Oh what a tangled web we weave...

A collection of circles is said to be concentric if they have the same center. The circles on a bull's-eye target are concentric.









StoneHenge- What is the common phenomenon between concentric circles found at Stonehenge and in Sacred temples?







Concetric Circles found in American Southwest, Central Australia, Hindu Temples, Harappa - Pakistan, in Buddhist mandalaas, and many many more places ...leads one to wonder -- what is this human fixation with circles that have a Common Origin?

Apparently, we like them, as well!
====================================


"Let us visit the historical cube in Mecca to conduct a thought-experiment: Imagine you are suspended in space in a satellite directly above the cube in Mecca. Presume also that it is night and all the lights in the world have been switched off. Now switch on the lights that shine on the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Mecca in which the cube is located and also switch on the lights of all the mosques of the world.

This is what you will see: directly below you will be the black square of the Kaaba at the centre of a vast concentric system of white circles that emanate from it like ripples. The innermost circles are in constant motion around it, and they are packed close together. White wheels within wheels unceasing in their motion. They are encircled by white circles that have a space between each other. These do not move around the cube but they do sway towards and away from it. Radiating away are unmoving white dots that make up bigger and bigger circles at greater distances from each other.
What are these three sets of ripples that emanate from the cube and what have they got to do with God asking Abraham to repair the cube?

The three sets of circles we saw while being suspended in space above the Kaaba were gatherings of people in different acts of worship (the word "ecclesiastical" which means "of the church" is from the Greek word ekklesia which means an assembly or gathering of people). Closest to the cube, the Kaaba, are the pilgrims dressed in the stipulated white unstitched garments, akin to their shrouds, circumambulating; walking seven times around the cube chanting to God, "Labaik, allahumma labaik" -"I am here, for You, I am here". They form the first set of moving concentric circles.

The next set of circles are pilgrims in concentric rows: standing, bowing and prostrating to God in the prescribed prayer. If the first set of circles move along the circumference then this set of circle moves along the radius, where each worshipper, while going from the standing, bowing and prostrating mode, is moving radially towards the centre of the cube and then receding. From your vantage viewpoint up in the night sky, this second set of circles would appear as white rings that pulsate: expanding in width and contracting. Finally, you have the distant circles that are made up of white dots that are the mosques of the world: segments of great circles (were you to light up all the graves of Muslims in the world, they too would lie in concentric ripples emanating from the Kaaba).

Thus, the mosque is defined as a segment of a circle whose centre is the Kaaba. For instance a mosque in New York would be a segment of the circle that passes through Canada, and crosses the Arctic to Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Singapore, and then crosses Antarctica, Peru, Colombia and Cuba, before re-entering the United States. The circle is made up by connecting the mosques, the white dots you saw from outer space that make the circle whose centre is the cube in Mecca.

This global concentric system made up by all the mosques in the world oriented to a single centre is a geometrical analogue of Tawhid - a doctrine of the Oneness of God and the unity of all existence. Tawhid is the foundation of Islam. Hence the cube is an ordering device; it is a marker that locates the centre of the concentric system. In it, all the axes of our horizontal plane of material existence converge and connect to the vertical axis mundi.

It is as an ordering device that the second, and less known, meaning of the word Kaaba comes into play. Kaaba, in Arabic, means the "cube" and also "a shape that emerges", i.e. both the form and the emergence of form. If the form is the cube, then what form remains to emerge?

As an ordering device, the Kaaba is not the modest cube in Mecca but a monumental project that has, for over a millennium now, been redefining the world in its own image. It has been constructing its circumferences (without which the centre is a point without identity). Each time a group of Muslims gather in prayer or build a mosque, each time Muslims follow the Prophet's practice of sleeping on the right side with their faces towards the Kaaba, each time a Muslim dies and is buried in a grave that is always oriented towards the Kaaba, in each instance a fragment of a circumference is being put into place. Prayer-halls, beds and graves are all rectangles with their larger side facing the Kaaba; all chords of its circumnavigating circles. With the global consolidation of a sacred centre, the faithful barely perceive that with their bricks and their bodies, they construct and constitute an international installation, the mother of all Monumental Art."
H. Masud Taj