The story behind the reHJon balance beam goes like this:

We wanted to report our business by adjusting our old reporting measures to measures that would encourage us to be more conscious of being three fold in the day to day reality of life.  To this effect we developed a reHJon Scale which is a mini version of the balance beam.  The scale has three limbs 120 deg apart.  One represents our Liberty strivings, one our Equality and one our Economic.  Herman Jonker, our Engineering Manager, built our first scale and was really interested in making it work.  You can now work out where the name came from.  How this reHJon Scale works and the measures we use is for another article. Because of the visual impact of the scale on human souls that we perceived in our colleagues, in other words the effect that the imbalance shown in the scale when each sphere of the three fold are not in balance with each other, we decided to see how it would feel to be the very balancing force ourselves by building a larger version, the reHJon Balance Beam.  Again Herman designed and built it.

The message:

In order to understand the real message being sent to us by the balance beam, we had to look carefully at what it was and then link the relevant concepts to it through our thinking and life experience.  This would enable us to understand it – understand what spiritual impulse was behind it and revealing itself to us through the balance beam.  In physical terms, we discovered the following:

• There is a pivot point right at the center
• There is more and more leverage as one goes further from the pivot point
• The more leverage one has, the smaller the movement of mass required to effect change
• The lever effect is not an opposite lever effect but rather one that affects two others, and two others that affect the original one
• Balance is the common objective for all three arms.

The above yielded the following realities on the balance beam for those trying to balance it.  At the center, large movements have to take place to create any leverage to move the balance beam.  When the beam responds to these movements, they are large too, creating instability.  People had to hang onto each other to prevent themselves from falling off.  When people started at the outer edges of the balance beam, they could quite easily get balance with small shifts of their weight while communicating with the others purely based on the feeling of imbalance or balance that they could feel in the movements of the balance beam.  It proved to draw real inner feelings of teamwork, common goal, real communication, while still being able to see and experience what was going on around them.

From a societal perspective, we are not living in a threefold system.  We are in the center where imbalance, dependence, and confusion reign.  From the balance beam experience, we know that if only we could get to the outer edges, we would be able to find balance.  The challenge is that the distance between the pivot point and stability because of leverage, is a high-risk area.

In my view, the above experience of the possibility of balance on the balance beam is a viable image for the working of balance in a threefold society.  We have to think the end result of balance actively and inwardly prepare our place of leverage at the end of the levers.  By doing this, at some point, we will be able to step into this space where our created balance will become a reality mastering the high-risk area between where we are now as a society, at the center on the pivot point, to where we could be.

The Iona Foundation, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, actively promotes the balance beam in Europe. Should you wish to experience the balance beam for yourself, please make contact here.

The drawings required for the reproduction of the balance beam are also made available by clicking on the link below.