Ever have a week that has it’s own theme? Last week was pyramid week for me. It seemed that everywhere I looked, a pyramid appeared.
Pyramids are iconic and symbolic and like all symbols they contain the magic to create thoughts and ideas. For this reason, historically, symbols appeared to have strange powers. For instance, runes, the protolinquistic script of the Germanic tribes were sacred and thought to be filled with sorcerous power because they provoked ideation. To early humans struggling with abstraction in a real world, symbols took on mythic significance. Today we believe we have we've evolved beyond that, but aren't these letters and words in front of you also symbols that mysteriously convey thoughts from one person to another?
We haven't really evolved at all. Humans still struggle to recognize the difference between abstraction and reality. I have a Christian friend who swears that the Pepsi symbol is Satanic, that it has the power to cast evil spells. Considering that seeing a Pepsi symbol might trigger a thirst response and entice you to consume an unhealthful liquid that is little more than water, sugar and chemicals, he might be on to something.
The Mayans were consummate pyramid builders and a recent discovery using laser technology to visually strip away the mantle of jungle surrounding Tikal, a Mayan ruin in the lowlands of Guatemala, revealed a megalopolis as vast and complex and paranoid as any ancient Old World city. The LiDAR (laser radar) photos revealed at least 60,000 man made structures including hidden pyramids, roads, building platforms, moats, walls and ramparts that surround this vanished Amerindian kingdom.
The Mayan elites loved pyramids. Not only were they monuments to the rulers who claimed to be descendants of the gods, they made nice viewing platforms to get above the flatness of the Yucatan, survey the domain and spy on the astronomical gods to see when they might threaten the world with an eclipse or a comet and somehow turn it to their advantage.
Because pyramids are iconic symbols of rule in both the old and the new world and are part of our history, the evidence of past civilizations not unlike our own, we associate them with authority. In other words, subconsciously, a pyramid conveys credibility.
My next pyramid encounter was Maslow's hierarchical pyramid of human needs as presented in a post by 
I recall Maslow's pyramid from Psychology 101. It appears to have almost universal acceptance within that academic discipline. I remember arguing its validity with the professor and, to shut me up, him eventually admitting that it was a generalization, a mere guideline to gauge human needs and not necessarily an accurate road map. I find these sorts of "guidelines" a bit dangerous since once they are in place, those who assimilate them do so without questioning their validity, which goes against the purest form of scientific inquiry, that of consummate scrutiny.
Psychology is not an exact science since human interactions constantly shift, consciousness evolves and perceptions change. Human foibles must always be viewed in context.
Freud, the founder of psychology, believed that all men had sexual fantasies about their mothers. We now know that isn't necessarily true. Freud lived during sexually repressed Victorian times when a woman who flashed an ankle was considered a hussy. He probably harbored mommie issues himself and, rising to a position of authority, projected them onto the rest of humanity. Imagine what he would think of today's butt floss bikini?
Maslow lived and died within the 20th century. He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and thus was at least aware of the tribulations of his tribe, his parent's life and perhaps also believed in the overburden of deity. Like Freud, his perceptions are thus colored by his experience and environment.
Maslow formulated the base of his pyramid through observation of laboratory monkeys. It seems logical that if you can't breathe, are dying of thirst, are starving to death are too cold or too hot you might be motivated to fulfill those needs before striving for anything else. In life, life itself must come first. But above that I seriously doubt that much hierarchy exists, that people pursue any and all abstract human needs in random order, or pursue none of them beyond the basics of life.
Self actualization can even become the prime motivator. In the past, sages have sought personal actualization by starving themselves, living as mendicants, self-flagellation, while teetering on the edge of dissolution through personal deprivation. Admittedly, that would be the extreme, but it shows that people cannot be pigeonholed into this structure and doing so generates general assumptions that aren't necessarily true.
Maslow places great emphasis on safety, his second tier. Maslow was probably a bit paranoid. Also, his pyramid exhibits purely Western values, though, near the end of his life he was still revising it to include more ethereal aspects. Through his studies he had evolved and had achieved quite a bit of personal self-actualization.
If you do an image search of Maslow's pyramid the results will astonish you. It's like a Christmas tree upon which various psychologists hang their own particular ornamentation. To some self-actualization equates with ego gratification. To others, reproduction is part of the base. Many use the pyramid as an excuse to indulge in profligate accumulation behavior claiming it to be "human nature."
I admire Maslow and the work he did. His assessment of self-actualization, though controversial, may be his greatest achievement. My problem is that now there is this symbol loaded pyramid that the less enlightened willfully use as a road map and means of control, in essence saying that people are mapped and predictable and therefore controllable, especially if we can convince them that the pyramid is a valid assessment of human motivation. Maslow's pyramid is a form of mind control, of self-fulfilling programming.
Let's compare Maslow's pyramid to another pyramid: the United States Department of Agriculture food pyramid.
Abe Lincoln founded the USDA to promote agricultural development in the United States. In other words, the production and marketing of food. It's first foray into nutritional guidelines didn't appear until 1894 and recommended a variety of foods like meat, fruits and vegetables. By 1916, with the ascent of scientific method and reductionism, drastically altered those guidelines to claim that fat, fatty foods, fruits, vegetables, sugars and sugary foods were all that were necessary for complete nutrition. This, of course, preceded the discovery of vitamins. My mother was raised under the umbrella of these nutritional guidelines. Most of her teeth were gone before she was 30.
In 1943 the USDA came out with 7 food groups. One group was butter and margarine. By 1956 this list shrank to the more familiar 4 food groups of meat, dairy, grains and fruits & vegetables. These are the foods most widely produced in the US. The four food groups nutritional guidelines lasted until 1991 when they came out with the food pyramid.
Enter the mesmerizing magic of the pyramid.
The first chart suggested to the USDA by nutritional experts in 1992 featured fruits and vegetables as the biggest group, not breads. This chart was overturned at the hand of special interests in the grain, meat, and dairy industries, all of which are heavily subsidized by the USDA. If Americans followed the chart suggested, they would buy much less meat, milk, and bread. On the other hand, if they ate as the revised chart suggested, it "could lead to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes," as original composer of the food Pyramid, Luise Light warned.
Wikipedia
Given the above statement and the number of o-beasts pounding the Earth, it becomes clear that the USDA is no more about proper nutrition than the FDA is about health or the DEA is about stemming drug use.
The USDA "My Pyramid" tries to blur this blatant propaganda with an almost unintelligible icon that includes something as non-nutritive as exercise.
In desperation, the USDA recently introduced "My Plate" which is the same four food groups arranged on a plate with fruits segregated from vegetables and a glass of dairy on the side. Same old, same old. Smoke and mirrors. Nice try guys!
Anybody who knows anything about food realizes that the USDA simply wants you to buy American food products and keep those subsidies rolling ever onward. They know nothing about nutrition, though they pretend to be the experts. When it comes to proper nutrition you're on your own.
The final pyramid in this week-long journey I noticed on the back of a US one dollar bill. If you're a yank, you know what I'm talking about. For the rest of you, here it is:
For some people, this triggers a conspiracy theory response: the eye within a triangle being a masonic symbol and the mark of the illuminati who rule the world. For others, and I think this probably relates to the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers, this is the eye of God, ever watchful over his chosen people: Americans.
For me it's the evil eye of Sauron, the surveillance state and the psychopaths who want to control it all, to elevate their own status to the top of the pyramid at the expense of the planet and all of its inhabitants.
But that's just me. My social programming didn't go so well when I was a kid.
What do you think about symbols and their ability to Trojan horse their way through the gates of your perceptions to trigger a programmed thought or emotional response? Are we being manipulated by symbols? Should we become that eye at the top of the pyramid, ever-watchful of our thoughts and our reactions to symbols to become more aware of how we are manipulated and lied to? Should this be part of our overall awakening process? Does it even matter?
First image is mine: Partially excavated Zapotec pyramid in Oaxaca, Mexico.