12 Pointed Star
of
Sustainable Culture
This page is an overview of the origins of the 12 Pointed Star of Sustainable Culture. To go immediately to the final diagram, the 12 Point Star Map, click on those words here.
While the end result of this journey is a system suitable for building a directory of Sustainable Culture, some may find the metaphysics behind this system of interest. Essentially, it is nothing more than a study of the sacred geometry of patterns of health, something that Human Beings have been engaged with for millennia. What may be new, is the superposition of different patterns over each other, and the distillation of particular patterns into oriented mandala formats to make this workable.
We are doing more than organizing a website with this system, and in fact, use it to examine the health of the Solstice Community. Also see Solstice Community Diagram.
So we begin by examining patterns of health. The study of patterns is helpful, because we can not understand the dataset of what a healthy system is, with a single human brain, if we try to know every molecular interaction. We need an overview. This methodology has been used for a long time, and Western Culture is applying it powerfully in such areas as quantum mechanics, chaos theory, ecology and permaculture. In fact, even the atomists were unwittingly studying patterns, they just didn't really know about underlying detail, so they described those patterns they could see. Most indigenous wisdom is coded pattern-knowledge. Interlinked pattern knowledge is very dense information storage, and it can be argued that the older we get, we move more toward pattern-knowledge and move beyond basic data acquisition. Got to make the best use of those molecules in our brains. For more about this direction, review the Solstice Institute Publication: Useful Information Content, a framework for ethical decisionmaking, by Ben Lipman.
A first, basic, and very old pattern is the Mind - Body - Spirit triad:
No claims that we are doing rocket science here. This is a central mandal of understanding of many medical traditions going back thousands of years. Note that it is oriented for an individual standing on the ground, looking up at the sky, or considering something greater than her or himself.
So, consider another mandala, currently used in some circles to contemplate a healthy society:
Note again that this mandala has an orientation. The point, coming to economics, faces down, to the earth, and the top topics relate to more global content. Economics, in its broader sense, meaning management of the home, is often where matters relating to Social Justice or the Environment get worked out.
So, we bring these mandalas, together, overlaying them. . .
And, then, putting their centers together, we find a familiar shape, historically associated with many things good:
So then, after studying the subject of Sustainable Culture, we add six more topic areas, each fitting neatly in a space between two of the basic six:
See 12 Point Star Map, which is also a directory to the 12 areas, organized in this cyclical mandala manner.
Note that, in essence, we propose a grid, 12 topics by 5 levels of scale. The topics follow a sequence, tagged by two digit numeric codes, and the levels are denoted by an alpha sequence A-E. If you know of sites, projects, or other activities that should be part of a directory of Sustainable Culture, please send e-mail to atsolstice@aol.com, and include, if at all possible, the URL of the material, a proposed topic and level (e.g. "05: C" is "agriculture: Village"). A brief summary of the site, its supporting organization, etc, is most helpful, as would be some information about yourself.