I do a radio shows from time to time, in the States and in Canada, about crop circles. This week it was The 'X' Zone, which is devoted mostly to UFOs.
I expected to be in friendly territory, but not so. The host was scornful of me, and even gave me a razz on the air after my hour was done and my mike was cut off. I was berated because the circles are “only” in 20 countries. And the failure of cameras and cell phones and compasses inside the circles wasn't of interest because other paranormal phenomenon involve things like that. And I was out to lunch because I had no theory on where the circles come from: everyone has theories. And why is it that the media ignores the circles, because sightings of UFOs make the news? In their radio poll of what people are interested in, he ran down the number of votes that each paranormal category got to let me know the circles had none. So there.
Here we are, with yet another arena in which we carve ourselves into oppositional camps. But what became clear to me in this little personal episode was how wars are a function of consciousness — unconscious people make war, and they do it in every category. We've got a world mired in conflict, and what needs to happen to change that is for consciousness to uplevel.
Could there be a new awareness that dawns in humanity? It seems far-fetched. But, then again, if “Contact” were in headlines, we'd be in for a new ride.
Have a look at the 2005 crop circles — it was a good year:
Perhaps the “Season Finale” reported August 13:
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2005/uffington/uffington2005a.html
2005 U.K. Crop Circles:
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2005/2005.html
2005 International Crop Circles (including U.S.):
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/inter2005/inter2005.html
Here's another treat. This tuned me into a deeper understanding of the split of Science and Spirit which has led us into our dualistic, materialistic unrest, wherein crop circles are invisible to most:
Originally the liberal arts were seven in number. They were divided into the three-fold Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the four-fold Quadrivium of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. These words mean, respectively, a three-way and a four-way crossroads, implying that these paths of knowledge are fundamentally interconnected — and, by extension, that all other paths can be found to intersect here, as well. The Trivium was the basis of elementary education (whence we probably get the word “trivial”): Grammar taught the craft of reading and writing; Logic, of careful reasoning; and Rhetoric, of effective communication. The Quadrivium was the basis of advanced education: Arithmetic taught the science of number; Geometry, of form; Music, of sound (and of “harmony” in the most general sense of the word — “number in motion”, as it was often put); Astronomy, of time (of “form in motion”). Moreover, from the very beginning, whether openly acknowledged or carefully alluded to, each of the Quadrivium sciences was accompanied by its complementary metaphysical art. Each dealt not only with the outer structures, but also with the inner meanings of its discipline. Thus, Arithmetic included Arithmology, the understanding that numbers were not merely quantities, but also qualities (that “two”, for instance, is also “duality, polarity”); Geometry included what is nowadays called Geomancy, the understanding (in, for example, the design of temples or cathedrals, or in the graphic arts) that the spirit and the emotions can be affected in particular ways by particular forms; Astronomy included Astrology, the divination of the meanings of cycles of time; and Music included not only the study of “practical theory”, of nomenclature and technique (e.g. “this is a minor third”, “this is the Mixolydian mode”), but also the study of “speculative theory”, of the meanings and influences of tones and intervals and scales.
The choice of these particular disciplines was by no means arbitrary. Plato, who learned the arts of the Quadrivium from the school of Pythagoras (who, in turn, probably learned them from the priestly schools of Egypt or Babylon), exalted them in the Republic and the Laws as the essential education for the philosopher — for the study of these art/sciences awakens the mind to the intrinsic order of the cosmos, freeing it from its bondage to mere “shadows on the cave wall”. By studying the links and intersections among these disciplines, one learns to recognize analogies, patterns, correspondences, through which the archetypal Ideas that underlie and unite the cosmos manifest themselves in the world of time and space.
Little wonder that, a thousand years after Pythagoras, as the Roman Empire was collapsing and the ancient libraries and academies were being burned and outlawed by religious fanatics, the seven liberal arts were the one essential seed of classical wisdom that was rescued and preserved by the monasteries through the so-called Dark Ages, to bloom in the Carolingian renaissance and yet again in the age of the cathedrals as the curriculum of the first universities. The Quadrivium flourished uninterruptedly in the philosophy, art, and science of medieval Islam; in fact, as interconnected sacred canons of measurement, of spatial orientation and architectural and artistic proportion, of musical scales and modes, and of calendric cycles, the four arts the West knew as the Quadrivium were also the basis of priestly and shamanic education and practice in ancient Egypt, Babylon, India, China, Meso-America — indeed, in practically every pre-modern culture one can examine.
In the West, up through the Renaissance, the seven liberal arts retained an important role in education, and the influence of the Quadrivium deeply pervaded the visual arts, architecture, music, and philosophy. Composers wrote musical works that were based on arithmetical patterns or, in at least one instance, on the geometry of the cathedral at whose dedication the work was performed (1). The proportions of cathedrals and palaces were in turn often borrowed from the “consonant” musical intervals. The astronomer (and astrologer) Kepler was led to his discovery of the mathematical laws of planetary motion by his investigation of the “music of the spheres” and his discovery that the five Platonic solids could be nested within the orbits of the known planets. Ficino's and Agrippa's magickal philosophies were based on the metaphysical arts of the Quadrivium. Such historical examples could be multiplied ad infinitum.
But they end rather suddenly in the 1600s, with the combined onslaught of the Christian “witch craze” — which branded the metaphysical arts of the Quadrivium as “satanic” and “occult” — and the Scientific Revolution, which inaugurated a dogmatically materialistic view of the cosmos (originally, scholars such as Frances Yates/”The Rosicrucian Enlightenment” and Carolyn Merchant/”The Death of Nature” argue, as a protection against religious persecution, but which soon hardened into an ideology that fit conveniently with the increasing domination of society by commercial and economic interests). It was as if a heavy iron gate had abruptly slammed shut between the outer and the inner, between the left brain and the right, between the physical sciences and the metaphysical arts. After Descartes, Newton, and the Royal Academy, numerology was permanently factored out of arithmetic; numbers henceforth were allowed to signify only quantities, not qualities. Astronomy deliberately eclipsed astrology; time was decreed to be measurable only by the uniform ticks of the clock, not the variegated images of the zodiac. Geometry was circumscribed to exclude geomancy; shape and proportion were deprived of symbolism by engineer and artist both, as utilitarian and aesthete increasingly diverged from their once-shared perspective. Music was silenced from singing of any art but its own — the scientists who commandeered its study of acoustics could only sneer at the “music of the spheres” and the “harmonies of heaven and earth”, and the artists who inherited its practice of harmony and rhythm were eventually left with a mere technical argot of chord-names, scale-intervals, and key-signatures.
Although the four Quadrivial sciences survived into the Age of Reason in the new materialist priestcraft of “physics”, the four arts were largely abandoned (numerology), ridiculed (astrology), forgotten (geomancy), or isolated (music). The Crossroads was buried and soon forgotten, and the link it provided between the material and the spiritual order was severed. In the new world order, knowledge and truth could no longer be uncovered through the traditional reasoning of analogy and correspondence, but only through the revelation of the Bible or the proof of the test-tube — that is, either religious faith or cause-and-effect materialism. once the habit of “pattern”-thinking was replaced by “straight-line” thinking, knowledge lost its unity and interconnectedness, and began to fragment into ever smaller specialties, each with its own jargon, each dominated by its own elite of “experts”.
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