Metamorphic Seeing

"Metamorphic Seeing"

Oil on canvas, 22" x 22" 

2023

 

"This life's dim windows of the soul 

Distorts the heavens from pole to pole 

And leads you to believe a lie 

When you see with, not through, the eye."

~ William Blake 

—:•:—

This painting is about the idea of "metamorphic seeing" — seeing the archetypal as a dynamic logos within nature and the world, not as a static abstract and detached unchanging archetypal order, but a logos that is with the living and changing forms of the world, seeing not just the transcendent or material, but both, One and Many, Being and Becoming, as One process, or non-dual continuum. 

Goethe called this way of approaching nature or phenomena a gentle or “delicate empiricism,” ridding the mind of theoretical preconception and projection, and even an initial rational explanation, to fully take-in an observational and visual study of the phenomena, nature or a living process. Naturally, artists who draw from nature and still life quickly learn this lesson in visual empiricism. To see fully the object perceptually for what it is, the artist has to let the object's light and image come to the eye indiscriminately without a mental preconception of representation of what it is, trying to see the object or scene as a direct whole-pattern image.

“There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself in the most intimate way identical with its objects and thereby becomes actual theory. This heightening of these spiritual powers belongs, however, to a highly cultivated age.” - Goethe

“We ought to talk less and draw more.” - Goethe

“It seemed to me that the ideas I gained about optics built a bridge between what spiritual insight reveals and the results of scientific research.” - Rudolf Steiner 

Goethe’s metaphysics is about finding the transcendent within the logic of the metamorphosis of form, not in a detached static unchanging Platonic sense, but in a metaphysics close to the senses and to the intelligence within nature, or what Simon G. Powell calls the bio-logic of "Natural Intelligence." It doesn’t exclude our senses or subjective perception and consciousness of phenomena, it includes them as a part of the process of understanding the whole reality, but with little room for abstract theory. 

"Evolution is a naturally intelligent learning process that weaves together naturally intelligent systems of bio-logic wise to their surroundings. This natural intelligence can be considered unconscious or even subconscious." - Simon G. Powell

“Rather than linking concepts together in a logically plausible, mathematically expressible, causal sequence, thinking about living nature required an organic, holistic, intuitive-participatory approach in which what the senses revealed as a sequence of parts is instead allowed to unfold in a single, continuous, unified process of metamorphosis.” - Christopher Bamford

This delicate empiricism, or "metamorphic seeing" is not something purely intellectual, or theoretically or mathematically modeled in its specifics, but is more an organic participatory perceptual philosophy of seeing phenomena all as a kind of interlinked musical physics and biology, a generative and then living mathematics, a metamorphic-logic embedded inherently in the emergence of form and order as a whole. It is less about precision and the particulars and more about the rough overall picture and dynamic of a whole systems pattern. This roughness of the overall picture, is something we see both in composition and layout in the arts, and also when looking at the visuals and principles of fractal patterns in mathematics.

The empirical and the holitsic, the objective and subjective, science and the arts, these are two different ways of seeing or lenses of perception that can actually reinforce each others truths, in the same way that the smooth circles and self-same straight lines of Euclidian geometry are different from the organic self-similarity of Fractal geometry, or as Benoit Mandelbrot phrased fractal geometry, the "geometry of roughness," both are different aspects or expressions of the same transcendent logos or archetypal principles that geometry itself represents to us most clearly.

"The existence of fractals challenge us to study forms that Euclid left aside as being formless; the morphology of the amorphous." - Benoit Mandelbrot

“Contrary to popular belief, the “objectivity” of conventional science is not borrowed from phenomenal objects.” - Frederick Amrine

“As in science, no matter how faithfully one excludes the subjective, it is still the subject who contrives the exclusion.” - Lewis Mumford

“Nature is interpreted to itself in human consciousness. Thought is the final member in the sequence of processes that forms nature.” - Rudolf Steiner

“If you can see science in the light of the process of cognitive perception (consciousness) then you understand what science is, and most importantly you understand what it isn’t.” - Henri Bortoft  

 * * *  

* * *

“This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence … a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.” — Plato 

 —:•:—

In a complementary way, mind, intelligence, or self-consciousness, emerges in humans from the natural unconscious intelligence of the body, as the natural intelligence of the entire biosphere emerges from the unconscious background cosmic intelligence, or the symphony of physical laws of matter. Building upon and within itself, a process of self-organizing creative emergence marks each great era in the epoch of evolution, from the matter of the cosmos, to the biology of life, to the interiority and inner life of self-consciousness itself, the awareness of awareness.

“We are not separated from spirit, we are in it.”

― Plotinus

This emergent and creative organizational intelligence that spans throughout the history of life and the universe could also be referred to as an "evolutionary intelligence,"  and that when it itself starts to become self-conscious through humans, (evolution becoming aware of the dynamics of evolution through the evolution of consciousness) could be a called a relatively new "evolutionary self-aware" capacity or intelligence, or level for seeing the world and itself as whole systems. One that has the potential to create systems in-tune or in evolutionary syntony with the overall whole—or "Design For Evolution," at the socio-cultural levels, a phrase the brilliant evolutionary thinker Erich Jantsch titled a book about.

* * *

"Dissipative self-organization is cognitive; that is to say, it organizes information into knowledge." - Erich Jantsch

"The ultimate importance of the evolutionary vision lies not just in its power of unifying scientific thinking and stimulating a truly trans-disciplinary approach, but also in the philosophy it expresses—a philosophy close to life and its creativity." 

- Erich Jantsch

"The clearer our sense of direction and movement, the more meaningful can design become, but also the more powerful. Because only when we sense all these powers around us, all this vast stream of evolution, can we coordinate and use them for our purposes—which will then also be the purposes of overall evolution." ~ Erich Jantsch (Design For Evolution)

* * * 

As an evolutionarily self-aware species, we are either going to learn to consciously design for and with evolution and its dynamics, or get controlled by mass reaction to perpetual social and natural crisis's, opportunist self sabotage and self-destruction, regressing into unconsciousness, the loss of self-governance, cultural and civilizational collapse and even extinction.

"Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate the spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction." 

- R. Buckminster Fuller

Because self-consciousness is counter to the unconsciousness of nature, nature and the evolutionary process are unconsciously naturally intelligent, they are self-organizing autopoietic systems; humans on the other hand are conscious of themselves because they can step back and reflect (through increased mental interiority) and manipulate that unconscious order of process, in nature and in themselves. 

Early cultures perceived that the causal order of nature was ruled by a more unconscious subjective mythos, (projecting gods on to forces of nature), then surpassed by the emergence of a more self-conscious objective rationality, reason, law and science that governed nature. But now we can see that we have to use both aspects together, self-balancing each other, creatively weaving the dynamic for a new emergent cosmic story, or way of relating to the universe, to create an evolutionary path forward that appreciates and integrates both truths; in short, we have to design conscious systems to be evolutionarily in-tune with unconscious ones for harmony or snytony to emerge.

Erich Jantsch postulates three basic levels for inquiry and design in his book Design For Evolution which I find helpful: 

1. The Mythological - (personal/subjective/instinctive)

2. The Rational - (technical/objective/reflective)

3. The Evolutionary (or Creative-Emergent) - (subject and object as complementary process/creative-emergent innovative action/nondual/self-balancing). 

"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist." - R. Buckminster Fuller

The alienation of science from life, which has become a matter of growing concern, is about to be overcome by the evolution of science itself." - Erich Jantsch

"You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason." - Plotinus

Current conventional science alone says the perception of truth must be detached and outside of any subjective human bias, transcendent of human error you might say, becoming an ironically godlike but also usually a creatively sterile perspective. But phenomenology and Goethean science says we can never truly fully get out of our human bias, to get down and past the so called secondary reality of our 1st person experience and to a 3rd person primary reality of pure equations of physics and matter and light; to do so would be an exercise in meaningless dogma, that mocks the idea of transcendent religious truth while becoming it, perhaps unconsciously. 

"Subjective and objective knowledge fall together in the framework of self-organization. The creative process wherever it unfolds, in art or science or merely in natural and effective living, falls together with the dynamics of evolution." - Erich Jantsch

A Goethean or Evolutionary phenomenology and epistemology would include the subjective presence of the observer, consciousness, the experience of the phenomena through the senses, as the primary reality, not secondary, creatively integrating its unique perceptual worldview and a whole systems view while also keeping open to the potential evolution and empirical critique of its own perspectives limitations and projections. 

* * *

“Goethe’s great contribution was that, in contrast to conventional science’s mechanist-materialist bias toward—indeed, nearly exclusive focus upon—what was lifeless, or dead, Goethe’s orientation was toward Life. He sought what was living and he understood that life, which was continuous and whole, permeated and included all in its embrace. His central discovery therefore, we might say, was how to think about and affirm the primacy of the organic.” - Christopher Bamford, Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge, The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner

“Some kind of evolutionary participation must take the place of the logical, concept driven proof.” - Rudolf Steiner 

"The arts still convey to us a wholeness embracing the opposites, where formal language fails and science has become a narrow trap of one-sidedness."

- Erich Jantsch

“Self-knowledge is already the beginning of self-transformation. The transformed self, co-creative, constructs enhanced phenomena in turn. Neither of these two poles is primary. Rather, what is primary is the activity that precedes the distinction between subject and object, and calls both into being. Out of this pure activity, the particular subject and particular object are precipitated as moments of a larger dynamic.” - Frederick Amrine

"The interdependence, the creative tension between structure and process reveals one of the most fundamental pairs of opposites from which all life, not just the life of human beings and systems, receives energy." - Erich Jantsch

“The keystone of the entire structure of the spiritual and physical universe is Rhythmic Balanced Interchange between all opposites.” - Walter Russell 

* * *

Fractal geometry, as a meta-field of study of self-similar and living patterns and geometry, also gives us an archetypal window into natures inherent and unseen side, into the generative feedback parameters of its “Self-organizing Golden Algorithm,” for the creative emergence, growth, and evolution of matter and then biology, and for seeing the cosmos, life, and consciousness as a unified evolving whole, with a universal fractal blueprint and fingerprint. 

"The Sacred Cut represents the main factor in ancient geometry itself. There is only one Sacred Cut. In fact, it was the main-door key to ancient geometry." - Tons Brunés

Thinking about fractals, with the idea of moving from a static conception of the archetypal to a more dynamic one, we find that the "Phi Ratio" or "Golden Ratio" or "Divine Cut" (also see: Golden Circles) exhibits these whole-part fractal and generative dynamic relationships in the traditional and contemporary study of sacred geometry, and is the key to opening up higher Archimedean solids and fractal relationships. They are made from straight lines and circles in a kind of Euclidean space of pure self-same order, contrasted to fractal geometry that is more made from organic and rough line patterns of self-similar chaos and order. 

Fractal Phi Pyramids over the Mandelbrot set

*Large Red Pyramid angle 51.827° (Giza Phi

Pyramid)

*Blue Pyramid angle 76.345°(Russian Phi Pyramid)

(Image by George Leoniak at Knew Geometers)

One is linked more to the inorganic world and the other the organic world, and to the extent that the physical world of space and time’s emergence comes before the biosphere’s emergence, because it contains and goes beyond it, there seems to be an order-of-process in these two archetypes of geometry; the more inorganic space-time geometry is more something that is beyond the universe, that the pure-line geometry and its constants become the closest shadows of the transcendent and the principles it creates that we can interact with in the physical world, while fractal geometry is more of a living and organic and unpredictable geometry of process and emergence, but still retaining deep connection with the more archetypal Euclidian or transcendental geometries.

* * *

"Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see."- Benoit Mandelbrot

* * *

—:•:—

 

Giaome Biogenesis

"Gaiome Biogenesis"

(Pencil & compass drawing)

* * * 

"As with one eye there is no perception of depth, so with one biosphere our view of the universe lacks depth.  A multiplicity of biospheres not only creates specific new angles of vision; it multiplies perspectives. It may also produce a whole new kind of vision, a sort of biological "hyperspective."" - Dorion Sagan

This is about trying to create a symbol for the idea of biospheric bifurcation, the multiplying of our earth's biosphere and our perspectives on life, evolution, and the earth, ensuring an evolutionary multi-planetary future for our species in the solar system. Evolving both humanity and the biosphere together by exploring the idea of engineering outer earth orbiting biospheres, self-sustaining planetary ecologies, and the idea of “eco-technics”; where permaculture meets astrophysics, and where natural intelligence meets artificial/sentient intelligence. 

The leaves and eyes represent the unfolding of this potential cosmic biogenesis inherent in natures intelligence, and the Apollonian fractal circle gasket represents the multiplying of earth into biospheres.

Overall, we can see the self-organizing, self-sustaining, and self-regulating dynamics of nature and the biosphere as a decentralized but holistic “technology”—an organic self-designing self-intelligent evolutionary systems technology running throughout all of life, that we can interact with in evolutionary ways that open emergent adaptations, transformations, and outcomes.

"We cannot conquer nature with our technology, but we can conquer our technological nature: by working with nature, by conceiving of life as a whole integrated organism of which we are part, we can use our ingenuity for the benefit of all life - and be the more human for it." - Dorion Sagan 

—:•:— 

"Earth Mitosis"

(Pencil & compass drawing)

***

—:•:— 

"Reproducing biospheres represent a new hour in the human day, a new age in the Earth's ontogeny. If we could examine history under the temporal equivalent of a microscope, we might be startled by the resemblance to organisms and cells of biospheres." - Dorion Sagan 

"We need a new story. We need a story that actually comes out of what we know about the universe. That's our moment." - Brian Swimme

"The ultimate importance of the evolutionary vision lies not just in its power of unifying scientific thinking and stimulating a truly transdisciplinary approach, but also in the philosophy it expresses--a philosophy close to life and its creativity. The alienation of science from life, which has become a matter of growing concern, is about to be overcome by the evolution of science itself." - Erich Jantsch

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

“Successfully running a new biosphere would show people what it takes to make it in our beloved old one.” - Dorion Sagan & Lynne Margulis 

—:•:—

Gaiome: Notes on Ecology, Space Travel and Becoming Cosmic Species

Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth

Dr. Bruce Damer:  S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D. Asteroid Capture and Handling

—:•:—

Phi-Eye and the Golden Circles

 

"Phi-Eye"

Pencil and compass drawing, digitally altered

* * *

“I see through my eyes, not with them.”

— William Blake

—:•:—

The Golden Cut (1:1.618...) creating the Golden Circles 

overlapping within the vesica piscis

* * *

“You will know, as far as it is allowed to a mortal, that nature is from all points of view similar to itself.” — Pythagorus

George Leoniak’s discovery of the Golden Circles template and the many different geometric connections that it makes possible really starts to open the doors of the phi ratio relationships in a very consistent way in your connection with geometry—no matter what level you’re at. 

The template, consisting of series of phi ratio proportioned concentric circles, in either 2, 3, or 5-fold view, makes working with sacred geometry altogether a more easily expansive and insightful practice, not only in the capacity to discover and construct forms, but in its ability to integrate the interconnected meanings of the root relationships, ratios, and perspectives more simply and coherently.

The Golden Circles are like a meta-organizing pattern to see the whole field of sacred geometry anew through. Exploring them is like interacting with a type of psychoactive auto-didactical generative tool for catalyzing new geometric connections and epiphanies; it is a way of keeping geometry in check with both the absolute transcendent, its source, and also the dynamic of life and phi as it emerges and connects back to source; both with the One and all its emergent self-similarities.

—:•:—

Three Golden Circle views:

2-fold/square view

3-fold/hexagon view

5-fold/pentagon view

Overall I find this approach a more holistic way of exploring and understanding what sacred geometry is, you could say it literally puts the proportional dynamic, the life of phi into the Flower of Life, or what Keith Critchlow more appropriately termed the “Flower of Creation.”

The basic version of the Golden Circles Seed of Life pattern is a simple and elegant complement to the traditional Flower of Life pattern. The Golden Circle lattice is in phi proportion and fits in between the familiar central 6-fold petals of the Seed of Life and Flower of Life patterns, giving an interaction and overlap between √3 and √5 geometries, showing us a richer field of interconnected circles for new connections, coordinates, and potentials for forms to emerge.  

The Seed of Life & Golden Circles, 

(blue circles are phi ratio/ √5, red are √3 )

Golden Circles Flower of Life

Working with the Golden Circles method incorporates multiple views and construction methods, both in what it does for understanding and discovering accuracy in the various solids and polyhedra based on phi, and in how it uses both digital and traditional compass methods for exploring and checking accuracy and creation method, and also 3-D construction.

A good example of this is how the Golden Circles method corrects the popular Metatron's Cube method of constructing a true dodecahedron. The difference is subtle but once you see it you can't unsee it. The dodecahedron created from the hexagon view of the Metatron's Cube method is not just a perspective or perceptual issue, it's a fundamental problem because it's not made from even-sided pentagons, and definitely not proportional to phi ratios, and so it cannot be constructed into an actual 3-dimensional form. 

(Images from George Leoniak)

Metatron method compared with Golden Circles Method

Golden Circles method - Nested Dodecahedrons

* * *

Engaging with this phi based method or key to further opening the secrets of the circles of the Flower of Life allows the sacred and symbolic aspects and the of the unity of geometry, or harmony of the constants, to emerge as internal insights into the eternal that happen when you do the work and make the connections and interact with the mystery and your own curiosity and creativity.

—:•:—

Below are some of the various polyhedra studies, created from using the Golden Circles template pattern and variations, discovered & taught by George Leoniak and Knew geometers at Knew Geometry — (check out more on his work, courses, and group here: https://knewgeometry.space/ — Knew Geometry Youtube — Knew Geometers FB Group)

"The world around us is a world of numbers—numbers that spell life and harmony. They are organized by the geometry of figures, all related to one another according to a sublime order, into dynamic symmetry.

Glimpses into this magnificent kingdom form the basis of all our knowledge and it seems that in this domain the ancient civilizations had gone further than modern science." 

— Paul Jacques Grillo, Architect (1960) 

—:•:— 

Golden Circle Polyhedra Studies

Dodecahedron from Golden Circles with √2 radius circles

Truncated Dodecahedron from Golden Circles with 0.618 outer circles 

Icosidodecahedron from Golden Circles

Truncated cube from Golden Circles with √2 circles

Great Rhombicuboctahedron from Golden Circles with √2 circles

Rhombicuboctahedron from Golden Circles with √2 circles x2

Rhombicosidodecahedron from Golden Circles 

Truncated Icosahedron "Buckminsterfullerine" from expanding Golden Circles 

Rhombic Enneacontahedron inside Dodecahedron from expanding Golden Circles

Great Rhombicosidodecahedron from Flower of Life with Golden Circles x4

Great Stellated Dodecahedron Star Polyhedron from Golden Circles

Small Stellated Dodecahedron from Golden Circles

Icosahedron front view from Golden Circles

—:•:—

“The Golden Circles of Giza”

The Great Pyramids slope geometry at the Giza Plateau is in precise alignment with the Golden Circles or phi ratio based concentric circles (blue & pink), and in part they give the generative points for its construction and inner shaft angles ..

—:•:—

Self-Organizing Bio-Logic

"Self-Organizing Bio-logic"

Digitally altered drawing, 2017

—:•:—

The poet Goethe was actually one of the first pioneers of the sciences of complexity and emergence. He found a dynamic participatory way of seeing nature, documented in his study on the metamorphosis of plants. He was one of the first to explore what a non-reductionist and vision-logic imaginative level of archetypal thinking can be, seeing a unitive evolutionary archetypal process at work in nature, and in perceiving and thinking about nature, or in other words a gestalt way of seeing the whole.

Applying Goethean Science or a gestalt mode of inquiry is essential to better grasping the order of process and dynamic complexity of the natural world ..

"If the scientist is too bigoted to feel himself into the sensibility and the living values of the artist, he will propose only dead structures." - Jacob Bronowski

“The holistic paradigm, Gaia, deep ecology, and new alchemy all have a hidden ancestor: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.” - John Barnes

—:•:—

“In Goethe's method, "how" to look is the key. We must switch our attention away from the verbal-intellectual mind and into "seeing." This way of seeing is active, not passive. We plunge into seeing the qualities of the phenomenon. This takes us away from the uniformity imposed on nature by the intellectual mind and we experience the non-uniformity, richness and diversity of the world. 

In this way we arrive at the simplest case, the "pure phenomenon," the part that contains the authentic whole. This is the aim of the first stage of Goethe's method. What is particular in our normal way of seeing becomes universal in the intuitive mode. Goethe described the pure phenomenon as " an instance worth a thousand, bearing all within itself." The classic example is found in Goethe's observation that "all is leaf." For the rational mind, the leaf is just one part of the plant along with the petals and stamens. These parts are regarded as essentially separate and independent of each other. But with the switch to the intuitive mode of consciousness the leaf is understood in a universal sense as an "omnipotential form," rather than as a particular physical leaf.

The process of active seeing is deepened in Goethe's subsequent stages, in "exact sensorial imagination," or guided imagery. We visualize the phenomenon in imagination. This is sensory and concrete, not abstract, attention is withdrawn further from the verbal, and consciousness is restructured into an "organ of holistic perception." The purpose of this stage is to realize an element of the phenomenon not given to sense experience. 

This is the law, the organization or unity of the phenomenon. The intuitive understanding of the leaf, the one single organ, allows us to grasp the continuity of form of the plant. We can visualize the "coming into being " of the plant, its metamorphic sequence. 

With a reversal of perception, the universal is not a generalization abstracted from the particular; it is perceived as "shining in the particular." We see not an assemblage of parts, an analytical snapshot; we see the intensive depth of the plant, another dimension in which "it shows itself as itself.”” 

—:•:—

“Who would study and describe the living starts

By driving the spirit out of its parts:

In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections,

Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.”

- Goethe, Faust

—:•:—

"Leaf Field"

Digitally altered drawing, 2015

—:•:—

Reference: http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/154/187

Metacosm

"Metacosm”

Oil on canvas, 70” x 40”

2015—2022

—:•:—

The word "metacosm," is defined as a system that encompasses cosmos systems, both the macrocosm and microcosm, as a transcendent field of forces that is beyond the created world. I didn't know this word at the time of first thinking about this painting and idea but it really fits with what I am trying to show with this piece. Especially how it relates to the torus geometry, and how it is a type of meta-archetype or pattern in sacred geometry, that shows up in the way the universe organizes itself at all scales, from atoms to cells to planets to stars to galaxies. 

Metacosm is about imagining the cosmos as an infinite fractally nested self-generating and self-creating bifurcating multiverse, which if bifurcating inside of itself infinitely at every plank length instance of difference/expansion, could represent a branching parallel torus universe structure (or metaverse) within the metacosm, that would be a way of thinking about a 5th dimensional view of 4th dimensional emergent bifurcating timelines or universes, or a 2-D slice of 4-D branchings within a 5-D concept.

"This is a creating universe not a created one." 

— Walter Russell

—:•:—

—:•:—

The drawings for this initially where rough sketches of torus forms trying to find a shape and order that could nest within itself, which then lead to being laid out within an inverse square grid, with the torus as an expanding field/universe within a circle shape.

Initial drawings for Metacosm

It wasn't until recently when I discovered George Leoniak's geometric construction for the mathematics of the golden ratio that I realized how the Metacosm torus geometry and nested torus pattern, though not directly in phi circle proportion, can formatively interrelate with the phi ratio circles, the vesica piscis circles, and the circles created from the inverse harmonic square grid pattern. 

George Leoniak's geometrical construction from the mathematical equation of the golden 

ratio (√5+1 divided by 2 = Phi (1.618…)) created from the vesica piscis. 

√3 circle geometry relationships overlayed onto Metacosm

Metacosm circle geometry studies.

—:•:—

The torus archetype, which is closely connected to the circle and vesica piscis, is both an archetypal field-form that is transcendent, beyond all creation, like the circle, and connected to the notion of the whole as a sphere, but then also is an archetype very present in natures way of organizing energy and matter into flows, vortexes, and cycles, into self-reinforcing self-organizing patterns or fractals, in matter and life and mind. 

As an archetype it seems specially preordinate, a-priori, and nondual, because it is both a formative transcendent background and static unchanging constant, but also an archetype of dynamic self-organizing fields, and emergent complex systems. It is an archetype transcendent of form but while also being emergent with dynamic form; both an archetypal blueprint-form, and an archetypal formation pattern of self-organizing fields. 

In short the torus is both a transcendent meta-structure and emergent meta-pattern, both macrocosm and microcosm; both above, and below; a Metacosm.

—:•:—

"The indication is of the notion of a plane of being that's behind the visible plane, and which is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that's the basic theme of all mythology, that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one." — Joseph Campbell

"Spiritual science seeks to connect the human being with the great laws of the universe, the great laws of the cosmos. The deepest impulses of spiritual science will be understood in the true sense of the word only when people realize how extensively we are actually searching for the connection between human beings and the great transcendental laws of the universe.” — Rudolf Steiner

"I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe."— Isaac Asimov 

“Every moment is of infinite value, for it is the representation of a whole eternity.” - Goethe 

“The Universe designs itself … every particle, every molecule, every organism, every celestial body in the Cosmos, exists and develops in the context of every other.” – Paul Harrison

"The whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals." – John Hartford

"That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, is the study of the works of God and is the true theology. As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God." –Thomas Paine 

"The cosmological picture that emerges--a map in time as well as in space--is not what most of us expected. It offers a new perspective on how a single "genesis event" created billions of galaxies, black holes, stars, and planets, and how atoms have been assembled--here on Earth, and perhaps other worlds--into living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins. There are deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld. . . . Our emergence and survival depend on very special "tuning" of the cosmos--a cosmos that may be even vaster than the universe that we can actual see." —  Martin Rees 

"To the eyes of a human of imagination, nature is imagination itself" —  William Blake 

“What makes every real work of art of interest is that it reproduces the mystery of Creation which operates in the Microcosm as in the Macrocosm, in Man as in the Universe.” — Edouard Schure 

—:•:—

—:•:—

***