PRECESSION AS AN ENGINE OF CULTURAL CHANGE
THE PRECESSIONAL MYTHOLOGY OUTLINED in chapter 1 tells us there were some quite-advanced ideas about precession in the prehistoric period that employed a set of creative metaphors for its appearance and behavior. In the ensuing chapters, I have tried to paint a bigger picture in which our cultural history appears to evolve its consciousness within the dynamics of changing equinox signs. This reveals humanity’s predicament in needing to take definite cultural steps that are orchestrated according to precession time that is itself organized in the image of a transformational cycle.
We can look back over half of this precession, assuming a starting point of twelve thousand years ago, to the end of the last ice age. This human journey first turned outward, toward an understanding of the visible structure of the universe. Then it turned to the structure of the number field that underlies creation. This set us on a path of technical and religious change that started the medium of written records—the recording of history. This outward-looking gaze found its terminus in our own scientific age, as physical sciences overwhelmed the idea of a God who organized and continues to organize the world directly. Technology, based upon this science, has led to the proliferation of devices and information that have a massive impact upon society today. Indeed, a single generation has now witnessed multiple sociotechnological upheavals.
Within this recent period, the narrative of the culture is no longer shaped by the culture itself but by its technology and its media in particular. This means there is a problem of initiative, for it is tempting us to be passive in the belief that the future will bring ever greater technologically achieved happiness. Such passivity is not making conscious decisions but rather is dominated by the physical and emotional. The present human culture is falling into a state where the intellectual brain, emotions, and actions rarely act as a single whole, and those instances usually occur only by accident. This means that citizens act like two-brained or even one-brained beings, which is like thinking animals or even insects. There is therefore a considerable risk of the cultural moon overwhelming human nature altogether in this age of so-called rationality—where the culture is undermining the evolution of human consciousness.
If there are cosmic energies that humans can transform, then the human work of receiving and altering them is important. Again, Gurdjieff provides unique clues.
THE LIFE OF IMPRESSIONS
We have defined the three types of food for humans: food, air, and impressions, and impressions prove to be a very special kind of food. “Neither air nor food can be changed. But impressions, that is, the quality of the impressions possible to man, are not subject to any cosmic law.”1
Impressions can come from different levels of the cosmos, and they appear to be something fundamental to the universe that makes itself known—a property we have called intelligibility. This allows for human consciousness, which can make available something in the lower worlds that can bridge the limitations of these worlds and thereby redeem them.
Impressions are not simply remembered experience, but, rather, impressions are experiences that remember themselves, that crystallize within our being as something that can be further digested. In Gurdjieff’s concept of work on ourselves, the objective is to enable impressions to evolve into a cosmic will based upon understanding them. If humans receive impressions that carry higher vibrations—this amounts to “will doing being” rather than “being doing will.” Ordinarily, we view ourselves as beings or sources of initiative who project our aims onto the world (our environment), rather as if we were creators. Instead, initiative involves impressions, and we can serve only their development within us. This development can project outward onto materialization of thought and inward onto self-development. In this view, we are co-creators with impressions. There is doing or action in which we can participate, and the higher worlds approach us via the law of seven, a process, rather than through agencies or beings, as religions have proposed.
Higher reality comes to us in a raw form, as impressions, and derives from a common source: a substance corresponding to the latent intelligibility of the universe. The common source substance, or reality, is will. This notion of will as coming from above corresponds to familiar religious ideas: that will originates in the higher worlds and the need for humans to respond to the will of God or the gods. Our ideas about saints, for example, include the story that they have been cleansed and therefore able to receive information from higher worlds. The need for a preparatory process corresponds to Gurdjieff’s sacred sevenfold Heptaparaparshinokh, in its articulation of the will through cumulative actions and also to the compositional structure of storytelling.
As a procedure for doing, the law of seven takes an initial impulse and develops it. Impressions form the raw material of any impulse, which can come from any level through the medium of environment, codified here as the moon. Their further development can become blocked by the first semitone interval if we do not find in the environment something that corresponds to them and that can revivify them. In this way, a work will not proceed without transforming something in the environment to our own use. All of this involves the path of expansion for an impression within the world. In the second half of the octave—and in a story composition—the type of activity changes. It becomes that of perfecting and sacrificing all that is unnecessary in order to leave only what is then understood. This understanding is then the intelligible energy of the original impression transformed through a sacred action.
The last two Stopinders of the new law of seven are the means for realizing will, establishing the Trogoautoegocratic process upon which the universe was based. The new form of this law enabled the evolution of higher energies, seeded into the lower worlds as impressions, to return enriched by the necessary work that transforms those impressions. Those impressions that are untransformed are simply undigested and are recycled within nature; they have never truly incarnated. Beings who transform higher impressions are themselves transformed, but this cannot be achieved without some work on themselves, through which they learn to submit to the process.
MAN CANNOT DO WITHOUT INNOVATION
It becomes clearer why Gurdjieff said “everything happens, no one does anything.”2 Everyday, humans do things on every level, but we mistakenly identify ourselves as the source of those actions. Most of the superstructure of developing an ego and personality through an actual life within society ensures that the actions we take are personal. As a result, the idea of recognizing an impression as significant, fostering it until it develops a form, making an extra effort to perfect it, and allowing only the realization of what is essential—all this seems quite impossible to achieve. Yet we can achieve these, because they involve only operating with what is doable at each stage—not as saints or holy men, but people of the next stage in cultural development. In a sense, we must take from Gurdjieff what we can work with; not what is possible for the highest development of three-brained beings.
The history of humans is the story of doing what is possible and then finding the help of an invisible, serendipitous hand. Indeed, if our history were too miraculous it would also be broken history—for it would no longer be a path of development achieved by human beings. By introducing just a few ideas about impressions and process and combining them in our age (in which information and technology are almost fully realized), perhaps the life of our ordinary impressions can find a path of development that does not require the full rigors of spiritual work on ourselves.
If we cannot do or act from a place of self-sufficiency, then we can at least follow instructions, which is exactly what happens with the use of technology. In a sense, we have become slaves to machines, and today they develop us more than nature. It is likely that impressions arriving on Earth led to modern technology. Transformed into technology, these impressions have represented a hidden intervention in human life.
It would be useful to have a technique that can help transform impressions. Technology can play a necessary role in making easy what was once difficult as an externalization of our own development. A clairvoyant may not need a telephone, but a phone makes much of his or her capability available to those who need it.
THE ARISING OF FORM
The academics who study the compositional form of ancient documents are not themselves drawn to write using this form. The techniques of ancient storytelling have languished for hundreds of years, and there are few explicit examples of modern writers who use the old techniques of storytelling. Since narrative speaks of the forms within human life, this ancient technology can be used to understand impressions through the work of constructing a narrative form.
The idea of Form is deeply rooted in the Classical roots of our culture.
Plato’s theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract forms (or ideas) constitute the highest and most fundamental kind of reality, not the material world of change known to us through sensation. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only true objects of study that can provide us with genuine knowledge. . . . Plato spoke of Forms in formulating a possible solution to the problem of universals.3
Plato’s ideal Forms may seem similar to Gurdjieff’s impressions, and Plato held a harmonic concept of how the world was structured similar to that of Gurdjieff. This sentiment led, however, to an idea of education in which impressions come purely from the forms found in our intellectual structuring of the world. This differs from Gurdjieff’s idea of impressions being experiences of a three-centered (or “three-brained”) human being. Plato’s ideas, instead, tend toward the intellectual educational norm that has deeply influenced the modern world of the rational. While intelligible structures are abstract constructs, they are also the experience of receiving them through all three centers, and it is this that makes them real impressions.
The intelligible world we find in numbers cannot exist as we experience existence, because a higher world is less subject to existence and to the effect of time that mixes up intelligibility. Plato’s Form is, therefore, intelligibility in the abstract. Instead, impressions are an everyday sense of a meaningful experience exactly because they are a communication between the cosmos and the biosphere taking place in us.
An impression relates to a moment of time in which there is a sense of latent meaning peculiar to the moment, of our selfhood and our environmental conditions.
Forms, on the other hand, may be
- universal, such as number,
- cosmic, as in astronomical objects and physics,
- evolutionary, as in the species of evolved animal types,
- descriptive, as in artifacts such as a table or a car,
- social, as in behaviors and institutions.
All these types of form are unified by our abstracted consciousness, which becomes an internalized nexus of meaning, and this can buffer us from the meaning of real impressions.
Gurdjieff said the third food of impressions is our continuous receipt of the meaning of our world. He suggested that we would die in days without food and water, within minutes without air, and within moments without impressions.
Impressions are therefore sandwiched between the stream of personal experience and an abstract mind that holds the picture of what we believe the world to be. An impression as information cannot compete with the formatory apparatus—Gurdjieff’s term for our abstract worldview—if it conflicts with such a strongly held view about the world. Though an impression’s content consists of the same descriptive archetypes that we have learned to recognize within our abstract worldview, its vibrational energy generates an experience that is unusually memorable and meaningful. Such impressions can progress if they are recognized as significant and, only then, certain insights formed from them—though these cannot progress further without reinforcement from outside, the third Stopinder that must come from our environment.
To become food for us, these impressions must correlate with something new about the form of the world itself, and not simply reinforce the picture of the world already in our abstract mind. Impressions that transform into a new understanding can change the way we look at the world and the way we act.
Gurdjieff presented impressions as having three different sources. Here is a summary by Anthony Blake: “There are three main kinds of impression, which differ according to their source. Ordinary impressions come from the Earth and its surface. The second kind come from the Sun and the other planets, and the third from the ultimate source of reality Gurdjieff calls ‘The Most Holy Sun Absolute.’ Higher impressions can somehow ‘lodge’ in us but remain unassimilated, when they ‘languish’ inside us.”4
From this perspective, major cultural achievements are not produced by our unaided efforts, and cultures themselves come from impressions received from higher, cosmic sources. If we can find a way to work with these cosmic sources, then these impressions have the power to bring about the appropriate changes to cultural life that relate to precessional time.
If the evolution of consciousness is driven entirely through the lives of individuals, and groups are able to work with higher impressions, no miracles are necessary. Free will is not compromised when we choose to work with higher influences and receive their implicit will to change the world. Centralizing organizations, such as states and religions, can support this only through maintaining conducive environments for the reception of higher influences—that is, through maintaining environments for their own cultural moon. Individual will, however, must have additional special environments to develop new and different ideas.
EVOLUTION FROM BELOW
The creation of higher energies from lower energies, as seen in the car engine, is the basis of most technologies. An internal combustion engine, through its design as an apparatus, turns heat (dispersed energy) into motion (directed energy). To do this, the higher energy found in fuels (a molecular or connected energy) explodes within a cylinder whose piston can move in only one direction. This apparatus, like living bodies, takes something higher from the environment (a fuel) to make something lower (the heated explosion) into a desired middle (a motive force), exactly according to Gurdjieff’s law of triamazikamno or threefoldness.
The energy of the higher must be available, but it cannot increase order within a less ordered world without a suitable apparatus to make use of it. Forest fires are natural, but cars harness the energy of combustion according to our technical insight. Life was also based on this principle of necessary apparatus. This is the whole raison d’etre of the universe in Gurdjieff’s view: the universe always strives to create apparatus within itself to generate something new.
The application of our intelligence to the task of interacting with cosmic energies relies on at least two key ideas similar to those present in the invention of the car. The first: to identify higher energies that can be assimilated. In the case of the car, this is a fuel formed millions of years ago by the biosphere, and in the case of human beings, it is the cosmic energy latent in our impressions. The second key idea: an apparatus constructed to transform cosmic energies into something greater than would otherwise exist.
Perhaps an apparatus could help cosmic energies to interact better with human consciousness if it avoided what normally happens to impressions. An apparatus for extracting higher energies from the environment would replace the wrong notion that we can already think about them without such an apparatus. The goal would be to generate actions informed by what is really meant by our impressions. Such actions would come naturally if we did not already think we knew what to do. A new technology might achieve this, instead of special training.
Before moving on to how we might better understand our impressions, it will be helpful to investigate how the internal combustion engine actually employs the law of seven. The internal combustion engine starts its octave with some momentum, which is usually available from the working engine but is initially provided by a starter motor or, in times past, by a starting handle. Do1 is therefore this angular momentum.
Twelve semitone intervals are required to achieve the seven notes in an octave. In figure 7.1, four semitones are piston strokes and three are valve actions for exhaust and a delayed fuel intake before and after the carburetor that mediates the fuel and air from outside. All of the key semitones are in the fifth and sixth Stopinder, which concern exploding a compressed fuel mixture and directing this explosion. The seventh Stopinder completes the aim of the engine in accelerating its crankshaft and providing the power of the explosion through a transmission system.
Figure 7.1. The law of seven as exemplified by the internal combustion (four-stroke) engine. The state of the engine becomes more sophisticated as the cycle proceeds. There are interesting oppositions and levels—such as force opposite the fuel mixture (which describes the basic idea), and the explosion is on the same level as the vacuum, which is conceptually an implosion.
The central axis of the cycle has potential energy at the turn below and angular momentum at the latch above—a momentum that provides a perfect and necessary connection by keeping the engine turning and by making continuous the flow of power to the transmission.
In the absence of fuel, the first two Stopinders can be given energy to function as a vacuum pump, which is what they are. By adding the later Stopinders, we can draw into the later strokes a chemical energy to create a lesser energy of heat, which, in the form of a constrained explosion, can work to move the piston, and this work is transmitted through the crankshaft of the engine, which translates linear force into rotational acceleration and momentum.
TRANSFORMING ENERGIES THROUGH TASKS
Human experience operates using three energies as yet unknown by science. Much of what we do is automatic, and we can do things that we have learned with little or no further attention to how to do them. When we need to learn a new activity, we need a sensitive energy in which our attention is aware of exactly what is happening. Just as short-term memory progresses to long-term memory, so too the sensitive experience of learning is replaced by the automatic skill to act.
There would be no need for any higher energy if we did not need to understand, if we did not have a capacity to read what is intelligible about the world. This higher energy is associated with conscious as opposed to sensitive awareness, for which it is often mistaken.
Because we are potentially creative beings, we can touch upon a further energy that is harder to recognize, for only its results can be seen—when we see that the world has been changed. Therefore, this creative energy can only be seen as a reality by conscious energy that finds a creative solution where there was not one before. Many people can stand before a creative solution and not recognize that something special lies before them.
Only the lower two energies—automatism and sensitivity—belong to the living being, to Life. The other two—consciousness and creativity—arise as part of cosmic actions that are intelligible and creative. The border between the living and the cosmic is therefore found exactly where we find the two most significant energies to human activity—that is, the sensitive and the conscious. Therefore, any work we do is either sensitive or conscious. In a sensitive work, we can rearrange, and in a conscious work, we can understand what is there.
As humans we can be compared to an apparatus like the car engine: the sensitive and conscious energies are the only energies available for the working of such an engine, and so these activities must be organized. Yet what kind of a work seems most significant to transform one element into a higher element within an octave? According to Gurdjieff, we have the constant impression that we are alive, and humans are constantly called into action. Remembering the idea that the world is intelligible, it is this intelligibility that lies behind the world of impressions. As intelligent creatures, there are things we humans can do, based on the intelligibility of the world coming to us through impressions. Yet the impressions do not say, “Noah, build an ark.” Instead, they might say, “Boat building summer school” as an advertisement and “Climatologist Heads for the Hills” as a headline.
There exists a system for doing based on impressions—a system that has been developed since Gurdjieff’s time called Logo Visual Technology (LVT).*9 As with the car engine, what it does can be viewed within the structure of an octave, from impressions to actions.
The five processes of LVT—Focus, Gather, Organize, Integrate, and Realize—function as the five whole tone intervals of the octave, but each of these can be further split into two semitone tasks, one in which sensitivity is employed and the second in which consciousness must be employed in order to see what has been done using sensitivity. These can be shown as a table.
Working backward, we can say that almost everything we do today in the human world is based upon the worldview held by each one of us or as a group. Thus, there is already a strong path to action if we can create a new worldview. The sensitive task of understanding a worldview leads to the conscious task of realizing what that view calls us to do.
Working forward, from the start of this octave, we can note that the continuous stream of impressions is mixed and must be ordered. By noticing the impressions using sensitive energy, we must have a consciousness task that can recognize a significant boundary within which to concentrate our work. Gurdjieff called this task that of forming a real aim that becomes the seed that requires a new worldview to succeed.
Once such a real aim has arisen, we can begin the sensitive task of gathering insights from impressions with respect to that aim, which then act like a magnet for relevant impressions. Each insight must then be transformed by articulation, a task for consciousness, in order to create a molecule of meaning—a small but well-formed statement—from which the Logo part of LVT comes.
So far, LVT does not seem very different from brainstorming; the subject of a brainstorm is a question, problem, or topic, and the ideas produced by brainstorming are written down, like molecules of meaning. At this point, though, a brainstorm comes to a halt as a technique exactly because the third Stopinder is a semitone requiring an impulse from outside the process. LVT bridges this requirement by placing the written molecules of meaning on a set of identical physical objects so that together they create an externalized environment of independent meaning objects. These can then be moved around and connected to each other so that corresponding vibrations, contained within them, can bridge this semitone of the law of seven.
This connection of related meaning objects is a sensitive task called clustering, which leads to a set of grouped objects that have some potential meaning when we consider them together. The task for consciousness is then to find a name for that which each cluster holds in common—a task that is called a distillation. Each distillation statement infers the domain of meaning to which a cluster of meaning objects points, inference being an act involving conscious energy.
It is worth noting that conscious tasks are more difficult than sensitive tasks, because they create something definite out of an undefined sensitive awareness; they create the words of a real aim, molecules of meaning, and the naming of domains by using language in an accurate way.
The new domains of meaning are usually 1/3 or 1/4 of the number of meaning objects, which brings them into the range of episodes found in a ring composition of manageable size. At this stage it becomes relevant to connect the disciplines of ring composition to the fact that the stories produced by these techniques became influential worldviews. We are therefore growing close to connecting the impressions at do1 with the actions at do2 if the domains of meaning formed using LVT can be organized in the form of a narrative.
To achieve a narrative requires that the domains of meaning be sequenced, in a task for sensitivity. Though the domains are not a narrative in time, they can be given a pseudo-causal order, which makes some sort of a story out of them. If we can see any given domain as flowing naturally from another or as preceding it, like a set of dominos having compatible ends, then a single pathway through the domains of meaning can be forged and each transition between domains merely needs to be plausible.
Once we create a narrative, we can note a beginning, an ending, and a middle, which will create the latch and turn of a ring composition as soon as the domains are re-displayed in a cyclic fashion. The parallelism between left and right will also emerge. As with the explosion within a car engine, the second semitone of this, the fifth Stopinder, is unusual. In this case, the task of consciousness is formed by the act of displaying a narrative in cyclic form, which naturally generates the new and powerful insights found within a worldview (see figure 7.2).
The task for sensitivity within a ring composition is to play with the different perspectives it provides in order to develop some understanding of what these perspectives mean. At any time there will arise moments of consciousness that will realize what the constructed world-view reveals that can be done (see figure 7.3). If we have an authentic relationship to our subject, then a will can emerge that has its roots in our do1 of impressions but has been transformed by the intentionally-actualizing-Mdnel-In into a do2 of creative actions.
A WORLDVIEW FOR PRECESSION
It is clear that the modern world has been accelerating, which means that time itself has become subjectively faster—largely because there is a great deal going on that drives human events. But it is technology that has increased the pace of change, and each of the past cultures contributed to this acceleration. We have already proposed that cultures will naturally cause such an acceleration and that, while the moon orbits Earth, our satellite’s realm of manifestation is actually in the biosphere and the cultures that ride on top of the biosphere.
If we apply the harmonic model to this cultural change, then we discover that new notes are produced by the intervals of precessional time associated with major cultural themes. A new note is a higher vibration, and, seen from the perspective of time, it is an acceleration of the subjective flow of time produced by cultures that provide, within themselves, new and easier ways of doing things. This means that while precession is a story in twelve chapters, it is also an octave in which the quickening of consciousness is caused by the cumulative effect of cultural development.
Figure 7.2. The process of turning impressions into creative action according to the medium of Logo Visual Technology (LVT). The five Stopinders of activity have sensitive and conscious tasks, each worth a semitone. The third Stopinder is facilitated by combining text with moveable objects to build a logo-visual environment in which the meaning objects can reciprocally relate to each other in the task of clustering. Through the consciousness task of distillation, the domains of meaning are few enough to be sequenced as a narrative and so made into a worldview using ring composition. The well-known power of worldviews to evoke actions based upon such worldviews can then complete the octave, because the intentionally-actualized Mdnel-In is derived from the worldview and the activity of generating it.
Success creates growth and acceleration, and when cultures fail they leave room for the growth of new cultures. For such cultures, this growth is from a higher point and includes skills that have already been won and are not themselves destroyed with the original culture that brought them forth. Great civilizations have passed along a surprising number their important gains to later civilizations, but they must wane themselves as a direct cultural influence if there are to be significantly new cultures to follow. The harmonic model, therefore, fits with today’s experience of extreme acceleration and of the last twelve thousand years as a gradual build up in vibration where the cultural tempo appears to grow faster.
Figure 7.3. An experimental medium for enabling insights based upon impressions (our life experiences) to be transformed into a motivational ring composition. The viewer is in the position of the latch and is opposite the turn. The story begins on the left and ends on the right, and levels of meaning run up the axis of the story, mediating left and right. These levels are used to realize what we want to do based upon this narrative as a worldview.
For these reasons, the law of seven might apply to the precessional cycle. Given the previous analysis of how an apparatus raises energy to follow the law of seven, then we can see that the twelve precessional ages are naturally semitones that raise the vibratory level of cultural intensity, as in an apparatus.
The third Stopinder is the Age of Aries (see figure 7.4) in which written history and numerical notation created a great expansion of the cultural moon. We may compare this to the intake of fuel in an engine and particularly with the Logo Visual environment (of the previous section) in which meaningful objects are created to bridge the third Stopinder. It appears that the acceleration of consciousness is a function of the amount of cultural knowledge in circulation. The expansion of printing, literacy, and other mechanisms has each created an acceleration.
Writing and numerical notation were each a spin-off of the Megalithic period that empowered the next semitone to be bridged through the formation of an extensive cultural environment in which vibrations could combine. The result was a consolidation of religious symbolism and texts designed through harmonic realities. Out of a pantheistic cloud there condensed a monotheistic God who was involved in a battle between good and evil that would be broadcast to the world.
Figure 7.4. A cultural map of the precessional cycle
If there are energies of consciousness and creativity that are cosmic, that are not generated by life itself, then these pass through intelligent life as part of Gurdjieff’s ray of creation. The modern condition has been caused in part by our thinking that we are naturally conscious and that we are already creative in the cosmic sense. If we are actually conscious or creative according to cosmic impulses that work through us, then the exact opposite of what we think is happening. This is perhaps the best way to explain why there is such a great problem and opportunity today in recognizing that consciousness and creativity are gifts as opposed to being naturally inherent.
THE SCIENCE OF STRUCTURAL WORK
Gurdjieff’s law of seven is significantly different from the science of musical harmony in that the law of seven attributes notes as higher and stable levels of structure. The intervals between these notes are therefore the types of work required to transform one stable structure into another. This does not correlate with the experience of musical tones, because their structure is simply a waveform with a given frequency. It seems, however, that the intervals between structural transformations follow the same laws of harmony: the notes of greatest harmony occuring within the model of the major scale.
Structure can be one of two types when it is developed. There is extensive structuring in which a series of components are generated in preparation for a later intensive structuring. In this second phase of structuring, the parts generated in the first phase are assembled to achieve a new stable form, equivalent to achieving a musical note. In a story cycle, the first half is largely development, and the second half largely welds these developments together in such a way as to achieve closure for the story as a whole. All of our cultural artifacts and creations follow this pattern; it is the way in which higher results are produced from existing components in the cultural environment.
When we look at figure 7.4, it may seem a mystery that the Neolithic culture required the Megalithic culture in order to arrive at Bronze Age culture. But, by externalizing the principle of number and cosmic observation, many of the skills involved in making Megalithic structures and measuring astronomical time were later needed for metalworking and for numbers used in trading. Early written language retained a correlation between its alphabetic characters and numbers, revealing that the extensive Megalithic period work regarding number led to subsequent intensive work of studying the laws of number, geometry, music, and astronomy as disciplines—still relevant in Medieval times as the Traditional Arts.
The stories prior to the Megalithic period—stories from the Neolithic period—must have been intensive, because there was no other approach than to subdivide the sky as a whole phenomenon rather than to extensively count time: Megalithic people had to do extensive building work on aspects of this sky phenomenon, revealing time’s numerical structure. This revealed the number field itself as an intensive pattern involved in the cosmic creation.
Structure differentiates types of materiality and gives rise to recognizable identities of forms that, like notes, are stable in their own right. A comet, a brain, and intestines share the characteristic of having an extra fractional dimension; they are all more than simply three-dimensional, a difference called complexity. New capabilities arise with fractal dimensionality because of their increased intensive structure. Sometimes, the surface area increases and at other times, it is the number of connections between parts that allows new behaviors to arise for the system as a whole.
The inner connectedness of a worldview, shown as a ring composition, is an externalized statement of the connectedness of the world. This makes it perform better than simply talking, thinking, or writing linear texts. An extra fractal dimension appears with the inner connections and those who wrote ring compositions employed this extra dimensionality. It appears that we have a structural side to our being perhaps because we have two eyes, two sides, and an up and a down with which we work at making meaning.
When we draw a circle we present a view that, when populated, becomes a world. This world is a blank piece of paper for the side of us that lives on a sensitive screen upon which our world paints itself. A painting is a work of an experience and not of what is present in reality. An experience is a structuring of reality and is not reality itself. Some may have higher experiences when others in the same situation do not.
We are natural structures of meaning and only became scientific recorders of the exact nature of the universe by sacrificing ourselves to the factual. The movement into structure reveals a harmonic nature to experience that can evolve through extensive and intensive work so that new structures of meaning can be achieved. Because we did not create the universe, we can do things only by working on structures in the appropriate way. Any culture that succeeds ours may recognize the implicit structure of situations and develop ways to communicate using a developed structural science.