Watershed Tale – A Drinking-Glass in the Sea

..

Many years ago, I dreamed of a drinking-glass in the sea, on the sea-bed, deep down.  It is a “Watershed Tale”, and I was about five months pregnant at the time.

25 January 1977
“There was a lone figure – a man – on a beach lit as if by sunset.   He stretched out his arms towards the sea, he was taking part in a ritual.   There were others on the beach.   I loved the pure water of the sea in its strong rough waves, and longed to be in it and of it.   I sat in the sea water, on a rock, with Cathy the little girl from next door.   The water of the tide coming in with bigger and bigger waves, was delicious, cold and pure.   I  didn’t mind getting wet.   The water was beautiful on my body.   The waves were bigger and more powerful, nearly drowning us;  little Cathy was frightened, so I swam the few yards back to shore,   carrying her.   The tide was coming in fast.  

“On the beach I found Cathy had dropped her drinking-glass into the sea.   I didn’t want to lose it, so I ran back and dived into the sea, already deep and surging.   I swam a couple of strokes and then dived under,  right to the bottom. 

“I looked all around.   The water was clear and still beneath the surface surging dangers and turbulence –  I was frightened of those big waves.   First of all I saw something else Cathy had dropped, and brought it up, but it was not the glass,  so I went down again and there, amazingly, was the glass, resting upright on the sands, where I could just reach it with the last breath I had.   So I brought it up triumphantly and to shore.

“Sea –  peace,  austere peace,  like in Beethoven’s quartet Opus 131.”

..

I have often thought of this image, and wondered at it, particularly recently.  The glass developed in my interior eye, to an elegant goblet:  but originally it was of green glass, and someone had made it from the bottom of a bottle, filing it smooth around the rim.

..

So today I painted it.  It means so many things:  diving into the heart, for one.  The shapely glass is formed from fine sand, from the movement of waves, and by the breath and in fire, it melts and is blown.  How strange, for it to be …  Any human being turned inward, with only a little flower turned outwards, is a bottomless vessel, a drinking glass under the ocean.   I dived for something I lost I think, and I found not that thing, but this, standing on the sandy sea-bed under and in the sea … the outline cannot enclose.

PLEROMA is the empty which is full, and was and is and ever shall be:  the Pleroma where all words fail, you feel it in the heart and in your bones – gnosis:  the gnosis of Carl Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead.

Jung as hermit

I have been working on this portrait since the weekend.  I had run out of my usual drawing paper, so I used the darker shade.

I am walking with the Red Book, and with the Seven Sermons to the Dead.  A wonderful edition of the Seven Sermons is available to buy online.  It is called The Gnostic Jung, and it is presented by Stephan A.Hoeller.  When he was a very young man in 1949, on a frozen day in Innsbruck he was lent one of the rare copies then in circulation.  All night long he transcribed and translated it, handing the book back to its owner the following day.

The Jungian Gnosis is a creative conjunction of therapeutic discipline with ancient spirituality, which is far more than the sum of its parts.   It is non-academic.   It activates.   It becomes the MEDICINE of the ages.  It heals.

Alchemy through the Red Sea – 2000

Deep down there is always peace.  On the surface, a wild weather or a struggle or a crust.   Inside of a tree is like the sea bed.

Be transparent.

Chronically distressed at human poison on its habitat, these days – do we rush to our extinction?   TV ads, idiocy and smartphone media addictions are that.  They are the ragged holes of the nothing, which ate up the living world in Michael Ende’s “The Never Ending Story”.  So many hold this view – should I add to it?   Or reinforce the sap from inside the Tree, a parallel Reality?   We know so little, and the measuring sciences know even less:  just a few tones on the spectrum.

Be happy, do service, die consciously.

Wood bird Yantra

..

The Septus Sermones began when the dead came back from Jerusalem and haunted Jung’s house and upset his family.  The dead had gone to Jerusalem (in his inner journey) in 1914 to pray at the holy graves, and now they were back, and dissatisfied.  The holy graves of religion did not yield fruit.  In three winter evenings, the Seven Sermons were written.

In the Seven Sermons, Jung united the Christian God with Satan, gnostically:  Abraxas.  Abraxas seems to be the blind Will, as in Schopenhauer, which is both dark and light: the parodox of our growth.  Jung elaborated this theme in 1952, in Answer to Job.  He was already familiar with Gnostic literature, and circulated the black book script of the Sermons in a private publication for friends.  The name of the author, Basilides, “fell unexpectedly into my lap like a ripe fruit at a time of great stress, and has kindled a light of hope and comfort for me in my bad hours.”

This was at the beginning of 1916, and at the same time, Jung sketched the first mandala of his Systema Munditotius;  then painted it, later.   (January 16).

Mandalas are the pattern of time across the tree:  the seabed of the soul;  the instrument of wholeness and of healing;  the guardian.  Jung’s first pencil sketch is a classic interior four-gated Mandala: the key to gnosis. See my earlier post.

Continued in Aquariel: Mandala, Abraxas and Angel

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

The Woman by the Sea

..

And who is Lilith’s sister, Eve?

This post belongs with the one two days ago – The Solstice of Each Day – and with my current journey with Jung – see also Mandala, Abraxas and Angel.

A Master’s eye is “through the looking glass” the wonderland of a small child.

young nymph 1957

One day (this was last year) when archiving my early art, I closed my eyes and up came (this is rare !) picture after picture – as if an inner chamber were unlocked.  It was extraordinary, because my visual free-rein faculty is not nowadays very good.

I saw a full-page drawing – many –  of  a magnificent woman looking at the blue sea and sky, from a scribbled green cliff-top field.  She wore a big Grecian dress;  her profile in strong crayon was clear, firm and free:  a priestess, a queen.   Her long black hair blew in the wind.  The colours were blue, green and red:  the style was my very own, at the age of seven;  I feel the way I hold the pencil, it is achingly familiar.    It comes from my inner nest, which in the child, is not yet grown – or the other way round, perhaps?

I have NOT done this drawing, yet here it is, complete, finished and unforgettable, unique and instantaneous, and as swiftly fades beyond my capture.    And then come others, under it, one after the other.

..

Gallery 1956/7

..

Where does this faculty come from, and how?     Who drew this?   The gods operate gaily in a dimension outside time.  In time, through time’s sentence, I labour and produce.

Other pageants welled up through the opening in my mind – romances and a black ghost horse leading my white one up a winding hill path – and things too fast for me to draw, which teem and fade as soon as they become thoughts – the movement of the river.

The force is a primordial treasury.   It is transpersonal, and like a downpour, it finds its way through my life in intimately personal ways.   It compels my recognition and to co-create.

child give birth, 2003

..

So I had to get out the old suitcase again, and search among my Cornish sea-cliff drawings of small girls picking flowers, which had this feeling.  It was an ecstasy to be by the sea in the warm sun, and to wear a summer dress, to be six, and to learn to skip rope.

Kitty by the sea near Penzance – you can see St Michaels Mount in the distance – 1955, after starting school

..

“To make gold, you must have it” …  in Alchemy, an informed spiritual nourishment translates the essence of the food we eat, into human mutation – the liberated Imaginative base.   I got a whiff of this when I saw my queen by the sea.  Her power is fluid in my consciousness.   Not one of my Cornish pictures is herself in full:  yet many tease me with a profile or an aspect of her.

botticelli madonna 1956

..

Suddenly, the Greater Mystery of the Madonna and Child opens to me again;  Queen Virgo is frescoed around my soul.  Virgo rising at my birth, containing Saturn (Binah or Understanding) forms and earths a Seal of Solomon aspect-pattern – custodian of the miracle.   Applying Kabbalah to basic astrology transfigures it to truth.   My everyday concerns are boots and mantle of lead, but the inner Order is illumined, and moves between the stars.   The more my personality bends to this fact, the more she reconditions to the lens.   It shines like a lighthouse at sea.   The real memory breaks through the ground.

..

I shall draw her if I can:  but the reconstructive memory is not enough.   It needs the connection of the electricity – like a lightning bolt –  to do itself.  This is for sure:  I don’t do it – it does.  I am a midwife,  I help it along.

In this project, I hear small girls everywhere, playing with their dolls;  the elaborate stories and passions, the self absorbed, dramatic drone.   Children draw freely until they try to be like other people.   Solomon’s gazelle looks through the lattice.

2 May, 2012, London

The woman by the sea …   A few days later, I found her.   There she is, among Angels and Queens, second from the right.

..

And this afternoon I thought I might just try to find her again –  so here is: my Xmas Eve …

..

..

..

**

wishing you peace and joy for Xmas
and blessings for 2014

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

The Red Book and Philemon

..

Change of plan … I’m afraid my blogging is getting rather active again.  I have to postpone till tomorrow, the sequel to “Each Day is Solstice” about child art and mythology, as Jung’s Red Book begins to take hold of me.   To read when I found it … scroll back to my two Tarka Trail posts, in October !

Philemon in the red book

I am still in the translator’s introduction.  Here are this morning’s notes:

..

Had war not been declared in 1914, Liber Novus the Red Book might not have been compiled!  The war outbreak affirmed to Jung that it was not he who was going mad (twelve precognitive visions 1913/14) but the European subconscious;  and so the Red Book integrates what he might otherwise have fallen victim to.

The psycho analytical theory in those days was:  (his talk in Aberdeen on 28 July ’14) – “In cases of neuroses and psychosis, the unconscious attempted to compensate the one-sided conscious attitude … which had supposedly become rigid.  The unbalanced individual defends himself against this, and the opposites become more polarized.  The corrective impulses that present themselves in the language of the unconscious should be the beginning of a healing process, but the form in which they break through, makes them unacceptable to consciousness.”

In other words, LIBER NOVUS is Jung’s platform of individuation:  his recognition of a collective psychosis, and his summoning of the Physicians from the deep past, being a native of neutral Switzerland.

This inevitable Great War included Hitler and Nazism and Holocaust – the nadir of our history.  (The technological revolution which followed this period is but a sticking-plaster.) Immediately after Jung’s lecture in Aberdeen, the war was declared;  his personal relief as he set foot in Holland was yet considerable, that the responsibility for catastrophe was not his in isolation, it was in the subsoil;  and he knew now what to do.

..

“The insane person falls victim because he cannot integrate the fantasy-material but is swallowed up by it.”   Creative involvement, on the other hand, embraces and engages consciously with it.   (Tarot Keys 1, 2 and 6:  the conscious self, the subconscious, and their reciproprocal activity).  It is like being either broken by the wave, or surfing it.   Creative involvement recognises a Great Work’s necessity …  and rebirth of God in the soul.   Creative involvement rolls up the sleeves and gets on with it.

It felt like this, when I tackled my own Earthquake.   I knew, although I hadn’t studied Jung, that I stood, like many do, on his shoulders:  he was the First Navigator of our time.

Here are two paintings from my Earthquake series in 1986:  scenes of my soul in leafy West Hampstead …

Kreutzer Sonata erupts ’86

..

Ferryman ’86 – Oistrakh, Menuhin & musicians of W.Hampstead

..

In November 1914, Jung studied Zarathustra.   In 1913, when he had the 12 visions, he was nearly 40, and having his Uranus Opposition.   (I was having mine, during the Earthquake.)

The Uranus Opposition in astrology – Uranus opposite its natal position in our chart –  arrives when we are reach the roaring forties.  It challenges us to navigate our small boats across the ocean.  Those who are ripe for this passage, confront their Shadow and achieve great things for humanity, whether concealed or openly.  The fallout from the voyage goes on being clarified for the rest of their lives.

“Liber Novus is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology.  The role of Philemon in Jung’s work is analogous to Zarathustra and to Virgil.”

These I love:  the Great Physicians, the appearance of Philemon, as the mud in the puddle parts, to reveal the clear blue sky.

B.O.T.A.Tarot Key 13. Death is the movement through Life. The Hebrew letter NUN assigned to this Key, means “a fish” or even a seed, like the symbol in the top left hand corner. The ruler is Scorpio – the scorpio-force of alchemy

Jung for me for Xmas!   At last I am connecting with his work, and I must stop here, today, as the excitement fills my jug.   (Just saw this – an N in the “jug” is Hebrew letter NUN, whose colour vibration is turquoise, the fish, the Key of Death, Movement and Transfiguration – the scorpio force of our second birth in life.  The Great Fishes are our deepest dreams.

Yesterday I blogged my Solstice piece, and spent hours on a sketch of Jung in his study.  The online photo was wonderfully suggestive but very difficult to work from, as he is lamplit, and gnome-like and fierce with his pipe and deep shadows and an Enormous Book in his hands.

I cannot find a repro anywhere of Jung’s first (initial) painting of Philemon – the kingfisher one – so what about reconstructing it for myself, this morning ?

During the later part of my Earthquake – the pain of life broke open and inward – and for many subsequent years, I was engaged with a Guide who inspired me every day and drew me along.   In the early days, this was Hermes Trismegistos into whose Hand I fell.  Later on, there were Ramana and Le Comte.   I have a devotee’s need to be aligned with a beloved Preceptor, and for several years this has felt rather scattered.  Today I feel the presence of Jung and his Preceptors and Elder Physicians, like the arches of a holy Temple.  I feel aligned with deep history.   They are all working alchemically in the world’s crisis.   They are yeast to the rising Bread.

young amazon, 1957

Together with the Red Book, came Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916), a seminal draft of all his work to come.  These profound psalms of non-duality were given to him by “Basilides”.  They awaken the “unconscious” – “The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they did not find what they were seeking.  They asked admittance to me and demanded to be taught by me, and thus I taught them:  Hear ye – I begin with nothing.  Nothing is the same as fullness.  In the endless state, fullness is the same as emptiness … …  is called by us the PLEROMA.”

Jung wrote of his first meeting with Philemon, in 1913:  “His figure first appeared to me in the following dream.  There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by clouds but by flat brown clods of earth.  It looked as if the clods were breaking apart, and the blue water of the sea were becoming visible between them.  But the water was the blue sky.  Suddenly there appeared from the right, a winged being sailing across the sky.  I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull.  He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock.  He had the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colours. 

“Since I did not understand this dream image, I painted it, in order to impress it upon my memory.  During the days when I was occupied with the painting, I found in my garden, by the lake shore, a dead kingfisher!  I was thunderstruck, for kingfishers are quite rare in the vicinity of Zurich, and I have never since found a dead one … 

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.  Philemon represented a force which was not myself.  In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought.  For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.  He said I created thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, ‘If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.’  It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.”

C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

..

I need to ponder Jung’s visions, and walk with him in the garden.   “Let us draw together.”

Obviously Jung’s painting of Philemon in the Red Book which heads this post, is not the same as the one in his dream, which has horns.  Nor could I locate where the original might be.   So I decided this morning to try to paint my own version:

My impression of Jung’s dream of Philemon in 1913

..

From a distance, the Philemon kingfisher looks like a quill or pen the right hand holds;  and the dead kingfisher might be the left-hand or feminine side:  the sleeping grey stone slabs on which the bird rests, are pages of a book.  There are hints of the dead, the wounded and renewal.  Only connect … the sides of consciousness.

Addendum – The Language of the Dead

Jung’s self-art-therapy interpreted and viewed his thoughts not reductively, but objectively – such as the relation of introversion to extroversion, pain or pleasure.  A reductionist interpretation obscures the view which opens.  In the Emerald Tablet it is written, “I speak no fiction, but what is certain and most true.”  I know it to be certain and true, because it has occurred to other souls – by intuition.  I can call it THE LANGUAGE OF THE DEAD.

Philemon held 4 keys. With one, he seemed to open a lock. The lock is this cruciform Mandala – one of Jung’s first pencil sketches for the Red Book. Mandalas are the gate and symbol to wholeness. Jung’s future patients drew and painted wonderful Mandalas.

The dead bird is where the book is open but unknown.   Yet all is known.  My new picture has the parting mud – like bright brown fishes – and the water of life.  It is projected as if I am the sea bed looking up:  yet it is the shore of Jung’s lake and sky, blood from the war spills into it; and the approaching Kingfisher Philemon suggests an alternative dimension which slants across the composition.

Interpretation therefore, looks forward into the opening, into the unknown factor coming in, rather than backward into a theory.  Francis Lucille said “an artist should leave the centre empty.”   While painting it, I do not know what message it will reveal;  I struggle with the details and to get the colours to work better.

..

..

This morning – the next – I wrote:
The dead do not have faces, so they do not talk together, and sometimes they cling to the living, to the living faces of speech.  The dead clutched at Harry Potter from out of the underground lake when he dipped a shell for water;  Frodo raised the legions of the dead in Lord of the Rings for the conclusive battle:  and Basilides of Alexandria summoned and preached to the dead, during the Great War, through Jung.  The collective subconscious is the dead – the carpet where we walk.  The Great Work in the interior, awakens their faces, the carpet comes to life, do not trample it, it is holy ground – “tread softly for you tread on my dreams” (Yeats).

THE POWER OF THE DEAD …  We really are the Awakened Dead – as a result of Jung facing his own.   Who knows what this hidden unconscious power holds?  Its presence is undetected by statistic sciences … a whole part of their equation is missing.

..

(continued in Mandala, Abraxas and the Angel)

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

The Solstice of Each Day

..

summer-solstice-northern-hemisphere http://www.space.com
photo by Tariq Malek

This morning a cloud has cleared, and I feel the peace and quiet and drawing-in of the solstice, and the opening from the longest night, and sense of Yuletide:  primitive and in my own (re)treat.

Yesterday I found this drawing I attempted and discarded about 18 months ago, after I “caught sight in my mind” of a childhood Queen, looking out to sea.  It is more expressive than I thought.  The vision happened, just before I discovered and recognised the “original” in my old drawing books from when I was seven.  I shall write more of this, in my next post.

..

I bought a book the other day, The Radiant Child.  It is by Thomas Armstrong, and was published in 1985 by Quest.  It offers a psychological insight into the hidden face of childhood.  I suppose that since it was written, the constraints around child psychology have loosened, and admit far more, the “descent of the Spirit” which is transpersonal – it seeks out the receptive personal nature for it.   In many young children the faculty is not encouraged or developed enough, but for some it is – and who knows what psychologists know about children anyway? or think they know?   Much of our linear education obliterates it.  The proof of the pudding is inside the child’s world …  inside mine, for reference.

Jacobs Ladder, showing the Four Worlds

I feel I can contribute, having been enabled to keep a record of my early years.  It is a useful angle on spiritual evolution, and is the reason I upload my childhood working process here.

The Radiant Child gives a good layman’s introduction to the esoteric perspective, and speaks significantly of the Four Worlds common to all traditions and cultures.  Everything it proposes is in my recorded experience and development.

The Transpersonal Spirit encircles childhood – the little bud – and enters it sometimes like a sperm.   The Transpersonal Spirit is timeless.   It seems plain, from my mother’s letters at the time, that it came to me in infancy:  and the pressure of the artist from five onwards, tells the rest.  Whether or not I knew the Self, I don’t know;  but some deltas from the human genius as a whole, engaged with my atoms for sure:  the passion, the commitment, the concentration.   Some of my early non-verbal childhood sensations suggest its movement, or its withdrawal.  (See my earlier posts on Childhood, parts 1, 2, 3.)

In adult years, I grasped with intellectual ease, the fourth dimension, and whence all spiritual traditions derive, and aim towards.  This theme pervades my life of time and space and enclosures, and is not any of them.  A friend of mine knows and says that all comes forth from and returns to Allah in the Great Sphere.

In a world whose children are crushed and maimed with war, neglect and abuse, I feel it is essential to keep the lamp which values childhood alight, wherever we can.  For this special awareness, mostly unknown to us as we become lettered and fettered with belief, is unbound – boundless, and – like our sexuality – the secret core and contagion of our human sense of being.

From my early years, my windows were made to stay porous : osmosis two ways.   Yet I am not “sensitized” in the way many contemporary kundalini awakenings are.   I suppose I am at ease with the condition, because the artist’s way, the poet’s way was and is its conduit through myself.

The passion and the commitment entered my Liverpool sketchbooks in its own way, at 19/20 years old, and abandoned Liverpool when it had absorbed and recorded enough there.

My archive keeping honours the Spirit.   I don’t attend a ceremony for solstice:  yet every single morning of the year I do a ceremony;  I light candles, invoke the Kabbalist Tree of Life, open my laptop, and I write.   Thus we greet the Solstice of each day, and awaken the Christ Child;  the eternal child of Christmas.   He was not historically born at xmas, but the seed of the Light is where the night is long and dark, ever since we struck spark from stones and lit our fires in caves near the river.   The virgin – she who is ripe – carries him in her womb.

The embryo gender before it begins to differentiate, is feminine … the mater, la mer, the sea.  Full humanas continues to be carried in the womb, closely furled.

Visible humanity today is a process incomplete, with a long way to go.   There are cyclic golden ages past, and yet to come;  the same within us individually, as collectively.  Awakening into humanas is potential everywhere, and in places visible as Consciousness;  it is possible that our dark, separative tantrum-toddler forces pollute and extinguish the presentation of it, on our beautiful Earth.   Consciousness however, prevails unaltered.   Higher human consciousness and compassion is none other than cosmic Consciousness …  through galactic dark matter which is thought.  It is berthed and earthed wherever there is gravity, in innumerable forms.   I have a sense here, through a glass darkly, of the Reality of the upper astral plane we essentially co-create, and the mental plane:  illumined landscapes and the temples of Eternity.

Towards this fact, certain pretty ideas of new age channelers about Earth’s ascension – about the good people rising up and all the nasty people dropping away – they almost reach the mark, but are groping and too literal.  So what’s new?   In most regions, the available human intelligence is somewhat fundamentalist and limited.

But come home here to hear your intimate thought and feeling process.  What ascends into the bright sky in this moment?  What obscurity drops away?   What is letting go and letting god?  What resists, and goes on replaying the movie?   It starts at home.   Solstice!

..

So now, on to Jung … for I begin now, to journey with his Red Book, a little at a time.

Jung started by visualizing himself digging a hole.  But he had already studied trance, automatic writing and Loyola’s and Swedenborg’s spiritual exercises, and he corresponded with Silberer who experimented with allowing images to appear.   Self-experimenters were active in that period before the War broke out.   A colleague called Straudenmaier coined a phrase Unterbewusstsein – Under-consciousness …  the same word as my “Underbeing!”

Deliberately evoke a fantasy in a waking state, then enter into it as into a drama.  Jung wrote down his mythological journeys in the black books – “the book of my most difficult experiment” (December 1913 – 100 years ago.)  Jung “emptied his conscious mind” so as to allow psychic contents to appear spontaneously.

In a way I do the same.  My writing empties mind of what is floating around or concerning me;  then the Underbeing comes up – the deep advisor, or poet.   Each morning when I write, there are at least a few moments of tumbling back into silence and the slow deep river:  the well.   I feel it in my back.

When Jung was up against the wall which was Freud, something in him said “it is not so”.  After two years of active imagination/symbolic thinking, so many ideas rushed in on him that … he appealed to his hands, and began to carve wood.   Philemon first appeared in a dream, in 1913 or early 1914.   Jung painted him from this kingfisher coloured dream: the sky appeared through mud – he found a dead kingfisher in his garden, very rare.  Philemon was at first Elijah, then he became an Egypto-Hellenic Gnostic pagan.  “He represented superior insight.”  In April 1914, Jung resigned from his academic posts.

The wall is there to drive one back into Reality.   Jung would converse with Philemon his guru, in the garden.   It is like the dream conversation I had with Jung in a garden.  Philemon had four keys.  In my dream there were four drawings, images I had made, arranged in a square, like a window.  I showed him them. One of them was the sketch of Jung at Bollingen which he “asked me for a copy of”, and which I drew shortly afterward.  I did not recall the others.

The Godcosm … these things, and where they beckon … is deeply reflective.

I would like to be more investigative.  Work objectively with my One who represents superior insight.   WORK WITH YOU.

During his early investigations (conducted in the evenings), Jung partitioned his activities.  His family, his profession and his military service, kept him earthed in the human Assiyah.

..

Jung in his study

..

(This is continued through the posts which follow, and also in Aquariel – Mandala, Abraxas and the Angel)

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

Liverpool Art School 1968 – Sketchbook 4

..

For a long time now, I wanted to get these old sketchbooks out of the cupboard and “archive” them, but kept putting it off.  This is the way to do it, and to share them!   Mixed media, felt pens, oil pastels and pencil … many of them were fixative-sprayed, turning the neighbouring line drawings purple over time;  and some of the black and white photos I took of Liverpool Eight and the Cathedral, exploded cubist space through my inner world.

See also my earlier posts – sketchbooks 1,2,3 and Mrs Mop.

street game

..

Gallery  One

doorways, characters …

Liverpool 8 was not yet rebuilt from the war – vast open space

The colours to the left, are of lovemaking

..

Ferry across the Mersey –
me on merseyside

..

The big Liver Building on the water front was sooty black in those days;  it is now gleaming white.  The throaty chimes of its clock competed with the slapping of the waters and the honks of river and sea traffic through strands of fog.

Gallery Two

She told our fortunes in the Philharmonic pub on Hope Street

looking up the tower

when I sketched, kids would settle around me like sparrows

The tenderness of those colours all night long, when in love

Liverpool 8 landscape, with the cathedral always in the background

Domenico, with L8 kids

He pulls her along with a sweetie

Those hills between Manchester and Sheffield – incredibly ancient caves inside, and ghosts on the hill

A typical day’s work

..

outside Ali Saleh Ahmed’s shop, near Entwhistle Heights

..

I found a strange magic in the houseless fields of Liverpool Eight.  It had been heavily bombed in the war.   The flowers which grow hardy in bomb sites were these tough little kids.  When I revisited Liverpool in the 1980s, the ghosts of those old streets near Huskisson and Faulkner and Prince’s Street were criss-crossed by brand new council estates, with their tenacious grip on life … like a tangled Nasca pattern.

I saw the tender colours of the surviving terraces, day and night, in my love affair with Liverpool and with my young man in London.   The waste lands and the piles of old brick beckoned the unreclaimed cities within my soul.

Over the landscape, in all weathers, glowed the gnostic tower.

Gallery Three

..

cathedral & small monument

..

Cathedral’s wild steep side.  One thing for sure:  inside and around this building was where I first prayed to God.

..

Gallery Four

Lorry cab: from the passenger street. This drawing is impressionistic and may be hard to read – the driver’s elbow (in black) is crooked across thebottom right-hand corner, his face (ochre-ish) with cap and specs just above it. Most of this picture is the windscreen.

I tried to keep AWAKE during these night journeys, absorbing every impression.

..

The following are mostly of London.  My young man lived in Vauxhall: he was studying La Rivoluzione, and working in coffee-bars.   I boarded a lorry on Friday night from Liverpool, arriving in Camden Town around 4am;  then walked wide-eyed across the west end, through Soho and over the river, to our ramshackle love-nest.   The old streets there have long since been pulled down.

Gallery 5

the feeling together in colours; a meditation without any words

I include this page, because I often dreamt in an archetypal way,of this type of situation since then … and this may be its source.

This is in fact the organ loft in the cathedral, with the organists bum on seat sticking out, his feet flying about on the pedals.. The music and chords were all in colours.

The dancers are to the left.

Impression of Vauxhall slum, I think, in the old days.

..

liverpool 1968 – Impression

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

Observations on The Lilith Archetype

lady of shalot, 1956

..

As we approach Solstice, the turning year’s deep point, what better than to befriend our Shadow Feminine? Bring her in out of the cold, for Xmas!

My friend Actaeon and I wrote this article together, in 2005, and it is circulated to his students.  He is a homeopathic practitioner and teacher.   It is based on experience and on our field work.  My contribution was also influenced by George Macdonald’s extraordinary novel, Lilith.

..

wicked godmother 1956

Who was Lilith?

The forgotten bride of Adam, she sought to rule and make herself known.  She stood alone, infertile, envious of Eve who bore his children, and she made mischief.  She is regarded as the feminine Shadow!

Historically, women – and the feminine principle – have been severely displaced at levels of creativity, culture and spirituality.  Certain mind-sets, principles and behavioural qualities in the modern woman – observable also in some men – characterize this Archetype:

1) She is manic, chaotic, and probably prone to insomnia.
2) She feels excluded, and doesn’t want to miss anything.
3) In our society she is a product of repression and abuse.  She looks everywhere for healing, but resists the healing process.

haughty, 1957

The first two points show a compensatory factor.  The manic process needs urgently to be in on everything, and to be at the centre of things.  As the feminine has been excluded, she feels her right to be included in everything.  The Lilith Archetype becomes obsessed with information and the need to know, but never attains wisdom.  Thus, her energy and envy become invasive.  All things must be hers at any cost;  she must be privy to the neighbourhood gossip – the one who twitches the net curtains, as well as the walking encyclopaedia.

4) The Lilith archetype wants to obtain the creative energy and power of the masculine for herself.  Why?

If the Lilith archetype is a mother, she is not satisfied with the creation and rearing of her child.  As society has undervalued the role of motherhood, she does not feel acknowledged or appreciated in this role.  In a healthy family unit, warmth, love and light shine from the father into the mother;  she reflects this love and light into the eyes of their child.  If the relationship breaks down, there is displacement in the psyche, and anger at the masculine.  Without his protection and support, she feels as a mother, disabled.  Her maternal authority carries no weight or assurance;  she starts to nag.  She, as Peter Gabriel said, “looks for the teeth to match her wounds.”

angry women

..

The feminine role is a dual one.  Interiorly she creates the child in her womb.  Exteriorly, she goes out to work, or expands her creative and evolutionary process.  A man who protects and provides for the former, and supports her independence for the latter, can help her to fulfill both.   The key to this is a couple’s mutual love, respect and understanding as lovers, companions and parents.  But – and this is also due to today’s economic stress – more often in a woman, the one role gets over-ridden by the other, or both are sustained in a tense atmosphere of over-achievement and anxiety.

The Lilith archetype in a creative woman or artist, makes her jealous and envious of male composers, musicians, artists and scientists in the past.  Her traditional confinement to domestic roles, excluded her.  Openly admiring male creative qualities, she subconsciously resents masculine achievement and success.  She now wants that for herself.

The modern Lilith archetype, when drawn to creative men and women, usurps their inspiration and knowledge.  Having no respect for the masculine seed, she ignores its lineage, source and consciousness; the way it interweaves with her own.  Her powers of intuition and gestation became distorted through witch-hunts and repressive values in our history.  If she is unable to access her real nature, she resents the male!   She wants his seed to be her own.

Envy of male physical strength and ability, makes her competitive.  She did not accept her power internally:  nor is she aware of how strong her internal organs are. (Women generally live longer).  Yet, throughout nature, as in society, the balanced union of the male and female powers generates life, love and sanity.  Who cares whether the chicken or the egg came first?

someone’s mother 1956

Secretly believing she is the more intelligent, Lilith may be fearful of the male gaining power and hubris.  The Lilith archetype in countless operatic roles, played her men off against each other.  Her old cliches are: “All he wants is his football and dinner on the table.”  “He’s useless in bed, he lives in his head.”  “He’s supposed to know what I want and how I feel, but I’m not going to tell him, and he should know!”  By conditioning, her collusion with her sisters emasculates and mocks their men, cutting them off from effectiveness, driving them to do office overtime, to computer games or the pub.  “He won’t step in the door – the wife drives him mad, the kids are playing up.”

By divide and rule, the Lilith archetype seeks Kingship/high Priesthood on top of her femaleness, and naturally she detests Eve.  Her efforts to be top dog, cut off her own power and love.  With the erosion of procreative male support from her life, things “don’t happen” right for her.  They seem to break apart.  She is left alone.  “Men are no good.  He hasn’t got a clue.”

Those who are subjected to her barrage, generally shut up or retreat.  Hungry for acknowledgement, the Lilith archetype feels deprived, and thank-you’s are rarely given.  If she gives, it is to promote her situation.  Her gifts may be inappropriate and misplaced.  She is owed something – the residue of past deprivation.  If this self image is coloured by previous-life inferior/superior roles, she may move towards the arrogance of the persecutor or the helpless hopelessness of the victim.  There is no true centre.

What is our centre?  How does it move and prosper? for it is never static.

marrying tetrahedrons: the point from in between

The point from in between the worlds is a paradox, which blends the edge and zest of life. A child emerges from a fertile point between the parents.  Creative persons, pioneers and those who are not afraid to feel their love and pain, emerge from the fertile point between established conventions.  They learn to honour this awareness as their own progressive centre.

..

..

The Lilith archetype, starved of parental integrity, inhabits a static fantasy bubble.  It just touches Reality’s open hand for which she hungers, but it doesn’t quite burst or free her into her own ‘point from in between’.   Classically, she hovers between isolation and community.  She endures denial and frustration, as she tries to maintain her comfort zone.  Wounded underneath, yet avoiding healing, she wants to appear powerful, dominant and in control …  Knowing she misuses others and herself, she may suffer acutely from shame and disunity.  She is “trapped inside the evil container – a house where mother screams and father shrugs his shoulders … a vehicle where mother is paralysed with father yelling at her because she doesn’t work properly.”

Ultimately disliking herself and what she is doing, Lilith may conceal addictive problems.  Her disguises make crucial issues unavailable for confrontation or clarity.  In dialogue, she may frustratingly lose the thread.  She is not OK.  She plays on this, making other persons feel guilty and responsible for her lack of fulfillment and success.  She may attribute to them all her own power to make herself miserable.  “The world has passed me by!”  This leads to depression, and an inability to discriminate others from herself.  She fears she might pull people down with her.

queen with suitor

Poor Lilith!   Her roles in theatre, opera and the celebrity industry, are legion:  Salome, Lady Macbeth, Lucrizia Borgia, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy (who would rather watch many men die, than give up her status), Queen Margaret, who took over the land from her King Henry VI and became a war vamp …  We have played or been accused of aspects of all these parts.

King Lear was betrayed by two Liliths, Goneril and Reaga.  His hard heart could not distinguish Eve from Lilith, until he held Cordelia dead in his arms:  “O, you are men of stones.  Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack – she’s gone for ever!”

Lilith was unrecognised until her process had been lived, right through himself;  his heart and mind were broken open.

Blow winds and crack your cheeks – Lear’s madness in the storm. 1987

..

In the old days, in villages in India, menstrual rags after use were dug into the ground under stones, so the blood would not attract snakes and particularly cobras!

During a woman’s menstrual flow she is psychically ‘open’.  In matriarchal societies, she withdraws and becomes quiet.  She lets her interior pulse with Mother Earth awaken kundalini shakti in the root.  Fearing the unknown, could some invading patriarch have derived the notion of the menstrual blood being ‘unclean’?

wise earth goddess 1987

..

(Against the conditioning, that the flow and flux of female blood is dirt and pain … I began to feel my own cycle as a cleansing and renewal, “dropping through”.  The ache had a lunar rhythm, like childbirth;  when I was young, I intuited the way it prepares the bed for the child.  It kept me indoors, to be still, relax into the ache.)

In November 2003, a new outer planet was discovered – far beyond Pluto’s orbit – and announced on 29 July 2005.  It is named ‘Lila’, and presages a revolutionary world view. In mystic circles, the menstrual flower is represented as a lily.  The Graal lineage comes through a dragon race (the goddess Nibiru) whose key females venerated as lilies, were named Lili, Luluwa, Lilith, Lilitu, and even LIL-LET!

Pluto or Hades is our collective unconscious;  and beyond Pluto, the ‘new planet’ is feminine.  In mythology, Persephone daughter of Gaia, became his bride.  She descended into the Shadow and returned to earth as spring.  She goes further than any.  The discovery of planet Lila provokes our transitional time.

Hades and Persephone 1957

..

In hyperactive modern life, who are wearing the LIL-LETS?  TV presenters, fashion gurus, polititians, powers behind the throne and business:  the high fliers, generally.  We are all aware of female ruthlessness in the media, and in the worlds of finance and crime.  We see women under repressive political and religious systems, becoming tyrants at home.  They may breed killer sons, by reinforcing unconsciously inherited attitudes.  We see the archetype in our families:  mothers and grandmothers who are intrusively possessive or who, despising the aging process in themselves, pass on this attitude to their daughters, and become sour, withdrawn and tight.

Men and women suffer aspects of this archetype in ourselves – anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, hyperactivity, lethargy and being ‘not good enough‘.  The surgical nip and tuck craze bears witness to this.  A daughter of Lilith measures and compares herself with others, seeking inclusion.

talking

..

Single mothers are rich pickings for the Archetype! … It may breed a mistrustful mindset through daughters and grandchildren.  The Archetype in a mother or a partner can cause grown men and sons to withdraw – even into the tragedy of self-destruction.  These factors coalesce in the subtle genetic structure, and lead to infertility problems down the line.

The feared and devouring Feminine at every level, is Lilith.  Having gleaned what she thinks is enough, she will be off with the next craze or fad in town;  there is nothing more to gain from this or that person.  Failure and fatigue follow her around, and drain off positive qualities in her relationships.  It is difficult for her to be honest about this, because she is clever at camouflage.  She may dissemble, insist and believe that all is sweetness and light.  If you don’t supply what she wants from the sperm-bank, then watch out, guys!  She’s after your bottomless wallet.

Bothwell and Mary 1957

..

What is the solution to the dark Goddess within our soul?   Who will turn to face and commit to her sterile, disabling force?  While she assembles data from all and sundry to support her case, there is no commitment or devotion to any one thing.

The Gurdhieff teaching refers to our “Chief Feature”.  It takes courage to turn – metanaoia – to look her in the eye.   .  The Chief Feature is a negative intensity or ‘hideous creature’ within ourselves which we cannot bear for others to see, and try to keep concealed at all costs.

Behind every Shadow stands the light.  In every method of therapy or esoteric work worthy of the name, the key to the Spirit is through the monster guardian or Dragon within the soul.  This is commitment.

goddess with triton 1957

Dragons are serpents with wings and fiery breath, who guard the jewel.  They symbolise subtle currents of power – leylines – through the earth and through the psyche and through our body as acupunctural meridians.  A warm Dragon breathes fire and flame like a sword.  A cold Dragon coils and creeps along the ground, worm-like, with flickering tongue.

The snake is associated with woman:  the paradox of her primordial knowledge, with her capacity to betray or beguile.  Just as the venomous potency of a snake or scorpion reverses homeopathically, to heal, so Lilith may turn herself around.

kundalini shakti 1988

How?  She is out in the cold, and frozen, and needs to be warmed right through.  Who will lie with her and warm her with his body? – for he receives at first, contempt.  Can he provide for AMMA and AIMA – the light and the dark womb?  The one nurtures his seed.  In the other is hidden the key to her evolution.

sleeping beauty, 1956

Centuries ago, the black madonna was walled up, who had something to say.  Allow her to arise into life creatively!  Then her expression is no longer distorted.

What in our life is dark, and cries out to be converted to light and awareness?   With hindsight and courage, a painful or broken love affair expands our heart towards unconditional love – we are not alone in this.  Without Lilith emerging to the passion of truth and light, the picture would be incomplete!  Let her awakening turn the dragons of the past.  Let our relationships become sacred, bestowed to future generations.

he and she tao, 2007

..

The Role of Adam with Eve and Lilith

When a man’s awareness embraces the light womb and the dark womb, he is fertile.

The Lilith drama is enacted within our psyche.  The way our interior male and female personas clash and pass judgement, reflects our external social inheritance.  When we begin to commit ourselves to reveal, to see and heal, it starts at home:  with our nearest and in our inner life.  Lilith’s transformative potential is towards soul growth and maturity:  Eve’s is given to her children.  Am I both?

You cannot negotiate with Lilith, and if you are wise, you don’t try to.  But the shadow feminine may be encouraged, to realise herself.  The Kundalini serpent trapped through centuries, lies under the stone.  The stone cracks.  She is only the shakti interned;  it turns.

serpent egg 1987

..

Turning towards the Light, or metanoia, a man and a woman look into each other’s eyes.  They are liberated into heart centre.  It awakens and opens.  At this point of stability, they each embrace Her dual nature.  She bears his children, and attends to the active evolution of her soul.  The man she loves, protects and provides for this, in whatever way.  When he holds both sides of the vessel steady with her acceptance, both are nourished;  their agreement turns towards the Light.

They honour each other for their childrens’ children.

The positive feminine accepts her duality: the infant life within her and the soul’s own life. She helps her partner to hold her creative polar polarities – her own development and the needs of her family – in the Yin Yang symbol. Both are nourished within himself also.
The sphere or globe is the ovary. Two dynamic sperms swim around a global womb, like whales. One is black with a white light inside. The other is white with a black light inside. These are the dynamic of transformation.

..

lady with gift

The Role of the Feminine within Herself

Sometimes, as the pain of her existence becomes crucial, and thus unbearable, Lilith will allow her unmasking, a veil at a time.  “She is a child.  Let the child grow up and become a woman, and she will step over the dragon guarding her, and speak her truth.”

It is the dismantling of a scaffold.  With her willingness to stop blaming others – including herself! – and to become response-able, vulnerable, the crooked ways begin to flow straight.  For the Archetype is transpersonal.

She turns, changes and becomes conscious.  From the collective unconscious, blighted seeds, twisted roots, half-forms and abortions stretch out tentatively from the dark … becoming whole, engaging life. They seek the light, the sun’s lamp which at first entering their limestone cave, stumbled and cast grotesque shadows.

The serpent within the Stone is a deep, fertile underground river.  She flows and carries nourishment as the venoms disperse.

serpent and soul 1987

..

..

In a controlled therapeutic dialogue towards simplicity, is TRANSFORMATION.

The Lilith Archetype, if ‘understood – stoodunder‘ can open the door to freedom and expression of the true feminine.  She can integrate with Eve.  At first she was trapped.  Then she no longer ran away, but became herself set free … from here … in here.

“Be still, and know That I AM.”

Actaeon and Jane
August 2005

..

self portrait, left & right hands/brain

..

“Then the Old man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning.  It disclosed a great hole. 
“‘That is the way,’ he said. 
“‘But there are no stairs!’ 
“‘You must throw yourself in.  There is no other way.'”

George Macdonald, The Golden Key

Fontanel – Chakras tarot Keys 2013

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

Liverpool Art School 1968 – Sketchbooks 1, 2 and 3

..

My previous post has awoken my Liverpudlian nostalgia.  I have long wanted to archive my visual diary of life at art school in Liverpool 8, in 1968.   So here are my sketchbooks.    And I wonder if any other grey-haired students from that Year might hit on this post, and recognise themselves !   Steve, Angela, Charles, Will … Jackie, Tony, Mimi … are you out there ?

The initial impact on my creative imagination, of the city, the Cathedral and our First-Year Graphics tutor, Ray Fields, was colossal.  Ray taught us – with great verve and excitement – to explore interior and exterior SPACE.

Caricatures of him in action pop up here and there in my Liverpool sketch books later on. He was an ardent laid-back red-head.  His punchy Cheshire vowels, flamboyant gestures and fatherly sincerity, enthralled the green first-year “stoodants”, as he pushed us out like ducklings into the wild windy street to collect leaves, cut-outs and concepts;  to tear up black and white tissue paper, to move in space and expand our view.   The bombed out acres of Liverpool 8, the Cathedral, and Ray Fields between them, made me a goner.

My digs were at a convent – St Mary Mount in Mossley Hill, a few districts away to the south – a gentle community with a garden and cats and cubicles to sleep in.  “Nuns or not, we’re human!”   I rode to and fro on my mother’s old bike, Black Colin, racing over the wet cobbles of Smithdown Hill.  Always the Cathedral tower shone in the distance, or overwhelmed me, close up.

My sweetheart was in London, a left-wing student from Torino, called Rega Domenico.  At weekends I went to a depot at Spofforth Road, and hitched a lorry down the motorway at night, to join him in London, arriving back at St Mary Mount in the yawning early hours of Monday morning.  The Irish nuns were charming about my comings and goings, and prayed we might one day get married.

GALLERY – SKETCHBOOK ONE

First day – with Ray Fields, tutor of 1st year graphics

anarchists’ meeting

project

one of the beat poets, adrian …

..

I found just these two images of Ray online:  the painting by him, reminds me how it felt, to be inspired by his free visual language and way of seeing things and handling his media.   “Fair enuff?”  he used to say … and “Creative thinkers MUST have a range of skills.”  He was a born pedagogue.

..

My sketch books are not of the course work we did, but of my companions, impressions and moods;  including some of the ideas they fed us with, and a taste of the politics.

I discover here, many source-points of my future Kabbalist path;  and raw material for the Cube of Space.

..

GALLERY – SKETCHBOOK 2

boutique

liver building, before its cleanup

through Hope Street to the cathedral

space project, cathedral 1

space project, cathedral 2

space project, cathedral 3

caff

Ray Fields writes the form

Sefton Park

space studies … …

fibenacci

Mrs Lester

Her prophecies …

Vista, Liverpool 8

Lorry drivers, Spofforth Road

..

..

I enjoy an artist’s sketchbook process – the intimacy more than the result.

GALLERY – SKETCHBOOK 3

Autumn leaves in Sefton Park

TO BE CONTINUED – there are 4 further sketchbooks, then it tails off.  I dropped out of Liverpool after just one academic year in the Graphics school, and moved towards free-lance portraiture.

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

Tales of the Watershed – Mrs Mop in the Tower of Babble-On

..

Liverpool 8 – Kids & Cathedral 1968.  THIS POST IS ILLUSTRATED WITH SOME of my photos and notebook sketches when I was at art college there.

This Watershed Tale is dream work.  I used my subconscious free association to explore a type of resonance from childhood which any of us might have;  to furnish in our private way.   My implicit story here, might be a springboard for your own Mystery tale.  Exploring, touching the membrane, released a profound pre-verbal knowledge:  connection to source.   It is a form of Self enquiry.   Self enquiry breaches the dam.   Self enquiry becomes gnosis.

The first part of this tale records my dream in 1976, which is archetypal – about Liverpool.  But from the point where the two sisters gaze down “through a chink” upon the echoing hymn of the Cathedral’s charladies (also in my dream), I refer back to my journal in 1966, which records the hospital in Somerset where I worked, the Xmas show, and Mrs Woman, in precise detail.  From this factual basis, the dream takes charge again, with the seedpod in my finger, and returns to the two sisters, and to a metaphysical breakthrough and meditation.   The finale – the rising waters of Babylon – completed the dream itself.

Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, during my year at art school next door in Hope Street, was my muse, my vessel of feeling and of God – I was agnostic and 18.   It is a vast and spunky building.  Liverpool is a pool of life.   Jung visited Liverpool in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections  …

In the 1960s, large swathes of Liverpool 8 were not yet reclaimed from bomb damage.   Those flowers in my dream, grew up in the bomb site, with the castaway graves.

..

Liverpool 8 – Cathedral & Hope Street 1968

Dreams No 237   17 March 1976

MANY OF the houses and squares of Liverpool Eight have gone.

Those great spaces where bombs fell, where the rubble of people’s lives has been cleared away, are now fresh planted gardens of flowers in which yew and other dark trees grow.   From the open trench of its own excavation site soars skyward a weathered half century of pinkish stone; the Anglican Cathedral.   This grave never got filled in.   The Cathedral stands in its own workshop.   It isn’t even yet finished.

I remember the rotting gravestones of those who built with their battles of faith this tower.   They were slabs piled up, they were torn out of the ground and thrown into the mouldering dark bushes with the discarded bottles of the drunk, like dead playing cards.   The medieval King, Queen, Knight and Knave for a rosy crusade have no place in the modern world.   Uprooted on the undergrowth lie their epitaphs.  Heavy lies their argot in the discolouring rains of the centuries, forgotten is the “art gothique” – replaced by the indomitable resonance of this tower – forgotten like the bombed out slums of this city, whose sweat and vitals flowed on the Irish tongue, whose sailors of old came in from the sea and spread a dusky lichen of Lascar fever on the ground.   Silenced are the voices in the tomb, silenced the fighting,  the drinking and the masonry, the beds which sagged under whole families, the cats which ran around chimney-pots  –  silenced,  to the rainbow arc of a new Babel.

Nobody wants the old graves, or the obsolescence of their tears.   They’ve been swept out, like the old slums.   The human graveyard is now a public garden where people may sit, walk and push their babies.   And God gathers all the nameless masons of the graves, He gathers together the scuffed and blurred chisel of their writing in the open stone quarry, and points that finger, bluntly, back to the sky.   Perhaps God is the maker of rain, of a new lichen of flowers upon soil of fertile carnage.

Liverpool Cathedral, from the trench

Liverpool cathedral sketches – flowers, text and grave

extending flower breathe, 1987

man in flower field 2003

Liverpool 8

* *

 I took my sister to see the flowers.   We scrambled down a bank into the far corner of the trench to approach the base of the Cathedral tower, and look up it.   The trench is now a garden.   The deep warm spring colours of crocus points, and of daffodils, bluebells and snowdrops, with ragged robin, are the carpet that we tread.   I am clumsy – so frightened of crushing them.   They pulse up everywhere in the grass underfoot.   She’s the nimble one, not I;   I trod most gingerly, and cried,  I slipped everywhere in the riot, too sensitive, of colour, the heavy glow of petals in the long grass.   Among all souls, the Cathedral, one giant phallic column, sits upon the navel of the church.   Red-brown brick and stone, it soars roseate to all of the weathers, an anachronistic apostle for this pool of life, this century to inherit.   They are still excavating it from the earth;  a part of it here is grey like a great rock being carved by the sea.

 “Come inside,” I said to her, when we came close, over the banks of flowers.   “come and see the great space inside the tower.”   So we pushed open the heavy door in the wide dark arch at the tower’s base, and entered.

But the interior has changed.   They’ve completed the rear end of the nave from inside.   They’ve put in a false floor of pews midway between vault and pavement, extending over the entire length and breadth.   Gone is the uplifting, uninterrupted fall of resonant space within.   It is cluttered now with construct, with frameworks for theology’s cradle like any stifling church, and I could weep.   We had to walk all along this false floor.  At its furthest end I found a chink in it where some planks had not yet been laid.   “Come over here, come and see!”

We squatted on the floor, held onto a joist of unvarnished wood and looked down through the opening.   So far below is the real altar, it makes us dizzy.   And up to us drifts sound, as from a choir.

“Be careful,” she said   “Those aren’t vicars down there, they are buckets and brooms to clean the church!   Can you hear them?    What a heavenly hymn they make!”

“Before they built all this clutter,”  I told her  “you could come in here and hear the organ being tuned.  The deepest notes don’t sound, they rumble ‘till they’re no longer outside but inside you,   you are the pipe,  the vibration itself going out again from here  like a great ripple.    Hey – that fat lady down there sitting on the altar steps to give her feet a rest?   Lena Hill, at the Musgrove hospital back home,  black plimsolls with holes in them for her toes – it IS her! –  what’s she doing in Liverpool?   I bet her ‘usband is still Christmas shopping in Taunton with his flopsy …”

We listened.   We did begin to hear individual voices in the ascending celestial cadence.   They echo a place in our past…   “… but I punched the clock 7.30 this morning, you saw me didn’t yer love,  so the Supervisor can go stuff his own nose it’s me elevenses now …”    “… run ring-a-rosies round ‘im she did …”   “Ooh give us a break.   Where’s me fags?   Come on love,  the Reck room won’t clean itself you know –  such pigs they are,  pigs …”

These charwomen don’t sound very Liverpudlian,  they could be in the West country or anywhere at all.   The roar of a floor polisher somewhere blends them.   “I remember Mrs Hill,”  said my sister.   “When Dr Cameron came to tea, he had some stories about her as well.   It was when you were charring at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton where I had my bad leg.    The “wee one-eyed Scottish doctor laddie”  wasn’t very good at exams was he?   He wanted to be a real GP to the crofters in the Highlands with a shepherd crook and those awfu’  black boots  –  he was so romantic.   He didn’t want any of this hospital nonsense.   Anyway, he knew Mrs Hill, didn’t he?”

“Everyone knew Mrs Hill.   The student nurses called her Mrs Woman because of her ‘usband.   I thought she was fabulous, she showed me the ropes and talked about life, but I couldn’t blame her ‘usband really, she never took a bath.   After we’d cleaned up the Nurses recreation room for about a week, she stank so I couldn’t stand it.   But  – do you remember Dr Cameron’s dancing pumps for the Christmas theatricals?”

“Not the ones he went a-shepherding with?”

“Yes, the ones he left behind in our house.”

“They were covered with mud!   What did they say when you took them to the hospital?   Wasn’t he an actor?”

“Well they were going to do Swan Lake in the Reck room for the Christmas party.  They couldn’t find enough white-coats for the dancers, so they decided to put on something a bit easier, you know what they get up to in hospitals.   I put the boots in a paper bag addressed to Dr C Cameron, Kiddies Korner,  because he was interning in Obstetrics.   Mrs Woman took it up to the Labour Suite and left it right by where he scrubs up.   He was only a Junior Wee.   Why did he start coming to tea with us, didn’t he play the flute or something?    He only had one eye, the other winked and watered …”

“He came to tea to chase the sheep with his viola and his crookie.   What sort of a doctor do you think he made?”

“God knows.  Oh look –  down there.   On the altar, see.   Something’s starting to happen.”

In theatre they’ve rigged up a waste paper basket on stage.  A giant papier-mache snake uncoils out of it in mid-charm, wrapped in a lady’s stocking.   Next to the snake the wide bottom of Mrs Woman polishes the stage for the festivities.   Tousled in her dirty flowery overall, and aglow with the stage lights, she rests upon her mop, complains vociferously about her Supervisor, and all the little theatre nurses applaud her.   Two surgeons on stage, who are not Junior Wees but Senior Registrars, have fiddled with the lights and props.   The bulk of Mrs Woman is now thrown into high relief.   Her own stockings are defeated by the girth of her thighs, she wears them rolled at the knee and undresses her marriage for everyone.   The snake in the basket nodded gravely, for the items of the Christmas show ranged from striptease to Socrates.   The bed she lay in was made by the ancillary nurses  – “You don’t need any training for that,”  announced all the cleaning-angels to heaven.

The show was a dreadful flop because of a bust curtain right at the beginning, but all the students received free sausage rolls and mince pies at the Interval, with the Supervisor’s compliments, and someone gave Mrs Woman a cigar for her trouble.   She left her bucket and mop where they were, cut her cigar in half, and shared it with me backstage.   We squatted side by side in a sort of tent between the curtains so the Supervisor couldn’t see us for dust, and the smoke was good and dark.

“I don’t know what they’ve done to me back,”  Mrs Woman went on   “and me ankles won’t stand for it.   You could be an ancillary nurse yerself, you know.   They’re ‘aving an epidemic up there in the Maternity ward, and they need all the ‘elp they can get, it’s better than going around every day on all fours,  look at me, why don’t you try it love,  you’re only seventeen, you shouldn’t be scrubbing floors at your age you should be enjoying yourself.   ‘Ave a word with Mrs Jeffreys.   She’s the Supervisor up there.   When she’s ‘ad a glass or two she’s alright, didjer just see her red face?   Now’s a good moment to get her.   Say I sent you.   But if you see Sidney on the way upstairs,  ‘e pushes the trolley, that dirty old swine, don’t let ‘im getyer under the mistletoe, ‘e’s always trying it on.   “I’ll tell your Supervisor about you,” he says when ‘e catches me   “I’ll tell her what time you clocked in today if you don’t give us a kiss.’   ‘ ‘Oo cares about my Soopervisor?’  I says.   ‘My Soopervisor can go jump in a bucket.   The Xmas shopping doesn’t get done by itself yer know, 2,000 years I been ‘ere nearly, cleaning up after you lot,  and nobody tells me any more when I clock in and when I clock out or whether I should do it meself at all.   I’ll give you Soopervisors!   You can take ‘er on if yer want a punch on the nose from me, and I’m going out now to do me shopping, I don’t care about Soopervisors, and if I see my ‘usband’s flopsy out there in the High Street I’ll trip ‘er up with the greatest of pleasure an’ a ‘appy New Year to you, five kids I’ve ‘ad, thirty years of marriage, thirty years, look at what I’ve suffered.   And I’m not getting no joy out of the inland revenoo for it neither, married or not, they sew it up nicely for themselves, we’re always the losers, we always were.   You enjoying your cigar?   Hey, you’re just not with me this morning, are you love, the morning after the show’s never so bright is it,  ‘oo’s your little friend with the white coat then?   Wasn’t he a cygnet in them bally-dance pumps?   They orter teach ‘im to dance a bit better,  ‘e was all over me floor, ouch –  me back’s killing me when all’s said and done,  thirty years,  thirty years of  …”

* *

But in those days when I was seventeen, I also read the works of Leo Tolstoy.   The ambiance of Anna and Vronsky through Mrs Woman’s flowery overall, made it smell rather over-ripe.   I drifted away from her to wonder about human life, the littleness of human lichen upon the altar of trans-substantiation.   I saw a synchronicity of fire and water,  the miracle,  the enigma of consciousness.   What did Anna and Vronsky see in each other glowing, who did they see?

These thoughts nourished me while I helped clean hospitals for pocket money and heard the problems of Mrs Woman,   So Anna K fell under a train!  the charwomen leaned on their mops, it made their day.

..

Something hurt in my finger.   It was a greenfly.   It had burrowed into my finger from some flower or other, and eaten its way up along the bone for the last couple of days, and was now a severe pain.   I squeezed and stretched the flesh till the wound opened and out popped the parasite.   It was brown and dry, and it had burst open like a seedcase in autumn.   I ascended like a spider the echoing threads of the chorus around the altar, to the heavenly floor above.   On the new floorboards by the gap, I found my sister still waiting.   The medical drama became a whisper again, a ripple from my adolescence in the deep of time and space.

My sister is now a small plump child in kindergarten.   She has to stay there as a boarder because our parents live away in a different part of the country.   This was my school also.   I waited by the staff room.   I didn’t know whether to address all my former teachers – some of them friendly, some menacing – by their surnames or their Christian names, because I didn’t know how old I was.   Such untidy ignorance embitters and distresses me.   I thought I had left school and grown up, but I haven’t, because I’m here again as a day pupil, with a message for her –  a message from our mother, who is not in Yorkshire any more.   But she didn’t want it.   She is crying, she is very upset about something;   I tore or defaced the letter before I gave it to her, and now neither of us can read it.   She is not interested anyway.   She is too small a child to be burdened with things she can’t understand;  like reading;  like being made to swim so deep a sea.

Something now is happening, something new.   Within her visibly I sense an unknown sister … our other sister, who was born to die.  A speechless sorrow surfaces.   The child’s name before she died at birth, was Bridie.   My father gave her name, Bridie in her Bravery, to the red-pink campion flowers that dance hardy in all weathers by the roadside.

In this moment, time has stopped;   to touch a child unknown, belonging to, and intimate with us, who lives in all the flowers.

Something from her reaches into my silence, to be heard.  She was too small to be burdened with the school of life, where her mother never held her, where they took her away to die.   I maybe looked for her since I was four years old, when my mother could not talk to me of her grief.   Did I draw all those babies at that time for my mother?  That is possible.   There is something children are not supposed or allowed to know;  a gulf that parents and children cannot bridge to each other.  Something was not enough wanted …   something still alive, but deep in the sea, an awareness received and felt, before the enclosures of our language came.

There are transpersonal meetings with the dead, quite outside the fabric of our years.   They arise afresh,  and do not have our words.

I think we know less about ourselves than monkeys do.   We can connect through any time and in any space, by our willingness being open, being quiet;  but it does not speak the way we are taught at school.

300px-Wildflowers_-_geograph.org.uk_-_473362

* *

False floors were built for this, a theologists’ heaven in Liverpool’s Tower of Babble-On.  They are filled with rows of pews like desks – a Sunday school, a crammer of dogma for gnostic children.  They immaculate the birth on earth of God.   They confine the babel of His babble to a totalitarian grammar,  meek and mild.

See sisters straying onto this hymenal heaven with their lost sibling.   They are genuine heretics.   What are they doing there?

They found a small rent in the mourning weeds of original sin.   Lost to theology, they look down through the gap in wonder, to where each and every life babbles regardless, deep in the soul.   A kingdom in a shared memory is theirs to share again.  Mrs Woman of the vintage guild of Mops gets someone else to do her clocking in.   A Scottish houseman in his peaked cloth cap, one eye bright brown,  the other a watery wink, romances the ewes on his days off duty.   The little girls see the eternal serpent of knowledge dressed up in a Christmas stocking.   They see the distribution of the Eucharist from Mrs Woman’s operation, with the innocence condemned by centuries of Church Supervision.

Inside the church they see a hospital.   Inside the hospital is a theatre.   Inside a theatre are the needs of the flock, and a rood-screen or curtain of the tabernacle.   Children of Israel floated their Arc of Covenant on the sea of their wanderings.   They birthed the medieval Mystery plays.   Shell after shell opens, like a babushka doll, in Mother Russia.

Our tower to heaven has around it a moat of flowers.   They were planted with a rain of grief for the ones who fell under doctrinal dispute, for those who were born and forgotten ;  and for the chorus walking hidden on earth, which jests, which births its own responses through the maidenhead, and which the pulpit extinguishes if it can.

Rest in Peace!    Chinks in the dogma allow stray odours of life to bloom, like flowers through a paving stone.

..

In Faulkner Square 1968

* *

And I seem to have stumbled in the radiance of those flowers outside, their vulnerable upthrust, because the next awareness in my dream is of water, the waters of earth which have risen through the soul,  which earth can no longer contain.    By the waters of Babylon we sat, and wept.   A stormy channel divided us from land for whose tender shores we yearned.

So near, so far, and in so deep a sea did you and I swim, we could be nowhere else, for it carried us further and further out and into itself.   Whatever happened to us, was in its hand.   I was sure we would reach the other shore if we swam, and that was that.    In the turbulent tossing sea between dark and light, day and night, I shouted, I loved the waves which swept me up and down, trod buoyancy over unimaginable depth.   Then I put my head down to swim, as you must do, and the lift and surge of the ocean waves increased.   Greater and greater they grew, then a wave broke over, submerging me.

And I struggled, strove against drowning, to become a fish, to awaken by two, by two …  upon the Ark of Noah,  to light.

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

The Photon

..

Phoenix, copied from Master R’s Trinosofia

This post is written in gratitude to all my fellow bloggers and the little Awards for Inspiration we give each other!   The Awards are places where the innumerable great streams of a river meet, and flow along each other.  Watersmeet.  Firebird.

In Alchemy, the first Matter – Sattva or Mercury of the wise – has a luminous substance.  Light on impact illumines and gives birth.  In the subatomic world, photon on impact releases a “new” photon.  Solar energy – at the speed of light – travels and is received in every direction, outward as inward.   Pilgrims along the great Roads of Consciousness, transmit the wisdom onward, everyplace.   Deltas without end form ganglia of transmission, as openly as wave-currents in the sea.

sea movement – maps

Then take the wand, and be AS THIS.   Be a lighthouse keeper.

Light inwardly, is CLARITY, the freedom of a perception, unbuffered and silent.   Limitless light concentrates itself in Kether, where the whirling motion begins manifestation.

Everything is Light, everything is the daisy-chain-movement of Light, including the difficulty of childbirth, and of human life and its pollutants, and of red in tooth and claw on earth and in the sea.

desert wadis, deltas, veins – Jordan

Light is obscured whenever the attention on it is lost.  I feel that Light, the movement of Light, is the true nature of time.   The time spent on battling with its dark materials when I lose that tender attention –  is dream-time, what-if time, maya time, imagined time, competitive time, fear-of-death Linear Time.   In that small illusion is trapped the bulk of humanworld and all its buildings and all its energy, crime, false economy and concerns.

When Light-awareness comes around again, it is found to be a seamless continuum:  and in this awareness, the dark materials in their tiny time – all the buildings, media and fatigues – are laid aside.  When I was not aware, I was immersed in the tiny manufactured time.  I was caught in the treadmill, and I got exhausted.

Think of this – which way shall I look?   Into the dark materials?  Or into the seamless Light?   Light it is, that watches the dark materials, and is their uncoiling.  Clarity.

For the dark is itself the Light.

What Reality do I create?

wave trains

Intelligence of Transparency

Light in this context, is the electricity in my body (manifesting through the blood stream) … the white river’s grace through my open mind … the current through the cable (Key 1) … the planetary polar axis and magnetic field, tiny portions of which are intercepted by humankind’s technology, to keep its own illusion lit up as cities in the dark materials.

The dark-matter throughout the cosmos, which links everything, is consciousness:  even as much of our brain is unexplored space.

..

Look up into the Angel’s Sound

..

Angel’s sound – Spiral chord polyphony

I was moved yesterday by Parker Stafford’s post on “How to bear Changes in the World”.  I think it was that one. And also his post about Death.  He said that when he wakes up, he is tuned in to – (my words for it now) -the vast Mother River, our solar Cosmos – the Solar sphere (in my understanding) which embraces Pluto’s orbit, and probably is galactic … the Connectivity.   The delta of the nerve-ends everywhere … in touch.

And Lissa writes of this too – (what an inspiration she is …) – she writes of our open and exposed human feelings which, raw as they are, touch the distant stars … filaments like spider’s string at dawn.   Union, even through distress and grief.

consciousness

..

Awakening to the sun

..

I understand too, that the tiniest movement in the eyelid of Consciousness, has the potential to stir mighty changes.   Human blind-unconscious activity disturbs even the vastness of the magnetic field, which manifests in weather changes.  So much cruelty in human history comes forth into the open now, that the Karmic process is inevitable.   We are a race in its infancy, barely past the destructive tantrum stage.  The habitat we are creating, will force us to maturity.

So – as night and day, sorrow and joy, keep coming – watch the flow of the Light which is Clarity, Existence, Creation … through a million fleeting dark garments.   This is Meditation, with whatever tools you need, to hand.

Be Loved.

The Wandering Fool, with spinning top – planets and nature

What a sky is left, where you once stood!

Wandering Fool with paper boats and hats

..

path of the phoenix

The photos of the sea and sky were taken by my daughter,
on her coastal path in Cornwall.

..

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/

Peace

..

..

18 July 1918 – 5 December 2013

..

..

..

**

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/