Introduction to Dan Winter´s book Alphabet of the EarthHeart: Symmetry, Sacred Geometry and Coherent Emotion by Vincent Bridges.
“What could a scientist and a sage, a Longchenpa and an Einstein in one, have to tell us about the nature of reality?”
SOGYAL RINPOCHE,
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
This is a truly unusual book. It attempts to answer the Rinpoche’s question: just what could a mystic with a scientific background tell us about reality?
For most of this century, science has struggled with the issue of “spirit,” quantifying and objectifying in search of a reality where the inexplicable is merely coincidence or faulty data. But “spirit” has refused to be so enclosed. The burning question in physics at the end of the twentieth century, the problem of “quantum strangeness” as exemplified by Bell’s Theorem, is similar to the end of the nineteenth century’s problem with radiation, which led to both Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Resolving this “quantum strangeness” will lead to just as radical a transformation in understanding, and, inevitably, to another
intractable problem.
The Holy Grail for physicists is that one theory which will explain everything. Steven Hawking has said that it should be simple enough to explain to a bright child. To date, even the most spectacular Grand Unified Theories have fallen short of that universality. However, the problem isn’t just the arcane mathematics or baroque imagery, but the physicists’ insistence on ignoring such spiritual components as “meaning.”
Does life have a meaning? Is there value to the Universe beyond its mere existence? These are spiritual questions that physics dismisses out of hand. Yet these are the essence, the glue if you will, that must hold any truly unified theory together. To reject them is to embrace a curious kind of blindness, a narrowing of vision that foredooms any attempt at comprehension to failure.
Science has forgotten that it is the orphan child of religion, a sub-set in fact of the spiritual science our modern mind denigrates as magick. Like any orphan, science both fantasies about, and resents the disappearance of, its parent. It feels unloved by spirit, and so attacks as superstition just those things it would most like to prove. However, science alone did not kill God; Christianity as whole participated in that subtle deicide.
Even as science has struggled to avoid and sidestep religious questions, its ever restless prodding and poking at reality has produced evidence of greater and larger levels of meaning. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theory insists on an observer-determined reality while Bell’s Theorem demands that we pay attention to some One Thing that underlies space/time itself. These concepts push us toward the spiritual values of mind and God while leaving unanswered that nagging question of meaning.
Because meaning only arises from experience, and even the experience of creating particles in the accelerator remains an external and emotionally distancing event.
How different is the experience of the mystic who creates new particles of being inside the accelerator of his consciousness. A rainbow glow in the sky might be the only external event, but internally the experience is far richer. Meaning, internally, comes from the content of the experience balanced by the “gnosis” of its context. A flash of intuition that a loved one is in danger has a different meaning than an intuition that the world is in danger, loved one along with it.
If we comprehend the meaning of our life, then we assume the momentum of its entire temporal bandwidth, or depth of experience through time. We become then a coherent being, awake and effective. If we apprehend the value of the Universe, then we gain the momentum of all that is, the longest temporal bandwidth of all, and so become unstoppable: immortal.
The mystical scientist could tell us many things about the nature of reality. Just read the chapter headings in the contents for a sample. From planet taming to conscious dying, from braiding genes with love to the feelings of angels, this is a truly unusual book.
Daniel Winter might best be described as a Gnostic philosopher. I can see him holding his own with Dee and Agrippa, Valentinius and Apollonius. It is Dan’s experience of gnosis that informs his understanding, and this makes him somewhat unique among scientists. Dan stands squarely in the tradition of the medieval alchemists who refused to separate out mind from matter, meaning from experience.
The alchemists preserved portions of an ancient wisdom, a form of gnosis that was old when the pyramids were built. The ancient Egyptians personified this wisdom as the Neter, or force, known as Tehuti, or Thoth to the Greeks.
The best statement of general alchemical principles is attributed to Hermes Trismegistos, or Hermes the Thrice Great; possibly a real person, perhaps even the great Imhotep, but just as likely a description of the essential secret wisdom of Tehuti. If we remember the tale of
Khufu and the Djedi, this secret wisdom of Tehuti lay hidden within the Great Pyramid.
Whatever the possible antiquity of the information, the earliest text dates from the eighth century AD. Jabbir ibn Hayyan, the “Gerber” of the medieval Scholastics, produced an Arabic version
from an unknown Greek original; probably from the 2nd century Hermetic renaissance, and contemporaneous with the “Kore Kosmica” and “The Divine Pymander.”
The following version is my own, using several different Latin texts and with reference to Jabbir for clarification of certain obscurities. I have not adhered to a strict literality, but tried to make the information speak for itself.
1) Truth: (certain and truly without doubt) That which is Below is like that which is Above, and what is Above is like what is Below, in order that there might be the miracle of Unity.
2) Just as all things proceed from Unity by the mediation of Unity, so also is the Universe created from unity by adaptation and combination.
3) Its father is the sun and its mother the moon. The wind has borne it in its body. Its nurse is the Earth.
4) It is the father of every miraculous work in creation.
5) Its power is perfect if it is converted into earth.
6) Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, softly and with great care.
7) It rises from the earth to the heavens, and comes down again from heaven to earth, and thus acquires the power of the realities above and the realities below. In this way you will acquire the glory of the whole world, and all darkness will leave you.
8) This is the force of all forces; it conquers everything subtle and penetrates every thing solid.
9) Thus is the microcosmos created according to the prototype of the macrocosmos.
10) From this, and in this way, marvelous applications are made.
11) For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistos, for I possess the three parts of wisdom of the whole world.
12) Perfect is what I have said of the work of the (golden) sun.
Interpretations of these twelve simple verses have occupied thinkers from Albertus Magnus to Issac Newton. Here, we have only space enough to note the holographic and fractal nature of the concepts. This ancient wisdom fragment holds many keys to a unified field of knowledge.
As such, it was accepted as the corner stone of alchemy, the original attempt to unify matter and spirit, science and mysticism.
But what if our modern understanding of physics allowed us to redo Hermes’ Tablet? What if we could describe, in a few simple statements, the essence of the unified field of matter/spirit/mind?
In one of Dan Winter’s lectures, at the “Love’s Light is Awakening” conference in Geneseo, NY, August, 1987, he presented a series of ten statements that can be taken as a new form of Hermes’ Emerald Tablet.
1. The universe is made of one substance.
The compressibility of this universal medium stores form and memory in wave shape. Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2 shows that energy and mass are the same thing, in different forms.
2. The universe has one wave shape, the sine wave.
This principle of frequency signatures called “Fourier” means that even the most complex shape is a simple sum of sine waves of different lengths.
3. The universe can be described as a geometry of pressure.
Geometry produces symmetry, which allows waves proceeding from opposite directions to meet each other and stand (to phase and phaselock.) Standing waves give the illusion of stability, segregation of momentum, and make possible the birth of matter. Pressure occurs where waves meet.
Ratio is sacred; scale is profane. If the geometry of replication is
embraced in a seed of any scale, it is ratio that has the power. Size is unimportant where information is concerned, since information can travel to any scale via the wave guide, and be manifested. The universe is a hologram; even the tiniest part contains information about the whole.
4. Focus is the only medium that creates, in a universe made of
waves. Focus creates a pathway, or gravity, for waves to meet.
According to the “Attractor” theory in mathematics, focus converges the harmonics (waves which fit into each other) into nests which stand, called matter.
5. Shape is the only thing the universe has to conserve. Naming, and memory, ring out only from differences in shape, not substance.
6. The only way to conserve shape along a path is to maintain the
ratio of length, area and volume (a nest of ratios.)
7. The best pathway to maintain a nest of ratios is the golden mean (Phi).
Phi squared and Phi cubed are represented by the ratcheted dodecahedron. This pathway enables information (shape) to be moved without loss of momentum (mind). The closer a material comes to forming this shape and path, the greater its conductivity. Think of superconductivity that is super-coherence of resonance or wave shape.
8. Coherence at any level is coherence at every level. An orderly relation between wave lengths establishes a connection between frequencies and fields, which cannot persist unless it resonates to ALL frequencies and fields. This harmonic cascade (Jacob’s Ladder) establishes the connectedness called holography, and also ecstasy.
9. DNA is a four-dimensional dodecahedron, in the sense that adding one spin to three dimensions adds a harmonic and a nest for memory. (The pressure envelopes of the little bubbles of light which make up the matter of the gene are enfolded or enveloped with another harmonic, with each successive axis of spin, or symmetry.) The DNA double-helix keeps a set of wavelengths evenly spaced on a path through time and space, thus conserving the wave shape.
10. Light, when folded back on itself, comes to know itself. The spiral-within-a-spiral-within-a-spiral creates genetic material at all levels. Light causes an extra axis of spin, which superimposes a harmonic of frequencies upon a nest of frequencies in an envelope of pressure we call light as matter. This creates extra mind, because the universal mind meets itself at every wave intersection. So the denser the intersections, or nodes, the greater the self-knowingness, or sense of identity. (See Arthur Young’s book, Reflexive Universe.) Thus identity in the cell (immunity) and coherence are the same thing, metabolically and emotionally.
This new Emerald Tablet contains the keys to a vast new synthesis of science and spirituality. It also contains the keys to understanding the book you are about to read.
This book has been collected from over ten years worth of Dan’s articles, letters and reports. Most of it has appeared through the years in Dan’s periodical publications starting with “One Crystal’s Dance,” and on through the Planet HeArtWorks papers and multiple editions of Alphabet of the Heart.
My goal in editing this book has been to present Dan’s ideas in a clear and understandable way. Think of it as a hologram enfolded and flattened down into a literary structure. Each section stands alone, is self-contained, and is also referenced to the whole concept. Each part contains the whole image.
Start anywhere you like. Read forward, backward, or just look at the pictures for a while. Then read it all the way through, in one flow, and let your mind resonate to this truly heroic quest: in search of the role of mind in a universe of waves.