HYPERBOLIC CEILINGS

The picture, on the right, was created to show how, through the process of reincarnation, a soul can take another life in another body. But it also shows how as youths we are preoccupied with attaining manhood, and once this fleeting zenith has been transgressed, we spend what's left of our lives revisiting those earlier moments. In a word, our attention 'twists' back upon itself. According to Hindu philosophy, if at the point of death we are still preoccupied with the events of our material existence we shall take on another body. If, however, we have twisted back upon ourselves in another direction - towards Godhead - we shall be born into the realm of eternal life with Lord Krishna.

A common feature of Salvia Divinorum trips, as seen posted on You Tube, is that those under the influence twist their bodies to look behind them. This is because, in general, the drug has stripped them of their bodily covering, leaving them exposed, as raw perception. The phrase 'going around the twist' is applied to salvia, because taking it makes one feel as if they are losing their mind.

In Le Mystere des Cathedrales the eminent alchemist Fulcanneli discusses the meanings of the enigmatic relief sculptures that appear in the Notre Dame cathedral, Paris. One of these simply known as the man turning around, which according to the author;

well illustrates that alchemical maxim solve et coagula, which teaches how to achieve the elementary conversion by violatilizing the fixed and fixing the volatile (pl. XXVIII).

If you know how to dissolve the fixed, 

And to make the dissolved fly, 

Then to fix the flying in powder, 

You have something to console yourself with.

I believe this sculpture to be another example of man turning back upon himself in order to reflect upon himself and upon his past deeds.

In the Teachings of Buddha it is written;

Once upon a time a man looked into the reverse side of a mirror and, not seeing his face and head, he became insane. How unnecessary it is for a man to become insane merely because he carelessly looked into the reverse side of a mirror.

And so it is with meditation, because when the mind is quiet we can begin to focus on the consciousness of consciousness, that first principle which is the cause of all causes and which is emptiness itself. The goal of the alchemist and the Buddhist practitioners are the same, as this passage from the Teaching of Buddha reveals;

Pure gold is procured my melting ore and removing the impure substances. If people could melt the ore of their minds and remove all the impurities of worldly passion and egoism, they would al recover the same pure Buddha-nature.

It has puzzled me why Fulcanelli focused so intently upon the sculptural and relief works of those famous cathedrals, but neglected to say a word about the vaulted ceilings and flying buttresses, which make the gothic style of architecture so distinctive. While I have made it clear, in other posts, that these should be likened to the energy centres or chakra points of Eastern medicine, there is one other consideration that I feel is necessary to bring to your attention.

The typical vaulted ceiling of a gothic cathedral ought to be viewed as an early depiction of a hyperbolic manifold, hewn in stone and mortar. Instances of hyperbolic mathematics incorporated into the designs of more modern day cathedrals (like this one, left, in Australia) would appear to support this idea.

The next logical step in teasing out the hyper-dimensional aspects of the cathedrals, would be to generate a computer model of a Gothic cathedral in which all of the angles are hyperbolic in nature. This would allow the user to witness dramatic changes in perspective typical of hyperbolic geometry (see video below), whilst navigating the backdrop of these beautiful cathedrals.

Now imagine that kind of geometry (above) with this kind of imagery (below), and you should have a clearer picture of what the vault of heaven, and the mind of God and the Metrix, look like (on a bad day).