how difficult it is to actually accomplish something.

Eric Barker's "Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong"

As I have already clarified, almost half of the content might be written by other authors. There are those who downplay the value of such prolific recurrence. I must say that this is a habit of mine that I have never been able to control. This whole book has been the result of an uncontrollable urge to bring to the "table" the voices and ideas of great thinkers, far more qualified than I am to express some of my own convictions, uncertainties and epiphanies.

The book ponders integration as a key activity in our era. We can imagine it as an enjoyable -and at the same time profound- conversation between old friends, rather than as a self-referential address from the haughty pretensions of a solitary author. I would like you to read this book as participants in a crowded after-dinner conversation. That, at least, is the intention with which I have conceived it.

Be that as it may, I have written a book that I would have liked to read...

As it could not be otherwise, I close this introduction with a quote; in it, Harari reflects on the importance of being able to waste time once in a while:

It is difficult to access the truth when you rule the world. You are too busy. Most political leaders and business tycoons spend their lives on the go. But to delve into any subject takes a lot of time, and in particular the privilege of wasting time. It is necessary to experiment with unproductive paths, to try dead ends, to leave room for doubt and boredom, and to allow small seeds of insight to grow slowly and flourish. If we can't afford to waste time, we will never hit upon the truth.

"21 lessons for the 21st century", by Yuval Noah Harari

1 The concept of metanoia as repentance originally arose in Gnosticism, a now "pagan" branch of the Catholic Church. For more detail on this and related concepts, see Appendix 2 at the end of the book.

2 Tomás defines himself as a self-taught phonologist, and claims as his "only endorsement" (and a quaint note) the fact that when he was five years old, his father found a notebook in which he drew the letters of the advertisements that appeared before and after his cartoons on television. That's how he learned to read and write, immediately teaching his four-year-old brother. This love of letters, beyond the words they form, is the inspiration for the design of the book's cover.

3 A small homage to “The Beatles” there.

Chapter 1

The Eagle and the Condor

PROLOGUE

By Daniel Roggero, keen observer of human behavior

In this first high-flying chapter, the author offers us the kindness of his clarity. Which has no other reason than his remarkable erudition of knowing a lot, and of the intelligence of explaining well. Signifying imagination that is no less real than the reality signified.

The common thread of this chapter is the possible balance, which apparently -only apparently- is broken by separation: thus he will speak of the eagle of the north that pretends to meet the condor of the south. A metaphor for a Humanity that is also "broken" between the modern and the ancestral, and whose best symbols would be science and the spirit, or reason and intuition.

A challenging and recommendable text for a reading that translates the invitation, more than the need, to know that the moment is coming, the destiny of a systemic and at the same time sustainable Humanity.

It is worth the effort and dedication that will turn into intellectual enjoyment, which is something in itself. The style seem careless, but every word has been chosen, as if carved out of the blissful experience and inspired by the good of others.

What else to say about the author? A restless man who likes to appease any interlocutor who can understand him. When you meet him, you get the feeling that it is always a reunion, as if you have always known him. Nothing more universal than someone who knows himself.

A joy for every reader who will be pleased, and very grateful, for each of the inspiring words that the author shares with us. Creating community from a book that demands and provokes, that makes you think, feel and believe; it is much more than a book: it is a proposal and a challenge.

The Eagle and the Condor

The importance of integrating poetry with telescopes

We are getting to a place where there is a growing agreement that poetry gives us as much information about our relationship to the universe as telescopes do, and that those two strains can live together and complement each other harmoniously. Those two things can happen, and that is not really different from my culture, which affirms that on the one hand there are dreams and visions and on the other hand there is a responsibility to maintain a clear version of reality. Those two streams of thoughts and reactions have to live cooperatively together. The idea that the spiritual and the secular can live side by side is extremely important at this time.

John Mohawk Iroquai, quote published in "Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future", by Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson

Of prophecies and re-encounters

How to begin this chapter of poetic as well as disruptive intentions..?

I could begin by relating the prophecy of the Queros, the last Inca people still alive in our era, who decided to come down from their mountains in 2012 (curiously, an emblematic date in the Mayan calendar) because the snow on the local mountain peak (I can't remember its name... I have to google it) began to melt, and that was the signal marked by the ancestors to reencounter the rest of the world and offer their ancient wisdom.

The Queros distinguish between the past (or matter), what is already done and can be "touched"; the future (or energy), the potential of things; and the present (or vibration), the "vibe" we give to the here and now. They recommend living in the present, which is the integration of what was and can be in the vibration of the moment (you can see why I think it is a good choice to start with the Queros... simply beautiful).

I could also start by listing other historical ways of conceiving and seeking integration in life. Satori in Zen philosophy. The Tao of Lao-Tse. The Ikigai, which is a Japanese term re-signified by Westerners. The still to become trendy Metamodernism, a concept coined by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh that integrates modernism and post-modernism in a transcendent view of life that has been described as "sincere irony". The concept of the "triptych" from an architectural perspective: in most of the world's cultures throughout history, there are examples of the structure of the 3 doors or windows, the middle one being the largest and most imposing; it is about opposites (doors/windows flanking the central one) merging into a balanced Whole (the central door/window), integrating the feminine and masculine, day and night, love and hate, among many other dualities in eternal relationship.

I could also start (I think we have already started at this point) by mentioning the circuit that has been created of "sensitive" Westerners (21st century hippies, aimless, curious, orphans of identity) from Ecuador and Colombia to Argentina and Chile, who travel the continent through the Inca roads and along the coast of Brazil; a circuit that unfailingly connected these young seekers -in search of an alternative to the consumerist maelstrom- with the Amazonian shamanic tribes, their medicinal plants and their Andean worldview.

As far as I know, no one found a plant that had a medicinal use that the indigenous people who lived there (and lived with that plant) did not know. Anywhere. Nobody found one. When they did find something, they usually had to ask the locals: “What is this for?” The locals, if they felt like it, would say: “Well, you know, that will cure poison ivy or whatever, it's a medicine”. What did that mean in terms of their process of deduction, of discovering that some rare plant was good for a particular use in medicine?

The only thing we can be sure of is that they spent a long time experimenting with it. You would guess that some of them spent thousands of years experimenting with it. If you have enough evidence, every now and then you will have a success, right? If you're good enough to memorize success, you have to make a lot of choices. In medicine, the choices are daunting. What plant do you use? What part of a plant do you use? When is the plant harvested? How do you use it? Do you swallow it? Do you rub it in? What do you do with it? Maybe you just dance around it, who knows?

With any given disease, there would probably be thousands of plants, tens of thousands of plant parts and numerous ways of dealing with them, from a poultice to an elixir to the consumption of that plant. So there were a lot of decisions to be made. Somehow they narrowed them down and by the time most of us heard about them, they said, this is how you use this plant for this purpose, which I say is a version of Indigenous Knowledge. They did all that experimental work for us, and we inherited the end result of that experimentation, that native science. And that is Indigenous Knowledge.

John Mohawk in "Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future", by Melissa K. Nelson

Native science… I could end with the idea (which connects with the Queros) that today "taitas and mamachas" travel the world delivering -and integrating- Yagé (Ayahuasca), Buffo (5-DMT), Wachuma (San Pedro), Cucumelo (psilocybin) and other spirit medicines (ego-dissolvers) to a growing population of globalized, aimless, curious, identity-orphaned city-dwellers.

Sci-fi stories and legendary “Oedipus’s”

We can say, without fear of being charlatans, that the field of science fiction is itself a covert prophecy-making machine. When an artist imagines possible worlds "just around the corner", and expresses them in novels, series or films, his most passionate viewers will look for ways to reproduce in reality the suggested technology, the proposed systems and the processes presented in such fiction, convinced that "it's all about that". When they succeed, wham! Fiction becomes reality. That possibility of an imagined future becomes the norm, the path, the ultimate link in the historical chain. In short: they become a fulfilled prophecy.

Something similar happens with the declared and legendary prophecies that we still protect from oblivion. They are handled in the same way. The fact that the account of what may happen is announced as something that will happen (i.e. the blatant declaration that it is a prophecy) only gives it greater symbolic weight in the impressionable minds of us superstitious hominids. But the "mental-real" journey is the same. Someone sets out a possible future and the world takes it upon itself to recreate it. If you don't believe me, let's ask Oedipus.

It's time to fly together

But make no mistake. Tradition does not slice life into pieces and the connoisseur is rarely a specialist. As a rule he is a generalist. For example, the same elder will be learned not only in plant science (the good or bad properties of each plant) but in earth sciences (the agricultural or medicinal properties of different types of soil), and the sciences of water, astronomy, cosmogony, psychology, and so on. It is a science of life in which knowledge can always be put to practical use. Keeper of the secrets of cosmic genesis and the sciences of life, the traditionalist, generally endowed with a prodigious memory, is often also the archivist of past events.

Quote from Amadou Hampate Ba (historian) in "The Black God", by Dr. Supreme Understanding

The prophecy of the "Eagle and the Condor" still survives in the imagination of some Amerindian tribes. What once referred to the northern (eagle) and southern (condor) peoples of the American continent, is now transcribed to "the West" and "native peoples" all over the world. The modern (the eagle) and the ancestral (the condor). Science and spirit. Reason and intuition... You get my drift.

This prophecy dictates that the time will come when both birds, both worlds, both ways of approaching life, will fly close to each other in a telluric dance until they intertwine and thus form a new magical, balanced, integral creature. The union on the conscious and real plane of opposites. The cosmic balance of a systemic, holistic Humanity, based on Sustainability.

The moment has arrived. Crisis becomes opportunity. Look ahead. There is no turning back.

Chapter 2

Love your rhythm. Return to the Unity.

PrOLOGUE

By Valentin Thompson, physician, philosopher and boxer

The whole universe has size, shape and balance according to the law of gravity. On Earth it is the same, so that everything is measurable and has a number. The human body, if we imagine it from the most elementary micro particles to the macro, is comparatively equal to the universe, and we can measure it in every detail. Now, if we move to the human mind, things are more difficult.

The balance of thought and the laws that govern coexistence are the product of trial and error over time (Chronos) to arrive at such a balance. This universal harmony also has anarchic phenomena; for example, meteorites whose shapes do not follow the patterns of the universe, and with their erratic trajectories collide, triggering catastrophic phenomena. The same thing happens in the human body, and in nature, but with Chronos everything ends up balancing out.

The social order also breaks down due to the tensions caused by limitations and changes; that is why it is often necessary to break that balance in order to release tensions, very well symbolized (and applied) by the Greeks with the Dionysian festivals. In them, the established order was broken for a time, at the end of which Apollo came with his music and re-established it, bearing in mind that harmony (the structural basis of music) is pure mathematics measured in cycles per second.

All this is explained in this chapter from the point of view of numbers and forms, looking at it through philosophy, science and esoteric beliefs.

Love your rhythm

Part 1

Before saying "let there be light", God said "first of all you must draw the line somewhere, then you go with everything else".

Alan Watts

Love your rhythm and pace your actions under your law, as well as your verses; you are a universe of universes and your soul a fountain of song. The celestial unity you presuppose will make diverse worlds sprout in you, and as your scattered numbers resound, Pythagorize in your constellations.

Ruben Darío

It is the turn of Divine Geometry, which, as a paradigm of transversal knowledge and integrator of arts and sciences, participates equally of poetry and prose, of physics and metaphysics, of logic and analogy, of reason, intuition and illumination.

Jaime Buhigas4

The qualities of the Soul

In ancient times, gymnosophists lived on earth. Saint Geronimo tells of Alexander's travels through India and about the Gymnosophists ("naked" sophists, ascetics, anchorites) who in Pharaonic times arrived in Egypt, on the banks of the Nile, and were the first geometricians in the region.

Gymnosophists? Geometers? Of course: they measured the earth. They worked on the bare ground with the "arithms" (numbers) to parcel out the surfaces, to venture into the universal constants and to discover the qualities of the Soul.

Over the centuries, their Egyptian descendants used geometry to return the land areas to their rightful owners5. Covered by the black silt of the floods, which covered all the land in times of low tide, the earth needed the exercise of the geometrician to return that metaphor of the Primeval Kaos -the uniform soil- to the Kosmos, to Order, to the neatly divided soil.

In this way, the Egyptian geometers recreated the first act of Creation. From Kaos to Kosmos. This knowledge then spread to Ancient Greece through the teachings of Pythagoras, who supposedly visited Egypt and studied with the local sages. It is now known that more than a person, Pythagoras was an entire school of thought; a group of nomadic scholars who, together, formed the stream that later nurtured today's renowned Pythagoreans, such as Epicarmus of Megara, Alcmeon of Crotona, Hippasus of Metapontum, Philolaus of Crotona and Archites of Tarentum. The "Agora of Pytha", Pytha being a Vedic god (Hindu) Father of the Heavens. From Greece knowledge passes to Rome, and from Rome to us.

One of the primary teachings of this school of thought was and will remain numbers. Along with "weight and measure", according to Plato (Pythagorean to the core) numbers thus take on a transcendent, sacred, universal connotation; put in more contemporary words, a "poetic" connotation, namely: the Pythagorean "Idea numbers". The metaphorical dimension of the arithms. Numbers as symbols (qualitative) and no longer merely as signs (quantitative).

The poetry of numbers

This book is the first book, painted in the past, but its face is hidden today from the viewer, from the thinker. Great was the exposition, the story of when all the angles of the sky, of the earth, the quadrangulation, their measure, the measure of the lines, in the sky, on the earth, in the four corners, of the four corners, as it had been said by the Builders...

Extracted from the "Popol Vuh"6.

The first thing was Kaos. Not to be confused with Chaos, which we understand as disorder. The Greek Kaos is not disorder. The Greek Kaos is the dot. The Nothingness that is everything. The realm of infinite possibilities. An Order that is indistinguishable because it has no parts. Because it has no limits. And it is not only unlimited in the large; there are no definite limits of any order, either large or small.

Similarly, our word "cosmos" generally refers to "outer space". But the word derives from the Greek kosmos (meaning "embroidered"), which implied not a universe as a huge room full of disconnected, "substantive things", but the order and harmony of the patterns and "fabrics" with which the universe is embroidered and moves. Kosmos meant the honorable and "right" behavior of the whole, the harmonious orchestration of the patterns and processes of the world. In this original sense, our word "cosmetics" refers not to the nouns involved, lipstick and rouge, but to the process of harmonizing the elements of the face.

From "A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science", by Michael S. Schneider

And suddenly, 1 appears. The monad.

The 1 is the divine number of the Primordial Unity. The Order, that is, the Kosmos. The All. The manifestation of Kaos. From the unlimited to the limited fragments. The One is represented in Sacred Geometry (the ancients called it “Natural”) as a circle. But beware! If one wants, one can transpose the circle by the dot. The circle as the sum of all possibilities, and the dot as the first manifestation. Remember that the Kosmos is the manifestation of the Kaos. It’s unfolding.

And then, who knows how, the first and greatest revolution in the history of the Kosmos occurs. Duality appears.

It is no accident that tricksters like the coyote and the raven were often the original creators of a tribe because they are so cunning and combine the worst and the best in human character. The Babylonians also had a God who combined those two things, but unfortunately he was ignored by the Jews, the Israelites who were in Babylon. They chose to separate that God who had two faces, into a black God and a white God, a good God and an evil God, and to this day; just look at the political situation today. We have the same kind of dichotomy that the world is facing because of religious ideology.

Dennis Martinez in "Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future", by Melissa K. Nelson

The 2 is the symbol of opposites, of choice, of separation, of conflict, of duality, of the Other. The Bible says: "The first thing was the word". That is, the verb, the “Logos”. In reality, the original term (in classical Greek) accepts two translations: verb (word) and radius (relation). That is to say that the first thing was the relation. The relation! That is why we shouldn´t confuse Reason with "thought" (as we understand it now), for it has even more association with the concept of "relation" (that which is "mediating"), far above mere thought, or word.

We were saying, then, that there appears a relation between the One -the primordial Unity- and the small, quantifiable one (which is not the same as the primordial 1) with the 2. You see, moreover, the relationship between One and one. Hermes Trimegistus7 is credited with having said: "As above, so below; for the greater glory of the Great Unity". Tri-megistus (thrice great). Today we know that the good Hermes, like Pythagoras, are ideas, schools of thought, and not individuals. And with this corollary, we come to the next sacred number.

The 3 appears. The triad.

As a resounding Pythagorean, Lao-Tse, that legendary philosophical personality of ancient China, writes in his Tao Te Ching: "The Tao produced the One. The One produced the Two. The Three produced all things.”

The 3 is the triad; the third element generates a relationship and thus a balance between the previous two. It is the solution to the conflict, the Cupid of lovers, the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son, the cunning little pig in the legendary children's story, Cinderella with her two ugly stepsisters; that element that recovers the balance lost with the advent of duality.

Stravinsky used to say that "you not only have to listen to music, you also have to see it". Music is geometry in time, just as geometry is music in space. Any exercise in geometry is fragmentation of unity by virtue of number. This could well be a definition of rhythm.

"Music of the spheres", by Jaime Buhigas

The 3 recovers Unity, but a Unity different from that of the One. It has made a journey. And this journey, which leads to a new equilibrium, has a rhythm. The word "rhythm" also comes from "arithmos". Not that it was numbers or rhythms. For geometricians both were the same thing. For a musician it should be the same.

Rhythm is the course, the mediation, the kind of perception of the passage of time. Rhythm marks our relationship with time itself, and subjectivises it, endowing it with meaning, narrative, and expression. The homogeneous rhythm corresponds to the primordial pulsation.... This pulsation fragments the timeline into equal intervals, which can be subdivided into other homogeneous intervals. It is a first partition of the infinite, which makes time, and therefore infinity itself, habitable".

From "The symphony of the Universe: In search of the numbers that hold the keys to the canon of beauty and harmony in the Cosmos", by Jaime Buhigas and Isabel Vázquez Salinas

The music of the spheres

The masters of Cretona and other Pythagorean cities were, among many other things, healers. And how did they heal? They exposed the sick to a numerical Order (Kosmos) so that, by mimesis (a term later immortalized by Plato), they would return to equilibrium. This numerical order was none other than music. Music, therefore, is geometry in time, capable of suggesting emotions. And what is the ultimate goal of music? Silence, "the music of the spheres". You can see how this subject unfolds into a fractal of refreshing revelations! Silence is the combination of all the harmonies produced by the celestial bodies of the universe. As they are always there, "Silence" is the name we have given it.

4 This chapter is dedicated to Jaime Buhigas, geometry teacher, actor, pilgrim, masterful communicator.

5 The origin of true writing is associated with the origin of "practical" geometry, in its relation to meeting a vital need for the development of civilizations. Such a tool began around 4,000 BC with pictographic images, particularly name seals and other markers of ownership, because, at that time, we had eroded our egalitarian systems of collective ownership to the point where we needed to mark what belonged to whom.

6Popol Vuh is the name of a bilingual compilation of mythical, legendary and historical narratives of the Quiché people, the most populous indigenous people of Guatemala. This book, of great historical and spiritual value, has been called the Sacred Book of the Mayans.

7 Thoth (with the face of Ivis) in Egyptian mythology, is Hermes Trismegistus (in Greek mythology) and Mercury in Roman mythology. The three immeasurable numbers that Thoth teaches men are the root of 2, the root of 3 and the root of 5. The root of 5, according to Thoth (the Greek name after all, for in Egyptian it was Diejuti), was the regenerating principle of the Universe. The root of 5 is related to the golden ratio (phi, the unrevealed number; the one that man discovers on his own), which symbolizes life. The fourth sacred number is the 1, the Unity, from which the other 3 arise. These 4 numbers are the ones that Thoth gives to men. All temples in history have these three roots as their main measures. Because every temple is a metaphor for the universe, and for the human body, which bears the same proportions as the Cosmos.

Return to the Unity

Part 2

Tao gives birth to One; One gives birth to Two; Two gives birth to Three; Three gives birth to every living thing. All things are held in Yin, and bear Yang. And are held together in the Chi of abundant energy.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 42

God is a circle

Says Plato in his glorious Timeous:

Wherefore, the god, when he began to build the body of this world did so from fire and earth. But it is not possible to unite well two isolated elements without a third, since a link in the middle is necessary to unite them. The most beautiful link (relationship) is that which can bring itself and the elements linked by it to the highest possible degree of unity. Proportion (also understood as analogy) is that which by nature achieves this in the most perfect way.

And so from 3 we go straight to 4! The basis. Timeous continues:

The god placed water and air in the middle of fire and earth and put them, as far as possible, in the same mutual proportional relation -the relation that fire had to air, air had to water, and that which air had to water, water had to earth- then bound and composed the visible and tangible universe.

Four is the number of the trinity materialized in the body. It is earth, it is base, the conservative principle: the square, the earth, which is related to Vishnu in Hinduism. Mecca (the cube) is a sacred chant to the square on a three-dimensional canvas. So is "the Holy of Holies", the cubic room in Solomon's temple where the Ark of the Covenant was kept.

If we imagine a 4, we can easily imagine a cross. This shape gives us a center. The center appears earlier in the circumference of the equilateral triangle, but this center is even more stable; it reveals the equality of the four parts. The X and Y coordinates appear. The cardinal points. The compass rose. The four horsemen of the apocalypse. The four Beatles. The Fantastic Four. You get the point.

And speaking of centers, I leave you with this wonderful quote coined by the mythological Hermes Trimegistus: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere".

From the Gymnosophists to the Greeks, passing through Egypt and coming from India, God was the Unity, the Order, the Kosmos, the Circle. For the ancients, to say Kosmos was to say God. And notice: the circle is an arrangement of infinite points equidistant from a point that is in turn infinitely elusive, mysterious, and infinitely small in the visual image. If we make the circle smaller, it ends up being a dot. We have already said it above: the ordered parts (Kosmos) are the manifestation of the Kaos. And then the Kosmos, the One, is also the manifested Kaos. We are all the reflection, the expression, the possibility of that Kaos, and of that Kosmos...

For the members of the Pythagorean Brotherhood and the wise Egyptian geometricians, to the credit of the gymnosophists, the Gods were the numbers. It's enough to smash your head against a wall! And then to experience The Revelation; the knowledge "given to you".

Sacred mathematics

Mathematics is woven into the very fabric of life. This is why indigenous cultures that lack the words for numbers still possess a deep numerical sense. There is mathematics programmed into our brains, and it comes from the same conscious pattern that structures the universe mathematically. This is why the folding proteins in our genes (the hardware of DNA software) form platonic solids. In fact, geometry is so deeply woven into the physical universe that molecules are combined according to their geometric shapes (like puzzle pieces).

"The Science of Self”, by Dr. Supreme Understanding

Form determines function. I learned this molecular concept the hard way during my years as a student of Biological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. And growth, personal development, self-knowledge, can only happen if one "walks the walk" and exposes oneself to experience beyond books, theory and the comfort of home.

Symbolic mathematics provides a map of our own inner psychological and spiritual structure. But studying the numerical properties and intellectually knowing the road map, the symbolism, is not the same as actually taking the journey. We take that journey by finding within ourselves the universal principles that these properties represent and applying the knowledge to our own growth. We pay attention to paying attention, in full awareness (without imagery), directing sustained attention to what the symbols refer to within us.

When the symbolic or philosophical mathematical lessons seen in nature -which were applied in religious art and architectural designs- are applied functionally (not just intellectually) to facilitate growth and transformation of consciousness, then the mathematics can rightly be called "sacred". For me, the terms "sacred arithmetic" and "sacred geometry" only have meaning when they are based on the experience of self-consciousness.

Religious art is sacred not only because of its subject matter, but also because it was designed using the subtle symbolic language of number, shape and proportion to teach self-understanding and functional self-development. The arts, crafts and architecture of ancient Egypt perhaps provide the best accessible examples of design that used the symbolism of number, geometry and nature to teach an accelerated form of self-development to trained initiates who knew how to translate the symbolism into meditative exercises.

Therefore, true sacred geometry cannot be taught through books, but must remain part of the ancient oral tradition handed down from teacher to pupil, from mouth to ear. Because over the centuries this knowledge was passed down in secret so as not to conflict with the prevailing (intolerant) religious authorities, or be disposed of to those considered profane, there is still an aura of mysticism about it. But the patterns of nature and those of our inner life are familiar to all and always available to us.

From "A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science", by Michael S. Schneider

The Pan Gu myth

An "accessible by design" example may be the famous Chinese myth of Pan Gu, specifically the story of the "world egg" from which the primeval god was born. This story dates back to at least the Shang dynasty. In this tradition, Pan Gu emerged from a primordial egg in which heaven and earth lay dormant. He then separated the two, a process that took eighteen thousand years. Somewhere between heaven and earth, Pan Gu transformed, going through "nine changes a day", acting "as a god in Heaven and as a sage on Earth", for another eighteen thousand years, until finally, the world was prepared for the coming of the Three Emperors. These were the Emperor of Heaven, the Emperor of Earth and the Emperor of Men, a triumvirate corresponding to that of "The Three Augustans".

Pan Gu, in this process, became both man and mathematics. Thus, the myth continues: "So these numbers arose and evolved. The number begins with one, settles at three, completes at five, thrives at seven and ends at nine". This numerical symbolism, where the procession from one to nine is used to describe the development of the universe, is found everywhere from the Tao Te Ching to the Kabbalah. It is, in fact, a useful (and accurate) way of explaining a very complicated science.

Integration as a return to Oneness

The harmony of the world is manifested in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of "mathematical beauty".

Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948, Scottish zoologist)

Now, you may ask: What has all this got to do with integration? Let's get down to it.

Integration is a beautiful, noble and courageous way of returning to Oneness. To recognize that we are not only nothing without the other, but that we are the Other. Just as geometry "is the science of integration", as Jaime says in his lectures, we knew how to be, and can be again, one of its most marvelous manifestations.

In man, body and spirit are integrated. The 4, the square, the concrete, the matter, and the 1, the circle, the primordial unity, the Soul, cohabit in man through the logos, that is to say, through the relationship between both figures that we can find in human morphology. That logos, that relationship, is the golden ratio, which appears in all of Nature. It´s simply fascinating, isn´t it!

I will try to explain the golden ratio in a few simple words: when two elements coexist, they have a relationship. When a third element appears that maintains that relationship, an analogy is produced, that is to say, a proportion. The Golden Ratio is the simplest analogy in the Universe. And therefore, the most perfect, ordered, "beautiful", the one that comes closest to Unity.

This subject could be the subject of whole books (in fact, such books already exist), but basically the human body is full of golden proportions and, as we said above, in man "body and soul" are integrated. With only two simple postures -immortalized by Vitruvius´s pen and Leonardo's charcoal- they express matter and soul, which are integrated, making the human body (in his canon) the "golden measure" of Nature. The center of matter, the genitals; the center of the soul, the navel, the "Omphalos" of Zeus.

The greatest Mystery is the Other

You will know as much as a mortal is allowed to know. That nature is always similar to itself, and always from all points of view.

Pythagoras

To finish understanding all this marvelous and revealing muddle we have to return to the present and reflect on our most resounding reality. Some would say disruptive or innovative muddle but, you see, these are timeless concepts and truths, constantly discovered and rediscovered; celebrated by the men and women of deepest antiquity.

The harmonious principles of nature are exhibited through their mathematical relationships. As we learn to read its archetypal language, we discover that the theme of the book of nature is a story, a mythical quest about the process of transformation. This mathematical myth of the creative process, this "mythomatics", is neither ancestral nor new age, but timeless, accessible in all ages because it encodes eternal constants available to all. Although the external form of myth is adapted to different cultures, it can be rediscovered in any age by examining simple numbers, basic shapes and ever-present natural phenomena.

Therefore, people of every historical period can understand the principles of nature's creation process by imaginatively examining the corresponding archetypal relationships inherent in mathematics, embodied in mythology and represented in art and culture.

From "A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science", by Michael S. Schneider

It happens that we live in a reality that is too fragmented, compartmentalized, specialized, where the Return is no longer perceived as Eternal; where the line, the 2, the duality, the opposites, the conflict with the Other reigns among men. And women.

Science, art, religion, philosophy, medicine, the liturgy involved in sacred moments; all were part of the same thing. Sacred geometry (which, again, the ancients called “Natural”) is the "science that relates all sciences". It got a bit more complicated later on, with the exercise of specialization, the fragmentation of knowledge. And now we live in duality, in this against that, in one against the other. That's why art, like science, is the search for a return to Unity. Not to God, but to the encounter with the Other.

As Antonio Machado said: "The eye you see is not an eye because you see it. It is an eye because it sees you".

The Other will always be a mystery because the Other is not us. And at the same time, if I look at the Other, if I really see him or her, I can only recognize that we are One. The greatest mystery is the Other and it is good that it remains so. The grace of trying to find an answer to mysteries does not lie in the answer itself, in the destination, the end, death... But in the very fact of searching for that answer, in the journey, the process, the surprise, the uncertain, the astonishing, the path along which we embark towards the unknown, the METANOIA...

And that which we do not know par excellence is the Other. This refers to the number 3, which returns to Unity after having travelled this path. That is why art, like science, religion, philosophy, all are paths that start from the same, and that one can follow in the search for the return to Unity. Not to God, I insist, but to the encounter with the Other.

The path to find the answer in the Other, is the path to find the answer within ourselves, in our Rhythm, in our core, in the realization that we ARE the Other. That we are One.

So love your rhythm, and you will return to Oneness.

Chapter 3

The Minotaur´s Embrace

PrOLOGUE

By Marta Oyhanarte, peaceful warrior in the trenches of Reality

Nicolás Gadda Thompson, in the first pages of this book, has challenged us to integrate our way of being and act; he has led us to recognize the infinite and the limit and, with equal solvency, introduces us in this chapter into the Labyrinth of labyrinths. "What is he looking for?” we may ask. The answer could be -but the reader will have to discover it within himself- the Integration to free ourselves from the prison of opposites, to learn (and apprehend) in this age that we have come to describe as fast, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, of the "combination of knowledge and the convergence of opinions" that will allow us to find ourselves and others in order to build the collective dream that we still owe each other.

Labyrinths are almost infinite, they are present in all cultures and appear to us in tales, stories, histories, symbols, metaphors, poems, dreams…

Who hasn´t imagined a terrifying encounter with the Minotaur, that monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, the supreme inhabitant of every labyrinth? We think of him as alien to us, dangerous and lurking. In this chapter we learn not to fear him. The author teaches us to use Ariadne's thread to get out of this confinement with the Minotaur inside us, known and tamed. He invites us to go on a pilgrimage, to recognize mandalas and spirals, to look at ourselves in the mirror, to accept our imperfections and to be One with ourselves, with others and with the Kosmos.

The Minotaur´s Embrace

Part 1 – There and back again

The true mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be experienced.

J. J. Van der Leeuw

The mother, the daughter and the point of no return

In this sequence of chapters that I have been developing in the midst of a strict quarantine due to the global pandemic that came upon us in 2020 AD (I mention it clearly because it will surely go down in history as a unique moment; certainly unprecedented to this date), Integration will be the central theme, the common thread that will lead me to share with you my galvanized conviction about the importance of promoting, celebrating and practicing it in these critical times we live in. This vision of integrating stuff -and ourselves- is today witnessing a marked acceleration of processes, and with it, a vertiginous, hopeful and at the same time overwhelming stage.

Important clarification: I am not thinking so much of the global pandemic -a mere prelude to an even more grandiloquent disaster- but of the real Great Challenge we face as a civilization. Mother of all pandemics, child of Man and his industrial revolutions, we are at a turning point in what we have come to call the Climate Crisis. And we have very little time left to reach the point of no return…

Those who read this in the future will tell us what realities we built, what is left, and what disappeared.

Into a primordial Whole

I insist on my point of view on any symbolic analysis: nothing is true and nothing is a lie, because every symbol is subject to infinite interpretations and we should never consider only one as valid. The symbol is nourished precisely by the abundance of its readings; it needs to be a repository of thoughts, reflections, imaginations, fantasies, experiences and points of view of the most varied human race. Whoever receives an interpretation of a symbol should not doubt it: he should only check whether the explanation awakens some spark within him, whether something resonates in his mind or soul, whether the words, always false, serve as a bridge to the ineffable, the metaphysical, the divine, which is the true land of the symbol.

"Labyrinths", by Jaime Buhigas

Let's do a little reminiscing. In the first chapter we spoke of the integration between apparently opposing attributes of human nature: reason and intuition, mind and spirit, action and contemplation, competition and collaboration. We spoke of the integration between Western civilization and its local interlocutors of the last centuries, heirs of the original peoples, even those who existed in Europe itself (original peoples as relegated as their counterparts in other continents).

In metaphorical terms, we speak of the integration between the "Eagle and the Condor". This integration, we said, responds to a change in collective consciousness that we recognize as transcendental and necessary, the fruit of a "metanoic" maturation of the individual and of the collective. Today it seems to be an incipient phenomenon; it is happening, at least in certain aspects and in some corners of our undeniable globalization.

In the second chapter (Love your Rhythm. Return to Unity), we went back in time to reflect on integration from the perspective of the Pythagorean geometricians, descendants of the Egyptian sages, descendants of the Indian gymnosophists, descendants -in turn- of who knows what mythological characters lost in time.

Hand in hand with those who "measure the earth with sacred numbers", we followed the path of Existence itself, from Kaos (the Unity without limits) to Kosmos (the fragmented Order), and we integrated these parts back into a primordial Whole, through a journey, a "back and forth" that is eternal, dual and triune, of a poetic beauty that transcends all that we understand.

In this third part of the journey (and echoing the rhythm, the relationship, the return to Unity that the number-idea "3" gives us) we are going to delve a little deeper into this "there and back again", using the sacred -and today little understood- metaphor of the Labyrinth.

The Hero's Way

Jews and Christians have parables. Hindus and Buddhists have sutras. Almost all religious leaders give sermons. Stories and tales. They remind us how to behave and help us to persist. Even if we are not religious, popular culture fills the gap. UCLA film school professor Howard Suber describes the films as "sacred dramas for a secular society". As with religious parables, we act as the heroes of the stories we tell. Studies show that when we relate to characters in fictional stories we are more likely to overcome obstacles to achieve our goals.

From "Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong", by Eric Barker

The first man-made labyrinth is unknown, but it is in every culture; in Egyptian and Pythagorean, in the Druidic of ancient Europe and the Galatian of Central Asia, in the Vedic and Amerindian cultures, in Africa and Oceania. The labyrinth is the oldest known unifying myth of cultures; in historical terms, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam are its most recent religious manifestations. And even closer in time, we can say that in cinema, novels and comics (creators of new mythologies and contemporary interpreters of old ones) the labyrinth also appears in sublime -and not so sublime- variations.