About Marshall Lefferts

Professional Highlights... 


Relevant Life's Journey (part 1)...

In 1978, at the age of 19 and in the throes of a college freshman identity crisis, I had a spontaneous awakening experience. It was a ‘frying pan over the head’ kind of event one night — sudden and definitive. The thought that triggered it was very simple, yet eternally profound… “I am creating the whole thing.” Though it was in relationship to my mind’s dire wish to blame everything else around me — the kids, the school, the god-awful dorms — for my despair, it did in that moment pop me into a state of awareness that I knew from then on something larger, something beyond “me”, was going on in this life and universe. And as the universe seems to continuously revel in its own cosmic humor, the joke was on me as moments before the frying pan hit I scrawled these words in my fit of rage onto the yellow-painted fluorescent-lit pegboard wall next to me…

Intrepid Actualism Will Exist Forever… 

…the little dots trailing into one of the little black holes of the peg board. Some venting... I can still hear someone laughing somewhere about that one.

 

In my newly expanded state of awareness I was quickly blessed with three seminal gifts from the cosmos that have laid the foundation for my life ever since in deeply fundamental ways.

The first was being assigned Be Here Now, the ultimate cosmic comic book, in the next semester’s Search For Meaning class. Very validating of the “I am creating the whole thing” piece. (About 24 years later I had the pleasure of talking with Ram Dass about the 12-around-1 geometry on the cover of the book that I had begun exploring for the 12 Sectors model while at the Foundation for Conscious Evolution.)

Concurrently, knowing nothing about what it was, I signed up for a semester’s class in Aikido. Learning about ki energy, the one-point, extending ki, remaining centered and relaxed, and the beautiful power of the spiral to bring harmony and balance to the universe are still some of my all time favorite seeds of knowledge. Why this isn’t taught to children from day one I still can’t fathom. (See Cosmometry in Life > Human Experience for more on this.)

The third experience occurred a few months later, when back at my parent’s home for the summer. I wasn’t much of a reader, but I felt called to find a book to dive into, and upon browsing the selection in the family library I came upon one called Intuition. “Hmmm, interesting name,” I thought. Buckminster Fuller… I don’t recall if I had ever heard of him before that, but as soon as I turned the first few pages and began to glimpse the magnitude of insight and relevance Bucky was expounding, I was hooked beyond hooked. He explained why it was I didn’t like school (I’m innately a comprehensivist by nature, not a specialist). And he so deftly brought my mind into an expanded state of awareness that was both logical and utterly intuitive, well… suffice it say I’ve been a devotee ever since. In truth, Bucky was my first real spiritual teacher. He wasn’t a dramatically overt spiritual teacher — sometimes you had to read the vast spaces between the lines to glean this aspect of what he was saying — but indeed it could be said that everything he said and did was a spiritual act. He was one of those magnificent beings who gets out of the way enough to allow the cosmic infusion to inform his total awareness (cosmic fishing, he called it) and then share the bounty of the day’s catch with the rest of us. And yet he was also about as pragmatic as one can get in the grounding of the ideas that would stream in into practical application whenever possible. As a spiritual teacher, one thing Bucky embodied, for me, was a good strong dose of realism while simultaneously being a supreme idealist.  …The following Fall semester he came and spoke in the little chapel at Lewis & Clark College. I got to meet him and be tanned by his brilliant light directly once. Thank you Universe!

So Bucky, Aikido and The Ever Present Here and Now are my rewards of a higher education that still carry me to ever greater degrees of insight, embodiment and truth in this non-stop school of life.

 

A couple of years later, now 21 years old, I had one more seminal experience that set me on my lifelong quest to understand the patterns of creation. It was on a hot July day in the heart of the Adirondack high peaks region in northern New York. Pure wilderness, miles from the nearest road, electricity, phone. I was on a solo vision quest. After a quick cleansing plunge into the icy water of the mountain brook I was ascending for the day, and a most profound transcendent visitation with about 30 butterflies, I headed off and eventually found myself way upstream in the cradle of Gothics — sort of nature’s solid granite version of the three pyramids in Egypt. Sitting in meditation on the gravel bank of what by this point was a small meandering sub-alpine brook, a vision was gifted.

In my mind’s eye, like arcs of light against a rich red background, there appeared two lines crossing at a right angle. Immediately they began to recede and there appeared four petals, and as the image continued to recede it grew in complexity until a most beautiful double spiral pattern filled my inner sight. I knew, this is what I had come for. And I have been stalking that double spiral pattern ever since… and it has been stalking me.

  

Coming from my initiation in Fuller’s Synergetics, I’ve never been strongly enamored by what’s typically called “sacred geometry.” First off, since everything for me is sacred, what geometry would fall outside of that category? And although the traditional sacred geometric investigations certainly tie into synergetics, Bucky never referred to his work as sacred geometry, nor has his work ever been placed into that category. Many great insights have come from those whose work is labeled that, there is no doubt. Yet, in my journey, I’ve always felt it presented a limited view on the vast nature of cosmic patterning, especially when it came to my quest to learn about the double spiral pattern of my vision. With its common emphasis on the structural geometric forms, the flower of life pattern, and the phi ratio and spiral, sacred geometry clearly has offered valuable knowledge for centuries, yet every time I’d encounter a new book on the subject and got to the pages where they’d show a pinecone’s beautiful double spiral, the commentary inevitably and abruptly ended with “and that’s the phi spiral”, or “that’s the Fibonacci golden spiral”. As true as this is, I was always left wondering about the double spiral pattern as a whole. What is that? Why is it present in so many cones, fruits, flowers? What is causing that pattern and what is determining its outer boundary? And what happens to the pattern in the non-visible area around the form that embodies it? 

One day, many years after my initial vision and numerous “and that’s the phi spiral” dead ends, I received the answers to these questions when I finally learned how to make a phi spiral on my computer and then “spun” it into a vortex pattern, and then a double spiral. Bang!.. there it was… what I’ve come to call the Phi Boundary Condition. In a most remarkable synergetic phenomenon, it happens to be that when a single phi spiral is “put into motion” and rotated around a chosen center point, the pattern that ensues emanates a spiraling vortex that first expands outward from the center point, then curves back upon itself momentarily before continuing on expansively, possibly to infinity. In this moment of curving back onto itself there arises a perfect circle, a delineation of the spiraling field energy’s inside and outside dynamics; the boundary condition that defines when and why a pinecone’s double spiral pattern transitions from form to formless, and what happens to the pattern after making this transition. In her innately elegant way, nature has designed the simplest possible means by which to define form within a boundless sea of formlessness.

My study of the phi double spiral has revealed many new insights into both the nature of phi and the phi of nature. For a deeper investigation of the phi boundary condition and its fractal-holographic qualities, see the Cosmometry of Phi article.

Which brings me to the name, cosmometry. Very simply, as I said before, I’ve not been all that enamored by the name “sacred geometry” for this field of knowledge, so one night I was compelled to consider alternatives. Even the word geometry felt too limited to me, since the prefix “geo” means Earth-based, and what I and other contemporary researchers, as well as Bucky and other of the great 20th century pioneers, were discerning was truly cosmic in proportion (meaning it spans atomic to galactic scales). Hmmm… cosmic geometry… “cosmometry”. Kind of sounded funny to me at first, and though I thought in that moment that I had made it up, it turns out it’s been in the English language for a few centuries but not in any significant way brought into common use. A web search that night revealed that, aside from about a half-dozen scientific papers that used the term, and some channeled writings from Sirian masters, cosmometry is otherwise out of use. And so it became my choice for what to call this vast and important field of knowledge, and I offer it to you to adopt into your lexicon as you see fit.

Along with my passion for cosmometry I am a musician, designer, photographer, ki energy practitioner, and joy-body lover dancing his way through this adventure called life. And what a fine-line we are dancing these days indeed!