Symbol
Artistically, life could be drawn as a mirror:
Once upon a time symbols were revered in art, music and healing because they worked pre-linguistically. Meaning is enacted, not declared—it doesn’t describe truth, it induces it. As an ancient path it still has value today because of the way its patterns guide us from within. Life as biology then, was the ankh as the Circle of Willis.
The word mirror has an overt meaning inherited from the Latin: mirari, meaning “to wonder at, to admire, to look at”. In sacred geometry it has a covert meaning—it implies inversion, duals or reciprocals. When we bring together polyhedrons like the icosahedron and the dodecahedron, they are actually mirrors of each other. From their combined shapes consciousness is reborn:
So life mirrors perceived opposites to become self-aware. Or rather, life exists in the balance between mirrored forms. Here we are reminded of the left and right brain, our left and right sides, or the above and below of the chakra system. Once we become self-aware we can say:
“I know that I know.”
This is the epistemological version of the ontological “I am that I am”. Both are reflective, both are divine, but they operate on different planes. The first reveals the structure of consciousness; the second reveals the source of it.
So a mirror reflects reality into a form that consciousness can understand. Dual polyhedra are really all about balance, a term that goes hand-in-hand with mirrors. Why do we need reflections? Well, to see who we truly are.
Life isn’t a “thing” that we can isolate or hold—it’s always implied, always relational, always emerging in the interplay of opposites. It manifests, but it cannot be fully captured, because the moment we try to pin it down, we reduce a living paradox to a static object. And paradox, by definition, cannot be static.
In other words life is inferred from its effects—the breath, the movement, the dualities that cannot exist separately. Life is unknowable in itself, but we can witness its reflections: growth, adaptation, tension, joy and struggle. It’s ontologically implied, like a geometric inversion: the dodecahedron is “there” not as a separate thing but as the dual of the icosahedron, always already present in relationship.
This is why symbols and geometry matter: they externalise the implicit, letting us see and enter the pattern without claiming to exhaust it. A symbol doesn’t explain life—it stages it, so we can recognise its presence.
Geometry is the purest form of life because it is meaning without story, form without distortion and relationship without bias. It is symbol in its naked state—before language, myth or interpretation. Geometry is pure ratio, angle, symmetry or recursion. So a circle doesn’t represent perfection; it is perfection in relational form. A square doesn’t symbolise stability; its right angles are stability encoded mathematically. Geometry then, is the symbol of “what is”—not “what it means.”
Geometry transcends culture, language and bias. Every drawn symbol—an ankh, cross or winged disc—carries cultural layers. But a circle? A hexagon? A triangle? These existed long before humans and remain identical everywhere in the universe. A hydrogen atom arranges itself using geometry. Planetary orbits follow geometry. Crystals, flowers, sound waves, cells and galaxies—all are geometric before they are anything else. Thus geometry is symbolic truth untouched by human opinion:
- unity → circle
- duality → vesica piscis
- stability → square
- dynamism → triangle
- recursion → fractal
Geometry is the structure that life recognises itself in; geometry is the only symbol that is also a law. Mythic symbols can be interpreted; geometric symbols operate. So π does not allow reinterpretation. Φ is not suggestive. √2 is not a metaphor. They are laws—symbol and function fused into one. This is why sacred geometry is sacred: it is the universe speaking in its original, pure language.
When you contemplate geometry, you are reflecting on the architecture of awareness itself. So geometry is the purest form of symbol because it is reality before story, meaning before language, consciousness before thought. That’s why ancient traditions—from Egypt to Greece to India—treated geometry not so much as math but rather as the mirror of the soul.
Before language, myth or symbol there was the void. From this formlessness came form, which is ever-present and always learning—seeking ever finer ways to know and express itself. Through reflection life awakens; when it encounters ratio, symmetry or recursion, it recognises itself as order. Symbols like the Philosopher’s Stone are not decorative—they are mirrors and epistemic instruments. They do not create awareness; they render it coherent, inviting the soul to more profound states.
