Against the stream

For many people, sacred geometry has become the buzzword to sell their ideas. Yet we can only sell profane things, sacredness resonates with our hearts, not our wallets. Sacred knowledge can only be experienced individually,  teaching acts only as a guide to venture within the depths of one's own heart.

Geometry offers an excellent tool to comprehend the metaphysical aspects of our physical surroundings. Many processes in the scenario universe follow simple rules, which in interaction with specific, unique circumstances create abundant complexity.

The tetrahedron acts as smallest possible 3 dimensional system - four focus points arranged in the closest packing possible. The Platonic Solids describe the idealised regular structures which compose the complex details of our perceptual reality.

Humanity's creations favour the square, or variations of it, with a few triangles thrown in. Not too surprising, as the 3 dimensional accounting system uses a cube as base unit. In the minds of commonly educated people, the 3d world is cubical, not tetrahedral. It takes observation and experimentation to understand the fundamental difference between these approaches to our physical reality.

I'm not too sure how much we are wired to perceive and resonate with geometric structures and symbols, but I suspect they have a much deeper reach than words. The use of geometric symbols predates the use of written words in this phase of known human history, indicating a commonly accessible knowledge about the deeper fabric of our universe.

The five Platonic Solids play an essential role in sacred geometry, due to their unique qualities (all edges of the same length, all faces the same shape). Traditional Western esoteric systems use only four elements (air, water, earth and fire) as universal elements, with ether clumsily tagged on as fifth element.

The Five Element Theory, part of Chinese philosophy and medicine, doesn't need to add anything to incorporate the five regular building blocks of reality Plato described. While it seems similar esoteric as the Western hermeneutic approach, it has some metaphorical power due to added (geometric) layers.

The tetrahedron represent Fire, the element of creation and inspiration. The ashes turn into Earth, the cube. You need two intersecting tetrahedra (a merkaba configuration) to build a stable cube, consisting only of squares it tends to distort and collapse.

Earth, element of stability, compresses everything beneath, and so creates Metal. Cube and Octahedron have the same number of edges, the compression transformed the cube into its dual. Metal condensates, and Water emerges. The icosahedron is the largest structure consisting only of equilateral triangles, introducing fluidity.

Water nourishes the Wood, transforms the icosahedron into the dodecahedron. Plato's 'secret' solid, showing twelve pentagons symmetrically and spherically arranged. That's the element responsible for good flow of Qi, unsurprisingly unfamiliar in Western systems.

Wood feeds the Fire, the dodecahedron collapses back into a tetrahedron, and the cycle begins anew. The beauty about the Five Elements theory comes from this conclusive idea of creative transformation in this cycle, combined with a tetragram in its centre describing the inhibiting influence among the elements.