In Touch: Art as Healing

Posted on August 22, 2012 by janeadamsart

PS – this is updated – I added a paragraph this morning.

This year 2012 is a time of change, a change of time, a river crossing the road. Some of us swim with the tide at tipping point. For many others, the pressures from the collective subconscious, nationally and individually, are unbearable. Like labour, there is pain, push and pull, and the rush of birth.

We each know someone – including ourselves – who gets overwhelmed by violent mood swings, stress, depression and obsessive disorder. Any small unkindness may hit a deeply embedded nerve “i-am-rubbish” and amplify it to a hurricane, taking life.

Prisoners of depression cannot reach out, and they feel stigmatized. The fragile one needs not words, but the presence of a friend somewhere, to support her coming through the crisis. Whom can we give – today – that sense of connection, the living thread, a phone call even? The smallest bit makes the difference.

Life doesn’t stop; so I have to blog-along-a-bit.

This sketchbook fell open, early this morning, when I was busy with Odds and Logs. They have your story in them somewhere, and contain a healing sequence. Some of them are drawn with the left hand. They are among many hundreds of similar drawings during 1987 -1988, when I was rowing across my interior Atlantic. Creative art is a quantum-packet of healing, transcending the artist, and making waves.

The pictures tell their own story; words are minimal map references.

Quantock ponies 2009

He art

Sunflower and Paddle Steamer

looking at me

Line dance 1

Line dance 2

Learning to

Learning (2) – a painting done in 2007

Get Well Soon. The little house to the right, is the soul. I sent this, and the one after it, to my father when he fell dangerously ill after swimming in a French river. It is an angel, but he calls it “Boy with Rabbit”. During his convalescence, he said each breath became a precious gift. It is like being born again.

Gan Eden … Adam, Eve, the tree and the ship of the soul.

Ode. This is moon talk, soul talk.

Navigation: the Fool (creative play) and the Lamb (emotional baggage). Hey-hey!

Flower, a despair of Painters.

In The Dawn of Magic (also published as The Morning of the Magicians), Jacques Pauwels and Louis Berger celebrated suggestively, a certain alchemical wildflower. They said she was saxifrage, and every painter failed – like the princes who tried to climb up a glass mountain to the bride. What could it be that makes the painters despair? Why should I be like them? I heard a sort of music around her, and drew what I saw in my mind’s eye.

flower the Despair of painters 1988

A painting done perhaps the following year. I wiped my dirty palette from the previous painting across the canvas, and that was my landscape. I outlined the found geologies and polished them a little. The Flower floats up to me from a pegged-down Violet Crystal, and near the Crystal, a little green man seems to fly her as a kite. Or he might be a painter, trying too hard. I didn’t draw him – he was just a splash of paint. But you might see something entirely different. What do you see?

Smeared paint with knife or brush turned into fishes, the fish of my dreams, swimming through.

The Elephant’s Child

When my mind raced, I would go outdoors for a walk around the block, slow, conscious and curious, like an elephant or a four year old, and notice things. To peg the mental dynamo to body tempo, earths and slows it right down. I used to have a chatter in my head all day long. I discovered that when I look out of the window and hear each word, at the actual tempo of speech, it gets too bored to endure itself, and collapses.

Walk the talk to calm it down, and not get carried away! To yourself … or to someone who hears … say each word. Soon you may not want to say any more.

Tie the tempi of the mental centre to the moving centre (the body), and learn to dance. Mindstuff moves like lightning, much faster than real life. That is where all the trouble starts.

Quantock heather path after rain

The point, with these drawings for self healing, towards world healing, is that anyone can do it. Drawing goes wrong when we try to do it too fast, like the grownups – then we are out of touch with it. I slowed right down, and learned to draw the feeling slowly, using my whole arm’s movement in that space, letting my body move like a child, a path, not knowing what the line might do, or where it might go, but believing in it. Sometimes I drew with my eyes closed, then looked. It was liberating. It is liberating to find and feel what is true to myself, and stick to that. It is liberating to dance, to take a stroll with charcoal and the line.

There might be a bit more to this, in the morning.

22 August

It is now tomorrow morning, and as I thought, there is a bit more. Souls move off the grid and into the medicine forest.

But “In Touch” was written towards all persons who get depressively suicidal. My cher ami told me another; the black girl up the road called him again and again at the weekend, and at last he went, and he saw her through, sat with her, jollied her out of trying it again. We discussed suicidal feelings for a while. He is a very firm person.

I am a river and I find my valley. Other souls see my pebbles and Quantock paths. Depression, locked in syndrome, is when nobody sees what you are and what you see. There is no worse pain.

So perhaps with one depressed – can say, say to me what you see; and see it too, without chatter.

This doesn’t turn the clock back for one who took her life; or for those who love her; but a sudden death – (I saw a guy on the Underground, just after I heard the news, he wore a SUDDEN DEATH tee-shirt and shades!) – a sudden death traps that fleeing soul in the tears and shock and guilt she leaves. I – we – go on seeing what she sees, until she loosens and is able to move on. As far as I know, and have always felt since childhood, death is no end, it is a gateway – like birth, but into a consciousness whose continuity is not “on-the-line of life”. The consciousness encircles it. A lifetime is one detail in that sphere, a whorl, a dust-devil dancer, a moving-centre lost, wrapt within itself. So perhaps what she feels more acutely than she can say, is the LOSS. The being lost.

But a point of Life within a circle of Consciousness, is circumpunct, the ancient Solar symbol.

Seeing what another sees, is not explicit, for we are built open, and yet are private. It is more, a willingness in the essence, to be open. (I am always on the learning curve, with this. I chip away at my conditioning.)

So go well, violet flower child, along your moorland paths and through the rain. His love, your friend, is with you. Let him live, for he carries your wild colour in his heart.

He carries your amethyst to whom he may next love, and their children. Nothing ends. It all flows on.

Having written this, a transpersonal pattern clears. There is a meeting whose roads cannot quite move on through each other – a Karmic cul de sac. Rising up, up above the Violet Crystal to the flower which is the Despair of painters, I see that she in her subconscious roll and pitch, gives him liberty. See the picture.

The existential despair of a suicide, is not the full picture. They are pressed to do it, and they exaggerate the prompt, because their boat rocks wildly. But the full picture is the way all the pieces move around, together. The sudden death is yet a gate for her to move through, and for him to go through into his new chapter. He is a Capricorn, and the amethyst is his true grit.

Many souls feel suicidal in life’s spiky graph at this time. Being touched, this is written towards all who are feeling this way, to try to companion them … a strong pulse of the violet healing radiance in the dew. Don’t try to end it, because you can’t, ever. Keep going. Go well.

World Compass: Go High, Deep, Far and Wide

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.

Head Remove (Gently) … with Atlas, Douglas and Robert

Posted on July 25, 2012 by janeadamsart

Head Removals (gently) 1972

24 July 2012 – “Head Removals Gently” was a thriving business in west London, during our hippie 1970s. Here is a head, stoned out of his mind, getting carried away from his Notting Hill pad – lost in his situation, and out to lunch.

But … remove the obstruction gently … from where I am – by seeing that there isn’t one?

Atlas emblem

Atlas (see previous post) holds up the globe, but is also a book of flat maps of the wide world. In the myth, Atlas held up the sky. The sky is Atlas’s head … or no-head. By the simple expedient of removing where he thinks his head is, Atlas is the Tree of the World!

Time is the rotating map of the world; time is a ball of persons waking up anywhere; time is in relationship NOW with many different phases, different lands.

There was once a time when at night the whole universe was dark and went to sleep.

Now, the lights are on all night. For the global insomniac internet, the sun never sets. It is always up in the sky for a friend as the tide of night travels … round and round … like a skipping rope. The jumper in the rope is inside a kaleidoscope or cinematic lantern show. I make and believe in my life-pictures, and get upset by them.

My Atlas emblem has the globe, with Atlas in full stress and preoccupation, and the full Moon with her own circle of time: but also, sky and clouds are seen from above – the serene and relative timelessness of the Master plane. In the sky near Atlas are little rose vortices, they are samskaras, thought-forms, life-spouts.

Atlas’s problem is: putting the world on his head. If he put on the world instead of his head, there would be no problem. If I keep remembering to do this, it slowly clarifies, and begins to liberate me, to relax in any situation.

In the lane, at Nacton.

The world is a Passing Place.

What is my concern? my stress? Touching base, there isn’t one. Foundationally, the world just turns upon her infinitely capacious axis, and my body has no rigidity.

Segments: interior Orange: beachball: longitudinal vanes.

Daffodils in Douglas Harding (From “The Dreamer in the Dream” by J.Adams)

Douglas Harding said we can bottom out our stress: let it consume us fully, then fly away! Stress is the pain-body of a person or of a country, family or culture. The pain-body – as Ekhart Tolle says – builds up through a history of civil war and private abuse. It cannot be ignored, but it can be seen, and allow it to pass through, and refrain from reacting. Refrain from reaction, is Sadhana, and is what Jesus meant when he said Love your enemy and offer the other cheek. It is ju jitsu: space for the problem to throw itself through and disappear. Refraining from emotional identification with the pain body, is Sadhana, and it doesn’t chill out overnight!

The principle is well upstream of any “fix-it” notions or pressures. Refrain from emotional identification and reaction with the pain-body. Keep practicing.

Sky muscle earth

The muscle twixt earth and heaven, is Atlas! This sketch has a bar of music playing through it. A pianist, or a real athlete, is loose and supple, let-go. A trained muscle is not a stiff one. Don’t bother about any thoughts at all, which are not relevant to Here and now.

The more I can pack my problems into a “shorthand” category, like “the pain-body”, the better am I able to view them from upstream. When I am personal, things are a mess; yet the personality is crucial! Egotism is incessant autobiography. But the vessel is like a salmon, moving upstream.

Tackle it with zest, not distress.

Zest, humour and turn the thing on its head. Imagination.

At Nacton

Realise I need exert no further than to STAND. My simple understanding: stand under. Exertion beyond this, is excess and trivial. Imagined conversations are excess and trivial – brick wall verbage I can’t get over or through.

There is only the plough of my underSTANDING, right now. Field, furrow and seagulls.

Do not attempt to theorise or justify. Head off the stress, by letting it pass through the chamber of love… without nagging or snagging it. The stress is just Life on my plate.

But who and what is Y? (from To Be and Not to Be by Douglas Harding)

I was wondering if my voice in my ears might change, when it goes deeper and waits.

Ideas do not form as word or voice, but as waves, silently. Words might form a poet’s pattern a-tumble in the surf. That statement sounded and felt a little different. It has an infinite leisure.

Then remember Ramana’s feedback to Ganapati: be in the root of the breath. Where breath rises, this is tapas. Where word rises, this is tapas. Vichara … the mantric root. Mantra is the ripple of sound, of water, of evolutions.

Ramana also said, no yogic effort is needed other than to ride the natural breath quietly, like a horse.

Douglas at Nacton

25 July 2012 SILENCE AND THE DRUM

Find silence. No intervention or comment, otherwise, has any account. The relief coming in from time to time, spreads like sunshine. You know why. I am going into new ground. Let it be.

In Robert and Ramana’s silence, the world turns as it should. Trust it, don’t shackle or try to pull it! Let go my nagging conscience, the talker who doesn’t get heard.

The silence is the root of all mantras, samskaras and life; detected bit by bit as the drum.

The silence becomes a mite stronger as I fall into it on the bus, and let the wheels turn. I can’t stop the wheel from turning. It turns out as it should. Only the cloggy bits that lean on it, imagine otherwise.

Robert: “You are not what you appear to be”

Trust in Life means – at a profound level – giving up “magic”. This cannot occur until a student is quite mature. An essential stage of Sadhana is the tension of the magic, the waveband of spells and ways of conduct. Till then, the spells are fine. But they use energy. I am a worrier. Slowly their glamour fades, and I am left with Life without method or end.

There is, as Robert says, silence in which all teems and turns; and speech in the face of that vast wonder, is impossible. As I settle, there are many tiny tensions up and down arms, shoulders and spine: let them keep sliding – like water off ducks’ feathers – to flow away. Down. Down to gravity and the unobstructed heart of the Universe. Silence. The mind cannot put up any signboards.

Rain. The sky’s river, chuckling, dancing.

All is well.

“I am a hidden treasure, and I love to be known.”

Shadows at Nacton

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.

Portraits & Poems of Eclipse for Ramesh – a Revision

Posted on July 18, 2012 by janeadamsart

A revision of my earlier post, "Poems of Eclipse for Ramesh &
Wayne", to update the verse formatting.
These were written in 1999: a sequential dialogue of Ramesh's
Advaita teaching with the ongoing difficulties of life.

**
TO RAMESH

I do not have to go anywhere else but here
to hold your hand, smile into your laughing
elder dove-hawk eyes

and thank you
for helping my understanding
rock steady; whatever rock
may roll,
nothing can alter the rock itself.

Jane loves mountains and rivers.
Mountains and rivers
move within the people
and break the outline of her heart.

Who is jane, indeed -
the projectionist - the
indispensibly inefface-able
Tarot card in her long floating dress ?

No matter.
The rock is that
as well as the mountains and rivers.

Companionship when the outline
which separates us, breaks
is indescribable.

Companionship
when there are no persons
is indescribable.
The companion ship of being
is indescribable.
The companionship of no earth, no trees,
no people and nothing to think or see or be
in any direction, is indescribable

naked of every sight
and containing everything.

Such is tantra, web of the universe,
the sparkle of its mountains and rivers
11 July 1999

A high tide at Alet in Brittany
**
..

WHEN YESHUA WENT UP THE HILL TO PRAY

Thunder draws the bow
across a barometric current.
It shouts.

Thanksgiving trembles in
my string when she is tuned,
like light from primrose spilling
bright stars in a grassy bank,
dazzles the camera, a blur.

Wild flowers are light sources.
They answer the sun.
They pulse.
Bluebells in a photo, fade
to a hint of amethyst,
too bright.

See how we connect
through what we
do not see.

When YESHUA went up the hill to pray,
leaving his lambs asleep,
he rested from the multitude.

In the soul’s deepest rest,
as Eckhart says,
is prayer which is silence,
making the primrose shine.
It shines because
there’s nothing to stop it shining.
And nobody.
.
.

RIGHT ANGLE CROSSING OF NODAL RIVERS

Certain types of stress
may be removed for good,
but what remains is variable
(as Swami Liquorman would say).

For instance: a relative integration
into the herd of sheep,
their concerns with wool;

For instance: release from the drama –
to clarity, peace,
but the gears still turn my wheel;

For instance: One who is free
recognises another,
unobtrusively.

A line of destiny shivers,
at crossroads. ‘Rivers’
renouncing the known
may in one another, drown.

Conception’s silence is the GAP
where streams of current
in one another’s wave, fragment
to an interference that doesn’t add up.
From the gap, as death exhumes,
a flowing mystery resumes.
What is your and my cross
of life? Awareness!

Shock plummets through
the shivering ship
reaction, flinching, from the nails,
strata sagging, breaking timbers,
as before sleep
sudden stumblings on the rock,
fog of nerve-ends jangling bells.

The secret of soul shock
is to soften it open.
Let it be. Let the alarm be not
walled up or out.

As Robert in Arizona used to say,
it is preordained while you lie asleep on the gears.
Awakening has no preview, nothing, no way.
No-one knows where the car might go. Who cares ?
7 July 1999 ..

**
..
STONE IN THE RIVER BED

If God removes a rock or obstacle
upraising the wave of standing-over,
the understanding coming strong, itself
rolls the rat that sat in the river, away.

So, what happens? Why!
The whole standing-over lot falls down
to the bed of the river, melts as
the ever it was, the river, the river, the river.

Dislodging a stone from the bed of a river
is a wondering weight to feel.
My language is not flowery
(as accused)
but applied, precision tool.

The words dropped in the gap
are not mine.
They come.
Then I polish the pebble,
inward casting, better to see.
The corner stone I yesterday heaved, and could not place,
and wanted to cast away,
today shifts into true, the treasure
exposed, the Stone.

See how the water rolls away, and on?
See water, stone, stone, water, wall of stone,
fluid, all of stone, cold, hand in water, solid current
presses my hand
just like stone, which it is,
flowing, chuckling, splashing, racing
river, mountain, stone, sky, space.

Hand in current, ‘cross the river flowing
imagines a solid surface, pushing it.
My hand, now rivering rivulet,
the current itself is showing.

The standing-over wave resounds
high over the stone,
a curve of space and time and planets
into the hidden presence of stone,
tickle the stone,
guddle it like the sides of a fish,
tease
gently from bed if the time has come,
to chuckle and roll.
The current does that, not I.
Should I move before its time, one stone,
the nature of the river bed
is stones.
7 July 1999
.
.

Ramesh at Home - a sketch from life

**
..

FISH

My standing-over sounds and choirs,
and cries out DOH RE ME
(from the depth we cry to Thee ...)
but a smoothly flowing
river, you’ll note, is quiet.

In this “write” a stone became
a fish.
No sound uplifts the hidden matter,
it swims,
receiving opening halls
of flow, upstream or down,
or across the stream, does not
resist.

Like a bird in the breeze, the
fish is aqua-dynamic,
may come to the surface, you see,
hello little fish, then gone again.

I don’t want to guddle this
fish or flip it onto the bank
for its natural element
is my teacher ;
but
open the root,
where I am right now.

My pipeline into earth
is not behind closed doors.
Ah yes !
Ah yes !
Got you ! ...
but let it go again.
Never seize or trap the fish
or it will die
and be your belly-concept only,
in all your dreams
a flavour far too strong for life.

I think that’s
enough for now.
7 July 1999

ramesh at home
**
..
.
EASE OF JUST BEING SHIFTED

If you drop a rock into a pool
shakti rises, turns
it into a fish.

If a Fool patiently all day waits,
the Moon arises to the bait.

Weary, by noon’s end,
felt my dowsing around with fish
is foolish.
The leading role of my masque,
disapproving the task,
scolds my lethargy – not
a kind friend.

Yet as
the bed where it lay, levels,
the Stone itself unravels:
a hollow that held
soft silt embedded,
the sky has seen.

I hope
that if my follying sits a-fishing all day still,
a High lunar Priestess will
my following entice, beyond
the fringe capacity
of my Foolish cap-&-bell capability
to “cope”.

Here in the living-room, meanwhile
My unsuspecting spouse
serenely contemplates within our house
his intelligent Companion –
quicksilver Knight by sleight
of holy Bishop, the Rook to pit
computerized ‘pon black and white – a Master pantheon,
in shades of courtly grey to dance , the winsome imp beguile.

My rocky river stone brought to rest
gently today, is only shifted
to an ease of being, solidity just
coming alive, watery bed sun-bright uplifted.
8 July 1999
.

Tarot Fool & Priestess

DOG DAYS AND FISH-HOOKS

When the pores close up   
and rain pours upon unforgiving stone,   
my tell-a-vision is left to herd   
the leaking word. 

Unable not to spin the top,  
gone is all I saw so clear   
to a blur or mere   
foolishness, mine alone.    

In the piglet's trough where they feed,   
how stupid indeed   
my words:  "Oh! now there's peace and light
on waves' crest, here in sight!"   
   
All my boast can see   
is troughs at sea.   
The way got blocked again with stuff half seen   
and over-workings on the screen.

Let it be -   
does the cog which clogs the wheel   
care what consciousness  
does or does not do today?   
If it is honest, it cannot miss. 
In service to ME, it is coffined.   
In service to Being, it is defined -  
a limitless clogged-up-ness.   

The way of American Al Anon hero   
paved with sonorous "Oh   
Mother fucks and Holy shits",   
with jovial laughter roars  
giving scant ear to choice bits   
of sentiment that blister at the oars.    
Salt of the alky tank, his sage sobriety   
helped reduce his popularity.   
The people went off feeling edified   
upon the wagon but   
a little sad.  

Cloud with brightness shining round or through the edge   
is my depression with   
tiny tasks of clothes and teeth,   
and a simple life's a weary hedge, 
toiling at my archival debt. 
I hate hot weather, I boil and sweat.   
Lonely?  Can't stop chattering?  monkey moans   
feeling bored, tired, fidgety, drones. 

Stuck.  Life too full - fool, foolish,  
heavy chatter.   
Stuck. And curious it is,   
alive and stuck, to own   
my issues. Personal behaviours   
are wearyingly irrelevant.  

When stuck, light floods in and chimes,   
There's nowhere to go.  
The way she feels obliged to spell it out   
at all times!   

The truth is stuck, stuck up and bored.   
Consider day after day this song   
crossing a river   
(no banks to board)   
with a staff, a poole, a pen to feel me along.   

Of what accord my tiny gleams,   
the triumphs few?   
Step, then step, then step, don't slip -   
foot forward, the view   
is walking -    
strange it is to be me, like being you!   
an insect, deep beyond belief.   
Nothing can "help" - not this   
writing, not a teacher, not anything.   

Life,   
I'm a ravening basket case.   

This to realize, awe inspires   
for nothing can help   
the water of life -   
no hope. No end in sight. No goal.   
No change. No charity. Why?  

This is real - not badges   
with sages upon them to wear.   
With no fantasy to prop 
my spirituality, what progresses?  
Ow! my ankle   
misjudged the hidden rock,   
tumbles into and as the flowing river!

Caught I am, as fish   
on the hook, this open-ness.

.8 July 1999

Devotion

Water, stone

PRESSURE POINTING

I found a pressure point   
in my left hand, whose sore signal   
probed, released   
a tingling trap in upper arm.   

Like this, a teacher   
gently penetrates the core.   
The kink slowly slow uncurls 
by ancient acupunctural science.   

Wherever the sore signal manifests,   
apply the gentle there, there -   
let it tell.   

Pull up the core with the seed.   
Your patterns bring you home. Honesty   
pulls up my taproot   
with the mouldering weed.   

Leaning on the points of life, that touch   
is unavoidable. I till the field for decades.   
The meridian comes out and up   
and seasonally discharges.   

There are parcels undelivered   
from the post-office of my   
Under-being. In sight is seeing.
Seeing doesn't mean seeing something.  
It moves the finger to write.   
I learned this, 
exploring tantra, art of touch, of love.   
Nothing in the web   
of days, months, years,   
changes, or gets better, or what ever.  

Touch continuously   
taps the combination   
here, there, everywhere, the same place.   
I have my ideas, but what are they? 

How can I see the ineffable   
except that it is   
through crest and trough?

11 July 1999

Ramesh at Gut Schermau

UNKNOWN FACTORS OF FASCINATION

Loving you in the being-with way, 
could, through frameless window   
touch him, here and now! 
Our separateness is a myth.   

The unknown quantum A appears in B   
through souls C, D, F or X,   
like electron's double rotation.   
Positive and negative "spin"  
through virtual and manifest seas   
are our polarised probables.

WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE ARE - (but are "known"...) 
and I certainly am not those   
crotch-forks in the street   
going to parties, to dimly drink   
unanimous uni-formity.   

What am I?  Which hidden part   
proliferates, up-rises, ripples?   
Which of you, within those I see,   
seeks out and touches me?   

Under the ground 
the life sparkles, warms,   
is husbanded in ways   
we cannot conceive.   

Indifferent to the container,   
and spilling unique into each and every One, 
each and every one thinks he or she 
begins or ends!   

and we play these unknown factors,   
ciphers of fascination to one another   
in T.S.Eliot's four quartets   
till we close the book -   

the mystery breaks here on the beach   
in wave after wave after   
wave after wave unending   
from the mist: out of dingy daily mist.   

If a gentleness comes through the probe   
upon that place, why not?  

Who cares if I get tired and sore   
and obsessive over tasks   
and way the wrong things?

11 July 1999

Ramesh openly

See also the earlier blog in this series – “A big Peach of Yin and Yang – Advaita Poems”

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.

A Robert Adams Transcript

Posted on July 18, 2012 by janeadamsart

Thank you, Hamish McLean for sending me this transcript today.

“Not everyone needs a guru. A guru can be a tree, a mountain, a lake, a flower.

“You’ve heard this before, but let me explain it. When a tree becomes your guru, the tree is no longer an ordinary tree. It’s you. You are identifying with the essence of the tree, which is consciousness. You’re not seeing the tree as a tree. It’s the beauty of the tree or the mountain, or the lake, or whatever, that first attracts you. But if you just see the tree as a tree, you’ll be disappointed, for the leaves drop off, bugs attack it, people chop it down. Yet if you identify with that tree, spontaneously, intelligently, that tree becomes you, and the essence of the beauty is the essence of your beauty. In that respect the tree is your guru.

“Therefore a guru in the human form is a being whose words in the silence you feel in your heart. And just like the tree, the essence of the guru is your essence. There is only one. Therefore when a student is sincere in their spiritual practice, when they put that first before anything else, when they continue to work on themselves, automatically the guru within yourself, the essence within yourself, like a magnet, will attract and pull you to a guru outside of yourself, which is really yourself, that can cause you to rise higher and become liberated. You’ve got to stop seeing yourself as a human being. You’ve got to catch yourself. Whenever you think something is wrong, someone has hurt you, someone hasrubbed you the wrong way, when things do not go right at your job or at home, do not be like the ordinary person and react to it. And do not believe that if you do not react, things will get worse.

“I cannot tell you enough that every situation that happens to you is necessary for your growth. There are no mistakes. Everything that you’ve been through, everything that you’re going through, is absolutely necessary for your spiritual growth. If it does not look kosher to you, realize it’s your mind reacting. It’s your ego reacting. And the way to handle it, is to just observe.

“Do not get involved by arguing, fighting, trying to change things. Just observe. If you can observe without getting excited, then you’ve passed that test and you will not have to repeat it. But if you get angry, you get upset, you want to get even, you’re always thinking about it, and you have hate and animosity, even though you move away from that situation, you will meet that situation again, and again, and again, until you learn not to react to it.

“The universe is a university to educate the soul. Before we can go any higher and awaken, we have to have these little realizations where we begin to feel that there is nothing wrong. There is absolutely no thing wrong. All the good of the universe is yours. There is absolutely nothing wrong, nothing. If you can only live in the moment and feel what I’m saying, everything in this world, in this universe will become you. That’s why people like Jesus and others have been able to say, “All that I have is yours,” meaning that consciousness is bliss, and bliss is expressing itself as the world, as the universe, as yourself. Live in that bliss. Refuse to acknowledge anything else.

“It appears that if you do not acknowledge something, something will go wrong in your life. But you are not made for something to go wrong in your life. There is absolutely nothing wrong anywhere, so how can anything go wrong in your life. Even those of you who believe God is running the show, God couldn’t be good and bad, or there would be a capricious universe in which we live. The moon would crash into the sun, wheat would grow one time and roses would grow another time from the same seed, when we live in a capricious universe.

“There are not two powers here. There is one power and you can call that God. It is all-pervading. If it is all-pervading, and there is no place where it is not, how can there be a problem? For in order to be a problem there has to be God and something else. But all you’ve got to do is a little meditation, and you will see that there is only God as everything and there is no room for God AND anything else.”

Robert Adams ♥

I wonder what your grand cross is. Mine yesterday, was a long, footloose summer walk in the Chess Valley flower-meadows outside London … and a x on my phone, as a squabble with a friend cleared up.

From a path along the woods, I saw the river below, full of recent rain and almost spilling its banks over the fields; then it thunders down a little weir. Inside the weir I guess, there is an extra little door to let the pressure through.

From Homer Rows, 2004

A Kabbalist Meditates on Time

Posted on July 17, 2012 by janeadamsart

17 July 2012

The Great Day dawns with beautiful sunshine. Lovely it is when the cloudy lens dissolves, and the power of the sun is green, blue and gold. Think of all the WONDERFUL THINGS which may happen from this day crossing Uranus, Moon, Pluto, Mars.

I dreamt about Ramana. This is an EXCEEDINGLY RARE event, only happened twice before, I think. He wanted to learn how to draw an eye, or write about it, so I offered him mine to study. I closed my eyes and was aware of my left eye like a blind vesica bud, swimming in my head. It is where it tends to ache. He examined, and began to massage my skull around the eye, and both temples, finding healing pressure-points. He drew me to follow him, and I trusted him absolutely, in his hands, and went wherever he pulled or pushed my skull, like a dancing partner blindfold, around the room: his long, probing, supple fingers. I didn’t stumble. When he’d finished I opened my eyes, and he wasn’t “Ramana” as such, he was a tall guy in a leather jacket with some others, but the non-dual Sage was in him, visible through the contemporary stress of facial expressions.

The “I”.

A Kabbalist Portrait

To a group meditation last night, in the evening. What theme does he choose, in the middle of the Grand Cross? He chose Time! Isn’t that interesting. In some ways, it is the same as my writing on the speed of light, which I am preparing to blog; so that’s a signal to complete it later today – a co-hearance.

As usual I was tired and find it hard to concentrate, and as soon as he touches Beriah I fall asleep. I go into a deep soft relax … maybe even into silence … while struggling to keep awake and hear the words. I lose the bit between ascending to the planets and Lord Thou Art God. But something lodges here, where the shield is not. So here goes.

It is three hundred years ago … isn’t that interesting, someone said last week, that the tipping point’s visible impact might emerge three hundred years from now… We are by the River Thames, looking across the water to Greenwich, and the Observatory on its hill. Greenwich longitude is where time begins – by general commonwealth agreement and convenience: the rotation of the day – the degrees of circumference begin and end here. So I am at an agreed point of the turning sphere. “I”. 1. (Or 0).

And it is evening, the sun is setting. London life is smaller, darker, smellier, much more dangerous and more restricted – except for the intelligentsia across the river, in the Observatory: fat cats, the toffs. The tide is out, so all the gravel banks are exposed, covered with the litter, garbage, weapons and sewage of 18^th century London, and no boat traffic is coming up-river. Along the bank are huts and wharves and warehouses, higgledy piggledy, mostly built of wood; with loaders, prostitutes and alleyways of crime. Above, the evening sky is a pearl, the stars beginning to come out. Streets are dark and fire-lit, flickering. The pollution on the ground is extensive: the air pollution is nil. The stars shine almost untwinkling, vast in number, like big round jewels, and we are always looking at them, fascinated by what they measure, pattern and portend: the Light above a pitch dark city: its cosmic laser pattern. Sometimes, on a moonless night, the countryside is as dark as the city, and you have to grope your way by touch. The blind become sensitive.

Perhaps in our present day, the whole atmospheric envelope carries trapped photons from the cities, so it is very rarely, truly dark. Photons interacting, emit more particles and their photon “energy release”. There is much saturation. Afterwards, G spoke of the black hole in the Milky Way whose billions of light years’ density conceals, or veils the heart of the galaxy through Sagittarius; if it didn’t, our nights would all be ablaze as Full Moon in the Alps.

Now we are watching Time, in our place by the river. Strange to realise, that Time is the act of watching, and staying here, as the heavens move across the field. Time has no television, news, gossip or distraction. Time is the Watcher. Apart from the Watcher, there is no time. On the whole I dislike Time, I am restless, I want something to do. But now this moment: feel Time, be Time, breathe Time, be here. My vacuum is filled with being: the passing of the night through London – God’s lanterns in the sky; the pleroma of emptying. Time is fullness. Mindfullness.

As a London inhabitant of the early 18^th century, my inner sense of being is so rich that I experience more to stand and stare; not everyone hurries. It is usual, to see many who rest, who wait between employments, who are. We sleep and wake and dream by the fireside, and by the waters. During the 20^th century, we submitted to the dictatorship of the media en masse, and have become much restricted. The modern mindset requires incessant, unholy stimulation, and blocks out the stars. Thus, the message we get from all sides, political, geophysical, social, ecological, scientific … lacks data. It is like gazing at one piece of glass, picked up from the ground: belief.

Around the horizon, the stars are invisible, packed together so densely along that plane, that they form a haze. I realise, there is no darkness. There are so many stars, that in my depth vision they meld together; indeed, each aerial atom is itself a star, an interaction of Light: it throbs everywhere.

As the night advances, the river tide turns, and the sea moves from the left, from the infinite arm of my subconscious. The river water, gleaming a little in the starlight between its murky banks, lit here and there by fires and moving torches, swells and spreads, gradually covering the gravel flats; it spreads and fills amoebically, the slow power of the waters as it fills. The river is wide, and when there is fog, you can’t see the opposite bank; so it passes me as the sea, mysterious to itself, like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave: a mist. Time un-named, un-aimed, rises and fills, rises and fills. In Greenwich they have a grandfather clock, a pendulum … tick tock … tick tock … a beating heart. Between the slowing ticks and tocks, the gap builds to a sneeze of no time. Mind the gap!

The river is filling, and cold it gleams and gurgles, carrying vessels, carrying the goods from the sea, carrying merchandise, curiosity and politics from far countries whose borders are unimaginable: the creative collective-subconscious debris and discovery. And as it fills, so I seem to rise with Life and Interest; even so I enter the Observatory on the hill, and look through the lens. The lens brings to me close the stars. It telescopes time, space and history. It is an hour-glass. It reveals an interlacing Pattern I live among, and am, which is quite other than the seamy novel on the ground. I ride, and am, a net of jewels, of an unbounded Order; and it contains as vividly the sounds and smells of dark old London and the chilly Thames and my small soul, as it does Itself; all, All is the Atom.

Thus as it were, with one flick of comet’s tail, I ride and survey the Solar System: surveying Time.

Time is a petalled flower of different circumferences; of curves of gravity to the centrifugal edge as it gains mass and becomes centripetal. Time is this conversational conversion, back and forth through the rim of the wheels – the Sri Chakra Yantra. Everything moves away from, and back into itself, at the Speed of Light, which alone is constant.

Time has different size “watches” or spherical shapes around the Sun. Mercury’s time is a few months; Earth’s time is a year – Mars, two years, Jupiter twelve: Saturn 29. Pluto’s wrist watch is 240 years or thereabouts. Imagine that great Circle of Now!

Time is a host of segments, parabolas and crescents, great and small; of bites from the Big Apple.

As I ride among the stars and perceive the harmonics of Kepler’s Chalice, Time’s arc of Now is unimaginable, inconceivable. It threads galaxies like daisies by their stalks; it embraces the Doppler shift and the in and out breath of Kalpas; yet still it rests within my soul, because I am made of atoms and am the Atom. I began the whole thing! and it has no beginning. It never began. It has no end. The I vanishes. There Is. There are the eyes. I AM THAT I AM: the burning bush spoke. Lord, thou art God. Lord, Thou art God. Lord, thou art god.

ADONAI I adore thee. Thou art I am. TAT TVAM ASI.

And still the ships with their lanterns travel up the heaving cold breast of the river, steaming a bit with the night. And from the east, from whence they come, the sky has opened, and dawn brightens, as dim as the day; it swells and advances ever from the east, like the tidal river against the land’s nocturnal stream. And open your eyes, back into this room, this current portion of the time. Well? That should be interesting. What did you see?

Periwinkle

Greenwich Observatory moved to the south coast, when London’s light-interference became too strong, and eventually to the highest desert in South America.

Most of what we believe, is led by the blind. Detachment, altitude and depth is generous to the smallest detail in the Bigger Picture. With detachment arrives insight and compassion, as the blind eye is healed. In any circumstance, any fog, it is our privilege to be, and to see the Cosmos. All it needs is a strong reminder.

The Grand Cross in today’s heavens, is a potentially violent configuration in many views or frames; yet in its essence is the intersection of T S Eliot’s “occupation for the Saint”. It is for us, a portrait of time and of awakening. In Exodus, the Children of Moses crossed the Red Sea from bondage to Mount Sinai, the promised land. On the Tree of Life, this story is: Yesod, the bondage or self-image. Then Temperance, the probational path of honesty to Tifareth, the promised land. Crossing Temperance, is a bridge: Hod to Netzach, the path of Awakening (the Tarot’s Tower.). In the Tree’s Queen scale colours, this path is coloured red: the path of Mars: the Red Sea!

A Cross is the most ancient of symbols, meaning “the mark”. At the crossroads, ways open; trees are planted – even kisses and chromosomes, as lovers meet. In masonry, the cross is the perfect builder’s balance with Level, Square and Plumb; in the Tao’s t’ai chi movement, the Cross is the everlasting fluidity of Yin and Yang at the dantien. At the crossroads, when we are lost, we ask the way, and get into conversation. The Cross is the sun rising or setting over the sea, creating a vertical path of gold through the horizon. As a rigid symbol, the cross is high-tension brittle and destroys; as a fluid interplay of horizontal and vertical planes, the cross is a beautiful tall ship under sail: keel and crows-nest.

Tree of Life, Alchemy colours

Let us form a vessel: the Tree of Life, in alchemy Queen-scale colours

It is good to trust whatever our individual cross happens to be, and dance with it. Under a Grand Cross in the skies, small movements are wise; movements of minimal adjustment: the navigator’s wheel at home. The big projects unfold later, as the tension opens and releases. Across the spine of an open book … read the lines.

Mobius strip – a quantum view of our Universe. Join the ends of a strip of paper, making a half-twist. Now cut the doughnut in half, all around the circumference: it becomes a figure of eight – OM HREEM. Repeat with the new long, circular , twisted strip … ad infinitum. Prana flows in these linked figures of eight from the Source and through the web of the universe in every ray of awareness.

The figure of eight unbrokenly circles itself

Every ancient symbol, from DNA caduceus to l’argot – the Gothic Art or Argos patois of the temple builders – has within it, the cross. Then the cross in our skies, linking the old Mayan calendar to the “new” Great Sphere of Time, through an hourglass neck, the pressure … has every conceivable future. It forms a figure of eight: a mobius strip: an infinity. Our destiny is writ far wider than today’s spectacles.

first-person specs – as I put life’s tunnel on my nose, who comes to meet me but my Friend?.

Polar alignment with small shifts of axis, is the centering of our spine: the centre of gravity. When it is out of line, it hurts; when it comes home it rests, and Life goes on. The movement in and out of this … is beauty.

Curve of gravity

He draws the bow ACROSS the strings: Itzhak Perlman, 1986

Yantra in the Wood

Tree Spirit, & some very old Pebbles from the Scilly Isles

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 Trees of Life

Posted on July 11, 2012 by janeadamsart

This is the Tree, showing the BOTA Tarot Keys on the 22 Paths. Each of the 10 Sefiroth and the 22 Paths is a living Intelligence, a manifestation of the One, in the many coloured dream-coat of Life.

And here is the Tree’s upper Face, like a map, with my own Tarot Arcana (1991) on the paths

Trees of Life as cosmic model, showing the anatomy of a musical idea, and the sensory download of our physical world

“A Tree of Life”: the children of all the world; each of us in our first-personhood the Seer, Malkuth; the infinite Earth, or space for the other(s) to happen in. This is one of my illustrations in Catherine Harding’s book Pierrot – the Explorers of the Real World – inspired by the late Douglas Harding’s life and work – On Having No Head.

The Rose of the World. The Rose of all the Universe is Tifareth the heart of the Tree of Life. The caption is: “If we look carefully, this immense heart is full of Light. And this Light makes us want to love.” Another illustration from Pierrot – the Explorers of the Real World. A new revision of Catherine Harding’s story for children of all ages, is being prepared.

“Old Josephine” – A French village learns to see the Tree of Life. Douglas and Catherine are to the right.

A Hermetic Temple: an integration of the Seventh Book of Hermes Trismegistos (12 Penalties, 10 Potencies and the Secret Song of Regeneration) with the Tree of Life, pillars of Solomon and Zodiac signs with their Elements

An Astrology chart on the Tree of Life. A painting of the birth-chart as a landscape in the Tree of Life. This man has Virgo rising (Mallkuth), the Moon (Yesod) and Mercury (Hod) in Capricorn, Venus (Netzach) in Scorpio, Sun (Tifareth) Sagittarius … then Mars (Gevurah) in Virgo, Jupiter (Hesed) in Taurus, Saturn(Binah) in Aquarius, Uranus (Hokhmah) in Virgo and Neptune (Kether) in Scorpio. As the Tree rises like a plant, through earth into sky, the Zodiac signs are depicted symbolically. Pluto (Daat, the dark non-Sefira of Transformation, meaning “Abyss, Knowledge, Union”) is in Virgo.

Jacobs Ladder, showing the Four Worlds – a working model of the Vision of Ezekiel. The Hebrew letters at the top spell AHIH AShR AHIH – “I am That I am.” Astrology is a study of Yetzirah, the World of the Psyche, or Formation, the way a soul is likely to embody Assiyah, the material world.

Mandala – poppy and oats. This is self explanatory – the way a Yantra or galaxy grows, in any detail illumined: the Tree from above, and so below. This photo was taken on a walk near Chesham, towards the end of July last summer. I was thinking of Amy.