Behind brilliant lies

Patterning Archetypal Templates of Emergent Order: implications of diamond faceting for enlightening dialogue (Part #7)

Despite their unique material value, gems are intimately associated with a fundamental lie. This is partly signalled by the fact that genuine gems can often only be distinguished from fakes by experts with special equipment. What does this imply for any metaphoric equivalent -- or for the achievement of any form of diamond mind or body?

Perfect lies: Furthermore the sparkle of diamond is essentially lifeless -- although metaphorically a distinction can be made between dead perfection and the 'cold fire' that may disguise compassion. For a jewel to work its magic it has to be associated with a person whom it enhances, or who enhances it. This may well also be true in the case of any metaphoric equivalent. More fundamentally however, the brilliant glitter of a gem distracts from a more subtle brilliance of quite another order and characteristic of the texture of reality itself -- Gregory Bateson's 'pattern that connects'.

This contrast is emphasized in warnings about superficial beauty in the legend of the Grail Cup, for those who seek to grasp and acquire proprietary rights over it. This is reinforced by the ugliness of stories associated with many of the most beautiful gems and the manner of their acquisition [more]. The nature of such subtlety is more obvious in the manner in which Japanese aesthetics values any expression of the harmony of imperfections, notably in the irregularity of form of raku pottery. The false assumption that one can adhere to light without dark (all things bright and beautiful) that is so widespread in a certain society today and which gives rise to a very dangerous dissociation of the shadow. Many folk tales also turn on the recognition of the beauty underlying ugliness -- highlighting the false assumption that one can adhere to light without dark ('all things bright and beautiful') that is so widespread in a certain society today and which gives rise to a very dangerous dissociation of the shadow (in Jungian terms).

'Withdrawing into the stones': The lie highlights the value of reflecting on the occasional legend, notably amongst the Celts, of earlier 'ancestral' races that have 'withdrawn into the stones' -- or of those that may have been trapped therein, like Merlin and the proverbial geni in the bottle. This has ironic resonances to the construction of memorial cairns -- which may well be a pale echo of the original functionality of stone circles like Stonehenge and other memory devices like memory theaters, as notably reviewed by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (1966) [more; more; more; more; more].

It is also worth recalling that gems, like diamonds, are known as 'stones' to those in the profession. At a time when there is much investment into the possible use of crystal lattice structures as the next generation of data storage and computer memory, and as a basis for future artifical intelligence, the possibility of people being able to 'download' or 'upload' there personal memory is less far-fetched than a decade ago. People may indeed have an opportunity to 'withdraw into stones' in one form or another, although the conceptual 'detachment' suggested by this paper is quite different from the kind of withdrawal currently foreseen by technology enthusiasts.

It is useful at this point to return to the attraction exerted by the kinds of archetypal patterns presented at the beginning of this paper.

For example, would such 'withdrawal' be a possibility for a group that collectively achieved a 'diamond body' that freed them to move at other energy levels through a 'bonding of light and void' (see above) -- as intuited in New Age references to 'light travellers' and in many science fiction stories inspired by recent speculation of physicists on the multi-dimensional nature of reality? Or is it more a case of 'withdrawing into the geometry' of the conceptual spaces for which gemstones provide an analogue? Ron Atkin's work ((Multidimensional Man: can man live in 3-dimensional space?, 1981: review) provides a mathematical basis for understanding the conceptual issues.

'Extraterrestrials': This withdrawal might offer a line of investigation for SETI research -- especially in the light of widespread rumour on the web concerning the imminent return of extraterrestrials from a planet on a highly eccentric orbit [more; more]. There are also references to their underground counterparts on Earth (the 'grey people') [more] -- in a morass of speculations about UFOs and alien abductions. In some ways these echo testimonies of many rural folk in Ireland who distinguish between the 'sidhe' who are seen walking on the ground after sunset, and the 'Sluagh Sidhe', the fairy host who travel through the air at night, and are known to 'take' mortals with them on their journeys.

It is curious that the underground extraterrestrials are identified as 'grey' in colour -- namely those who are 'between' light and dark (as with the sidhe visible in the gloaming, the dawn or dusk periods that traditionally facilitate switching from one dimension of reality to another). Ironically it is also the colour of choice of the 'suits' of the business world favouring globalization (in contrast to the multi-coloured dress of those who oppose them). It is also curious that two groups of 'greys' (or 'zetas') are distinguished, namely the 'zeta-for-self' and the 'zeta-for-others'. This pattern of 4-fold distinction, between those on 'high' and those 'below', is reminiscent of the traditional distinction amongst the sidhe with their 'high' and 'low' courts, whether 'unseely' (selfish and wrathful) or 'seely' (unselfish and peaceful).

Also worth careful consideration in this connection is the nature of the withdrawal of the ever-present ('Dreamtime') ancestors of the aboriginal peoples of Australia 'into the landscape'. The Dreamtime is not simply a period of the past. It is an ancient way of seeing the world as it continues to transform itself in the present. Aboriginal people believe that the entire world, including the seas, continent, living things, and human beings, originates in the deeds of Ancestral Spirits. These Spirit Ancestors were active in the past, in the time often referred to as 'the Dreamtime', but are also present in the landscape today. They continue to influence all aspects of the natural and social worlds. The rules governing human life are grounded in the deeds and continuing presence of these Ancestors and may govern perception in special ways [more; more]. For example, Robert Lawlor (1991, pp. 236-7) states that:

"An Aboriginal friend told me that in one of his most profound initiations, in a state of deep trance, a tribal elder transmitted to him the experience of his body extending into space so that it encompassed the entirety of his tribal land. The songlines that crisscross the landscape flowed as his own veins and arteries, the swamplands were his glands, the grass his hair. During the trance, the elder painted his body with the symbols and locations of the water holes, the sacred sites, the centres of spiritual increase, and all the distinctive features of the Dreamtime landscape. This experience .. was not symbolism but part of a deep sense of identity."

Mytho-poetic understanding: Previously widely held amongst Celtic peoples, the belief survives of an invisible realm to which an other-worldly ancestral race, the Daoine Sidhe, has withdrawn -- after living in Scotland and Ireland (that they called the 'jewel in the Western seas') as the highly cultured Tuatha De Danaan 'in the age before this one' [see extensive web references]. Originally an aristocratic, warrior race of heroic proportion, they dwindled in size after retreating underground, to become the Daoine Sidhe (theena shee) or diminutive faeries of Irish folklore. The description of them as 'gods and not gods' and 'something in between' is consistent with a form of transcendence of duality reinforced by attribution to them of magical powers -- akin to those associated by Buddhists with achievements on the Diamond Way. Their withdrawal 'below the surface', or 'underground', into an 'invisible realm', 'beyond the veil', could well be understood as an effort to describe their unusual relationship to space-time and to the conventional objective world whose surface they live 'behind' -- 'fading into the hills' and into the fabric of reality. This same 'in-betweeness' is evident in their creation myth describing them as born of the union between the great Creatrix (Dana) and the stars themselves -- again reminiscent of the Vajrayana goal of identification with the bonding of 'light and void' (above).

For the Daoine Sidhe, in one account: '...the energies of magic and immanence (connection to Deity) are inseparable forces that run through every living thing. What is unique in the Sidhe worldview is just what constitutes "living". Everything in the Sidhe cosmology is a living thing, even rocks and handmade objects are believed to retain living essences of the things they once were. Thus, magic inhabits everything from the majestic redwoods and the magnificent big cats of Africa to the sand along the beach and the chair in your dining room' [more]. Many stress the importance of distinguishing more essential direct insight from magic understood in psychic terms -- siddhis [more] by which one may be distracted and enthralled as a result of certain forms of training.

Traces of this mytho-poetic understanding remain in many indigenous cultures (see Darrell Posey (Ed.): Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, 2000) and amongst those people described as 'fey' -- notably amongst Celtic peoples imbued by the remnants of the cultural influence of the Tuatha De Danaan. William Mott provies a worldwide review of Subsurface Inhabitants in Folklore, Myth, and Literature [more]. Celtic peoples, for example, might be understood as inheriting a disposition to being able to live to some degree in that other reality -- or to embody it in some way, the 'behind' as 'within'. Perhaps the Tuatha De Danaan effectively 'withdrew' into the genetic structure of humans -- especially in the light of current representations of DNA like stones on a string -- or into a memetic equivalent that remains to be understood. In this sense, they are never far from their living descendants some of whom claim to be able to 'slip sideways' into the other world and dance there awhile. Is this romantic fantasy or love that keeps a countryside singing and dancing with it's people -- as emphasized by indigenous traditions of singing to the land?

For anthropologist Diana James, referring to Australian Aboriginal understanding:

Aboriginal Dreaming ancestors continually shape shifted form, moving easily from animal to human, to rock or plant, from the earth to the stars in the sky. A rock with striking circular patterns may be an ancestral giant lizard, whose spirit manifests in the animal sunning itself on the rock, and in the human descendant, chest painted in coloured dots, who sings and dances it's creation journey across the land. People move into the other world through song, dance and meditation on the ancestral being, they become one with it and can move comfortably on other planes of existence.

For Mott: Each group of faeries and goblins can be viewed, of course, as the dethroned, exiled gods of an earlier, defeated human culture. The question is, what were these "gods," which still exist in the popular imagination today? Were they symbolic pantheons or archetypes, or living beings which predated man on this planet? Or are 'pixies', 'gnomes', 'fauns', 'elves', 'dwarfs', 'trolls', 'norns', 'goblins', and the like, in some way projections of subpersonalities associated with individual chakras, possibly in positive and negative modes?

Psycho-physics: Access to such realms, in the light of the diamond metaphor, may be associated with analogues within the psyche [more] to light effects such as opalescence (a common descriptor of the Sidhe) and polarization -- 'turning a corner and disappearing', partly recalled by such wiccan terms as 'going widdershins'. Science fiction, through Star Trek's 'beaming up', has familiarized many with phenomena such as 'pixelation' -- a term reminiscent of the 'pixies' of Celtic myth. In this connection the relationship between polarization of light and the nature of duals in geometry is worth exploring with respect to such fundamental paradigm shifts.

In considering the function of the numerous Sidhe 'mounds' in Ireland, it is worth reflecting on how an elevator would be understood by someone who had never entered one -- it does not necessarily go 'down'. The dramatic changes which may be imagined for the future -- with many effectively withdrawing into virtual worlds that are completely invisibile and meaningless to major sectors of the population -- are illustrated by the shift, over the past decades, in the psychic locus of identification [more] for many in the emergent web-oriented communication socety. This could be seen as paralleling the withdrawal of the Tuatha De Danaan.

Analogues to such phenomena as resonance in light suggest other transformations of conventional reality in the possible multiverse of modern physics [more; more]. This is especially striking in the case of sound through overtone chanting [more; more]. This is a central feature of Tibetan Buddhism, and of its associations with shamanism, found also in Tibetan Bon. It is used for a religious "flight" to the world beyond, which is induced by means of music: drumming and singing, notably overtone chanting.

Another modality calling for reflection is the process reality contrasted with that of reified objects. The identities sustained by the dynamics within process reality are then effectively 'aliens' -- unrecognizable from a static perspective to which they are not 'linked'. It might then usefully be asked whether people could be distinguished on a continuum depending on the the degree to which their identity is associated with how they 'move', as opposed to how they are -- their 'status'. At the process extreme, in folk traditions those of the 'flow world' might then be readily recognized as spirits and the like -- hidden fairies contributing coherence to the forest. The religiously inclined might refer to them as angels or demons. In part, they would only live through the dynamics between the static identities. The 'demons' would be of special concern as malevolent riders of those dynamics -- 'dark riders'. What identities live through processes of overpopulation, starvation, disease, injustice, pollution and violence -- or globalization itself? [more] In an era of "spin doctors" and multi-media morphing, are there more fruitful ways of understanding the conceptual implications of shapeshifting? [more]

In Australian Aboriginal understanding the landscape is not a flat plain, rocks and trees not merely objects of any gaze. Reality is not a flat plane, that is the illusion. The picture frame does not describe or help understand the contents of the picture. Paint is multilayered, the artist applied it in many hues and thickness to capture and reflect light differently. If the gaze is allowed to be unframed, it can move behind the layers. People can enter the painting and experience the shifting light and dark, the chiaroscuro of life. They enter the landscape, their bodies being painted, becoming the creators, the rock, the lizard, the dancer in the tree, the earth, the wind, the water and finally the light itself. No longer needing to gaze outside themselves to find beauty in precisely cut diamonds, but inside themselves to the magnificent fragmented and patterned light of uncut gems embedded in the clay of their beings.

As in the case of the Grail legend, the condition into which the Celtic sidhe withdraw is associated with immortality -- the Tir Na Nog or the 'land of the forever young', outside the passage of time. Irish tradition identifies many specific places, such as Lough Gur (Limerick) and Brugh na Boinne (Newgrange) that are gateways to this multidimensional world -- the magical vision of sustainability and coherence in a re-enchanted Earth -- from which they can emerge into the here-and-now as appropriate. It is such a world that remains an inspiration to writers such as J R Tolkein (Lord of the Rings) and their millions of readers.

It is not significantly 'fun-dead' 'sustainable development' that captures young peoples imagination -- despite the best efforts of spin doctors. On the other hand, to the great surprise of adults, this has been achieved by games replete with complex symbol systems, such as Dungeons and Dragons -- recalling Hesse's Glass Bead Game. Despite the need for advanced players to study manuals of extensive pantheons (and to the dismay of some religious groups), these have attracted many young people whose moves within the game are enabled by the use of set of seven polyhedral jewel-like dice (4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-sided dice) [more].

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Behind brilliant lies