The Kaleidoscope

Sir David Brewster invented the kaleidoscope in 1816 while conducting experiments on light polarization. Its name derives from the ancient Greek kalos ‘beautiful’ and eidos ‘form’. This optical device is made from ‘tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated’. It became a social phenomenon. In 1818 Blackwood's Magazine stated that: " no invention, and no work, whether addressed to the imagination or to the understanding, ever produced such an effect." Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions were purchased in the course of the century. Some adjectives that describe its effect – psychedelic, polychromatic…. ever-shifting, fluid, fluctuating, unpredictable, impermanent.

The Golden Gavel

My grandfather was an ornamental ironsmith. He created the gavel pictured here almost a century ago. I’ve always loved its simple, powerful design and balanced heft. Gilded iron. His creative spirit, will, and skill are enfolded into its very materiality.

Iron is heavy and dense due to rigidly ordered, closely aligned molecules. Water, by way of contrast, consists of volatile, random molecules with lots of space between them. Smiths heat the iron to loosen up the rigid molecules. It becomes more malleable and therefore easier to work with.

Like iron, our thinking can sometimes be dense and rigid. It needs to be loosened up if we want to forge something new and better. The heating and hammering is an apt metaphor of the psychic processes entailed.

Blacksmiths: Magicians of Transformation
In many cultures, ironsmiths are also diviners, priests, and healers. They were often feared as much as revered for their skill in transforming inert metal through fire and force into tools and weapons for life and survival. For example, in Dogon myth, it was the blacksmith who brought fire to earth for the first time. Among many Mande cultures, blacksmiths are called

“The First Sons of the Earth. They are associatedn always present at the forge: fire, air of the bellows, water, and earth. In this setting they are thought to harness the forces or energy of nature (called nyama) to transform materials of the earth into tools, art, and ritual objects"

This idea is also found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Tubal-Cain is referred to in the King James Bible as a master artificer of iron weapons and tools. In the 1850s, the Scottish poet and songwriter Charles Mackay wrote his famous verse .

Old Tubal Cain was a man of might
In the days when earth was young:
By the fierce red light of his furnace bright
The strokes of his hammer rung;
And he lifted high his brawny hand
On the iron glowing clear,
Till the sparks rush'd out in scarlet showers,
As he fashion'd the sword and spear.And he sang - "Hurrah for my handiwork!
... And the red sparks lit the air;
"Not alone for the blade was the bright steel made;"
And he fashion'd the first ploughshare!

The Great Hammering
In Alchemy there are several stages involved in transmuting a base metal into gold. The fourth stage - Sublimatio - has also been described as a great grinding down to rhinisima, refers to the micro filings that result. It’s this ultra fine powder, almost gas, which is key to the final step of transformation. This idea is also echoed in Norse Mythology. The Norse believed that Thor, the god of thunder and lightning, wielded a hammer called Mjolnir. It’s Indo-European root mel means to crush or grind. In turn, it’s related to the Latin malleus, for hammer, as well as the Latin mola, for mill.

The Whole Picture

A word’s meaning evolves over a long period of time. Tracing its roots can be revealing. Seemingly disparate words often share common roots and import. Such is the case with synapse, yoga, algebra, and art. Each in its own way denotes joining things together to create greater wholes.

Synapse
It’s apt to start with this biological term as millions of mine and yours are sparking now as I write and you read! A synapse is like a junction. It facilitates the exchange of electrical signals from nerve cells via interconnected circuits throughout the central nervous system. Young children have some 1,000 trillion in their brains. As we age, this declines. Most adults have between 100 and 500 trillion synapses. Through this synaptic activity, biological impulse is magically transmuted into perception and cognition.

The term is derived from the ancient Greek synapsis meaning conjunction. It was first coined in the late nineteenth century by the British physiologist Sir Michael Foster. It gained wider exposure through his student, Sir Charles Sherringon, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.Apse is a related architectural term. Both stem from haptein, which originally meant joining arcs to form a circle, especially in reference to wheel making.

Yoga
Yoga is an ancient Indian practice, dating back to 2500 BCE, possibly even earlier. Its name derives from the Sanskrit yuga, which means to join, or yoke together. A yoke is a wooden bar that fits over the necks of animals to pull a cart or plow. Generally associated with servitude, the yoke once had a more positive social meaning. In Old English, for example, it meant a bond of partnership or cooperation. The goal of yoga is to yoke our temporal being to the divine imperative, just as the oxen is yoked to the higher purpose of drawing the plow.

Algebra
Algebra is concerned with that branch of mathematics in which symbols, usually letters of the alphabet, are used to represent unknown numbers. In 830 CE, Al’Khwarizmi wrote Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala, or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, from whence algebra got its name. In Arabic, Al-Jabr means the reunion of broken parts. Al’Khwarizmi also developed the concept of algorithms so crucial to computational technologies today. In an earlier post I discuss how Fibonacci introduced the term zero to the West. His source was Al’Khwarizmi. Al’Khwarizmi also led a team of seventy geographers to calculate the earth’s circumference and develop a world map.

This idea of measured calculation is also expressed by the term ratiocinate, to reason methodically with precise logic. Its root is the Latin ra, which means to fit together. Ra in Latin is actually a transposed Ar. We will come back to Ar below. This transposition between letter and sound, called metathesis, is common in many languages. Of course, there’s always the danger of too much adherence to strict reason and logic. Shaw describes one his characters in 'Androcles and the Lion' as an “inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate".

Art
The Latin root ar means to join together. Related terms include arm, artery, are, article, and articulate. Art is another related term. However, in its definitions there aren’t any related to the idea of joining things together. It’s actually there but hidden. Between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, education was largely the Church’s purview. It was the only institutional steward of knowledge in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire. It took several centuries to rebuild civil authority and society. During this period, the Church continued to use Latin, the empire’s lingua franca, throughout Europe and the British Isles. It also established universities in the larger cities.

The curriculum then consisted of several required ‘branches’ of learning (called the Trivium and Quadrivium respectively). These included mathematics, rhetoric, music, and philosophy. A student who successfully completed the entire course graduated as a Master of the Arts. One could have easily called him or her Master of Joinery. For that is essentially what they did. They integrated the knowledge gained in each branch within one larger conceptual frame and worldview. The value of artem - this ability to effectively join things together - was widely understood and appreciated, whether in producing good walls, wheels, and scholars। It takes skill and creativity to build something whole and enduring from smaller bits, whether these are stone, wood, or ideas. True then and now.

This calls to mind those master artisans who construct works of great beauty and utility by joining natural elements together. For example, the stonewall mason able to fit rough stone to stone, without cement, so that their walls stand for centuries। Or, consider for example, a furniture wright who joins disparate wood pieces together without nails, so that the piece serves for ages too.

The Greater Conjunctio
Alchemy is concerned with nothing less than the union of opposites, the squaring of the circle, and the rebirth of the phoenix. In its final stage, called the greater conjunctio, all one-sidedness is rectified. Alchemists also called this stage, zygon, which is ancient Greek for the even older Sanskrit yuga, which means, of course, joining. In The Act Of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler provides a tour de force analysis of the creative process within the arts and sciences. His principle finding is that all acts of creation involve the novel intersection of idioms, concepts, processes, and materials. He developed a conceptual framework called the bisociative pattern of creative synthesis to describe this process.

One of his many examples involves Guttenberg’s quest to create what didn’t exist and had no name। After great challenge and set back, Guttenberg wrote in his journal: What am I to do? I do not know: but I know what I want to do: I wish to manifold the Bible. I wish to have copies ready for the pilgrimage . . .[1964:122]. In his fervent and fertile inventiveness, and through much trial and error, Guttenberg ultimately and ingeniously married together three entirely different manufacturing processes – the manual hand printing of pictures from wood blocks, the metal die casting of standardized coins, and the wine press.

This is bisociation, or Ar, in action.I call yoga, algebra, and art the primary imaginal joints। Each joins things together in its own way. The symbolism of their colors further underscores this, yellow [yoga] for spirit and faith, blue [algebra] for science and reason, and red [art] for creativity and feeling.

E.O. Wilson, the biologist, foresaw the potential integration of the sciences and humanities. In 1998, he introduced the term consilience to describe this “jumping together of knowledge... across disciplines to create a common groundwork for explanation." Seven years later, Bill Gates, a Microsoft founder, refers to consilience in a special essay he wrote for Business Week: These technologies promote "consilience" -- literally, the "jumping together" of knowledge from different disciplines. They help people combine their own ideas with at least some existing knowledge far more efficiently than was previously possible.

Fractal Logic
Tellingly, Mandelbrot derived the term fractal from the Latin fractus for broken, uneven. The fractal is another good term for these times. It’s an irregular or fragmented geometric shape that can be repeatedly subdivided into parts, each a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are used in computer modeling of natural structures that do not have simple geometric shapes, for example, clouds, mountainous landscapes, and coastlines. They’re used to digitally reproduce complex natural shapes like clouds, coastlines, and mountain ranges. Digital artists also use them to create luminous works of computer art.

Island in Space

In 1986 I had a chance to visit the Vancouver World’s Fair. The United Nations Pavilion made the strongest impact. I purchased a beautiful publication - Island In Space: Prospectus For A New Idea. This is where I first read Hoyle’s prescient 1948 observation: Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . an idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose.

Further on in the text, there’s an essay by the astronaut Russell Schweickart. After his 1969 space flight he wrote:

You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross again and again ... and you don't even see them. From where you see it the thing is a whole and it is so beautiful ... And there you are - hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that you can't even see ... You realize that on that small spot, that little blue-and-white thing is everything that means anything to you - all history, and music, and poetry, and art, and birth, and death, love, tears, joy, games [1986:10]

The first photo of earth from space I ever saw was on cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue in fall 1969. It affected me from the start just as Hoyle predicted. The catalogue’s founding publisher, Stewart Brand, had first learned about an earth photo taken by a NASA satellite in 1966. In fact, he vigorously lobbied to have the photo released to the public. In a 2003 interview, Brand said he felt it would become a ‘powerful symbol’ of Earth ‘as an island’.

We finally saw our home planet as it is. No escaping the visible fact we live on a ball. The photo also gave new credence and impetus to that old saying what goes round comes round. One-sided, narrow thinking slowly began giving way. Great thinkers from diverse fields - such as Kuhn, McLuhan, Fuller, and Bohm - began creating a new language to help describe such holistic concepts as global village, geodome, paradigm, and holomovement.

It’s almost forty years since that first photo of earth. During this time, ingenious new tools like computers and the World Wide Web have emerged to further catalyze this budding consciousness of the greater whole. And yet such tools have always been available through the ages. For example, Mandalas, Labyrinths, and Medicine Wheels are all designed to help us perceive and live life holistically.

TED Media Director June Cohen states this well: The newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage, with the rest of the world as a backdrop.

Birds make their nests in circles; we dance in circles, the circle stands for the Sun and Moon and all round things in the natural world. The circle is an endless creation, with endless connections to the present, all that went before and all that will come in the future. ~ Black Elk

A Question of Perspective

In 1948, Sir Frederick Hoyle, the physicist-cosmologist who coined the term ‘the big bang’, predicted that once the earth was photographed, its image would unleash “a new idea as powerful as any in history.” Twenty years later, during their extraordinary flight to the moon and back, the crew of Apollo 8 took that very first snapshot. Only now are we beginning to grasp the full import of this powerful ‘new idea’. With it, we truly see ourselves – that is humanity and life entire – in a global context. As Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders said: "We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

The Zero

The concept of zero was first conceived of in ancient India. Its graphic symbol was a dot called a Bindu in Sanskrit. This dot was also called śūnya, meaning void or empty. It was perceived as being like a seed. That is, in itself inert and unmanifest, but from which life springs and returns. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad compares this to a tiny spider at the center of its web, spinning out and reeling in concentric circles of silken threads.

Even today, thousands of years later, Hindus still paint a bindi on their foreheads for spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic reasons. It’s applied mid point just above the eyebrows where the ajna chakra, or third eye, is located. This chakra is associated with concealed wisdom. The Buddha is often depicted with the index finger and thumb of one hand in the form of a circle. This too symbolizes the void. Given the commercial and cultural exchange between the Indian sub continent and the Arab gulf, the term sunya was eventually transliterated into Arabic as sifra, or cipher. 

In the twelfth century C.E, an Italian mathematician nicknamed Fibonacci wrote the Liber Abaci, or The Book of Calculation. In it he introduces the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to the West for the first time. Of course, the cipher for nothingness was included. Being fluently multilingual, Fibonacci transliterated sifra into the similar sounding Latinate term, zefiro. This term, which had wide currency in the Greco-Roman world, was used to signify the West Wind. In ancient times, Zephyrus, was believed to be god of the West Wind. Interestingly, many cultures associate this cardinal direction, where the sun sets, with death, imagination, metamorphosis, and rebirth. The ancients also believed that Zephyrus and Iris, the rainbow goddess, had two children, Eros, god of love and Porthos, god of longing. Of the four cardinal winds, the zefiro was considered the gentlest. Associated with spring, it was also called the fructifying wind. Over time, zefiro became zero. However, it also continued in modern usage as zephyr, which still means gentle wind. Fibonacci’s transliteration was based on similarity of Arabic and Latin vocalizations. While the two terms sound the same, their meanings are different. This unintended semantic link merits further consideration. Is there perhaps a subliminal relation between zefiro as wind and zefiro as nothing? The original concept of zero has been depicted in other ways as well. For example, in ancient Vedic belief, Hiranyagarbha is the golden egg of the universe.The Ouroboros biting it's own tale is another striking example. This also recalls Einstein’s famous comment that imagination encircles the world.

One Picture 1000 Words

The saying that one picture is worth a thousand words is wrongly attributed to Confucius. It was actually coined by an early American advertising manager, Fred R. Barnard. He wrote it as copy for an ad that appeared in Printers' Ink in 1927. The ad, in turn, promoted the sale of yet other ad space on the sides of city streetcars. His pitch was that an ad with a large picture on the side of a fast moving streetcar would be quickly and easily ‘read’ by pedestrians.

The saying fast gained wide currency. This isn’t surprising. It succinctly expresses what people already intuitively understood. Given its resonance and given the advent of mass communications advertising, it was bound to spread. That Barnard unethically called it a Chinese proverb is an even more revealing insight about the power of images and the social imagination. Clearly he wanted to give the saying a patina of legitimacy by associating it with an ancient culture. It almost immediately became ascribed to Confucius.

This too isn’t surprising. Confucius had been known in the West since the 1600s, thanks to Jesuit missionaries. Later, leading philosophers such as Voltaire embraced Confucian ideas such as atheistic philosophy and political morality and ethics. By the early 20th century, Confucius was well ensconced in the popular Western mind as a symbol of wisdom. Paradoxically, Bernard’s false attribution registered authentic precisely because one could easily imagine Confucius saying it. It isn’t just that the Chinese alphabet is composed of ideograms, or word pictures, thus giving the attribution extra credibility. It’s rather because Barnard’s saying actually embodies timeless wisdom. He simply brought this to light in ‘modern’ times.

A New Earth

The European Organisation 
for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere reports that: “Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date...and capable of having liquid water...it orbits a red dwarf... [There’s] also strong evidence for the presence of a third planet”

The implications are immense. As Xavier Delfosse, one of astronomers, states: “On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X”. What a profound insight wrapped in such apt whimsy. This reminds me somehow of that beautiful hadith; I was a hidden treasure longing to be known.

Over fifty years ago, Henri Corbin suggested "that the most astounding information of modern science regarding the physical universe remains inferior to [the Imagination].” Yet, some of Lene Hau’s fellow scientists discouraged her from trying her ultimately successful experiments desribed in the previous post, saying they couldn’t be done. Imagination liberates vision, and gives hope a map to steer by.

Transmuting Light Into Matter

"Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic…. Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa… It's a thing that most scientists never thought was possible. Some colleagues had asked Hau, "Why try that experiment? It can't be done।"

Pixelation

There’s a wonderful scene in Frank Capra’s 1936 film - Mr. Deeds Goes To Town - in which the hero is characterized as being pixilated. Longfellow Deeds is on trial to prove his sanity because he wants to give away his large fortune to the needy. The big-city legal team representing Deed’s rich, greedy relations have called two elderly sisters from his small town as witnesses. It’s they who call him pixilated. By this they meant Deeds typically behaved in a whimsical way and often seemed intoxicated.

This term was used throughout rural America in the nineteenth century. It likely stems from the Celtic pixy. A pixy is defined as a supernatural being with magical powers; a fairy, an elf. Many of the early American colonists came from the Celtic regions of Great Britain -Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales. In these regions, it was believed from ancient times that someone who encountered pixies would become disoriented, bewildered, and often lost to this world. It was also believed that a pixie-path linked the two overlapping worlds. The person who has stepped over the boundary between 'them' and 'us' is in both places at the same time. Many…have experienced a dislocation in time: a short while…may be months or even years in human time.

This pervasive mythos reflects a deep but inchoate societal understanding of the power of imagination to mediate reality. Longfellow Deeds appeared pixilated because his orientation was different than the norm. He has seen farther and deeper into the nature of life and cannot help but be affected. His story is that of all the light bearers, from Plato’s Cave onwards. And he too pays a price. In many societies, for example, the blacksmith is someone who must live apart because of their particular skill. That is, mysteriously forging hard raw iron into implements of great utility and beauty using fire, force, and art. Often, for these same reasons, the blacksmith was also seen as a wizard and healer.

The concept of pixie dust is a delightfully apt metaphor for this transmutation of imagination into manifestation. I haven’t yet located a good historic source for when this concept first appears. It is popularly defined on Wikipedia as the trail of sparkling material that often follows mythical creatures such as pixies and fairies in general when they are visually represented. Sometimes, this trail is interpreted as being a tangible substance, often imbued with magic powers. The most notable example of this is in the 1953 Disney version of Peter Pan, where pixie dust allows one to fly if one is thinking happy thoughts, specifically the song "You can fly".

You can fly! You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!
Soon you'll zoom all around the room

All it takes is faith and trust
But the thing that's a positive must
Is a little bit of pixie dust

The dust is a positive must
You can fly! You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!

You can fly! You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!
When there's a smile in your heart

There's no better time to start
It's a very simple plan

You can do what the birdies can

At least it's worth a try

You can fly! You can fly! 
You can fly! You can fly!
Music: Sammy Fain 
& Lyrics: Sammy Cahn

Positive Imagination

Longfellow Deeds may well have been led down the pixie path. But society is enriched by his wise enchantment. This idea of positively imagining our worlds and our selves anew is at the heart of such tales as The Ugly Duckling, Pygmalion, and A Christmas Carol. Frank Capra directed yet another classic film in this vein called It’s A Wonderful Life. In this 1946 story, the hero - George Bailey- faces ruin at every turn no matter how great his efforts or good his intentions. He’s on the verge of jumping off a bridge when he hears someone below drowning in the dark night and calling for help. Instinctively, because of innate decency, he dives into the water to save the individual. This turns out to be an angel-in-training named Clarence. He too is striving to earn his wings, also without success. In fact, he’s been told that George represents his last chance to turn things around for both of them, hence the ruse. Clarence then helps stretch George’s imagination beyond belief. As he says to our hapless hero: You've been given a great gift, George: A chance to see what the world would be like without you.. After several more trials, George returns to the world a changed man. And Clarence, who symbolizes his higher angelic self, is transfigured.

Trans-Pixelation
There are two distinct pixelations currently used in the English language. And while they share the same spelling and pronunciation, their meanings and origins are decidedly different. The first term, described above, represents the illogical, irrational, and magical world of imagination. The other is used in contemporary digital imaging, where there are no true curves. This becomes immediately apparent to the naked eye when a digital image is magnified. Instead of the seamless smooth sweep of an arc, one sees a series of stair like gradations. This is referred to as pixelation. It’s been suggested that this graphic design problem will be solved when the square is finally circled.

We seem to intuitively grasp that the power of positive imagination is a nexus between what is and might be. Yet this awareness largely remains inchoate and implicit. We reveal it to ourselves indirectly and beguilingly through our stories, myths, legends, and worldviews. Interestingly, pixie dust, an imaginary concept, is now being consciously used as a reference point within science and technology. For example, Don Brownlee, principal investigator for the Stardust initiative, and his colleagues are studying the organic molecular composition of Wild Comet २. Their findings are challenging fundamental notions about the origins of life. Brownlee states that if all takes pixie dust to get life going and it has all these magical organics, it could be very significant. A lot of this stuff got flung all around the early solar system। [The photo above is of the coma of dust and gas around Comet Wild २ and the one below is a representation of smart dust.]

This semantic confluence of the worlds of imagination and reality seems to be gathering speed and power. For example, in 2001 IBM introduced a hard disk technology using a layer of a precious metal called ruthenium, three atoms thick. Engineers also whimsically called this pixie dust because of its seemingly magical qualities. There’s yet another technological equivalent of pixie dust. Smart dust is composed of hundreds of individual mechanical motes, the size of a grain of sand. Each mote has sensors, computational capacity, wireless connectivity, and a power source. Smart dust clouds will be used to access information that otherwise might be dangerous or difficult to obtain such as tracking enemy movements in war or monitoring a buildings heating and lighting conditions.

Light & Imagination

There’s a wonderful and growing literature on the relation between imagination and light. This goes back to antiquity and encompasses the work of such luminaries as Suhrawardi, Corbin, and Cooperrider. I believe imagination, like sunlight, is instantly and easily accessible, ubiquitous, inexhaustible, and endlessly transformative.

Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Curiously, the word ‘imagination’ is still rarely found in public discourse and policy. Consider, for example, the Partnership for the 21st Century, a consortium of American business, education, and policy makers. In its landmark report, Learning for the 21st Century, the word knowledge is mentioned 47 times, imagination not once. In fairness to the Partnership, this is a widespread social phenomenon. Googling ‘knowledge’ generates 1,720,000,000 links; ‘imagination’ generates only १३८,०००,००० or ०८% in comparison.

Children enter school just brimming with imagination. They’re masters of make believe and visualization, honed through years of preschool play.However, given schooling’s focus on tests and scores, imagination doesn’t figure much in formal curricula. Most students therefore leave school with a greatly diminished capacity. The community and workforce are poorer for it too given just how crucial imagination is to knowledge creation and innovation.

There are deep historic and cultural reasons why this particular faculty has been so devalued. It has defied precise definition, despite some of the greatest minds, precisely because of its

inherent irrationality. However, imagination is being enfranchised anew in the global knowledge economy. Consider, for example, the recent observation by Thomas Friedman, NY Times editorialist and author of the World Is Flat - "If whatever can be done will be done...the biggest competition is between you and your imagination". General Electric's corporate tag line is "imagination at work' and one oft its website states" "The human imagination is one of our most valuable resources".