.By the Numbers

A world of wonder

In the beginning was the creation of light, a prism that disperses the seven colors of the rainbow.

Seven is a rather magical number that belongs to that mysterious architecture of the cosmos called sacred geometry. Seven astral bodies are visible from earth with the naked eye, for which the days of the week are named. There are seven energy wheels called chakras in the body, and seven heads on a hydra, so watch out. The Sound Of Music teaches us do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti, which are the seven tones in the musical scale that Miles Davis used to write “Seven Steps to Heaven.” In the Old Testament, Salome performs the dance of the seven veils, and in the Babylonian myth Ishtar descends to the underworld through seven gates, there to find all the used VHS copies of Ishtar.

Twelve is another special number. Two sets of 12 make the 24 hours of the day, half for the sun and half for the moon. There are 12 apostles of Christ, 12 gods of Mount Olympus, 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 donuts in a dozen, but don’t eat them all because the gods punish small things quickly.

Sacred geometry shows us that the universe repeats the same patterns at different levels of resolution. A spiral can be as small as a snail’s shell or as vast as a galaxy. Sacred geometry even comes through sound waves, since stroking a violin bow on a metal sheet covered with sand causes the sand to create a snowflake pattern. Change the tonal frequency of the stroke and the snowflake changes. Even the vastness of space is mirrored in the emptiness of the atom. 

The earth’s movement is also full of mystery. It rotates daily and orbits the sun annually, but it also wobbles on its axis, which is tilted at 23.5 degrees. This causes the spring equinox to cycle backward through the 12 signs of the zodiac over the course of 26,000 years in what’s known as the precession of the equinoxes. Jesus of Nazareth was born in the age of Pisces and is thus closely associated with the symbol of the fish. The 1967 musical Hair hails the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. 

The universe is a majestic place, and how fortunate we are to live in its eternity for a speck of time. The ancients said the bulk of mankind lives in a state of limited awareness akin to sleep, and the process of opening one’s consciousness is called the doctrine of awakening. So close your eyes, open your mind and begin to see. 

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