Tree of Learning: Tiphareth Sketch

To Get That View

 

Tiphareth: sphere of beautiful and truthful harmony situated on the unifying middle pillar where the upper-subtle and lower-dense meet; where ascents and descents are decided

Strolling Along

The 7th of August 1974 was an overcast day in New York City. Business-as-Usual reigns as the supreme dictate of the day in this 24-7 hub of global finance, especially in the two largest building's in the world: the twin towers. In the early morning hours, the man pictured above steps onto a 3/4th-inch pole and begins to walk. Between the pole and the ground is a 1,300-foot drop. 

Welcome to the life of Philippe Petit, a poetic terrorist extraordinaire in the garb of a tightrope walker. Months of meticulous planning have led to this moment. He walks across several times, lays down in the middle to admire the view, and taunts some flabbergasted police --- all to balance between the sky and ground for over forty minutes!

A peak experience for sure.

In the background a wide-open sky tempts us with flight, tells us to leave behind our dense flesh-machines and soar with Spirit, that subtle identity countless philosophers and sages throughout the ages have yearned for. But that would leave one naive, romantic, and dead.


Our physicality must be respected.


A balance is to be struck between Above and Below in all its forms --- mortality and immortality, individual identity and  collective identity, time and eternity, finite patterns and infinite patterns. In that entwined space is where the potentials of Tiphareth lie. Through the study of mathematics, the heart, and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a sketch of this balanced center in the tree of life can emerge. 

Mathematics

In Sacred Geometry and Practice, Robert Lawlor sums it up quite well:

"Geometry deals with pure form, and philosophical geometry re-enacts the unfolding of each form out of a preceding one. It is a way by which the essential creative mystery is rendered visible. The passage from creation to procreation, from the unmanifest, pure, formal idea to the 'here-below', the world that spins out from the original divine stroke, can be mapped out by geometry, and experienced through the practice of geometry."

Keep that 'tween the ears as we proceed. The above diagram illustrates the fundamental insights of PHI, showing how (in its muted-pink glory) the proportion is to be visualized. This is done by breaking up a single line in such a way that the smallest part relates to the largest part in the same way that the largest part relates to the whole. As a number it's 1.61803... with the "..." signifying that it never-ends and never-repeats --- a property known to create mathematical migraines or glimpses of en-light-enment in those that study it.


Although it might not end, the "discovery" did have a historical beginning. It was during the 300s BCE when you, dear reader (*the author shakes nervously -- "please have readers!"*), chose to waft in non-existence (pff, slacker), it was then that the soon-to-be Father of Geometry Euclid was busy writing a collection of thirteen books that would reign supreme for over twenty centuries. Inside the axioms, proofs, propositions, and dense words lies one of the first written descriptions of PHI, of "dividing a line in the extreme and mean ratio". Simple sentence yes, but a seed was planted. This seed laid fallow during the infertility of the dark ages, but it germinated and began to grow as the renaissance flourished. In 1509, Luca Pacioli publishes De Divina Proportionare (with artistic help from the hand of Leonardo da Vinci) exploring the nature of PHI and popularizing another alias for this mathematical nomad: the divine proportion. Its leaves and fruits and other things that come from germinated seeds, crop up in paintings, architectural designs, science, mysticism, and more, saturating the creative waters of the renaissance. 

However first to print rarely means first to know. More than 150 years before Euclid sat down to write, the sculptor Phidias was busy using PHI for the creation of artwork to be placed in a great temple to Athena, the Parthenon. And before that (just to one up the Greeks) was the intuitive or explicit knowledge of PHI used in the Great Pyramids at Egypt --- way back in 2560 BCE. And to one-up the Egyptians for one-upping the Greeks, in a time-scale predating human cognizance, PHI can be found in the anatomy of dolphins and ants, in the composition of DNA, in the placement of sunflower seeds, and in the calcite symmetry of nautillus shells. PHI seems embedded, and in bed with, nature at a fundamental level. 

Why?

Ah (perhaps a "Lo" too!) the search for reasons. Since we never know nature-as-such but only nature-with-us, the curious appearance of PHI in such diverse natural phenomena points to it being essential to human perception. This act is born through context alone, in being aware of relationships like that of smallest-to-largest and largest-to-whole. PHI is a way of mathematically representing how a unified whole can be partitioned into a dis-unified multiplicity and how it can re-assemble back into that whole. 


Fibonacci Fibonacci

In Italy back in the 12th century a bipedal being by the name of Leonardo Fibonacci (among a slew of other aliases) sits down to write Liber Abaci. A culmination of his learnings gathered while traveling around the Mediterranean, this book introduces and popularizes the Hindu-Arabic number system for a European audience. His use of a specific number sequence inside the book to illustrate a point eventually bears his name --- an egoic ritual practiced in many scientific traditions. Thus we have: The Fibonacci Sequence.

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...

This set of mathematical relationships is essentially a formula for growth. By adding two preceding numbers together, the next number can emerge. Likewise by dividing the new number into the preceding number, a number approximating PHI emerges. As the 40th number in the sequence is divided into the 39th number, the result is identical to the irrational number of PHI to the 15th decimal point. Like mathematical lovers, the Fibonacci sequence and PHI reach a state of collective number-gasm where individual identity dissolves. 

Extracting the insights from those strange mathematical glyphs and placing it over this-world yields some tasty contemplations. The breeding habits of bunnies, the ratio of males to females in bee hives, the botanical study of leaf arrangement (philiotaxis), and the spiraling geometry of human ears all embody this relationship. The simple beauty of this algorithm of growth, of evolution-metamorphosis, lies in the fact that "the new" encompasses and emerges from what we already have. 

 

And something else we all have is....

 

 



 

A Heart

 

In the anatomical sense, the heart is a four-chambered, eleven ounce, grapefruit-sized ball of muscle tissue situated atop the mediastinum, aka the central chest cavity. Every minute of every day until the minute of the day we die, this pump circulates 19,000 pints of blood every 24 hours while beating 60 - 160 times per minute so that the cellular ecosystems our bodies are, can be fed, oxygenated, protected, and functioning.

 

 

In the entry hall, or atrium, to the right side of the heart, oxygen-poor blood is collected. An electrical charge in the upper part of the atrium rhythmically grows until it cause muscle cells to contract, 100,00 times a day, in sequenced fashions. Blood drops into the lower little belly, or the ventricle, and is pushed to the lungs for oxygenation --- a process  known as pulmonary circulation. Once imbued with the benefits of quality oxygen, it's pumped to the left side of the heart --- a process known as systemic circulation. The atrium collects, the ventricle distributes, and that life-giving properties of blood, that viscous goo of plasma and water, travels throughout the whole body.

 

 

In many spiritual traditions the heart  is focused upon extensively as a way to develop psycho-spiritually. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the heart comprises the main organ for Anahata, the fourth chakra. Sanskrit for "un-struck" or "un-broken", this subtle energy center of love, integration of masculine/feminine, and empathy, can be felt and radiated from. By grounding oneself in the intelligence of this heart-center, practitioners can survey the landscape of spiritual ascent and descent and choose where they would like to place their willpower.

 

 

If the heart is forgotten about it can wither up and cause heart dis-ease at least on a psycho-spiritual sense. On a continual 24-hour a day, 365-day a year, every-moment-until-you-dead basis, this four-chambered ovoid piece of bodily machinery contracts and expands, contracts and expands, contracts and ... (dare I repeat it once more?) ... expands! During the contraction phase it symbolically holds an individual bounded identity and during the expansion phase it symbolically lets go of that individual identity to participate in the whole Somatic State -- i.e. the meat machine vectors that carry us through the game of life.

 



 

Maslow's Self-Actualization

 

 

But it's about more than mere survival, right?

 

 

Distraught with the disease model of psychology organizing the collective in the first half of the twentieth century, Abraham Maslow sought to create more positive and affirmative models for understanding human psychology. This lead to the formation of the Humanistic School of Psychology, sometimes viewed as the third step in a four-fold historical development --- 1st psychoanalysis, 2nd analytic psychology, 3rd humanistic, and 4th transcendental.

 

 

In 1943 Abe Maslow writes "A Theory of Human Motivation" to, well, flesh out a theory of human motivation. In trying to describe what motivates people, he came up with five major needs: physiological, safety, love & belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. These needs are structured hierarchically so that each preceding need has to be met, to some degree, before the succeeding need is felt.

 

Physiological (food, sex, thirst, breathing, water, excretion, sleep, homeostasis)

 

Safety (security of body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, property)

 

Love & Belongingness (friendship, family, sexual intimacy)

 

Self-Actualization (morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts)

 

The last of these, self-actualization, is often correlated with peak-experiences. These types of experiences can be known by great athletes, explorers, mystics, scientists, and psychonauts, and open up vista's vast and deep. 

 

 

Time to Wrap Up

 

 

The insights culled from the study and practice of sacred geometry, the study and cultivation of the heart, and the study and integration of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, can open a space to the potentials of Tiphareth. Like that small liminal opening between the two sides of an hourglass, one can balance on the central fulcrum of Tiphareth and be in truthful harmony.

In 1338 Italian artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti unveils his fresco An Allegory of Good Government and time stops! For a moment... perhaps. Regardless of the effect then, it's the first known artistic representation of an hourglass. This mythically potent artifact seems to be an invention of the medieval era that expanded upon a time-measuring device that dates back to the Egyptians, the clepsydra.

 

Seafarer's embrace it and praise it for its accuracy as they drift on those wide abyss's of open ocean. Magellan was said to have 18 on each ship. The hourglass has a tri-part construction: a giving container at the top, a small central nexus, and a receiving container at the bottom. The three interact to play the game of Time. And on that note, it's time to head out.