Missed you and I'll see you all again wednesday. But before I go I'll leave you with this missive from my sleep deprived brain. It may be useful, but you can skip it.

Cheers, Michael

I wrote this for the thought so that its not going to become a rant later on...

Seriously, as I mentioned earlier, in my better moments I look at thoughts as things and whenever my mind turns to Wilber I see a tetrahedron. I'm not sure anybody else sees that or has slightest clue about what that signifies to me or intrinsically. (*)

(*) funny how in the bits i'm reading right now wilber would say that value is lefthanded and given by me... i'm rooting for the bits where he talks as value and meaning supervening and being intrinsic higher order connection points.. but i digress..

besides being easily made by playing with your food tetrahedrons are the simplest three dimensional thing money can buy! Look at this page for my favorite picture of one: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tetrahedron.html

Can you tell my favorite? its the first one in the 2nd row. Its the one most cleverly hiding the dimensionality of the very first of the solids. See.. before the tetrahedron gots its last star it used to live in flatland where things where a mess and everything was fragmented and complicated. so it has its roots there and it can flash you its behind making itself look like a cross or the top view of a pyramid.. but its neither.

Grids and linearity are 'male', right-handed and classically (has been since the dark ages) the most acceptable language to use. but like all language its a perspective and a projection which Wilber is using with a lot fewer (none so far) disclaimers than I would have expected.

I'm not sure what's going on here, I see him talk about 'higher' and 'maya' and 'logos' and 'unification by decending' (!) AND i don't see those concepts springing into my head from the visuals I'm getting. Quite the contrary!

In the grid the center is a) a primitive level, b) simply a place of orthogonality and opposition, c) boring and objectionable. All evolution is outwards, away from center, differentiating and not integrating anything!

So the mystic over here is wanting to mention to the guy that perhaps something's missing.. I say there's no point in continuing to work with 2D projections of what we're thinking about and that perhaps nobody's noticed that the tetrahedron is/was and probably will be the quintessential lever that when applied will straighten things out.

(Perhaps this would be a good place to admit that two of the early books to influence my mind in puberty were mt paradox (forgot its name) and one called flatland. mt paradox taught that a 3rd party wins in every conflict and flatland that all dimensions share all other dimensions anyhow anywhere. That was wild at 18 and its no less so today)

In the past, say in Taoism they will call the pure void heavenly mystery endpoint the source of heaven, man (who bridges), and earth.. which then by their heavenly nature repeat the same thing on the concrete plane. Later in Judaism we find the Star of David representing the interaction of heaven and earth (imagine a man drawn in the center), elsewhere we find it as the Celtic Cross and the Gordian Knot. The entirety of alchemy and the hermeneutic system of astrology are based on this geometry.. and while nuts get lost in those corners, sane people ought to embrace this stuff at the core instead of copying bits and pieces of it..

see... we talk politely about yin and yang, when we really mean 'substance' and 'thought'. the tao is about the synthesis the guy/gal in the middle is asked to master and ever since some monkey decided to point fingers at either side we've been stuck with cosmology that derives from opposition and orthogonality on the outside while on the inside paying shrinks to help us root in our space.

That would all be nice if it was not bullshit. We know its bullshit (on the level of 'its bullshit to identify with these struggles') but we mess with it still. The Mystics get around this all through the tetrahedron (or two or three thousand of them nested inside bigger ones in curious ways) and, for what its worth, so does science!

Witness the math describing the the operations in a flashlight. It relates quantities in four dimensions through a web of 12 formulas where each and every last thing about the math there fits the simple 3d thing we know as the tetrahedron.

For some reason though it seems impolite to use that sort of model as the foundation to integrate our mystical achievements with those that science has spewed upon us and we continue to consume books in mystical language which takes years to absorb and more years to properly utilize simply to get closer to what we know we are anyhow!

Much like you, I do not like this state of affairs and its why I had to speak to the frustration of having to use a differentiating model in order to study integral stuff. that's counter-intuitive! it'd be nice to sex it up and take the pain out of the map! more conducive to rally a revolution with or around then.

I fully understand that by adding one dimension to the model we achieve no ultimate map but that we're doing something like pulling out the thorn that's kept the lion away from the hunt.

And that's huge of course. But perhaps I'm just a heretic soon to meet a fiery death. After all, if Wilber puts the limbic system, emotions, the family and typhonic thought in different corners, then that's where they should stay! How dare some geek point out that they are all items already connected in knowable ways and that each is a well established facet and transformation of the other..

And that's about all for that thought.

If you have a windows computer and like colors btw, take a look at this page: http://www.efg2.com/Lab/Graphics/Colors/index.html and these two demos: http://www.efg2.com/Lab/Graphics/Colors/ColorMix.htm http://www.efg2.com/Lab/Graphics/Colors/MaxwellTriangle.htm

They are 2 dimensional unfortunately but you can see the roots of the earth red+green+blue+black and heaven cyan+yellow+magenta+white colors there and ask yourself why there's beige and orange in spiral dynamics ;) (reflects its commercial spin?)

ARE THERE better visual models on the for pay sites? Can someone snarf and email those to me?

Geez this got long, I better go to sleep.

/waves night.

Michael