In the past, people traveled on foot. They knew how many days it took to get from one village to another. They entered into dialogue with wolves, rivers and mountains without fear. They understood that each being has its own field of life and consciousness. They abandoned themselves to not knowing, while knowing.
We are in the 21st century and we don’t know how to recover conversations with the earth, how to live with who we are. We make maps of knowledge where animals are not present.
One of the oldest and most common maps in civilizations is the wheel . An elemental symbol that represents the sky, the earth and an axis that connects them. A form that evolves into different types of crosses to complex representations of the micro and macrocosm.
From the prehistoric sun wheel to the complex Tibetan mandalas, through the Christian wheels of the Middle Ages or the Amerindian medicine wheels, the wheel is a cross-cultural symbol for speaking about the paths of life and wisdom , the course of things that as humans we must follow and respect.
Paths that lead to a center, to the integration of polarities, to the perception of the unity of life and consciousness.
An ancient Tao Te Ching (6th century BC) put it this way:
“Thirty spokes converge at the center of a wheel but it is the void that makes it possible to turn” – Tao Te Ching
Movement, temporality, reference to a timeless center, to a space without form: basic elements of a worldview .
The wheel is in itself an image of the cosmos, being the axis, the articulation of the different planes of reality. Planes and dimensions linked to an original and therefore sacred time.
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At Uniterra we explore how to move from a scientific worldview to a worldview rooted in the earth, in the senses, in the places we inhabit.
How are we connected to living species and what does their disappearance mean for us? The impoverishment of the earth obscures human consciousness, takes away its importance. The homogenization of the world and the loss of diversity deprives us of light, perspectives, and the ability to understand.
We need to write the imaginary of this change of era . We need symbols to walk in the direction of the regeneration of the earth and our psyche. Maps that show the correspondences between what we think and what we observe in nature and help us interpret the signs that constantly come to us from the cosmos.
The Kosmotheandric Wheel is a map of the knowledge we share with the earth. A symbolic map that places the word Aion at its center. And that outlines the way of understanding knowledge from Uniterra.
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Aion is a Greek word translated as time of life: –aei-on –: the life that has always come to us . A temporality that unfolds and is renewed through cycles and cycles of existence and that is steeped in non-time . Therefore, during Hellenism it was translated as: eternity, always or timelessness; meaning with these names, a time without beginning and without end. Later, during the Renaissance, recovering Plato, aion meant the soul of the world .
In the imagination of the time, something without end had nothing to do with an infinite line or a circle that repeats itself in an identical way. But rather, an entire time, which contains past, present and future and which at the same time is always different due to its inherent dynamism and openness.
Reality is folded, as Bohm said, in different dimensions. We can live in a single fold and take it for granted or let ourselves be imbued with the folds that lurk in dreams, in imagination, in a mystical experience, in a moment of fullness or pain. Moments of intensity that tear us away from the surface of things.
Aion is the gap between one perception and another, between one thought and another; The opening that allows us to let go and create something new. Aion is the presence of infinity in the world; the soul of the world.
Perceiving the soul of the world in the thaw or in an open deposit, makes us recognize our own losses, griefs and absurdities. It gives us the option to reconcile ourselves with our own history and transform it .
Reality continually invites us to enter into facts, to open them and to liberate them. Each fact is unique but its open and unfathomable quality means that it can be revisited and transmuted by consciousness.
Aion makes this regeneration of reality possible, access to the creation that continues to pulsate within the earth.
How to bridge the gap between sensitivity and spirituality? How to reread nature, as the ancients did, seeing in it a story that also speaks of humans and guides us?
The Kosmotheandric Wheel represents the great conversation between the human species and nature , as Thomas Berry said. As we learn to communicate with birds and oceans, we write a mythical narrative to navigate climate change. This transition is not feasible without a new rooting in myth, in beliefs about who we are.
The kosmoteandric wheel marks milestones, locates coordinates, has a compass in the center that acts as a solvent for all the desire to arrive. The wheel has no origin or end. It is walked .
The wheel is a path, but a spiritual path cannot be linear. That is why the reference to the center, the abysmal aion that empties all pretense of arriving somewhere. And widens the inner space that we share with the earth.
The wheel draws a map of living interrelationships ; it shows how the sky is connected to the mind, the breath of the forest to inner calm.
It is a transcultural map that Uniterra proposes to travel the contemporary paths. To become intimate with life. To perceive the mutual reflections between the interior and the exterior, between the mind and the senses. One step after another, until there is no exterior, there is no interior. Only continuity. A joint breathing.
It is a spiritual path that has become a collective condition for healing the planet.
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The wisdom of the earth is expressed in many ways. One of them is in the course of things themselves, in the path that each circumstance opens up, inviting us to respond to it.
The image of the circle prevents us from projecting ourselves into the future and thus dilutes the obsession with controlling what will happen. Instead, it teaches us to look into the depth of the moment we are living in. A moment that is not the interval between the past and the future, but something that is coming from the depths of reality.
Always in motion, the wheel is the master of processes, of what is leaving, of what is arriving. From one pole to the other, integrating differences, the wheel moves without discontinuity or rupture.
Every end is a beginning . There is no cut between the two. There is a continuous transition. There is no break between the seasons. There is renewal of energy. Renewal of the course of time, without break.
The consciousness of indigenous communities is always localized, always connected to the senses. This is expressed in medicine wheels, where trees and animals are metaphors for expressing complex emotions. Indigenous Intelligence guides us in this time of erosion and symbolic poverty.
Aion, at the center of the wheel reminds us that everything is alive, everything moves, everything pulses according to different rhythms and synchronicities. Everything speaks and everything has the power to express itself.
Every being, the entire world, has inner life, is a subject.
The cosmos lives and breathes.
The psyche is not ours. The atmosphere of dreams is connected to the air and storms. Both consciousness and the unconscious are inseparable from the invisible environment in which we move.
Everything is rooted in mystery and therefore is inexhaustible.
The world is articulated as a story in which we participate along with the clouds and the snow. We are part of the same story.
The world is our consciousness and it embraces us. This is how Gary Snyder expresses the unity of consciousness and the symmetry between the inside and the outside in the universe. Each of us participates in this enveloping consciousness, from a different angle.
That is why we can say that every living being and every culture is the center of the world. Because we do not confuse the center with a geometric point nor do we reduce the circumference to the drawn line, but rather we know it to be open, whole and dynamic.
The wheel is an invitation to root oneself in infinity to keep walking, in the rain.
Text: Àngels Canadell
