The Rotating Blade of Meaning (6)

(Above: the original Bell 30 which established commercial helicopter technology, and was invented and developed by Arthur M. Young. Picture Wikipedia, public domain)

In our last post, we looked at those most frightening objects: numbers which are squared and cubed. This exercise in cruelty was an attempt to remove the fear of these things in order to put them in a very special place: Arthur M. Young’s conception of how consciousness worked – and its simplicity.

Arthur Young discovered that how the human mind grasped ‘meaning’ could be represented in a very simple graphical figure; one which gave greater depth to our understanding of consciousness. As well as being a scientist and famous inventor (the Bell helicopter was his creation) Young was a master astrologer – a very unusual activity for a scientist. He did not feel that astrology was antithetical to science, and admired the way the ancient science tried to encompass the whole of mankind’s experience rather than just the workings of the material world.

Young reminded us that our picture of the ‘world’ is our own; and is formed as a composite of information from our senses and our mind. This includes the way we react to it, as well. Let’s absorb this. There is no world, except the one we make. We are incapable of a full consciousness of the ‘out there’. That is not to say that we will always be limited in this way, but the present development of our species forms a very subjective picture: what I think, as opposed to what is. And we need to remember that it is very much a picture, though it has more dimensions than the area of the ‘picture’ we constructed in last week’s blog (Part 5).

There are certain things that have always been with mankind. A good example is the sky with its sun, moon and the mysterious planets – those ‘wanderers’ in the night sky that behaved very differently from the constellations around which ancient peoples spun their stories.

Arthur M. Young had determined that there were four stages, or aspects of how the pictures formed by our consciousness. Now, we must bear in mind that all of these are projected by the mind onto what we paint as ‘out there’. These stages have been carefully constructed during the course of our evolution, so Young felt justified in placing them at the centre of things.

One of the drivers of evolution was how we reacted to the motion of objects, friends and predators. To Young, the motion-related issues of distance covered, velocity and acceleration were related to three of the four aspects of meaning that we humans need to fully comprehend what is happening to us, and how we should interact with it. We examined this in Part Three and Part Four, like this:

(1) Distance travelled is seen to be the baseline of motion. It is analogous to our simple line of blocks in the last blog. The diagram is reproduced below:

(2) Velocity (or more commonly Speed) is Distance divided by Time, as in miles per hour. In other words, it’s a rate of change. With a constant speed (as in car staying at 70 mph on a motorway) the motion is at a constant rate and there is no acceleration, until we ‘speed up’ or brake. In our simplification of the formula we saw that Velocity is equal to Distance divided by the Time taken to cover it. in the diagram below, the distance is simply the length of the top line of blocks.

3) Acceleration is the rate of change of the previous aspect of Velocity. In a car travelling at a constant 70 miles per hour is not accelerating.  If our car, which had been travelling at constant 70 miles per hour, suddenly accelerated to overtake a wagon, there would be an increase in not only the distance, but also the velocity. This equates to the distance divided by time squared. We have seen that anything squared is equal to a square. Here’s our square from last week:

In each case of the above aspects, we have evolved our understanding by creating a ninety degree (a right angle) turn. We moved from a line (1+1+1) to an area, a square, by turning our evolving shape through ninety degrees and extending all of it by the same length.

Have we finished what we can know? Our blocks have been carefully drawn to show that another transformation is possible. One more turn through ninety degrees is, effectively, extending all the squared blocks backwards into the diagram three times (1+1+1) as we hinted in the final diagram from last week, reproduced below:

Do we know this figure? Most certainly – it is a cube. We got to it by dividing distance by time cubed. We live in a world of cubes; that is , we live in a three-dimensional world. Arthur M. Young proposed that there is a missing type of motion related to this final transformation of the aspects of motion.

In the next part of this story, we will look at the nature of this third derivative of distance and time; and the vital link it provides between a scientific world of ‘only matter’ and the presence of the observer as an intelligent part of creation…

To be continued…

{Note to the reader: These posts are not about maths or physics; they are about a unique perspective on universal meaning created by Arthur M. Young. If you can grasp the concepts in this blog, your understanding of what follows will be deeper.}

Previous posts in this series:

Part One,   Part Two,   Part Three,  Part Four

Part Five

©️Stephen Tanham

Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.

The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.

Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.

You’ll find friends, poetry, literature and photography there…and some great guest posts on related topics.