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Kindof a summary

The argument over the existence of a 4th spatial dimension has been around since at least the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato's on one side of it, Aristotle on another and since the guys never really worked it out, hillarity and a bit of a mess ensued.

While the giants were fighting it would seem that the entire argument can be reconciled by the following:

The left side of infinity consists of the womb wherein the irreducible four elements/fundamental forces/dna-letters/chambers of the heart do their work on the interior plane. In Cosmology, Astrology, etc these four have classically be expressed by Geometric or even Newtonian methods. So if that's possible, then they most certainly should be expressible in terms of Electromagnetism and the Strong and Weak nuclear forces as well. In either case, this interior space is, paradoxicaly, the realm of the classic celestial. Its the Idea of the driver, the prima mobile, the electric motor, etc etc. 'the occult' side of things. hermeneutic. It consists of four interior dimensions at 60 degree angles.

On the right side of infinity we have the concrete tangible exterior world which we know as basically consisting of the houses, human affairs, conflicts etc. This is the linear stuff so shocking to every one born into the world. It consists of three dimensions, up/down, hot/cold, wet/dry (substitute arbitrary dualities of your choice) at 90 degree angles to one-another.

Thus the confusion and argument about the missing dimension, at least on one level, is pretty much the result of some misguided reasoning that acts as if "as above so below" worked as perfectly between these realms as it does inside of them. This does not appear to be the case.

Qualitatively "as above so below" would seem to give the right idea, but one can not take this method too far as simply does not reconcile the duality born of four irreducible forces. Simply put, the inside is not like the outside.. not per se. There's a difference between the coordinate systems. Internal spaces are inherently tetrahedronal, External spaces are conventionally cubic. (were we rational about external space we'd think about it as tetrahedronal. this would fix the dualist mess we're in and restore the 'as above so below' paradigm to its universal and central place; but hey, they still use inches in the us..)

In a nutshell, that's what Pythagoras would seem to be whispering.

To sum up the premise once more:

Consider that an axiom stating the following is missing from the mysteries: 
the inside is a unitive space of 4 irreducible forces at 60 degree angles...
the outside is a set of 3 irreducible axes at 90 degree angles.

the inside (heaven/celestial/zodiac) drives the outside (earth/terrestrial/houses)
outside and inside relate .. much as a baby in the womb.

an expert astrologer combines the 100% qualitative understanding of a newborn
with the 100% quantitative understanding of a scientist.  ars et scientia!
Astrology today contains all this as well the mistaken assumption that we can express the irreducible four in terms of duality. we can't. if we could, science would speak of two irreducible forces, two letters in the dna.. and it does not.
We can not explain the four in dual terms. To keep trying would seem rather insane!

 

The fundamental error in astrology

Over 25 years as a software developer I've read computer code written by lots of people and in the process I've learned a few things about how thoughts are given shape.

So, when I look at the classic 8-fold pattern of zodiacal analysis I see two 4-quadrant systems on top of one another where one is rotated 45 degrees.

This is the same kind of pattern we see in the trigrams of Chinese cosmology. In the BaGua we see a complementary arrangement. This arrangement emphasizes the perfect balance between heavenly and earthly realms. This gives man a tool to navigate the dualities contained in the world. It has nothing to do with Astrology.

The two systems of four integrated by classic astrology model the relations between the internal realm of elemental forces and that of the external realm of duality.

Subtle as this difference may be, it is a profound one.

The Elements of Fire, Air, Water and Earth relate to the four fundamental forces known to science as the strong and weak nuclear force, electro-magnetism and gravity. The forces are fundamental. They do not reduce to one another, they are the building blocks of nature. In a similar way our genetic code consist of four letters which also do not reduce any further. The Elements, Forces and Letters of DNA represent interior space. And they are shown at the 45 degree angles of what Patrice Guinard calls "The Dominion".

On the horizontal and vertical axes of this classic grid of superimposed domains are shown the Qualities. Like much of the surface experience in life these are dualistic. Qualities go between wet and not wet, hot and not hot. These dualisms in the exterior nature are usually summarized as hot, cold, wet and dry.

Probably due to the death of whoever unleashed the overlay, the distinction between these fundamentally different systems of attribution would appear to have gotten lost early in the history of the art.

Suddenly people forgot the difference between internal and external realms!

And confusion ensued!

Soon people began describing the Elements in terms of qualities as if this description had a reality all of its own. In fact, all that happened was that the map-readers mistook the map for the territory and for centuries hilarity ensued.

Eventually, fed up with the confusion of the well meaning map-readers the intellectuals of the 18th century came up with a way of reasoning without the metaphors and the age of Enlightenment began.

This has brought us much progress, but were it not for the Buddhists who kept the symbols pure and clearly distinct from one another, we might have even greater confusion today that we already have. What they did was rather simple. By distinguishing the 8-fold path as relating to two types of meditation in four forms they prevented the kind of excessive rationalization suffered by original western system.

Designating Sitting, Standing, Walking and being on your back as the four forms in which you meditate with eyes open and eyes closed, they even managed to encode the origin of exterior and interior components into the system. It does not take a genius to realize that duality is exterior as perceived with two eyes, nor do you really need to discuss that the interior sight you have with closed eyes is singular in nature.

But we're talking about the western stuff. While perhaps we forgot that there was a difference between dualist exterior vision and the integrated interior vision we managed to salvage the notion of three worlds, of reality developing in three distinct ways and would eventually engineer the 12 fold zodiac.

In the zodiac, at least in the west, we never really distinguished the mess we had originally made of the original overlay. To this day people will get rather defensive and act confused if you ask them to explain how the heck we went from the so-called eight to the twelve.

I don't think that the archeologists of thought have ever really understood this. Not that there is a problem with either a 12 or 8 fold division, but the fact is that to this day we act as if the 12 fold division was complete by itself.

This seriously hobbles astrology! To this day even top notch astrologer carelessly confuse the internal nature of the elements with the external nature of the qualities simply because instead of using one zodiac for the heavenly and one for the earthly realm they took the intuition of the intermingling of these world and went on to use houses and signs.

But this just extended the original mess! Houses, belonging to the earthly realm should use the directions and qualities but not the elements. The zodiac, properly understood is the realm of the elemental forces. The incarnation or hour and locale of an arbitrary chart determines the intersection of these forces.

Classically a horoscope is cast when our completeness exits the interior realm of the womb and enters the dualistic exterior realm of the world.

These were not lazy people! Hermeneutic thinking is a demanding art, but something must have happened that let an error of this magnitude creep into. Exactly how and what happened would be the topic of a different paper.