The Chakras with the Tarot Keys

Posted on April 25, 2013 by janeadamsart

This post, concluding my Chakra journey, partners Vishnu, the Covenant and Exodus in my other blog, Aquariel.

(Hence, my new drawing of Vishnu in this one also.)

The Builders of the Adytum Tarot cards are supplied as line drawings, uncoloured. We colour them in “by the book”, to take them into our own energy field, as co-creators. The colour relationships speak louder than words. In this set of windows into the inner plane, each colour has its musical tone, Hebrew letter, number and vibration. Very long ago, when the teaching of the Ageless Wisdom was endangered, it was put into coded picture form, to protect it from abuse and persecution. Additionally, the subconscious responds to images rather than words: the pictures as living archetypes were circulated underground, and survived. In the Middle Ages they surfaced as a deck of playing cards. In the 19th century, Eliphas Levi and others revived a Kabbalistic Tarot, and re-discovered the key to the Greater Mysteries.

Eliphas Levi (1989)

Eliphas Levi referred to the Tarot as a divine algebra, and wrote, “A prisoner devoid of books, had he only a Tarot of which he knew how to make use, could in a few years acquire a universal science, and converse with an unequalled doctrine and inexhaustible eloquence. The oracles of the Tarot give answers as exact as mathematics, and measured as the harmonies of nature. By the aid of these signs and their infinite combinations, it is possible to arrive at the natural and mathematical revelation of all secrets of nature.“

The 22 Tarot Keys are a full Alchemical process, a western Yoga method. Not only does each one have its special path on the Tree of Life: pictorially they illustrate the Chakras for westerners. This illustration shows the sequence from left to right – the root chakra being The World, the sacral chakra The Tower, and so on.

7 Tarot Keys and Temperance

Crown: Key 1, Magician –Mercury

Each Chakra has its specific planetary vibration. Of the 22 Tarot Keys/Hebrew letters, 1,2,3,10,16,19 and 21 are traditionally assigned to the alchemical properties of the planets. If we want to practice the instrument more deeply, this colour scale is equally related to musical tones and frequencies. Therefore, when we look at those colours in sequence, or study the Tarot Keys together, their picture language messages those centres in our subconscious.

The Indian Yoga system energizes the subtle/physical centres more subjectively. This science of the nadis is ideal for a culture where a meditative life style apart from life’s muddle is – or has been – supported.

The Western Alchemy system disapproves of this, because it can overload and imbalance the physical
organs and endocrines.

Third eye Chakra, Key 2 The Priestess – Moon

Our system is based on the mutual information of self
conscious and subconscious. It therefore views the chakras objectively, as pictures to observe and meditate on.

The Indian emphasis is on purification and immediate deliverance from caste restrictions. The Western emphasis is on acceptance of life’s rough and tumble, and that things take time to ripen.

So with the Builders of the Adytum, we lay out the Tarot Keys for the seven chakras, and contemplate them one by one, and in relationship. Each one is designed to “message” or illumine its assigned centre. There is an elder wisdom of subtle anatomy in this.

Throat chakra: Key 3 The Empress – Venus

My rainbow spectrum for instance (discussed in the last 4 posts), is a view of the chakra principle all in one – the white light fountains up through the colours of the rainbow, as Ruach; as Kether: the cleft of the seed. To go into more detail, we need to adopt a system which suits us. It doesn’t matter which one, for their destiny is the same. The Indian system for instance, is very elaborate, with gods, colours and Sanskrit intonations for each one, and I have not studied it.

I think the inclusion of gods and prayers helps to protect and guard the physical centre so transposed and energised. It does not do to gloss over any esoteric system superficially. Nobody can play certain kinds of music till they have practiced the notes, the keys, the scales and arpeggios. Those musicians who are natural and brilliant improvisers, inherit the fruit of previous lifetimes’ practice! – built into the cellular and subtle memory.

Heart Chakra: Key 19 The Sun – Sun

So called spirituality is a detailed map of anatomy, physiology and psychology rolled into one. Coming to us from the ageless wisdom, it not only instructs: it creatively inspires, and kindles the secret of health, vigour and love.

The proper description of a Chakra is “vibration”. Without the primal vibratory wave or concentricity, no organ, no physical function can come into being, or operate, or be coherent with the rest. When we are awake to our chakral centres, we move a little upstream, into their potency. We reflect on the potency rather than on the visible area or physique.

This is a homeopathic practice. We move upstream from the molecules to the atoms. (The atoms clump together in numerical patterns to form binaries and thus the molecular lattice.)

Solar Plexus chakra - bota Key 10, The Wheel

Solar Plexus chakra – Tarot Key 10, The Wheel – Jupiter

As mind and body are interwoven through the organic capillary of Daat, the Tarot Keys as archetypal pictures of each centre, bring clarity to the way we think and live.

The Tarot Keys are codes. They are cylinder locks, whose numbers open the inner room.

It is a waste of time and energy to try to resolve the different Chakra systems and “prove” their different colour notations together. It is best to work with whichever one you respond to best, and to respect the way other systems – according to culture – teach the Word, with a different spelling.

Sacral Chakra – Tarot Key 16 The Tower – Mars

rainbow spectrum sketch 1

Root Chakra: Tarot Key 21, The World – Saturn

rainbow spectrum sketch2

Fontanel – Chakras/Tarot Keys/Tree of Life – new today

“Churning”

He displaced his passionate mind.
His quest into the nadis churned
from nadir’s night, the nectar; then turned
to embrace undying spark, refined.

Reversing dark to light, the dross to burn,
he suffered his painful insistence.
In Self, the Self is all existence
consuming resistance: in Atma born.

Within and without, the same lamp shines.
He saw as One the world,
so broke the nexus, knot of nadis furled.

In my dwelling, light enshrines
my bond of body, Self empearled:
the churning is the Sun itself, pure gold.

From 55 Sonnets on the Ramana Gita, 2011

Notes from a Group Discussion, 21 April 2013

In Key 14 Temperance or Probation, the Archangel appears like a white Fountain, shining through the rainbow spectrum and the worlds.

Key 7 the Chariot, is a stepped-down voltage of Key 1 the Magician: to form an enclosure or vessel for the seed of light.

NOTES ON KEY 14: Why are the sky, crown and seven point star coloured gold? To prove the Work of the Sun. Yellow, and thus also gold, are the Eagle’s beak (speech) and feet (walkers of the Path) and the lion’s eyes (sight). Eagle and Lion are otherwise earth-brown, the mixture of the primary colours as solid clod. Gold gleams through life’s clouds, like it does through Earth’s mineral veins. Gold within our bodies and within the planet, is “petrified sunlight”.

The path just visible behind the lion, is also gold. In the distance, this golden path reaches the twin peaks Binah and Hokhmah. Above and between them shines the Crown of the Sun – Kether on the Tree.

Clearly, we can study each Tarot Key from Malkuth subjectively, as a map of the Tree looking upward into the living Sefiroth.

The Archangel who pours the fire which flows and the water which burns, is clad in shining white. Over him is a rainbow corona. The whiteness fountains up through the apparent rainbow spectrum. The Archangel’s wings are designated red, but I have coloured this redness to contain the shine of the rainbow itself, through it. Light plays and dances this way, everywhere.

The seven point Star on the Archangel’s breast cannot be exactly measured by our earthly geometry. 7 does not divide exactly into 360 degrees. Each angle of arc from centre to two points of the star, is just over 51 degrees. This is the same angle of inclination in the Great Pyramid. The correct figure can be found by tying knots in a druid’s string.

In other words, the attempts to measure things exactly by our geometry, do not adequately reflect the Cosmic pattern. If we force the issue, the result is discordant. If piano keys are tuned logically, each at an exact interval from its neighbours, the result is discord – it clangs. A piano tuner works concentrically from centre or middle C, adjusting the relationships of octaves, intervals and chords till they “chime”. Each key has three strings: the adjustment of the resonance, to ring. Every occult and esoteric system through our history is based on the triad – the primary circuit of electric power.

The tetrahedron is a circuitry – with its new cycle emerging from the “produced” fourth point, whichever way it turns.

Tuning a part in relation to all its surroundings is a way of Mandala – the way a keyboard tuner checks the chords around and fore and aft, to harmonise. Such are our individual lives in relation to all the other parts being played. It is the Sri Chakra web, constantly being tuned.

How do we tread the path? Start walking into Nature’s mirror! What is the Great Work? We keep plodding. Our subconscious and selfconscious learn to converse, rather than to collide.

Yehudi Menuhin was born with an old Talent or passion. As a child, he played without practice, and could perform anything. It was all embedded in his cellular subconscious. As a teenager, he became self-conscious and the faculty disintegrated. He became a notoriously unreliable musician, because his tutelary subconscious was not yet working consciously. The levels were in disharmony. He played wrong notes, he fell out of rhythm, he was Out of Tune! So he had to re-tune. Yehudi’s autobiography about his re-tooling process, is very moving. Falling off the adult pedestal of Prodigy, he had to learn like a child, the scales, fingering and arpeggios. Gradually, the fully in-formed musician emerged. Kabbalistically, we have to balance the right and left pillars in our Ground.

This calamity and the dark valley it took him through, led him to study Yoga and be a messenger for Iyengar in the west. Similarly – like Barenboim – Yehudi became an ambassador for Israeli cultural consciousness, and the healing of the holocaust. He took world citizenship; he spoke out about ecology; he expanded his musical horizon to India and to jazz; he experimented and played his fiddle with Ravi Shankar and with Grapelli – not very well, some think: how could he keep up with these Masters? His enthusiasm was contagious.

Stephane Grapelli in 1973

Ravi Shankar & tabla, circa 1967

Galactic Core and 2012

Key 14 – the Arcanum of Probation, the testing of the spirit – is assigned to Sagittarius. Viewed from Earth, the Sagittarian constellation is superimposed on Galactic centre. Sagittarius is called Mula in Indian astrology. “Mula” means the root, and Muladhara (root hari …) is the name of the base chakra in the Indian system.

“Mula” is likewise darkness and death, according to our projection – the unseen black hole of an Unimaginable Light behind billions and billions of stars and years of light. Great sages perceive, in the core of our galaxy, the root of the multitude whirlings (gilgalem), a Sun so vast our physical eyes cannot see it. The American seer, Robert Adams spoke often of it.

Now, at the end of the Mayan calendar, 21 December 2012, our Sun transitted this degree of Mula forming an exact alignment with it. At all other times – as the galaxy is not a disk but three-dimensional and moving as a spiral – this transit rocked above or below the point.

This time, on that day, there was a kind of eclipse, rather like in our microcosmic scale, the biannual alignment of earth, sun and moon.

We all were aware subconsciously, of the gathering moment of the dark crossing, and each culture projected its own tensions upon it: there was a concerted belief, deeper than usual -(due to the transit and to long projections onto the telescoping of time) – in the Worlds’ End.

This tension had built up over several decades, and is now released in the way tidal waves travel through the cosmos as unseen ripples. Only with many decades’ hindsight will we be able to discern the effect. We are still inside its “eye”. We are affirmed to drop some of our bundles which bind, and look through a window to a simpler way of life. It is as if what bothered us so much before, gets unknotted and drops away. What we seem to agree on, is a new and multi-dimensioned perception of Time. Time is not a line, but a sphere – a flower of spheres.

The shift is timeless, but in our terms it doesn’t happen overnight. More likely, we enter a process of facing each of our restrictions and working through them: conflict resolution.

On the whole, and in planetary fashion, there is a reduction of general tension, a slowing of the breath. We passed through the centre of the hourglass.

Netzach Hod Temperance

Key 14, Temperance, illustrates the fact that “the Sun, the Crown is coming to find you.”: “equilibrium is the royal road to gnosis”. To the left is the cool current (water on lion) – inhale; to the right, the warm current (fire on eagle) – exhale.

The teaching advises: if we want to achieve something, try focusing on its complementary or polar opposite, to allow it to grow. Our wishes often overload and incapacitate the desired object. Cushion the billiard shot! Most esoteric methods are cunning billiard shots. The cue hits the ball into the pocket by bouncing another one to it, from off the edge.

The Great Work is:

the way of an Eagle in the air,
the way of a Serpent on a rock,
the way of a Ship on the sea,
the way of a Man with a maid.

As all the medieval Alchemists agreed: when our eyes are open to the Inner Gold, or work of the Sun – unbrokenly aligned to the whole galaxy – we shall never more know poverty of means or spirit.

This fact, engendering awe, love, freedom and reverence – the sacred Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh – is Brahman, the Tathagata, the Buddha Nature, Yeshua, the Arc of the Covenant.

Vishnu at rest

As the Age of Aquarius matures, the Arc is delivered from priesthoods, into our hearts’ response-ability; into these feet which do walk the Road, into these hands which touch, this heart which speaks openly. Thus, there are more born on Earth at present, than ever before; containing by homeopathic proportion, a larger number of the Awakened incarnates.

We who awake traverse a valley of great shadow where the Sun is rising over the mountains. We sow glow-worms in the abyss … seeds of gold.

A Great Dream – 1969

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/

Today is a Special Day

Posted on December 12, 2012 by janeadamsart

12.12.12 today … completes a series in the cosmic clock. 10 October 2010; 11 November 2011; 12 December 2012 – but there is no 13th month! Today is very special.

This painting is called “Binah”, which means “the understanding”. At the bottom is written BEREISHITH – the Beginning. The Divine Child Genesis gazes into the dark profile of the aeons’ reflection, rising to complete the great Circle of the Light.

It is a fourth-dimensional image.

Many are our projections onto the 2012 solstice – the completion of the Mayan calender, the opening sphere of Aquarius. The actual miracle of this moment passes almost unnoticed. It is beyond our language, and independent of our drama. Picture language draws near. This recent Tarot oracle reveals the quality of a Now, and its past (left) and future (right.) 21 is Now, 12 inverts it, and 6 is half of the full 12 in The Lovers. Through a silent night, holy night, the portal to each other opens.

The Hanging Man (who walks contrary to the world) and The World are the two most profound Arcana of Completion in the alchemical process. These two Keys portray the ascending and descending triangles of the Sri Chakra Yantra … and of the Shield of David, or Seal of Solomon. Key 6, the Lovers, applies the understanding in Tifareth. What a Fruit!

The mind stops and enters yabyum, the lovers. A Rainbow Buddha is in the Tree of Life. Time’s wheel strikes the moment.

Oracle of solstice. Ora, oasis approaches this year’s solstice. This is profoundly real, striking the ora, hour, a moment through the clock’s face of Real Aquarius. Alignment flows the ease of being. The force is imperceptibly vast, like gravity. What is gravity? – connectivity.

I carved this balsa boat for my grandmother’s birthday when I was 12 or 13, and packed it in a glass box with cotton wool. The vessel goes on sailing through the clouds. When she opened the gift, she said, “Annapurna in cumulus!”

The child of the turning page (below), was drawn in 1954.

It is but the page which turns. Read on; breathe onward; peace, the solstice blessing, as our unmoving axis turns the worlds.

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.

Sacred India Tarot Archive: 5,6,7 Pentacles – Buddha’s Enlightenment

Posted on December 8, 2012 by janeadamsart

What is a Chakra? The word means literally – “wheel”.

Chakra spiral, centrifugue and OM

The seven chakras in the Yogic body are centres where the Life-force flowers. Chakras are transmissions of energy in the Earth vessel. The story of the Buddha’s enlightenment aligns the chakras, bringing them into the sublime cosmic harmony which is compassion – the natural state.

This post will cover the creation of SITA 5,6 and 7 of Pentacles, or disks. Here is A E Waite’s traditional interpretation for Five of Pentacles: “Two mendicants in a snow-storm pass a lighted casement … It foretells material trouble above all, whether in the form illustrated – that is destitution – or otherwise. For some cartomancers it is a card of love and lovers – wife, friend, husband, mistress; also concordance, affinities. These alternatives cannot be harmonized. Reversed: Disorder, chaos, ruin, discord, profligacy.”

We will therefore reflect on the Sacred India Tarot 5 of Pentacles as the misfortune and sense of deprivation which shadows and precedes a realisation of the Truth which is 6. In 7 of Pentacles, the realisation is mature and mobilized. It becomes a transmission.

Rohit’s Notes 2003

“The starving Buddha is a famous trope in Buddhist art. We include a few visual references! Basically a sort of pastoral scene under a tree would be ideal. The discs would be a little difficult to fit in easily, perhaps in a ring around the tree? He is usually depicted as clean shaven, though if he was not eating for weeks, perhaps shaving was not his highest priority.

“The skeletal gauntness and meditation are important here – mental peace at the expense of physical torment, which he realized was not an adequate tradeoff. It is a mistake to torment the body.”

Meditation – the withdrawn Buddha

Sacred India Tarot 5 of Disks: the Buddha Fasts

Rohit’s Notes:

“The Five is a very unusual depiction of the Buddha in the starving state, but I realised that actually this is more liable to be the truth than the traditional representations. He did tapasya as a Hindu, and the beard is more likely to have been his true condition, than the gaunt clean-shaven skeleton so beloved of Buddhist art.

“The disk as the solar plexus chakra is another beautiful touch, linking Buddha up with his nature as an incarnation of Vishnu, solar god. (See Vishnu The Magician in Sacred India Tarot Archive series, http://aryayogi.wordpress.com).

“I just love the composition of the card; the manner in which the disks form the quintessential question “Why?”, seen in the card as the giant letter Y, which after all was the purpose of such starvation, to find answers to the whys of life.

“That banyan tree is one of the most remarkable things I have seen drawn.”

Jane’s Notes

The banyan was inspired by the trees at Ramanasramam – the shaggy condition of the sadhu in full tapasya. The sheer force and focus of the meditation is given back to Nature. Nails, hair and beard grow unimpeded! In the end Buddha fulfilled the whole history of Hindu spirituality by showing that the via negativa has its limitations.

To reverse the laws of inertia, a sage at first backs up into them, against the body’s need for nourishment. Towards realisation, that effort becomes irrelevant, and reverts to a more natural alignment with the Fountain of Nature. The 5 pentacle disks are arranged to suggest the growth of the life force through the tree. In the autumn, it falls to the ground, like the fountain, and circles through winter, up into the stem, year upon year.

The physical body no longer denied, blossoms as the bodhi tree in all its beauty; for the impending enlightenment is seamless: no separation.

Visual reference – The bodhi tree

Rohit’s Notes 2003

“6 of Pentacles/Disks should be a dynamic sort of card, as the moment of Awakening, becoming the Buddha, arouses the last attack of the Evil One, Mara. He sends his daughters, along with natural calamities, wild beasts and venomous things, to disrupt the massive shift in Consciousness that was about to be achieved.

“While all around the Buddha there can be chaos, he should be depicted in stillness at the centre of course, under the famous Bodhi tree!! His fingers should touch the ground in the mudra shown in the illustration, the famous Bhoomi Sparsha mudra, calling on the Earth to witness his attainment and confirm there was no ego present.”

Visual reference for Buddha’s enlightenment

Here is a recent impression in my companion blog, Aquariel:

So who are you then, whomever I meet and fear? You look like Mara’s face, in the SITA Buddha enlightenment card. Mara is the Buddha’s opponent – the force which tried to stop the enlightenment. So get it out, and look at the devil, sex and death. Through all the blandishment, Buddha sits under his tree and keeps touching the ground with his open hand … the same as FOOT – keep walking, feel the ground – (like baby Buddha did when he was born – straight out from under his labouring mother. If you turn to the Ace of Pentacles, she too is hung upon a tree!)

Mara goes BLAH …

When I am tense and full of think, I am frightened of this stranger – Mara going BLAH – and above all, ASHAMED of admitting anything about it here, ashamed and scared of my panic and projection, lest it get worse. My panic and projection is a disguise – a whirling dust devil. But go to the root – does it really exist? No wonder it harries and drives me away from telling about it. Does it exist? Look at Mara, depicted below. Has he a body? Is he not just my scurrilous mind going WAH from behind a bush? Has he any root at all? Why, no ! just confusion. That is what he thrives on, when I let him settle in my city; and just about anything can inflate to look like him and drive me nuts. Confusion is the disorder. Confusion is the tension – giving it the power to damage and hijack my life.

This is seen in all the world’s trouble spots, cancelling Consciousness.

Well, good, good, keep going, this inner exercise will help my mind to clear. Mara forms a Grand Trine around Buddha, with a sly serpent and a siren woman. The serpent and the woman proceed through chaos, but the Buddha’s serenity is firmly established in the green and golden ground as Tifareth of Pentacles – his spine with the bodhi Tree of Life: the wheels of the cosmic Law. Death’s skull leers from behind the woman. Men consider Eve to be the gate of death because she gives them birth.

The Sacred India Tarot 6 Pentacles/Disks – Buddha’s Enlightenment

Enlightenment on whatever scale seems to follow on a jolly good clearout of the Shadow in one’s cupboard. Enlightenment happens as the projections clear. Every obstructive interior terror from his innumerable lifetimes must have bombarded Buddha as he quietly attained his peace. For the lower mind is in love with its own drama.

Such is the Great Wheel depicted here – the card itself is a life-mandala. The design was inspired by the film Little Buddha, starring Keanu Reeves.

Correspondence 2003 – Rohit to Jane

“… The Six is a spectacular composition, depicting the triumph of the Buddha over all the forces of Evil and negativity; and what forces they are!

“At the moment of his greatest challenge, he calls upon the earth to witness that he has transcended, he is Awake. The card captures that feeling perfectly, as well as the futility of attempting to shake one who is awake. This is really beautiful.”

Rohit’s Notes 2003

“7 Pentacles/Disks. The first sermon ever given is regarded as the complete Buddhist teaching in itself. In the deer park at Sarnath, verdant surroundings seem to be mandatory.

“Traditionally, he has always been shown as being much larger physically than the students in religious art – his stature being gigantic as a representation of his achievement. It is famously called ‘Setting the Wheel of Dharma into Motion‘ – so one disc could perhaps be rotated. We need to convey that he was radiating immense energy from that point on… a sort of translucent skin…?”

Buddha 7 of Disks, visual reference

7 of disks visual reference

This is the pose I used for the card: his former disciples felt a little shocked and betrayed by their Guru’s illumined evolution to full stature. They preferred to go on starving.

Ramana Maharshi’s story followed the same general pattern. When he was very young, his continuous samadhi remained detached from the world. After his second conscious death experience on Arunachala, his state became “sahaja” – that is, unconditional. The realisation unbroken, he engaged fully in everyday life, as chief cook, bricklayer, engineer, bookbinder, poet, counsellor and friend.

Sacred India Tarot 7 of Pentacles/Disks: The Sermon in the Deer Park

Jane’s Notes 2012

7 in Tarot is The Chariot. On the Tree of Life, the 7th Sefira (emanation) is Netzach, the Life power – a spark which wakes the physical and emotional worlds. The Wheel/disk in Buddha’s hands indicates the binary force turning the chariot wheel – an upward and a downward pressure – as in the Sri Chakra Yantra: duality.

Sri Chakra Yantra - 4 Siva triangles through 5 Shakti triangles form a radiation which is simultaneously concentric and up/down.

Sri Chakra Yantra – 4 Siva triangles through 5 Shakti triangles, forming a radiation which is simultaneously concentric and up/down. It is like the sap through the seasonal cycle of a tree’s rings.

As the One however, every point radiates concentrically – the rings of a tree, a ripple on water, a sound-wave. The point has a spherical geometry, for it is infinitely reducible, as well as expanding to an atom, aura, planet or star.

The nature of the Enlightened One is everywhere, in all places, all times: Tathagatha.

Buddha teaching in the Tree of Life, showing chakras

Rohit’s Notes – 2003

“The Seven is yet another creative breakthrough, in that all the disks are spinning, as the Great Wheel of Dharma has been set into motion with this first sermon. I have an idea, should we call the suit the Suit of Chakras then, as that is what the disks seems to represent?

“I particularly like the touch of the Buddha’s halo being a Great Wheel too. I have seen many representations of this pivotal Buddhist event, but I feel that Jane has managed to capture something new and fresh about it.

“This suit is turning out marvellously. Again the Vishnu/Solar element is conveyed in the placement of the disk in the hands of the Buddha.”

The blue “Buddha light” – a healing radiance – enters these russet-brown, Taurean waters.

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

Rohit Arya

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

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

flower sermon

Jane Adams

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

Sacred India Tarot Archive: 2,3 & 4 of Pentacles – The Awakening of Buddha

Posted on November 26, 2012 by janeadamsart

What are Pentacles?

In the Minor Arcana, the Tarot Pentacles are its “Earth” suit – the plane of manifestation. A Pentacle is a conscious mark or sigil. The cross-section of a tree with its concentric rings, is a sigil, a Yantra. Flowers and their sacred geometry are sigils; so are the Fibernacci series, the spiral, and the laws of growth. In every mark of nature, and everywhere in life, if we care to look, the sigils are engraved. They appear also as omens. They require intelligent reading. Intelligence is of a deeper order than “cleverness”.

Fibonacci series pentacle, by Keith Critchlow (“The Hidden Geometry of Flowers”)

A Pentacle is classically a five-part pattern or circle, embodying humanity. The Coins, by which this suit is also known, are Currency. They bear the mark of trade. Financial currency with its gold or paper standard, is a “promissory note”. It is no more visible in essence, than electric current, the current of life: our imagination gives it power. Our coinage is a symbol, with its own temples, altars and acolytes. It depends what we believe in; but without adequate means and/or a nourished belly, it is hard for the Great Work to touch base. The Currency is the undercarriage – monetary, linguistic or psychic – which helps us/the Great Work, to survive; a relative freedom from anxiety. Best is a balance of all three. The Currency is a balanced state of health.

shell spiral

For the Sacred India Tarot minor-arcana, the Pentacles or Coins are “disks”. Vishnu and other gods within Brahman the All, carry a diskus in one of their many arms. The diskus is a sport, a weapon, a wheel. It is thrown, it spins like a planet, it reaches target, comes to ground. The Wheel of Karma likewise comes around, to wake us up. Justice is the Law of action upon reaction.

Wood bird yantra

In the Buddha’s story, we decided to let the Disks be wheels. The Buddha, who overcame the traditional habits of denial, and touched the ground all through his enlightenment, is often called The Wheel Rolling King. He has the Wheel of Dharma; what comes around, comes round, as a Kalpa, seasonal leaf through trees, or an insect life-cycle. What comes round comes around, in our life, to help us untie the knot.

Paul Foster Case

The Buddha Nature is itself a sigil: right conduct, compassion, the Great Middle Way. The shining Pentacle of Gautama Buddha’s lifetime among us, was and is his awareness and concern for human suffering, disease and death. What can be done? How can freedom be found, through these vicious and perpetual circles? He applied himself to pioneer a way which was practical, and – like Jesus a few centuries later – overturned rigid, doctrinal tables in the temple of the One.

The Buddha’s long life and teaching is supremely practical. Practice is the way of the Pentacles, the Suit of Earth.

Two of Pentacles

Rohit sent me this in 2003, as an early image-reference marked “Two of Pentacles”. It is the only one I have. I am not sure what he had in mind. A woman offers fruit – or sea-urchins? to another woman. They share a Mona Lisa smile, or secret. Perhaps it is the Buddha’s feminine nature – the women who surrounded his pampered youth; his early sexuality and experience. The most beautiful portraits of the Buddha all have a heavy-lidded cosmic tenderness – the smile which just suggests an invitation.

In his instructions for the Suit, Rohit wrote to me:

“A prince in the lap of luxury, surrounded by beautiful girls, in a garden, walled off. There is poverty sickness and suffering on the outside but his father has kept him from unpleasant sights, determined he will never know of pain and decay – to the extent of removing dead leaves, branches and flowers at night!

“He is a very capable and intelligent young man but he is also being stifled in this curious ignorance he is being kept in.

“Compositionally this is not going to be easy – I know.”

My solution is graphic – the young man in his garden of delight, is disturbed by an intuition beneath the surface of things. He awakes uneasily. Is not this so also, if we give too much attention to a meditative bliss, and not enough to where we are? What are we starving or neglecting? Balanced spirituality must be embodied. The Buddha found this out by trial and error: first, through sheer empathy, he would endure his own period of starvation.

His eye of Consciousness – rather like ancient Egyptian profiles – opens sideways from the eyes of life. It is; it will be; it always was.

In many teachings, the blind lead the blind. Studying this card, makes me reflective.

The Wheels are the old teaching: as above so below. The beggar woman touches the wheel as if to implore divine grace. Her baby hasn’t milk – her husband is blind.

Correspondence March 2003 – Gautam (the publisher), Rohit and Jane:

“Dear Gautam – got yours and Rohit’s … Re Ace Pents, I certainly did not know that the ladies should be dressed Vedically. I will see if I can reduce them. Maybe they are not needed at all?” (Later, the extra ladies, or birth-helpers, were removed, so the Buddha’s mother is on her own – see the Ace of Disks Birth of Buddha (earlier post.)

“I’ve started on Two of pents, and plan to send it to you when I’ve done one or two others as well. Am recovering from bronchitis and not quite up to scratch, but much better this week. I would like from you just a few more hints on the ‘teaching’ in each one. The idea of using the Dharma wheel as the coin, came spontaneously, and can be used in each card of the suit. But I would like indications from you as to where you would like them placed geometrically. For instance in Two of pents, the design has Prince Siddhartha in the garden, top half, with a (smaller) wheel in the background, rather like the sun – and two less fortunates (whom he senses but cannot see) in the bottom half. They also have a golden wheel above them, and are divided from the Prince by a wall.

“As I said before, I’m doing the minor arcana in a slightly simpler style than the major – otherwise it will take years. In most decks, the minor are more symbolic and less literal than the major; some are purely geometric. My aim is to try to keep a consistent formal design and colour scheme through the suit. Any suggestions?”

“Dear gautam and jane – I have nothing to add to what jane says here, it is all great stuff. There is no message or teaching coming forth from each card in the suits, unless it is the key-word association. Perhaps that would help. I will send off a list.

“Jane’s ideas on card no.2 in Pentacles is great. I do not wish to get in between her and her obviously inspired streak! she is on the right track. I agree we need to keep time in mind, but still, the minor arcana cannot be a dip or drop in the quality of effort. We are aiming to compete with the best in the world. The Mythic Tarot would perhaps be the only real competition we have. A few extra months does not matter – this pack is for being done to last many centuries! Since each suit is a theme and story inspired one, it will take some time, more time than if we just drew the pentacles or wands. That is an acceptable slow process. With regard, ROHIT“.

Fragment from Rohit – “… would indicate, in fact sometimes wearing considerably less. (You could not possibly be expected to know this, and I missed communicating it, because it is simply taken for granted, and not even part of normal consciousness.) In fact India was a gorgeous and sensual place then, the richest country of the ancient and classical world. The pentacles suit should reflect that spectacle and grandeur. You cannot possibly overdo the ‘effects of opulence’, especially the use of gold ornamentation, if you wish to draw it that way. The south-east Asian and Indian visual references we sent, will help here. For the whole pack in fact, we should keep Opulence, Splendour and Gorgeousness as keywords. I think we are doing very well indeed, and creating something genuinely valuable for the world here.”

3 of Pentacles

Rohit’s Instructions: “Curiosity drives the young prince out of his faux paradise. He sees Four Sights from his chariot , Disease, Old age, Death and a Sage who seems to have found peace in his meditation.

“Again to cram all of this into a rectangular space is going to be difficult, but I trust you will find some way round the difficulty. It is regarded as a great victory in Buddhist literature for the human spirit, so the sense of potential and urgency the prince feels is central – not the harrowing sights.”

Visual References for SITA pentacles/disks 3 – The Four Sights. Note the Wheel

The Earth disks tip the scales from the Sky disk, with the desire to see and understand the reality of suffering: poverty, disease, old age and death. These “sigils” (pentacles) shocked Prince Siddhartha profoundly, and altered his course of life from the local to the universal plane. On his fourth sally from the palace, he met a sage whose serenity (despite starvation) sustained a blessing on the piteous human condition. There must be a way …

Rohit’s Instructions for Card 4 –

“The story explains the context but it is very clear he left when his wife and newly born child were sleeping. He left on horseback instead of his chariot to confound any pursuers. Again the situation is regarded as a huge triumph for consciousness.

“There has always been a tension inherent in this episode, he is refusing to do his duty to follow his entelechy! If that can be conveyed it would be great…”

Four Sights, Signs, Wheels … the Law is aligned, and the household sleeps. The Prince rides forth on muffled hooves, in an etheric shroud to protect his destiny. Yet he bears in his mind, his wife and child. In due course, they became his devotees. The Buddha’s tempo of evolution is seemingly accelerated, in relation to theirs.

Throughout sacred and esoteric history, we come across different time-signatures in tandem, like a raga with two or more rhythms through it.

Correspondence – April 2003

“Hi jane – card one looks much better now. We’re very happy with 2,3 and 4, and suggest u just ‘go with the flow’. … Warm regards, Gautam.

Rohit: “It perfectly captures the sense of luxurious blindness to reality and the imperative for change, which is the message of the Two in the suit, anyway.

“Three is dramatic, even somewhat harrowing, but that is exactly what the young prince must have experienced in the Four Sights – something that knocked the bottom out of his shallow ‘successful’ world. It is a very strong composition indeed, made all the more powerful by substituting a skull, which has archetypal resonance, over the more obvious choice of a corpse.

“The Four has a somewhat Mughal miniature feel to it, with its split perspective to indicate simultaneity of action in different places. I think the prince has never looked so regal as at the moment he is going to renounce all the trappings of royalty. As always, Jane draws animals marvellously! It is a poignant card, not a dramatic one.”

“Painting the Buddhist Wheel of Life”, photo by Scott Aaron, 2divineways.com

Shyam-Kali Yantra, 18th century Rajasthan. Yantra with magic pentagon symbolizing the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, ether – may be vitalized as a safeguard against destruction and evil, and for good fortune.

Sri Chakra Yantra created in an electronic vibration field, an experiment in the translation of sound into vision. A similar experience is ‘sensed’ during ritual worship when the yantra pattern ‘dematerializes’, appearing to dissolve into a sound-pattern or vibration field of spoken mantras. Still for a film by Ronald Nameth.

These two Yantras are not of the Buddhist tradition, but they serve to demonstrate the universality of the Wheel: the precious seeds we bury in our lives.

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

Rohit Arya

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

Jane

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).

Published recently online: The Reckless Fruit in two parts
– here are the links to click

Beyond the Box

Posted on September 23, 2012 by janeadamsart

Sarada Devi, the wife of Ramakrishna

“Put to good use, the powers of the astral plane, to reign with heaven.”

Reflect on “conscious participation”. This is what an artist does, who generates “new” images and astral temples and landscapes. (Nothing is new – just freshly reconstituted!) All the astral plane’s brilliant beauty and terror and muck is made up of what the human psyche has installed there and impressed to believe. It is the realm of the embedded Imagination.

On a visit in a dream, when the landscape has that tell tale illumination, colour and clarity, it was travelled in by a soul, perhaps recently, perhaps repeatedly, perhaps in very ancient history. It is something their life, their delight and their problem made, and it is there for ever.

Similarly I visit nightmare, panic, depression and loss when I am vulnerable or in transition. And I learn by trial and error solve and coagula – what I truly wish to sponsor, and to withdraw from what I would not add to. This last is difficult, because anxiety and violence – co-dependency at any level – are truly attractive and compelling.

The Age of indelible inputs which we have now (by cyberspace network) only copies and makes a little more manifest what is there already and has been for unknown millenia – an infinitely expanding backlog. Governments get all excited and think they can exploit and control it to keep tabs on everyone, and people are furious; but it makes a small difference only to those who magnify the idea. A government is no different from myself or any individual. Any detail dwelled upon, becomes all-encompassing and engulfing – a universe, a MAYA. That is why sages and Masters touch on life lightly. “The situation is desperate, but it isn’t serious.”

Theatre Arunachala Vichara

The shape and consistency of “me” is extraordinarily powerful, to counteract and disregard the universal borrowing that goes on. Each individual is a Clapham junction. Trains – individualities, traumas and long life histories, themselves shiploading souls containing eggs and sperm – zoom in and out in shades, occupying an hour or a day or a passing breeze. Learning to identify the moods as persons or flourishes of the Goddess, may help to release from “identification”; and to begin travelling consciously within the dream… like Castaneda.

Paradoxically, identification happens when we do not have good, clear boundaries.

The dreamer in the dream! Which is which? Visually, we are cocoons, dreamily interacting with other self absorbed cocoons – a mutual fog. At a party in a garden, coastlines chat to coastlines of the dark continent and cheerfully restrict each other. “Here be dragons.”

Coastlines meeting socially

The raised eyebrow of Ramana and the sound of water pouring through Skanda-ashram, reminds me to dislodge the cocoon and ask who … ? Unanswerable! My “touch-base” with Ramana has no ashram enclosure. Ramana “who sports in the Self” … helps me to navigate the quicksand and return to space and base.

In bird watching mode

Ramana Maharshi’s life and atmosphere is embedded in my hard drive, with the Tree of Life. I hardly notice it! Why did these useful friends get embedded so? Not by sitting meditation, but by years of hands-on apprenticeship to a craft. In my case … drawing, writing, and then learning to use a mac to archive things.

The computer copies the neural mind. It demonstrates psychological menus and the way the memory base works. So the screen is fascinating. It is a self portrait. It reflects faithfully, our obsessions. It displays our private subconscious in full view… to the extremities of twitter fallout.

wood bird yantra

Then it is up to us to select … what to bind, and what to loose.

The universal snapshot is oblong, like a house, a car, a phone. As three-dimensioned beings, the oblong and – (with a stretch of imagination) – the Cube … is how we view life and ourselves, habitually. Conscious participation lifts the lid a little. Conscious participation accepts Life above and below the screen, and to each limitless side; and fore and aft. Conscious participation invites a larger spectrum.

The Cube of Space. See Builders of the Adytum for the course work

Habitually the planetary orbits around the Sun are viewed as an ellipse – a thin slice across a hard boiled egg.

Conscious participation intuits – “above” and “below” that plane – the Solar system as the egg-in-shell of nesting spheres … feel it, taste it, be it. An electron wave-pulse enspheres the atom so, and gives it number, weight and significance. The planets in the physical plane, are points: positions in the Heisenberg position-or-motion principle. The observer’s consciousness “collapses” the observed into one or the other, and records the observation locally.

The energy-field of each planet – whose physical globe we perceive – does not encircle but enspheres the Sun. This concept releases an entirely different information: such as the elder science of astrology: the interconnectivity of the solar system with galactic wheels, eggs and atoms.

The concept uplifts the interior life to walk tall. A Yantra is a cross-sectional projection of the tree of life’s organic and actual growth. The tree – our body – grows up through the Yantra, root, stem, sap, crown and birdsong, through the seasons.

tree yantra

Truth is largely hidden from the daily grind. It is unavailable to the general news media and entertainment, because it is perpendicular to our limited sensory horizon. I do not go along with the idea of “conspiracy theories” keeping the human race asleep. I know too well the pattern of my own inertia momenta to keep me asleep (by habit), to pass the buck! It is natural, given the habitual pathways, tensions and comfort zone, for this to happen. The half-conscious state is indeed susceptible to crossroads of bacteria, cancers, ancient kundabuffer (see Gurdjieff), space invaders and what-have-you. But to imagine a conspiracy is part of the fantasy. It has no real substance. It finds no grip.

Are we not, each of us, responsible to …? Doesn’t each plant wrestle with resistant earth to reach the sun? – (often over many cycles, many lifetimes.) And are we not buds on the same tree, all destined to open, but not at the same time? What am I to do, right now? To pass the buck to anyone else, any country, society or government, is day-dreaming and depletive. Right here, and no where else, is where the quantum leap begins.

Quantum physics knows the morphic resonance of atomic particles. Where one bows, or hops to a higher orbit, others distant beyond the reach of light and space, behave simultaneously. We are never alone. I am never alone.

Sri chakra yantra

I do accept I am hypnotized by what I am conditioned to believe. Where do I put my concentration … that is the training – which in due time, manifests? Esoteric and occult schools drum in the alternative way, by REPETITION. By repetition is how we view ourselves from infancy, by repetition a musician rehearses, and by repetition we learn. By repetition the seasons turn. That makes the scriptures and schoolbooks of Ageless Wisdom seem very boring!

The dimensions: point (dimensionless) to line, plane, solid, spatial (after Ouspensky). The Point, its infinite potential in any direction, inward as outward, is the geometry of the sphere, and is perhaps the fourth dimension.

In all the teachings, the Fourth dimension – the grasp of the Whole – is perpendicular to our time and space, inward as outward. The box falls open!

A tapestry or Sufi blanket is woven into patterns horizontally – lifetimes: but the thread entering it vertically, at any point, is Consciousness. At the heart of the thread is pure lambs’ wool, undyed.

The Tailor of the Dark Field

Needles' eye!   
My heart's thread sews   
heaven into fields   
of day and night.   

The point!   
In fragrant flowering night   
are drawn in paths of light   
those patterns of the bright   
sapphire sky.    

Creating the One!   
Passing through point's eye   
into unbound and brilliant hour,   
I AM the sacred thread    
of dim, dark lifetimes gathered   
O Lord of Caves   
and of the meeting rivers!   

Listen to the sound   
unseamed   
where waters meet;   

my point opens   
the way a diamond   
shines.

from Siva Poems, circa 1994

Tetrahedral Tree of Life (1993)

Mouni Sadhu – (in Meditation, chapter 33 The Possibility of Miracles) gave a useful exercise to train the mind to step out of the box:

“(1) Take a small box, a match-box will do. Look intently INSIDE it and study it, so that every detail will be firmly impressed on your mind, and you can then recreate it in your imagination in full when you are not actually looking in the box. It is not easy, I know, but no important undertaking which is rich in results has ever been easy!

“(2) When you have finished with the ‘inside’ of your box and can build an exact picture of it in your mind, pass to a study of its OUTER surface, exactly as you did with the INSIDE. Check the results carefully, so the new picture is just like the first (1), clear cut and definite.

“(3) Now comes the actual test: try to get a SIMULTANEOUS picture in your mind of the inside and outside of your match-box. If you succeed, you have enriched yourself with a certain enlargement of consciousness, which leads to a realisation of the possibility of higher dimensions.

“This exercise may take a lot of time (weeks or months) if it is to be performed as intended. And it is quite possible that you will feel yourself completely unable to perform it. Then leave it alone, nobody can exceed his actual powers, and it is not essential.

“Most probably, you would like to hear how a unit of say, the FOURTH dimension may look in relation to its predecessor, the cube. Well, it must be built by the creation of a body, which will be simultaneously perpendicular to all the surfaces of our cube, as our former deliberations about the three known dimensions and their formation have shown us. Only a mathematically skilled mind may see such a possibility clearly.

“The problem is up to you to decide and try it for yourself.

“Incidentally, this ‘fantastic’ four-dimensional unit, derived from a cube, is often called ‘THE TESSARACT’.”

Mouni Sadhu

Orbits meet

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.

Drawing the Sri Chakra Yantra: some early Notes

Posted on September 13, 2012 by janeadamsart

The most visited post in this blog is the one which “began” it – “How to Draw the Sri Chakra Yantra” in early June. This exercise was foundational to my creative projects down the years. The wedding of Siva and Sakti through the cosmic lattice – whether subtle or physical – is the groundwork. It underwrites and ensures a healthy lotus.

I discovered the other day, the following sequence of drawings and diagrams, which may be of some interest.

In 1993, I kept (with my beloved of that time) a log-book. We were laying foundations for a spiritual dwelling. So to begin with, the two pages which follow are thoughts of the Sun, from Maitri Upanishad chapter 6:

“(1) – the Self bears himself in two ways, as he who is breath and he who is the Sun. Therefore, two, as true, are these paths inward outward. They both turn back in a day and night. Yonder sun is the outer self; the inner self is breath. Hence, the course of the inner self is measured by the course of the outer self.

“For thus it has been said:

“Whoever is a Knower, who has freed from evil the overseer of his senses, is pure minded and firmly established in that which is locked away from outward objects, is even so, the Self. Likewise, the course of the Outer Self is measured by the course of the Inner Self. Now that golden person who is within the Sun, who looks on this earth from his golden place, is even he who has entered into the lotus of the heart and eats food.

“(2) – Now, he who has entered the lotus of the heart and eats food …

The action of the Sun in all directions, inward as outward

Following this, the Upanishad says: “There are two ways of contemplation of Brahman: in sound and in silence. By sound we go to silence. The sound of Brahman is OM. With OM we go to the End: the silence of Brahman. The End is immortality, union and peace.

“Even as a spider reaches the liberty of space by means of its own thread, the man of contemplation by means of OM reaches freedom.”

A cutting for the logbook, with a quote from the Yoga Vasishta

Here are the early Sri Chakra diagrams from 1993. The method is from Saundarya-Lahari – The Ocean of Beauty by Sri Shankara-Bhagavatpada, a translation by the Theosophical Publishing House in Madras, 1937. The method opens the hymn as a whole. I tried it out, and simplified it just a little, to understand it.

Note: alchemical sulphur (fire) is represented also by a triangle atop a cross – see next drawing. In the “trinity”, sulphur is rajas-guna, salt is tamas-guna, and mercury their balance is sattva-guna. The alchemical qualities corresponding to eastern gunas are an interplay of elemental humours – dry, damp, ardent, and so forth. Water mixed with earth is damp: earth mixed with air is dry. Each element inclines to fire or to water. It all embodies prana, breath. Upon these very basic qualities the universe is woven.

Flame is an upward triangle: water a downward droplet. Flame is phallus and water is womb.

A reference to the same interpenetrative law, in the Tao philosophy: I Ching Hexagram 11 with Earth over Heaven: Peace. When Heaven-creative trigram (three Yang lines) stands above Earth-receptive trigram (three Yin lines), they draw apart – the static “Standstill” hexagram. But when they are infolded the other way round, the Heavenly power ascends through gravitational Earth – the male through the female – fertility – which is “peace”.

This archive is by way of an embellishment. For the method to draw it yourself, see How to Draw the Sri Chakra Yantra 12 June.

This was used as the logo for the Ramana Foundation UK journal, SELF ENQUIRY.

More recently, in 2008 I drew this version, as part of an Ananga-Ranga series …

The Sri Chakra Yantra, fountain of eastern wisdom, combines here with the Tree of Kabbalah. The lovers are seated at Tifareth: Consciousness. Crucial to spiritual development, world peace and all good intentions, is health and loving-kindness in our sexual nature (whether active or sublimated) and relationships. We are on and in this earth for the Great Work. The flasks, retorts and pelicans in alchemical engravings, contain the lovers at every stage of the “cooking”. Their prana breathes the Divine One in and out.

SOUL PARTNERSHIP SELF TOUCHING:

Inner and outer Tetrahedrons. A Tetrahedron is a triangle with four sides. The fourth point is a fulcrum – the dimension of volume or understanding, in any relationship.

The points of the interior, inverted Tetrahedron, touch the sides of the exterior Tetrahedron. Extending through the sides to equal size, they form with it, the Platonic Seal of Solomon.

Star of David/Seal of Solomon/Cube of space – 3dimensional tetrahedron structure

Finally, another newspaper cutting …

… from the logbook in 1993. “Kate Adie” (celebrated war correspondent) was my bossy persona … anxious to keep myself updated on the militant-esoterickal scene.

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.

Some More Portraits of Ramana

Posted on July 12, 2012 by janeadamsart

Self enquiry, the being here, is a particle which leads to God; the God particle in the higgs bosen affair. The particle is an open question.

What about the alone, the just-now?

The Life in and out is everyone’s; nothing stands alone. The out and in of this is beauty. Loneliness and its concomitant death anxiety, is fantasy, an imaginary tower block. Silence opens every conceivable companionship, like an infinite school of fish in the sea. Keeping still, the shoal appears. It is a cloud of fish, the waters, or the swooping serpentine patterns of starlings over Rome. The silence is alignment with the dancer’s grace. The soul with Siva bends and sways the meadow grass – the sara-grass of Vedic Mantras: pulses of fire. Touch lightly: this feeling is every where.

In his Guru Mantra Commentary, the seer Ganapati Muni discusses the mantra saravanabhava, whose vibration is: “One who is born from the forest of Sara”. Sara is a kind of grass. The story goes that the seed of Rudra, placed in the stalk of grass, became Kumara, Skanda – the mythical hinterland of Ramana. The Veda says; “he put his image in every form … he made out of the grass, special faggots and nourished all around the fire of Yama, Kala, Time. He expanded and increased that which stood in the sky as the fire of Time. Time is not different from sound. The sound resonates subtly in the sky and cultures everything.”

Ramana as Skanda in The Sacred India Tarot

TO RAMANA, A SON OF SHIVA (I)

Your flower uplifts
and in my cup,
the pestle pounds
sweet seed.

Your pools of dark fire
drink eyes to eye;
and rippling, tipple and
spill sweet rivers …

and as the neck
of milky swan,
so rises and falls the wave
to my breast – drink wisdom …

and as the serpent’s
sharp tongue
uncoils, float
your soft speech, free!

From Footfalls of Melody Unsounded, 1992

TO A SON OF SHIVA (II)

Into my mortar cup
your pestle grinds.

Dying, I am born.
The cook rises at dawn
with the recipe “nam yar ?”*

No grain is wasted.
Squirrels and monkeys gather them.
Skandashram’s scullery fills with song!

Each nut case hard, dim, brittle
to you brought,
is the art,

and red, golden, green flavour,
pappadom, crushed ginger,
cumin and wild rose,
sing in the cup;

beloved deliverer, pound
my fragrance!

No captured entity strives
in your hand which captivates.

Your lotus eyes
strike down the harvest of
my skanda-lizing stalks.

From Footfalls of Melody Unsounded 1992

Those who, as food for Siva, pour
their minds into the sacred fire
of pure awareness, and dare worship
and blend in Siva’s form, attain
his own auspicious formlessness.

Muruganar Garland of Guru’s Sayings

He that sees the Lord
in the Temple, the living body,
by seeking within, can alone find Him,
the Infinite

in the temple of the universe
having become the endless eye.

Muruganar/L.Sharma Guru Ramana Vachana Mala

Ramana with newspaper and Ti-Puss

Ramana with Cow Lakshmi

Mouni Sadhu arrives to Lunch

Ramana & Devotee

Path in North Mimms, near London

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.

How to Draw the Sri Chakra Yantra

Posted on June 12, 2012 by janeadamsart

This is my article about the Sri Chakra Yantra, and how to draw one for ourselves. It first appeared in “Self Enquiry”, a number of years ago. Readers of The Sacred India Tarot will note, that the back of the cards carries this design, white on ochre gold, the colour of Sannyas on the traveller’s path.

I refer you also to http://aryayogi.wordpress.com – Rohit’s essay on The Symbolism of the Sri Chakra Yantra – you will find it in his May archive.

The Sri Chakra Yantra with its divine flowering of masculine and feminine energy, is a crucial agent in the creative process. The Siva Sakti blend acts rather like Ganesha does, to facilitate beginnings. The Self Enquiry Journal (Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK) carried this Yantra as its logo. The Yantra appears in two of the Sacred India Tarot cards:

Tarot card 3 The Empress – Lakshmi Here, the Yantra as her throne, extends through the landscape, her inter-connected golden net of prosperity.

Tarot card 18 The Moon – Chandra. The Yantra in this enigmatic image appears like a tree section: it is also the Path of Life, which this threshold deity guards. Classic western Tarot decks show a winding path between two towers, to the distant Mountain. The 18^th Arcanum conducts an unbroken stream of embodiment, from the earliest forms of life, to Consciousness, through the aeons.

Prefacing “How to Draw the Sri Chakra Yantra” are two of my earlier poems and an article by Krishna Bhikshu, which was published in The Mountain Path in 1965.

TWO POEMS: June 1989

Goat/Crab Landfall

Sometimes my dear
though stepping on golden land 
I have still 
the sea in my ear. 

Come forth, comes answer: 
Go into the land, come sea-legs; 
mind not the morrow, nor yester 
year, O jesters, but
step forth 
walk in the land of flowers and mountains 
feasting your eyes, my dear 
about you.  

One step 
two step, like 
a teddy bear, remember? 
The scale of Ursa Major has 
no fear.  Up into the place of meeting 
and piano in the palm 
of your hand, my dear. 

.
.
.
And the second poem ...

.
   Approach

There is a point of 
light in my heart, to rest 
in the core of being 
the stem, deep beyond measure. 

Look only within 
to see and be. 
The point of the
infinite deep 
is drawing "I"in. 

My flower face is drawn in the heart 
of a body of God, 
indivisible the stem 
as into a well. 

In my green stalk 
of the watery world, 
the silent star, a point so bright, 
indivisibly, infinitesimally 
pulls me in. 

My 
daisy crystal fire 
in boundless vibrant 
darkness, cannot see; 
she is.

Introduction to Sri Chakra Yantra

In a 1965 issue of “The Mountain Path”(Ramanasramam journal), Krishna Bickshu wrote:

“Out of the Bindhu or causal state, are manifested light and sound, which appear on a formal plane as form and name. The whole process of manifestation is dependent on and governed by the shakti who is 1) Consciousness, 2) Desire and 3) Action. Action (3) is the combined result of the first two, and is represented as the apex of the triangle of which they form the base.

“Although one says ‘base’ and ‘apex’, the triangle is usually inverted, with its apex pointing downwards. It represents the descent of the Divine into the manifested world. The sadhaka or aspirant is represented by another triangle with its apex pointing upward. The two triangles interpenetrate. In the heart of them is the Bindhu or point.

“All the geometrical figures used in the Sri Chakra are variants of circles and triangles. A Bindhu surrounded by a triangle in a circle can represent the entire Creation. But all the manifestations of power have to be realized in the completed Yantra. The original shakti manifests at each node(crossing-point) of the triangle as three different shaktis, or three primary forms of the Divine Mother. Each of them has various aspects which are then manifested in the larger triangles.

“The powers of the shakti are legion. Cosmically each larger triangle represents a wider and grosser manifestation. The tantric texts give the names of presiding deities at each of the nodes of each of these triangles. In sadhana however, the order is reversed. For the individual, what is in seed form in the first upright triangle has to be expanded by his practice into the larger triangles which represent wider powers latent in him. These finally lead the aspirant back into the amplitude of power, consciousness and peace, which is the essential nature of the Divine Mother. The mind becoming one-pointed, merges into the indescribable Beyond, which is the Mother.

“It is taught that the cosmos is in three stages: causal, subtle and gross. For one of tantric temperament, all this is richly symbolized. For the advaitin (follower of non-duality) this is not necessary. The ultimate result is the same for both.

“Sri Ramana, prescribing Self enquiry, also instituted this type of temple worship for those who are helped by it. The beneficent power he brought into earth is induced into the Sri Chakra sanctified by his touch. Those drawn to the more elaborate path may continue then to receive his grace, as well as those who practise Self enquiry alone.

At the installation in the Mother Temple, Ramana took great interest, personally added details to the forms of the Chakra (etched in a piece of granite two feet square upon a gold plate) and supervised the entire Temple construction. He inspected each stone for the workmen to eliminate defects, and at every stage of the work he was the final authority on form, on the ritual to be adopted, and on the deities to be worshipped. Before the ceremony, he stood for some five or ten minutes with both hands placed on the Sri Chakra in blessing.

“After the installation, Major Chadwick who had stood at his side throughout, said “How magnificent this is: such pujas should be performed regularly.” Ramana replied, “Yes, but who will see to it?” So Major Chadwick undertook to establish the Sri Chakra pujas six times a month. He remarks, “The explanation for this unusual show of interest by Bhagavan is probably to be found in the necessity for the Shakti always to accompany Siva. It is not enough to have Siva alone.”

On the Method: The Ocean of Beauty

On 19 April 1937, a respectable gentleman asked Ramana about the Sri Chakra.

Ramana replied, “It has a deep significance. There are 43 corners with sacred syllables in them. Its worship is a method for concentration of mind. The mind is wont to move externally. It must be checked and turned within. Its habit is to dwell on names and forms, for all external objects possess name and form. Such names and forms are therefore made symbolic mental conceptions so as to divert the mind from external objects and make it dwell within itself. The idols, mantras and yantras are all meant to give food to the mind in its introvert state so that it may later become capable of concentration, after which the superb state is attained automatically.”

(Talks with Ramana Maharshi, p.380)

Shankara wrote a long love-poem on the Sri Chakra, entitled Saundarya Lahari – “the Ocean of Beauty”. To receive the full benefit of a sacred symbol or yantra, it can be helpful to draw it, and earth its components into one’s being.

What follows is an initial exploration along these lines.

The Sri Chakra Yantra seems to have been given through a celestial comprehension beyond any mathematical agent of the human understanding. Contemplation discovers an exquisitely asymmetric equilibrium of movement and stillness – a musical note being tuned. No manifestation in the universe quite accords with our logic or the bound laws of arithmetic. Everything is a movement towards and into perfection.

In the Sri Chakra, nine interwoven triangles come to meet each other in a dance which is not symmetrical, but wondrously balanced. This dance is an expression, or shakti, of the central point: the Bindhu, the formless focus –purusha – of being. The point is primordially Siva. The flaring outward from the point to form a triangle is the projected universe or shakti power: his consort Parvati. From each point in the triangle, a movement flows out to meet its self.

In tantric scripture, the triangle – particularly with the apex pointing downward – symbolizes the female, the womb. The Sri Chakra is worshipped as a manifestation of the Mother who both proceeds from and gives birth to, the formless source. However, the Sri Chakra is constructed from a dual movement or marriage of ascending and descending triangles. For general purposes, the ascending or realizing power can be regarded as masculine, and the descending or manifesting power as feminine. Likewise, we see the ascent of our spiritual practice, through the descent of grace: its fruits.

Construction

The Inner Circle of the Sri Chakra, to draw it, consists of :

One Vertical Diameter, divided into 48 equal parts

(2 millimetres each, seems to be a good measurement to use.)

Nine Cords, or horizontal divisions of this vertical line, marked at 6, 12, 17, 20, 23, 27, 30, 36, 42 parts, working from the top down. Number these 1 – 9 inside the Circle, and let them, as a grid of pencil lines, cross the vertical diameter at an exact right angle.

Five shakti triangles pointing downward, their inverted “baselines” at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of the nine. (This is the female yoni).

One Bindhu point at the Circle’s centre.

This is purusha, the unborn, undying source.

Four Siva triangles pointing upward, their baselines at 6, 7, 8, 9 (This is the male linga).

In this construction, it helps to draw first the Triangles upon baselines 3 and 7.

These – the one descending, the other ascending – are the largest pair. Encompassing the whole universe, they are the only ones to touch circumference. They provide the framework for the remaining seven triangles to intersect one another accurately. These are constructed on baselines 1, 8, 2, 4, 5, 9, in that order, referring to the illustration for the apexes, and adjusting the intersections by using one’s eyes. These points or nodes, intersecting three lines, are called marmans.

It is interesting in this context, to note that each key of a piano is tuned to resonate three strings. There is a natural correspondence with the law of three in all cosmologies, including the play of three gunas in Advaita Vedanta. It seems that sattva – as purity of sound – emerges from the attunement in relation to each other, of rajas and tamas. Rajas expands, is fiery and whirls: tamas contracts and is dark and dense. Tamas is the inertia momentum inherent in any creative process. Without tamas, rajas could never come to form. Excess to either side becomes toxic: but their dynamic equilibrium is harmony. The same principle, applied to Yin and Yang, is Tao.

To continue the musical analogy: the keyboard of a piano is tuned not to mechanically exact intervals – which would produce an actual dissonance – but centrifugally: from each octave, to its higher and lower registers, in mutual relationship and approximation. In fact, an exact physical symmetry is discordant in subtle plane harmony. The earthly expression of the subtle plane is a Tao – a dance towards unity. So the Sri Chakra is a living organism on strings which are tuned and pulled taut, to resonate.

Do not strive to draw exact intersections or marmans at baseline 5, for it is actually off-centre. The inmost shakti (or womb) triangle on it, pointing downwards, embraces the central mystery of the Bindhu point. You will also find you need to pull and tug your lines a bit, through the three-way intersections to get them all in place; it is like weaving a rug with uneven threads to pull tight. This is not a mechanical process: but you will if you have measured carefully, get a good approximation, which ‘sings’ as a unified structure. When the Yantra is completed and inked in, erase the 9 working pencilled divisions across the Circle.

Contemplation

Notice also, from the centre outwards, a radiating movement. This is revealed in: 43 small triangles (or ‘corners’). Their outward-pointing apexes make four concentric circles around the first triangle in the centre (apex 6, below the Bindhu, and baseline 5, just above it.) The inner circuit around this has 8 triangles. The second and third circles each contain 10. The fourth which is outermost, contains 14.

These four circles correspond to the Four Worlds of Kabbalah in the western tradition.

Upon the horizontal frame of the Yantra are strung nine “cords”.

They form a vertical movement – the interpenetrating triangles, shakti (downward pointing) with Siva (upward). The coming-to-meet motion, or love-knot of the Yantra, through its nine horizontal strands, suggests the Unseen Weaver’s warp and weft: the universal play of the three gunas – Rajas, tamas and satvic – through the Divine tapestry.

The Bindhu at the heart of the marriage, is clear, formless source. The Bindhu point is the potency of all energy, the essence of any movement of mind before it begins to sing. From it, is generated the prakrti (primal world-stuff). This radiating or concentric movement, pervades all atoms of time and space simultaneously. Upon it, the fabric is projected into existence like a standwave; a pattern or vibrancy.

The radiant movement echoes, if seen cross-sectionally, the rings of a cut tree – the sun’s action over the years. But osmosis – the tree’s “invisible” realization – is root and shoot, the growth, seasons, branches and foliage upstanding, and lifts away from the world’s flat plane. It crosses the orbital rings. It encompasses what was, is now and is to be.

The world whose surfaces we perceive with our sensory spectrum, cross-sections Reality, like a slice across the tree. The radiant movement of Sri Chakra should be sensed not only as a mandala or wheel, but as encompassing and extending all directions: a hologram.

The marriage of 9 interwoven triangles is consummated over a horizontal web.

The concentric movement of the 43 “corners” suggests a dimension perpendicular to the triple depth of our world – being at once horizontal as vertical, inward as outward, immanent, all-Present.

If the interwoven triangles suggest the dual nature of Ishvara (the transcendent Divinity), the irradiating triangles through the tapestry imply the immanent Brahman, embraced in all beings as their One Self. The “Ishvara” triangles descend as grace. The upward movement is an illumined aspirant’s readiness.

If followed sequentially, the downward and upward movement in the Sri Chakra leads the aspirant inward to his or her core, to contemplate infinite peace in “Brahman”. At this point the aspirant attunes to the “spirit-level” of the human soul, which is mostly obscured, but here and there awakened; for the meditative focus touches universal verities. The upward and downward triads dive into one another. The Bindhu glows.

An exact harmonic in the subtle plane marks an inexact resonance in the world of our senses – rather as the perfect orbital Circle of platonic philosophy translates to ellipses in our physical solar system. Through molecular stresses in the biosphere, there is a gap. Within the gap we discover love. The love-necessity is the Mother; the cosmos flowing out to be reabsorbed in and as the Son. Gravity is this cosmic connectivity.

This paradox – accessible to contemplation, but beyond the powers of ordinary thinking – occurs in all revealed cosmologies. Physical science is able to perceive the expansion of the galaxies from an initial point: Vedic, Buddhist and Kabbalist sources speak in their own ways of the kalpas – the breathing in and out, of God, over inconceivable spaces of time.

The Sri Chakra, whose installation in the Mother Temple was meticulously supervised and blessed by Ramana Maharshi (who was not otherwise interested in religious trappings) delicately evokes the mysterious “interval” which out-stretches the aspirant in life, and awakens a path of enquiry, surrender and grace.

Two concentric circles surround the Yantra. The inner, consisting of eight lotus petals, represents centrifugal force. The outer circle is centripetal formation, containing and defining the force; it has sixteen petals.

Outside these, and outside the three concentric rings which circumscribe them, is formed, as in all classical Mandala construction, the Square with four gates – the world of the senses and of nature – which surrounds the abode of the Divine.

This essay on the Sri Chakra Yantra was first drafted in about 1994. The method to construct and draw it, was found in Shankara’s “Saundarya Lahari – The Ocean of Beauty”