Manifold-ness

There are times when it is deeply satisfying to be embodied.

Sitting in the garden at dusk, all the greens – forest, juniper,lawn,kelly – merging to grey-green at the withdrawal of the sun. A head full of manifolds of n dimensions, I focus in on the 3-space. Riemann!Hamilton! Gauss! Laplace! I invoke and conjure thee. Grigory Perelman, thee I make hallowed in this triple-dimensioned space!

For to see the universe as a nested hierarchy of manifolds – each a surface, though in 3 dimensions they are surfaces of something four dimensional – is to draw down the seven bodies of life referenced in the Western Mystery Traditions, or to invoke the increasing densities of beings a la Neil Kramer, or to feel the presence of the seven veils which conceal the totality of all-that-is from our mortal sight.

And seven planets, too…as Jupiter and Venus brighten to the west and the Moon filters light down through the darkening leaves of the Cape Ash above me, I am filled with a sense of..Manifold-ness. An expansion covering at least the first 3 dimensions in which we live our incarnated lives. And as I expand to higher manifolds, I see that things which were far apart are quite close together, now, and that which was separate by light years are coincident on each other.

And, further, that all of space is Sacred. All of it. Not that each smaller subspace does not have its own holy aura – it does, oh yes it does – but that this, here, now, in all its almost-escaping-of-comprehension glory, is holy, sacred and perfect in every granule and at every scale.