The
Origin of the Structure
In began with the dawn of the
scientific age: the Greek classical era from Homer to Plato and beyond, and its
reflection in the Egyptian scientific culture at the time, which all together staged the
background for the Christian era. While we find few references to science in the
Christian historic record, a profound concept was presented at the very end of
the Christian Bible that records a people's dawning spiritual awareness in a
context that is rooted a scientific background. Here, at the end of an era, the
Revelator, who looks forward to a new age past the end of all evil, presents the
image of the new world as a foursquare geometric structure "ascending"
from the
Intelligence of the Universe onto mankind.
The idea of a foursquare structure
representing aspects of civilization appears to have many expressions. One of
the most famous example is found in garden of the Taj Mahal in India.
http://www.diddilydeedot.zoomshare.com/4.html
Everything about the Taj Mahal is
foursquare, especially its garden, which is divided into 16 parts, and the
building itself is perfectly aligned north, south, east, and weat.
Many centuries later,
America's pioneer of spiritual science, and scientific mental healing,
Mary
Baker Eddy (1821-1910), picked up the foursquare structure as platform for her
own ordering of the processes involved in mental healing. She defined the structure,
her pedagogical structure, in terms of four
rows, respective to four distinct levels of thinking, and in terms of four columns
in which development takes place according to the four progressive levels.
She
defined the four columns in accord with the natural cycle of the Sun, beginning
in the North as dawn, sequencing on to the sunrise in the East, the heat of the
day when the sun is in the South, and the golden glow of the sunset in the West.
But she didn't leave it with that.
She divided the for lower rows into half, an upper half and a lower half,
thereby creating a vertical confrontational structure. She labeled the three
levels, the domain of the spiritual and scientific (top level), the moral domain
defined
as transitional (in the middle), and the domain of depravity at the bottom. And
she didn't leave it with that either. She divided these three levels into an
upper half (light green) and a lower half (dark blue). The line between them
thereby becomes the moral line. Everything above the moral line unfolds in
scientific and spiritual development, the development of our humanity - and
everything below unfolds into the very opposite, such as insanity, immorality,
depravity, as is typically found in the operations of empire. The dividing line
between morality and immorality is often a very fine line, including when it
comes to modes of government, such as Republic
vs. Democracy.
She further defined the four columns in accord with the four great
aspects of civilization, the aspects of loving; living; understanding and
acknowledging universal truth; and the development of science that enables one
to go beyond
the leading edge.
In order to make the individual
development channels more perceptual relevant she divided the four columns into two groups,
a right group and a left group. The right group might be seen as related to the
concept of Temple, a place of celebration, and the left group might be seen as
related to the concept of Church that symbolically reflects the struggles for
the development of civilization. The topics for this website were chosen to
reflect this basic design.
See the related
study: The
Power Cycle
Mary Baker Eddy has
divided all of her major works into 16 parts (ten in total), which are applicable
in a similar manner towards a large and comprehensive pedagogical structure for
scientific and spiritual development. I recently recognized that my own work,
the series of 12 novels, The Lodging for the Rose,
can be applied in a similar manner, together with its two associated
novels.
The series was not
written with this application in mind, but it fits nevertheless. The two lead-in
novels are on the bottom row. However, the last two elements on the bottom row
are not covered.
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