OUR GALAXY SPIRALS
When I was three, in the dark, I rubbed my eyes and saw brilliant white spirals, which I named Mr. X the detective.
O. In our sense of separation, an endless ring also pictures lack of choice, submission to rhythms of the dream universe. Even the heroic sun seems to go down on schedule, having no movement out of its rounds. But the sine wave, the spiral, and all things, are always emerging inherently from the sacred seed of zerO. No Thingness opens to balanced opposites, and that circle of balance opens out in free play to the spiral, the dynamic imbalanced horn of plenty, cornucopia, which releases us from our pent-up belief in limitation.
The egg, seen from the bottom, is a ball. Placed on end, it ascends towards birth.
Everything in the world seems circular, and yet we thrust forward: spirals.
The ziggurat, the caduceus in its many forms, the bindu point, the tao, these are all variations on the theme of a rising helix, as in a Shinto shrine. To say a helix (a 3-D sine wave) ascends, rather than lying flat as we’d find a snake, is to suggest it grows, from a bedspring into a spiral. The sine wave of human bondage escapes, is lifted from the waters. A nice metaphor of growing awareness.
Pythagorean wisdom: The rectangle of the golden mean, used to proportion pieces of classic and modern art and architecture, produces an accelerating spiral. Embodied in nature, in the Fibonacci sequence, spirals shape a chambered nautilus, a pine cone, a sunflower, and so on. Square root rectangles likewise generate a spiral employed by the Greeks in proportions of art and (my brother Robert discovered) musical scales.
It’s been pointed out that the continents and their peninsulas, like inverted pyramids, also spiral outwards as they spread North.
A circle in time, it spirals.
A physics fable: In an expanding universe, all objects and interspaces continually and inherently and invisibly are proportionally expanding, like that set of Russian dolls (You can’t see it, since everything’s expanding). So with a circle or oval, such as a classical planetary or atomic orbit, it’s secretly a spiral as it expands. A spiral is an open circle. Openendless. Two of the meanings of the metaphor: 1. We are never just repetitively circling around, we are always opening out. 2. Beginningless beginning is already here.
(See chapter: Science)
Horn. Latin, corn. Hebrew, keren. Horn of plenty: Keren also means Source. And it means ray of light. Einstein confirmed, light rays curve; we travel straight forward across the expanding universe to swing back here, spiraling, enriched.
Ziggurat
“As we sow, so we reap.” Horizontally: Just flatly on this human plane, what we do, we do to ourself; karma. Vertically: Do we sow to the flesh, or to the spiritual plane? Subtly, we’re being raised beyond.
The Sumerian ziggurat turns like a screw. There’s as much of God at the bottom as at the top. In life, we seemingly circle endlessly between contraries, a flood or a drought, trapped by conditioning, paying off our debts, reduced to dust. But with the turning, miraculous grace is constantly reconciling these visions, raising us to wider views, exalting us.
As the wave hunches before the crest appears, as the water heats before boiling, we each build up to ascending levels. Climbing the ramp of a ziggurat, from our step-by-step evolution springs the revolution of a sudden new vista; as we struggle higher the turns are made much faster, though still with the ramp’s built-in smoothness. Our wide, seeking vacillations on the path can tighten as we zero in, while our fruitfulness catches the dervish rhythm.
A spiral travels the longest distance between two points, poetically speaking. It takes our world a good while to affirm its perfection.
Loop after loop. We go beyond this world in meditating, to curve back enriched. Only then can this whole world, that travels away, curve Beyond and back.
Along the spiral a place of perfection appearing, a resting place, a way station which then breaks up, but functions periodically at every rung.
E-volve: rotate out, spiral.
Paradox: As our overarching, bridging Consciousness unites the turmoil of our growth with our hidden homing intent, so in the spiraling seedheads of sunflower and daisy, every new seed is pushed outwards, and each actually follows a direct path straight out.
Pinecone
In the pinecone, every line is slowly spiraling up, never marking time. There are paths patterned at cross-grain to our paths, climbing too. And then we take steep paths up, but they too are on a pitch---we cannot go “straight to God” by following a rigid invariant life plan; there must be adventures and leaps of faith, giving it up to Grace.
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A Baker’s Half-Dozen Eggs
The bindu point, a metaphorical seed, the spiraling out of form from the super-dimensional Beyond, is recreated again and again within the world in a series of metaphorical seeds: The atom is a primordial seed, secretly spiraling because ever expanding. Combining the bindu-shaped sperm and primal Ovum, our current human seed, the zygote, with its helical DNA strands (leading to the spiral fetus and helical umbilical cord), stands about as complex compared to the atom as the whole world does. So the bindu point has radically grown, showing how, through the world of nascent growth, of becoming, the one Being that always Is and that I Am keeps traveling from glory to glory.
Our seed is fashioned by our omnipotent Spirit, straightly and through these agencies: by every sort of previous conditioning from our mass psyche; by the environment of the womb and the emotions surrounding it; by cosmic rays as we say; by the ability of all our alternative genes to turn on and off responding to influences unknown to man. So our human seed is analogous in its formation to our whole life.
The wave patterns of the primeval Milk Ocean that flow into each of us prenatally contain confluences of influences (just as we contain now). There is not a block one-to-one transference of a previous life to our present one, no such reincarnation, for ours is not a personal life.
Such multitudinous currents can be seen in every sort of conditioning, in subtle unspoken family dynamics transmitted from vanished generations, in all suggestions of our mass psyche. In reconciling all these interweaving opposites, the leavening action of our omnipotent Spirit continuously synthesizes tail-biting snakes into opening spirals.
God is symbolized by a seed, because Being inherently grows, and this our origin wanders always with us as we swing round the ziggurat or seashell or caduceus again and again. Seed, semantic, sign: Both our Substance (Being) and our meaningful signs and plans (Becoming) subsist, symbolically, in a tiny bindu point, from the first through this present time, into a Renewed World. We all carry seed and make connections. The times we lose our bearings make part of the design. Principle: Spinning our wheels can be spiraling. Then at ever new, yet corresponding levels, we reach meetingplaces which harmoniously resonate with the purpose of our formless core, in surrender we cry tears of joy to find God at work, to find our effortless ineffable center living Its life As us all.
Our food consists mostly of seeds: Grains, beans, eggs, fruit, nuts; and all flesh comes from a seed. Cooking on the fire parallels the alchemy of awareness: Seeds, signs, messages, the progressing directionality of the universe, are being changed, and lifted up, into and through all who eat.
On earth, we unfold; the entire planet is filled with channels and passages, and is itself a reference point on a priceless Path through infinite space.
An oldie: When beleaguered birds were given wings, they asked, “What are these burdens?”
Mullah Nasruddin sees the heavy ocean currents sloshing, steering the schooner to starboard and port, but why are those sheets flapping in the wind above?
In the spiral, Buddha’s Middle Path synthesizes opposites: We take our feminine circularity, dash a byte of knight errant, venturing masculine into it, and joined together in the mystical marriage we curve gracefully outward, the ball unwinds, we love to go awandering. 
(Innumerable even pairs always add up to some even number, then just throw in a single little “1”, yes even the 1 of unity, and this makes the whole number odd, this subtly propels the spiraling open.)
Our lives spin outward, into redemption: Turn out, e-turnal. How’d it all turn out? A mustard seed, the world and its problems. Minute in itself, it turns into all of Reality.
The Simple Principle: We’re lifted beyond the standoffs of opposites; we necessarily reconcile, learning to love with God’s love; freed, we open out; we freely start playing.
