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Overview
This is a follow-up session to the Cosmos Cafe from 9 January.
When we met last, we took a look at the Creation Story in Genesis (1:1-25) both in regard to its status as mythology and as a potential statement of fact. The former is the common understanding, the latter an apparently outrageous claim. After providing a bit of background to alternative understandings of the text – primarily via Kabbalah (in a very general sense) – we took a closer look at the work of the Meru Foundation and Stan Tenen’s explorations into what he calls the “geometric metaphors” of the text.
The text appears to be self-correcting; that is, self-referential, and generates a number of geometric models, one of which is the 2-torus (doughnut shape), which some scientists (such as Einstein, Eddington, and Young) believe to be the shape of the universe. The defining topological feature of this form provides a way to describe two, three, and four dimensional views of life in geometric terms. Derived from these findings, Meru has developed a model of Continuous Creation that goes a long way in helping to understand and clarify a wide range of metaphors from various spiritual and religious traditions. One very significant result is the discovery of a system for gesturing the individual Hebrew letters, thereby enabling us to produce what might be called an embodied expression of the text.
In this session, we would like to further explore the Meru findings of course, but also answer questions that may have arisen in the interim and possibly to explore further ramifications of these results.
Seed questions
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Having had some time to think about it (or not), and aside from details already raised in the follow-up thread online, what do you think is going on in the text, and what consequences do you see arising from that?
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What is the relationship, for you, of the Book of Genesis (given its multi-dimensionality we’re discussing here) and the Ever-Present Origin? Do you believe that Origin is coded in the various ways we find in Genesis? (ToH to Marco)
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What is the relationship between encoding, shape, and information? And, is there anything you believe to be inherently ethical about shapes or numbers? (ToH Marco)
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How does the beginning of the Gospel of John ("In the beginning was the Word… ") in the New Testament relate to the geometry of the Old Testament origin story we are exploring? (ToH Marco)
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How many dimensions or order – text, sound, grapheme, meta-, etc. – are there, and how do we write poetry in all those dimensions?
Inputs and backstory stuff
Agenda Items
- Scheduling upcoming cafés… Abhivanagupta & Tantra, Models of Hyperspace, etc. See Cosmos Café: Season 1 [November, 2017 – March, 2018] - #19 by madrush
Café sessions
- Cosmos Café: Time, Space, & The Hebrew Alphabet [2018-01-09]
- Cosmos Café: Alternate Ways of Knowing [12/12]
- Cosmos Café: Disambiguating Space and Time [12/5/17]
- Cosmos Café: Synchronicity and Modeling Time [11/28/17]
- Cosmos Café: Fractal Time in Everyday Life [11/21]
- Cosmos Café: The Reflexive Universe, by Arthur Young [11/14]
References
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Haber, Bill (n.d.) “Meru Made Easy: An Informal Introduction to Meru Research” [online].
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Kinney, Jay (1986) “A Higher Geometry”, Gnosis Magazine, No. 3, Fall/Winter, pp.34-35.
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Tenen, Stan (2011) The Alphabet That Changed The World: How Genesis Preserves a Science of Consciousness in Geometry and Gesture, Edited by Charles Stein, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA.