nsb  Primordial Tumblers.

October 1, 2011.

I love that feeling of hidden harmony. The secret Order in the Chaos. You might be watching waves at the beach, stepping into the Pantheon, or playing The Wall backwards while watching The Wizard of Oz. And suddenly your spider-sense goes off. That carbonated tingle of being Aligned With the Universe comes over you.

You can’t quite put your finger on intellectually; it might be because you are completely stoned. But some kind of subtle pattern is encoded in your experience somewhere, and it’s clicking all the right primordial tumblers deep down in your lizard brain. You are genetically programmed to be a first-class paranoid conspiracy theorist, constantly and compulsively searching for secret patterns everywhere. And delighting in them, whether you know it or not.

Here’s a great example of hidden Order-ishness I found recently: a rock garden at a Zen temple in Kyoto.

See those large boulders arranged in a pleasing yet seemingly haphazard fashion? You love them. You love their aesthetic placement on a molecular level. Why? Well, some nerds ran some of their Dark Math against the garden’s arrangement. Below is a schematic of the garden, with the main hall of the temple marked in red.

The dark spots indicate the local axes of symmetry between the various stone clusters. This means that standing on any of those lines puts you equidistant from the closest set of stones. As you get further from any one cluster, your distance between the stones begins to even out, and the axes tend to converge. They converge in a mathematically perfect tree-like design, right down to where you’re standing in the center of the main hall, admiring the Buddhist Hell out of the garden. Completely stoned out of your skull.