The Importance of Counter-Clockwise Dance Rituals
The pathway to magical living goes in a circle
We live in a world of lines, squares, and boxes. Here’s what a modern city looks like.
Most of us live inside a grid—and it’s usually part of a larger grid. In this kind of world, life is mostly moving from one rectangle to another.
We navigate through these rectangles by holding other rectangles in our hands.
Only in rare moments do we get a glimpse of life outside these grids. Many find this disorienting or frightening. They can’t wait to return to the safety of the rectangle.
The rectangle is all about solidity, strength, and separation. That’s why the iPhone, like the skyscraper, evokes the defensive boxes of medieval fortresses—the safest rectangles of their time.
Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist—whom I’ve claimed elsewhere “ranks among our half dozen most important living thinkers”—explains that “straight lines predominate wherever the left hemisphere [of the brain] predominates.”
The pervasiveness of straight lines and box-centric lifestyles in today’s culture is a warning sign that we are fostering a psychically claustrophobic society—one that obsesses over STEM rationality, prefers numbers over emotions, fears lived reality, and cuts itself off from holistic thinking.
There are no straight lines in nature, McGilchrist points out, except for the horizon—and even that is an illusion. The horizon is actually curved, like Earth itself.
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The circle is always the symbol of wholeness, of health, of connection. Even the word centeredness conjures up mental images of a circle. To live a centered life is the opposite of hiding inside the fortress.
Confronted with a circle, you cannot analyze beginnings and ends—you can’t even find them. In the circle opposites not only coexist, they actually join hands and come together.
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