We might not understand the logic and significance of geometrical arrangements as being contained in the circle with the spirals, but we still adopt the idea of containment into our thinking and preserve it as a widespread, legendary mythology that we recognize has a hidden meaning. This idea of "containment," that seems so foreign to us in our thinking, may actually come down to us in mythology as King Arthur and the Holy Grail. In this legend the Knights (the pictographs on the disk?) of the Round Table, (the disk itself?) quest (run around in the spiral maze?) looking for the Grail cup, the container of "the water of life" and the path to immortality (the infinity symbol created by joining the two sides of the disk?). [see right column] The Grail King, the knight who finds the Holy Grail, can consume the contents of the cup and gain eternal life. Or not. Looking at the disk, we are perhaps looking at the origin of the Grail Cup mythology and the original idea behind the ancient, spiritual concept of containment. Does consuming the contents of this "cup" grant us immortality? I think it does.

The idea of containment may have developed over time into a concept of the Grail cup (Grail meaning Crater) but perhaps originated as the crater that contains the cosmos that appears as a vortex-whorl, spinning the elements of itself round and round the crater until centrifugal force separates the elements into a spiral, like a spiral galaxy, and creates a vortex and a funnel through which passes the overflow from itself to itself as a function of containment (the image to the right, the Phaistos Disk, with both sides of the disk joined together, illustrates this concept of overflow in containment). It's an ancient theory that is not that farfetched when you think about it. For example, is this the function of a Black Hole, a vortex that serves as a funnel through which passes the overflow of the spiral galaxy from itself to itself?

This ancient theory of creation of the universe, an everflowing fount of contained creativity, found predominantly in the antique religious philosophy of Emanationism, is simple to grasp. Try to think of the beginning of the universe as motion, forming naturally as spin in a void and becoming an infinite spiraling vortex that forces, through centrifugal force, the thickening of motion into substance. (Well, sure. Without modern physics to lead them down a dark path, the ancients could imagine this creation scenario without questioning exactly how, in terms of physics, it works.) Then, the friction caused by the substance ignites, causing an explosion - or a "Big Bang" as scientists-as-creationists call it - and also causes seeming chaos, seeming because the chaos actually has patterns (as expressed by the Phaistos Disk), and then occurs further diversification and material development.

The spin fans the fiery universe and creates internal spiral galaxies, stars and debris, and then forces them into groups of similar physical density that create physical planes of matter while, at the same time, creating planes of invisible force facilitating this separation and distribution. Thus, out of this seeming explosion of chaos arose the perfect patterns and ideal forms - the planes of geometries - of our world/whorl occulted by this fiery, spinning, spiraling universe which we mistakenly imagine is random, mindless, and hostile to us because we are unable to perceive the brilliant design inherent in the Creation. But take a look at the chaos of the Phaistos Disk and then reveal the hidden patterns, and there it all is! And this could actually be the real explanation of how it happened, how the universe came to be, and all that science that followed down through the ages was just people trying to figure out the mechanics of it.

This is now an obscure version - a completely lost version - of the creation of the universe and one we would not think the Minoans could conceive of, but that is only because we are arrogant in our view of ancient worlds and we presume they didn't know anything about science since they didn't have washing machines and automobiles. But how could they be any less intelligent than we are when you consider our common version of creation, which has held reign since the Dark Ages, is that, simply, God created the world? Period. End of story. End of investigation and certainly without the heretical quesion, "Really? How did that happen, exactly?" The other common version, equally dense, is produced by our scientists-as-creationists, "It was a great Big Bang that created the world."

But a thoughtful people could come up with a better version through deductive reasoning than both of those, of which we are so proud, just through observation of the circumnavigation of the stars. Or perhaps the Phaistos Disk and what it seems to relate to this solver is just one artist's enlightened version of reality. Though complex and well-conceived, this is just another version of Emanationism, the popular, ancient theory of creation that underlies all the historical religions and that developed from the older religious philosophy of Dualism. Emanationism is an attempt to unify the duality of Dualism into a container-contained concept - a oneness statement - but still postulates the existence of a creator, perceived to be the motion of the vortex, and it identifies the universe as being the Mixing Bowl of the Creator - the Crater - who spins it with his whirl.

"...he who surrounds the spheres and spins them with his whirl, set turning his formations and let them turn from a beginning boundless unto an endless end." (Poimandres in G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol.. 2, p. 5)

The Phaistos Disk perhaps shows the primordial idea of the crater - which may have become "creator" - as dependent on the process of overflow, the idea of the cosmos as a winding river or an ocean - Oceanus - with the upper levels spiralling into those below, creating as it goes. With the Phaistos Disk as evidence, the Minoans appear to have originated the cosmogonal idea of Oceanus. The disk seems to demonstrate a unique cosmogonal theory of the flow going both ways and not just "from above" to "down below" but a return path, as well. This is a complex version of early Emanationism involving the crator of the whorl that might have become, over a long period of time, the creator of the world.

Oh, how 'bout that! Identified God en passant - God is the crater/creator (the container) of the whorl/world (the contained.)

Perhaps the Minoans conceived of this complicated cosmogony by simply drawing an inference from their observation of the circumnavigation of the stars in a vortex-whorl movement. Perhaps our word "world" comes from their observation of the "whorl." It is easy to think of ourselves as living in the "whorl," and comforting as well, since it somehow makes sense and seems like home. Perhaps the Minoans, apparently great geometers, took it one step further and conceived of our "whorl" as being contained inside two pyramids, one inverted sitting under the other, and inside of both is the world disk, its two sides connected for an eternal whorl involving the world "above" in the top pyramid, and the world "below" in the bottom, inverted pyramid. Like the Phaistos Disk, the whorl below is the inverse reflection of the world above, and our life's journey involves moving eternally back and forth through the spirals of this maze, or a ceaseless life-death cycle from living reality above to deceased reality below.

Finding no less than six hidden pyramids on the Phaistos Disk encourages me to think that perhaps their idea of the container half of "container-contained" formula is two pyramids, one inverted and mirroring the other. As for what contains those two pyramids that contain the whorl/world, I guess it's pyramids all the way down :)

A closer look at our whorl (the disks above) reveals our microcosmic existence as a mirror of the larger celestial reality, the macrocosm. Like the stars, we are scattered throughout the spirals as all the different kinds of people, represented as the pictographs separated into the spirals. We seem to be living in chaos but in actuality we are creating patterns of geometries by our identical characteristics, which are our ideas, that become our connectedness to each other. Because the geometries, like the stars, are eternal, we can infer from this that we, as the anchors of these geometries, are eternal as well. Based on ancient, pre-Aristotelian ideas, this is a geometry theory and a logic that proves itself in its simplicity and its beauty and that somehow became lost to us because we are predictably getting lost in the maze of the spirals and being spun further and further away from the center, thus becoming more and more distanced from the simple logic of our origin and our purpose. In this ancient cosmogony, we are essential points of enlightened perspectives as we anchor the eternal geometries by the connectedness of our ideas. Were it not for the geometries that connect us together we might become completely lost to our reason for existing. We are an integral, pictographical part of the function of the Whorl.

These geometries connecting us all together form angles - angels - who thus invoked into existence by the high ideas - the ideals - then take up their function as arch-angles - archangels. These pure geometric forms support the archs of these created angles so that the potential of the ideas can be fulfilled to become the forms and archetypes of the World Soul - the universe or alchemical alembic in which fusion occurs among the ideas to create new realities. Thus, the world is a fluid whorl and a creation in progress thanks to (the Creator's/Crater's) spin and (with us on board) the formation of the angles (angels). This deification of geometry, or sacred geometry, I call Planeism.

Planeism may have been the basis of an ancient geometry theology and number philosophy that deifies both the created - the universe of ideas - and the creators - ourselves. It might have been the basis for Platonism and Platonic Idealism in which Plato taught, 1,300 years after the Phaistos Disk expression of Planeism, that ideas are ultimately real, Good being the highest Form or Ideal (Good becoming God, a kind of abbreviation for good meaning Good to the nth Power) and the basis for understanding all other Forms. In Planeism, which is an attempt to express ideas in terms of geometry contained within a sphere, this Good/God might be expressed as a right triangle, considered the most perfect triangle form. Plato, his thinking based in dualism, also acknowledged the distinction between the ideal and non-ideal realm.

Think of reality like this. We are in the non-ideal realm, the physical world, the idea being to create the ideal realm and then inhabit it, both here where we are now, if possible, and later, where we will be. Thus, we bridge the two worlds, the world of spirit where we will be and the world of matter where we are now, when we connect with others in this world and in the "other" world where the same ideal is expressed, creating an eternal plane of geometry, an ideal realm to inhabit that transcends the duality expressed by the two worlds by rising above it or transcending it via the geometry of ideas. (left and below) The multiple planes of the triangles create the possibility of multiple spatial relationships within the same plane and, taken a step further, multiple civilizations within the same dimension, all sharing the same space in an unaware reality. (Gaze at the image, left and below, and see the fluid geometry, the planar dimensions sharing space.)

Phaistos Disk, both sides connected at the matching line segments and all four Mother/Isis/Nurse matching pictographs connected with lines. This creates the Oasis or "Oisis", an archangle - archangel - a Comforter providing relief in transcending the extreme duality (polarity) of our natural world.

So our ideas create this invisible, eternal plane and then upon death we follow our ideas/consciousness into it, and ascend/merge into those others whom we resonate with and co-habitate the plane. Well, this is what we are doing here and now, although it does not seem that way because there are so many people we do not resonate with. But we are building our ideal planes with people we do resonate with - we could even conjecture this as the purpose for being here - and so we have to be very careful what ideas specifically we are resonanting with because we are creating our destiny to reside in those ideals or planes of ideas.*(see below)*

From that lofty afterlife perspective, when we attempt to connect with our physical counterparts in the physical world, those whose ideas match ours, we would be mostly or completely invisible to them - ghosts or spirits - and historically may be interpreted as the "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit" by those who experience the connection, given the ideas involved. Because of the mechanics of plane geometry, our invisible plane exists in the same space as their physical plane, though on diagram seemingly above it, creating a veil between worlds.

"A veil exists between the world above and the realms that are below."("Hypostasis of the Archons," the Nag Hammadi Papyri)

The natural barrier or boundary of the worlds is the dissimilarity of form between the timeless, virtual world and the temporal, physical world. (This dissimilarity of form is the result of dissimilar subatomic particle field density.) This barrier, or veil, called Limit-Cross (Horos-Stauros) in Gnosticism, is symbolized by the intersection of the horizontal bar (Horos-Limit) and vertical bar (Stauros-Cross) of a cross. Limit-Cross is the frontier of separation between the realm of the timeless, invisible world and the temporal, visible universe. The vertical bar of Limit-Cross is individuated extension (Space) and the horizontal bar is individuated duration (Time), together Space-Time. From this ancient cross symbol that pre-dates Christianity by thousands of years, we get the idea of a "Mighty Power."

Diameter on the Phaistos Disk is compared with a symbol from Minoan art that seems to imply spin. The intersecting plane and virtual Limit-Cross is created by vortex spin.

Our ability to create the universe via our ideas and interconnectness with our counterparts in the eternal realm is, in early common era Gnosticism, a Mighty Power that is ascribed to a "higher power" than ourselves - a creator. Through time we gave away our mighty power to the idea of God the Creator, and the cross was reappropriated by Christianity to mean something to do with suffering and loss, maybe the loss of our powers. Perhaps a being named Jesus did incarnate to "save us" since we have completely forgotten this genius science we brilliantly created and instead have run off down some other path in pursuit of diversions and various carnal pleasures. Well, we are supposed to be having fun, too ;) Some failsafes against mindless maze wandering must surely be in place, however, since the method of creation of the universe is an old system with a lot invested, involving the interests of more than one dimension.

Plutarch and Plotinus between them gave accounts of this ancient world-view that also involved numerology and the sexagesimal system of counting that seems preserved on the disk. These accounts relied heavily on mathematics and originally involved a mother goddess creator cosmology, the belief in the emergence of the entire physical world from the womb/void of the goddess "Rhea," the womb also being conceived of as an obvious symbol for the crater/creator - the void into which emerges an individual who, born contained within its placenta, expresses the divinity of container-contained, each child a Christ whose destiny is martyrdom for an unremembered cause. The system also describes a limited number of original souls and may be the ancient religious philosophy that informed popular beliefs in Greece during the time of Plato, who envisioned a complex theory of reincarnation involving the upcycling of incarnated original souls.

*(footnote)* To see this Planeism theory of resonance in action today, to see people taking it up as a religious philosophy, look into Buddhism. There you will find advocates working on becoming Bodhisattvas, beings of light who are delaying their Nirvana to stay behind to help those who are suffering because they are lost from the path of compassion. Bodhisattvas produce Bodhicitta, compassionate mind, and are creating it as a plane of resonance, habitable here and now when produced. This is the path I am walking as are millions of others. Historically, this philosophy is not always called Bodhisattva, but it is the Path and has been the Path since the ancient Indus Valley and long before and also in ancient Egypt in which it was known as the Lion's Path, with the goddess Sekhmet as its earthly guide. It is an ancient Path called different names. Many practitioners consider this to be a path salvatory in nature, but I think not. It really isn't about saving the world or alleviating the suffering, which I think is a presumptive approach, but instead is about using compassion to build the plane of resonance and elevating the world. After all, compassion is the best building material/idea we have :)

Plato's theories about original souls and reincarnation may have come from the following ancient mythology of the creation and population of the universe that seems preserved on the Phaistos Disk. This is obviously the creation myth being expressed by the numerology of the Phaistos Disk. In the ancient mythology, formed in Rhea's womb were 5 main divisions of layers or cosmic stuff (cosmoi), and into these layers or firmaments formed 60 soul spaces made of 60 types of soul-stuff, comprising 240 individual souls made of 48 different archetypes. The 5 layers are the spirals on both sides of the Phaistos Disk. The spirals are divided into 60 line segments (30 Side 1, 30 Side 2). The 60 soul spaces in Rhea's womb is the total number of line segments on the disk, the 240 individual souls she creates is the total number of pictograph impressions, and the 48 soul types is the number of unique signs on the disk. This begins the earliest system of astrology. Perhaps the Phaistos Disk is the Birthing Stone of Zeus.

And in these sixty spaces dwell the souls, each one according to its nature, for though they are of one and the same substance, they are not of the same dignity. (Plutarch)

As we see, they are not. Same substance, different dignity.

In an extension of this astrology, Kabalistic mysticism helps us account for the fact that there certainly seem to be more than 240 individual souls in the world. This is where "Tree of Life" comes into the picture. Each of these original souls has taken root in our reality and begun to produce branches of itself, so that each of us is a member of a light network of souls (left), a family of souls belonging to one of those original 240 souls.

Two or more humans may be different but complementary aspects of the same archetypal form or World Soul - the collective soul sometimes known as Source Soul, Oversoul and Higher Self. This Source Soul creates individuals through incarnation who then embark upon a journey of reincarnation until they are elevated in dignity to return on equal standing to the Source Soul. In Minoan Tree of Life (above), in the top right panel, this Oversoul might be portrayed as a lion, perhaps a reference to the Egyptian goddess Sekmet, the lion-headed divinity. Just beneath the lion, the Oversoul may be portrayed as a Griffon. The World Soul as collective soul or Oversoul continues to incarnate, producing individuals patterned upon itself (see the light-skinned Griffon-headed beings in the bottom right panel).

The Light-Body Network (up above, left) is one illustration of this network of individuals within the collective. The souls or sparks of the same Source Soul or World Soul exist individually, each in its own space-time dimension, but they partake in the larger reality of a Higher Self outside space-time and existing in an eternal, Ideal Realm. They may also exist in the same space-time dimension and might even be aware of each other, existing as "spirit twins."

When we die we return to that realm where we send off a branch of ourselves, if we have taken root and raised our "dignity", and become an Oversoul patterned upon our archetypal Oversoul. So, with Planeism in mind, if our original Oversoul is an acute triangle, then so are we and so are our branches. We can branch out infinitely but we can never be anything other than an acute triangle, although we can be infinite varieties of acute triangles with infinite color spectrums and vibratory levels. Because it takes an infinity to create all these varieties of acute triangles, we never miss being something we are not, and no geometrical form is more significant than any other but all are necessary for a complete pattern.

This unusual concept of incarnation is challenging to comprehend because it is a long way from the common and simplistic notion of reincarnation, in which an identical first soul is reborn into the body of a human or animal, according to karma. In our unusual concept, there is no physical rebirth of the individual, who exists instead In Ascension, a place as real and eventful to that Soul as our reality is to us. Also challenging to grasp is the accompanying concept of an individual's "past-life memories" as being the experiences of another individual within the collective soul and not really one's own personal memories, in the strictest sense. This involves, from Judaic Kabalism, Neshima Consciousness, wherein the individual souls gain awareness of the existence of each other. Experiencing the "past-life memories" that belong to one's counterpart in another space-time dimension heralds the dawning of the level of consciousness called Neshima, a larger perspective than just that of the individual ego.

In full Neshima consciousness, according to Rabbis, who cannot utter the word "reincarnation," (nor could my mother but she insisted Jesus was going to give her a new body when she died) the counterparts are aware of each other and they communicate. This communication is facilitated by souls in the collective who are incorporeal and nonspatial. These "messenger souls" may have been known by many names: Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus in Alchemy, Nous or Mind in ancient Hellenistic theosophy, the Dove of the Holy Spirit in Christianity, the Divine Infant in Taoism, the Guardian Angel in Kabalism, the Divine Messenger in Gnosticism, Poimandres the Good Shepherd in Hermeticism, Thoth the Divine Mind in the ancient Egyptian religion, Drahla in Bon Buddhism, and Tibetan Great Soul in Theosophy (Esoteric Buddhism as interpreted by Theosophy).

Consciousness is the greatest mystery there is, obviously, probably because consciousness and the universe are the same thing. But the other reason it remains such a mystery is because of the world of dreams. Sometimes I wonder if the relationship between the macrocosm and microcosm - the whorl above and the whorl below - is expressed as the relationship between the waking mind and the dreaming mind. Here is what I think is the relationship and what I think is happening in dreams.

When we are awake we engage upon introspection as the way of making the self responsible for what we are experiencing in the environment, as in "It's all my fault." "What is going on and can I change it?" "What if I do this, what will happen then?" "If I am kind and cheerful then everything will be better." But when we sleep we do the inverse, we engage upon projection as a way of making the environment responsible for what we are experiencing in the self.

As example, if we have muscle aches while sleeping we might explain to ourselves what is happening by dreaming we are in a doctor's office getting a massage that's causing the aching. Or, if we have a headache we might dream we are in combat somewhere and getting injured in the head. If we are restless in our sleep we might dream we are being bothered by some creature or some such explanation to ourselves of what's going on. It is impossible we can deduce something in dreams like "my legs hurt" or "my back hurts" and make a conscious statement to ourselves while dreaming as explanation of it. Dream consciousness isn't capable of that kind of critical thinking but instead forces us to think in terms of explaining to ourselves what is happening by projecting a dream environment in which we are involved in something that is causing whatever we are physically or mentally experiencing. In this way, dreams help us with our mental health.

Also, the dream events occur one after the other over a period of time like in real life, but it's an illusion. They seem linear but really they aren't; it's just that our conscious experience of them makes them seem linear. There is the famous example from Carl Jung's case of the man who had an extensive dream of being an aristocrat in the French Revolution, plotting against the rebels, getting caught, going on trial, getting sentenced to death, being taken to prison and finally being taken to the guillotine and getting his head chopped off as a way of explaining to himself why his head hurt when the picture above his bed fell and hit his head as he slept. Jung used this dream as an example of how dreams seem linear and lengthy but really aren't. Thus, our unconscious minds masterfully manipulate time as a handy tool while we dream, and our conscious minds surrender to the rules of time when awake. When we dream we transfer those rules via some mental processess into our dreaming reality. Against time we are helpless except when dreaming, when we are Masters of Time. Space also has power over us except when dreaming.

Dreams are perhaps a sudden creation in a burst of consciousness, and inside that burst are all the elements of the events, like a rain drop full of subatomic particles or pictographs inside a spiral, that we sort out with our conscious mind and make connections from one to another so that geometry is formed and the dream projection created and the events seem to occur. The application of consciousness in a sorting endeavor makes the events seem linear and helps them make sense. Is this what we are doing in life? Are we experiencing the rain drop of the "eternal now" as a linear series of events because of the application of our consciousness in a sorting endeavor to make sense of our reality?

By dreaming, we square ourselves with reality, and it's satisfying. We can control what happens, we are the masters of reality in dreams and that's important because the reality is that we were born into a pre-existent world/whorl. But at night we relax into the opposite way of experiencing it, of projecting our environment and creating our world, as a release and a creative expression, and we are refreshed for the next day of waking consciousness in a world not of our making.

It is a condition of life that we come into a pre-existent world, or maybe it only seems that way and is, in fact, the ultimate mystery of consciousness, and we bring with us into this reality the essential consciousness tool - alternate world of dreaming - a kind of shovel that can dig us out of our "stuck" condition. Dreaming helps empower us into believing we can change the world more to our liking, bring it closer to the Ideal World that we intuitively seek. Through dreams we gain inspiration, mental refreshment, and the will to bugger on in the ultimate reality of certain death.

I love this Aztec hymn from about the 5th century C.E. Though it seems amazing to have come from that period of time and those people, the Aztec and the Maya were very into the dreamtime. The Maya called the dreamtime "Otherworld," and each dream they called "Vision serpent."

We only came to sleep
we only came to dream
It is not true
no, it is not true
that we came to live in the world (whorl)
We are changed into the grass of springtime
Our hearts will grow green again
And they will open their petals
But our body is like a rose tree:
It puts forth flowers and then withers.

If this is true that we only came to sleep and dream and not to live in the world, it opens the mind to other mysterious dimensions of consciousness and it raises many questions. Where did we come from and what kind of being are we that only comes here to dream but not to live? Is living and dying here the price we pay in order to gain the experience of dreaming? Why do we need to come here to dream? Why can't we dream in our normal existence? What kind of being are we that cannot sleep and dream but nevertheless needs to? Is the entire physical world/whorl our creation just so we can come and get our dream on? And finally and ultimately, if all this is true, that we create this world just to come here to sleep and dream in it, then why do we conceal from ourselves this knowledge of who we are and what we do and where we come from?

What was already deep and mysterious just got deeper.