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.

(Above: the original Bell 30 which established commercial helicopter technology, and was invented and developed by Arthur M. Young. Picture Wikipedia, public domain)

In our last post, we looked at those most frightening objects: numbers which are squared and cubed. This exercise in cruelty was an attempt to remove the fear of these things in order to put them in a very special place: Arthur M. Young’s conception of how consciousness worked – and its simplicity.

Arthur Young discovered that how the human mind grasped ‘meaning’ could be represented in a very simple graphical figure; one which gave greater depth to our understanding of consciousness. As well as being a scientist and famous inventor (the Bell helicopter was his creation) Young was a master astrologer – a very unusual activity for a scientist. He did not feel that astrology was antithetical to science, and admired the way the ancient science tried to encompass the whole of mankind’s experience rather than just the workings of the material world.

Young reminded us that our picture of the ‘world’ is our own; and is formed as a composite of information from our senses and our mind. This includes the way we react to it, as well. Let’s absorb this. There is no world, except the one we make. We are incapable of a full consciousness of the ‘out there’. That is not to say that we will always be limited in this way, but the present development of our species forms a very subjective picture: what I think, as opposed to what is. And we need to remember that it is very much a picture, though it has more dimensions than the area of the ‘picture’ we constructed in last week’s blog (Part 5).

There are certain things that have always been with mankind. A good example is the sky with its sun, moon and the mysterious planets – those ‘wanderers’ in the night sky that behaved very differently from the constellations around which ancient peoples spun their stories.

Arthur M. Young had determined that there were four stages, or aspects of how the pictures formed by our consciousness. Now, we must bear in mind that all of these are projected by the mind onto what we paint as ‘out there’. These stages have been carefully constructed during the course of our evolution, so Young felt justified in placing them at the centre of things.

One of the drivers of evolution was how we reacted to the motion of objects, friends and predators. To Young, the motion-related issues of distance covered, velocity and acceleration were related to three of the four aspects of meaning that we humans need to fully comprehend what is happening to us, and how we should interact with it. We examined this in Part Three and Part Four, like this:

(1) Distance travelled is seen to be the baseline of motion. It is analogous to our simple line of blocks in the last blog. The diagram is reproduced below:

(2) Velocity (or more commonly Speed) is Distance divided by Time, as in miles per hour. In other words, it’s a rate of change. With a constant speed (as in car staying at 70 mph on a motorway) the motion is at a constant rate. In our simplification of the formula we saw that Velocity is equal to Distance divided by the Time taken to cover it. in the diagram below, the distance is simply the length of the top line of blocks.

3) Acceleration is the rate of change of the previous aspect of Velocity. A car travelling at a constant 70 miles per hour is not accelerating.  If our car, which had been travelling at constant 70 miles per hour, suddenly accelerated to overtake a wagon, there would be an increase in not only the distance, but also the velocity. This equates to the distance divided by time squared. We have seen that anything squared is equal to a square. Here’s our square from last week:

In each case of the above aspects, we have evolved our understanding by creating a ninety degree (a right angle) turn. We moved from a line (1+1+1) to an area, a square, by turning our evolving shape through ninety degrees and extending all of it by the same length.

Have we finished what we can know? Our blocks have been carefully drawn to show that another transformation is possible. One more turn through ninety degrees is, effectively, extending all the squared blocks backwards into the diagram three times (1+1+1) as we hinted in the final diagram from last week, reproduced below:

Do we know this figure? Most certainly – it is a cube. We got to it by dividing distance by time cubed. We live in a world of cubes; that is , we live in a three-dimensional world. Arthur M. Young proposed that there is a missing type of motion related to this final transformation of the aspects of motion.

In the next part of this story, we will look at the nature of this third derivative of distance and time; and the vital link it provides between a scientific world of ‘only matter’ and the presence of the observer as an intelligent part of creation…

To be continued…

{Note to the reader: These posts are not about maths or physics; they are about a unique perspective on universal meaning created by Arthur M. Young. If you can grasp the concepts in this blog, your understanding of what follows will be deeper.}

Previous posts in this series:

Part One,   Part Two,   Part Three,  Part Four

Part Five

©️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.