On Angels and Providence

Posted on February 28, 2013 by janeadamsart

Archangel Gavriel of the Western waters

This is a formative essay from about 1992, which for some time, I planned to edit and blog. It belongs with the series of other older and updated writings: How to draw the Sri Chakra Yantra — Alchemy & Self Enquiry — Speed of Light: Tsim tsum & Self Enquiry — the Field of the Dead.

I was discussing with a friend the other day, the practices which enlist the help of Angels’ magick – and some of the unpredictable results – doubtful of commissioning the Angels to our own small desires and interests. Ten years ago, I learnt about some of the methods, but lost interest … or perhaps it just didn’t work for me.

I do like to remind myself of the Archangels Mahael, Rafael, Gavriel, Uriel – the guardians of the compass points and of the elements Fire, Air, Water, Earth – and their Sefiroth on the Tree of Life: Beauty, Intelligence, Nature and the North.

Self knowledge is crucial: else there is mere projection. A mystic is a natural scientist. The root of science is knowledge through enquiry and verification.

Where “Above” meets “Below”, is a point of unifying awareness, the Now. As this area expands, as the eye widens and deepens … in a creative act or moment of contemplation … the compass of my mind opens. The dimension is embraced in the heightened awareness of a moment, or of a lifetime. As provincial intellect dissolves, I awaken from sleep. In my sleep I dreamed I am an island separate, clever and enclosed, surrounded by an ocean. When I wake, I AM the ocean.

To live and work where the worlds meet, is to wake and sleep where they come to each other. Is my “Above” unawake to what is “Below”? If “Above” and “Below” cohabit in a random violence, they cannot align into the texture of living.

The work is to integrate the six sides of the Star: to keep the interpenetrating Triangles’ place of meeting, open. The one descends into the other ascending. Balanced work aligns the mystic faculty to the senses, to manifest the ‘Angel’ on Earth … exercised in each day’s encounters and relationships, as in the solitude. The only way to navigate the allure of hidden rocks – excessive reaction in any direction – is to develop a steady inward vision. The sailor trims the vessel. Excess of wind or current can capsize it: the penalty of a moment’s blindness. When I am blind with the weight of personal opinion, judgement or outrage, how can I see what is provided? the provisions for the voyage?

If “Above” and “Below” are separate – blind to each other in the psyche – they violate each other. In the mirror is a personal ego which cannot contain their confrontation, and fears both. If the personal vessel is driven by sub and supra-conscious forces seeking possession but unintegrated, that hue and cry will manifest in her earthly environment. Everything happening around the vessel, arises from the mind’s state of “trim” or ballast. This condition assembles a perception of the world.

Watch and see my dwelling’s colour, and its walls. Learn the cause of certain repetitions; what is provided. It is Providence. These are KA BALLISTIC observations.

Emblem 8 – angel sieves wheat from chaff

To define an Angel? The word symbolises – in the earth bound perception – a region in the spiritual psyche which is asleep until called upon. So it appears, as a reflection in these waters below. Yet regarded as a whole, the Angel is a higher archetype, a prototype or series – conduits of quintessence – in the collective pool of consciousness; the power to influence our navigation. If we are blind to archetypal weather patterns, they are our dictators of good or adverse fortune. Perhaps to wake, to call upon the Angel, allows us to see the pattern as a whole, rather than the mould.

There are in humanity, innumerable archetypal resonances. They reside not “out there”, but in the depths of you and me. In the deep ocean uniting us, where no holds are barred, they are winged movements of the Self. Given awareness in the human fabric – the “I” – they are my article of evolution, from the skins of animals, through tribes and individuals, to Consciousness and beyond our imagination. Consciousness is a garden: to the Self be true. This in-tention develops precision in the dialogue.

Angels gossip – 1956

My concept is: that an Angel – those which translate to winged messengers – is a conduit of force. An Angel is an emanation, an elemental “strand” or filament of interactions. The Angel in the sub atomic universe arises in a myriad pathways, from the colloquial “big bang” exhalation of Genesis, and is eternally present, in the formation of space-time.

The unseen fibre of Creation dwells in the pulse of all Formation, through mineral to the Divine source. One angelic force drives a geometric interplay of planetary orbits – a tide of human destiny. Another is the intimate silent song which shapes a woodland glade or flower. Another rules a neighbourhood, an element, a star, or a deluge of cosmic particles.

All Angels emanate from the heart of cosmic expansion – from Genesis, from the moment before time and space began. Thus they are not of our time and space. In Kabbalah it is written that the Primordial One “brought about a contraction and made room (a void) in himself where the worlds could be created.” For God to behold God, for the I to look into the I, that which emanates is Creation, Formation, Materiality. But that from which it emanates, is a measureless unity.

These things are in the mind. She looks into herself and believes what she is shown, the day and the night.

The truth transcends the everyday and academic mind. The truth is beyond the spectrum. The breadth, height and depth of our physical and sensory universe is yet a “flat-earth theory”. The truth is outside time and space and yet here in the heart of the matter as it ever is, closer than breathing.

Emblem 3 – Angel at the door

Angels are the multiplicity of the Holy Oneness in his-her aspect of Creation, along subatomic “routes” – a galactic universe which, to our senses, still expands, and yet is ever Present. Angelic is the homeopathic potency to reverse a dis-ease. The molecular web’s dilution back into the “atom before Creation”, overcomes the symptom.

Angels singly, or blending their infinite dance of Numbers, are natural Law. They are functions. They cannot alter themselves, because only time and space can alter. There are Angels of positive current and Angels of negative current in the cosmic circuitry: the hierarchic colour tones and frequencies. Intelligent life is not a mere passenger, but cooperates with the Angels. Intelligent sensitivity is a discerning hand in the fabric. Angels were the great early gods and powers who emanated from the One. Every cosmology ancient and modern has a host of expansive deities – their tapestry of Self reproduction. But the Holy Oneness in the core of each and every one of these, evades description. Genesis, a parable of a Kalpa’s origin or exhaled Divine breath, is a coded script for the indescribable.

Detail, Botticelli

The story of the One-I-Verse is one statement – the centre of a flower about to open. Angels are paths of the Immanence. They are in and of the awareness of itSelf.

Copy from Botticelli, 1956

I cannot “see” an Angel. But an Angel is the feeling when a chamber of my mind opens. An altered energy state flows through, unimpeded by gross actions – though these obscure it. I try throughout life, not to capture it into an ego-centric craft, but to let it resonate delicately as a water lily on dark water.

The personal ego is a navigational instrument. When allied to cosmic Self, she is a vessel of choice – to welcome energies selectively. Excess in any direction gives birth to excess in the other.

The relationship of “Above” and “Below” is not a marionette theatre. The higher interior consciousness corresponds with its inverse reflection in the material, sensory world. Our brain inverts light and darkness which, entering the lens, form an image on the retina. Right-side brain rules the body’s left side. If I look down into a pool, my reflected face with the sky behind it, is dark. Matter inter-relates with, and makes visible, the unseen. It is the outline.

To be conscious is a going concern – a verb – among the Changes of active and passive states. An infinity of conscious strands is woven through the universe of this life: not as a fixed predictive engine, but as multiple probable worlds. The subatomic interactions without time, yet fall into the order of molecular adherence, or time. The marmons or nodes – where three lines intersect – in the Sri Chakra Yantra, are interactions:

Consciousness is not rigid, but infinitely flexible. A watcher of Providence observes the shape of daily life in the greater or lesser context, and what comes to it – a visible manifest of the underlying cause. The more I watch, the more I see the meaningful. The pitfall is when I confine the meaningful to a local – thus incomplete – interpretation. In a symphonic musical score, are layer upon layer of tones of Providence. Focusing on one line only, I lose the hearing of the whole score. An over excited thought stream enacts and re-enacts an excited environ – a primitive exaltation of short-waves. Every beginner in early civilization does this for a time. Eventually tiring of the agitation, mind becoming more disciplined, seeks a tranquil centre. A longer wave comes. It hasn’t the one incessant melody: the polyphonic progressions of a sacred chorale are heard. The hearing is non-verbal – a devotion. Underlying the chimera of cause and effect, the life-stories, is a greater Sound in the silence … the garden of Eden.

Sri Chakra colour-sound vibration (from “Yantra” by Madhu Khanna)

Sensing also a greater palette under the chimera of cause and effect, I become a painter, and mixing the colours, I call the awakening land a Choral Garden. It is a song of all the lifetimes. The repeated resonance of their hues within the score, is like the harmonic of a bell. This is the pargod, the tapestry or veil of God. Occasionally in my dreams, I hear music, all along the horizon, which I never wrote.

What is allowed to happen? What can be developed and remain true? What is being continued? Is it time to change – having exhausted – the theme? Who desires this theme? and which other colour in the symphony does it support?

In Buddhist teaching, Karma – the cyclic shapes of life – is likened to firewood. As long as there is fuel, the flame will burn it – ashes to earth. The inner journey towards perfecting, is the oeuvre of existing. The alchemical tools are acceptance of pain and joy, energy and fatigue, as self-teachers. There is reflected in the ever changing life-element, a particle or being of the Holy Oneness.

The stars are reflected in the raven’s wing.

Underlying the filaments of all the lifetimes, is ever present the Source: ever elusive to be.

An article of faith is a religious commitment – adhered to, but not understood. An article of Self knowledge is experience tried and tested … which is not infallible. The evolving gnosis of life re-writes it each day. Constantly, the “knowledge” in the abyss is un-known, and rediscovered.

Emblem praenesis: ship anchor: “This shows the way”.

So what is Providence?

Provisions for life’s journey, provisional to Godliness, are provided for … to exercise the destiny. Providence coming from other lifetimes of that destination, is to a great extent self-provided: do as you would be done by; be done by as you did. We try that terrain again and again until we realise: the do-do is obsolete, it loses energy.

Why disqualify human beings from reincarnation? Are we other than the tree which grows the same but different leaves, for hundreds of seasons? or the Sun, giver of life, whose seed is captured in Earth’s molten core?

“Above” is a definition of my soul’s viewpoint and ethics. “Below” is what is realised through expanding and contracting it into the living body by breath. “Consciousness” speaks and acts consciously, in whatever the situation. An “infalllible” personage is one that cannot be reached. Nor, I suppose, can an “infallible” Angel. “Infallible” is an impenetrable fortress, built on shifting sand.

Providence is a highly subjective encounter. In the superficial terrain of cause and effect, one’s meat is poison to another. “She” might perceive a providential chaos – or nothing provided at all. “He” might hear everywhere, a harmony. Both, beholding the same landscape, experience Reality.

Each “I” sees out of one window or facet of the whole crystal which is “I”. Whole societies or tribes look out upon the world from one, or very similar windows.

Deeper polyphonies of Providence transcend the province and await a re-tuned ear. Each tree grows in a chord of everymans’ earth, to capacity.

Today …

Angels express the depth of our emotions – or our feelings and states of mind call forth the angel, light and dark. My thinking about angels today, reaches towards … a renewal of … commitment : let “Above” and “Below” come forth, from the in-between.

The angels have not the three lower chakras. The animal kingdom has not the three higher. Who has the octave and its potential for the meeting of all the worlds? … humanity.

Baruch & Balthamos: copy from Botticelli

Baruch & Balthamos,in “His Dark Materials” : copy from Botticelli

Respect for the Great Beings doesn’t try to fit them into our toys. The respect recognises their beauty and their immensity. It is the quantum path of awe. At the same time, I translate Angels into my visual field, as graceful beings with big feathery wings, and love them thus. In fact the Angels look through Daat on the Tree into our Yesod interface, and cast those big winged shadows.

The Angels are like Tolkien’s Elves. They are undying essences, timeless, caught sometimes in the conduits of time and space. Then they appear to be warriors and creators. Angels carry out the Holy One’s thoughts. Angels are the Holy One’s intergalactic wings. Angels are of the supra-galactic being. Angels are the ELOHIM. The House of God is BETH HA-ELOHIM.

Each Hebrew letter is an angelic being. According to Paul Foster Case, BETH HA-ELOHIM’s numerical value (gematria) is 503, the same as Hebrew words meaning “to expel, to put forth fruit.”

“To put forth fruit” is GeReSh: gimel, resh, shin. It also means “a fruit, product of the earth, produce.” In Tarot’s spelling of this word, Gimel is the High Priestess, Resh is the Sun and Shin is the Judgement (from right to left. The Tarot Keys are numbered one behind their Hebrew letters, because Tarot begins with Key Zero The Fool, whose letter is Aleph, number 1).

The three pictures say it all: the splitting of the seed, the awakening shoot. The Priestess’s pomegranates become Archangel Gavriel’s great red wings, in fourth dimension. Insight strikes, and mind is still. The pomegranates pass through sunflowers around the naked children, to the Archangel’s wings. (I typo’d poem-granates !) The pillars of the Temple, Jakin and Boaz, are the seed case. In SHIN the Judgement, the call to earth, they are parents of the child. The Priestess is virgin, which means ripe. The purity is ripe.

These three Tarot Keys with their letters, are the Moon, the Sun and Fire. “A product of the earth is that most precious fruit, the Stone of the Wise, compounded from the elements.” (Paul Foster Case).

Every fruit has its Stone, or pip.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

Link to Aquariel

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Sacred India Tarot Archive: Creation of 2, 3, 4, 5 of Lotuses/Cups – Siva & Parvati

Posted on February 23, 2013 by janeadamsart

Blue Lotus by Bahman Farzad

These four cards cover the early stages in Siva and Parvati’s courtship. To subdue Tarakasura – a demonic force in the Universe – the Dharma required Siva to sire a son. As an ascetic Yogi, he had to be beguiled. On her part, Parvati, Daughter of the Himalaya, would undergo intense spiritual practices to match him energetically. The suit of Lotuses or Cups unifies the male and feminine natures: the Lord recognises and honours his half who is Woman.

Rohit’s Notes 2004 – “Two of Lotuses – Narada announces Parvati’s Destiny. The visual reference in the comic strip is clear enough, though we could have Parvati offering two lotuses at the feet of the divine sage.

“Upon learning that she was destined to marry Siva, Parvati in typical Indian style, falls in love with him! This is romance Indian style, which is the message of the card. There could be a great face of Siva hanging semi transparently in the background, between the sage and the girl.”

Visual reference, for 2 of Lotuses – Parvati receives Narada’s news

Jane’s Notes – The visual references I was given, were in a comic-strip picture book called Tales of the Mother Goddess. The courtship of Siva and Parvati can be viewed romantically or cosmically.

“In the Hindu pantheon, Siva represents the supreme Consciousness as well as the male principle which acquires the power to create and destroy the elements only in conjunction with Shakti, the female principle. Thus Siva’s consort is the manifestation of the supreme Consciousness, and that was why Vishnu and others were keen to see Siva married to Sati.

“Sati was reborn as Parvati, who wooed and won Siva, never to be separated from him again.“

Tales of the Mother Goddess

In the elder mythos, Sati did away with herself because her father did not show Siva/Rudra sufficient respect. Siva the ascetic plunged into the waters of life for an aeon and unwittingly fathered the vegetable kingdom and the teeming seeds of life. In time, these harboured asuric tendencies or demons. They rose against the divine upholders of cosmic Law. Only a son of Siva could subdue these, his earlier offspring – but he was immersed in Yoga. The gods’ efforts to beguile him into taking a bride, make a long and racy tale.

Here, the great sage Narada brings to Parvati the message of her destiny: intuiting the invisible, she worships the visible, or rupa – the bearer of the tidings.

Sacred India Tarot 2 of Lotuses

Correspondence, Rohit to Gautam, 18 October 2004

“Dear Gautam, I love the first two cards. I LOVE THEM. They are perfect. Such a Siva has never been seen before, and such a Narada too. Parvati looks tremendous also. We are doing so well with this. Jane has hit an inspired vein and I just do not want to give any sort of instructions. The three yogis with Siva is a superlative touch, and the jaunty Ramana Maharshi brings an aspect of joy to the card that is beautiful.

(See earlier post, SITA Ace of Lotuses for the first card – this also contains some extracts from Stella Kramrisch’s work on Rudra).

“If we continue like this, we will have the best suit of the pack, including the Pentacles.

“The little Kundalini snake activating over Parvati when it is announced that Siva is fated to be her husband, is a magnificent touch, Shakti rising, ascending to meet Siva. Jane is to be commended for it, it is a spiritual touch that I had overlooked, but she intuitively sensed.

“I love these cards… I am a hard core Siva fanatic, but they are still tremendous.

“Rohit.”

Rohit’s Notes for 3 of Lotuses – The Bliss of Service

“Parvati and her friends serving Siva. In the Indian context, the greatest happiness comes from serving a great person, and the boost to one’s self image and self worth is incalculable, indeed incomprehensible if not actually Indian.

“The entire comic-strip page can be used as a reference. Offerings of lotus flowers to Siva are the obvious way to get them in, but if you feel they are better off elsewhere in the card, please feel free.“

Visual reference for 3 of Lotuses

Sacred India Tarot – 3 of Lotuses

Siva and his attendants. Above the Himalaya is a core Siva Shakti Yantra. The ascending triangle is Siva, unity. The two descending yoni triangles are Shakti, duality, multiplicity. The bliss of service is in following the Higher Law, and realising one’s natural state.

Correspondence – Gautam to Jane, 20 October 2004

Dear Jane – feedback as under:

“This card is very good too. It is a terrific card, but who is Parvati, the one with the fan or the one doing puja? Both are equally good candidates.

“I do not think Siva has ever been depicted with such majesty and grandeur, outside of our temple sculptures before. Please forward this point to Jane. Hindus do not cover their heads when praying or worshipping, except the punjabis, and that is the sikh-islamist influence. The head is normally left bare, you actually take off whatever headgear you have. It does not seriously affect the Three of Lotuses, but it might be worth noting for future cards.

“Rohit”

Correspondence – Jane to Gautam and Rohit: “Yes, glad you have this. I think Parvati is the one doing arati, as she is still ‘veiled’ to him. Point taken re head coverings for following cards! Regards, J. Hope you like 4.”

Rohit’s Notes for 4 of Lotuses, October 2004

Visual reference for 4 of Lotuses

Sketch for 4 of lotuses

Jane’s Notes – Here below, is the published version of the card: Siva was deep in meditation; Kama the god of desire aroused him at that point, to the earthly beauty of Parvati, the dark daughter of Himavat, the Mountain. Kama depicts a state of urdhvalinga, his erect phallus indrawn yogically.

Compositionally, I had always a problem with the long narrow cards, how to compress into them the wide landscape of cause and effect. With Siva, cause and effect, time and space, are simultaneous.

Sacred India Tarot, 4 of Lotuses – Kama’s Arrow

However, there was an earlier version! – as the correspondence shows:

From Gautam (20 October 2004) – “Dear Jane, herewith feedback from Rohit. You seem to be on a roll! Warm regards …”

From Rohit – “Dear Gautam and Jane, we cannot use the pic of Kama in Lotus Four as he is depicted, as the phallus points straight at Siva. Some joker or other is bound to take offence. Otherwise it is a fantastic card, and captures the essence of what I sought to convey. This is great work. But we need the phallus painted over. The rest of the card stays unchanged.”

Original version, Sacred India Tarot 4 of Lotuses

Kama transmits to Siva by eye and by arousal, the image of lust, as he pierces Siva’s heart with the arrow. In the published version, Kama looks at Parvati, conniving-ly. Either way, his psychic proximity to Siva is seductive at that moment. The god – awakened into the earthly kingdom from his blissful crest – responded as in Card 5.

The yogic linga flame in front of Lord Siva is a combination of Akasha-Tejas tattva (the Saturn and Mars chakras whose equilibrium enters the heart centre) with the triple-line mark of Siva’s devotees. As in the elder Rudra mantras, Siva sustains the bliss for aeons, until precipitated into an involuntary creation-destruction cycle by Kama’s wiles and Parvati’s beauty.

Parvati is subliminally aware of the Lord’s sudden focus upon her. Her accelerated awakening to womanhood goaded her to a long period of spiritual austerities, to match the nature of her beloved.

The monkeys in the tree are the chat-line of every age: the outraged prurient press.

What followed? here is the romantic view of the event …

Visual reference, 5 of Lotuses

Siva slays Andhaka, Elephanta caves

Rohit’s Notes 2004 – “The Andhaka Asura Vadha Siva sculpture in the Elephanta caves, is just perfect. You can reproduce it ad verbatim, with merely a blaze of light coming out of the third eye and falling upon ashes of what used to be Kama, the god of love. Parvati is shocked and devastated at what has happened. Rati has fainted away in a corner. It is a scene of heartbreak and desolation. The particular sculpture captures the wrath of God better than anything else I have seen, so it is most apt, especially as it is a wrath against Andhaka – the darkness of desire which Kama was trying to awaken in Siva.”

Jane’s Notes – (Rati was Kama’s wife) … and here is the cosmic event itself:

Sacred India Tarot, 5 of Lotuses – Siva destroys Kama

Correspondence from Rohit – “…Card number five is equally beautiful. I was expecting a more wrathful Siva, but I think that Jane’s interpretation of a calm Siva slapping down such effrontery is terrific. The Kama and Rati angle are marvellous, and so is the shock on Parvati’s face. I wouldn’t change a single thing in it.

“In card number 10, Siva agrees to restore Kama, I want an ARDHANARISWARA, which we can scan from the Presence of Siva book. In the case of the card, the reconciliation and restoration of eros to life can happen only by an integrated male and female energy – in short, the Ardhanariswara (Lord whose half is Woman). The figure standing by the bull is perfect to use.

“I want to get this across to Jane now, because the speed at which she is hurtling along, we might have the card ready before we can talk to her.

“I also want Jane to do a Dattatreya. I do not know where we will use it, but it certainly has some scope in the pack, perhaps as a bonus.

“With regard, Rohit.”

Here, in the Sacred India Tarot book with the deck, is Rohit’s resume of the four cards:

“Narada’s proclamation is actually a diksha – spiritual initiation. Narada is the guru here, who arouses the dormant spiritual fire personified in the serpent of the Kundalini, and fans it into a mighty blaze that will consume all karma. For while marrying Siva may be her destiny, it does not mean Purushartha – human purpose – is not necessary or that there will be no obstacles. All spiritual rewards come only after effort, and what is at stake here is the future of the world. Parvati will be required to rise to heights she cannot currently comprehend. She is the Mahashakti, great active power of the universe, to Siva’s role as All pervading Consciousness. Of all the methods of attaining a spiritual goal, bhakti or divine Love is the swiftest. Narada speaking with characteristic eloquence and cunning, has managed to imprint Siva in Parvati’s heart. She will have no other husband.

“Reasoning that proximity is a prerequisite to awakening passion, the Mountain King offers to send his daughter and her friends to aid and assist Siva in his sadhana and his daily rituals of worship. Lost in his immense meditation, Siva Chandrashekara (the Moon crested) wears the universal lunar symbol of marking time, to signify his conquest of Kaala or Time. In this spiritual state, he inhabits a zone outside of Time and can barely distinguish between male and female – seeing only the in-dwelling soul which has no qualities. He has no objections to such service which, for Parvati and her friends, is a wonderful experience. Out of him flows a blessing to Parvati that she gain a husband fully worthy of her, who will never love another. Yet Mahadeva, his consciousness turned inwards, continues to be oblivious to what is obvious to everyone else. The gods, still exiled from their heaven, writhe in agony.

“… Kama quakes with fear. Then he sees Parvati’s incomparable beauty, and his confidence comes flooding back. All that lives is in thrall to Kamadeva – why should Siva be any different? Kama shoots his burning arrow of desire into Siva’s heart. He has made a calamitous blunder.

“… For an infinitesimal second, desire flares within Siva. This snaps his unbroken flow of meditation and makes visible the Atma Lingam – the Soul Lingam that is his inner reality, and is also the Primal Ellipsoid, the first vibratory form that emerges from Primal Sound (pranava or om), to set Creation in motion. The Atma Lingam being manifest and distinct from Siva even for a mere moment, is for him a fall from Pure Consciousness to the chaos of thought. (But) the devas have outsmarted themselves. The power of desire could not overwhelm Awareness.

“Siva erupts with the essence of incandescent rage. Kama’s shabby little trick provoked the opening of Siva’s dreaded third eye – the Ajneya Chakra, seat of viveka, discrimination. The frightening, paradoxically calm wrath of utter clarity, blasts and devastates Kama in fire. This is not rage any more – it is Divine retribution for insolence … Only being grounded in Consciousness can vanquish desire. This form of Siva is known as Kaala Agni Rudra – the howling fire that devours time – a triumphal moment in the evolution of Consciousness.

“Kama’s wife Rati faints in shock and terror … Siva is the kindest God, but trying to provoke lust in him was like dancing on volcanoes. Parvati is appalled and awed – she was about to utilize Siva’s blessing for a husband, and instead of love she gets this hurricane of anger. Siva is splendidly unperturbed about the chaos he has just caused, and he vanishes from the sight of all created beings, to resume his meditation. Parvati is left heartbroken and humiliated in front of the world. Of Kama who used to boast he was the god with most power over life, there is naught left but ashes.”

Rohit Arya

For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts, or Archive of All Posts in the title bar.

Rohit Arya

Rohit Arya is an Author, Yogi and Polymath. He has written the first book on Vaastu to be published in the West, {translated into five languages} the first book on tarot to be published in India, co-authored a book on fire sacrifice, and is the creator of The Sacred India Tarot {82 card deck and book}. He has also written A Gathering of Gods. He is a corporate trainer, a mythologist and vibrant speaker as well as an arts critic and cultural commentator. Rohit is also a Lineage Master in the Eight Spiritual Breaths system of Yoga.

Earlier posts about the deck, including the first 15 Major Arcana archives are in http://aryayogi.wordpress.com The deck is copyrighted (c) 2011 to the publishers, Yogi Impressions Books pvt, and available also on Amazon and internationally.

Jane Adams

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

The Playground

Posted on February 20, 2013 by janeadamsart

Do we look at our children – the miracle – and wonder?

In Parliament Hill Playground (1983)

Children, tender-lined
splash and tinkle sweet flesh unfinished
on water, sun and sand.

Mothers with breasts and veins
and fathers with hidden lusts and large legs
among their offspring, wander watchful.

On the other side of the sunny screen
is the Dark world of love,
the memories and messages in dreams.

Here are tall poplar trees, the grass,
the splash
and the screams
on Sunday, a picnic lunch;

and there, twelve daughters comb twelve heads
of the wizard who plans in pasha sleep
their marriages.

A drawing by R.A.Brandt from “Why the Sea is Salt” and other Norse fairy tales, 1946

Across the sea from those tranced islands
that little brat in the sandpit’s mine!
Fresh and strong as a sunflower, she runs and plays.

I bore her from an island
into whose ravine I sank with a man
from a different world
in sad and catastrophic collision.
Within its crater,
with debris and by shattered wells
he wrote his alien sign
imprint of peace and pity scalpel sharp
within my sleep.
And seas of time and settling sands
did drown them in the deep.

High tide brought today, the messages
clear writ, unfaded, scraps within my keeping;
water sheds … to whom can they be told?

That little one with a brand new friend in the sand,
is my child!

They called me, come see their print –
their peak of sand with flagpole twig,
stick drawn circles, scuffed cities of play.

Lightning strikes
my life up till … and yet to come.

All our messages are these same
scraps of stories.
Sad adults play with them too
from one dark island to another dark land.

Mothers with breasts and veins
and fathers with hidden lusts and large legs breed
from their treasure chests

the mystery,
combat, tedium, joy
of their childrens’ sunrise.

The background of this poem is the genesis of the Watershed Tales. It was a summer’s day in 1983. The day before, I unearthed from the back of a cupboard, a large pink ring-binder containing carbon-copies of hundreds of recorded dreams during the 1970s. I had forgotten it. The rediscovery opened Pandora’s Box. They woke. There were stories ! There were dimensions ! I was in shock, and couldn’t sleep all night. I worked with them – on and off – ever since. They are my raw material, my esoteric garden.

Here is a birthday card from my daughter this year. It is called “Cotswolds Wall” and the photo is by Catherine Ames, but it reminds me of the dry stone walls on the Yorkshire moors, and my recurring early-childhood dreams of birth. It was hard work to cross the garden of sorrows, to reach my mother, who stood at the wall, by a tree, and called me.

This is a drawing of “a demand” – a troubled relationship – a hand outstretched which could or would not be filled. The woman in the wall is the shape of an ear, but the man doesn’t know she hears him; and so she grieves.

Sisters in Bransdale, circa 1954

Parenting 1999

…

… and stretching heart strings. (1999)

A friend, who gave birth at 42 (1983)

Lambing, at Bransdale, 1954. My father midwifes the ewe. We called the lamb “Rossita”. Behind him in the third photo, you can just see Moss, the watchful border collie, who taught my father everything he knew about sheep.

And here is a peak of sand with flagpole twig: I Ching 53 – Wind over Mountain. “Mountain” is “keeping the back still.” Wind is “Gentle”, Wood, and thus a Tree whose roots penetrate the rock and it is seen far and wide. The Hexagram is called “Development – Gradual Progress.” It came up in the oracle early this week. (As it did last November – see “Mandala, A Demonstrated Democracy“). Tensions fall into place and are fulfilled. It is serene. My bottom line is found again – profound, beautiful and unplumbed: for GIVE. It is the Tree of Eden and all its fruit of all the worlds, silence. Silent night. I felt a shift deep down. It dropped and fell open. Something extraordinary happened this week.

Watch the tree, and even a whole wood on a mountain, visible and growing slowly: the long term project. The attitude of oasis.

Ecology is a science of echoes. Keeping still, let the woody veins of the weather guide the field. In the keeping still is warmth, life, light, vibrance. Tao, the Middle Way, finds itself, or is found, like divining the river in the night. The magnetic threads “draw together” as dharma, the right way to swim with, and for things to grow.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

See also the Aquariel Link – “On Gaia as our Self” – a landmark article about Autopoiesis.

Tales of the Watershed: A House of Hundreds of Rooms

Posted on February 18, 2013 by janeadamsart

The Watershed stories were written down long ago, around events which are more or less done and dusted. But as they were dreamed, they have a tendency to reverberate, and they come to me as teachers, past, present and even future. This tale underlies my emotional landscape of the last week or two – somewhat bumpy, but beginning to settle; to acknowledge, and let go. It is another tale of incarnation or birth, the parental mystery from womb through tomb. Mastery of any art is again, a spell-thing.

“The Witch” – Dreams, No.270 October 1976

I SAW a great roll of sea race into the bay and up the beach. My father dived into this witchy wave as it turned to race back out to sea, and I saw him rapidly carried by the current very far out from the rocky beach. He swam and shouted in the distance, his head could hardly be seen. “He’s too far out!” my mother shouted “The current’s got him, he can’t swim back to us against it. Oh! He can’t get back. We’ve lost him …”

But I began to get ready. For yes, I am going after him, to follow him out into the wondrous wild grandeur of that surging grey sea. It pulls every fibre of my body, I must be there in that music, else my life ends in envy. There is no more after that in my memory. There is only the tug of the boundless white element, the wave.

But there is also a huge house in which I lived for a time.

In this house were hundreds of rooms. Many of them were bedrooms, as in a hotel, but they also were clustered to form large apartments loosely interconnected by corridors, kitchens and utilities. The living spaces communicated with each other like a grapevine. The bedrooms were large, the beds in them wide and neatly made: sometimes there were two or more beds to a room. They were extraordinarily inviting.

Cupid & Psyche 1973

They tugged my body. I wanted to sleep in them all. I couldn’t make up my mind. I felt also intensely sad and deprived, because none of the rooms, beds or clusters belonged to me. Others lived in and occupied them. The rooms were redolent of the warmth, the pain, the sensual expectancy of those lives, sweet poignancy, my heart filled with an anguished longing and envy. I wanted to be with a man on those beds, to have sex, to have affairs. Dark, close, divinely rotting is the fruit, so thick the air, and intense the waiting. How to possess any of those rooms? They were allotted to people there, haphazardly by the management; to my sister and to my brother; both of them were in this place. They knew their place in the music of adult providence.

In the kitchen a stout jovial woman cooked meals and looked after people. Is she the owner, or the mother of them all?

Cooking – 1987

Within the walls were a musty honeycomb of dark staircases and passages. I went quite often to the kitchen to talk to or watch Queen Bee the jovial woman, to blur for a few minutes the sharp edge of my anxious loneliness. Her kitchen had, I think, no windows. She was always busy there, and she was not a tidy cook. The electric light was strong, and her stoves, airing cupboards and hand-me-down furniture were massive. Dishes piled up briskly by the sink and vegetables upon the table and newspapers on the chairs. She kept her recipes on scraps of paper within the leaves of the great philosophers, and lost them from year to year. She strode on large legs, voluminously aproned, and tied her dark hair in a knot. The walls of her kitchen were painted an old fashioned yellow, and the wainscoting was chocolate brown.

The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter

In the walls were yielding places. By the broom-cupboard, a small area yielded to deep channels of shadow in the “fruit” beyond the wall; yielded to an ancient breath of corruption.

This very small aperture in the kitchen wall frightened me. It was stifling and rather hot. I might get stuck. A thick flap or curtain covers it almost to the bottom. It is uncomfortable to submit my body to the slanted twisting plane of this confined space. There might be claustrophobia, cannot breathe. But I crawled through it into a passage that led upwards for some way, like the chimneys in Tom Kitten, and then down a steep flight of stairs, narrow and murky, to the door of a closed room which was a witch’s hole.

A cloth hung over this door. I removed the hanging cloth and pushed up the screen to open it. An appalling square of darkness rushed out at me, paralyzing my memory. I took the body of the witch in my arms – it was hanging on the door mummified, long preserved and undisturbed, wearing a petrified cap encrusted with jewels – switched on the electric light into the room and walked across it. I think I laid the witch down on a box bed at the other side and in the corner. The room was empty, fusty and full of dust. It was redolent of petrified spells and latent powers.

spell-thing

Having opened the door, I have returned many times to that room.

Many times I crawled through that disagreeably small aperture into the passage and the murky flight of stairs. The woman in the kitchen did not prevent me from doing so. But in her genial way she was anxious. She warned me to be careful, making almost a joke of it. I was a little afraid she might become severe and forbid my access.

During my visits to the room, its atmosphere became tangibly charged with ions (condensed from aeons) of purpose. Awakened feelings and influence throbbed up from the bare worm-eaten floorboards, making me wish to do strange things with my body, to burst out of it, to abuse, to copulate with the air, to leap around, to fly upside down. These things however I did not do. For I must not dissipate the serpent force. I am playing in this place with an ancient danger. I am very frightened, but I do not think my fear will overcome me.

What did I set out to do? I cannot quite see. To the limits that I’m allowed, I am an observer of the ancient danger. I am its explorer. I renew the life-force of the witch and the spell that she herself placed under seals in time gone past.

Water flows from rock, from life and thought, from fossilized bone. The seals were cryptic diagrams and stars to trace with my body in the dust of the floor. And I am their release. They in that room had no speech, no form. They were perhaps evil. Their current was an increase of power from fancy to substance, getting hotter.

I am the serpent that awakens in the shivering land. I am uncoiling from sleep, and the room is a solid flying creature like a rainbow, earth broke open. Night is devouring light. Every tree under the moon is a vipers nest of lights whip-lashing earth. They penetrate my body like severed conduits of current. They spark, they writhe. I can’t get back, I’ve lost them, I the spectrum of all precious stones, I a prism for pure light into the rainbow, into coloured fog, night to devour the light, go back, go back, pour the oscillating pulse back into the trembling equipoise of stillness, yes, stop it moving, stop the circling thought. Pour its iridescence back into the floor-boards, mischief is the excess of things.

Again and again I would leave the room and creep through the little opening back into the kitchen where the jovial woman reigns among her kitchen stove, sink, steamer-pots, pans, peas and parsnips which she baked in sesame oil. She – her sympathy with me is cooling. I am beginning to lose her alliance, she turns her back on me, she looks perturbed, she’s bending over the oven, its heat is all around. “Wait, can’t you,” she snaps “It isn’t ready. In this house are hundreds of lives to feed …”

And then I must return again to do whatever it was that I was doing. “What are you stirring up?” she asked suddenly.

Shepherdess, 1988

A time came for final retreat from the room where my body lay. It was full now of elementars, and of vaccuums of a viscous grey entity whose force was stronger than I, and frightened me very much. Last time I went in, a shrill twittering and shrieking greeted me. I saw a live horned bat hovering outside one of the windows. There are windows to this room, windows to some further degree of night that cannot be uttered. This bat was hungry. It was attracted by the light. It would come in and sweep its dubious soul through every dark dream in the house at the other side of the aperture. But into light the bat flies blind. The light makes it stupid, it cannot see. So I left the Light on in that room. I closed the door and pulled the green cloth screen down over it and escaped back to the kitchen and to the company of the genial Queen Bee.

Lovers & their History

“There’s a bat there now,” I told her, trying not to shake too much. “I left the light on in the room. For a creature of darkness, light is a Black Hole. It extinguishes the night vision. It makes the creature’s sight collapse in on itself, it is gravity sort of, in reverse, so it’s alright isn’t it? to stop the bat at the window? Otherwise it’d just go on and on, find all the dark that is in the world …”

But the jovial woman was very alarmed. “On no account must you go back there!” said she. “Yes, it is well that you left light there. That bat is eternity. Eternity is looking in. Eternity is wanting to belong in, to own just one little room of time. Eternity is you and your curiosity, you foolish child.”

“But,” I said “I made a barrier of light, the illumined room of the witch. It bars the bat from flitting through the room and the door and – and into where people are living in all the bedrooms – oh – what if I left a crack, an opening? I’ve got to – go back, haven’t I?”

The woman said, “Yes, you’d better. To be sure within yourself.”

Crevassemoth Ally – Sketch

I went back. One more time, to make sure all is safe and secure. I had forgotten one thing in my haste, which is to cover the door and the green screen with the cloth.

So I crawl again through the stuffy aperture in the skirting-board, up through the passage of night and down the murky stairs. The staircase now is full of horror. Hesitating at the top, I steeled myself. Now I am plunging into an abyss, entangled in a grotesque cobweb from the bannisters, ropes that grope to strangle me. At the bottom I pull the cloth covering right down over the door, over the green screen that covers the door, tucking the edges of the cloth closely in all round to leave no gaps. The screen yields to my touch as if it hangs free and is alive. I pull it down closer to the ground, hoping there is no way through for the bat. The Light will stay on always, as a lure to the whole force of the bat. It will curve its particles of will inward, how can it go anywhere else?

Then I escaped up the stairs. I looked back. The cloth hung still, quiet and pale over the door, with a great rose coloured cross designed upon it, which reached to its height and breadth. And when I looked back again, there hung upon the rose-coloured cross the witch, who has apparently been put back in place. But this time no cap hides her head. It is a human head, sorrowful with drooping eyelids and long brown hair combed as if for some ceremony.

In this house are hundreds of rooms.

They are the honeycomb of my sad soul, soul of the world, for “being” is transcendent, measureless through all the rooms. “Being” is you and I and the fields that we know and the seas that we don’t. In infinite depth or series of transparency, I look out through every window of history. There is no floor. The gleam of light that is realised in consciousness within, through and beyond this house of hundreds of rooms deeper than the Universe, is a key to the world.

103 World compass

The passage back to the key-hole – aperture to the kitchen of the jovial woman who reigns in and feeds a house of hundreds of rooms – intersected another passage on the way. I discovered this passage opening out to the left. It is a big and open flight of stairs descending towards the basement, to the nether regions of the house. I can hear people, the voices of men down there. Perhaps they are working, or repairing something. I seem to hear the percussive ring of tools.

I have been down that great staircase a little way, but not to the bottom.

Here is a song of the Earth and Sea. I painted it many years later, while listening to Cesar Franck’s joyous Symphonic Variations. “Crevassemoth” is a meeting of the elements in my soul, where waves break into Earth, atoms interact and shadow spills Light. It is an alchemical transmutation. The sun glints my golden path in the waters’ embrace.

Crevassemoth Alchemy 1987

More dream stories in this series, are in the Watershed Tales Category on the sidebar.

WordPress make it great fun to insert a mosaic gallery and wonder what order they will show up in. This post was intended to be “pictorially restrained” with a small gallery at the end – even so, a surprising number of ideas popped up from my files; I discarded about half of them, so this is what is left.

GALLERY

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

The Wandering Fool and Ramesh

Posted on February 14, 2013 by janeadamsart

With drawings from my sketchbooks in 1988, some “Poems of Eclipse” 1999, (inspired by Ramesh Balsekar’s philosophy) and a new sketch of Ramesh.

Read also my landmark post On Gaia as our Self in my other blog, Aquariel !

Arcanum 0 The Fool

A Picture …

Standing over
a rock under standing – river bed
unaltered wherever I go,
the art of life discovers
a masterpiece – the obvious!

Along the rain washed road, a wanderer
wears battered hat, carrying
bundly bag and flower. Why
did God’s will place him there?

He turned. He thought he knew
but could not see the thunder cloud
above him, deftly brushed.

Trapped in the wrong dimension,
unwittingly he got wet!

Backed on canvas, his quest
is strung on fibre, warp and weft.
His human history, he cannot see.
On flat earth theory, he’s crucified;
the Master’s Eye looks back!

Who created him: Botticelli, Van Eyck,
Michelangelo? He was
and is composed no where apart
from Life around him, which is Art.

Let the vagrant lift his Cross
of time through space,
the canvas warp and weft,
to follow Eye.

Let him through a hemisphere
turn his gaze
from flat earth
to Creation’s inward sky.

Let him see as the Master sees
himself.

The spirit in the Garden of Eden
took root in animal skins.
World’s habitat being strong,
my vigilance is overcast.

The disappointing fragment magnified
is an ever present threat
to thunder and enclose my soul –
yet the coast is clear.

The breath that stops the world
can nothing else contain,
for it is everything.

The holy Grail
draws to itself the Grail against
all other gravities.

In Ramesh’s aphorism, my life
is a painted land,
a mile or five miles wide.
A house or two I see from where I stand.
What next unfolds? I walk in time and space.

That thread links a hill which hasn’t happened yet
with a vivid face which has.
The future hill with remembered face
in the Master’s Eye, are space.

Stepping away,
wider vistas with the fragment coalesce
and realisation comes: the masterpiece
was painted long ago.

Creator

My vivid face and brooding hill
have thirty roving years between.

My wanderer, awarded a cosmos of his own,
searches source
around the fade-out of his visual field.
He rests at night in a picture frame of mist.

How may he know God’s will unless
he’s in love with nothing else?
content to be rained upon, re-brushed
with madder rose, ochre, a touch of sapphire,
and even cleaned away?

Meet Mrs Madder Rose – 1987

In love with nowt but what Creator does –
he’s granted a strong belief he may find out!
Else who among his Angelic lovers of Art
could his capering convince?

Ramesh in his wisdom has remarked: “When understanding happens, a created object sees that nothing he or she believed they did, or felt, is separate from the Creator Subjectivity. It has no being apart; nor ever had. The entire texture of autonomy, guilt and pride, is illusory, fabricating divine ignorance.”

Ramesh Balsekar ja 14 feb 2013

Master

God’s Name
belongs to the canvas figure, alone.
Prayer is open-ness.

GOD is a sound: here a spiral shell
on the beach, and elsewhere tightly closed.
The Mystery of Master’s work within a gem
erases and enhances Grace.

The co-creation has no concept
but to be. The Master knows not
how his own beard grows.

Binah – the Understanding

The drum’s
cellular surface quivers
like an ear.

Osmosis passes from root in earth to flowering leaf, as sun from star.
Osmosis regulates cell densities through magnetic vacuum
beyond the brain.

The gnosis has no fight with life,
and always unseats itself.
Behind every alteration it
seems to bring about, gnosis
remains unaltering.

The philosophical aphorism accepts and discards
concepts freely, as tools
that grow on us, are sharp,
grow blunt, and are put away.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

Human Landscape: The Rubicon, Part One

Posted on February 9, 2013 by janeadamsart

A series of big drawings and small sketches of Life in West Hampstead in 1986. I call it “The Rubicon” because just before it began, I dreamed:

28 November 1985 – I am on an indented coastline. Around us – me and who? – is desert, and maybe a holiday camp. But a long headland of cliffs stretches away up the coast. It becomes increasingly wild, rocky and beautiful, with Mediterranean juniper and olive, more and more trees, and the potential to explore and get away from this place. I see the rocks in sunlight, adventures as yet unknown; and life is coming back!

First there is a river – the coastal headland is quite far off – which rushes inland from the sea.

So swift and powerful the current, that huge, round loose boulders hurtle headlong, buoyant along the depths. There is no way to cross this river. I imagine my fate – colliding with those swift boulders.

But a little way to the left – towards the sea, the torrent’s source – I find a built up ford or bridge by which it might be crossed. It doesn’t look as if it will be swept away. There’s a house near it. Anyway I set foot on the bridge.

After I woke up, I wondered – am I about to cross the Rubicon?

GALLERY ONE – to view, click any image

Eric Shipton – ja 1985

Eileen Coffey & the kids – ja 1985

Charlotte, Emelie & Simba – ja 1985

Il padrone Fabrizi – ja 86

Marisa watching TV – ja 1986

Christopher Gardner in Mr Osaka’s shop – ja 1986

Henry Mayor – ja 1986

A Casa Fabrizi – ja 1986

Through the Looking Glass – ja 1986

Rocky – ja 1986

Red Horse – ja 1986

Tidal wave with coal – ja 1986

Harbour – ja 1986

Ferry – ja 1986

Sunday at Fabrizi’s – ja 1986

Study – ja 1986

In Green – ja 1986

Sketch of lovers at bus stop

Bus shelter in Devon – ja 1986

Good Friday – (written at Damehole Point, Hartland, North Devon

The Passion spills grotesqueries
upon my dinner table.
It blasts my loved ones
with proxy imagery.

I may as well converse
with phantoms
which people my world
with Goyan gnomes and witches.

The Passion is then
a tarty tarnishing splendour,
a fools’ errand: the phantoms belong
in pictures, for they are not human beings.

Instead, put sail about,
change course, my grief
to separate
the people from my pretenders.

25 March 1986

GALLERY TWO

Woodland – ja 1986

Bike Bump – ja 1986

David Lewis, Jury mast – ja 1986

Geoffrey Rackham G.C. – ja 1986

Frank Wild of antarctica

Amundsen of Antarctica – ja 1986

Southern Cross – David Lewis meets Scott, Shackleton and companions

David Lewis in the Southern Ocean

Monday morning at Fabrizi’s – Bernard & Adam Kops, David Annersley & friend

Order of Preachers – Father Alan Cheales at Speakers Corner – ja 1986

Visiting Alexander Pollock – ja 1986

With Fred Barschak – Beethoven spring Sonata – ja 1986

Building a Jetty after shipwreck – ja 1986

Daffodil – ja 1986

Horowitz in Moscow – ja 1986

Sketches of Horowitz – ja 1986

Priest on the Front Line

Went down to Speakers Corner to photograph Alan Cheales. I only had five or ten minutes before he finished – I took 10 photos. He had a large-ish crowd and was vehemently haranguing a heckler. I caught up with him afterwards, and we travelled one stop together on the Underground. He is extremely tough, out on this cold day in his white and black medieval robes, no gloves, hat or overcoat. I love to see him in his public street-level persona, picturesquely garbed. His listeners don’t know what he is like in private. For he projects his voice to them like an actor, and is rugged and strident, not gentle: he is being the Order of Preachers.

“What a good thing,” he said “that you didn’t come earlier. I had an awful start, there was hardly anyone there, and it wouldn’t have been worth your while. Then I got this heckler, very offensive he was too, he calmed down towards the end, and he drew the crowd for me. You arrived at just the right moment then.” (He didn’t see me moving around with my camera, because he was extremely absorbed in the dialogue, vividly proselytizing with with stabbing forefinger, darting nose and shadowy eyes. He swings about from the waist in his “cradle” platform.) “I had to take him aside and thank him afterwards. I always thank my hecklers, because they do me a favour. There’s a chap round here who goes around persuading everyone to drink meths because it gives him power over them. Well, he comes and helps out sometimes. I see him give me this big wink.”

Antarctic Journey

Worked on David Lewis and his welcoming committee and the blubber stove, gave their modern anoraks thick bright colour, and the firelight which creates an exciting focus of heat and light – a sudden “Illumination” or prophecy from within the grey heroes of 1909. On the other side of the grey hut history is Amundsen eternally, with penguins and snow in ice-blues, ice-greens and whites – all the penguins conversing politely in their black dinner jackets and orange collars. The penguins are a folkloric alter ego to the explorers. They catch human souls who have perished, suffered, triumphed and parasited among them. They were there before and, though much plundered, are there after. This drawing developed a life and complex thematic material, transitions of colour and contrast like music – its possibilities submerge me, and I just have to keep going somehow. The whole Amundsen concept evolved from a chance fanatical gleam in his eye, put there by a clumsy chalk.

Scott is the only one who can see Amundsen, apart from Frank Wild, who is skeptical. But Scott believes his eyes and is dumbfounded: this is utterly unsporting. This terrible phantom in the race to the Pole with Scott still wintering, gave me quite a start – it changed everything. There will still be a howling blizzard outside, at right angles to Amundsen’s progress. The drawing became an essay on How Not to Reach the Pole – you don’t reach it by being kind to ponies but by being cruel to dogs. It was a difficult technical problem to draw a see-through Amundsen driving his see-through dogs through snow and undisturbed penguins. You can see Oates patting the ponies through Amundsen as well.

Southern Cross – David Lewis meets Scott, Shackleton and companions

I made David Lewis look absolutely wrecked and feeble from his voyage on Ice Bird, and his welcoming committee very kind indeed to him – a touch of self pity there! Behind them I drew the wind-up gramophone – the character I originally intended to be Oates (before I drew him with the ponies) is listening to it and smoking his pipe. Seaman Evans now looks more like Stoker Lashly – a real Old Faithful, with no bad habits.

The landscape – vast in miniature – comes to a sudden end with Bowers and Cherry-Garrard (with his diaries under his arm) working in a crevasse.

Last night my thoughts were suddenly aqua-glints of light in crevasses. I am the crevasse, the battered boat in the ice-cove, the snowy romantic inhospitable landscape, the blizzard, the Incredible Blackened Meeting story in the sky (two expeditions which wintered over in ice caves and miraculously converged) … I am the hut roof, the ice being chopped, the penguins, the warm comradeship inside the hut. I am the blubber-fire, the exhausted voyager, the cup of something hot, the hand on his shoulder. I am Scott’s anxiety, Amundsen’s mania, Oates with the ponies, Evans’s quiet practicality, Shackleton’s gallant yarns and Bill Wilson drawing seabirds, saintly-receptive. I am the socks hanging up to dry, steam, stink and dream, and the sledge hanging up in the rafters. I am the Katabatic and human crosswinds. This drawing suddenly took a new and unplanned direction with Amundsen and his dogs – I don’t know what this is, yet.

And what are they up to, what are they doing? No need to comment or analyse. The way to draw things and people is to “I-am” them, so they tell their own story. “I-am” also my conventional portraits – General Bill, Paul, kids and Buller mess soldiers.

I saw where I can put a little symbol for the Southern Cross – a cruci-twinkle of yellow in a shadowy corona, in the Austral-lit sky at the edge of the recessed hut roof. In the Antarctic, everything is topsy turvy and refracted. God is sometimes seen … a distant concept: meeting Father Alan today.

9 March 1986

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Tales from the Watershed: “Spelling”

Posted on February 3, 2013 by janeadamsart

Hermetic Key, 1987

“The Spelling” (1976)

Some dreams are impossible to describe. I knew, waking from this one, the futility even to try ; nuances of knowledge, and the “spells” integral to it receded from my conscious language. To write it down, fetters it in the ‘prosaic’ of ready letters and conditioning. These are meaningless, without direct access to the tool-room of the psyche. What seemed then beautiful and vast – the suggestion of extraordinary riches – was it my vain delusion? I had been some place other, but could not retain enough to know, or judge.

I found myself willy-nilly starting to note down, even while still dreaming, what I could recall. The “morning after” the vision, barely outlines what was seen and done. Parts of it translated into H.P.Lovecraft’s language as an approximate vehicle, as I woke ; the American writer Lovecraft had got under my skin and blended with my feelings. Yet the vision had authentic clarity. Additionally, Mr V at that time admired Lovecraft’s literary style. He enjoyed the way different levels of meaning overlapped one another as living entities in the multi-dimensional fabric of the same paragraph, and the way each paragraph encountered and gave colour to the next. It was like a walk in the Massachussetts forest.

I think this “dream-story” records the perennial struggle – at birth and throughout life – with that monster, language. For a poet, words, when learning to read and write, as often also in speech, or in the stammered struggle to relate, are “spells”. They are keys to the inner world, and they live and glow and alter perspective. A spell condenses an intangible potency into substance and response. So the title of this story is “SPELLING”.

Many years later, I learned about the elementals – invisible forces of our collective miasms and fears.

Dreams No.265 1 September 1976

IN THE dark gulf of nightmare I called up monsters.

One of their manifestations was as shadowy frog-like creatures that hopped on the sheets of my bed. I regarded them and my dealings with them with a mixture of horror and triumph. Many times I made huge mental wrenches of imagery and screamed out “key” words and sounds.

My control or mastery over these dark amphibious entities was touch and go, as if I drove a herd of madly galloping black horses. I, in mortal combat with these entities, was at the same moment in alliance with them. The battle and the alliance were synonimous and mutually meaningful, lifegiving to the relationship. It was all paradox. The paradox flowed in the lucid river of all that happened. I must have talked in my sleep. For I yelled out things like YOG SOTHOTH, and I was sharply aware at one time of the warning in the Lovecraft stories : “Do not call up that which you cannot put down, lest it call up something greater in its turn against you.” I recalled these words ad verbatim in their archaic English at a time when I was very active with these terrifying forces, and very very much frightened. I woke from time to time and dived straight back into the fray. I turned from side to side, to realise and explore the things I must do.

gallery

1 like a teddy bear 1987

2 the I feeling crushed 1987

3 monsters 1987

4 Cave of Hermes 1987

5 Light & Dark – after Eliphas Levi, 1987

6 Hermes to his son Tat 1987

7 Ceres & John 1987

8 Mythology, Karma & Hobbits 1987

9 Hobbits go down below Karma 1987

10 Feed Cerberus first 1987

There was a battle in a dark cavern under the hills with these entities, it seemed to be an subterranean river, one of them grasped and pinched my finger painfully in its great pincers. I saw other human beings with me. There was a titanic anger and destruction. Yet the alliance with these lethal entities sang of an exquisite and far-reaching rosy folklore, a vast fragrance of dawn, which even in those murky caverns revealed humanity, a human race, the mountains, sunset skies, and untold secrets, in all of which I was aware.

They had given me a small carved wooden crucifix which I wore round my neck, and which had little points or thorns at its junction. In the last battle in the cavern it was damaged, one of its wooden arms was broken off. At some point I woke into my bed and felt for the little engraved-silver cross he gave me and which I always wear; it was not the wooden one and not broken, and all was well. It had twisted round on its chain.

Even in the victorious joy of clear vision there lay a depth of shame in my humanity, for our dark ways of trafficking, for the things that must be exposed and endured before we are free.

Every time I woke I was full of fear. There might be mud and grass stains on my sheets. The Lovecraft character walked in his sleep. There is the local pressure of a cosmic responsibility. Where had I been? What had I done or stirred up?

Plutonic Mysteries 1987

My next memory takes me outside the caverns, into the steep range of mountains with the other human beings. My whole being was filled with awe, with well-being and the fragrance of tremendous things seen and done. I was the leader of this group of people. I attempted to explain to them what had come to pass. We journeyed through a forest on a high alp; across a valley soared a great rosy coloured hill, the Canadian Rocky Mountains. We were chasing or being chased by a big brown bear who yet was our friend, from one mountain top to another. This bear was our guide. I understood and could explain to my companions everything that was going on, and where we should follow and find the bear; but I cannot now. I had reached that state of total fatigue which finds the second wind, the air of the heights, rare and pure. My body, languid and alive with adrenalin, could do what I asked of it, over any distance. I was free.

We came now to the old hills of Scotland, near Inverness. In that delicious and serene twilight of the Rose, I ran down a mountainside or almost vertical cliff, followed by the policemen in their blue shirtsleeves and helmets, and all the other people, including my sister. I set the pace and they followed. Though I hurtled down, flying from one rock or mound of earth to another, too fast for belief and out of control, I knew I would not fall or trip. I knew I could slow my momentum when I wanted to. There was a vast exhileration in this plunging race, my balance barely sustained on lightning footholds: running, jumping down the falling scree.

Reflections Loch Maree

We reached an upland lochan or sea.

Its shores were jagged with needle sharp rocks, the waters of limpid pure crystal, infinitely soft and still. We stopped there. My sister immediately dived into that lovely water and began to swim. I did not, because I had clothes on and was bothered about getting dry afterwards, and because I was lazy. The waters were those of the Scottish lochs and rivers, cold, fresh and transparent. Golden sunlight spilled into their silvery depth, and near by, arose the Rocky Mountains in majestic peaks of forest. The policemen too played an interdependent and paradoxical role. They were there as policemen and as protectors. They punished and cherished at one and the same time.

I went and sat on the rocks and began to cry, the waters rushed out with the clarity of the lake. I cried with an overwhelming, yet severely objective grief and ecstasy, for being washed clean, and for the haunting, crucial beauty of a folklore I discovered. I cried for the love of immeasurable things, in the dawn of the Rose. Compassion, grief swelled so my heart must burst, and still there is more. I was cleansed, it was baptism. The waters poured through me as the world, when I looked into the lake.

The policemen stood near me on the rock. Whether they tried to comfort me or whether they just stood by, I do not know. I knew they understood. They did not interfere. It was indescribable, blending despair and joyful hope in tears, with the overpowering and sacred presence of … what is immensely beyond and greater than me.

I woke again. Is that mud or blood? Where have I actually been?

gallery

11 Go shopping for White Spirit

12 Too much art neglects children

13 Orpheus 1987

14 Devils surfing

15 Feed Cerberus (2) 1987

16 Arm wrestling 1987

17 Great Hermes 1987

18 For my father – Emerging, 1987

19 Arm wrestle (2) 1987

20 Dancing with Hades, 1987

The remainder of the night was coloured by this experience, which returned in different forms. I only recall fragments: I was in America and laughed with an irrepressible hilarity at a certain urban arrangement of leisure persons in glass houses along the edge of a big green meadow – like bathing-huts by the sea: a greenhouse effect along the wilderness. I laughed with their entire culture, with an extraordinary welling of happiness. And my period began with a rush of blood somewhere in a cellar, before its due time: and so I sorrowed again, because it meant I had not conceived from these extraordinary events. And I took LSD at one time. I wondered fleetingly – shouldn’t I have listened, during it, to Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus?

There were drawings on my bedroom wall at Manor Farm, which I had covered up with new tight delicate geometrical designs. I had almost forgotten my Bransdale boys with great heads like ripe pods, and serious eyes. They could just be seen here and there through the frieze of later designs which overlaid them like crystals of frost on the winter window pane.

Something big had happened.

I told my parents, both of them, I mustn’t try now to talk. It’s too big. It’s unsayable. I knew this within the dream. They knew. They do know. They smile. Their very agreement is formidable with the secret.

There came a time, through the days and rooms of my house with them, when I must try to explain. It – some details – must be communicated somehow. What if they don’t know, what if it is never known…? – I’d better write it down after all. “The brown bear …” I began, to fix it in my memory piece by piece “ … the Americans live in glass houses, on TV all the time for everyone to see, yet try to preserve their privacy, not throw stones – that … rosy dawn, the sky, the Cross – pincers, they were titan entities – it all happened in the – yes the water, water the tears – the Word it drowns in grief and beauty, welling up inside. God. Oh yes, dark places, fighting and then the light, all of it in the waters, it happened like this, I knew, I spelled the code, I did, I led them, it …”

Sunset over Rhum, seen from Eigg, western isles

So near, so far!

How thin on the ground, like a rime of salt on sand that is left by the receding wave … words only; my poverty, my recall.

My mother’s voice: “Jane-crane, don’t forget your promise! – it cannot be ‘told’. You can keep it safe, open bud in the dark, where it flourishes and nourishes the garden. If you expose it too soon to common currency, you debase and betray it. You know that. It’s not yet time. You might miscarry the just.”

My parents in on this conspiracy? – how so? But I couldn’t stop talking and trying to tell of this thing.

Other voices from time to time during the night sounded a warning bell. They alerted me to what could become an infantile impasse. “That is a narrow world,” they said “that dreams itself a mighty one. It is not the craft of love. You have heard. Don’t entice to you a Force without the Formation, or it will rule you in a sad mad narrow place. And you won’t come out.”

* *

(QABBALAH …)

I read that the angel closes the mouth of an emerging infant for a very good reason. To really know is to be all over again the very beginning: genesis. To really know – the gnosis – is for vision to grow as the sap – through osmosis – within the Tree of language on earth.

But I tried and I cried against nature to tell.

To spell of the fruit. On such a Tree.

Kabbalah 1989, Tree of Life

Other Watershed tales can be found on their own, or embedded in a post – in the Search box, or in Categories/Watershed tales.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Aquariel Link

The Sacred India Tarot Archive: Creation of Siva Ace of Lotuses (Cups)

Posted on February 1, 2013 by janeadamsart

Blue Lotus Bud www.ebsquart.com

The SITA Minor Arcana, by Rohit Arya and Jane Adams

In 2003, the Suit of Pentacles/Disks – the life of the Buddha – was followed by the Suit of Wands/Staves – the Ramayana – in the creation of the deck. But the present re-creation with the Archive, leads its own way. Towards the end of the Buddha posts, came some unmistakable Sivaic signals – his Lotus should follow suit !

My artistic response to the Lotus of eastern sunrise … is where it becomes the Rose – the glow of sunset in the west.

Sivalinga

(2004) Rohit Arya’s Notes on the Suit of Cups/Lotuses

“This is the water suit. Cups and the valentine hearts may not do for this Suit, as they have no resonance in Indian culture. The lotus flower is the best symbol of the spiritual water element in India, so perhaps we should use that as our symbol.

“The basic story is the love between Siva and Parvati, as outlined in the comic-book (see later visual references.) I only have a reservation, that Siva not be represented as a jungle dwelling proto-Tarzan, but as a great Himalayan king, which was the norm in the great temples of India. We need to show he is Siva, which basically means the elements of identification; the half moon in the hair, the trident, the snakes wandering over the body, remain constant, but otherwise the Elephanta sculptures, which depict a gorgeous and spectacular King should be kept in mind.

“Most of all, this means the jewels and crown should always be constant, even when he is meditating. The crown is actually a visual symbol for the extended chakras above the head, which begin about the hairline, and then proceed quite a way upward.

Sadasiva siva trimurti at Elephanta

“I recently had a vision of Siva. He was over seven feet tall, muscled like a puma or mountain lion, and tawny haired. The face blazed with glory. Surprisingly there were no snakes.

“The comic-book visuals will provide the basic story, but they should be drawn like the sculpture visuals. The background should always be predominantly Himalayan with a lot of animals wandering in and out of the cards, as Siva is the Lord of Animals. Just go wild here, with no restrictions, as animals have been compensated for being dumb brutes, with always being able to see Siva; a vision that comes only with great effort to speaking humans.

Siva meditates – comicbook visual reference

Rohit’s Notes – Ace of Lotuses – Siva in Meditation

“He could be shown in the classic lotus pose of Yoga, atop a great white or blue lotus (no other colours.) He has withdrawn into meditation because of the death of his first wife Sati, and he is seeking to heal from the trauma which is after all the core meaning of the card – healing.

Rose sivalinga

“I thought that we could show him surrounded by great Yogis from many timelines, to emphasize his stature as the first Yogi and first Guru. The Yogis I had in mind, were Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Babaji, Paramahamsa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, and Sai Baba of Shirdi. We will send pictures of all these Yogis to you – they could be grouped in the ground around him, in a Himalayan setting.

“The face can be modelled over the Elephanta sculpture with great profit: the massive withdrawn inner calm of the central Sadashiva. The Lakulisha figure may provide some ideas too.

Jane’s Notes

I was for a long time inspired by the works of Professor Stella Kramrisch on the Siva prototype. The original Vedic form of the god Siva and his fiery derivatives, was Rudra the Roarer or Wild Hunter. Rudra is the wildness behind all forms or rupa of Siva.

In her commentary to the Hymns of Rig Veda 10.61 and 1.71, Stella Kramrisch extemporised: “In the lucid frenzy of the images of the Hymn, He arises and abides. It is when time is about to begin. In the dawn of the world, when the black cow of cosmic night lies with the ruddy cows of morning, two figures appear, the Father and the virgin daughter, his own daughter. They are the two actors in the primordial scene. The Father makes love to the daughter. Suddenly he pulls back, his seed falls down to Earth, the place of sacrifice.

“In their concern, the gods created a poem, a Word of power (brahman) and out of this they gave shape to Vastospati, the guardian of the dwelling, the guardian of sacred order. Like a raging bull did the Father foam, running this way and that way and away with scant understanding.

“Like one rejected, she sped south … into cosmic night. In spite of his mishap, or on account of it, soon the patter was heard on earth, of the progeny of the Father.

“Creation is an act of violence that infringes upon the Uncreate, the undifferentiated wholeness that is before the beginning of things. And yet another act of violence is hinted at, and this act is kept secret in these wild and portentous Mantras. He – Rudra – is implied, for it is He who is invoked in this hymn: He the most powerful, who with the arrow in his hand, hit the target. The Father was made to pull back from the creative act that was to be prevented or undone by Him, yet lead to the existence of life on Earth. Without revealing their source, sparks of meaning flare up in tense brevity in the Raudra Brahman.

Rudra, wild Hunter

“A Hymn to Agni (RV 1.71 sheds light on His nature whose name the Raudra Brahman witholds. This hymn celebrates Agni, who had prepared the seed for Father Heaven. But when Agni noticed the lust of the Father for his daughter, this hunter crept along, then boldly shot his arrow at the Father just when he was quenching his desire in his daughter. The Hunter had aimed at the creative act itself. Father Heaven shed his seed. It fell to earth. Agni, the Fire, brought to life the Father’s progeny, the benevolent host of immaculate Fire-youths.

“Fire is a hunter. The flame creeps along, lashes out, it hits the victim with its dart. The arrow of Agni strikes the Father in his passionate embrace of the daughter. But Agni’s heat had also ripened the seed of the Father. Foaming in hot fury when he is struck by the fiery arrow, the Father spills his seed on the Earth, the site of sacrifice, where it will sprout in the splendour of the immaculate and benevolent Fire-youths, the host of the Angirases, Agni’s priests.

“The ambiguity of Agni is the ambiguity of fire itself, which both sustains and destroys life. But inasmuch as the Father is the object of this ambiguity, Agni is the name of the hunter who is but a mask of Him whose name is withheld, and to whom the gods, the celestial intelligence, in compassionate insight, gave shape as Vastospati, the Guardian of the Dwelling (Vastu), of divine Law. They carved this shape out of the poem (brahman) while they created it.

“By their wording of the sacred Mantra, His shape arose in its metre, and the vision took form in the rhythm of … this wild fierce hymn of the god whose name it hides, while he is seen as he arises in his unfathomable nature and paradoxical shape as guardian of sacred order, Lord of Vastu. The mystery of Creation in this simultaneity of manifestations, begins with a fateful shot, the wound it inflicts on the Father, the loss of his seed, its fall to Earth, and the birth of the poem and of mankind to be.”

From The Presence of Siva by Stella Kramrisch, Princeton University 1981

Stella Kramrisch – ja 2012

Siva is a later generation of the Rudra aeon. He holds within his Yoga, the primordial Fires of Earth. In further cycles of the myth, Lord Siva plunges into the feminine Waters, and there remains for another aeon, inseminating all which would come forth as life – the vegetable, animal and human Kingdoms, the unbroken Consciousness.

In other versions of the mythos, Siva’s immersion was a thousand-year Ardhanariswara with his bride Parvati on Mount Kailas. From their blissful union was destined the child Skanda or Sanatkumar, who alone could defeat the cosmic demon Taraka. The gods at first despaired, as the timeless couple, being Yogis, spilled no seed until tricked into doing so.

Rudra wild Hunter Immerses

Kramrisch again, on STHANU:

“Time will not prolong the lives of men; it will not defer their death. It will bring them back again into a new youth, and a life resonant with their past. In time, their life will be ready for death – and rebirth. STHANU is the motionless pillar of all being. Sthanu out of the quiescence of his stance, prevailed on Brahma Creator. Death and birth thenceforth came to be interwoven in the pattern of time, due to Sthanu’s compassion for creatures. The paradox of the motionless ascetic withdrawn from the world, yet moved by pity for its creatures, is resolved by a form of time that carries quiescence in its structure. This is STHANU …

“…When Rudra entered the waters, he was like that great wondrous presence that strode in creative fervour on the crest of the sea. That mighty presence was a consecrated celibate, as Rudra is, young and ardent. Absorbed in creative fervour, he stood in the sea, in the ocean. He shone on the earth. He glowed with utmost inner exertion, the heat of creation. … He created life, though not through procreation. He plunged into the water, where the plants derived their nourishment from his presence. They pass it on to man. Rudra is ‘the food of living beings everywhere’. The Great God severed his linga in fury. Rudra who is wrath and fire, prevailed over Rudra the Lord of Yoga. The severed linga retained the ambivalence of his two natures. It fell into the earth, then rose in space, went to the akasa, where it stood as the endless fire-pillar whose beginning and end neither Vishnu nor Brahma could reach.

“To the command of Brahma to create mortals, Rudra the Lord of Yoga responded in two ways. In total introversion he turned into a motionless pillar. He became Sthanu. And he plunged into the waters to practice asceticism, and he remained submerged for innumerable years. The glow of his ascetic energy irradiated the waters, and the plants began their life in them. Like the numinous being, the brahmacharin shining in a shaft of sunlight had entered their glistening plane.”

From Presence of Siva by Stella Kramrisch

The foregoing are fragments only from the depth of Kramrisch’s translation. Siva/Rudra was a Yogi, and his Reality transcends time and manifestation. He had no desire to generate Life: yet by his in-tense, Life proliferated … no matter how He pruned his own vine.

The tale echoes the formation of our planet, by fire-seed and then the oceans.

Lord Siva on his Tao

The plant soul is pure, less individualised than those in the animal kingdom. Brahma is the Puranic form of Prajapati, the Vedic Creator Father. The immersion of Rudra’s fiery seed in the feminine waters harbingers the yogic intercourse/stillness of Siva and Parvati together as Ardhanariswara – Lord whose half is Woman – lasting a thousand years. The daily Vedic chanting at Ramanasramam includes as it did in Ramana’s lifetime, the NANAKAM, the Hymn to Bhagavan Rudra.

Mythology has no rigid defining line. Stories change a little with each generation of the telling, and through different angles of vision, as water flows into itself.

Sacred India Tarot Siva Ace of Lotuses

Here is the finished card. In the end, there was only room in the composition, for four of the assembled Sages whom Rohit had in mind: Anandamayi, Sai Baba of Sirdi, Ramana and Ramakrishna. But this is appropriate, because Lord Rudra in The Fool card is accompanied by four dogs, representing the 4 Vedas.

Sacred India Tarot – wild card THE FOOL – Rudra Brahman

I am the boundless ocean
This way and that,
the wind blowing where it will,
drives the ship of the world.
But I am not shaken.

I am the unbounded deep
in whom the waves
of all the worlds
naturally rise and fall.
But I do not rise or fall.

I am the infinite deep
in whom all the worlds
appear to rise.

Beyond all form,
for ever still,
even so am I.

I am not in the world.
The world is not in me.

Sacred India Tarot 21 Natarajan The World

I am pure.
I am unbounded,
free from attachment,
free from desire,
still,
even so am I.

Oh how wonderful !
I am awareness itself,
no less.
The world is a magic show!

But in me
there is nothing to embrace,
and nothing to turn away.

Ashtavakra Gita

So here, for aide-memoire is Siva Natarajan: the wildness and the serenity …

and the Sage who lives on Aruna hill:

Reflect on Ramana’s eyes. He is of the Skanda Siva lineage. They are immeasurably profound, soft and penetrating, and invade nobody. They are the eyes of the Self. Their invitation is eternally devoid of agenda. The Master’s Eye !

The beauty of the Sage on his rock.

Touch base: Siva Ace of Lotuses. The power of Love, the power of Law. Gravity. They are one and the same. Respectful is their expression.