FLOW AND FORM

After a very long hiatus, I'm experimenting with a return to the blog world. I want to test the waters with a magazine article I saved from the firestarter pile -- before I share any more words of my own. A lot has been going on in the last couple of years, and I'm still trying to make sense of it. More accurately, I am trying to live with the fact that things often don't "make sense."

With that in mind, I'm going to share the words of David Tresemer, a professor of Anthroposophical Psychology in the US (article from Lilipoh magazine, Fall 2016):

SACRED NATURE, SACRED STRUCTURE

by David Tresemer

We have quite a job to grow a soul during this life, leaving at our passing some small contribution to the soul's long evolution. We can call in help - we must do so! - by invoking powers of sacred nature and sacred structure.

Nature demonstrates to us the unending flow of life-force through the elements. We can admire the clouds for their flow. Water moving in streams and cascading in waterfalls gives us the most faithful portrayal of the pull of gravity. It's healthy to gaze at the interplay, including the splashes, the seemingly anti-gravity events that are testament to the faithful love of our planet for everything. Even the earth element itself flows, as mineral substance slowly moves. Flow works via acceleration, always moving faster and faster. It's quite a miracle that we can stand upright, as gravity pulls us down faster and faster every moment. We must counter with levity, a power of rising up to the heavens that also must increase as an acceleration from moment to moment. All the elements move in acceleration and deceleration, never staying still for long.

What makes nature sacred? When you give attention to any object of to a whole scene, they reveal the powers of divine energy swirling through. We mostly project out labels to things - "tree", "flower", "waterfall", as if these objects were tranquil and fixed. They aren't. The essence of nature is ever moving, gushing, surging, playing - flowing. 

Sacred structure originates in the unseen dimension of geometry. A talent required of the builders of the cathedrals was knowledge of "sacred geometry," understanding the ideal dynamic relation between plane and angle, between tension and compression. Geometers knew and know the power of proportion, which is analogy operating in every aspect of form. Geometers - the world from measure (meter) of Gaia (living earth) - also know the powers of dimension and orientation. When we create sacred architecture, we can stand and work in spaces where these principles are made manifest, and feel their impact. The StarHouse in Boulder is one such place, a twelve-sided building whose horizontal and vertical components make cared geometry manifest. On that property, other structures can be sampled, including a nine-foot high dodecahedron. Sitting in a perfect symmetry of twelve pentagons, with no rectilinear angles, it swiftly opens one to a stream of insights that one must work hard to attain elsewhere.

  

Sacred nature and sacred structure form the two poles of a dynamic tension between flow and form, between what the Greeks initially meant by chaos (potential, streaming, surging, energy moving) and cosmos (dense manifest objects, energy in apparent stasis, expressing the macro level of order brought to the micro scale).

During most of our lives, we live neither in sacred nature nor in sacred structure; rather we live in degraded ignored nature and cheap constructions. We could name the pole opposite to sacred as "broken," which means the shattered bits of failed creations, the shards and soot that have not yet dissolved into the primeval chaos, thus making their energy available for new creations.

The triangle form suggests that nature and structure, as they rise in refinement to become more sacred, merge into one glorious experience. The broken triangle at the bottom is smaller because it is a temporary aberration with less power. Indeed, most of our lives and lived in this temporary aberration from sacred called civilization.

Parks are, when successful, designed to enhance both sacred nature and sacred structure. Russell Square Park in London combines the two beautifully, and was the location of Eckhart Tolle's meditations that led to his fresh new view of reality. He also sheltered in the British Museum, another example of sacred structure. Visit the Reading Room someday, a structure deserving the descriptions "awesome" and "sacred"! A friend once commented to me, "How do you know you are in the house of an anthroposophist? There are crystals, color and order in its expression of beauty." This attention to the power of sacred structure informs the design of an anthroposophic counselor's meeting space.

In the search for methods to enhance soul growth, one is duty-bound to find both sacred nature and sacred structure, as they both heighten one's sense of what is possible. The StarHouse is a sacred structure surrounded by sacred nature. One walks from the parking lot through the trees, as worries begin to flow away. Then, one enters into the StarHouse to experience the sacred structure of proportion, dimension, and orientation. Then out into sacred nature again. One can thus experience rejuvenation (of flow) and transformation (of form), thus strengthening oneself for the return to non-sacred nature and non-sacred structure.

A further relationship: the anthroposophic term Lucifer related to flow and the term Ahriman relates to form. When an individual is unconscious of these forces, they can become ugly; they imprison the human soul and surround it with the "broken." When made conscious, these forces or beings can be pressed to service in the task of making nature and structure sacred, and thus serve human development - both personal development and the maturation of humanity as a whole.

(For images of the StarHouse, see https://thestarhouse.net/)