Beginning Something

Posted on April 5, 2013 by janeadamsart

Alchemy through the Red Sea

Materials to hand: a way through the Red Sea: waves to each side, drawn back, stand high. The ripples in the sand are fishes of the Sun.

When a big wave passes over, when the Occupying urgency isn’t here, my depleted system has to grow again – slowly – seeking equilibrium. Big outgoings from deep within are for me, profoundly therapeutic. Yet the shifting hurts. Protest! It is one thing to ride the tide: it is another to be tossed like an impudent surfer in its wake, or thrown among the rounding scuttling wet pebbles as it drops back into the further oncoming of itself. Then I droop over the bones and stiffen with the cold, and feel confused. Sing over the bones, as the women did of old, and wait!

a high wave in Portugal, with surfer

In my recent post Siva Tests Parvati, I mentioned Rahu, the Vedic god of the Moon’s north node cycle. Rahu was a demon: he crept up close to where the gods feasted on their immortality and – like Prometheus – dared to sip their elixir! He was discovered at once: they severed his head from his body. They condemned him to eternity with that sublime taste – a nectar, a mouth without a body.

Yet Rahu brings us – like the gift of fire – that tantalizing glimpse. He is a non-entity: the field-frequency of a moving point where Moon’s orbit around the earth intersects Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This point moves around the Zodiac, completing itself every 18.6 years. Rahu’s antipodeal point, south of the equator, is called Ketu. Rahu signifies what we accumulate: Ketu reveals what we have to let go. They echo the equatorial oscillation of Capricorn and Cancer tropics, the song of humankind.

Rahu is a paradox – awakening, charisma and delusion.

For many of us, Rahu is the archetype of the glorious illusion, the glitz, the power and quest of life. He is the “tantalus”. He is the inner tuition through which “the Shepherd leads himself back to Himself” … “the One most fully present in His seeming absence” … “honour Him with integrity or He will swallow you whole” … “there is no where in heaven or hell where I AM not” … “I do not believe – I know” … (Rahu’s cosmic Love song by Jeanette Kishori McKenzie)

Here is my brand new sketch of him:

Rahu, north node – Scroll down the Comments on this image, to its source, Rahu Baba/video links

His body is his own fantasy.

I like also this online image of Rahu: here he rides a lioness. How the Ganga and other rivers from the Himalayan watershed leap like lioness from the snows, and down through the deep valleys like Solomon‘s gazelle !

Rahu by srishti wilhelm vedicastrology.net

I went to visit Jeanette in Chichester. I left my camera behind last time, and we decided not to entrust it to the post: but the agenda transformed to a practical Rahu seminar, getting the boat ready! She teaches people. His lovesong in her body, is Let it Be, sing with it, be with, move with it, dance into its interest, difficulty and irregular unusualness – let bones grow and edges be crisp. I had a bandaged right wrist – a tendon weakness and OW – which she eased at once, by telling me to put big toe on ground like a root, and triad it with little toe and heel: and to stroke out the arm issue into the air, like pulling out little sticks from a beavers dam – after a bit it suddenly falls in and flows, and the obstruction passes out. My right arm still gets cross about last summer’s overwork in my mother’s garden: I kept on hacking and clipping way past the pain No-No.

The pulling out sticks and thorns from a wailing joint is the same as encouraging them to float out from my soul. It all takes time.

Rahu is this space with everything passing through:

Rahu’s lovesong is in my main problem which is the TIREDNESS. I had it at primary school, coming home from the overload of impressions, to cry and whinge. It still feels this way. Pain, psychic interior pain. The awareness brings up all the times I blasted on through the tiredness barrier; so I get it now, with dividends. I am a stranded dolphin. Too bad about the equinoctial flow and the joys of spring! Honour the god by easing along with what I am. My headache, the wear and tear of life today, pulls up many, many stuck voices of tiredness and skinlessness. They too have the right to breathe and to open. Reality.

We drove quickly to the sea coast, the tide was in, and I thought of my brand new folding bike and the empty Suffolk coastline, eagerly.

Some of Jeanette’s creative waterfall processes through my system, too. She made another AMAZING LUNCH, it began with juiced beetroot, apple, carrot, celery and lemons. It was EARTH-ILY DELICIOUS, but didn’t perk me up yet. It continued with beetroot and apple grated salad, and a warm mix of millet and veg, garnished with yeast flakes and hempseed, oil and balsamic. Fabulous. I sat on an inflated exercise ball – very nice for rotating lower spine and hips – this made me feel better.

Women in labour watch women work!

Rahu gathers together, indraws the threads, pulls the strings, Rahu’s outrageous love song is pure Uranian, a tale of the Unexpected, love it, live with it, receive it in full like a wave right through, and let it go.

music making 1 – keep practicing

music making touch

music making 2 – still trying to keep in tune

polarity

So we went to the sea for a moment, stood on the shingle in the salt, saw Her waves slapping in aslant, biting cold wind, sour little English houses and closed icecream parlour and carpark. Rahu by the sea, the great Mere. “Rahu takes the given dissonance right to the very edge where it falls into harmony.” For Jeanette the dissonance opens her into a yoga that explores and flirts with it. For me the dissonance is my recurrent Fatigue and dislike of public conveyance – sitting upright in buses or train. Try to be okay with it.

houses by the sea

And my lack of esoteric curiosity these days, in books or studying. Where do I practice? In the visceral deep feminine sea, in elements, in earth, in absorbing an Elder principle and letting it come through my writing – though I leave the methods and recipes to others. We are One, and I have Kabbalist “recipes” which are the Same. So nowadays I let it flower, and meet my sisters.

extend flower breathe

I went to Chichester to collect my camera, and I came home with a powerful interior snapshot – I was too lazy to take a photo – of me and Jeanette by the brisk bouncing sea, ready to launch.

The goddess in Rahu is a big Steamer with proper funnels … (a long oil ship went by, on the horizon). Siva tests Parvati with the love song we hear, again and again and again. It tosses us around in mountains, rivers and the sea. Be a Temple for the passing through of the Wave. Thinking again of the lady who dived into the cold, cold and foaming sea, and let nine waves swim right over her before she surfaced with an eldritch seagull cry from the deep.

jeanette’s Song of Rahu

In this light, I am turned to, and receiving the god. The god comes to me in any form of Siva. This is the nub. There are disclosures and disguises of the god. But for an undisclosed time now, I want privacy with the god. I am different child houses being sketched, as in House Life. Tired or no tired, the god arrives in my being, drags me around a bit, and shows how all is drawn together.

lake manasarovar near Kailas, roof of the world

Hm. The snapshot is in my minds eye now, of Rahu, Jeanette by the sea, a drawing – I can get her right by looking at the video in her link. Our embarkation is a picture she posted on facebook of a woman silhouette by the sea – Rahu is in both our minds for starters: and I see together with it, the Roof of the World Manasarovar photo, with a sadhu bathing in it; and my 1987 drawings of me and the Shadow coming out of the sea – my spirit child, Malo.

Markham’s Stormy-Petrel oceanodroma markham img 1891.jpg

http://www.cindyvallar.com/superstitions.html … (about the albatross, stormy petrel & mermaids)

Hornbys-storm-petrel img 9390.jpg

The Stormy Petrel is up and running! skimming the water bounce bounce … and me on the big blue ball while she makes lunch … and a couple of the St Malo waves/sea-scapes. Rahu with each breaking wave. And the Alchemy through the Red Sea. O yes!

List of ingredients comes together for the pot. And a hint of all those houses, with the 1987 Snake approaching my House. Ha ha!

serpent & soul ’87

woman in sea with Shadow ’87

woman with shadow Spirit child

We females each harbour and walk with Ms Fanny Cave in our inbetween – the Great Estate of Private Property. My TIREDS may be sensitive to a cosmic-earth cycle of rise and fall. It rises, it drains me, it is renewed. The Archetypes are energy fields, they tweak the system; they laugh at my temporary outline. The same RUACH within every form and disguise is the sea. And so my shoulders relax again, obey gravity, water runs off a ducks back.

woman gentling a difficult child

tread softly … for you tread on my dreams

Still I am tired, and have to go and walk my friend’s dog this afternoon; but what can I do. The cosmic, earthickal Magick trickles, flickers and is never fickle. It is the Power House – the Flame in a little cave.

wood lamp

GALLERY, sea-scapes at St Malo and Alet, 1986,
with two photos of new bike, last week

On a camping holiday in Alet near St Malo, these two leapt into my tent at night, in a dream

sketch, St Malo from Alet headland

sketch where clouds birth into islands at sea

as in Castaneda – slip into nagual, the crack of colour between the known “tonal” worlds.

April 2013 – roman ruins in background, Verulam

Very low tide between islands dotted around St Malo

April 2013 – near St Albans

I sat on the cliff and captured the rain coming …

… then ran back to the campsite to sketch the town just before the storm fell.

Castaneda inspired – seeing the space between the leaves

This may have been a dream also. She is the sea.

A Poem by Raat Raani. This arrived in July! Click on the drawing of Rahu 2, above, to see the comments.

A Halting Litany
(inspired by Shri Rahu)

You are
What I thought I could never afford seeing.
Afraid of seeing,
dare not behold – too scared to ever get hold
of the Darkness,
of this inverted Light of Yours,
with its painful sharpness.

If I get it right,
You are the only power
in this surge of fear from within…
Chastity in the clothes of sin.
Hatred
which is never apart from love…
Hell and Heaven and all above.
Yes and No and Not Stated.

All I have ever seen,
down to the point of the final contraction.
Every action and anyone who acts.
All the lies, all the facts.
Every-single-thing.
But it’s only now that I really can feel it –

Absolute
is a name for vodka
But You are 100% pure Spirit.

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. 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/

World Ends for Elevenses

Posted on December 22, 2012 by janeadamsart

At 11 11 GMT, (which being British, is Best) yesterday, my companion-in-the-Work and I made a nice cup of tea, stopped talking, and enjoyed together the latest Big Bang.

Steven Isserlis & friends rehearse Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time at Wigmore Hall in ’88

What a great day! Everything is ROUND, like the Mayan calender. I even got a snowball from Israel – (my cher ami’s family) – and threw one back to them:

rebbe & rebbetzin celebrate Yule

This drawing was done back in the naughty 90s, but my dear Ex in it (currently in India) looks rather like my cher ami now! – but has more hair.

OK Xmas cracker: now for my usual SERIOUS STUFF.

Fool 0 Hermetic tarot

I sleep better this week, and woke this morning with a vivid impression of two long electric cables being plugged in – (to me?) – blue and yellow. These colours were in something I saw or thought of, recently. Anyway, they are the colour tones of the Priestess and the Magician/Strength/Fool. Priestess and Fool are my old partnership. Blue and yellow irises: buttercups and blue sky – the colour recipe some people use to go to sleep with – remember that.

Priestess 2 Hermetic tarot

Today has that winter grey feeling, Xmas chores are done (except Slippers and Calender) and I might go snuggle with cher ami this afternoon, and watch strictly tinsel on TV. I feel as if every tree is covered with snow. It is raining.

In the world are many disappointed dressed up persons with nowhere to go. The Great Moment passed and nothing happened. The Great Moment has informed my psyche in recent years, because I am sensitive to the collective astral pulse and its themes behind the heartbeat. That meant my little “me” subscribed to some of the nonsense, and felt apprehensive, and blogged like mad.

It is so beautiful the way the symbols cohered yesterday, and gently touched – especially Paul’s xmas card for me, with all its Circles and Eyes, like raindrops.

The Great Moment is now, and passing through all the time.

The Companions of the Light and of crop circles, set up 11.11.21.12 End of Mayan Time, as a joke – to give all the humans a tension buildup, whose relaxation helps us behave a bit better to each other … the relief of a belief. It was in the collective subconscious. Of course, most of us pooh poohed it and went about our business, but it was there all the same, the butt of many a bad legpull. And for the gun-psychosis victims in the States, their parents’ world ended just the week before. The agony.

Those children, those souls were “taken out” abruptly. Many interesting souls died in 2012. They are precise, creative placements on the membrane’s other side. A child’s sudden removal is a bud taken in full fruit. Some of them were advanced souls, and their brief of birth was not to blur their spirit-level with the problems of life. They incarnated just enough to get earthed, be loved, and acquire some language; then go back behind the veil and do their job. Those children now are strong. But it is not sufficient for their grieving parents to join self-interested séances. The grieving parents have to grow, to realise their child is in the Life Stream for their own and the human evolution, through the tipping point. And contact. Aquarius is the contact with the whole human ocean around the globe – experientially, scientifically, cybernetically and spiritually. Touch hands.

in touch 20.12.87

As consciousness, none of us are born. None of us die. We are in eternal connection.

The soul is an infinitely wider landscape than the small presentation of it which births into a family’s love, upbringing, school, abuse, and adult Karma. Rapidly those little ones with their irreplacible gap-tooth smiles, shot through the veil, and now are transpersonal Counsellors. The many sudden and “meaningless deaths” of loved-ones, increase the Manifestation of the Wise, as Aquarius dawns and lifts the dust. For those little children are ancient Ones.

I have yet to experience the traumatic death of a loved one. All the deaths I have been with so far, have been at a ripe old age, or ready and willing to go; so they were celebrations. My parents are still alive. I am nearly 64. I don’t know how I shall feel when they go. BUT – I used to dream again and again, that my baby daughter died. I even tried to dig her up. Those were recurrent nightmares of streaming, shattering, unbearable loss and grief. THE GRAVE.

In my last life, she was aborted from me; my cells have the memory. It is said that I, as young Sarah, died in 1895 at 48, from ovarian cancer, which is grief. It fully tasted me.

The antipodean seer who told me this in 2010, was reading my Akasha records quite accurately at that time. Then a moment came when for various reasons, he could no longer do so. He had been going to give me all the details. He wrote and told me not to correspond with him any more.

In this lifetime I remember, when I was in my late forties, worrying I may not survive fifty, I might desert my daughter, my parents and my loved ones.

My Cheiron return pushed this button hard! – the wounded healer, my daughter’s “eclipse” into San Francisco. I was able to keep in touch with her during her wild years by being silent and calming down. Somehow I knew in the silence she was well, and that this bedrock honesty is better than conventional reassurances.

Goodness! What unexpected and interesting thoughts, this morning.

Placement at the other side is Consciousness each side of the Yule door: a delineation as the Age of Aquarius matures. The Age of Aquarius began in 1600 when Kepler met Tycho de Brahe and plotted the orbit of Mars; but Aquarius in full, begins around now. There are big penumbrae of passing, between Ages. They overlap, casting a pomegranate curve of shadow: vesica pisces. December 2012 is the present portal – Jesus’s birth and death was perhaps another.

A Great Portal requires nothing more, than to sense it is there, and go about one’s daily life in a relaxed way.

Life goes on

Regarding grief and its expression, and how unreachable I was to my family until I broke down during Marisa’s travels, and said how painful it actually was …

On an Ascension path, one is bound by an astral loyalty to the Guardians which makes expression in life extremely difficult. I tended to chatter in code, and in slogan, and to preach. This appears like arrogance. It is not. It is the struggle to find a language in which both emotional realities – each side of the Door – are honoured and can converse, or agree not to. It is painful, and for a long time isolating. Growing older, erodes the resistant membrane, and helps me to laugh at me, to be vulnerable and to share.

There is a close relationship between those who pass on and those who stay on the earth plane. We who stay, assist those who pass – in our daily actions and understandings – to become coherent in their transpersonal duties, feeding back. We are all interconnected. Wherever this is recognised, is Consciousness. It is the sunlight breaking through my Path of Awe.

put on space?

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.

Other blogs: (click on image) – Aquariel, Reckless Fruit (1), Reckless Fruit (2)

Aquariel

Whom do I give power to?

Posted on November 9, 2012 by janeadamsart

Subconscious & the Worldview 1987

Provide-ence is an ongoing tapestry through which we wake and go to sleep, as the thread goes in and out. When I die, I sleep to wake again. Each life is a training ground, or school, TO WALK the map. Each time I am born I find myself with the familiar set of fascinators (problems) but differently expressed; and the means to progress them. Next spring, the same leaf opens, to a different angle on the tree. The lilies of the field and the squirrels are provided for, and so is each nut to the ground; the galactic and subatomic detail and the DNA beyond our grasp.

How do I find the Providence rather than an Accident? – by opening and slowing down my perception, at any moment. Slow down my thought. Accept tough love also.

sleeping parents 1 – 1987

The fragile flat coastlines to our dark hidden continents, interact, and tend to ignore providential warnings from the sea. “Many times through the aeons and small millenia, the trees go back and forth; humans adapt; life and death breathe in and out; systems exhaust their time and are replaced. Observe the tipping point, and keep practicing,” said my Kabbalist Elder last night. Very few humans make conscious choices. How do we recognise them, from the mass heritage of floating pressures to bear? What is Accident and what is Providence?

Sleeping parents 2 – 1987

Accident is a rush of waves against each other, an untidy conglomerate of tempi. In the dimensional spectrum, subjective states awake or sleep. When you shift levels, the blind intercourse of billiard balls completely changes its nature. The message of the Upanishads is: “it is only the body that dies.” Ah, the poor wordy scholars! Accident is revealed as Providence when time within it slows and stops, like it does before a sudden death; and the level opens wherein you see with it, the screenplay of your whole life. The pattern, the tapestry appears.

The sudden death is but the lifting up of a veil I thought was life and history.

My Elder has a strength and breadth of outlook, which helps to lift mine above the local fusspot plane.

Sleeping parents 3 – 1987

Thanks to WordPress, I expand and alter the map whenever I wish. Here’s what today’s post originally began with, as intended:

Mr C and Mr O …

My defining symbol and hope, emerging through recent events – that the tea party guys and the re-elected President agree to trade moneybags and get real in the coming fiscal emergency, because actually they need each other now – and not to bite the hand instead of the cakes.

… begin to spell C and O … co-operate, or else.

Firemans lift (Copied from “multiracial team” in http://www.photosearch)

However …

I discovered through a providential intra-blog-link prompt, an http://phaelosopher.com, who writes wise words: Thought for Food. This was last night. He reminds me – don’t give away the power to the whole fantasy – ELECT MY SELF.

Whom have I the power to elect, at any moment, any meditation, any movement or thought, wherever I am? My Self – the Godcosm. This unlimited room of my being is private, unimpeachable, all powerful and eternal. It is rather like Douglas Harding’s way of being built open. Elect my Self. There is no other way to begin.

Sleeping parents 4 – 1987

When I think of all those stars and stripes across the pond, whose job is to demonstrate how not to be, with their impassioned presidential cutouts, and the political hell of it all … and my emotions getting caught up in it, wanting to understand … My own thesis (or this-is) now reflects: the true empowerment is Here inside – not the outreach glamour and worry, nor any society, personality or governmental type.

And not my cher ami in Golders Green either, who just this moment, while I was sitting here wondering what to write next, poked his phone, and chucked me out of his heart. He hasn’t done this for well over a year. I know his problem’s pattern of old, how it builds up and suddenly breaks out; and to NOT TAKE DELIVERY – but my hands shake, my mouth goes dry, and adrenalin spikes. Why? It is a deep trauma embedded long before his day. I feel punched in the gut, furious, deeply hurt and shocked – ALL OVER AGAIN. I am also in an utter frazzle how to compose a cool bog-off return text, to rebuff his flak. I also feel free, which is fragile. Go for a blowout in the hills, and don’t think. Poor bloke is starting his second Saturn return. Wash him outa my hair.

Sleeping parents 5 – 1987

Whom do I give my power to? How difficult it is to “keep practicing”! – the visceral black cloud whirls up a storm to break my house.

Frightened child awakes – 1987

When it is that difficult to have a relationship with a man I love dearly, and sometimes don’t like – thank God we don’t live together – why should I expect and require the other stars and stripes of the world to get along? The human condition starts here at home at my kitchen table in a mess, and nowhere else … and another ancient feeling in my solar plexus seems to uplift through it, seeking some altitude, solace, a view, and even a smile.

Roll with it! Tao with it! Grieve and tear, and yet rejoice in what the Providence provides, the whole of which I cannot see, but sense, and know to be true – the wild fling of life out flung, chucked out from his heart – so what? It was hemming me in a bit!

Each time the heart is broken, it actually expands … if you let it.

Pain into the open, goatish Pan – 1987

And do you know? An hour or two went by, and I didn’t walk out, I put in the writing at the beginning, about Providence, from this morning’s journal; and found in a ready file, a scanned sequence of Sleeping Parents which interweaves my stories of election and lovers’ tiff so providentially … and I am now HAPPY. To be honest, I am not pleased with him this week, either. Some time off, suits me fine – school’s out. Aligning to the event, the hurt, and letting the creation flow, slows down and turns it around like a fruit. Pain is a potential blessing; honour the situation. We are pissed off with each other – so it balances! I won’t give power to theories and replays, worrying about him – I know him. He has multiples of nine lives.

Drawing with eyes-i closed – 1987

It is a beautiful autumn day, a long dark cloud-bank cruises along the rooftops of sunlit houses and the air is pale oyster shell. There is the joy of being. It seems when I said No to the useless argument, my inner peace awoke. The tempo of my being curved towards encircling. We live in interesting times, and Mercury is retrograde. I feel the winds of change.

BLOG NEWS – I shall shortly be putting in my “About”, the links to my two new blogs.

Aquariel (http://janeaquariel.wordpress.com ) is a companion to this one. It has one post in it so far, and I shall probably add to it once a fortnight.

The Reckless Fruit (http://therecklessfruit.wordpress.com) is something quite different. It is still in preparation. It is a book – my 150 “Taunton Black” charcoal drawings, with sketches, doodles and poetry, done at school during the 1960s, and contains my best work. It is a documentary in two parts. It is being published as a thing complete, when ready. I finished revising and uploading Part Two, and I go on to complete Part One, “up” the timeline, so it can be read in sequence “down” the scroll, when finished.

The Reckless Fruit has ten chapters so far. They are posts, still listed at the bottom at present, but I shall move them to the side bar, to access.

There were a few teething problems in both blogs, so I’d be grateful if anyone giving it a try would comment if pictures are not appearing where they should, etc.

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.

Sandy

Posted on November 2, 2012 by janeadamsart

Under the Tempest lives Prospero.

When my heart is particularly touched to draw, I sometimes turn the photo upside down, and draw it upside down, then turn it round and finish it. Seems a different region of my brain comes into play, and my drawings done this way, are more honest: the proportions are better. When I went up to Waitrose yesterday, and saw this photo in the paper, I cried. It said everything. I cannot say why.

Here in England, we are a fraction the size of the United States, and the things which happen to us are correspondingly on a smaller scale. Sandy was a thousand miles across, leaving scenes resembling the tsunami in Japan: our Great Storm during the night of 16/17 October ’87 was perhaps 50 to a hundred miles wide, at its full strength.

I was drawing before, during and after it. So I attach below, my picture gallery of this sequence, in solidarity.

There can be nothing more terrifying than Natures apparent malignancy, unleashed against our lives, homes and loved ones – perhaps even more than man’s inhumanity to man. For Nature is the only reliable home we have.

Symbols abound – political, ecological and of history, during our era of the tipping point; and not one person’s private thread is unaffected.

Here is not my time or place to opinionate or discuss these symbols; except one. As we cross from one temporal Great Circle of the “Mayan-calender” into another, (as if through an hourglass) it is curious that the East coast hurricane got re-christened “Sandy” even before the waves arrived. The waves threw great drifts of sand over the streets of New Jersey. The only thing wise to say with any certainty, is that Sandy is a wake up call, wake up from the national dream: it changes the patterns and fates, and moves them differently through each other. There are breaches; unexpected reconciliations occur also, in a concerted effort to mend and rebuild the human landscape.

During our English October storm in ’87, I was viscerally aware of an “alchemical process” stirring under the blast. To discover the meaning, if any, we need to look below the turbulence. Under the tempest lives Prospero.

Prospero is not only the guardian of spiritual wealth and heritage, but also the human factor awakened in cataclysm, to draw together, face harsh truths, assist and console one another. Prospero tames and teaches Caliban.

My drawings in ’87 were aware of the approaching storm, before I was. I was emotionally asleep, along with the infamous weather forecast; the sketches from my subconscious, were awake.

Before the Tempest

Before the storm ’87

anxiety ’87

Welcome across? ’87

the day before … ’87

After the Storm

… and the day after. ’87

Monster nightmare, or Wake Up ’87

The Wounded Isis Tree ’87

King Lear – “Blow winds and crack your cheeks!” ’87

Gust ’87

Carnage ’87

… and praise Those that Stood ’87

Destinies and fates thrown across each other ’87

Prospero

Shelter ’87

Ancient voices and wisdom begin to emerge: Prospero ’87

Forage ’87

Storm’s inner alchemy: a crucible of peace ’87

The living trees and civilizations around Earth’s crust share a common root, the crucible of the core.

Dragon & Mother Isis ’87

Mary Gaia with baby, 1956

Whatever the outcome:

No one who leads a land, is superman. He or she contends with too many conflicting self interests in government, and strives to keep a firm middle road.

If he is lucky, he keeps his integrity and his honesty, and is not afraid to declare his limitations openly. No change happens overnight. Nor is change brought about by just one four-year term of “Yes We Can.” “Yes we can” needs to complete the process, through all the “no we won’t” resistances to it. That takes courage.

The winds of change we witnessed this week, are a stern picture; the storm accelerates our vision. Hurricane Sandy on earth is a tangible warning, as is perceived all round the planet, from the higher plane. Besides destruction and tragedy, it blows out the cobwebs, and a much further horizon may clarify. Each Tempest, in a single soul, as in a nation, contains a seer, or transforming power.

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 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) – along with many other creations in house.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Watershed Tales -The Tree is a Fountain: The Man in the Ravine

Posted on October 30, 2012 by janeadamsart

This post, and the next few – though probably not consecutively – will include a story from my Watershed collection. In the mid 1970s I went through a very difficult time, which flowered at night – or under earth – into hundreds of vivid dreams, many of them visionary.

I wrote them all down, and years later, began to de-code and compose some of them into stories. They became my experiential laboratory; the archetypes arose.

I call it the Watershed, because it is like a mountain ridge. The “waters” from it, irrigate the channels of my whole life and landscape around it, far into the past and future. Because of the Watershed, I don’t perceive a life-time as a linear progress, but as a solar orbital system: a sphere. A pulse.

My spacetime diagram is of a leaf dropped on water: the concentric ripple. The same are soundwaves, light cones, and the Watershed: from which the events of a lifetime descend and flow to manifest in all directions …the way a tree grows. We are not normally sensitive enough or “programmed” to detect the wavelengths of warning and encouragement which come from “future” wisdom. But they are there! and hindsight always reveals them.

A peak of intensity in any lifetime irradiates the past and future equally. It is that life’s gravitational centre and purpose to be. It is like the circling beam of a lighthouse.

Thus we are seen from “Above” – like ourselves looking down at rain-circles on the lake.

Comprehending this, is in the way we breathe consciously. What is the fountain breath?

The fountain breath is this, in whatever shape or teaching it takes, up and down, root and shoot.

Invoking the very best in life: peace to all beings: a prayer for a friend in pain, or those in the storm: a drawing together of the Great Work … light the candle, focus the third eye, and stretch open armed a Tree, a Chalice, an Albion witch, moving a little with the dancing Ch’i.

The Tree’s branches receive the sun. The sun bedews and sparkles in them. The sunlight trickles down them into the trunk. The trunk with all its oaky bark flowing upward is a fountain, resplendent from the ground. This is “meditation”.

tree diva

Think of the trees everywhere now, whose leaves turn gold and fall, preparing for the winter nude, the cold deep dark waters of polar tide – the tide beneath the waves; receive back into essence the wet, wild kingdom, Mother Ceres of the tiny seeds that grow – Persephone in Hades – in the ground.

Ceres & John

Drenched I am with the rain, the frost and sea salt, dark and drenched and wet my wood: and vibrant is my capillary in the sky, its leafy burden shed. Vibrant are my fingers in the silver sky – the throbbing of the festival.

Here is one of my Stories of Life –

“The Man in the Ravine” … Dreams No.189 27 September 1975

Events led me down the valley into this very deep ravine.

It is like the tale of the Water of Life. Three princes set out to find the Water of Life for their sick father. The first two were walled up in a ravine along the way because of their churlish behaviour. Others, I know, have been here before me, and come to grief. Perhaps I’ve come here to find out what happened to them.

The ravine had sheer high cliffs that walled it around three sides. It was a cul de sac. So deep down was it enclosed that in here it was always night or a very murky twilight. If you looked far up, right up the mountain walls, you could see daylight or the sinking sun. But the base of the ravine was not much larger than the floor of a large room or hall. To reach its depths you went down a natural stairway of rock, a kind of ramp. Over the floor of the ravine you had to pick your way over the mud and over the puddles of water murkily shining. It had a warm and velvety miasma. I explored it carefully. I had to cover the whole of it or reach the enclosing wall over on the far side, what was I looking for? Because assuredly I was seeking out something. What happened to those poor fools right down in this darkness from whence if you looked up the walls you could see, like a great rose, the day above? The place was repugnant.

Suddenly I stepped in some soft mud and was sinking. I had waded into one of those bogs that suck you down and down into the morass to drown. I fell full length on the mud and struggled to get my right foot free of the all-enveloping ooze, and I succeeded. I pulled myself out. Then I went over to the right side of the ravine where there were some big stagnant puddles, and began to wash my feet and sandals which were covered with sticky smelly mud. From there I watched the bog where I had almost sunk. It was displaying a curious activity. A sort of waterspout or turbulence of liquid mud began to jet out of it like a fountain. Out of that unrest came a small solidity, a box or a square tin; it fell and lay upon the quivering mud. Then out of that mud came a man!

A man lived here, within the mud, within the bottomless floor of the ravine. He emerged, a stocky sort of man. The place had been disturbed by a question, and out he came. It was extraordinary that he should live and breathe down under the mud. He had a malign power.

We had a conversation, him by his bog-hole and me by the puddles where I’d been cleaning my feet. He is a sorceror. He causes in me very strange physical changes. A certain look from his eye immobilizes all my nerve. I can see him a little. Stocky, squat, with dark curling hair. The lines of his face flow downward.

“What is in the box?” I ventured to wonder.

“I am,” he said.

That makes perfect sense. The box is discarded. It contains me. The mud erupting flies apart into disjointed brown crescents of time. Between them are swirls of chaos. The newborn cannot read the signs. Lots of animals live down here. My right arm has gone. But now I have three heads, and I see and believe in a different world from each one of them. I am terrified. But I have been told to open to my fear. Now I am an animal, a creature I do not know. Now I have branches like lopped limbs from a tree. This branch waves from one of the rock walls of the ravine. But this one too is deep in the silty floor. Yet another strains in the sky in a great bolt of wind. All over the ravine is scattered the (w)hole not I. It is the darkness. It is the vivid strength of the man in the mud, his trident, his trident touches and jerks me into three-plane being.

I am the Great Cat. I am the life that runs in cold metallic vein through the fish. I run like a rat, the colour of the ground. I am the bull and the goat and the twins. We are having a kind of conversation, him by his bog-hole and me … ah yes, that is it, he has stopped the time. The quintessence of each animal spirit broods in this place where no beginning ends. “You are too mercurial …” but my shoulder has burst. I cannot describe it. I fall yet I stand. I have no control over any of these changes that succeed one another rapidly as air. They are all in his alien hand, whatever he draws or gestures, that I form, and then form un-begun suddenly an owl. The bird is shrieking. The form like soft clay silent is putty and quicksilver in his alien hand, my penance. This is not me. It is according to his powers. I accept this, for I trust him. I have no choice but to trust him. There is no other way save submission to these curious disturbances and transformations. Some of them are painful like fire and blood. Some are nauseating, and some are cataracts of water: it is a tempest buried in earth. This is where I am. I am here with this man of the bog and his powers, and that is that.

That is clay on the potter’s wheel. That is the bed of the river.

“Water,” I said to him “the Water of Life.” (I think the others were devoured by the bog).

“You are their successor,” he replies “but you didn’t succumb you know, to what drowned them” “What was that?” “It was the walls you know. Walls they rode themselves into, grew up around them. These people were interested only in their own ends. You must pay the price. But we can speak. Here we may speak. There never was any prince with whom I could hold conversation. This is unique you know. You must stay. You are the first of them returned. So I must hold you here.” And thrice with his wand he struck me. Water gushed from this rock, this matter. Life. Cried out.

I am the prisoner of the man of the bog who till now killed everyone, the wrestler without a friend. The angel is all of the night. A curious friendship seems to be developing between us. In this dim grey light we became close. He came over to the puddles where I am and I stroked his arm a little, to teach myself to like him. He didn’t bite. He didn’t stomach-sickeningly change me into anything else. He emerged, a stocky sort of man, so darkly invincible that my strange commitment to him must be total, else I die in darkness, unseen. I surrendered. There is no escape from the ravine.

Once he told me, gesturing skyward, that in the east with dawn, there rises the lotus of a thousand petals white and pure. It floats over the azure sky, the tip of every petal blushes with gold, but earth dark, deep and dank holds her underwater root. He said that in the west this flower sets. It furls into a great rose, rosy red song of the heart, the scent of the Spirit. I have to learn to love and obey the one who reveals to me such things. He is stronger than me. Many of me that came down here before, have come to grief, and are prisoners. My bond with him may release them. “You are their ransom,” he said “if you survive. There are more to come, Proserpine.”

Whether or not I wanted to escape from the ravine, I cannot now remember, nor what I did in captivity. I know only what the hostage knows. He was stronger than me.

This post combines a Pluto initiation with the fountaining tree of life. The pictures and images for this, proceed in waves, an alternating current.

Tree lovers, Quantock hills

Dark Hades and Persephone the day.

Trees love, by a creek in Arizona

Descend: look down from the cliff top through trees to Sea – (Alet, St Malo, Brittany 1988)

Stone slab and secret hieroglyph (language) 1987

Hermes and Persephone 1987.

This drawing has many Hadean elements: three ears of wheat, the Goddess under earth, the ferrying of souls. The curving spinal column is a “shorthand” reminder of my ancient lizard nature, containing all those souls and deaths of life and consciousness to come – in horizontal mode. The ears of wheat are seasonal appearances. Hermes Trismegistos, top left, oversees.

Pluto and Persephone ’87

Persephone meets her subterranean dark lover. Alchemical engravings often feature a Saturnine gentleman with an injured leg. I used to see this in my dreams also. It is a place or a someone where some healing or completing or time is needed. And time and the way it unfolds and manifests, is Karma !

Plutonic Mysteries (1)

This was the first time I twigged the graphic relation of the Venus and Mars glyphs.

Plutonic Mysteries ’87(2)

Looking down through spinal chord into a Yab-Yum of sorts. I didn’t know the terminology when I did the drawings, and had not heard of Kundalini. The language arose spontaneously. It was explosively satisfying to create and combine the light and darkness. I drew quite slowly and thoughtfully in the surfacing storm.

Elephant trees: Alet, near St Malo, Brittany ’87

Studying Castaneda’s books at the time, these drawings explore and outline the space between the branches and the leaves – my defining lesson as a visual artist.

Conference in the Wind: Alet, near St Malo, Brittany ’87

Another outdoor study. Tipp-ex is a marvellous enhancer, depending what you are drawing.

Tree space atoms ’87

Living upside down and inside out like this, was scary and exhilerating – every atom of the air alive. Space and the feeling of interior and outer space, is the key. That same awareness implanted the dimensions of the Cube of Space and the Tree of Life, yet to come. It acts subconsciously nowadays, but informs my life and work, generally.

4our Trees

They form a four-towered “tower of alchemy” – the vessel, our body, the Tree of Life all in one. For a lucid and detailed guide to this practice, combining Kabbalah, the Grail, Yoga, breath work and Tibetan Buddhism, see The Tower of Alchemy by David Goddard, Weiser books 1999.

Caduceus Tower Tree 2002

Here is everything combined – the caduceus or healing polarity, the Kabbalah Tree, the levels of the Tower, an oyster idea, and a stimulating problem for the right and left brain: try to draw the solar and lunar spirals, both hands simultaneously, crossing over, without stopping or leaving the paper.

Grail Trees 2002

Sanctus sanctorum: rose cross: the trees’ rings: oyster shell: pyramid: pearl

Fountain linga

A much more recent drawing, done earlier this year. I copied it from a photo of a carved Shinto shrine in The Cosmic Embrace by John Stevens. Apart from reminding me of the Fountain symbolism in trees and human beings, it makes an unusual door-knocker.

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Tree Spirit ’88

This image combining bud, yoni and encircling growth of time, is in my mind’s eye this week. It is like a baby’s hand in utero.

The Chakras on the Tree of Life (1992)

There are seven surrounding sheaths, probably for the planets. The sheaths of a tree become its bark. They fountain through the crown, and encircle again the root.

Roots in the Quantock hills

Tree seed Siva Shakti Yantra

31 October, this morning’s thought before posting: regarding cosmic synchrony, with life’s small details. This is more apparent to some of us, than to others. The visibility depends rather on the type of astrology pattern we are born into – and whether we can honour or whether we resist what we are given.

If it is hard to see synchrony as a whole, if daily life is frustration, fog and violence – focus on any one event, relationship or understanding, that has harmony. Cultivate it like a rose in a garden. Be creative with it. The principle invites its own, and gradually expands and links to its own – the osmosis of oasis. It is like a pattern of fields slowly becoming visible as fog or impediment clears:

“the silvery light that gleams around the clouds
breath taking, undulates
a floating, patchwork cloth of fields
whose margin into faery fades …”

But we have to keep practicing. That part of life which is magical or wise – it is not just an island. Keep giving it attention. The unfaltering principle is Self created. If I put my money on connectivity, sooner or later the connections appear for real, and are sustained. It is a dialogue, Self reflecting: but left to right, always changing.

1988

This self portrait was done without a mirror, with left and right hand simultaneously; building the bridge through the brain’s sides, subconscious and self conscious, crossing over. Here’s looking at you! The power of my left hand, which falters in life, is where the Teachers are.

Profiles welcome across atlantic; 1987

My heart goes out to all whose homes and lives are devastated in the big East Coast storm, and have to rebuild, recover and be prepared.

At election time: a wake up call. It makes the campaigning circus look somewhat irrelevant. Who looks best able to respond? Who has the gravitas and the troops? Who is truthful and trust worthy in emergency? Open question.

Elephant sky 1998

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BY THE WAY …

“The Man in the Ravine” echoes and invoked a certain spine tingling sound – for me – in Liszt’s late piano piece Sunt Lacrimae Rerum. It is in the Third Annees de Pelerinage. The music plummets to a fracturing, jarring depth and height: then into the abyss enters a Hungarian lullaby, far away and ancient like an angel, tender as a child – a strangely integrating alchemy. My favourite recording of this, if you can find it, is by Zoltan Kocsis; but this Youtube of Nyiregyazi playing it, has an antique curiousity value; and Liszt’s manuscript is displayed with it. The link in caps will find it on google, and other interpretations. Or the weblink, pasted onto your address bar, opens the video:

LISZT’S MANUSCRIPT – “SUNT LACRYMAE RERUM” (NYIREGYHÁZI) – YOUTUBE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzuO1B1p2PE

On the Liszt topic – (see my 11 August post Maestro – Some Views of Liszt) – there is more material on his and other composers’ work with Rosemary Brown – including recordings and sheet music – on Elene’s interesting blog, Elene Explores. (http://elenedom.wordpress.com)

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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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Listening with the Oracle

Posted on October 18, 2012 by janeadamsart

Some of my journal from a week ago has been sitting in the pipeline. Upon these images and impressions were “floated” my recent posts on Karma, Kundalini Shakti and the Tree.

Woman by the Sea 1987 – drawn with my eyes closed

What is Oracle?

The oracle is a quirky thing. It is a way – an ear to the ground for footsteps or the pulse of things. The same root becomes orator and orifice. “Ora” means “now”, in Italian, and also Or is gold, and the ore of metals: the aura of the dawn: the oral tradition.

An amphitheatre is shaped like an ear in the ground. The oracle speaks at Delphi – where a peculiar configuration of the rock and waterflow condenses human receptivity. The oracle is also a coracle – a little Celtic boat shaped like a nutshell.

Firstly we learn to perceive the omens – affirmations and resonances which pattern human affairs.

It takes a long practice to become reliably “oracular”. It is clouded by anticipation, hope, fear and superstitious tension. To some extent we need to undo our education. It is clarified by human whole response, moving with nature. The Australian aborigines’ “Dream Time” perspective and way of life is a seamless oracle with the landscape.

For the oracle we use formally, Tarot cards, I Ching, astrology, scrying and countless other devices. We use whatever forms for us, an adequate lens. Leaves on the ground would serve, if we give them that meditative focus. The key to the oracle is a moment’s concentration: peace. To that concentration, the universe mysteriously responds, with picture language, the language of the subconscious; and things are revealed which only ourselves can privately know. It is the psychic law of gravity.

You-night: from Owl-Fox shaman series 1986

The little fox comes through the long grass, near magic mushrooms; and a distant owl is in the tree. This is an oracular painting, because I let it lead me. I had a dream that the owl, my familiar, came and stood on my shoulder. Our profile is along the borderlands.

I use the oracle as and when moved: usually for a reflection on what is going on. As the waters become still for a moment, I look. It is like the trees by a pond, as ripples which broke up the surface, fade. Actually the oracle never ends. If I ask it specific questions, it may give me answers to others. I use the Tarot and the I Ching, as and when moved. My daily writing is my invocation and my divining rod. It leads me where I didn’t know I should go. It digs the earth, finds the well, and raises the spirit level.

Mischief can easily enter the oracle. Alliance with a tried and trusted teaching, such as the Tree of Life helps to guard the truth. Above all, we develop our ability to discriminate the Maggid (inner plane teacher) from the Flatterer or Tyrant. The hallmark is: the “inner plane” does not opinionate or give orders. It shows cosmic and ethical principles, and in the light of these, our own decision ripens.

Ebony shakti, siva, elephants

Journal 12 October 2012 – After Acu-pins

It is truly very marvellous to know human beings: the individual treasury to savour.

I’ve been dipping in Nothing Ever Happened – and do you know? Wonderful as that view is, and Poonja’s great stature and humanity, and him with Mira … it is to me, quite flimsy. Now you’ve got it, now you haven’t, listen to the teacher and keep quiet, there is no thing, be happy … it is very Indian, but cancelling out the Vedas and all their intuition of Nature. It is OK for a time of rest. Poonja had power of presence and siddhis and laughter. People wanted relief from their Stuff.

Wood lamp

The teachers’ personality and presence is fascinating at all levels.

But my devotion doesn’t go there! All that enlightenment is a carnival. It is not reliable, without a sound working grasp of the way the mind and the imagination work. Voluntary de-nutrition is not the way either. All the paths come to the same Thing, unthinged as the sea, whatever the texture and weave. How deep does it go? Self realization in the cave of the heart, assists the whole humanity in a way transcending any teaching or banners. At one time I tried to give up diary keeping, so as to toe the advaita line. No way! Ramesh Balsekar put me right. He said enjoy and honour what you are.

Light crossing the brook at Buckland Filleigh

I am guided by the Shakti, an elder feminine discarnate, and at this moment, the current is running in tune to her sharpness, my projection onto her. The woman births what the man built up over the years. The flavour of attunement has soft needles, for I went and had acupuncture yesterday. It prickles and yet it is a white flowing cloud, a magnetic fluid. It is the reality of my Sun mandala.

The sharpness is the way the Maggidim perceive. It is within and under their eyelids, like the core of the rose. The rose is a profoundly female organ, flag of desire, invitation. The pattern under her is both disbanding and integrative – (see dakini oracle pictures, below). She is a spider, yet she does not devour, she takes the dark staff and heals; that is her DNA.

What may I call you? Rosa? Maria Rosa?

Jupiter and Rosa

My history of Rosa is that she – I – was a moon of Jupiter Zeus, and he sent great charges of gravitational shift through my orbit, like lightning bolts. Thus were my initiations, and the acupuncture reminds me of them. I had a series of Watershed dreams during the 1970s; the initiations discharged their shock during them. I did a crash course of catching up.

sun wood yantra

I use the Secret Dakini Oracle (by Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger) for reflection. These 64 cards are a collage of Tantric and Tibetan deities – wrathful and joyous – with modern western archetypes.

When I ask it a question, it gives me picture-poems like Lyra’s alethiometer in His Dark Materials. Usually I lay out just the top cards of three piles, the present moment, centre, with its past and its future. This time, I also laid them out as “JHVH” – with the three cards which underlie each one.

Present moment: “Rose Garden“, with “Cutting Loose“, “Ganesh (in spider web, Lord of obstacles)” and “Mercury/Caduceus“.

and past …

… and future

The past is “Recall“. With it are “Last Laugh“, “Fuschia/As Above so Below” and “The Wish fulfilling Gem“, which corresponds to the Lovers. (You can see these better if you click on them.)

The future is “Self preservation“. With it are “Centering the Present“, “Solar Return” and “Joker” (Fool).

In “Recall“, big sea shells in the sky hear the sea and sands. “The Rose garden” has pure perfume shells like kisses. The Egyptian was an ancient priestess in the winds of time. I feel with her, the stars, anterior to swirling sands … and how they become dutiful bubbles and subconscious blots – the dreams and forgettings, the lifetimes of being human through millennia to come.

The cards under her are symbols of the Sun Mandala, dark and light. “Sri Chakra” is the ultimate Yantra. In the Secret Dakini Oracle, it is called “Centering – the Present“. “Solar Return“ is a new moon sun-eclipse: poems of eclipse and confrontation; enquiry into roots; dark night of the soul: astrology. The “Joker/Fool“ wears a solar swastika mandala, rosebud in paper hat, little world – doesn’t god play dice?

Are they dancers? or pillars? Wood like stone and elephants

The oracle – the underbeing: the tempo slows down and comes in with the tide

“We say you have your threads together now, and so you spin them out, concentrically. Speaking to you in this element while you are here, and hear, we instruct. Mandala, chakra, web, the fuscia and the gem; cut loose, lay down the axe and smile.”

Woman entering the sea ’87

“Recognise that this strata has nothing to do with life-form thoughts and troubles. It transcends and antecedes them. It has its own tempo.”

“Each oracle lets go baggage – 49, 64 and 0. Let out the reservoir. The reservoir was a meridian behind a closed door. The door is open. The reservoir flows out in a controlled way. We are its handlers where she goes.”

“There is no more to dictate from this level; it is all stored. Lean back into here, rest and be silent. Trust me. I rain and I shine. I AM my way of writing you.”

“As the reservoir flows out, the acupuncture pings: your dolmens and dancing dragons.”

wood lamp pings

“There is a conversation between practitioner and client, which doesn’t need speech. He can see and she can feel the dolmens. So it is with us.”

brook by Henlys Corner: snake water stone

“Your silence is my speech. I am the goddess of your being; the daughter of the Himalaya and of the stars. I am Parvati and Isis and Annapurna. I make you a dancer, a temple dancer slender, curvy and supple. I recommend you dance, to clear your weight off the front. I am your commonsense. I am the knowledge of your body and her renewal. I am X X criss cross. I am the crossing over of the rivers of Time. I am ALL WAYS the centre of the Flower. I flow the centre of the flower. Follow. Following.”

“Transmission is absolutely continuous to and in itself; register the blips and pin points.”

Young tree of life upon the old

Midwinter dancing with Pan ’87/88

I am that I am.

I put on Dead can Dance, and danced with and as the She. So now the nadis sing in the back of my head. The Ancient World is a worship like the storm in a tree.

Recall those nadis, amrita, sushumna, and shankini. They are dancers.

3 nadis dancing with Pan 1989

She dancing with Pan ’89

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Self enquiry and Shadows

Posted on October 11, 2012 by janeadamsart

The Fool & the Lamb write a book

I am trying to … investigate life, the lines, the tales, the untold, the features, the honesty … without emotional investment or subterfuge … as I guess a good novelist would.

Recollection is impossible in the sun-umbrella of another person’s flavour, or a strong surge of my own. At such a moment, my mind truly cannot hold more than one impression. What am I being shown?

Ramana’s raised eyebrow at the root of it, is way beyond and anterior to the modern advaita rattle. Honesty flows with Ramana and his strange life. The Teaching is a prattle.

Why do I like my cher ami (who doesn’t do “spiritual stuff”, and doesn’t read my blog – not one word!) – why the vitality there? Because he is an HONEST MAN, irritating as that can be. He sees through everything. He gets carried away by his own silly plans – but faces and endures the consequence, and that is the honesty. I love him because he is honest. Wow. That is a gem. This feeling when I’m out beyond the waves and swimming the deep sea – exhilarates. Thought stops. Reality shines.

Active “Spirituality” is the attempt to see through my own dishonesty. For a long while, the noble effort pushes up a bow wave of exactly what I am trying to row through. Ha ha!

fuzz tries to catch shadow. Ramana used to tell this story.

Krishnamurti also urged, to just remove the jacket. He never could escape from being Indian: his culture. Once upon a time, the wind and the sun competed furiously, to take away a man’s jacket. The wind blew and blew and blew, and the man wrapped his jacket ever more tightly round him until the wind ran out of puff. Then the sun came out and shone and shone, and the man took it off.

Arrive then, at an updated form of Self-enquiry? The vichara transcends any doctrine, and is applicable to all. Recognising that I hold mentally/emotionally at any one moment, my full flavour or another person’s … pause, to get a hold on the rich imaging and components. Each is a door to perception. It is even paper thin! Hermetic clarity … how Sod sees Yod-yesod.

The who-am-I mantra is not much use, if used as a tin rattle. But unspeeched perception, engaging my attention and sensory field, begins to “part the waves” as the Lovers’ Sword does. It un-muddies the waters to what is clod and what is fluent. I begin to see the drifting continents, unsouped, unsewaged. Tempo changes. Discriminate the subtle from the gross. Self-enquiry is a way of viewing plankton, the floating piscean populations. Keep confidence, that I learn to truly see, and am less hoodwinked by my handicaps. In the thick of life, how can there not be handicaps? Who plays golf without one? Charismatic persons play God because they cannot see their handicap, the sun is too bright.

..taking off shadows?

The wisdom of the NOW is beleaguered and betrayed by what I ought to do or say later. The NOW is an edge of the garment that I lift, like a bridal train. Now I feel quite attractive and erotically game; but this cannot be stamped onto an imagined “later” with my cher ami. Then will be a different Now – another garment; accept how it is. This week’s acceptance has an October clarity and turn of leaf: an informed sparkle. Gamble only on Now, to win the other nows; to be a “sun shine see through”: rain wet windy cold.

The robe is vichara, the journey is life, the Realisation is all around it. When I am dead I will see and be for real, all around, what I dimly and enticingly perceive: the lifting of the veil.

The absurdity of the Eastern patent, as misinterpreted, is the notion of getting rid of the i-thought before it is Self conscious … it just pushes more and more dung into the Unconscious, to continue disturbing the universe for aeons to come, while the meditator momentarily basks and gives Satsang.

The strength and sobriety of the Western rose, is its determination to make the Unconscious conscious. Then and only then, does the problem mature, become little, and dissolve. It only takes all the time in the world to be in a hurry.

Essentially this is what Ramana did and said, all his life, but few would grasp it. Few would grasp the nettle. The consequences – peoples’ worship, immobilizing him on his sofa, with indigestible food offerings – aged and infirmed his body – that and his own youthful self-neglect. The culture, the old, old tradition.

ramana & mother

But … here is a fresh angle on what is actually multi-dimensioned – how essentially different is the teenage Ramana taking no food and allowing the vermin to crawl all over him, from the bingeing and self-harming western way? What shared root, on entering adult dolt-hood? Basically, Ramana refused to go to school any more.

I was impressed and disturbed in JKRowling’s new novel The Casual Vacancy, by the agony of the girl trapped and cutting herself for relief, the criss cross razoring. I wanted to at times. The most recent time was a few years ago. In unbearable pain from something concerning my daughter, I ran to the living room window, scratching and clawing my arms till it drew blood. THAT PRESSURE. I was shocked. THE PRESSURE is behind the drinking, addictions, street oblivion and violent self abuse.

Reflect on Ramana 107 years ago, himself under THE PRESSURE even if sublimated, abusing his young body in a hot hell-hole, obliviously. OK, he had transcended his death and was with his Father Arunachala in Self ecstasy. But Ecstasy is also a drug.

Down to earth smack!

So: Buddha’s compassion with the obnoxious raucous young, coming of age, and confronted with the horror and barrier of the adult dolt, like a virus in the system. In more intuitive times, a tough forest Initiation was provided – or war alas, or hard work. As England has lost or given up its industry, there is hardly any real employment, nothing to engage with. Rage. Rage against … the dying of the … ight.

Therapy … the rap…

To jump the hurdle into a-dult is really dreadful, because one hates that encroachment, the boring tyrant slamming into oneself.

Understood!

My reaction to my teenage parental noose was rudeness, the dark Labyrinth, travel and hitch hiking. The Reckless Fruit. Poems investigating amorality.

a “taunton black” drawing: Wild Thing 1965

There is a deep JKRowling insight here, into the quest for authenticity – that battle-call – and its distortions. The lad called Fats goes so far into his own parentally-dislocated authenticity, that it turns him round and he grows up. Hey! Her book which everyone is cross about, is excellent. She has the knack of compassion – of making her characters as a whole, the youngsters AND their stressed out parents and community, so believable, you empathise them and see from different places. I see my feelings and my troubles when young, and when parenting, and what they are now.

drawing my self without shading 1988

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

(1) Touching the Hem, (2) Seal, Stone, Garden

Posted on October 2, 2012 by janeadamsart

Liszt Legende, St Francis de Paules

A link –

http://elenedom.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/where-does-music-really-come-from-more-on-rosemary-brown/

I follow Elene’s blog. After doing my writing this morning, I came downstairs and found her latest post in my email. For me, it develops my earlier post Maestro – Some Views of Liszt (11 August). It includes downloaded sheet music, transcripts of Rosemary Brown being interviewed and writing down the music, and another poignant recording of the Liszt/Rosemary Brown Grubelei – composed in two time signatures simultaneously – and other music.

The philosophy, the open quest and the music itself “touches the hem of the robe” or reaches hand to hand … a discovery from in between dimensions, which scholars find hard, but friends can find.

Today I am writing about ways of drawing near; beginning with my Kabbalah studies.

Here are Paul Foster Case and Anne Davies, the founders of the Builders of the Adytum. Anne took over the work after Paul died in 1950. I follow their correspondence courses.

A few technical points first – like notes on a music stave. Learning to hear them inwardly, takes practice. Gematria, numerology and notations are ways of expressing the ineffable in shorthand. We have to let them penetrate the clever mental fence, and be assimilated. (Assimilation is alchemy.) Then they become meditations – alive, joyous entities, in conversation and in the worship.

Each Hebrew letter has a numerical value, and as a hieroglyphic language, its use forms a music, a supra-conscious resonant lattice. So I read: the Hebrew YESODOTH (plural of Yesod, the personal-ego sphere on the Tree of Life) is a noun meaning Foundations. RZI YSVDVTh is “the secret foundations”. These letters add up numerically to 703, the extension of 37 (sum of numbers 0-37). 37 is the number of YChIDH the One Self. The personality is a seed of the Self. The Tree of Life has 10 Sefiroth, the sum of 7 and 3.

The (alchemical) Stone, EBN when the final N is given its full value (700), is also 703. E is Aleph whose value is 1, and B is Beit, 2.

Again, the garden, hebrew GN, is 703: so we have in Tarot the Stone on which the pregnant Tarot Empress sits, in her garden (see earlier post, “Dove“.) She broods it like an egg. 703 has the TEN Sefiroth of the Tree of Life infolded; the Law of seven and three: menorah and trinity.

Here is the code: the secret foundation is the seat of the unborn yet eternal and undying Self. The numbers roll free into sensation and blends of flavour. The oak tree dreams inside the tiny acorn. Each one bears a billion acorns. No human technology can break into this principle. It lays surface waste to it for a time, but it cannot alter the principle. It can copy, it can build a hologram, but not create. The photonic lattice which projects the hologram is – must be! – beyond our long monkey arms’ reach.

tree in stone, and avocado seed

Creativity is co-creation – nothing other. I am not creative. I am able to form a vessel. When just a whiff of Godcosm creates through here, there is bhakti. I use the “Secret Dakini Oracle” a lot for readings – just three cards usually. The first one placed in the middle is the present, then the past (left) and future (right) of this moment. The quality of this moment reveals a picture story, like Lyra’s alethiometer in His Dark Materials. The subconscious stores images, and responds with them:

Dakini Oracle 30.9.12

Briefly: God pours his veiled ladies onto the lingam in the shrine. They blossom as flowers, nature’s sex organs. The Stone and the Garden are symbols of Yesod’s reproductive power.

Tree of Life as a formal garden (1989)

Try to recall: this is what I truly am – these mysteries in full. And you. The Greater Mysteries are not written or explained, because they are plain as daylight on my nose. Carry the Child. I am the reproductive power of the universe: pause to reflect. I, you, we all are; I am here this moment, with all this oak potential in the soul as seed, and in the organs which have finished harvesting, but do their time.

Chakras on the Tree: Hod and Netzach – the arms and hands – are also the solar plexus, seat of memory management and the emotive nature.

The core of the cosmos is total peace.

In Kairos – cosmic or “present” time – the wheels very slowly turn. Kairos as the galaxy, moves through Chronos. Its seeming slowness travels in fact far, far swifter than the whirl of Chronos… as Hermes Trismegistos himself suggested, when he said to Tat, you can’t keep up with me. Chronos is local, linear, planetary time. The business of time and standing still, is subjectively relative, like being in a train with the distant landscape slowly circling at different speeds. Some parts move backward, some move forward. It is like looking out to sea, where different currents move through each other – a great woven wicker fluidity. The idea suffuses BENEVOL through veins and blood vessels – a gladness. My body – when not trapped in the mind’s say-so – likes it. My mind cannot quite grasp it, but is willing not to try. The Doppler shift moves centrifugally, faster than we can conceive. And yet I am its centre, its out-welling or emanation. That is why we cannot conceive it, because you are too, and so is Venus and so is Jupiter, and so is each atomic particle in the Andromeda constellation … and so on

When a balloon is blown up, every single point on its surface stretches and expands away from other points. Yet life in our tiny time provides a surface tension, to interpret consistently … as it does for the creatures we cannot see through.

Paul Foster Case wrote: Mental imagery, resulting from the creative male life-force streaming from the stars to Binah on the Tree of Life, is both cosmic and personal. Holiness dawns. It IS holy. These ideas and feelings bring about a let-down reflex of “Lord, thou art God.”

dandelion Flower of Life

I dreamt I had a pet or daemon, a creature the size of a large water-rat, with long fur, yellowish and black, and the sweetest toothy snarl. I called him Stoat, and he loved me too, and I cuddled him to my breast. But whenever I got out of a car or something, I forgot him, and then searched for him, “Stoat, Stoat!” in anguish. He should stay in my pocket. I should stay awake and watch him all the time. Street and traffic life is full of danger, and he squeals and cries.

What do I have with me, like that? Many years ago, at the ruined fort at the end of Brean Down, a little stoat looked out of his hole among the rocks and grasses: I saw him, and I wondered what he saw. A conundrum: what is the difference between a stoat and a weasel? Answer – you can weaselly tell the difference, ‘cos a stoat is totally different!

The stoat is a little insight or paradox I treasure, and keep forgetting or losing. His universe – the way he sees Brean Down for instance – istoatally different from mine; the inclusive totality of God.

menorah rose

Paul Foster Case wrote: “Gestation is the outworking of mental patterns in the mother’s subconscious, modified by the qualities transmitted at conception from the father’s ancestral line.”

This is marvellous to ponder, from experience!

The months of gestation impress the entire history of animal evolution on the foetus. The foetus holds a little branch, the ongoing delta of the DNA, umbilically.

It is “the baton” again. The relay is not through one lineage, but billions in a moment, cross-purposing, porpoising, each one as significant as all the others, as all the other vesica-crescents in a stretch of sea: the fish, the ripples.

Through the red sea, detail

“The highest spiritual healing is direct application of the cosmic life-force, controlled by mental imagery.” The organising and expression of mental imagery seems to me essential. It regenerates awareness of the stock. It touches the collective, a circle of hands. It assists the specialities and professions. I DO feel the life force flowing through and out of me into the day. Paul Foster Case describes it; the sensation is familiar. Stone of the wise? The Stone and the Garden – the Tree: seven and three.

Seven and Three

“Thy faith has made thee whole,” said Jesus to the man who touched his garment. An instantaneous healing is recorded in the New Testament, but what we do NOT know, is how the healing held. It is likely the recipient got the Light of Damascus on that day, and walked, and his sores fell off, and the scribes wrote it all down; but he fell back into his temporal condition as the revelation faded. However, what Jesus said is true. Faith is an illumined glimpse of what we are holistically in the whole, through space and time. One such glimpse is enough to work transfiguratively through the heavy waters and spades of a lifetime. One who received it, one who has touched the hem, may go on suffering from disabilities, but he or she has shifted; the ground is never the same again.

Solomon’s lily in earth

Part Two – Seal, Stone, Garden

I have to add some more, today. I dreamt about another child animal, this time a young seal. I met a workman carrying it along the street, and offered to take over. The seal was heavy, but cooperative and affectionate, and produced a pair of little dragon legs for me to grip.

Seal script in the rocks on Eigg

Dion Fortune in Moon Magic says they work with a flower in the east, and in the west we work with a tree, and we should sit with a straight spine for a while each day, for the mercury to rise. I’m afraid I don’t. But the straight stem is implicit. Walk tall: what do I seek? – an unfurred pipe: integrity.

This is the basis of all esoteric and occult work – the integrity with myself … draws together its own.

Mercury is serpentine, with the Staff of Hermes – the caducean snakes. The mercury heals when it is an ankh. Quicksilver trembles up the rod, and a seal is not unlike a snake. A seal is those wonderful veinous wave patterns in the rock the sea has made.

Such thought is a mountain spring, refreshing and subtle: a cool kundalini. The confection of the Philosophers’ Stone is this (caduceus) – and it is the Stone and the Garden. The living Stone is a river: water flows – the snake, river, stone, the eye.

Ojas is “the illuminating or bright” – the sublimated seminal-sexual energy. The manner in which a man and woman touch each other, is contained and continent. The creative and the sexual root and thought, are one and the same. Venus goes into Virgo today. A secretary is a SECRETary!

And another thought, helpful to me and maybe to you: when I work at this level, I slow right down. My metabolism changes, like a river in a deep wide bed, to a different order of time and breath. Small wonder later in the day, there is metabolic fatigue as this tempo collides with frets and scurries of my surface mind: depressions and undone housework. Look at water: it moves over itself at different levels. Our mind is no different. Observing and respecting this principle, adjusting my pace to the cycles and tides, is not easy, but it keeps me in good enough nick.

I am told when I am deep down, that most disease is due to pushing ourselves beyond the appropriate tempo for the situation. Unconscious stress and well-meaning obligation clings to and clogs an engine like blind bits of dirty oil, overlooked. In time it turns to grit and blocks the wheels.

To respect and pace myself to the given tempi is just as essential in the long run, as the right food and vitamins. Those are no use, when the Spirit is slack or disengaged.

To diet sensibly doesn’t come easily. Though I like salads and greens and curries, I am not a veggie, and I eat rich dairies, eggs and chocolate. These deposit what the acupuncturists call “phlegm”; and similarly with my Sun in Capricorn and full moon in Cancer nature, I digest life rather intensely. As physique and psyche interweave, I HOPE the inner work clears my body as we go along. The field is electro-magnetic.

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Dove

Posted on October 1, 2012 by janeadamsart

Happiness is the open capacity, rain or shine, tiredness or uplift: to let it happen.

Priestess, 1988

Heavy rain and cold autumn equinox – the coolness of the air liberates me; the grey sky yesterday moved with beauty. Dion Fortune writes (in The Sea Priestess) of the touch of mind on mind. This is so much deeper than seeing appearances. The touch of mind on mind comes to the boundless space between – as the maggidim alighted upon her School, Society of the Inner Light; and got written down by trial and error.

Lucita, a medieval Moorish sage 2005.

Come Isis. Come, my guides, Lebecq and Zofira.

Let us draw together that space where the sky blows around wild Brean – invoked as it was before it got built up and farmed over; in the dip of strata beds, the tail thread is so strong and pulsing, that Glastonbury Tor is near enough to touch. In the astral dimension, the map conforms to VISION and the currents; and the work is One Form. The Great Seas roll in, even though it is the Bristol channel.

The touch of mind on mind: be still. Words and images ripple from it, but are secondary. The touch is silence. This was Ramana’s balm. It is the Cave of the world; O Lord of caves and of the meeting rivers… tailor of the field.

The sufi sews in and out of life, a thread whose core is fleecy white. Loud white wings beat behind the plough.

By notarikon, the word Kabbalah compresses in its syllables, these traditions: the elder Egyptian Ka, the Father and the Submission to grace. The Cultural versions converge to silence: a pyramid tip.

The Empress in Tarot is called the Luminous Intelligence. The Empress gives birth to what the Priestess broods. Their paths cross in the Great Spirit Kite. The Priestess probes: the Empress bridges. Together they gestate, vertically and horizontally, the White Brilliance from Kether.

The Tarot Keys on the paths of the Tree’s upper Face

The Empress (horizontal path, Hokhmah – Binah) and the Priestess (vertical path Kether – Tifareth) are colour coded respectively green and blue.

My scroll post is vertical, a long, long anchor of the Sri Chakra anchor in the deep. That Yantra contains all the laws of Nature, and is thus the base.

tree yantra

A little local intelligence by long habit draws near to the One – upadesa – and ties the boat-cord to a ring in the harbour wall; the pin goes into the socket. The One – I say this again and again – bridges and connects everything, as the very air we breathe, which comes from beyond the stars. The One lightly tosses my form, as in this sketch of the breeze before storm in 1987 The One, connecting all places, sees and is and swirls.

The mother tells a frightened child: “those poplars aren’t crying, it is the wind singing in their thousands of little leaves.”

Copper is NChSh in Hebrew. It shares the same gematria value – 358 – as the Serpent and the Redeemer. Venus Aphrodite here, has a heart shaped shield, the soft, conductive metal. It is golden bronze, and turns green with chemical age.

Tarot Key 3 – The Empress (B.O.T.A.deck)

Temptation – the ageless wisdom says – transmutes to protection, as the white dove of peace is formed and grows.

When I painted the Sacred India Tarot‘s “Lovers” card, I armoured Kaccha’s genitals with a dove. Reflect on that; the linga doesn’t stab but is alive, abundant with love and seed. A tantric lover “nests’ his shaft in the yoni, sense of touch. Reflect on ZAIN. This is the Hebrew letter assigned to Key 6 The Lovers; it carries two meanings: “sword” and “penis”. Its psychological function is to penetrate, to part the waves, to discriminate error and judgement.

With archetypal spontaneity, here, the dove’s depth and flight bridges west and eastern wisdoms: the pregnant Empress in BOTA … to the Sacred India Tarot Archive(SITA).

The Sacred India Tarot: Kaccha and the demon Princess Devyani

Adam and Eve …

… after my very distant ancestor Lucas Cranach (a copy from Durer’s portrait of him.)

The Copper Serpent

Botticelli's Aphrodite   
on the waves   
has red copper tresses.   
Through the copper coil   
her living snake    
warms the soul, the Sun   
reddened by the iron of Ares.   

Earth, so warmed   
is the Son she loves   
giving birth.   

The Copper Serpent 
is a game of snakes and    
jacobs' ladders. 
Saints gave to it their Sol, 
and to the nonresistant   
metal of Venus,  
their body by fire or wood
as martyrs.

Copper in the ancient world, as today, transmits the current through minimal resistance. It is a “soft metal”. A metallic alloy of gold and copper was used for mirrors. The venus symbol – circle over cross – is a looking-glass!

The mirror is essential to creative imagination.

The hebrew for Dove happens to be YONAH! ( Sanskrit yoni is the female organ.)

The hebrew root from YIN yayin, wine suggests: to be warm, effervescent like the foam of the sea which fermented into Aphrodite.

Sperm, yeast, yoni, come, ferment, goddess.

YNVH (yonah) dove translates to sexual warmth, a dove to dove magendovid. The magendovid, correctly translated, is not the star, but the shield of David – warrior and poet of the psalms.

There is a waterfall behind the Empress (see illustration above, of Tarot Key 3) – the masculine vertical to her female pool: sivalinga in yoni: Chaiah the life force.

The wheat is the development and multiplying of the seed.

Kama’s wheel

She …

Like snakes in the wind   
some of Aphrodite's tresses   
are bound, and some are loose. 

Medusa is her shadow 
precipitation onto stony waste - 
desire   
when clung to as possession.   

Tempter and advisor  
warm the soul   
like the Sun on stone's
redemption.   

Nature, warmed by the Son   
thinks she is   
the Sun, and loves   
and gives birth.

From The Masters’ Eye, 1992-2009

When I copied the Durer drawing of Cranach, I turned it round to draw upside down. I did the same with this sketch of “Zofira”, using a photo of Anandamayi Ma, whom she is said to resemble. The resulting freedom of the line – as seen and followed objectively, rather than the “short-cuts” of visual habits – achieves an anatomical observation and accuracy. Similarly, drawing with my left hand is slower and more difficult, but much more conscious: the attention now.

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

On Spiritual Organizations

Posted on September 28, 2012 by janeadamsart

High lochan on Eigg, western isles: 2000

In this post I want to clarify what I learned with spiritual organizations: but first, to get into my stride …

Journal: I posted my final Coastal Path instalment after two days work, and was very spent. I felt my writing in it is a bit pompous, and trimmed it. But I did my first new sketches of Ramana. This felt wonderful. I need to learn him again … approach the mountain’s grandeur and beauty with my caricature.

The Coastal Path was a BOOK of catalyst, now published here in full. Today, my daughter’s photo of the strata change – (downward tilt to the sea, with Pembroke coast in the background) – shows the view (see previous post.) On the “organ pipes” (above to the left, and out of frame) is where the revelation happened in my dream afterwards. It is told in With Ramana & Krishnamurti (3) on the Coastal Path. The devil whispered a “conspiracy of doubt-versus-certainty” over the good firm rock, everywhere.

In Ramana’s vichara, the living shape coming up from the deep – as I tinkered with charcoal towards it – is a private bhakti to lean back into: his eyes, humour, industry, stillness and dry Capricorn flavour … Capricorn-Cancer, along his midheaven axis of eclipse: the elder as the child of humanity.

It is rich, ochre-brown and wonderful, like southern sandalwood with honeyed milk poured over it. Western symbolism adds the wealth and paradox of the 15th Tarot Key, which is ruled by Capricorn. The lesson in this Key discriminates the Effigy and the Real … “separate the subtle from the gross, Earth from the fire, acting with prudence, humility and good judgement” (Emerald Table).

The devil said (traditionally) “Give me a sage, and I will organize him for you.”

Artists have this productive trouble.

However, as dear AJ told me when I first met him, we know the rock is sound, on this step up. Ultimately, the depth where Ramana links and is our consciousness, is a safeguard from delusion. In private, he is “Bhagavan”. In public however, the bhagavan becomes a facile label, an imposition on ignorance. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – it degenerates into advertisement. Bhagavan – used accurately – is a name of God, of light, of care, moving spontaneously. How can I say “God” unless I glimpse the limitless cosmic connectivity? To say “God” the tiny seed of life must split open and die.

Theoretically my whole life renews Ramana like a mountain spring, and feels easier for it; but the bhakti Kabbalist current behaves in its own way, regardless. In the morning I “part the waves and kiss the lips”; later on, the bhakti subsides, as the fog comes down the hill.

Moses went up to the light and came down with the stone. It is the high, holy day of Atonement. At one.

What is bhakti (the way of devotion) truly? It is attentiveness. It is like the small burns or hill-brooks on Eigg – up near their source I part the heather and bracken to see the dark water gleam.

Ramana’s Indian silence is the sea inside the wave. Let it fill veins and vessels like salt: the buoyancy. The scent of sandal paste: the hard, dark wood or stone of sivalinga over which they pour the offering: the ananda at the root of the breath. The young Ganapati Muni climbs up the hill and finds his sage.

Early sketch of the Muni meeting Ramana. However, there were also my wishes and requirements – to “magick a Ramana Centre” (house for us) – the same old story, using the props. The house didn’t happen, we couldn’t raise the money, and I went on living where I am now, and so did AJ in general. The spiritual home is centred within: it is uncluttered by props, walls, admin or mortgage. The truth ensures just enough material support: no surplus.

The young Ramana and Ganapati

At this point, I searched for some correspondence relating to my inflated Inner Twit – the years of my high profile in the Ramana Foundation. In about 1996, a friend mirrored back to me his distress, how I was acting out, all over the place. I can’t find his letter now – a pity, because it was salutary, it hurt and I was furious; but it stopped me. In brief – wherever he looked, there was jane standing in front of Ramana, her gush, her ideas, her pictures. Seeing this through his eyes, was a shock. I was very cross with him, but I began to dismantle my “satsang personality” and withdaw. She couldn’t survive being “exposed”. She wants to be everywhere, manage everything and count everybody.

Fund raising – Spiritual snowman

Yet she knows, and knew from the beginning, that Ramana’s Self-enquiry dissolves adherents back into itself. Circles of Satsang form, and form more circles; but from the flower, the petals isolate, grow brittle and die off, as the Self keeps flowering.

I was spiritually arrogant. It is only a step from this, psychologically, to Sheela on the ranch planning to eliminate persons who don’t toe the line; in the guru-organizing mindset, however mild and apparently “british”, this tendency roosts, and full blown, becomes a monster. I wrote screeds about the teaching, and I was dishonest.

Spiritual vasanas are powerful, as we observe in contemporary religious excess. The personal ego when juiced up by spirituality or a magnetic sage, is an accelerated BULLDOZER, subconsciously driven, entrenched in righteous belief, and working out its issues full time.

Paradoxically, the sage who is clarity gets projected onto fog around his followers. Annamalai’s book Living by the Words of Bhagavan (1994) recorded with painful honesty, the ashram buzz around the well – the troubles and jealousies of all those sadhaks, thrown into high relief by Ramana’s presence among them. The light casts our strong shadows, the ones desiring Consciousness. Ramana used to say – he had no alternative – “It must come up and out.” He was an agent provocateur, as all great teachers are.

I am left with a deep distaste for spiritual organizations and “inner circles”. The glamour tendencies in myself are nowadays short lived, they run aground, the energy dies. They are mastered by a deeper Conscience than my surface. This life-time’s Karmic lesson applied equally to my love-life. The understanding when it burnt my fingers, is total! My flow with the Kabbalahsociety is unbroken … 24 years now … because of its transparency. The management of Kabbalahsociety – Companions of the Light – is minimal, light on the ground, and therefore efficient.

Our ideal for the Ramana Foundation UK was transparency and no baggage. That is how it turned out to be, and is today. It runs itself, by companions.

Spirituality and identity with spiritual organizations is an easy cover-up, for wishes which are selfish. Genuine esoteric teaching advises us to become thoroughly acquainted and insightful with our own desire nature – “what I want” – the elementary principle to bring to light and master. To master the racehorse, we must ride it … by the sea.

newspaper cutting

Thinking of my daughter also – her depression in her teens, having to contend with Mum in full zeal. I was blind. It made her vulnerable. She lived with the goings-on in our house, and was neglected. Given the smallest encouragement, I praised and preened her own achievements and I am proud of her, and meant it, but it came out hollow and grey and did her no good. No wonder I still feel guilty and disabled, when we discuss spiritual tools.

Probably my spiritual obsessions deepened her shadow. She understood what I was going on about, but didn’t need the rattle. By her compassion and strength of character, she found her own way through, and continues to.

There – that is what I wished to say. I am a solitary type, on the fringes of Ramana community, and others. I learned much, from “managing” RMF UK etc upfront, until a friend’s criticism and disgust reached me. Those learning curves hurt, but were valuable.

Unhappy Hermit ’87

Nobody is enlightened. Enlightenment spreading around the Earth, comes and finds where our soil is fertile, and plants its seed. Wind blows, rain comes, sun shines, darkness enters, light goes forth.

Homeless hermit, jealous of Enlightened People ’87

I don’t write much about the Shadow. I do try to describe my insights through it. The Shadow is easy to access and dramatise, and is more than adequately seen to; I have my own job to do. It came through my very real valley of the Shadow. It put me through the wringer … shudder! There is no regret, because it was a thorough Shield and Buckler. I understand spiritual, emotional and physical addiction.

jiva, jlva – an attempt to cut ties and heal a relationship calvary

Today when the meditative current up-wells, it is of the source, and I call it BENEVOL: the will-to-good. In the Yoga Vasishta, the demons of havoc concentrated so hard on themselves, that Brahma’s aeons in due course transmuted them to cosmic bhakti, their true nature. They all in time dissolved into ramanas: Siva the dance of light – they couldn’t help it. The name Ramana – (given by Ganapati Muni, master of mantras) – is: “who sports in the Self”.

Brahma and Vishnu are an interwoven cosmic maintenance: Siva the disposition.

Rudra Immerses (2000)

The Yoga Vasishta demons were hard little mischievous pins in fantastic yogic contortion on their mountain tops. Their intense egotistic tapas generated an awful fracas through the worlds. There is One way ultimately, for all thoughts, all processes, pollution, politics, geologies and fantastic things: to realise the Self. Nothing can escape or contravene that Law… the awe of consciousness. It makes us work on ourselves. We only believe the effort is ours because we are still nine-tenths asleep.

Just the littlest bit – homeopathically – is awake, enough to “keep calm and carry on.” It is from our evolution as a whole, the whole “eye”, and at present incomplete.

These thoughts contain Kabbalist references to Hesed (benevol) and the path of awe, as well. Where the yogas of east and west meet, the east is bhakti, the west is analytical; both are applied psychology, and complement each other. The eastern psychology in the Tantras, Puranas, Ayurveda and Jyotish (the science of light) is profound and accurately mapped. There is no flab or fatalism in the sages of the dawn or in the Tao. Perhaps it takes a western mindset – where the sun’s lotus sets, turning rose – to fully appreciate.

We need to be a little culturally detached, in order to see.

Thus the hands touch and join; thus the Bridge.

Annapurna, from the Pass of 27 April, 1950, photo by Marcel Ichac

This post is not as planned. I had not planned to write one at all.

Following my mother on Eigg, with “belvies”

“The Law of Adonai is other than the laws of men, for into the laws of men has entered confusion. This must be, since mankind remains a work unfinished. Yet be on guard, you who seek to be numbered among the sons and daughters of the true Israel, lest you mistake the half-formed concepts of an earlier stage of growth, for final truths.

“The Great Work directs itself always towards the building of the Temple of Adonai, and in its early stages there are needs that do not continue throughout the building process. Yet men mistake the scaffolding for the building itself, and thus pay idolatrous reverence to old rules which have no longer any useful purpose. Watch therefore, O ye who would rule as the Lord rules, lest you usurp the rights of Adonai!”

Master R: ageless wisdom

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.