Natural philosophy
What moves our thoughts, our perceptions, our trajectories?
You may have had the experience of learning something and thinking that you have understood it. Then, out of the blue, you see it in a whole new way.
In the first decade of this century I wrote a book about the Austrian visionary Viktor Schauberger. I loved the way he talked about the motion of water. Being Austrian, he gave the threefold motion he saw a mouthful of a name, translated into English by Callum Coats as cycloid spiral space-curve motion. He described three distinct types of movement, which you can see in a river that is flowing in a natural watercourse.
The first motion is cycloid. Towards the centre of the stream you will see a rope of water twisting in on itself. As with the water draining down a plughole, it spins anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern. The second is the spiral. The entire rope of water swirls down the stream, a spiral within a spiral. You can see that as the water drains out of a bath too. The coil of descending water describes a larger movement as it snakes around the plughole. The third spiral involves the entire river. It curls as it moves downstream, eating into its banks on the outer edges of its curves and depositing silt on the insides. We only see a flat snapshot of each spiral as it reaches the interface between the water and the air, but these processes involve the entire body of water.
That much I knew — or thought I understood. I also understood Viktor Schauberger’s insight that this motion is in response to the movement of planet Earth through the heavens. The Earth also has three types of motion. First, our planet rotates on its axis, the cycloid motion. That gives us day and night. Second, the planet spirals around the Sun. That gives us the seasons (as the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer alternately face towards the Sun) and the year. The third movement, analagous to the entire watercourse, is that the whole of the solar system also moves on its path through the galaxy.
Watching this coiling, spiralling movement in a watercourse a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that, just as only part of the spiralling movement is visible from above, I was seeing a two-dimensional view of a much bigger story.
Because the water can’t do anything else (unless humans interfere and straighten the watercourse). It CANNOT NOT respond to the movement of the Earth through the heavens. It is locked in. It is the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm. So, when we are mesmerised by the patterns the water makes as it flows downstream, we are watching its response to this cosmic dance.
Looking further out, everything is in phase with this motion: the growth of the trees and their swaying in the wind, the movements of the clouds, our bodies. It has become unconscious to us, so as I write my systems compensate for the speed of the rotation of the planet and all of the more complex movements of the solar system. I am unaware of any movement at all, in fact. But it is there, always.
If we spend time by a river and let our consciousness follow the flow, then we can tune into this motion. Our bodies, made of the same stuff that made the stars and the planets, can for a moment bypass the matters that preoccupy our conscious faculties and feel the bigger story that we all move within. That is why it feels so calming, so nourishing to do so.
We can see it in the spiral of a honeysuckle or ivy plant as they reach upwards, or the meanders of a raindrop as it runs down the windowpane. It is there in the flight of birds. It is everywhere.
So, as we move out from one year and into the next, I will remember that this is the context I find myself in: part of an immense, flowing mystery.
Images from Exmoor and North Wales, UK
