For thousands of years, human beings have told stories about enlightenment, revelation, resurrection, apocalypse, and transformation. These stories differ in detail but not in structure. A prophet climbs a mountain and returns changed. A seeker descends into the underworld and rises renewed. A dying god collapses into darkness and re-emerges in light. A mystic enters a void and encounters a presence. At first glance, these look like metaphors, the shared vocabulary of cultures trying to articulate experiences beyond ordinary life.
But the more I’ve worked through the geometry of mind and meaning, the more convinced I’ve become that these myths share their forms because they map onto real structures in consciousness and reality. They are patterned the way they are because we are patterned the way we are.
Most mythic or religious transformations follow a three-part geometry. First comes collapse: the hero falls, descends, empties out, or is cast into a darkness they cannot control. Second comes a boundary: a moment of suspension, stasis, liminality—what anthropologists call the “betwixt and between.” And finally comes emergence: ascension, transfiguration, awakening, or the return with new insight. These three phases mirror the three-layer spectrum I described earlier: collapse into the lowest state, boundary at the lavender threshold, and emergence into a higher mode of being.
This is not poetic coincidence. It reflects the structure of human cognition under stress. When a person reaches a limit—psychological, emotional, existential—the mind briefly becomes unmoored from its usual reference points. It enters a state of heightened sensitivity, where perception, memory, and sense of self can reorganize. Myths describe this moment using images of death, darkness, wilderness, or the belly of a whale. Phenomenology describes it as boundary consciousness. Physics describes it as a system near a phase transition. The geometry is the same: a descent toward collapse, a suspended threshold, and a release into a new configuration.
This geometric pattern appears in ritual as well. Nearly every initiation rite—from Eleusis to the sweat lodge to baptism—follows the same arc: separation from the old identity, immersion in ambiguity, and re-integration on the other side. Even secular experiences mirror the same shape. Consider the athlete entering “the zone,” the researcher on the brink of insight, the parent exhausted at 3 a.m. who suddenly feels overwhelming love, the person in grief who finds clarity in the midst of collapse. Mythic stories are, in part, reflections on these threshold states.
The symbols themselves—circles, triangles, hexagons, spirals—show up again and again in religious art. Circles represent unity and completeness. Triangles represent tension and decision. Hexagons symbolize resonance and cooperative order. Spirals symbolize emergence and transformation. These shapes aren’t decorations; they’re the geometry of consciousness externalized into culture.
Even notions of “heaven” and “hell” follow the apex geometry I’ve been sketching. The upward orientation (generativity, compassion, expansion) becomes a realm of openness and light. The downward orientation (domination, fear, contraction) becomes a realm of collapse. Religious cosmologies map moral geometry onto metaphysical space because that’s how the mind experiences moral direction in the first place.
Seen through this lens, religious myths are not primitive explanations of the world. They are maps of how consciousness reorganizes under pressure. They use story to track the same structures that physics tracks with equations and psychology tracks with developmental models.
In the next post, I’ll turn from ancient stories to our current moment—because the same geometries show up at the scale of societies, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that we are approaching a collective threshold of our own. And it involves information concepts of optimization & physics concepts of friction and thermodynamics.
