The Great Turtle

It is a truth that will be discovered by those who seek. Reality as we construe it is built upon layer after layer after layer of deep structures that have been bequeathed to us by our ancestors. When we think a thought, have a feeling, use a metaphor, or express an opinion - these are the end result of tens of thousands of years of human beings negotiating their world. We talk about "the unconscious" or the subconscious - these are modern terms. They refer, simply, to the overlooked, in all its dimensions. When we are told that the world is built upon the back of a great stack of Turtles, the reductionists will laugh "but we can see it is not!" But the turtles (or elephants) that the story speaks of are not literal, zoological instances of their species: they are metaphors that can point us to a profound discovery. The thing about Turtles is that the shell that they live in - that they ARE - is a coherent and consolidated pattern. It forms and integrates and holds. This is what is being spoken of in the myths: there is a pattern matrix that forms, and integrates, and holds us - and it is wholesome: the result of human discovery, creativity and labor. Just like the tortoise is it's shell - we are our own stories. Our foundations can be found in the way that math and myth mix. So consider the oldest of the great magick squares: the Lo Shu. According to the stories, it was first seen by the Yellow Emperor - the founder of the Chinese civilization, on the back of a great Tortoise. It is an arrangement of the numbers 1-9 that gives us a "magic sum" of 15, however you ready it. Just recently, 15 was identified as the lowest possible number of integers that you would need to tile an infinite grid such that no digit was closer to another instance of itself than its own value. There are great mysteries in the Lo Shu. It truely is a world Turtle - a world Foundation.