Sacred Geometry
The term ‘sacred geometry’ is often associated with the New Age, however it is anything but new. One only has to look at the unfurling of a fern frond or the fractal nature of a pine cone to realise that nature adheres to strict mathematical principles. Ancient peoples around the world were well aware of this and the ‘flower of life’ pattern, which epitomises sacred geometry, can be seen depicted in artefacts and paintings from as far afield as India to Egypt and the Americas. Historically our Western culture was also keenly aware of the fundamental nature of geometry and the ancient Greeks, who formulated many of our current mathematical formulas, studied it extensively.
The Platonic solids are fine example of this. Named after the great philosopher himself, Plato and his contemporaries recognised that there are five geometric solids, whose faces are all identical, with regular polygons that meet at the same three-dimensional angles with perfect symmetry. They consist of the tetrahedron (or triangular pyramid), the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron. Plato assigned each one to an element and believed that these shapes were the building blocks of the physical world.
In fact it seems that these geometrical forms were acknowledged a long time before Plato. Archaeological discoveries of carved artefacts at a stone circle in Scotland, suggest that the ancient Celtic people were aware of the significance of these 3-dimensional shapes 2000 years previous. In fact when you realise that each of the platonic solids can be seen in and formed from the flower of life pattern, then we may come to conclude that these core patterns of physical creation were understood and held with great reverence throughout the ancient world.
These ideas can also be found hidden within Chinese philosophy and in acupuncture, though they may not be at first all that apparent. In numerology the number that is inherent in the flower of life pattern is 3-6-1. The tetrahedron, the first of the Platonic solids is the most basic 3-dimensional shape that we can make. It has 3 sides and 6 vectors that surround the 1 shape. This 6 surrounding the 1 concept is key to understanding the formation of the flower of life pattern, as each circle is surrounded by 6 more circles. This then expands out in to the 19 circles that we see in the flower pattern.
The ins and outs of this are too detailed to describe here but it is sufficient to note that 19 squared is equal to 361 or 3-6-1. Is it a coincidence that there are exactly 361 acupuncture points on the main meridians of the body? There are in fact hundreds of other ‘extra’ points but the ancient Chinese were keen to state that only 361 of them were to be officially counted. What were they trying to convey with this very specific number? Was it so that they could connect the meridian system to these underlying patterns of creation?
This 3-6-1 principle can be embodied and experienced within a very simple, yet extremely powerful acupuncture pattern. The first needle is placed at the top of the head, and the second and third needles are inserted into the hands, creating an upward pointing triangle. This triangle is then transformed into a 3-dimensional tetrahedron by inserting a needle at the point in the middle of the chest. This point can be likened to the capstone of the pyramid.
This configuration, along with the nature of the actual points being used, results in a strengthening and balancing of a person’s energy system. This can be likened to the 3-D pyramid that is created when the body is arranged in to the full lotus meditation posture. Furthermore the fractal nature in which this triangulation unfolds, which is itself determined by the patterning of the flower of life, means that the person’s energy field expands outwards to connect with the energies of the surrounding area, resulting in a much more expansive and connecting experience.