From the Cube to the Rhombicuboctahedron: An Expansion of Perception

Quaternity is more than a game. It is a practice that unsettles habits of thought and prepares the mind for another way of seeing. The cube represents our present three-dimensional condition — stable, symmetrical, reassuring, but confined. To cut and expand the cube into the rhombicuboctahedron is to take a step toward a wider field of vision, where more faces, more relations, more connections come into view.

Rodney Collin, in The Theory of Celestial Influence, spoke of a new kind of perception, a four-dimensional awareness in which the unity of things would be directly experienced. Ordinary perception, he wrote, emphasizes separation and individuality; the expanded perception would reveal interdependence. Quaternity, with its fourfold interplay, can be seen as a rehearsal for such expansion — a training ground where the mind learns to hold several perspectives at once.

Yet the passage is not easy. Ernest Scott, in The People of the Secret, reminded us that at each stage man must abandon the secure, the trusted, the very thing that once seemed ultimate. He must confront the inertia that resists change, just as his ancestors once had to surmount biological obstacles. What is asked now is nothing less than to accept the mechanism of his own evolution — the appearance of a new organ of perception.

Kaleb Seth Perl, in Own your Truth, adds a warning: what may hold us back is the dominance of the intellect. Useful in past survival, it now clings to the cold vibrations of logic and linear reasoning. Too much reliance on this narrow faculty misaligns us with the pathways ahead, leaving humanity vulnerable to systems of control and to the machinery of its own making. To step into the future, intellect must yield its dominance to a perception that is broader, warmer, more resonant with human essence.

The first stirrings of this organ of superior perception may already be visible — in flashes of intuition, in sudden recognitions of unity, in the ability to hold contradictions without breaking them apart: 4 > 2, and beyond the binary lies the wider field, as Rumi reminds as.

Quaternity belongs to this preparation. In its play we are asked to face inertia, to let go of the old geometry of mind, and to taste the wider dimension now opening. As the cube becomes the rhombicuboctahedron, so perception itself may unfold into a richer form, revealing the unity that was always there.

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The image above is credited to Ligia Unanue: a construction in glass tubes of the Rhombicuboctahedron, a polyhedron derived from the expansion of the cube and called “Vigintisex” by Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci.