The Golden Mean Book and Caliper Set by Now and Zen
Tools to Increase Spiritual Perception
Overview
The Golden Mean is a way of looking at the world. It is a special relationship between a part and a whole that acts as a formula for harmony and beauty. Working with the Golden Mean is an ancient form of spiritual practice. Awareness of the Golden Mean's significance has been instrumental in the acceleration of culture throughout history and is now contributing to the emergence of a spiritual renaissance art movement.
The Golden Mean Book and Caliper Set provide the knowledge and experience of this special relationship that will allow you to possess its power. This book describes the profound spiritual significance of the Golden Mean as well as the myriad ways it appears in the natural universe and in human culture. The Calipers promote an intuitive awareness of the Golden Mean relationship--they serve as both a practical tool for adding harmony to your creations, as well as a symbol of visual philosophy.
Contents 1. Introduction to the Golden Mean
2. The Mathematics of The Golden Mean
3. The Golden Mean in Life and the Natural World
4. The Golden Mean in Art and Culture
5. Inner Principles of the Golden Mean
6. The Spiritual Renaissance Art Movement
7. Practice Activities
Excerpt from Chapter 1:
Design Principles of the Golden Mean Calipers
The Golden Mean Calipers are a practical and symbolic tool for discovering, appreciating, and creating the Golden Mean relationship. Golden Mean calipers were first used by Renaissance artists to determine the most harmonic proportions for their compositions in stone and on canvas. The Calipers will determine the Golden Mean across a range of measure. They can also be used as a pantograph for making enlargements or reductions according to the Phi relationship. Specific exercises for the Calipers are described in Chapter 7.
The Golden Mean Calipers are constructed on the frame of a pentagonal star.
Working with the Calipers helps you see Phi more as a relationship than as a number. While you can find Phi without the Calipers by using a ruler and calculator, the Calipers promote a natural geometric familiarity with this sacred ratio which leads to its intuitive expression in your work.
Like geometry itself, the Golden Mean Calipers begin with the vesica piscis--sacred symbol of the creative act. The vesica piscis (which literally means fish bladder) is the almond-shaped area of overlap created by drawing two equal circles so that the center of each lies on the circumference of the other.
The vesica piscis is the geometric womb from which all shapes can be created. Prior to mechanical drawing and computer aided design, all geometric patterns had to be rendered using a compass and a straight edge. Amazingly, the points formed by this overlap of two circles establish the precise mathematical coordinates required to construct all the geometric shapes. It was through the use of the vesica piscis that the artists and architects of the past, in both the East and West, were able to construct accurate geometric forms. And this device of two overlapping circles will create accurate geometry for the construction of either a monumental temple or a tiny piece of jewelry.
To ancient geometers, the vesica piscis symbolized the fusion of opposites which created a portal from the world of preexistent form into the manifested creation. The ancient Greeks understood the numbers one and two not as numbers, but as the parents of number. Three was the first "number" recognized by Greek mathematicians. It was through the unification of duality that the first number (3) emerged. And the first three shapes to emerge from the vesica piscis (the shapes most easily constructed by connecting the points indicated by the overlapping circles) are the triangle (3), the square (4), and the pentagon (5)--the shapes which form the Platonic volumes (discussed in the next chapter).
Chapter 6 excerpt: The Spiritual Renaissance Art Movement
The renewed use and popularity of the Golden Mean is evidence of the emergence of a new art movement. History teaches that the collective mood of anticipation and the sense of new beginnings associated with the millennium will definitely produce at least some kind of art movement. Revolutionary art movements can be found at the heart of almost every period of cultural progress. In addition to the major art movements of history discussed in chapter 4, there have been many smaller art movements that captured the mood of distinct historical periods. For example, Art Deco expressed the liberated modernism of the Twenties and early Thirties. And Art Nouveau before it personified the romance of pre-World War I culture.
As a result of recent experience and intuition, it is the conclusion of this author that the presently emerging art movement has a distinct spiritual character. It seems that the art which characterizes this movement strives to represent a new sense of the sacred. One unique aspect of this emerging "spiritual renaissance" art movement is the recognition that the creation of art is a form of spiritual practice. That is, everyone who identifies with this movement can participate in it directly by practicing its forms.
And while each person's approach to spiritual practice can be original, every art movement has defining characteristics that give it shape and meaning. Participating in the early stages of this art movement inevitably involves trying to identify and discuss its distinctive elements, or tenets. Identifying the goals and the specific motifs of this emerging art movement is a matter of intuiting the structure of the collective unconscious--sensing the theme of the Zeitgeist.
There is much evidence that a critical mass of people are striving for a richer experience of spirit. And in connection with this trend the spiritual significance of beauty is being rediscovered. The emerging spiritual renaissance art movement reflects this cultural movement toward a more sacred lifestyle. One of the ways the art does this is through expressions of harmonic form in general and through the use of the Golden Mean in particular. The spiritual renaissance art movement also employs fractal "part and whole" motifs in an attempt to express universal law and spiritual truth.
A recent confirmation of the vitality of the Golden Mean as an organizing principle of this emerging art movement can be found in a group of crop circle patterns that appeared in southwest England during the summer of 1996. Many of these huge and complex formations that mysteriously appeared in farmers' fields made prominant use of sacred geometry and fractal mathematics in thier designs. In fact, the artwork for the cover of this book is adapted from a photograph of a crop circle in the form of a golden spiral Julia set--a quintiessential use of fractals and the Golden Mean in spiritual art!
To fully describe the substance of the emerging spiritual renaissance art movement is beyond the scope of this book. However, a discussion of the vitality and relevance of the Golden Mean would not be complete without mention of its role in the generation of this new art movement in our time.
Every movement needs identifying symbols. In the Sixties the peace symbol served to define and unify the hippie movement. The peace symbol signified the movementís general value: (a state of peace), as well as its immediate goal: (an end to the war in Viet Nam). The Golden Mean (in the form of a spiral nautilus shell) can act as a symbol of the spiritual renaissance art movement because it simultaneously expresses the value of universal unity and the goal of a new culture based on beauty, truth and goodness.
The peace symbol is versatilr can be made with a hand gesture. And the hand gesture for Phi is made by holding up the side of your fist to reveal the golden spiral in your hand.
Phi is a wonderful symbol because it is simple yet complex, meaningful yet mysterious, useful yet transcendental. Phiís power as a symbol comes from its multidimensional existence.
The Golden Mean exists on the levels of fact, meaning and value (that is, the levels of matter, mind and spirit) as follows:
Fact: a tangible mathematical proportion found throughout the cosmos.
Meaning: a demonstration of the efficiency and power of harmonic unity.
Value: a technique for understanding spirit and creating beauty.
The Golden Mean shows the connection between the physical and spiritual universes in the simplest, most direct way possible. It thus symbolizes the new art movement by expressing its goal which is to foster the unification of creature and Creator.
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