Why am I lecturing on fractals, when what you want to know about is the Face at Cydonia? Well, after decades of disinformation and misdirection have muddied the water, it is necessary to correct the context in which the information is viewed. A carefully crafted set of perceptual prejudices otherwise obscures any understanding of what you see. What you need to think is, �Wow.Look at that!�, rather than, �Gee. What am I looking at?� That second alternative actually causes less thinking to occur,as the brain struggles to fit strange contents into some familiar box. It is far better to analyse the actual data than to intellectualise and internalise the process of analysis. Be here now, in the Zen Buddhist sense.

I realise that contradicts the fundamental operational parameter of academia and mainstream science. Oh, well. There are just a few more points to cover, and then it�s �On to Cydonia !�

The Martian way of seeing things was exactly that: a Way of Seeing. They had what could be called a perceptual culture. If everything is perceived as interrelated , then , for any particular result, every possible element is of equal importance. This means that the moment, and the mood, and the location , and the color of the shirt worn by the person across the room, and where they intend to go later, are all things which can actively influence the result you seek. If you can mentally embrace such a total matrix of potentials, you can choose to put effort into what would , in the Terran �Way�, seem to tiny and irrelevant details, and yet acheive profound results. Much of what passes in our culture for superstition derives from the vestiges of that older Way, static and largely impotent echoes of the way the mind wants to do its work.

The underpinnings of our culture are conceptual. There is nothing particularly wrong there, other than that the concepts are theoretical. Interpretations lead to hypotheses, which generate metrics, which become the standards by which information is filtered and judged, often becoming a closed cycle. If it doesn�t fit, throw it out. This is arch �left brain� activity from the hemisphere which is always seeking to simplify the equation. By �metrics�, I refer broadly to definitions, measurement units, prejudices, and anything else that is used to catagorise with an intent to generate more metrics. This is the basic difference between the Terran and the Martian mindset: the former uses the mind to insulate from the world, while the latter seeks to interact mindlessly (without preconception) with it, to put the difference in our terms.

The Martian outlook was therefore visual where the Terran one is intellectual, and vice versa. What we would call Martian �art�, conveys actual information in a meta-language that is completely missed by anyone who attempts to extract meaning from too small a sampling of the details. The �Devil� may indeed be �in the details�, but if you only stare fixedly at his foot, you will surely miss what his hands are doing. I should mention that I keep tossing in these bits of folk-wisdom for a reason � folklore and mythology are examples of that ancient meta-language, especially when interactively expressed through oral tradition. That is why the Druids, greatest scholars of their day, chose not to commit the ancient wisdom to writing, and why the Kabbalists objected to translations of the Talmud into other languages, and out of its native context , You may recall that the teachings of both Socrates and Jesus are known to us by the writings of their students, not directly. This is not to imply inaccuracy, only to suggest a limitation of the full meaning through the �note taking� process. Another bit of folk wisdom: �It loses something in the translation�. Indeed.

The Martian eye for detail, or their right- brain orientation, if you prefer, puts an emphasis on texture rather than surface. In our view a wall is a definate boundary, so it may as well be flat. In the Martian view, a wall is inevitably part of a larger tableux and has a much more complex rôle to play. This difference in perception lends a pointillist quality to the Martian landscape.

Pointillism was a style of painting that became popular during the Impressionist Movement at the end of the 19th century. It uses clusters of small primary-colored dots to convey the impression of a full spectrum from a very limited palette, as the eye fuses the dots together from a distance. This �discovery� was really a reappearance of the ancient, forgotten logic behind mosaic tile work, something we�ll investigate further in a later chapter. In the modern era, it led to practical methods of color printing, and is, of course, how a television picture is formed. The salient aspect here, though, is that the process requires contrasting colors to work, nice bright cartoon colors, not pastels or gradients, and that is what one finds on Mars. The same fascination with garish exhuberance was once the norm on this planet as well, and still survives in �primitive� cultures. Ancient statues which we see now as smooth white marble were often originally brightly painted, and even the original surface tiles of the Great Pyramid were apparently painted with bright murals. Just a few years ago, a careful cleaning and restoration of the Sistine Chapel revealed (much to the horror of many Art scholars) that Michaelangelo had in fact painted that famous ceiling in loud comic-book hues , not the soft soot-obscured tones that had been thought. This is all relevant, I promise you.

The Martian pointillist landscape only shows its �true colors� when viewed up close. Very close, which is why I include so many pointless/pointillist extreme close up illustrations. We are used to visually gauging scale by comparing the apparent surfaces of what we see, but on Mars, that doesn�t always work. Many sites, by design, change drastically in appearance when viewed at different distances , and colors almost always shift. The �pointillism� expresses not just by colors, but in all the elements , in a visual metaphor that has no modern name. Perhaps fractillism would be an acceptable word for it.

It should be noted that we are routinely offered incorrect data for scale and distance in the released notes that accompany the Mars images, which compounds the problem. I initially thought many of the images I studied had really, really humoungeous big structures and artifacts in them, based on the data tables. While the Martians were easily able to erect domes spanning miles , the individual buildings, statues, and whatnot are often actually of much more comprehensible sizes. Which is not to imply that there aren�t really any huge structures there- there most certainly are. Consider that misleading measurement data as another one of �Truth�s protective layers� ( added to preclude real research, no doubt), and peel it away. I can�t offer you any better numbers, unfortunately, but I can let you see the �doors and windows�, so to speak, which provides, I think, adequate comparative data to work from.

Now we�re ready...

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