3. How to dissolve a circle’s boundary

This is about One wholeness. It’s about exploring, inquiring, and resting with questions in openness of heart-mind until answers appear.

We all start in the same place, which is… the pattern with which you and I now, holding our unique qualities of past experiences and hopes, currently understand our shared wholeness. In this shared starting place, we all have differing views.

This post aims to help you dissolve any objectifying boundary around ‘shared wholeness’. Dissolving ‘the circle’s boundary’ means discovering openness of life.

Dissolving circular boundaries in general may transform how you currently understand or question wholeness in movement, from an object focus (the circumference and parts) to a relational process focus (openness in movement). This transformation aims to leave you securely balancing and rotating with awe gently in constantly reformulating time-space-substance.

You, me, others, are the embodied circles of wholeness of life expanding as our experience grows. To rest in that process of growth opens a potential to understand life also beyond our embodiment. If I could see my own growth as if from outside linear time, I might look a bit like this carved acorn. It shows me becoming a whole person relationally to myself and in my ecology, which includes you and others.

The cup of scales that attaches me to the oak tree until I detach has its point of origin that expands over time to its circumference. This cupule holds the growing seed of my potential future life. I can see my potential bursting forth, filled with nutrient, at the leading edge of which is another small point opening to pure light. In that embryo tip is my lived reality, my next generation as yet unformed in potential, for which my life now should have a care. But nature’s abundance means that many people throw their lives away, with potential unfulfilled. That is life. We all shall have unfulfilled potential until we find that perfect rest in wholeness, where our relationality in movement fulfils every unique personal identity.

Dissolving a circle’s boundary is like discovering openness inside the acorn’s seed of experience that sees through its unformed embryonic eye into the light of all potential.

Three points is the minimum necessary and sufficient number of interactions that allows unpredictability to form and take shape in temporary stabilisation of movement.

There are many ways to picture the interconnectedness of three points. The obvious, geometrically efficient one seems to be a triangle. But I find my living heart rebels at the idea of being described as a growing person in such straight and probably rigid lines of efficiency. It feels too much ‘in my head’, neat and tidy in also someone else’s head, as if this idea about the way my ecology and life could be shaped is held by them. We are not rigid crystals in each other’s hands... at least, I am not one. We are, I believe, fluid crystals, able to transform life mutually. I want my life to contribute more than diamonds to a living wholeness that we share in One.

Others take a circle as an idea and put a triangle into it, setting a boundary of objectivity around the three. But let’s take a flight into living geometry here. Let’s take off and see from above or outside that each side of any triangle is in fact a square that extends out. A triangle is the space left between three squares. It is not an object in itself. Mathematicians will tell me that where a 90 degree ‘right angle’ shapes the triangle, either side of that right angle the two areas making the shorter sides will add together to strangely equal the area of the square contributing relationally and proportionally the longest side to that empty triangle. People mostly don’t ‘see’ the three squares that extend a triangle beyond any circular or other idea of a boundary of containment. That sort of a circle is a myth. The squares are like flags waving in the wind of openness shaping up, or like sails catching the open breeze of wholeness into local proportional movement.

So if I take the circle of myth out of my picture of wholeness, I may seem left with nothing but dark emptiness – Tao, or trackless void that holds me. So a circle around my life, like the cup of the acorn, provides safety for a season in the openness of light’s potential for life to grow. Let me not shun the circle, then. May I therefore understand instead how the circle releases me to grow in substance as a seed meaningfully in my ecology. Then I may contribute relationally in all reality’s potential. I constitute the inquiring that actualises light as local forms to nurture this shared world of experience.

To understand the ripple of a circle spreading, I need to recognise how life unfolds through three equidistant points on my circumference of personal growth. These three points unendingly reconnect in cycles.

Change relationally shapes any and every point in my life experience.

Imagine these to be three points on a growing circumference. Together, like the cupule of an acorn, they look back to their one central source point, and they look to each other in a way that actualises the seed among them.

Change fluctuating at any point draws a relational response from the whole that shapes a curl of movement into formulation as the third meeting point.

Changing relatedness repatterning form… These is the integrating, core, 3-in-1 principle that organises movement in wholeness.

As the circle of my experience expands in a responsive wholeness, so simultaneously every point within me reforms and repatterns in this way. I am a continuous creation, a continuously diversifying movement of life towards the light. My source leads on to and through my embryo in the relationality of wholeness. This is the light within of spiritual rebirth.

To dissolve a mental boundary circle into openness of presence I need to look more closely at how that curl of relational responsiveness condenses movement into an actualising and dispersing substantial form.

As the circle of my experience expands, these three points cohere as integrity among the freedom of exploration. The circumference stretches into three arcs billowing like sails catching a breeze. They stretch into three semicircles from the two that constrain as a simple circle. This is inter-dependent co-origination, as freedom with integrity.

Inter-dependent co-origination

Imagine now that the space within fills with reflections of that expansive movement. Reflection inverts with integrity the semi-circular loops of connected movement. As the loops turn inwardly, the three points of integrated growth become reflective corners where the integrative loops start to curl around each other in a spin. One curling loop needs to pass through another to sustain the integrity of reflective interconnection. THIS is the relational moment of ‘an experienced event’. The word experience derives from the Latin, ex- = from and pereo = I go through. Experience is the relationality known from going through. A tri-quetral spin of inner experiential connection in the outer growth of life’s movement is a relational moment of formed illumination.

A right spin triquetra

A left spin triquetra

The triquetra is an icon of unending movement in two forms of spin, called left and right by convention, imagining that the two lower corners rotate clockwise or anticlockwise respectively in relation to the top corner. A triquetral spin is a three cornered, 3-in-1, reflective movement that generates more dimensional depth than a triangle. A circle turns into a self-knowing, unending movement that is creating a dimensional space for changing forms to relationally appear and dissolve. This is more informationally subtle and versatile than shown in a trefoil, or a moebius strip.

A trefoil

As you will see in subsequent posts in this series, the corners of a triquetra are reflexive movement, turning back from growth extension to inward reflection that reintegrates exploration, inquiry, and resting with questions while waiting for answers to appear. In a triquetral spin these corners of reflection can equally open out to a wider fluid crystal context to connect briefly with, or perhaps even induce, a neighbouring spin. I call this potential for temporary spin connection ‘a ligand’ forming from a reflexive corner of an integrated rotational spin.

A temporary, mutual exchange of informational movement might slow the spin while synergic outer and inner transformation happens – a conversation of sorts. Slowing of movement in my lived experience is knowable as cooling. In time, spin connections may cool to the point where repeating patterns can cyclically stabilise, and extend, and perhaps build structures of spins that appear as patterns that I interpret as solid because of the way I relationally interact with them through my triquetrally living embodiment.

My understanding of movement thus becomes continuous with the substance of my body and the transforming material of the world. If I focus on forms, I may objectify parts of wholeness and separate their cyclically stabilised forms away. If I focus instead first on wholeness of relational movement, then forms become relational dynamics of light, bursting with potential to transform under prevailing conditions.

A triquetra is a circle spun into a dimensional exploration of inner and outer without boundary. The changing space within is continuous with the changing space beyond, imaginatively explored with inquisitive loops for potential to formulate as actualising life.

Time and space and substance move in synergic wholeness with diversified fluctuations extending into flexible, fluid crystal structures of light that are held in a united attraction as thermal resonance. Their relatedness qualities change as gravity-mass vibrates in thermodynamic cycles, gathering or dispersing as stabilities come and go.

Any form, therefore, is the radiance of changing relatedness. I look around at any form in my whole, participatory lived experience. With my reflective heart-mind’s eye I see its gathering and dispersal in cyclical time as a story of changing qualities of relatedness manifesting in and beyond me now.