Status Updates From A Beginner's Guide to Const...

I've actually read at least 28 pages. Goodreads never counts the Roman numeral pages in the front - and, ironically, they ALWAYS count the index, glossary, appendix, etc.

I think GoodReads should allow us to count the Roman numerals pages pre regular numbering. I read xxxii pages which comprise the introduction, plus page one. That's 32 pages plus one, but GoodReads only gives me credit for being on page 2, not page 34. Sigh

I'm still in the Roman numerals (which go up to 32 -> XXXII ) and Goodreads does not recognize those as progress in the book.

We can train ourselves to view plants not as “things” but as patterns of moving energy.

The digestive system follows a whirlpool to transform food into energy and waste.

Far from insignificant, the calm eye is the spiral's center of gravity around which it all balances. Without the eye there would be no spiral expansion or dissolution, no whirling, no balance, no life.

In watching water whirl down a drain, note that the narrower and calmer the eye is, the greater the speed and turbulence around it. Notice also that unlike the center of a wheel, the spiral's eye is not fixed in one place but is dynamic and flexible.

Learn to recognize spirals in nature, in the living whirlpools we call "trees" and in house plants. Look for the "eye." Whatever its substance, the eye is always mysterious and hypnotically fascinating to watch and to contemplate as the source of the spiral.

Mathematicians call the golden spiral's eye an asymptote, a place always approached but never reached.

These correspond to the eye and the spiral, the unknowable source and the turbulent universe around it, mysteriously driven by the "calm" core.

The Hindu religion refers to two aspects of the universe, the unmanifest and the manifest. The unmanifest is called Nirguna Brahma, "Brahma without qualities," unknowable, without characteristics, while the manifest universe is called Saguna Brahma, "Brahma with qualities," all that is know-able.

Like the deceptively calm eye within a storm or hurricane, intense action swirls all around it but the eye itself remains placid, untouched. Leaves rustle in the wind, but the trunk is rooted in the earth.

A curious fact about the golden spiral in mathematics and nature is that it has a "calm eye," a core with a character different from that of the whirlwind around it. A watery whirlpool wraps around a core of air; the leaves of a tree whirl around a woody trunk. The calm eye corresponds to the "zero" at the very beginning of the Fibonacci sequence.