page 109). Several years later they realized that just a little ways away, maybe a hundred yards or so, was another marker. They hadn’t realized there were two spirals. I don’t know whether the people working with this understand its significance even yet.
Spirals in Nature Here is sacred geometry in nature [Fig. 8-8], the real thing. It’s a nautilus shell cut in half. It’s an unwritten rule that every good sacred geometry book has to have a nautilus shell in it. Many books say this is a Golden Mean spiral, but it’s not—it’s a Fibonacci spiral. You can see the perfection of the arms of the spiral, but if you look at the center or beginning, it doesn’t look so perfect. You can’t really see this detail here. I suggest that you look at a real one. This innermost end actually hits the other side and bends, because its value is 1.0, which is a long ways from phi. The second and third ones bend also, but not as much because they are coming closer to phi. Then they start fitting better and better, until you see this perfectly graceful form developing. You could think that the little nautilus made a mistake in the beginning; it looks like he didn’t know what he was doing. But he’s doing it perfectly, it’s not a mistake. He’s simply following exactly the mathematics of the Fibonacci sequence. On this pine cone [Fig. 8-9] you see a double spiral, one going one way and one going the other. If you were to count the number of spirals rotating one direction and those going the other direction, you’d find that they’re always two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. There are perhaps 8 going one way and 13 the other, or 13 going one way and 21 the other. The many other double-spiral patterns found throughout nature correspond to this in all cases that I know. For instance, the sunflower spirals are always related to the Fibonacci sequence. Figure 8-10 shows the difference between the two. The Golden Mean spiral is the ideal. It’s like God, the Source. As you can see, the top four squares on both drawings are the same size. The difference is in the areas where they originate (the bottom sec-
Fig. 8-10. Comparing Fibonacci and Golden mean spirals
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