HOW IT ALL BEGUN...
Or, how does a man of no scientific qualification create a new geometric model?
In 1999 I woke up from a dream. That was the first step of my personal journey into the realms of geometry. At the time, I was living with my dog, Giddi, in a small apartment at a bustling central area of Tel Aviv. All I can remember is taking an afternoon nap, one of many, a nap that was soon established as a very strong awakening in my life.
I woke up to an unfamiliar feeling. In my dream, a geometric shape appeared – a shape I had never seen before. A few short moments later, armed with some inexplicable determination, I found myself hurrying down to the local stationary shop from which I emerged holding a blade cutter, an angle ruler, and some modeling cardboard. Back at home, I sat down to build the shape that appeared in my dream.
I built the shape like a child lost in time. After about an hour of computation, cutting, and gluing, I found myself holding an exact version of the shape that emerged in my dream about an hour earlier as if all of its geometric rules were transferred to me while dreaming
I lay down, holding the structured shape in my hands, feeling like I might get lost among its 24 facets. I had no linguistic description of the shape, no recollection of ever having learned about it, I did not understand its composition, yet it instilled in me a strong sense of curiosity and a strong need to merely stare at it.
With a strong desire to establish some orientation, I tried mapping the shape. I numbered its faces, and then, like eyes adjusting to the darkness, I realized it was constructed of two interlacing pyramids. I then marked each face with color and realized that, in fact, the shape comprised eight small pyramids.
Marking the faces with primary and complimentary colors proved to be very useful. I was suddenly excited to find a perfect order; out of chaos and disorientation emerged harmonic order. Effortlessly, the shape showed me the relationship between primary colors (yellow, red, blue) and complimentary colors (green, purple, orange). Thus, on the very first day immediately following that dream, I have already created what I would later call the three dimensional model, expressing the relationships between primary and complimentary colors.
My passion for exploring the shape continued in the next few weeks. In a chance encounter with a friend, I showed her the shape I built and learned from her that it was a well known shape that had a name, Merkaba, and there was even a book written about it. I hurried to the local New Age store and bought the book, unfolding the theory of a man with a somewhat odd name, Dornabello Malki Tzedek.
My shape was given a name which, according to Dornabello, by its very meaning - Merkaba, "light transferring body" - would open to me, through his book, the pearly gates of sacred geometry. I would define this realm of knowledge as the Kabbalah of geometry, dealing with the alchemy of spirit and science and the formation processes of geometric shapes. Learning sacred geometry is not a rational, analytic process, but rather an experiential and emotional one. For long periods, I submerged into journeys deep into the shape known as The Flower of Life, a shape considered the Mother of existing forms in nature.
I continued to build the shape from different materials, and a new question emerged from within: what is the shape of the empty space hiding within the Merkaba? This led me to build transparent Merkaba shapes made of glass and wood, hoping they would facilitate the understanding of the inner space of the Merkaba. When I looked at this inner space through the glass windows, I discovered a symmetric and aesthetic structure hitherto unknown to me. This structure is known by its scientific name, the octahedron, also known as the second Platonic body.
At the time, I thought my discovers might make a quaint three dimensional game that can transfer the knowledge of the shape of the Merkaba. With a long standing affection for magnets, I began assembling a magnetic game that eventually led to the discovery of the magnetic pattern that governs the model's base unit. I finally deciphered the simple pattern of attraction and repulsion through observation of the attraction and repulsion pattern exhibited by water molecules. The model's attraction and repulsion pattern merely replicates the behavior of a single water molecule.
It took several more years to simplify the Merkaba, and then, in 2011 I emerged on a new geometric experiment, one that finally established the geometric model athe assembling technique I developed. Driving my experiment was the question, what shape would emerge from combining two Merkabas? The result of my experiment was yet another shape unknown to me (Gyroelongated square dipyramid) Attempts to decipher the inner space of this new shaped revealed the model's base unit.
