Our Tetrahedron

 

 

Our successes and failures

Are less important than

Our aspirations and habits.

 

 

 

Imagine a shape.  A solid shape. Flat faces.  Straight edges.

One on which you can NOT orient yourself, because

All the faces are the same,

All the edges are the same, and

All the points are the same.

 

How MANY such shapes are there?

An infinite number perhaps?

 

No.

Far from it.

There are five.

 

Now, always, forever … 5.

 

This (special) family of shapes is referred to as the Platonic Solids, or

The Regular Solids :

 

Tetrahedron

Hexahedron (or cube)

Octahedron

Dodecahedron

Icosahedron

Number two has squares for faces (6 of them).  Number four has pentagons for faces (12 of them).  The other three all have triangular faces (equilateral triangles, of course.  4, 8, and 20).

 

The simplest shape of the family (the first on the list) is the tetrahedron.  (6 edges, 4 faces, and 4 points.)

A pyramid with a triangular base

It’s the only shape (that I know of) which has the SAME number of points as faces.

 

And consequently, it’s the only shape which can TWIN perfectly

A TWINNED TETRAHEDRON is known as a Merkabah.

(Students of Sacred Geometry have a lot to say about the Merkabah)

 

If you turn a tetrahedron (causing it to rest on a new base) – you find that it looks just like it did before you turned it.  (And, of course, this is true of all the regular solids)

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

For the past year or so I have given considerable thought to what I want … my goals … my desires.  But only fairly recently did I come up with a symbolic depiction of my Desire Structure which seems appropriate and believable.

And – the main reason I’m sharing this with you … is that you may find it believable for you as well.  (And if it is NOT, then you should, of course, alter it … till it seems right for you)

 

Anyway … we do not want just ONE thing in this life.

No.  We want several.

 

And (for me, at least) I am, for now, satisfied – that they are these:

 

Love

Health

Wealth

Service

 

Service would seem to be the ultimate life goal … but I find I cannot accomplish it without a certain amount of wealth.  And love / a happy family life. And without good health – very little is possible.

 

Many people put Wealth as the number one goal in their life.  I think this is a serious mistake. Eventually we come to realize that wealth (career, and power) does not provide fulfillment.  It’s not enough (to satisfy a Human Being).

 

Health – certainly is fundamental.  It’s basic to all other achievement.  And there are those who make fitness (and athletics) into a career.  In our (modern) society there are many professional athletes. But I am afraid that many of these people are out of balance (though not all.  As a culture, we are not particularly thoughtful.

As Dorothy Canfield Fisher points out –

 

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

 

One of my best friends was born a bit crippled.  When he was in utero, his mom was in a (mild) car accident, in which she was thrown against the arm rest (in the back seat).  This injured the child growing inside her. He was born – with one foot pointing backwards. This defect was soon corrected by surgery, but one leg was a little longer than the other, and his feet were different enough, so that he’s always had to buy two pairs of shoes, when most of us just buy one.

His doctors said he’d never walk right, and probably NEVER run.  But this was not so. I’ve played baseball with him a number of times.  He’s the ablest cripple I’ve ever known.

The thing is – he was passionate about baseball, (but it was learned, through privileged sources) – that if he had NOT been crippled (in the womb), he would probably have spent his life playing baseball, and there were beings who wanted more from him than that.  (They did not want him to waste his life. Mmm?)

 

And we should realize that Health is not just physical … that it also has a spiritual component.

[I would commend to you the film – “Meetings with Remarkable Men”, about the early life of the (Russian) spiritual teacher – Gurdgieff]

 

Myself, I put Love at the top of my list (of goals), because, it seems to me, that not even Health is worth much without Love.  NOTHING is.

 

As Rumi says – 

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing

lives.  But this dove here

senses the love hawk floating

above, and waits, and will not

be driven or scared to safety

 

 

Ernest Becker says that we (all) have an Immortality Project.  It’s the legacy we want to leave the world. We want our lives to have counted for something.

 

For me – I feel I must do what I can to try to keep the Human Family from wandering off the cliff of Self-Genocide.  For we seem determined to destroy the planet we live on.

 

Anyway, I feel these four goals are inter-related and intertwined enough – so that it makes sense to symbolize them with a tetrahedron … with one goal represented by one of its four points.  (rather than assigning a face to a goal. Because that way, one goal would always be hidden – when the tetrahedron is resting on that face)

 

And what does our tetrahedron rest ON?

 

I imagine that it rests on four discs.  And the topmost one is –

 

 the disc of – OUR HABITS.

 

It is our HABITS  (what we do) which will get us where we want to go.

(or … if they are NOT aligned with our goals ,,, then they will take us somewhere else)  so

we must see to it – that our habits are in accordance with what we most want.

 

I am what I repeatedly do.

                    

                                                       –  Aristotle              

 

 

The next disc down (a little larger than the top one)

Is the disc of our Economy & Culture  –

We are each the beneficiaries of all.

Some of us build houses, some make clothes, some build power stations, some teach our kids, some raise food, some build or maintain our roads.

But we ALL get to live in a house (or at least, most of us do);  we all get to wear clothes, and use electricity, and get educated, and eat food, and use our roads.

 

Specialization & Giving (service to the whole)

That’s how a tree works … and it’s how an economy works.

 

And the next one down is – the disc of the World.    

The sun, the earth, the rain, the soil, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere (all the water), the whole biosphere, the great forests (the lungs of the earth).

Many politicians do not realize that we live FIRST in a biological system … and THEN in a political system. 

ALL activities are upheld by the World itself. All political systems, corporate systems, economic systems. All such things happen on the basis of the Great Biological System … and the Planet Herself.   

 

Now, I realize that many (intelligent & educated) people would consider that we just now described the bottom-most disc …

 

But I think that there is yet  one more – the disc of God and the whole spirit world.

There’s a lot goin’ on.  And we do NOT see the greater part of it.

 

We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions.  We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality; but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.

                                                       –    William Irwin Thompson     

 

What we can see … is upheld by what we cannot see.

 

So – make a stack.  Put down a quarter, then (on top of that) a nickel, then a penny, then a dime.

[then, on top of this stack – is our tetrahedron.   Mmm?

except it should be bigger – maybe a 3 1/2″ tetrahedron resting on a stack of discs, 4″ – 5 1/2″ in diameter … something like that}

 

From bottom to top, then:

 

 the spirit world … then 

the material / biological world (Gaia, the Earth) … then 

the economy (everybody helping everybody else) … then

 what I do (or what we do) …

 

And upon this stack – rests the tetrahedron of our goals / our Life

 (or – the things we value the most highly, and which we wish to nurture and to foster)

 

Mmm?