This image represents what I’m calling unity of function: subtopics, congruence & confluence.
You’re looking at an inner and an outer circle (micro- and macrocosm) within and across which harmonious reciprocal exchange occurs. Energy flows along its proper pathways and water in its channels.
I came across this configuration of shapes and duo-directional arrows while rolling over in my mind’s eye the figure of the archetypal compass rose and the Dharma Wheel. Rota Fortuna, the Tao & halo. It calls to mind two historical sacred text references which I’ve gained a lot through the contemplation of on a personal (and transpersonal) level.
Now, within navigation, you have something called “boxing the compass”, which - as I understand it - has something to do with naming all the cardinal points and their divisions around the rotation of the compass. So, instead of saying north, south, east, west, you have to go through many smaller divisions like north-north-east, but then the next one in a clockwise (I’m not sure if direction matters) sequence.
But anyway, pairing that idea with a lot of divination and geomantic work I’ve been experimenting with lately, I started experimenting with the above figure as a grounds upon which to create an informal geomantic divinatory space: drawing the circles in the middle, dividing the page up into named quadrants - typically antonym pairs: more/less, forward/backwards, etc.
I’m thinking of it, like, if the symbol itself of this imaginal operating system is the first utterance, the seed-syllable, if you will of the operating system as a whole: the invocation. The sigil. I’m not yet talking about business graphics. I’m talking capturing the spirit of potentiality and marrying it to a flexible framework for navigating complex systems, situations and environments.
So, like say you drew this image with the end of a stick into the sand. As you draw each stroke of the image, you contemplate what that particular circle stands for, and what each arrow (motive forces, feedback loops) represents, or the “houses” made by the intersections of the arrows across the circle.
So if you “boxed the compass” on it, you would get opposing pairs around the board (not next to each other in sequence though): INNER, MORE, BIGGER, FORWARD, OUTER, LESS, BACKWARD, SMALLER.
It’s almost like you’re defining the basic functional possibilities within a given space: whether it be a computing environment, the real world, the Dream Time - whatever you’re working with (should suit any usage). In theatre, we have upstage and downstage, stage left and stage right. It’s counter-intuitive until you get used to seeing in 4D from many perspectives.
Like for example, say in ten years your consciousness gets tracked and trapped in some unlicensed synaesthetic infosensorial environment it wasn’t supposed to be in for its jobclassrankstatus. Worse than prison, because nobody knows you’re gone and your body has been reanimated by an automated simulation of his personality. Say this happened to you, well you could invoke the CORE MANDALA OS FUNCTIONALITY by drawing first the inner circle, then the outer circle (within the two is emptiness) and then drawing lines of freedom and exchange connecting the two together harmoniously. Permaculture talks about concentric zones with best-practices and natural coinhabitants and allies. Scientology has its eight dynamics, a system of valuation.
Then, within that space you invoke through the exertion of the symbolinterface you start assigning values to subdivisions of that space into commands used for navigation and interaction. It’s almost like if you could build a web browser into any kind of environment or system of complex information (which is what reality is, at a root level: a highly complex system of information arranged in atoms and molecules whirling through space). You’d be able to navigate anything. Much like the functions of the Matrix Alice discovers down the rabbit-hole. How to build yourself back doors out of your own escapist fantasies into other people’s used memories for pennies on the dollar.
Unity of function means you can be dropped into any kind of environment, orient yourself, move and act upon information you’re receiving through your senses and intuition as a perceiving center within a perceptual environment - regardless of what its make-up may be. Put more simply: no entity, environment, system, platform or device has the inherent right to take away basic user functionality.
Maybe we need to draw up a list, a User’s Bill of Rights. Does one exist? What would be on it… something like:
The user has the right to:
1. Use or not use
2. Observe, interact, navigate, withdraw
3. Persist or terminate
4. Reciprocal feedback loops
I’m not really sure what level of abstraction is appropriate for this level of consideration, since it’s still really all just a collaborative thought-experiment. But for me personally, deep meditation of these subjects has yielded the heady fruits of many small victories. #usersunion
Sidenote: The core “tenets” of Mandala OS should be something that you can communicate in a verbal teaching to strangers or using glyphs drawn onto temporary surfaces. This is the level of ambient computing we’re talking about…
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
And the good ole Gospel of Thomas, the latter half of saying 22:
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].”
Worked up the graphic last night in the OpenOffice draw program, but you could technically “invoke” the symbol and its functionality within any application or experiential environment. I wonder if this isn’t something like the Lesser Ritual of the Golden Dawn, a pre-cursor sort of orishanxestor program you run at the invocation portion of your working - but I don’t know enough about that to recommend it or otherwise.
Happy Hunting, don’t forget to email error reports to themandalaOS@gmail.com. I think the password is still spiritware omnivate, but I guess you could say I haven’t logged in as that user for quite a while. Goodnight folks!
- END -
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8 Comments
The symbol also bears resemblance to the chaos star.
Ah, I thought so…
But that convergence symbol you had on here before is what does it for me. Focus on the black, the arrows swirl inwards. Focus on the white, they explode outwards. But they’re really doing both at the same time.
It’s a consciousness exercise in simple graphic form.
Oh, and in regards to the LBRP, check here and here for a good graphic representation of that.
I think you did a really good job with this. I like it so much I am thinking of getting my first-ever tattoo.
There’s so much meaning that can be mapped onto this. I like the empty, inviolable center, the arrows traversing a zone shared with others (the noosphere?) then out into the infinite universe.
Eight is a good number. Calls to mind the Buddhist eightfold path. What else?
I’m just going to spew thoughts.
So the thing about circles…well, its like multiplexing. Like if you have a 2D image on a computer, it gets stored as a string of bytes. Maybe bytes next to each other are pixels next to each other in the same row, but pixels next to them in the same column will be a certain distance apart. (since rows are stored one after the other) So there is a periodicity, like a wave. There is a relationship between things that are next to each other, and things a given period away from them. In a circle like that, this same relationship holds. In fact, a circle can almost be *defined* as an infinite set of points, where each point has a unique point that is farthest away from it alone, and a unique pair of points closest to it alone.
The thing I am trying to say here, Crow Grandfather, is a that the seemingly complex geometry of the circle has at its heart these two relationships: That which is farthest from a thing (its opposite) and that which mostly closely neighbors a thing. (its simile) I personally don’t believe that latter is that important here: It doesn’t matter how minutely you divide the compass. What’s more important for the work is the the opposites. For the symbol to work there must be a circle within. This is therefore to say that the individual has to *contain many opposites* to be balanced. Only when this balance is attained, the fundamental opposite/duality, the barrier between macrocosm and microcosm is removed.
Anyway, I can FEEL what this means, but I’m having a hard time finding words for it. We have too look for the opposites of what we THINK we are and illuminate these aspects of our personality.
Its a theory anyway.
Peace Tim, Love the site as always.
On circles and containing opposites:
a picture
a picture
and a picture
and, what the hell, a few words as well…
Haha, I was telling someone at rehearsal about how magnetic north and the north pole are not the same thing and that magnetic north is actually a south pole magnetically…
Wow! Beautiful Ian, a whole new level for me to contemplate. Sweet!