The 7 Liberal Arts were bequeathed to us by the Ancient Greeks as the basic required study for those participating in a democracy. Vestiges of them are found in most school curriculums today and were taught in Plato’s Academy for a thousand years from 500BC until about 450AD.
The Western Secret Tradition can be traced back to Ancient Egypt, but the Greeks played a pivotal roll becau se they wrote it down. Up until around 500BC the Wisdom tradition was oral, it was already very old when the Greek philosophers discovered it. It is known that Pythagoras and Plato travelled to Egypt and possibly India too. Of course we have no writings of either Pythagoras or Socrates; we have to rely on Plato and Aristotle and others in their various translations and editions some two and a half thousand years after the event.
It is probably important to understand that when the Ancient Greeks talked of Democracy (government of the people by the people) they meant only free men; no women, no slaves. The point being that free men had time to study the 7 Liberal Arts and were thereby wise and qualified to vote. For all its faults democracy is still with us today and still worth fighting for until something better comes along.
The first 3 of the 7 Liberal Arts are: Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic, called The Trivium, meaning three ways, (and the origin of the word trivial).
These are the fundamental skills for the art of communicating.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, whether in politics, sales or relationships or anything.
Grammar is the correct structure of verbs and nouns, punctuation, spelling and so on.
Logic means making sense, and not just to yourself.
(NLP is a recoding of these tools for the 21st century.)
So if these are the tools of communication, what can we communicate that is not trivial?
The Ancient Philosophers were clear that their duty was to Truth and encoded it in the Quadrivium, the four ways:
Mathematics, Geometry, Music and Cosmology.
Studying these matters reveals the structure and order underlying the creative process in the universe, what Socrates called ‘the Heavenly Pattern”’ which, once seen can be installed in oneself.
Mathematics in this sense means the qualitative aspect of number: 1 as wholeness and unity, 2 as duality or reflection, 3 as trinity and so on, (as opposed to simply quantitive, the mundane use of number expressing how much, how many etc) and how number itself reveals hidden structures.
Geometry is number in space, crucial for navigation and surveying and deeply embedded in all organic growth processes.
Music is number in time, the regularity of harmonic resonance as a universal model.
Cosmology or Astronomy is number in space and time, the astonishingly beautiful, proportional ordering of planetary dimensions and orbits.
(In NLP terms, something worth modeling.)
So why is this important?
I would like to quote from a brilliant new book titled In Love with Venus by Angela Moore:
"YOU MAY NOT REALISE IT BUT THE WAY YOU PERCEIVE THE COSMOS GREATLY AFFECTS YOUR OUTLOOK ON LOVE, LIFE AND HAPPINESS. IF YOU BELIEVE THE UNIVERSE AND OUR SOLAR SYSTEM ARE ESSENTIALLY RANDOM, YOU WILL TEND TO SEE LIFE THAT WAY TOO. TUNING IN TO THE NATURAL BEAUTY THAT IS GOING ON ALL AROUND YOU CAN AWAKEN YOU TO A HIGHER ORDER, GIVE YOU AN ANCHOR TO A CERTAINTY OF AMAZING WONDER, AND EFFECT SUBTLE ALIGNMENTS IN YOUR PSYCHE WHICH CAN ACTUALLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE."
This is what the courses of Thorpe Institute are designed to do.