If what I had to present was in any way helpful at all, then it was worth the time putting it together. As I’ve been interacting with the Meru material since 1986, my experience has shown that words alone cannot begin to convey the richness of what Stan is discovering. There are, however, so many pictures and graphics that it is difficult to decide which might be most helpful. If you have the time and patience, the Meru website is packed with them, along with some animations that help make some of the ideas more accessible.
We all have lives and those lives make demands that must be met. That’s just how it goes. Fortunately, we have developed technologies (like texts and books and films and forums) that allow us to continue conversations that would otherwise simply have broken off. I can give you a brief summary, but you will also be able to review in more detail what we talked about once Marco posts the session video. He’s very good at doing that in a timely manner, too.
To put it in my own words, Marco’s exceedingly welcome skeptical speech culminated in what may be the most profound and insightful question we can ask (and again, these are my words, not his): So what? When all is said and done – though much more needs to be done and is being done, and will continue to be done – what is it all good for? Corollary questions include, “Do I have to become a math genius to get what’s going on?” This was enhanced by John sharing some information on a book he’s come across from a woman who gained some high-level math abilities after some trauma and which she was exploring with Louis Kauffman, one of the leading knot theorists (and who oddly enough is, I believe, also on the board of directors of the Meru foundation … small world). These two seemingly disparate items provided, however, the theme of our wrap-up chat, namely experience.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Flatland, but if you haven’t, it’s worth the time (it’s a novella, not a tome, and it’s available online, of course), but even if you have, it’s worth revisiting for it deals with the very fundamental issue of how a higher-dimensional being might try to communicate with lower-dimensional ones. One way would be to provide some tool (perhaps a text that explains how) to lead them to having a higher-dimensional experience. The key is, I believe, is that one must experience it.
Vicarious experience, that experience we get from reading or someone telling us something, is a form of experience, no doubt, and it is unique and profound in that we humans are the only self-aware creatures – as far as we know – who have it. Nevertheless, it is the weakest of all experience types, at least to my way of thinking. I can tell you all about planing and sanding wood till its velvety to the touch, for example, and you can certainly get the idea, but nothing surpasses getting a piece of wood and planing and sanding it till it is velvety to the touch. It’s the step from “ah” to “ah-ha!”
What I also find so impressive about Stan’s work is the linking development of the gestures for expressing the text. Humans are the only self-aware creatures on this planet, at least, who point. We “know” about it and how it works at an extremely early age. It is essential to our human development. (Raymond Tallis explores the phenomena in a very entertaining and insightful little book entitled Michaelangelo’s Finger which you also might find worth a read some time.) We point with our hands, to be sure, but we also point with language in general, but the physical act of positioning your hands, arms, or whole body (the text could be danced as well), as John is wont to say, embodies the experience. It’s not just a stream of sounds coming into your ear, it is – much like Tai Chi exercises (which I believe are about the same thing) – a more (w)holistic mode of experiencing something very specific.
Finally, we also came back around to Arthur Young to his assertion that the photon is toroidal, as are we, as is the universe … the interconnection among us at all levels of manifestation … and how even very abstract notions in physics – such as the 1/2 spin of subatomic particles – can be found even unexpectedly elsewhere in our human activities. The movements of the dancer’s hands in the Philippine wine dance, for example outline this (also known as the Dirac string trick): 1/2 half the “knot” defines 1/2 the surface of the 2-torus.
One thing is clear about Stan’s work: there is a high level of intelligence present in the text of Genesis. He and colleagues have done similar research into other, non-sacred texts, and you don’t find this kind of internal coherency and consistency, and certainly not at the letter level. The consequences of the notion that the “letters” may in fact – as tradition maintains – the literal building blocks of creation are very far-reaching, and, by their very nature, exceedingly difficult for, say, more materialistically minded individuals to accept. By the same token, the universality of his findings is, of course, exceedingly difficult for those religionists who assert the exclusivity of their own belief system to accept. There are lots of folks who have a vested interest in rejecting this work. I think that’s a shame, for it seems to be that we have some sound, well-documented, evidence-based ideas here that show that science and religion have a lot more in common than we have come to believe since Descartes rendered them assunder, but more importantly, a wide range of cultural and religious are all dealing with a reality that goes much deeper than their superficial commonality that it’s nice to be nice to others.
I have been encouraged by the Meru work for it also shows us that our forebears may have “known” and been aware of such things without necessarily “knowing” any of the rather abstract, esoteric mathematics involved. The math path is one way to get there, I am sure, but it is not the only way. What is more, if evidence of these very basic, fundamental principles can be found in everyday activities (such as folk dancing) as well as in sacred or religious-based activities, then I have hope (which I know is a very non-curmudgeony notion) that even “the least among us” can “get it”. And whatever that “it” might be, it might be well worth getting.
OK, this was longer than the “brief” you asked for … but if you eliminate all my editorializing, it’s not so bad.