Now we have finished with our incursion into maths, and I know that will be welcome…

Why have we been talking about such non-spiritual things as acceleration, velocity (speed) and distance? The answer is that these aspects of motion are at the heart of how we learn about the world, and how we interact with it. In learning, we forget how we learned and become absorbed in the results.

When the infant reaches out to get the hot cup she shouldn’t touch, and her fingers fail to grasp it, but push it away, she is using acceleration in the force she is trying to exert with her fingers. The small training cup may move but a larger and hotter teapot wouldn’t. The difference is not in the child’s fingers but in the mass (heaviness) of the teapot. A burn may be the result. It’s important to be able to gauge the mass of things – cycling into a tree or a wall is more painful than a hedge.

When the young boy, against his parents’ wishes, finds himself following his friends across that busy road, his life depends upon his ability to gauge the distance and how fast (velocity) he can run before the approaching vehicle kills him. If he’s successful, his parents will never know – and he is free to carry on learning.

If, halfway across that road, he sees that he has misjudged the speed of the approaching car, then he still has one chance of survival left to him: he can begin to run faster, in other words, accelerate. By generating more power (force = acceleration) in his leg muscles, he can propel his body forward, faster than before, and then faster, again, until the limit of his straining organism is reached. The swerving car passes him, its wing mirror rips the back of his coat, its horn is blaring, the driver frantic… but the boy is alive, and has learned something that will affect the rest of his life. In accelerating by choice, he has exercised something not present in position, distance, velocity or acceleration: he has developed control using his desire and free will to survive – using his mind and the mechanical capabilities of his body.

These are vital things, and they are key to how we learn and continue to learn. They give us our basic capabilities; and they help us to make sense of the world – our individual world – for we can know no other. Can we relate them to Arthur M. Young’s core diagram of how we learn the meaning of anything?

Let’s take a journey into ‘micro-time’. We enter a new house. In the corner of the first room there is a shape. It looks like a triangle, but so do many things. This is our first ‘taste’ of the previously unseen object. We examine it in more detail, believing that knowledge of its construction and function is important. We are at the stage of the Objective General in the above diagram.

We notice that triangle is actually three dimensional and has little ‘dimples’ in its material, We have good evidence that this object is made from a compressed paper derivative. We are now at the level of the Objective Specific.

Further study shows that there is light escaping from the edges of the object, and that its colour is a vivid orange. This is the Subjective General – because we are now imposing on it values (colour etc) that are actually part of our own minds – none of us sees exactly the same shade of orange, for example.

In a flash of recognition, we know its purpose: it is a lampshade, and it has been switched on.

This example shows how we perceive, though we do this in ‘micro-time’ and automatically. If we encountered an object whose like we had never seen, our minds would have to evaluate it in this way, step by step – but that process, too, would be automatic.

The  ‘automation’ in our consciousness is necessary. Without it, we would be exhausted with all the routine ‘processing’ our brains would have to do. Its negative cost is that our world very quickly loses its magic unless we deliberately ‘look-again’ at things.

This science of perception was already well known to scientists, psychologists and mystics. Arthur M. Young’s interest was in the fact that it could be viewed as a diagram of meaning, as above.

He superimposed the attributes of motion that we have discussed in the last three posts onto the circle in the same way. Remember that each of the sequence: distance, velocity, acceleration, and now, control, had been seen to emerge from a 90 degree shift from the previous state – a ‘right-angle’, as the ancient builders described it. This followed the way the line (a number) became a square (the number squared), and then a cube (the number cubed).

What resulted was this:

We move clockwise from Distance to Velocity to Acceleration. This is the point where classical physics ends. But Arthur M. Young was an engineer and knew that you had to add control (and thus the Observer) to have the whole system work – as in the creation of the helicopter. Control needed to be at the top of the circle, with another 90 degree shift from Acceleration.

With this discovery, Arthur Young knew that the circle had to be capable of holding all the relationships to not only how we know objects, but how we interact with objects. More importantly, these relationship would each have their own angle in the circle. The above diagram shows how the fundamental quality of time had a 90 degree relationship with this master-symbol, and could map itself four times around the circle before returning to its original state.

Young had been fascinated by the history of how Egypt’s treasures had been discovered. He remembered that an artefact named the ‘Rosetta Stone’ had enabled the same description to be mapped between the ancient Greek and Egyptian languages, opening up the written story of that mighty civilisation.

He decided that his search was of a similar nature. Could he extend how Time was mapped into the circle to the other fundamental qualities of physics, such as mass and length?

In the next and final post of this series we will summarise the conclusions he came to, and show his Rosetta Stone of universal meaning.

Previous posts in this series:

Part One,   Part Two,   Part Three,  Part Four

Part Five   Part Six

©️Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.

You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.