The Paradigmatic Matrix – The Cube
Everything perishable is but an allegory for the eternal.
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces — facets or sides — 12 edges and 8 vertices, with three meeting at each vertex. It is the only regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids[1].
The cube is a three-dimensional square; it is a symbol of stability and permanence, of geometric perfection, it symbolizes the final stage of the cycle of immobility and is understood as a building block of all simple matter. Cubic shapes can be found in many structures including the natural formations and growth of crystals — salt, pyrite, and some fluorites — and are the basis of western architecture.
The Cube sits flat, rooted to its spot. It denotes honesty and straightforwardness, morality and integrity; frequently forms allegories with solidity and the persistence of virtues, hence its relation to thrones or chariots; it can be seen as the truth, as it looks the same from any perspective.
In Pythagorean, Indian, and Platonic traditions the cube is associated with the element of Earth; it represents the Earth, and it is commonly thought of as the counterpart of the sphere (Heaven – the hemispheric Dome). In Egypt, the Pharaoh is depicted sitting on a cubic throne; in India, many statues of deities are shown standing on a cube, one under each foot, and it corresponds to the Root chakra.
According to intuitive knowledge, meditating on this shape assists in grounding individual energy, regaining focus, removing tensions and easing physical stresses as it reconnects the energies of the Earth and Nature. It is used for focusing energies before beginning any type of healing or higher energetic work. It is the Foundation stone embedded in the principle of Earth as nesting the human experience within the spiritual/physical universe. The cube gematria conforms to all things spatially equal in their parts, being them metaphorically, symbolically as well as physically, in relation. It, therefore, sets the standard of inserting spirit into form in perfect equilibrium.
Its central core, where all forces converge and unite, is this centre that connects the foundation on Earth to the foundation in Heaven. The outer edges of the planes of the cube ground the centre into the realm of substantiation. Its six faces correspond to three complementary dualities. When two dualities interact, the four elementals are created. At their turn, they dualise to give rise to eight vertices representing the relative absence and abundance of each elemental.
In sacred geometry, Metatron, the archangel of life, supervises the flow of energy in the mystical Metatron’s Cube, which contains all of the geometric shapes of creation and the energetic patterns that make up everything. Mutation oversees the Tree of Life in Kabbalah, where it channels creative energy from the top of the tree [keter, the crown] downward to all the parts of creation.
In Sufism, the Kaaba (cube) is a symbol for the Heart in man, not the physical organ (qalb) but its spiritual counterpart. The same as the Kaaba was historically cleared of idols, so all idols, associations, and anything other than the Absolute should be cleansed from the Heart to progress further. The purified Heart of a perfect human being[2] (Anthropos Coelestis, Insan al-Kamil, Adam Qadmon, etc.) is analogous and corresponds to the heavenly archetype, and is the counterpart of the Cube. Purifying the heart allows the divine light to shine through, a light often compared to the light of the sun; accordingly, the sun is analogous to the heart. Gold is the solar metal, the symbol of the original purity of the soul. Since equivalence of symbols allows substitution of each other, exchanging the sun with gold offers “a heart of gold” or, vice versa, a “soul of light” or an “enlightened soul.”
Such a state, though accessible to man’s consciousness, is not reducible to the ordinary four-dimensional space-time continuum, and the phenomena occurring wherein are not measurable in physical terms. Hence, the existence of at least a fifth dimension to account for the spiritual breadth of sentient beings, and of the universe, is required. Humans are five-dimensional beings — not four — amphibious beings inhabiting two worlds: the physical, with the body; and the spiritual with the spirit. Everything experienced in the physical, ‘profane’ four-dimensional linear/historic space-time is finite, transitory, ephemeral, and temporary. On the other hand, the spirit, the ‘sacred’, is permanent, eternal, ever-present and everlasting. In between, uniting and partaking of both worlds, dwells the soul, that once enlightened, allows the flowing of energy at both ends.
The Performance
Performance rites are an attempt to re-create the original situation considered to be sacred[3], the Real. The sacred time is a-dimensional, is the eternal now, the notime of all times. The sacred space is self-generating the eternal here & ever continuum of the performance. Notime is coextensive with, but not limited to or bounded by the finite space-time continuum — this being a subset of notime, a plane of lesser dimension in a ‘space’ of higher dimensions. Since notime is a-spatial, unrelated to any specific topos, it can be accessed from any point of the profane world.
The performance aims at re-enacting the primordial event occurred either in notime or at its intersection with the profane world. This implies that the ‘surface’ of the profane continuum is not a rigid plane, rather an osmotic membrane between the esoteric and the exoteric worlds — the Middle mesoteric stage between the Sky and the Earth stages on the Paradigmatic
matrix in Cave 3.0. In the soul, events are experienced in both the ordinary continuum and in the notime, and bear the flavour of eternity, as they close the hiatus between here & now and there & then. In other words, they break through the veil of Maya stretched between the sacred and the profane, the cosmic hymen[4] between all polarities, between Heaven and Hell, the High and
the Low — the Sky and the Earth at the Higher and Lower stages of the Matrix. The initiation rite melts the callus in the soul, opens up the channel — the vertical Axis mundis[5] on the Matrix — and allows the energy to flow both ways, top-down and bottom-up simultaneously, meeting on the plane of symmetry of the Cube with a middle outcome, thus reinstalling the original bond between spirit and matter.
This event is an archetypal model for all journeys to the centre of the Self for which the Matrix constitutes the archetype. The Axis mundi connects the centre of the Heaven with the centre of Earth, the path of descent, or projection, on the tensorial membrane of its heavenly counterpart. It is the invisible axis around which the performance generates the horizontal historical Axis eventus field unfolding the plane of the narrative.
In this rendering, the Cube is the first stone to be laid, and the last stone to be lifted into place at the centre of the inner self/temple[6]. The cornerstone and the keystone, in that is both the first and the last, the alpha and the omega.
This re-enactment of the original condition on the mesoteric stage is the first step of a three-phase unfolding process[7]. Once activated, as by induction, it reverberates on all the planes of manifestation, igniting its next purification/regeneration phase involving the death of the old self and the rebirth of a new self — the “Arie of Death & Rebirth” in Cave 3.0 —; in turn followed by the participation phase of the performed action closing the hiatus between the performance and the audience.
Cave 3.0 is a polysemic opera that can be experienced through different lens: throughout the textual literal meaning of the narrative; via the allegoric sense interpreting the experience on the narrative and sub-narrative planes by means of images related to the literal meaning thanks to a series of analogical relationships; in a symbolic fashion; with an ethical significance, in that it infers a behavioural/aesthetical model from the narrative; with an anagogic significance relating the tropes to the mesoteric reality; or in all lens in concert. In any instance, our suggestion is to discard all lens and to open the eyes.
The Cube is a door of immanence-transcendence to materialise spirit and spiritualise matter.
[1] Platonic solids are a set of five three dimensional shapes — tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron — that date back to the Pythagoras and later named after Plato. Each has all equal sides, the angles are the same, and the faces are identical, namely, they are congruent. Plato paired each of the platonic solids with the classical elementals — fire, earth, water, air, and ethers — and maintained that these three-dimensional shapes were the building blocks to the creation of everything, in and around us.
[2] Abdulkarim Jili (AD. 1366) in his Insān al-Kāmil [The Perfect (Universal) Human (Man)], maintains that the Insān al-Kāmil is the prototype of the human being, it is pure consciousness, and one’s true identity, to be contrasted with the ‘material’ human who is bound by physical senses and matter. The author claims that there are three stages to the Perfect Human: bada’ah [beginning], when are conferred divine attributes; tawassut, when the perfect being, who being equally human and divine can comprehend both realities and eventually receive both seen and unseen knowledge; and when it is bestowed power over the natural world and any other being.
[3] Cf. Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), and his Naissance mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
[4] Cf. the relevance of ‘virginity’ in traditional lore, also, Titus Burkhardt, Mirror of the Intellect (Albany: University of New York, 1987).
[5] The Axis mundi is known in diverse cultures around the planet either as the Axis of diamond, the Pillar of light, the Cosmic pillar, the Universal column, the Cosmic pole, the Jedi column, the Arabic letter alif, Jacob’s ladder, and so forth. It can be set and found everywhere as it belongs to the n-dimesional mesoteric structure proficient in an infinite number of intersections with the space-time continuum. It shapes the axis of the Cosmic Mountain representing the universe, to say, the Sacred mountain (mount Meru, mount Alburz, mount Gerizim, Olympus, etc.), the Wheel of Life, the World Tree, Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, the Heart pillar (shinbashira) at the center of the Japanese pagoda, or the invisible axis uniting the Altar to Heaven in the Temple, as in the Rome Pantheon, etc. In its upward direction above the mesoteric stage, are ordered the higher states of consciousness, or heavens; downward towards the Earth, are the lower heavens. It represents and is homologous to the Kundalini, with its centre located in the 4th chakra. Worth mentioning here the strictly symbolically related imperial ‘parasol’, a typos common to diverse cultures, in which the ‘canopy’ stands for Heaven’s vault – sectioned into and supported in multiple of 4 ribs/pillars mounted on the axis – under which the emperor (the Self) is supposed to act for the common good of the community. An analogues reference is to be found cast in the bow-arrow binomial, where the archer stands as the acting agent.
[6] René Guénon, Fundamental Symbols (Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1996).
[7] Among other readings, these three phases can be seen as homologous to the three-partition of Dante’s Divine Comedy; Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. On the deeper/broader meaning of the Comedy, see both Luigi Valli, Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “fedeli d’amore” (Rome: Melita, 1988) and Miguel Assn Palacios, La Escatologia Musulmana en la Divina Comedia (Madrid: Instituto Hispanico de Cultura, 1961).
