From the Void to Architecture

The Void

In the beginning there is nothing at all, which is what we refer to as the Void. We can symbolize this strictly unthinkable notion by a blank space, or by a page deliberately left blank, or as John Cage notes, in music, as Silence. No matter how we call the name of the Void, we must be wary of the fal­lacy of nominalism, confounding the name called with the original of which the name, or mark, or token of a mark are symbols. This is why, of the 100 Names of Allah, only 99 may be spoken--not an idiot prohibition or gossipy secret, but merely setting forth what is obvious and true.

"The earth was void and without form." So let us follow a venerable tradition in referring to the first mark indicating the first space to be distinguished from the Void, the first distinction, as the Form. The text of the Prajnaparamita Hridya Sutra (the Heart Sutra) specifies this order of distinction precisely, "Form is void, and voidness itself is form." This is an equation which relates and equates the first order of distinction, the act of creation, the first crossing into the first space created with the first space in order of being, which is to say no space at all, the Void. We are to imagine that if a distinction could be made between voidness and form, here it would be. But we should not believe that form, no matter which of any forms we imagine, is any different from the void itself.

In so far as we violate this teaching of the Heart Sutra, we are imagining ourselves to be apart from the real Unity and to be moving about in some so-called world of ups and downs, ins and outs, left and right-hand turns, and so forth, and back. O.K. Ordinary people do this, and talk about it in temporal existence, acting as if one believed in the reality of the Form, creating the grandest of illusions, the spectacle or magic show of the phenomenal world, also known in Sanskrit as Samsara. In the space of the Form, the space of the first distinction, called by the Tibetans the space of the Densely-packed Region, we are advised by that other essential text of the teachings of the middle period of Gautama the Buddha's life, the Prajnaparamita Sutra called Vajracchedika (variously, the Adamantine, Indestructible, Lightning Bolt, or Diamond Sutra), the Form of the Unity of the whole may be seen in nine ways. These nine ways of seeing the whole of it all-together are the epitome of the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita teachings, and these teachings as condensed and presented by the Diamond Sutra, are further condensed toward the end of the sutra, and set forth in the form of a poem, which says here are the nine ways to see it:

STAR.......CATARACT.......LAMP
MAGIC SHOW.......DEW.......BUBBLE
CLOUD.......DIAMOND.......DREAM

The text of the Heart Sutra is itself much shorter even than the three thousand lines of its companion, the Diamond Sutra. It is but a single page. And at the heart of the matter, teachings about the nature of the void as that which is without any qualities whatsoever, even those implied or supposed by the merely semantic conventions of nominalism and the psychic propensity of human beings for reification - imputing some sort of phenomenal reality to what are imaginary states - these teachings attempt to make it as clear as possible with words the the true first order of being is the utter Void. And then the text epitomizes these teachings, not as iconic images of Unity, but as mantram, as sound. The mantra goes like this:

TEYATA OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA

When one repeats this mantra, the sound of the words are understood as indicating the Void, as having exactly the same value as Silence.

These are not just idle intellectual indulgences, but practical guides for those with a mind to get it straight, as we say, and to begin any count we make from zero.

In architecture we imagine the first crossing from voidness into form, as a point. Psychologically we may imagine our center of being, the integrated self as being in and at one with the cosmos. Human understanding of this centered sense acknowledges three principle centers of consciousness: the body, the heart and the mind. In Buddhism there is the corresponding doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha. And there is a Fourth (or primordial) body, not merely the sum of the other three, but the whole body of which the other three are as three roots of the Void, representing the Void as the Form, or the first unity. The Form is the body, Nirmanakaya, the Son of the Holy Trinity; the heart is the line, the crossing, the verb, God the Father and Sambhoghakaya; the Void is Dharmakaya, associated with mind and the Holy Spirit. The one as three and three in one is called Buddhakaya, which in our present isomorph we may identify with the "point" at which the other three come together. Projecting this isomorph into the domain of life on this earth, we discover it as a most useful model of consciousness. Many current and leading theories in the neurosciences utilize this isomorph, characterizing the components as brain functions (anatomy and physiology) and as formal logics (process neuroarchitecture).

If we were to build a physical model of the iso­morph, it would look like a tetrahedron, built of, say, four plane equilateral triangles for each of its sides, any three of which meet at one of the four apices opposite the fourth side.

The Pyramid of the Great Seal

Let us now call this isomorph by a name--let's call it the ADAMANTINE ISOMORPH. As a tetrahedron, it looks like a pyramid--a three-sided pyramid rest­ing on its base, the fourth side. Not a pyramid of four sides such as at Giza, and illustrated on the back, right-hand side of the U.S. one dollar bill, series 1935 (although, according to tradition it is a left eye, the All-seeing Eye, shown in the capstone, and with the understanding that the chiasma, or crossing principle of optics of mirrored surfaces, illustrating the laws of en­antiomorphic symmetry, would lead us to expect it shown on the left-hand side).

The Adamantine Isomorph may well be that which is symbolized by the Eye, but it is definitely not the base, material form, foursquare, which plan is shown presumably at the plane of trun­cation. The Eye of Providence, hopefully guiding the United States of America, was indicated as an essential element of the Great Seal by the committee formed for the purpose of designing one in 1776. The spirit of the so-called Enlightenment, with its fear and loathing of the mystical, has influenced politicians since the time of our Founding Fathers, the fifty-five Freemasons (were they all official members?) in Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, situated exactly on the 40th parallel North, in the summer and autumn of 1776, prompted America to show one side of its Great Seal to the world: the side with the eagle (Benjamin Franklin, (who as a member of the Society of Friends, a Quaker, did not join secret societies until rather late in life he became a high Rosicrucian, did as we all know, prefer the turkey).

The other side of the Great Seal, with the pyramid and the All-seeing Eye of Providence was turned facing the wall on the large version exhibited Eagle-out at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, 1893. In 1934, Henry Wallace prevailed upon President Frank­lin Delano Roosevelt to have both sides of the Great Seal appear on the 1935 series dollar bills being then designed. A copy of the note sent by the President authorizing the symbols has been preserved, with the change in Roosevelt's own hand and initialed by him to print the pyramid on the left-hand side; to change the original design and designation of obverse and reverse of the seal. And that is why our dollar bills look the way they do today, and not how they were designed to look by the committee composed of Jefferson, Adams and Franklin. The proof printing of the U.S. dollar bill, Series 1935, with the eagle on the left and the pyramid properly disposed, appears on the Roosevelt memo.

Our Founding Fathers did make one important dis­tinction, in order that America be on record, in the marked state--they agreed to write down the Consti­tution. And they agreed to write down, to enter into the marked state, the Bill of Rights as the first ten Amendments. The very act of defining them in writing would presuppose some sort of limitation, argued some. Not so, said the majority. And so, although as Amendments to the Constitution, and thus distinguished from the original body of the Constitution itself, we find these rights guaranteed by law. The separation of church and state is graphically symbolized by the Eye connected only to the pyramid of the laws of the state by the radiance of its illumination.

The Unity

The Unity is perceived all at once, as we say, instantly, even though we imagine ourselves to be in the flow of lineal time. If all means truly All, there is no distinction between us and "it' being perceived, seen or imagined. This is the Epopteia of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Great Mysteries of ancient Greece (and the only Mysteries described as Great by the Greeks). Something was shown, seen by the initiate, revealed in the sense of Truth as aletheia: an unveiling or revelation of what is, has been and will be there all the time.

Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper
Et in secula seculorum.

World without end, that is to say without time, in No-Time, or more accurately, not 'yet' in time--not yet in a system complex enough to accommodate time. Such is the nature of Eternity, which is neither a very long time, nor quite quick as a wink. The brief­est mode of being, in terms of fractions of a second when a rho prime meson is, is being, in duration and marked by a second order of time as a derivative function of time as simple duration. With time as we know it in daily life--which is to say, in our life as we imagine it flowing like the time of day, with lineal and cyclical functions--there is already memory. It can be shown that the psychic sense of time and mem­ory have as their theoretical justification a mathematical sense of time. This may be represented as an oscillation, illustrated, for example, by the oscil­lation of a sine wave, or curve. We show it graphically projected into a space of what we count as two physical "dimensions," and what we describe variously as a Cartesian co-ordinate system, an x/y plane, the achieve­ment of Egyptian architecture in precisely defining and realizing the plane surface, superficial elegance -- the outside of the All and Everything, looking inward toward the source, the center, the mother of the Cosmos, where things are simpler, and there is not time yet. For time is born of space. Space is the mother and time the son, as the sacred scriptures of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism according to the Kagyudpa have it. This is not merely a tradition or a superstition, as James Keyes notes, it is the way things really are.

In Eternity, space and time are confused, having been stripped of all relation to place and occasion and the participation or projection of our sense of self in the daily world. Conventionally, we may enter this realm in our imaginations. Then we do not describe places, but recognize the objectivity of space in its abstract, pure and formal nature. Space in Eternity has been well-charted, by religion, mystical insight, and by mathematics as well as by art. In the Oriental traditions "they either get it right, or they do not get it at all." In the Occident with the paramount tradition of dis­crimination, drawing distinction, measuring and science, they get it right and wrong and in any number of ways.

"Let us count the ways..."

We begin at zero. Ordinally our first natural number. The whole idea of zero we conventionally indicate by using a sign or mark, such as: 0. We could as well leave a space blank, as: . The indications on a military manual read: Leave this space blank. The printer sets a line of type, which is printed on a page, and bound into the set of orders. Some pages are not printed for distribution, but are retained for security concerns, but blank pages are bound in order to preserve continuity of pagination. The Admiral's copy has the the text corresponding to the blank pages. But what the pages say is: Leave this page blank. "By your leave, imagine this page as blank, which of course it is not, because this very sentence appears here, as you are reading this--but let us imagine that these initial words, id est, Leave this page blank, to be instructions to the printer. What does he do? If he reads the manuscript copy injunctively, he does indeed leave it blank, without even setting so much as the page number. You know some books, such as Joseph Campbell's volume C in the Bollingen Series, have pages bound in on which plates are printed but without pagination. G. Spencer Brown has a page deliberately left blank bound into Laws of Form, published by Julian Press, New York, in the 1972 edition--which was preceded by a British edition first appearing in 1969.

There is a way to read the form of the book itself, as might a printer and a bookbinder, to see that this page is so correctly numbered. If we were to give it a number it would be represented by the conventional notation for the imaginary value: i, having the numerical value of the square root of minus one. Charles Muses identifies this as the first hypercomplex number. Since by the rules of our "arithmetic" (which is truly an algebra, as it contains both constants and variables, while an arithmetic is properly the formal relationships between constants) a minus number multiplied by another minus number (or by the same minus number, for this matter) is a plus number--by the rule of changing signs in the operation called multiplication-‑ there is a contradiction, because according to the other rules which define squares, exponents, power series, and square roots, here we have a number, -1, which is presented as the product of multiplying two other numbers. It is recognized in logic as a "self‑ referential" proposition or equation. Outlawed by Russell and Whitehead, it is nonetheless indispensable as an analytical tool for most of the higher mathematics written since them." In the military manual the page is not left blank. In Brown's book it is. Here it is not.

This points to a need for clarity in the use of injunctions, clearly distinguishing them from descriptions. Music, mathematics, mystical exercises and cookbooks are examples of texts which distinguish between injunct­ions and descriptions. Describe an eggplant parmigiana. Depending upon the sense of planning and programming contained in your description, in imaginary response to the injunction, another might or might not be able actually to prepare such a dish. That is why cookbooks set out injunctions, such as: Take your eggplant, wash it, wash your hands too, while you are at it, and in general, wash up the entire kitchen in addition to the eggplant. If we do not know from experience what an eggplant is, then we have recourse to pre­liminary descriptions. Implied is: Take as given, fire, water, earth and air, the quintessential ether, etc., and also that we know what it is, an eggplant, and that our kitchen floor is swept clean before we begin to move about with fire, water, eggplants, sharp knives, fragile crockery, etc. The complete cookbook would have footnotes citing Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. But cookbooks are not usually written like mathematical texts. Ph.D. dissertations on art and culture are typically longer than those in deeply generalized disciplines such as mathematics by a factor of 100. Cookbooks fall in between. But no matter how one describes eggplant parmigiana, its savor and flavor, the surest way to chart the path for others to follow is to provide injunctions.

Slice the eggplant 1/8 inch thick, half-moon shape. Spread on paper towels and lightly salt. (Take as given, salt = NaC1). Prepare oven, and so on. If we introduce variables, such as using Liederkranz instead of Parmesan cheese, contradic­ting the injunctions, then we cannot reasonably ex­pect towind up with eggplant parmigiana. Ruqayya Jaclyn Smith, in Corey C. Hill's cookbook, takes 1/2 cup grated Swiss cheese for her eggplant. She does not indicate "parmigiana." What is to be taken as given in a cookbook recipe is usually a list of the ingredients.

In a history of architecture the list of plates or illustrations indicates a canon of reference for the descriptive text. An injunctive text in architecture, can be a set of plans, blueprints or other such program. Peter Blake laments that schools of architecture do not presently teach their students how to build. Mies van der Rohe was trained as a mason. Antonio di Sangallo was apprenticed to a carpenter and so learned how to build, and as James Ackerman observed, inherited control of the Vatican school and papal com­missions, effectively keeping Michelangelo from prac­ticing architecture, at least in Rome, until after the death of Sangallo when Michelangelo, then 72 years old succeeded him. Sangallo was the only other real builder among the students of Bramante and Raphael, which helps to explain how he was able to hold that position of power.

Architecture

Our understanding of architecture begins with the distinc­tion between natural forms and the products of human action. The process of architecture may be thought of as the primordial augmentation of natural shelter--a modification of space; human consciousness manifesting itself by ar­ticulating its material environment. Leaky (1977) suggests that our distant ancestor, Ramapithecus, may have discovered the distinct advantage of tool using in the exploration of the new habitat which opened up for upright early hominids sometime around ten or twelve million years ago. The mater­ial evidence is very tenuous: a cobblestone found at the Fort Ternan site, possibly used as a bone-smashing tool.

More than two million years ago we do know that hominids established campsites as home base, around which coalesced the early essential elements of human culture, including food-sharing, tool making and language. The controlled use of fire is established by B.C. 500,000. By B.C. 400,000, at the Terra Amata site, we have material evidence of early architecture: stones with sockle holes for a superstructure of bent branches--building that very probably resembled structures still built by the :Kung and G/wi tribes of southwestern Africa. The paleolithic caves sites are well-known for their highly sophisticated wall painting and occasional examples of relief sculpture. While we are agreed that an architectural function was fulfilled by these caves, they do not as yet contribute to the evidence for building. At a very early stage, however, human beings probably did construct temporary shelters, windbreaks and thorn-bush fences or barricades. Paleolithic nomads hunting large game during the ice age, down to about B.C. 10,000, constructed tent-like shelters of skins over a framework of branches, anchored by a circle of mammoth skulls. And we know that with the receding of the ice over much of the world, settled communities with neolithic techno­logies become more common, and are able to support increasing population densities through the development of grain agriculture and animal husbandry.

Among the oldest and also the most impressive of neolithic sites is that of Jericho, now dated to approximately B.C. 7000. At Jericho were impressive walls, long before the historical appearance of the Biblical Joshua; not just rude defenses, but fully scaled city walls, with watchtowers, ramps, staircases, parapets, windows, rooms with whitewashed walls, and full-scale, naturalistic sculpture of the human head. Other neolithic sites evidence highly-refined workmanship, clear conceptual programs and impressive aesthetic quality. Giedieon chronicles the most important of these.

The Pyramids of Egypt

With the coming of the world's high civilizations, architec­ture in the full modern sense also comes into being. Ichazo (1972) characterizes the violent appearance of a culture with the discovery of the Unity. "It is beyond any doubt that the Egyptians discovered the Unity. The Pharoah was a king-god, that is, a man who has achieved complete in­ternal realization, the Unity." (p. 14) At the same time, the first large-scale, complex, integrated architectural programs appear, executed in cut and dressed stone with consummate skill and expressive success. The Unity in Egypt is marked by the geographical, political, military and social event of the unification of Southern and Northern Egypt under Menes, or Narmer, around B.C. 3000. All at once the essential characteristics of Egyptian style, refined sculp­tural technique, heiroglyphic presentation of stylized human and animal forms and spatial organization are demonstrated, which continue to typify Egyptian art for the following two millenia. The medium of stone masonry is introduced, and within a few hundred years--in the Step Pyramid and temple complex at Saqqara of the Third Dynasty Pharoah, King Zoser--the monumental vision of Zoser's Visier and Chief Architect, Imhotep, is realized. With Imhotep we may say that the logic of architecture, as one of the most enduring activities of mankind, receives a primary definition and expression. Later Egyptian tradition raised Imhotep to the status of a demigod, principally as a healer, but he is also given credit as the inventor of architecture. This connection was not coincidental, since "The conception of the pyramid is something of un­deniable importance for the human psyche." (p. 14)

In the succeeding IVth Dynasty, the architectural form of the pyramid is refined to perfection in the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. With the precision of opticians Egyptian builders succeeded in giving objective material form to the internal, archetypal human psychic space. Because of the deeply generalized power of the pyramid shape as a model of consciousness, there have been many imaginative interpretations, and frequent fanciful rationalizations of its iconic qualities. No one since has designed a struc­ture possessing intrinsically superior qualities of archi­tecture. Expressive elaborations there have been, innova­tions with materials and techniques, adaptations, variations and complications--but not a structure that is any neces­sarily better architecture. Although perhaps intuitively appreciated, these intrinsic architectural qualities are sometimes missed by traditional scholars who insist upon limited, single-use functions. It is not merely that the pyramids were monumental Pharoahonic tombs--they may not have been tombs at all, since in the only "burial chamber" ever inspected with anything like archeological control, that of a smaller pyramid associated with Mykerinus, the supposed coffer was empty.

We do know that the west bank of the Nile was associated with the land of Death, and so it is fair to assume that the pyramids did serve some funereal or at least memorial function. This may very well have involved a teaching about the imaginary nature of the distinction between life and death, analogous to ideas perpetuated in Vajrayana Buddhism, and in various Sufi and esoteric Christian traditions. Then it would be reason­able to suppose that the pyramids served a ceremonial, and perhaps an initiatory or educational function as well. Obviously they were richly multi-purpose enterprises. As Tompkins and Stecchini establish (1971) the pyramids could have been used as theodolites for surveying, and do appear to have been geodetic markers, with dimensions commensurate to accurate geophysical measurements. Through proportion and number a rigorous set of correspondences was established by the early high civilizations between establishing standard units of measure on the earth and the precise marking of time by observation of celestial phenomena. Campbell (1962) argues convincingly that "The highest concern of the mythology (was with) order: some sort of mathematically ordered, astronomically referred notion about the relationship of man and the rhythms of his life on earth, not simply to the seasons, the annual mysteries of birth, death, and regeneration (neither history nor fertility), but beyond those to even greater, much larger cycles: the great years." (p. 120, v. ii)

It is noteworthy, according to Campbell (p. 94) that with the advent of durable stone architecture in Memphis and Saqqara, "the mythology arose also of a god who never dies." And the priesthood now known to have been responsible for Egypt's art and architecture of stone, was that of Ptah, the mummy god of creation, and the god of creative art. "The Greeks identified him with Hephaistos. He was the god who had fashioned the world, and the secrets of his craft, therefore, were those of the form and formation of the world." Ptah was the god of quarries, of the stone and its material self, and of the processes whereby the stone was cut, dressed, incised, erected, polished and consecrated by the priests who were master craftsmen, and by "a high priest who bore the title wr hrpw hmwt, "master of the master craftsmen." (p. 94) "It is entirely to them that the civilized world owes the noble ruins not only of the step pyramid of Dynasty III (c. 2650 B.C.) but also of the Pyramid Age of Dynasties IV - VI (c. 2600 - 2190 B.C.), and therewith the earliest manifestation in firmly durable stone of prac­tically all of the basic rules, techniques and formulae upon which the arts of architecture and sculpture in stone have been grounded ever since." (P. 94-95)

We understand that architecture and the other fine arts are expressions of human beings, that they may thus be distinguished from the events and elements of nature. A sunset and a painting of a sunset are thus distinct in kind, as the Great Pyramid is distinguished from a mountain in pyramidal shape or from the cross section of the pineal gland. As works of man then, architecture reveals the characteristic type of thought of the people who produce it. Where there is a perception of the Unity, we would expect it to be revealed in the architecture. Could it be any other way? In any case this is an assump­tion upon which most modern cultural histories depend.

The Trialectic Mode of Thought

Following Ichazo (p. 7) we may indicate three principal modes of thought: logical, dialectic and what is called "trialectic." Formal logic explains identity, and dialec­tics incorporates also movement and change, but neither are capable of comprehending the Unity, a metaphysical concept that cannot be grasped by conventional logic. Trialectics "describes the process and the Unity of the Whole." Trialectic thought is illustrated by the great works of art in any culture in which there is perception of the Unity, the works typically containing elements that can be recog­nized as specifically self-referential and wholistic.

As we know from history these elements can be superficially copied or borrowed, or inherited with only a partial or distorted understanding. The Great Pyramid manifests a unified perception of the whole, but when similar physical forms are used, as by the 19th century Italian sculptor Canova in his "Tomb of the Countess Maria Christina" (1798­-1805), the result may be no more than theatrical sham (Janson, 1977, p. 592, 601).

In the attempt to develop a historical approach to archi­tecture, we must recognize that a wholistic, trialectic expression may be found in any given time period since the original revelation of the Unity in human consciousness. Indeed, a microcosmic whole-systems sensibility may be one of the deepest standards by which great art is judged. And there may be groups or individuals whose work is in­spired by profound integrity, even though their historical circumstances, the social and cultural forms, and the pre­dominate mode of thought of their contemporaries does not appear to have reached full realization. The perception of the Unity in Egypt sustained a unified cultural expression for some two thousand years, but things change in the world, and the vision of the Unity must be constantly refreshed. Otherwise, with the institutionalization of mere forms and practices, there is always danger of an obfuscated and faltering inner light.

In order to set a work of art or architecture in what we call historical perspective, then, we consider not only its intrinsic qualities, but also the problematical relationship of the work to the predominate characteristics of the context in which it appears. This approach challenges conventional assumptions about some so-called "evolution" of artistic sensibility, spawned by a misunderstanding of 19th century biological metaphors. Yet the imaginary concept of lineal time is of obvious utility, despite the severe biases it has engendered: it is not utterly without meaning to say that some things follow others in time, so long as we do not forget that there are other, quite possibly more important things that are not so constrained.

No doubt largely because of its material capacity to per­dure in time, architecture is particularly vulnerable to arbitrary historicism. Not so long ago, it was popularly assumed that the inhabitants of ancient Egypt were some sort of brutish, enslaved multitudes, dominated by what had become a very unpopular political form of theocracy. And for another thing, five thousand years ago was thought to have been very close, indeed, to the creation on the world. This event was said to have occurred in 4004 B.C., on 23 October, at precisely nine o'clock in the morning. (Leaky, 1977, p. 21) Now we know there is a very much more generous temporal perspective in which the cultural achieve­ments of the "ancient" Egyptians come relatively quite late in the two-and-a-half or three million years of human history. And far from appearing at the Dawn of Creation, the foundation of high civilizations are but an eye-blink ago in context of the two billion years of life, the four or five billion years of the earth's existence, or the eight or nine billion years since the hypothetical Big Bang. If the entire history of the universe as we know it were represented by a conventional year of 365 days, the Great Pyramid of Giza would have been built in the last minute of the last day of the year.

What does it mean to be in a culture, swimming in the fluidity, the form or ground against which the conscious articulations, the works or art and expressions of creativity are set into the marked state, figured in the gestalt? The jump in level of consciousness from being in it and of it to the Sufi self-awareness, being in it but not of it renders what was invisible for Marshall McLuhan now apparent.

Architecture as frozen music, in the literature, is but a half-developed dichotomy. What about music as melted architecture? By playing in our minds with both concepts, we can measure the metaphor. Architecture is fixed in space. In the neolithic, it arises as a collective effort on monumental scale, built to last. Built to endure in time--and also according to a model, paradigm, ideal , plan or archetype, like the shoe patterned on the last. Stone masonry was mastered and taught by the Priesthood of Ptah from the First Dynasty in Egypt. Within a few hundred years stone cutting technology, already splendidly refined in pre-dynastic alabaster vases, was translated into a monumental scale. The polished limestone facing of the Great Pyramid finished like the artifact of a giant optician. Precise plan, orientation and clear purpose, accurate siting of a true geodeisic, built with the resources of an empire and the skill of centuries, maybe thousands of years of transmission of techniques: the Great Pyramid was already a millenium old in the time of King Tut. And it lasted for another thousand, almost two thousand more years before it was stripped by lazy latecomers who understood the structure only as a quarry.

Such a flash of duration in the flow of Earth time for human consciousness, is an ironic commentary on the naivete of Pyramid builders. They wanted it to last forever, indestructible. Well, there is a way in which that intention can be recognized in the domain of the history of consciousness, but on the plane of material manifestation, it is a cruel joke. Important as it was for the solid masonry of the Great Pyramid's physical form to have been--at least once--realized, it is not in this form only that the eternal nature of the pyramid as an archetypal paradigm of consciousness itself may be experienced: both understood and known.

Kurt von Meier