The Round World — Cycles
Series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order.
Existence runs in cycles. Some of them, like the seasons, the water cycle or the tides, are obvious, others, like the mechanisms of life, or the rise and fall of empires are not.
Every quiet and settled system displays a natural tendency to suddenly and inexplicably generate unrest after a while.
This happens because existence is motion, stillness means death to our universe.
Anyway, about the cycles.
If you watch a phenomenon long enough, you notice that it starts displaying repetitive patterns, a fact that shows in all the workings of life.
Some of these repeating patterns take too long to yield useful information, but if your life span allows you to observe a phenomenon enough times, you can perfect your response to it and better your odds of success in tackling its challenges.
Training a skill, weather prognostication, sailing by the stars, these are all examples of using recognizable repetitions as instruments that allow you to engage in conscious interaction with events instead of randomly reacting to them.
Your ability to read cycles is a tool, just like the quill you write with is a tool.
People make use of cycles all the time, although they aren’t always aware of it: the farmer who reads the subtle variations in the weather to determine the optimal time to plant or harvest, the seasoned sailor who can tell the moods of the sea, unseen to others, by scent or by the quality of the light, the mother who can tell a child is not well because of slight changes in their behavior.
People attribute this subtle knowledge to instinct, but what else is instinct if not the recognition and assimilation of the underlying patterns of life?
Many of the things you haven’t encountered before did in fact happen, at some point, to somebody else, and their experiences reverberate echoes in the substance of reality in ways you can recognize.
If you have an emotion, you’ll find it expressed in someone else’s poetry or music. If you have a thought, you will find it reflected in conversations, in mundane daily events, in places you wouldn’t dream of. Watch for those echoes, they will help you clarify what the thought, the emotion, was about. And know that you are somebody else’s echo too.
So, what can you do with cycles?
Some people use them to time their action to the beginning, rather than the end of a process, and in doing so they reap its full benefits, others are keen observers of human nature, which is also filled with repetitive patterns, and wield this knowledge in any way they wish, from studying the human heart to using its predictable nature to their advantage.
Seeing that things repeat is the beginning of wisdom.
The substance of being is very simple and everything that is is cut from the same fabric, so to speak.
The complexity you see all around you is born of endless repetitions of processes that run eons, and which are occasionally subject to random shifts.
There is little difference between you and this rock, and that difference is born of variations on a theme.
But what about the soul, you ask? Let’s stick to the physical world for now.
[Here the historians are unsure what the master meant to say.
Does he ascribe to the evolutionary theory, developed centuries after his passing, and which surely would have been considered heretical at the time of these writings?
The researchers dare to go a step further and infer that these concepts derived from an esoteric school of thought, which was his contemporary.
We believe that some of these manuscripts contain veiled references to concepts whose spreading would have been very dangerous at the time.]
Let’s pick a cycle and analyze how we can use it. We associate every verb with a repeatable action. Pick a verb.
To express. Fine.
The night is bright and full of stars, and I have a yearning I can’t describe, half thought, half emotion, both quivering and raw.
I’m afraid but I’m also elated by this vision so many people saw before me, and wonder how come nobody thought to give this feeling a name, or maybe they did, and maybe I don’t know it, but I have no way of finding out, and I don’t want my feeling without a name to die unsung, so I’ll name it myself, for myself, and thus give it meaning.
I then jump on that name, which we’ll call awe, with gratitude, relieved to no longer be dumbfounded by the feeling, and now that the circle is complete, that name will become a temporary stand in for the next unnamed yearning, just like quivering, raw, afraid and elated were for it.
This is the first iteration of a cycle.
Let’s say it happens again, with the word tenebrous, and then again, well, it doesn’t matter.
After the first few iterations I immediately jump to the temporary stand in words, try to find what they have in common and how they are different, and why those words came to mind when describing the quality, as opposed to others.
I no longer hesitate, or doubt my endeavor, because I already saw the usefulness of having a term to express a certain something as opposed to gasping in frustration and trying to mold the air in front of my body with my hands (which is also a valid form of expression, by the way).
I enjoy the process and start looking for elusive feelings to express, just to perfect my word craft.
I guess that’s how Adam must have felt. Name everything. What an epic endeavor!
Anyway, this is how you use a cycle to improve your interaction with the world.
The pathological version of a cycle is a loop. A loop wastes your time and you have nothing to show for it when it ends, because you are exactly at the same point you were when you started. You might say that you still learned valuable lessons during a loop, but that’s not the case. If you learned your lesson from that loop you would no longer be in it, such is the nature of things. This is especially true if you’ve been in that loop more than once.
Learn to recognize loops and get out of them as soon as possible, they waste your life essence. Cycles refine, loops stall.
Everything looks simple and obvious when you look at it like this, but in real live it hardly ever is. You can’t recognize the patterns, they are too muddled by the noise of everything that surrounds them and you can only get hints they exist, in the form of signs that stand out to your attention, things that seem like they don’t fit, and feelings of deja vu for new places and situations. It takes you a while to recognize them as loops you’ve been through multiple times already.
We will take a break here and when we return, we’ll examine another cycle.
[At this place the manuscript contains a drawing — a quartered circle, placed next to a quartered Bourbon rose.
Some proposed that the drawing is by the hand of the master himself, and its sophistication justifies this supposition, however we haven’t been able to authenticate it as such.
We don’t know what the drawing was meant to convey, if he used the rose as a personal symbol or to represent a real live element side by side with its diagram, to show the underlying nature of things.
Either way, the drawing is exquisite. The circle is drawn by hand, but it is perfect. There is no way to tell where the line starts, it looks as if somebody placed it on the page as is, in its entirety. No beginning, no end.
Some suggest that the circle represents a loop, and the rose represents a cycle, but that doesn’t make any sense, because depicting the fatal flaw described in the paragraph above with perfect geometry seems to contradict the whole point of the teaching.
His use of the rose to demonstrate how a diagram works looks like a more plausible explanation.
Bourbon roses would have been fairly available during the artist’s time, which makes them a convenient teaching tool.
The sketch was drawn in purple ink; careful examination established it to be the same as that of the writing. The rose appears light blue. The highlights and the shadows are dramatic, making the sketch look as if it’s trying to emerge from the page. After looking at it for a while a strange optical illusion occurs, one which we all experienced: the circle starts to float above the page too, with the quarters tiered, like they belong to different planes.
This unusual piece of art was photographed many times, unfortunately the three dimensional effect gets lost in photography, which renders both the rose and the circle flat.]
Back to cycles. What did I just draw?
[We have to pause here to comment that there is no proof he is referring to the etchings of the circle and the rose.]
That is correct, it is a building plan. Notice that it is a perfectly symmetrical Greek cross with equal arms inscribed in a circle.
A few decades ago this would have been the embodiment of architectural perfection.
To the taste of our time it feels simplistic and barren, indicative of the fact that we are looking at a diagram of a plan, rather than the plan itself. It seems too lacking in detail in our present context.
Maybe you already noticed that the people of our day and age have developed a taste for flourish and things have started to overflow with detail in every field — architecture, literature, art.
Soon these details will warp the fundamental principles of their original design to the point where it will be rendered unrecognizable.
A new generation of builders will come after that, who will decry this fall from grace and who will reinvent geometrical perfection in a new form.
They will rediscover the purity of simple lines, but they will look down on the dusty work of their ancestors, the ones who would have loved the simple building plan above, the Greek cross, and who would have deemed it complete.
These newcomers will not recognize that they are in fact reproducing the mental patterns of their forbearers: their quest for simplicity and order, their desire for a unifying model, their abhorrence of everything that doesn’t fit inside the lines.
Same sensibility, different forms to express it.
This is a very simple cycle too, it only has two states: order and profusion.
[The last phrase sheds light on the manuscript drawings, although the choice of the rose to illustrate this example seems random.]
Do you have questions? How does the understanding of cycles help you with your life?
Cycles are powerful devices whose strength comes from many sources acting in concert. This makes them difficult to defeat. They can also be the wind in your sails when you are riding with them. If you can recognize a cycle, knowing where you are inside it can offer you useful guidance about what to do next.
How do cycles start? Evidently they all must have started at some point, but with the well-established ones, if you try to go back and recognize them in all their different guises, you can keep falling backwards until you reach the time before the world began. The truth is, I don’t know. Cycles are meta devices for life. They can help or hinder your process, but they are not your process.
What to do if you get stuck in a loop?
What do you do when you misplace an object of great value, a ring, let’s say? First you look in all the obvious places, then you try to backtrack your steps, and then, if those efforts have failed, you turn the house upside down, one chest and one drawer at a time, as many times as it takes for you to find it. Not the most enjoyable activity, grant you. After you’ve eliminated all the causes that seem obvious to you, you look at everything, especially the things you rarely question. This makes a mess of your life for sure, but what else are you going to do, walk in place until you die?
What if you can’t find the ring, even after this epic effort?
You have my sympathies.
What sources come together to feed cycles?
People, ideas, the mores of the time, unusual natural occurrences, accumulated knowledge, triggering events, things that push from behind, scarcity and overabundance. Many things.
Before we end this subject, I would like to speak briefly about the ceremonial function of cycles.
Engaging in a cycle for its own sake is the essence of ritual.
The willingness to lend yourself to it, to give of your spirit to power ceremony is present in every religion and spiritual tradition.
Participating in ritual keeps a mental timing different from that of your daily life and which pays homage to the sacredness of the soul.
In ritual you communicate to the world you are willing to speak its language, see its behaviors, adjust to its speed, learn what it has to teach you.
[Some scholars suggested that the master’s emphasis on the utility of cycles evolved from a more specific interest in ceremony and ritual, but nothing in this manuscript justifies that supposition.
We have not corroborated such an interest from any of the sources contemporary with his writings.
The rose is a motif that comes back again and again in the manuscript, but it is not clear whether it represents something or if it is drawn for its own sake. For all we know, the master simply loved the flower and enjoyed sketching it when he got bored.
This may not be as satisfying as the assumption that the rose holds a secret meaning, but often the simplest answer is the truth.]
