“My God, it’s full of stars”

Jubilee Plantation 2011 & the last known words of Dr. Dave Bowman

The Jubilee Plantation crop circle (August 10th 2011) was the last formation of the 2011 season, and was perhaps the most ambitious and complex of the year. It carries a small connection with the first formation of the 2012 season (Hill Barn April 15th 2012), in that it too was described as being messy inside and was written off as a piece of mindless vandalism. Whatever the Jubilee Plantation formation was, it could hardly be classified as mindless.

2010 had seen the first explicitly 4-dimensional formation, a Tesseract (4-D cube) at Fosbury Camp After years of showing us 2-D and 3-D images the crop circle phenomenon had evolved to another level. I must admit I had not expected that the crop circles would make another dimensional leap so soon, but then what do I know!

 

The beautiful star-like pattern at the centre of the design is undoubtedly a Penteract (a 5-D cube), from fig.3 you can see how I have overlaid a penteract over a photo of the formation to show just how accurate it was. There are several ways to depict a penteract, the first thing we have to understand is that this image is what is called an orthographic projection, which is used to show the shadows cast by a higher dimensional objects in our 3-D reality. We cannot see a penteract as it would appear in 5th dimensional space, because we are limited by our 3-D existence, but we can calculate what it would look like. A penteract has 32 vertices, 80 edges, 80 square faces, 40 cubic cells, and 10 tesseract hypercells. Blimey!

The unfolding of dimensions in crop circle design has evolved beside the systematic unfolding of number in those same designs. The movement from one dimension to the next could be symbolically seen as some kind of ‘deepening’, or may signal the preparation in the ‘collective unconscious’ for an assimilation of a new depth. Often the unconscious can be seen to be working with material long before it is fully manifested into the conscious mind and into the world, I find this deeply interesting.

The evolution of human art has also followed a similar pattern, the development of dimension in paintings has often been remarked upon. The first truly 3-dimensional painting appeared in around 1455-60, a painting titled ‘The Flagellation Of Christ’ by Italian artist Piero della Francesca. It is generally accepted as the first painting to successfully add depth to height and width. It is interesting to note that the painter was also a mathematician and a geometer, and wrote much on proportion and perspective.

He was a great influence upon Fra Luca Pacioli, and his ideas were illustrated in one of Pacioli’s books by none other than the great Leonardo Da Vinci. What this painting showed was that although we have always lived in a 3-dimensional world, and that humans have always seen the world in three dimensions, we had at that point in time only just began to assimilate that knowledge fully into our conscious minds – allowing us to project it onto board and canvas for the first time.

As we reach finally reach 2012, I wonder if that is going to happen again, only this time with an assimilation of other realities/dimensions into full consciousness? Perhaps the idea of the fourth dimension is symbolic of that. Clearly, we do not live in a 4-dimensional world and clearly we are not equipped to perceive fully dimensions beyond our own, but I think (as Holmes would say) that ‘something is afoot’ and that it has to do with consciousness, dimensions, perspectives, space and time.

These new tenets will not only shift the way we understand reality, but will also in turn affect our consciousness. How will consciousness look after these new ideas, perceptions and perspectives have been assimilated, how might we project them into the world?

As I drew the Jubilee Plantation formation I was struck by two things; the first was its rotational (spiral like) properties, (this is self evident by looking at the five beautifully spinning crescents around the perimeter of the design), but the second was how the centre also had a rotational element. The centre pattern is drawn using a similar methodology to the drawing of a decagram star (ten-pointed star). There are in fact three (I think) different decagram stars, this particular one joins every third point around a circle divided into ten. If you follow this methodology (as I did), you end up drawing around the circle. The centre of the formation then contains two further smaller (nested) decagrams, each nested in the centre of the previous one, three iterations in all. If you follow the same method of construction for the next two nested stars you end up winding a spiral right into the heart of the penteract and the centre of the formation itself. It was a very satisfying synchronicity to find that the inner and outer parts of the formation complimented one another in this way. The crescents are not part of the penteract but they are rooted within its geometry. To me this is crop circle design at its very best, bringing together seemingly disparate components and entangling them in a complementary way. I see non-locality, entanglement & complementiarity at work here – symbolically of course. I think this is portentous and highly significant.

To look into the Jubilee Plantation formation is to fall headlong into another world, another reality, or at least to glimpse it. To me it is a embryonic projection of a new stage in human consciousness manifested in our 3-dimensional reality – it is therefore, in fact, anything but mindless, it is, in my humble opinion, filled with mind.

This circle reminded me of the final words of Dr David Bowman, the ill-fated fictional commander of the USS Discovery in Clarke’s and Kubrick’s mighty vision ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. As he approached the ultimate unknown, the mighty Monolith, he exclaimed “My God, it’s full of stars”, I felt like saying the same thing I as drew the centre of the Jubilee Plantation formation. Consciousness is the next great unknown, the metaphorical modern Monolith, are we about to transcend our current limitations of perception and, like Dave Bowman, become something entirely new?

KAREN ALEXANDER – APRIL 25th 2012