Anamnesis

"You are the center of the mandala." -- Terence McKenna

The circumpunct, or circle with a dot in the center, represents many things which ultimately serve as analogies for the one thing: the monad, the holy mountain at the center of the world, the magician in his magic circle, the "I" in the triangle, the self.

From The Da Vinci Code, “Sir, the circumpunct has countless meanings. In ancient Egypt, it was the symbol for Ra—the sun god—and modern astronomy still uses it as the solar symbol. In Eastern philosophy, it represents the spiritual insight of the Third Eye, the divine rose, and the sign of illumination. The Kabbalists use it to symbolize the Kether—the highest Sephiroth and ‘the most hidden of all hidden things.’ Early mystics called it the Eye of God and it’s the origin of the All-Seeing Eye on the Great Seal. The Pythagoreans used the circumpunct as the symbol of the Monad—the Divine Truth, the Prisca Sapientia, the at-one-ment of mind and soul..."

It is the symbol for the most elementary element, Hydrogen, and in alchemy, for gold which is the metal associated with the sun whose symbol in astrology is the same, stemming from the ancient image of the sun as a wheel, circle or spiral with a central point or hub. Hydrogen is the most basic element, and the alchemists held gold symbolically up as the ultimate achievement of evolution of all particles of matter. Using the same symbol for both hints at the process from beginning to end, alpha to omega: hydrogen to gold. The alchemists say that it takes a seed of gold to make gold, and I say that it takes a seed of God to make God. The dot in the center is that seed, it is you in the center of your own universe. You can reach out into infinity in all directions and therefore circumscribe the limits of your own personal universe and reality within a circle, or really, a sphere.

If God made Man in His image, and God made the universe and/or is everything in the universe, then Man is a microcosm of the macrocosm and is essentially god, and the universe itself, in miniature: Man as a homunculus. The constellations of the zodiac are connected to areas on the body so that the zodiac, when unrolled, represents a macrocosmic man in the sky. The twelve houses are the grades, degrees or steps which the sun, Sol/Soul--your consciousness or ego--travels through during its material incarnation. On the even more microcosmic scale: your body is covered in fractal homunculi, like those used in acupressure and acupuncture where the points on your ear, hand, or foot represent the parts of the whole body.

From the bible, Mathew 18:18, "Verily I say unto you, whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be what has been bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be what has been loosed in heaven." Whatever doors you open and close in your self are opened and closed in your universe, an extension of the self, which is totally unique to you. There never was someone like you and there never will be, and no one will ever have your experience of reality. And if you want to adjust what you see around you, you need to adjust your perception and understanding of what is around you. Essentially, whatever you hold true on earth shall be held true in heaven.

The germ, seed, flower, and tree of life is a fractal design from Sacred Geometry which can be scaled up and up while maintaining the basic central pattern which encodes the revelation that the seed contains the tree. In Kabbalah, it is said that each point on the framework known as the Tree of Life contains its own tree within it. And we can imagine that the tree we are looking at could therefore be just a single point on a larger tree, and so on ad infinitum.

You'll notice that each point in the flower of life image is both the center of one circle, a circumpunct, and a point on the circumference of another circle. The shape of the vesica piscis is formed from the intersection of two circles around a common radii. This can be easily visualized in a Venn diagram of only two circles.

The Venn diagram attempts to find a common ground between two or more apparently different phenomena.  What is discovered growing in the fertile common ground created by the union of the different spheres is the interference pattern that produces the divine child, the new idea, or the experience: the manifested union of opposites. It is happening right now as you read these words which stem from the center of my universe and touch the edge of yours.

Now, reach out and touch someone. ;)