Magdalene

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The name “Magdalene” is derived from a Hebrew word, magda, meaning “tower”:  a vessel for the second birth.

the tomb – October 2000

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This morning in my dark night of the soul, I remember a painting I did.  Here is its story:
(3 October 2000): “Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.  If I am sitting in the retort, seeing out of the window, the birds of mercury that fly by, are throbbing warm feathered vitalities of the Spirit. 

“On Sunday a powerful bolt of feeling – listening to Messiaen’s organ music of Mary Magdalene/Jesu in the sepulchre (No.11 in Livre du Saint-Sacrement) – produced this drawing.  Mary M is leaning back into him and giving birth to the Sun, which is still inside her.  He appears in the grey dawn when she thinks he is dead:  he says her name very quietly, and her heart awakes with joy.

In the night I woke up with foxes shrieking outside;  and I felt in myself what was still blurred in this drawing.  A “hermes sensation” came slowly over me, with the teaching.  On Monday morning I completed it – a cracking dawn landscape, her womb.  The rocky cave around these beings became like the original Serpent.  Christianity is more timeless with adam and eve, and more esoterically erotic, with the Son being born through Mother Earth, than most of its caretakers might care or dare to see.  

“Then last night I dreamed I’d given birth to a baby, and now the pair of us – baby and I – were engaged on the enormous and exhausting task of feeding the baby from my inner body;  i.e. to find a position where this could be done, how to hold it and the blankets around us (as Earth):  the vast and cooperative hunger of the child.”

“O Night you black wet-nurse of the golden stars!  From this darkness all things that are in the world have come as from its spring or womb.”

Thomas Vaughan

“The red and the white tinctures of alchemy are in this drawing:  the pinkish violet in the rocks around him like the changing of the water into wine.  It is a geode, and also the fresh, cold sea.”

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19 April 2014 
I recall now, that I did the drawing with an awareness of history.  Like Jesu’s agony in the garden, foreseeing perhaps the centuries of abuses in his name, the woman bears with the Sun in her labour and return, a knowledge of how she will be suppressed, distorted and demonized, for religious reasons.  Deep down, the Yeshua Maria consciousness is alive, two halves of the same seed.

Easter is a family time.  On holy Saturn’s day, when all the religious images in their churches are shrouded, I sorrow also – my sense of apartness.  It aches sharply through my hands; but the pain brings connection to my creativity.   I asked my Tarot for a key to open my day with.  It turns out to be Key 0, the Fool:  the alchemist:  the eternal antidote to depression.   To the left and right, I found the Lovers and Soul Strength.

Yes, the stone will roll away and the Son of Man will come out.  In this moment the cave of the tomb is Mary Magdalene, as in my painting; and he called her name, she heard, and he came and stood beside her.  He is free.

The solace is as ever, my interior world and its precise vision;  it wakes through the shutters.   Life strides on brightly through the shadows;  all is well;  there are these passing shadow states.  Connecting seems to happen through the passage of pain through my hands – brief and sharp, like lightning – for the creatures of the forest begin to stir – the Glory begins to stir – my resources flow their lifeblood through me, I am in the dawn.  The healing is that I am not limited.   Don’t get bogged down with life.  Keep travelling the mountains and the ravines.  Pick me up each time.  “If you don’t fight with life, Life takes you up and puts you on her shoulder” …  an old Osho song.

I climbed out of the dark night and grasp the bright, sun warmed rock.   Be at peace with the turning point, however it manifests:  for still there is pain, and the grief of having been unwise, and now my trapped negative nerve is clamouring.   Look to the progress of humanity, of human values:  courage, honesty, mindfulness and real love.

You see, the Fool travels at dawn, the Lovers are open, the lady restrains the red Lion so he will roar in a different way, he will sing to the dawn.  The red Lion is bound to her body softly, with roses.   Look to the human values, and mend.

In the churches, the holy images are draped in mourning cloths.  If we have a troubling inner issue, we are likely to be crucified on it for holy Saturn’s day.  Fall, fall, fall into the dark tomb and rise again as Light.  Everything that is preached about this, is theory.  I have to do and be it myself, or pass for ever, the buck.

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The Last Supper and the Healing

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The sound of the sea is unchanging, bringing with it, seals and souls.
May all that we plant and cherish this spring, bear fruit.  I wish you a joyous Easter tide!

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My adventure invites fellow travellers.  I am a poet, an artist and a seer.  I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom. 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 2012-2014. 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/

A Walk in the Dark Night

My recent post The Miasms, Karma and Homeopathic Healing touches on “walk-ins” or demonic possession.  I had a strange experience of this, about thirteen years ago.  This post contains that story, as I told it to John de Ruiter.  Around it I found other writings and pictures.   Existentially, we come to grips with our shadow, as we walk.

Sea 1

8 November 1998 –  The Dark Night of the Soul

The truth is impersonal.  It isn’t “me”.  It is intercepted by colourful individual hue-and-cry localities.  They do what they want or are designed to do – the shape of a flower, fish or hedgehog – but it never stops being truth.  If in the morning it flows strongly, I think “Ah, I can see the truth!”   But that’s because it will open any mind that’s willing.  It is not something to be proud of.  Sages – those who are established in truth – go about their business and most people wouldn’t recognise them.  Why?  The truth doesn’t belong or stick to anyone.  It is all there is.  The obstacle is in considering it as an object I must reach.  The obstacle is the seeker after truth, for she puts it ahead of her, like a mirage.

sea 2

Tripura Rahasya says (p.12) – “The beneficent work of the self-inhering divine Grace is finished when the inward turning of one’s mind increases day by day.”

notebook page

…   is the realisation there is nothing I can do, and thus the extinguishing of hope.  Life burns a lamp of hope revealing rock walls, and believes it is the agent of illumination.  But when there is no lamp indicating progress, the darkness is its own source.  When the light is gone and there is only the infinite, soft and impenetrable darkness, this for some is death, the loss of heaven-god, and so it is called the soul’s dark night.  But you know, and I know, since we are One, that this is the cave of the Uncreate.  The darkness of the void is but another perception of the light.  Wait.  For the Word has not happened yet.  There is no Word here.

sea 3

Yesod — What is the dark night of the soul?

Tifareth — It happens before the ability to see from beyond the pairs of opposites dawns.  Some souls, when in the power of darkness, experience futility.  Gifted adolescents turn playmate to the demons, which are half formed currents of Creation in the astral body.  They feel trapped in vast, fecund fields, for the vital energy is vampirized.   That is why they stay in bed. They are exhausted.  The fields of the night glitter with POETRY – “the gorgeous black sticky stuff“.   Every soul, every branch of the Tree, must experience Hades – whether past, or yet to come – in the relative cupboard of Time.  It is the loam of below the Earth.  The wraiths of Nature  prey on and suck substance from one another, as within the physical ground: the play of spores, nitrates, seeds and rotting fibres.  It is the mud without which no lotus grows.  All must find the magic land.  Some, having passed through it, forget it.  But you and I recall it, to draw the references.  We recognise the stems, which are still rich with it.   Your drawings in 1964  are the Asphodel, the Hadean flower.  But you are not trapped.  You were when it was seductive, sensuously compulsive as the Soul’s Dark Night.

Jukebox and Beehive, Carlisle 1964

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Tifareth — The dark night of St John of the Cross – Mine eyes have seen a great Light, but now they don’t –  laboured in sorrow to bring forth, and to reconstruct the ladder.

The dark releases you.  Nothing else can.  When you go inward first, it is dark, not the custom light of the world.  You cannot see the unknown.  This is truth.

The substance of all this is that the Dark Night occurs when God disconnects you from seeing Him as a safe, Heavenly Mountain to climb up and reach, and pushes you back to drown in your swamp.  The Dark Night occurs during the i-lamp’s destruction, the miner’s lamp to …   you feel?

Yesod — It is when the lamp no longer lights my cave walls with shadows, and so there is just the unbottomed. But what is the dark night of the soul REALLY?

Tifareth — The dark is the passage of waiting.  It is the night through which you cannot sleep.  It is the longing for sleep, and the sterile agitation of the mind, and the slumberless corners of the body.  It is whatever episode in the life span endures grief, pain, bewilderment, inner destruction, the letting go of baggage, detachment learned the hard way.  There is no other way.  Without the dark night, who would bother to look away from the grazing-ground?  It isn’t cause and effect.  It is just that in the painful or sludge-y darkness, there burns a naked longing for the wise.

Yesod — Integral to the dark night perhaps, is to know “I have no control.”

Tifareth –– Whatsoever.

Yesod — This in broad daylight looks very fine, but when trapped, it is the essence of suffering.

Tifareth –– And the essence of surrender.  Surrender is’t just a pretty face.

Sea and rock, the feet

The dark night is the curling coal of the fathomless wave, the curve or swelling, and the willingness not to panic or wail with loneliness, but to “chill out” with it, rest on its breath, as in its feet.  There is a longing to be un-costumed, and to give up all resistance.  It is the Miner of the dark hard Night.  I learn from the companions.  When resistance is less, “I” diminish, therefore what suffered, becomes the easy movement of the breath.  The cells know this, for they sink.  This quiet state has the union and pivot of the world;  and in here the existential hell gets shot through with stabs of silence, open-ness, NOW, irrelevance, like shafts of Vedic Ushas, the Dawn.

Ushas

And then the swan of silence floats.  There is still “I”.   Only God may remove what God put there.  Think about that!  Only God can remove “I”.  I can’t.  Only God can remove God’s eye one seeingness is. But can he? …  There is no escape, nor is there death.  Tentatively, cast adrift, leave prIde and other eyes behind (they are mental attachments, seeing, applauding, approving … ) unclothe and see what happens … alone …

A verse I wrote when my daughter was young and wild and off the grid in San Francisco

You see my Lord  
never mind that I'm her mother,  
but I am (?) put in the place where it is my feeling  
to have her come safe to harbour over the heaving waters - 
soul come safe to harbour, come what may, 
be loved, her own (unknown)  
and so the spells attuning in the fields of Asphodel 
with the healing silence, 
in the dry nude mountain are in-placed. 

What a cinematic world this is. 
All is well, so I am told deep down.  
All, all manner of things is well 
and strong, and blossoming.

hallowe’en

And … even during the really difficult years, now past, she could laugh at Mum being such an old bat, and we could reach each other in this way:

… her threat to abandon her A Levels and become a Beautician in deepest Essex

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Here is Ramesh Balsekar with Gabriel Hafron.  They had honest conversations about suffering and  suicide.  Gabriel walked his dark night and – as far as I know – eats lotuses.  I love Ramesh’s pragmatic and passionate fondness for talking.

Gabriel and Ramesh

I recall the barely concealed jealous tension around the relaxed alert old man: the sniggers and impatience we could barely contain while Gabriel worked out his stuff.  The sheer mind-stuff in one’s teens and youth hurts.  It is a torment.  It tangles the web and hammers the knot.  Philosophers suffer atrociously from mercurial parasites and mental arguments – Gabriel was a philosopher with sharp streetwise chutzpah – a “nice” Jewish lad.  The public sage receives seekers who are ignorant of psychology and their own emotions and the basics and are desperate for a path.   For meeting after meeting, Gabriel begged Ramesh for relief;  and Ramesh explained to him with all the time in the world, and with intense compassion, no, he cannot help him.  He must walk himself.

I continue to feel fond of that little old man and his bright ways and blackbird gestures.  He was a retired Bank of India manager.  As I have been in his room, and dedicated my time there, I savour the background Mumbai street noises;  wailing barrow boys and baroque car horns; the wheezing crows and twittering sparrows;  and I think of him alone and snoozing in his chair after lunch with his dignified wife.  I see him walking to and fro on his roof in inquisitive harmony.  Living on the top floor – you can see the sea from there – he took his daily constitutional in the apartment.  I cherish the gentle grace of his greeting, white shirt, silken skin and impish smile.

Ramesh said to a German visitor, that when the ego wants to be enlightened, the ego wants to be God, and of course it cannot be, and thus the depression and “losing it”.

What a dodgy business to install the understanding in an unripe hyacinth!   Many a spring it takes, to flower and shrink back into the bulb underground;  for subconscious programming to accept an accelerated revelation.

Hyacinth – A Sivaic Poem

When the blue, proud Hyacinth dies, he falls 
slowly inward; flower fading crinkles 
first, and then his tips of tall green spears  
turning gold, begin to burn.



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The bulb of his Self Light 
that hides, until a Spring to come 
in dark soil, is drinking him, 
all of him up, O Lord of Caves! 

Let his sapphire die back to earth   
and then, consumed
in your fire, spring forth! 
O Lord of the River, and of Caves.

1993

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November 1999 – Talking of a Walk-in

Here is John de Ruiter, whose early appearances in London were homeopathic and alchemical.   He seemed to be in love with wandering very slowly around in peoples’ black holes.  He puts his YOD – the attention – on the littlest bit, and just lets it, and waits.    He may have  touched the deep before speech,  releasing me from having to listen to any more sages.

John de Ruiter and his game

The people who spoke to John were little microphones.  Sometimes they were little mirrors.  The one on the right goes pop with enlightenment. The lightbulb on the left is  endarkenment.

In one of his meetings, I had a conversation with John, about a “walk-in” I’d experienced recently.

I said:  “John, I’d like to talk to you about being nobody who has nothing, and about tension.   Tension seems to build up whenever it limits or defines itself –  limitation is put around it – in any way.

“But something happened last month.  It was a dream.  There were footsteps coming.  There was no person in them, just the essence and the sound and the place of them on the gravelly ground.  They came from behind, walked right through me and pulled me towards a farm, a place of violent anger, revenge and fear, and I was terrified.  It was an electric current, a magnet.  I tried to stand still while it was going through me, but it had enormous strength.  At that point all of a moment, I thought of you.  I tried from side to side, to open, soften, let it pass through me like a wave through water – but it was too strong.  Then a Christian prayer came very powerfully, the Prayer of the Heart.  I woke from the magnetic field, shouting out loud, with that prayer.

“But there was still my enormous tension of resisting, wasn’t there.  It’s a razor edge thing of being, and yet being also the resistance.  Subsequently, I felt this current had moved away and left me.  But I had had to make myself HARD with all my might, to resist it.

John replied eventually: “It’ll be back. 

“As soon as you resisted it, for that energy, its response was, “That’s good enough.”  That’s what it wanted.  So next time it builds on what took place, and then the next time it builds on that, inside of you.

“The only way is to let yourself completely dissolve in the midst of that. There is then no threat which is taken to heart.  Nothing to protect. Then it’s not only you who is dissolving, but that energy that’s moving through you.  And that energy dissolves too.”

I said: “There is an energy used, “to not resist” – to “try not to resist.”

John: “This is the belief that you ought not to resist.  Such a belief you don’t need. Tender absence can live.  Your belief is something you’re doing.

“You would even be better off to resist and to be OK with resisting, than to try to “not resist” because you believe that you shouldn’t.  The second one makes more of a mess than the first.”

co dependent borderlines

Long pause

co-dependent fishes.  

[NB – Some other paintings in this series are in “For Z”, posted 25 August  –  see the Archive of all Posts].

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Jane: “I don’t know what sort of mess it made … because it left a feeling of openness …”

John: “To resist and be OK with it?  That’s the first one.  Even to put effort and trying into ‘not to resist’, because you believe you should put effort into not resisting – there can be an open-ness in that. The open-ness is wonderful. The effort creates the mess.

“Two things can be happening at the same time, and then there is a mixture of tightness and open-ness. The mixture is OK.  Stay with the part you’re in love with.  You don’t have to work with the other part.”  (24 November 1999)

This retrieval rings extraordinarily true for me.  It leads me to the way – in principle – Christ may have dealt with the dibbuks.

First:  while copying it out, I saw and felt John de Ruiter’s predisposition to bathe in these situations and their darkness, and be their elixir – the awareness.   He loved unconditionally the darkness, to be its slow unfolding light, from the deep depression which had rebirthed himself.   He held the tantra touch, the YOD.   He was indifferent to the huge meetings, the organization, the groupies, it all went on around him. He went to bed with some of it, and people were scandalized.  He was a forest man from the north;  a lumberjack.

(She closed her eyes and asked John to, also)

Secondly, the entity in my dream was “Mr V” whom I had met again, after many years.  Our rendez vous was the terrace outside Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath.  His approaching footsteps made the crunchy sound in the gravel; and we had a rather intense afternoon scrambling in and out of the woods and over fences.  Then they walked straight into my dream at night.  They tugged me towards an emotion – a farm nearby which was red with rage and gore .   I know now that if I had gone with them, my soul could have held a permissive bitterness, and I might be stuck and sick, seeking revenge.

I first knew Mr V when I was 20, and can only say about him now, that he was a gifted soul, but he was going into a downward spiral.  My long co-dependency with his dark side accelerated my awakening.  It re-opened my ancient doors he now shunned.  He was a catalyst in every way.  I saw the raw Karmic force, the way it whirls like a tornado.

I did this small painting (below), soon after my dream.  I amalgamated it with a 1970s dream from The Watershed, about a wounded, orphaned foal (also below).  I didn’t draw Mr V’s crunching footsteps through my space  – but I sketched the blood-red farm impression, the psychic “rage, revenge and fear” which I tried to resist by standing still and letting it go through me.

Foal farm holocaust

This is the story from “The Watershed” – The Foal.

Dreams No.124  June 1975

THE FOAL is crying,  we wish to discover how the larger animal died,  so we are leading the helpless foal through the broken out-houses, that it may sense and tell us.  The foal screamed and held back, native terror of its dead kin.   But we were too strong for it.   I carried it in my arms.   It lay numb and resigned with terror.   There was a splash of red on the floor,  blood going sticky.   I pleaded the foal’s case with the others,  I said Let’s spare the foal, it’s not right to force him into this fear.   We’ve seen the blood, we can find the rest for ourselves.   Please, we mustn’t do this to the little animal, the baby,  we will scar him for life.   So I took the baby back into the yard to wash and clean him again,  he was covered in thick mud again,  thick wet mud like a baby found in a bombsite,  and I was cleaning it off with water.   He was a human baby.   I was to clean him at a sort of trough.

The yard was derelict and full of rubbish,  thrown-out relics of demolished houses,  plaster and refuse.

The creature who had died, who had taken its own life, left imprints of itself,  its face,  in silver foil which was lying around.   It had been playing before it died,  it was non-terrestrial,  it came from some other place in the universe.  It left big graceful sculptures on the ground in thick wire and scrap iron tubing.   They would not live long because they were an alien implantation and they could not survive here,  they could not be seen.

They were ungainly structures standing on two or three legs with a kind of conscious expression above, like a child’s drawing.   They were very simply made and ephemeral because …  heaven knows what would happen to them,  they might get thrown away in ignorance with the rest of the rubbish.

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My job here is to touch on essences, not the pressure of autobiography in the tyre.  The Karmic narrative condensed within that dream, took many years yet to walk through itself, and realise the  “water under the bridge”.  I can look back on it now, and recognise the essences.  They release me deeply, acknowledging past-life hints and flavours:  apprenticeship to a medical magus in Elizabethan London, whose boundless curiosity raised and angered the dead.  In those days, cadavers were useful not only to Renaissance painters.  The esoteric Renaissance was rooted in compost – the fertile nitrates of medieval plague.  The penalty is the pain I took on, in this lifetime, together with an abortion at age 17 in my Victorian life.   These issues working through consciousness, are in the domain of “the Divine Regulator”.

My dark night revisits the pit, the walk-in or mood, to share with you my way through.   The daughters of Solomon are dark but comely.  Beauty walks with the beast.   I am astonished how, in the walk-in story, when I called on Christ with the Jesus prayer, I was released.  After twenty centuries of abuse, Jesus’s Name still has power to overturn the tables.  In any healing circumstance, His is the homeopathic power –  his Father’s, with Mother Earth.

In that episode and others, I suffered first the NEGATIVE force/fate, for it highlights the power of That which overcomes it.  They are one and the same wave crest.

The principle applies to everything we suffer, individually and collectively.  The Overcomer isn’t as dramatic and colourful as the negative fate, which is hard like gristle.  The Overcomer only pervades it, unnoticed like gravity, and brings me through to let it go.  The negative fate has its entire worldview, prediction and science.  All that is cast away – a heap of old clothes by the road.  (Even now, a symbolic Samaritan paradox:  the parables are multi-dimensioned.)   The sun came out.  Sometimes when the Sun comes out it is blinding brilliant like the road to Damascus.  But usually it just makes me take off that coat.

In my previous post, Listening with the Oracle, the Egyptian priestess in “Self Preservation” gazes at the whirling winds, the tornado before the sun comes out.  My efforts are considerable, but imaginary.   Who Ray!

Life is a landscape, a veil on the rock: the rock is the Face, the underlying geology.  It changes like clouds, because we are human and have lived a long time.  It rings the changes and comes around like the stars.

sun path

What is my Guru?  Guru means dispeller of darkness.  Let all obscurity fly from thee.  The Guru may be a person, but is really an interior climate.  When I think Guru and look inward, I find the seed of love in all its forms.  Love has the face of my beloved, and of others; but they are all incidental. They are boats on the wave.  With love comes patience.  The Guru is essentially, relationship – the give and take which is patience.

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 The Guru of Everything in Life

A footnote:  Gareth Knight describes in his superb biography of Dion Fortune, her first great astral battle with the college headmistress, who bashed her for four long hours with:  “You are incompetent and you know it.  You have no self confidence, and you’ve got to admit it.”

This mantra is the exact inverse of the strong occult leader she was to be.  The disabling hypnosis flagged up the opposite, like a colour complementary in the dark.  The girl broke down for months, but would rise to the initiatory test.   Competence and self confidence are the achilles heel and hallmark of creative artists, great mediums, and leaders alike.

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

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.

The Miasms, Karma & Homeopathic Healing

The Fool in the flower

In my view, homeopathy is a philosophy, inseparable from a working knowledge of Karma:  the Law of cyclic action and return.   This Law works through the seasons, the centuries and our daily selves.

To understand homeopathy, we need to think outside the box of tick tock time and into Kairos, depth.  The homeopathic principle is a mandala, All-Present.

In the “sixth sense” of his healing ministry, Jesus struck at the root of the miasms in his day.  Homeopathic practitioners recognize these as conditions we inherit and build up by subconscious resonance.  The law of action and rebound prevails through generations and through incarnations, and often baffles modern medics.  A symptom may reflect in a polar-opposite way, a hidden previous life in the collective memory, which cannot be accounted for in the present one.  Equally, an unexplained self-healing may occur from that source;  or even from a green fig’s future ripeness.

“The Principles and Art of Cure by Homeopathy” by Herbert A Roberts, lists at least six principle miasms in our society:

psora – desire to live. Conditions such as psoriasis, overheated blood, adrenal rush and imbalance. This includes the opposite: inertia, depression, fatigue.

syphilitic – self destruct, around love, and destroying the capacity to love oneself. Addiction, boils, eruptions, eczema, bone degeneration.

psychosis/gonorrheal – split between head and heart, or I-ness and Am-ness: loggerheads, manias, mood swings.

tubercular – mother cow, milk, respiratory problems. Sacred cows and superstition.  The relationship to our own mothers, the maternal principle and earth.

carcinoma – Alienation from the natural environment, and from parts of ourselves. Vulnerable to ancestral and system imbalances and their bankruptcy. In allopathic cancer treatment, one virus is set to combat the other virus: a mere exchange of hostilities.

immune deficiency – AIDS, ME.  The planet ecology is compromised, which afflicts ourselves. Alienation from the natural order weakens the strain, and so does “genetic engineering” in the plant and animal kingdom.

Deliverance:   JHShVH – “Jah Liberates”

When a schizophrenic splits apart, the aura opens for another energy to enter it.

When Jesus was at work in Galilee, the schizophrenia miasm was all over the place; but he as the Son of Man was more so. When he said “offer the other cheek” he taught a spiritual judo or martial art –  let the miasm cast itself out by destabilizing it, as you – the personal ego – step aside.  The power of the Logos “throws” an opponent over your shoulder through space and into perdition.  The Name vibrated enough authority for his disciples to do the same.   Extreme psychoses of the schizophrenia miasm – possessions, walk-ins, dibbuks and hysterias –  were rampant in those times, as in ours – our fascination with sociopathic horror and the supernatural. Down the centuries, the Church as it gained power and wealth, did all it could to burn out and suppress them; the same dibbuks re-surface to this day, in more materialistic forms.  Repression and cruelty fed them.

The homeopathic principle abides. We cannot “medicate” an invading force in any way reliably. But with the greater power which is Consciousness, we can turn to face its nature as it afflicts ourselves.  It is like turning to face the wind.  In the same manner, Jesus allowed the dibbuk to blow straight through him and out.  The confrontation – in any difficult and painful detail of life – is aware.  It changes the particles.  The healer stands near, to hear.  When we are by ourselves, and need inner strength, it is like standingunder the waterfall.

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It is my observation – as I am not a practitioner – that the broad homeopathic principle runs through other forms of healing – Tao, ayurveda, acupuncture, dream-work, black box telepathy, counselling, ad infinitum.

Homeopathic healing comes under Solomon’s six petalled lily.  “Similia similibus curantur” – by establishing an astral contact between the sufferer and the remedy, homeopathy treats a symptom with a dose of “what it is like“;  for as above so below, the ascending and descending triangles reflect each other.

Our life’s molecular chemistry forms binaries and compounds – the notion of separateness. Atomic particles on the other hand, are “of the One”. They develop individual character when they clump by number into molecules. On the extended Tree of Life in Kabbalah practice, the atoms are Beriah (Creation) and the molecules are Yetzirah, entering forms. 

For more information on the Four Worlds of Jacobs Ladder, see Halevi, Kabbalahsociety.

Homeopathy dilutes a poison until it is more “atomic” than “molecular”.  From subatomic Oneness, the same poison becomes a remedy, whose pure potency drives out its own symptom in the physical world.  Homeopathy addresses “the invisibles`’ and treats beyond the surface … the Face before we were born.

As in all forms of healing – including allopathic – the process is two-way.  It works through a bond of trust between practitioner and patient, established subconsciously, and calling on the cosmic Will-to-good.  All healers pick up the voltage of the Father or the Mother – a higher “divine” frequency.  Jesus’s ministry amplified and earthed it:   “Not I but my Father speaks through me.  Go in peace, your faith has healed you.”

These words when I stop with them, are extraordinarily beautiful.  They ring out here and now, as they did 2,000 years ago.  A healer/therapist worth her salt, learns to discard the delusion that he or she is the doer.

polarity staff

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The miasms are living installations in our general landscape.  Holistic and conventional medicine each have strengths and limitations.  They work best together by mutual referral, according to the case.  Naturopathy and holistic medicine cannot perform surgery or cure a toothache, but it goes to the root, and can take a long time.  Allopathic medicine and psychotherapy can successfully alleviate symptoms and establish a more hygienic life style, but do not reach the underlying causes for un-named grief and fear in the human race.

This drawing is titled “Baruch & Balthamos” after the angels in “His Dark Materials”, but is a copy from Botticelli’s painting of Christ being taken down from the Cross.

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We each hold humanity’s entire history in our DNA, and may be susceptible to one or more of these collective conditions.  The miasm underlies a host of symptoms and states – physical and psychological – of fatigue, unease and deprivation.

The contemporary AIDS miasm is immune deficiency.   Not only ourselves individually, but the planet as a whole suffers a current decline of the immune shield.  The holes that open in our “firewall” emphasize an increased vulnerability to anxieties and cancers of all kinds, and to illnesses relating to addiction.  Cancers seem to thrive on a “voltage overload” between our subtle and  physical sheaths – an input/output imbalance. Where neural transmission is poorly regulated through the energy field, an over-compensation or excess may build up:  a culture for toxic dictatorship, as in the political sphere.  It is no different from the economy and the banks.  In the biosphere, our interaction with environment is under affliction;  a collective anxiety and lack of strength.  Each nation as a body suffers its own disability to regulate the  economy concertedly.

At the same time, the condition is generational, part of an evolutionary curve.  As seed to the ground, and chrysalis to butterfly, It is inevitable that for new growth to occur, older systems and their worldview break down.  The new cannot be predicated from within the old ways of thinking.  The homeopathic quantum is minute, being of the other dimension.  As Consciousness, the tiniest portion is equal to the sum of the mass.

Madre de dios ’03

Reflecting on:  “What am I here to heal, in myself?   What have I taken on?”   throws light on afflictions, emotional and physical, which otherwise make no sense, and helps to clear them.   The miasms – the Karmas coming forth, collectively or individually – have one agenda:  to become conscious, and find release.   All the demons in the Yoga Vasishta ultimately become Divine.  As Ramana Maharshi used to say:  “It is its nature to come up.”  So long as a condition or dis-ease remains unconscious, its pressure will recycle through the generations.

Karma means “action” – and action upon reaction.  Each one of us has the capacity to act – to become more conscious and to hear ourselves, as we would a troubled friend.  It is helpful to identify “where it hurts” close to home.  Otherwise, we are magnetized to events “out there” which we have no power to alter, which deplete us; and avoid relationship.

“Avoiding relationship?” is a question Baba Free John used to ask himself, and it is a good one.

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The following extracts are from my essay – “What is Karma?”.  Broad principles pictured, can alter the mindset of a problem:  the idea of gaining altitude.   Our subconscious is stubborn against the wordy faith, but responds to images.

 

 Child mother ’03

What is Karma?  Why do we have acute pains of life?

The literal translation of Karma is “action”.  Karma, the law of cause and effect, seeks equilibrium.  We observe it throughout nature, in the weathers and elements, as well as experientially.  To gain some insight, we need altitude.  From inside the corner grocer shop, or The Vic in East Enders, I cannot see the city.  As I rise higher, the street plan, the river, the Dome and a host of interconnected neighbourhoods come into perspective.  Perceiving my life’s thread within that overview, I receive and hear likewise a brother or sister’s enigma, even a nation.  Compassion encompasses our myrad lifetimes.  It does not react from, attach to, or try to “fix it” until it has received sufficient information.

This takes time, as a fruit will ripen in due season.  It takes time and space to truly love ourselves.  To love another, gives space to allow them to be who they are.  To love unconditionally is to receive his or her humanity fully – but with clarity, not as a doormat.  “Keep practicing”.  “Let go, let God.”  Let the wheel turn unobstructedly.

Karma is the eco-system of the human psyche.  It interlaces our soul Laws and social structure, like the web of root systems and nitrates throughout the biosphere.  Collective racial Karmas have a distinct character, like a rock, a vineyard, or a wood of tall beech stems and connecting fibres.  Tribal, ancestral and creative Karmas arise, settle, change and decay:  as do Karmas of the workplace, of families working out patterns of abuse, and of towns.  From an airplane we see the pattern of fields and cities move slowly past, and apprehend the actual stress of landing into life.

Mother & Child 1985

Karma is a force seeking consciousness.  It has an urgency to transform – it is blind and tries to see.  It repeats until a tendency is recognized, regenerated and freed.  That means not acting from it, but  “taking responsibility” for the way it feels – especially in our given relationships.  The force of Karma moves through human rivers as the current, eroding the banks and creating whirlpools, rapids and still waters.  The Tree of Life is just one of various working tools to reclaim the unconscious swamp, and heal the root miasms.  It is for us, a universal challenge to inherit human awareness – “I am receiving the full dose of being abandoned or rejected or hurt, which I gave” – and to grow up:  to forgive, and be forgiven.

Though we do not reincarnate as the same individual, the soul Law propels the recycling of a memory into renewed forms of expression.

The Theosophists’ theory of the human root races is based on the same general principle.  A new “root race” is established in the decaying of the old.  We can observe the evolutionary process anywhere in nature.   The tree each spring puts out the same leaf, but different ones.

Yeshua ben Miriam

Collective and personal Karmas are a multidimensional web of cross-currents.  Karma is an unbounded watery surface moved by the wind;  the warp and weft from every direction.  Some actions generate lifetimes of harmony;  other wave-trains recreate havoc.  The chaos seems eternal – thus the punitive old doctrines of Hell – but is temporal, a matter of voluntary adjustment from within.  The key to Karma is transformation;  for no act of cruelty can stand, if understood.

The woman mourning ’03

As we are pulled through aeons of fire, rock and ice, the divine atoms of our human birth awaken in the plane of Middle-Earth.  Our evolution is in the marrow of our bones, and easily eludes analysis.  There is a word for our entirety:  ruach – the Divine breath, breathing us, en sof, without end.

From Manishya – on Being Human (2010) by J.Adams and P.Taylor

The Sun through water and fire:  Photos of fish and volcanic landscape from pinknpurplelizard.com, article.wn.com & pocketburgers.com

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Ibn Gabirol of Malaga – 11th century Kabbalist sage and poet

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**

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

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.

Beyond the Box

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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

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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

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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

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

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.

In Touch: Art as Healing

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

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He art

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Sunflower and Paddle Steamer

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looking at me

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Line dance 1

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Line dance 2

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Learning to

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Learning (2) – a painting done in 2007

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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.

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

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Ode.  This is moon talk, soul talk.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Sacred India Tarot Creation of Card 17 – The Star: USHAS, the DAWN

Rohit’s ref

Rohit’s Notes

“We are again in pioneering territory here;  insofar as I know, India has never depicted Ushas, Goddess of the Dawn.  Considering her tremendous stature in the Vedas, this is one of the most astonishing oversights in Indian culture.

“She is the Morning Star, not a typical star as the tarot packs have it, but her close association with the Sun, as well as the fact that stars are Suns, and thus solar phenomena, made me decide on her.  The great power, healing and goodness associated with Ushas is typical of the Star Arcanum.

“We have various female figures which may suggest a starting point in drawing her.  What is clear is that she is extremely beautiful, and somewhat translucent in complexion.  The sun who follows her, shines through her;  and it is the light shining through her blood which makes the dawn pink or red.

“Depicting her as a sort of female sun riding in a chariot and watering the heavens, earth and the waters of the earth, with Light poured from jars like water, would satisfy both the traditional tarot requirements, as well as keep to the integrity of what Ushas is.”

sketch

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Builders of the Adytum

Jane’s Notes:  9 August 2012

In the traditional Star, the wisdom shines down into the nude woman, who is earth, illumining her chakras on their stem, which are interior stars.  She gazes into the pool, which is a little sea.  She sees beyond her reflected face.   The sea is the subconscious.  Meditation is a fish-hook let down into the depths of water as it becomes still.    As I become still and look …

The scarlet ibis in the tree is Thoth, the scribe of the Egyptian gods.

The violent awakening of the Tower falls away like a chrysalis, to reveal the maid, like a butterfly.  At the tail of every dragon she stands, waiting to be rescued;  while the princes gallop gallantly up and down.

We call The Star “Meditation” and also “Hope”, for under its auspices, the totality of an event is revealed, and comes to peace.

The Star – from Jane’s Hermetic Tarot

Meditation through all our sensory organs, receives sensory essence:  the Tattvas, whether known or not.  For this reason I will include in my process journal, some impressions from my sea-side holiday – found over the page, immediately after I drew the SITA card.   Seals are archetypes of the soul;  they rise curiously to the bait we let down into the deep, and play among the waves.

But firstly:

Jane’s Notes on the Star:   “Meditation, Countenance” – 23 September 2002

The Higher Self cuddles the upset child in its arms and makes her laugh.  When I read about the interfacing Upper and Lower Countenances of the Tree of Life, there was a movement of delight and love for the Tree, which is no different from a devotee’s for their Guru.  The Tree has faces of incomparable beauty, simplicity and splendour, and I receive them humanly.  My Teacher has this geometric warmth of expression. 

I checked a rush of “Feeling” with the deeper “Emotion” which is quieter.  This sobriety is the operation of Tifareth – the heart, beauty, consciousness in the Tree.  I monitor the precision of stepping through the etheric envelope into the sky-lark space of the astral.  Astral are imprints and architectures of deep emotion.  If these are pure, uncluttered by the surge of Feeling, it is TAV, it is good – a refined and aerial texture.   Monitor how the morning’s sludge awakens, when it sees and receives the Countenance.  The passion itself transforms and refines – surrenders – itself to the Unifying Face, and then feels less, because it is subtle:  a distilled tenderness of being.  It is open.  Because it is not separate, the desire to describe or outline it, dies.

Analysis of the opening process, is watching – the intimate detachment into Tifareth – the way a musician hears, to touch and phrase a note.  The raga is tuned minutely to the sway of the sruti.   Where is this movement on the Tree?

The shift from the personal to the Self.   In my case, through the tidal embrace of lunar Cancer into solar Capricorn – a divine stability.  The mountain goat has a fish-tail rudder.  It is a miracle and a wonder.

Distracting thought-trains become visualized in the space, as generators, rather like complex car batteries, generations.   Stepping back from them just sufficiently to perceive these objects, “re-generates” the psyche, hermetically.  Yes!  and SELF-ENQUIRY.

I noticed a vitalized affection for W my tutor.  Since looking at my chart with his, I receive him differently as a Companion of the Light.  Last night he rang up twice, enthusiastically, to tell me about the Kings of England on the box (I was already watching it) and then to see what I thought about it.  The two goats after all these years, are sufficiently well acquainted to stop together and enjoy the same patch of violet tufted thistles.  As it happened, on the programme (about the bloodthirsty Edward I) there was a lovely picture of thistles – the Violet Ray – as well as beautiful photography of the crash and passage of the sea, rocks and Western Isles.   In the flux of our animal nature, the brute history never changes.

Ka is the soul;  the ballast is Capricorn;  ka abba allah combines the mystic roots.  This friendship taking root like an oak, will grow and LAST.  W said, “you are one of the oaks.   You are an old grandma.”   It is funny to be becoming an elder, but feeling unchanged from child, or in my twenties.   When I look in the mirror, that is what I see;  but photos give me a shock!    How can I live in peace with my awful profile?

Well, come on now.  Countenances.  The Tree of Life is a Countenance which embraces and awakens me, in which I am content.  The holy place of meeting happens… the contact with the seven interior stars.   (These in the Tarot Star card, are the chakras.  The science is precise.) 

Chakras on the Tree of Life

Gurus – dispellers of darkness – present human faces.  In the Western Mysteries, the faces are less focused.  What is behind them?  I’m still reading the Anandamayi book, but getting a bit bored.  Vamadeva Shastri’s article on Agni is pure sushumna Fountain.  I visited his website, (www.vedanet.com) and read a bit of the awe inspiring great work and lineage, he publishes and transmits.

I only last week bought a TV, when W urged me to.  Last night, after watching Edward I and a fascinating documentary about survival in Alaska, I watched some of the video of Neelam in London with RMF, with much interest, as it is full of people I know (including my awful profile.)  The night before, I watched a Poonjaji video and the faces of his lovers – to see the phenomenon if possible, uncritically.   I only criticize erstwhile targets of my own involvement, which reflect on my lower self-person, which is always changing and never true.   The Poonja phenomenon is an obsession with “Awakening” – a love-play through eye contact, body gestures, vocal sounds and silence.   They are doing it through the soul, and by generating astral currents.  But they never say that is what they are doing, and the seekers are shy and awe struck.  It has its quintessential eternity, like a flower in bud and bloom before the petals rust and drop.  Neelam and her stage are compelling to watch, because she is PURE DRAMA from moment to moment.  She has sometimes an extraordinary naked beauty, and at other times a heavy-grained old Dame looks out from there – a disturbingly voyeuristic screen.   Perhaps she will become a fat formidable Polish grandma, still teaching in the States.

Countenances.  In the Hermetic way, everything is by analogy.  The subtle contact with W only reflects, connects and earths what is in the Upper Worlds.

Yesterday I drew Card 17 – The Star – for India Tarot, but was tired, so it is not yet as clear and fresh as I would like.  Countenances.  A lot less Hokhmah (Revelation/Wisdom) is coming down, these days.  I think they are monitoring it more, with me, as the alignment deepens and becomes peaceful. 

I have a rope.  It guides me up the mountain paths to meet them.  In the Cloud of Unknowing (Daat), I hold one end of the polarity – they are my Antipodes.

The Spiritual Seeker

Countenance.  I have not forgotten, with the repetition of this word, L.Eagle (through DG’s transmission) telling me I shall be bestowed with the gift of the DIVINE COUNTENANCE, having rendered his own;  so this nice word is the flavour of the week.  It frames things well.   It is also seeing the Sea – off to Pembrokeshire coast tomorrow, to watch the seals.

Countenance?  I love you.

The Star – Ushas the Dawn

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HYMN TO USHAS

1. Heaven born by truth, the Dawn has shone out.  Revealing her majesty, she has come.  She has concealed the unwelcome, hateful darkness.  As the foremost of the flaming Seers, she has set the paths in motion.

2. Be awakened today, for our great and happy journey oh Dawn;  into a great auspiciousness extend us.  Goddess human in mortals, hold in us a wonderful splendour and glorious revelation.

3. The wonderfully clear, immortal radiances of the Dawn, have come for the vision.  Generating the Divine laws, filing the interior realms, they have spread afar.

4. When she is yoked from the beyond, she travels around the five races of men in an instant.  Surveying the ways of knowledge of men, she is the daughter of Heaven, the queen of the world.

5.  Full of power, the maiden of the Sun possessing a wonderful beneficence, she is the ruler of plenitude of splendours. Lauded by the seers, giving maturity, the beneficent Dawn shines, sung by the carrier flames.

6. Wonderfully bright radiant horses appear, conveying the flashing Dawn.  She travels luminous by her chariot of the universal form, as she grants the ecstasy to harmonious mortals.

7. The truth with the truth, great with the great, the Goddess with the Gods, holy with all the holy ones, she broke down the firm limitations and dispensed the radiant mornings, as her rays roared to greet her.

8. Now hold for us an ecstasy made of nourishing rays and heroic force, oh Dawn, the all enjoyment made of swift energy.  May our mere humanity not stain this altar.  Protect us with the powers of well-being forever, oh Gods.

Rig Veda VII.75:  Seer – Maitravaruni Vasishta.  Translated by Vamadeva Shastri (D.Frawley)

 

Vedic goddess

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Jane’s Notes:

The solar horse is in fact a Unicorn, whose third eye is projected or introjected as a gleaming horn or ray of light from the Star.

The Unicorn is a fabulous faery creature, a vehicle of purity for the inner journey, a subtle creature of the borderlands, particularly at dusk and dawn.

In this card, the rising Sun (beginning to melt the stars) forms a fiery Wheel, depicting the Buddha suit of Pentacles.  The blushing Ushas pours into it her everlasting inner being.  Her hair is the night.

**

Seal Notes

2 October 2002 INTERLUDE:   WITH THE SEALS

I liked going along with my mother, and looking after her.  Our great passion was with the seals, it is the season for their lying on pebbly beaches in the sun, with their suckling young in chasms beyond human reach.

The bulls guard them in the deeper water, their noses pointing out.  Sometimes they play in circles, or fight, and powerfully submerge.  Watching their floating, upright stance (Yetzirah) I took yogic lessons from this for my walking, for letting the rocky path flow me.  Let the deep, dark waters of silk lift you up the cliffs and rocks.  When I swam off the deep rocks, I floated and sculled the way they do.  The first of these swims was near a bull seal.  The mutual nervousness of the animal kingdom:  he is big and powerful in this element where I am fragile.  He guards his baby and its mother in the cave beyond, and he might be angry or anxious.  Every time the Wise Old Man of the Sea popped up his great head, whiskers and snorting nostrils, I scurried back to the barnacles, scared he might surge up and bite my bum.   At the same time, to see him and his missus so clearly – she came out too, grey and shining – was an enormous thrill.  I kept saying Hello and smiling to them, and telling them I like swimming too.

As seals are highly intelligent, I am sure my enthusiasm communicates, as well as my ambiguously unwelcome humanity.   When we climbed  back up the cliff – my mother at 78 is still at home on this terrain – the big bull watched us out of sight, with interest.  Down to that swimming-place flow steep slopes of sea-grass and then the good, golden rock, wherever you see.

A seal in his great sea, enjoying the sun on his head, observes a fascinating colour, inaccessible movement, and solidity of crusty land … those who climb about in it, where he cannot go.   We barely pass into one anothers’ surfaces.   He and his dams flip and flounder with heroic effort over shingle, sand and rocks.  We, nursing our knees over footholds and thorny bushes and loving the sun, observe his ancient kindred in the deeps of the cold sea which we cannot see, and dare not travel into.   In the old myths, seals steal human souls down to the deep to become mermaids.

Mother’s sketch 1

During long periods of a sleepless night, I lay “sealing” into the great wide sea;  letting my unworded, uninformed perception spread, and receive, the language I do not know.  I wonder about seals, that elusive shape of the waters between rippled crescents.  Where do they come from?  How did they begin?  How did they separate from the waters to become these fat, shiny, mottled, melodious beings?  Who is “I’” of the seal, and how did it ever detach from the sound of the waters, and how did it ever come to be?

Mother’s sketch 2

At night we heard their cries, and the cries of their young, echoing up from hundreds of feet below the Youth-Hostel at Pwlderi, bewildering the blood with the cold tide of the dark.  I lie in my bed, and the little defenseless babies shrimp spreadeagled on the shingle, their fur still white.  Their mothers cannot always find them;  nor are their mothers always maternal.

Everything, on such a dramatic coast, is sealy – the lions-paw rocky cliffs, the silky grass, the caves, the movement of the water, the sun on your head.   Latent memory – my last visit in 1991 – opened out and became heathery ground and deep, clear caves of indigo and golden warmth.

Coastal path at Pwlderi, near Strumble Head

The magic cannot be photographed.  The magic imprints and empowers the formless movement of the soul, framelessly.  The high, wild places and their vivid colour – the family life of the seals in the deep places, and their owl-like faery hooting, is beyond enclosure.

As well as seals, we watched ravens and choughs sea-eagling among the cliffs with velvet black pinions, and flocks of gleaming dive-bomb gannets out to sea.  The gannets are the coastal albatross.  We watched buzzards and gulls glide aero-dynamically into the teeth of the wind, we watched the seabirds stay absolutely still in the big waves of the airs.

The sea most of the time was a mirror calm.  It is deep, clean and clear, tincturing indigo with turquoise, and with the flickering shades of golden, russet and violet stones.   We saw herds of wild ponies at St David’s Head, and two big stabled billy-goats at the Youth hostel, one of them had a devilish expression.  Awakened in me, was wild-life watching, and I caught sight quickly in the right place and time.  When we got back to my mother’s house to recover, I read a book about otters in Scotland.

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… I love walking in the dark, by the sea.  My night-senses awaken – the vision of things unseen:  an awareness in my feet imparts its rhythm like a cat, for stones and things.  The relaxed attention and soft alertness is most agreeable.  The path gleams by starlight, and in the path are other small, gleaming things which are not glow worms, but which like water, cannot be picked up in my fingers.  There are devic beings at night.  Though I cannot see, I feel their presence, and they surely know my love, and let me walk this way with them.   We look down into an abyss or pit of sighing dark water, where the cliff falls away.

I read Dion Fortune’s Initiation-Training book.  Persons in the work are Initiates or they are Hearth-fires.  In the western tradition, physical strength and quite a dense physical frame are characteristic.  This comes into view on the coastal path, the place of power where sea meets cliff, where elements flow into each other and marry, where climbing and swimming embrace.

In the east, where the climate is quite different, yogis and sages have and seek an ideal of disembodiedness … transparency.   In the west we have to be ANCHORS.   I wonder if I shall ever be received formally into an initiation.  So much of what I read about it, I already am.   Anchor.  Ankh – the staff of Life.

On our way home on Sunday, we drove over the Preselli Hills – the quarry for Stonehenge.  I was disappointed that we missed the turning to Carn Enoch and my ecliptic portal of standing-stones near it – (two of them are gate posts into a field.)  But we did walk up over the wild, sweet nude Preselli contour, away from the road.  It is dotted with little pyramidal points of rock among the sheep.  We saw from this windy space, where ancient Egypt and Stonehenge slumber – a clear view to Carn Enoch and to the tumulus hill behind distant Pwllderi.

My mother drove us home to Somerset with the perennial childlike stamina of the Adams/Edes, and was glad to reach her house with the thrill of the Pwllderi coast inside her.

**

In London, there was a Kabbalah Meditation – what kind of ship are you?  The ship is feminine, and so is the sea – the fluidic command of her keel in the watery element through storms.  It is not rigid.  It is not controlling.  It moves with.  Ponder the words:  Free. Will – the wheel.  Ship’s hull is feminine and filled with men, and yet a good captain is totally receptive and responsive, and can feel where the storms are, and instruct the navigator.

While doing Kabbalah notes all day, I listened with deep feeling, to Franciscus Liszt’s three Annees de Pelerinage, and loved this beloved Master and his profound humanity.  Mrs B and I had such fun yesterday over the bull seal and me all pink and white on the barnacles – “Franciscus has got a rival!” said she, shocked indeed – that Liszt’s music has come thundering back into my heart, not to be outclassed by a mere whiskery amphibian.

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Correspondence:  Gautam and Rohit – 24 September 2002

“We love the card, with the little touches of the solar horse.  Do you feel you need to improve on colours?  For Ganga and Star, for all goddess figures, we suggest covering the nipple with a band like in Lakshmi, or jewellery like Saraswathi, in order not to offend Indian sensibilities.  For example, Ganga could have her tresses covering her nipple as well.  For the Star, you might perhaps need the band.

“The revised Kali, though perhaps less archetypally powerful, is remarkably serene, as is the Ganga.  Where the first Kali was turbulent, this one is calming.  It’s almost like the Kali looks like the Madonna.  We are very happy with how this is moving ahead.”

 

Correspondence: Jane – 24 September 2002

“I am so glad the last three cards are successful.  Yes I could emphasize the allure of one or two of the devil’s daughters.  As to Ganga’s and the Star’s nipples, these will be treated in the way you suggest – I had forgotten the rules.  Also I was reading a text on Ushas (the Star) in the Vedic Hymns (David Frawley translation) which says she is ‘bare breasted’.”

“I had a wonderful holiday with my mother, thank you, on the Welsh coast in perfect weather, rock climbing and swimming near seals.  It was total soul nourishment.  We arrived back to our houses very exhausted, but refreshed.  I read your vedic astrology project with great interest.  I think it is well presented, and I am sure it will be successful.  Let me know your impressions of David Frawley’s website http://www.vedanet.com …   

“As I’m not sure if this address is working well at present, can you send me a note back to confirm?  Haven’t had any messages from anyone for over a week, but then I haven’t written any!   Regards, Jane”

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Rohit (see http://aryayogi.wordpress.com)

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

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) – along with many other creations in house.  

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

Tom’s Torch of Time – an Olympic Relay alchemy

Children of the World 2007 – a drawing done for the Human Rights Aid Foundation

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Here is the Olympic Flame during the Games.  204 children, one child accompanying each nation’s team, carried a bronze petal towards the  creation of the complete torch flame.   The petals when lit, lay as a great mandala over the ground.  As national diversities emerged into unity –  like stamens of a flower – the mandala rose to form the Olympic torch.

Here is the flame from within it, looking up.

My earlier post, Reflections on the Grand Cross (22^nd June) touched on the Cardinal Crossroads (17 July) of Pluto in Capricorn, Moon in Cancer, Mars in Libra, Uranus in Aries:  tensions and responses through the antipodeal frame of solstice and equinox.  Many astrologers and seers speak of a profound tipping point;  the relay-release of the old Mayan Great Circle, or frame of time, into the “new” Aquarian Great Circle.  They see violent interactions, and all kind of things.

Our projection onto 2012, when boiled down to essentials, may amount to the handing over of the Torch of Time, through time and space: through the dream.

Four seasons electron figure-eight

Intense pressure is suffered in a myriad different ways, collectively and individually, as human conscience passes the midpoint of a cosmic “8” – the figure of infinity;  itself a crossing-point of the unbroken Circle.   The dawn of “something new” has no adequate prediction.   The dawn of “something new” is through the neck of the hourglass.  It reflects the old, yet differently.   A young gangster kid may be inspired to break through into athletic training and fellowship – a local quantum leap.  These things happen.

Few of us have the “dancer’s training” to bend and yield and flow with it.   Yet truth is found when we look within ourselves, rather than outward onto the shifting persuasion.  This inner truth is sometimes surprising.  It is like having a view from above, rather than from inside the street’s canyon – to see all the streets, all the connections, the city and its fields.

And … for instance … a TV camera inside a helicopter records a hand-over of the Olympic torch down there in a London street …  or a village …  or a coastal path or remote, rainy field.  The place is lined with flags and inaudible cheering;  a small white clad figure approaches another in the rain;  there is a pause while the flame is stabilized, then off goes the new white clad figure, her arms uplift with joy, her hair down her back;  she seems to float, she is heavy and yet she flies.  She runs like an early Picasso Grecian dancer;  and the ancient happiness punches up into the sky.

I was moved, by something deep and archetypal.  Till then I was “an Olympic sceptic” – I saw chiefly, an extravagance far beyond the British purse, its one heritage being the “greening” of an industrial desert – a reclamation of toxic soils.

Torch bearer (1955)

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Every carrier of the flame was stirred, carried into an unexpected dimension, and so were the watchers, along its 8,000 miles.  (Or was it 80,000 …?)

Astrologers view the Grand Cross and London’s exact alignment with it, with traditional pessimism.   Yet I also perceived the coming of all the nations together in an estwhile centre of the Common Wealth:  Greenwich meridian 0.  There is a civil vulnerability;  Isn’t there also the potential for a progressive release;  a different gesture?   Alignment with whatever the stress, converts it to an asset, and flows.   It is an art of life.  The forces which move us are so much deeper than we know.

Leda & Swan (1957)

The euphoria of the Olympic award in July 2005, was swiftly followed by the bombings.  The wake gathered in Trafalgar Square to say “we shall not be defeated, and nor shall we hate.”  In all our minds is that vigilance with the shadow which accompanies the light.   Yet in the passing of anniversaries, the replay of patterns, history “reverberates” beyond our fears.   In the bigger picture of the cycles, there is so little that we actually see.  What we think we see is feudally enclosed by our conditioning.

All we can be sure of, is that we cross again these points, but with a turn of the spiral, rather than a closed circuit.  Thus is Nature and the growth of trees.   The spiral is tight with our history and apprehension;  yet still it is the Great Spring – a planetary kundalini Yantra.   Watch the world, and turn inward;  see “the point of intersection, time with timeless:  an occupation for the saint.”

 

Draw a Yantra

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A Kabbalistic meditation this week:  the PRESENT.  The present.   A Present, like a gift – here in this room with its pictures and things, in this block of flats, the noise of cars and trains going by each side, in this neighbourhood … within the event of the Olympic Games in London.  Mostly, this Present is the busy, tiny, teeming moment’s turmoil.   Sometimes this Present is an entire aeon, or aeon of aeons … the Buddha’s breath … NOW.   Into NOW, the tiny things melt for a moment.

What different clocks!   And we can go anywhere.  We can go to before the big bang, behind where all this began …  nothing.   No thing.   Silence.   Space.   Conscious.   The focus of an emanation which is Light – a point – expands.   Let there be Light, and all that becomes.  The tsim tsum is this beginning of the whirlings, gilgalem, the polarized pulse of atomic gravities, so tiny, which turns – the great wheel of the Milky Way – in one of its spiraling arms voyages our little Solar System.   The Vedic gods I realize, with their many arms, are GALAXIES!

 

Cosmic egg and wood grain

Then a trip through history, geologic and human, evolving through NOW, always now, to the re-absorbed aeons of ions into the point:  no thing.   Kalpa, the Great Breath.  And open your eyes into this room.   Thou art God.   TAT TWAM ASI.  AHIH ASHER AHIH.   And make the tea!

Time is multi-directional, and also inward.   Time is a petalling flower – each petal is a local clock, and they grow and fall away, and new ones come;   each petal is an electron circuit, a planetary orbit around the stamens of the Sun.

This brings me to Tom’s Torch … and its hundreds of bronze petals.

Thomas Heatherwick, the architect of the Olympic cauldron, is the grandson of Elisabeth Tomalin, who died aged 99, this year.  Elisabeth carried in her tiny, intense, twig-like frame, a century’s history:

http://www.thecnj.com/review/2009/102909/feature102909_01.html

Herself a Jewish refugee from world war 1, Dresden and the Holocaust, she met Jung in Switzerland and made her home in England when she was young.  She worked as a fabric designer for Marks & Spencer, then trained as an art therapist, and returned to Germany in the 1960s, where she pioneered her work among students whose parents had been Nazis, to heal their soul.  She released their creativity through dream interpretation, using water and sand.  In one of her visions, she inherited the link in an unbroken tradition of doctors, whose root was in Israel – this was a comfort to her.   Her story is extraordinary, as the above link shows.   Here is one of her last embroideries which she gave me.  Her hands could not control a brush, but could still sew.   Embroidery, for Elisabeth, was a tapestry of the soul, the colours of lifetimes, in and out:  the flowering landscape of the inner thread.

Figure of Eight, by Elisabeth Tomalin

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Elisabeth’s burning quest for connectivity, and the wholeness of the soul, made her a difficult companion, to herself and to all her friends.  In her daughter Stefany, her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, that powerful river of the lineage survives and flows.  Her grandson’s imagination is prolific, since childhood.   He is the architect of the Seed Cathedral in the Shanghai Expo, and of holistic buildings patterned on the flow of wood and water, in Britain and all over the world.   He and she were close.

Tom Heatherwicks Seed Cathedral

The Great Work of Alchemy is stealthy, and many of its hands do not know what they do.  Time’s great petals are brought to form a mandala, each is dipped to combine an Olympic flame.   Young persons and athletes without celebrity, brought Tom’s bronze petal-buds each to each.  It is beautiful to remember how the flame traveled around the land, from the Giants Causeway to Trafalgar … villages, lanes and towns, by horse, by boat, by wheelchair, by abseil and by bike.  It atavistically moved people, one didn’t know why, culminating in the great, converging relay.  It is ancient, as the beacons on hills, the messengers along ley lines who carry fire in nests:  the elder earth energy.   It woke something.   Until I saw it, I had no idea what all the fuss was about.

Tom’s Torch – the Miracle

The mandala of the petals of the flame lay on the ground and glowed.  Then every stamen was raised up, like a carousel on stalks, till the One Torch merged, flowed and burned for the world:   Tom’s torch of Time.

The horizontal yantra rose into the vertical stem.

Torch bearer (1954)

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A Summer Grand Crossroads brings many, many nations together in a world city, to compete, befriend and celebrate;  to pass through each other, and begin to transcend the little cult of the individual – through stretching individual capacity beyond the barriers.  There are problems, furies and triumphs.  We are villagers.

The weatherman on TV last night, announced with relish:  “The weather is improving.  This weekend, for the closing Ceremony, we may look forward to a Bright Gold Medal in the sky!”

Crossroads are places of meeting.  In their centre may be planted a tree, a seat, a garden, a gossip, a conflict, or even a sacred space.

What is my Crossroads?   What is your Crossroads?

How does the river flow and feel?

Even if we in the British economy, suffer “an Olympic Hangover”, this too, shall pass, and is part of our character. Likewise, we chuckle at Danny Boyle’s opening Ceremony, a radical departure from the tradition of the host country to boast about itself.

It is important to recall the  surprise of the revealed Symbol, signifying yet something other, always.

 

Sunflower

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Relay – Centaur, Athene and Child (1987)

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Solomon’s Seal:  Flower of Life

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The fire of our Sun creates the light of the world.  The seed creates the form within the Mother Consciousness.  Here, the children return the Flame to its source.

In the seed and the flame is the essence of our humanity. They light the Tree of Life.

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Snowdrop:  In touch, across the Seas (1988)

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

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.

Twelve Rosicrucean Emblems – PART ONE & PART TWO

A sequence of alchemical drawings, inspired by Franz Hartmann’s In the Temple of the Pronaos of Wisdom.   His little book describes over 150 signs and symbols from the heart of the Celestial Mother (collected in 1741), the divine Child, and Hermetic axioms. I planned to draw them one by one as Emblems, and make them into a book of meditations.  So far, only a dozen have been done, as they triggered other creative work.   Here they are now – beginning with a first-person “prelude”:

  And God …

A root image – together with the Sri Chakra Yantra – for the contents of this blog as a whole.

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This Reveals the Way/Road 10.5.01

The first Emblem – PRAENESIS:  A Ship on the open sea, with a floating anchor, and a star shining overhead, with the inscription:  Hac Monstrante Viam – “This Reveals the Way/Road”

A ship of souls.  A pilgrimage.  All my lifetimes and yours are passengers and crew. The anchor trawls the ocean Current:  the contact.  The star is a Hermetic Cross.

On and on upon the deep, the Quest seeks centre point.  The tug of anchor and of star is Self correcting, like the winds.

The drifting is an alert surrender.

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By all, through All  13.5.01

EMBLEM ONE:  An open Book, with the name MARIA, and a heart transfixed by a sword, with the inscription:  Omnibus in Omnibus – “By all, through all”

The Sword is pure light from heaven, piercing the earth of leaves (the pages) which is open like a flying dove at rest.

As above, so below:  heaven penetrates earth.  Fishes are ripples in the sands.

It is the same light, by all, through all.  All worlds meet;  sand, salt and sea;  sky in the open rock.

The birds are Akasha, or space;  trinity mysterium.  Everything is written in Akasha, but cannot be seen by earth-sense eyes.

Receive the incoming sea.  The heart of the book has countless pages opening along its spine.

The earth of leaves is an alchemical term for the prima materia – the garden we are given to work in, drenched and fertile with nitrates and the seasons’ humous.

Maria is the sea – il mare – and prima materia, Mother Earth.

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In Thy Valorous Strength 5.6.01

EMBLEM TWO:  A seven-headed Monster threatened with a club.  Inscription:  In Virtute Tua – “In Thy Virtue or Valorous Strength”

Act from the heart, by whatever means. The demons of despond and panic cannot be beaten by proxy – only from my Real centre of gravity, with commitment.

The weapon is gripped from the heart, from within, as itself.  Where it strikes, it is armed by the great Exorcist, JHShVH, Yeshua.

In Thy valorous strength, not mine.  Mine is not the Strength.

“May God be resurrected and his foes perish- As wax melts before fire, as smoke is driven by wind – So may all who hate the Lord flee his sight – And the just rejoice!

Psalms

The monster with seven heads is personal egotism or inflation.  Strike at its root or tail, with Self-enquiry.  Defend the sanctum, create a shield.   Use both hands.

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What is not Lost …  10.6.01

EMBLEM THREE:   A closed and sealed Door with an Angel attempting to open it.  Inscription:  Signatur ne Perdatur – “What is not Lost”

The door is a membrane, like the inner ear.  The Angel has tools, but does not force the door.  The keyhole is the extent of vision the sleeper has, peeping through the Tree of Life.

Buried treasure.  Three knots in the wood suggest three worlds, or levels of entry:  ways of perception.The angel sees through all our matter and mass and concerns, being the space of atoms.

The door frame is the fourth Hebrew Letter, DALETh;  the Above is rooted in Below. The grain of the wood flows like water, a river, Yetzirah the World of Formation; the psyche.

The Angel of Beriah (World of Creation) wears the Atef Crown of Light.

On the Tree, the Sefira Daat is where the Angel’s dimension steps through into our consciousness, projecting shadows onto space and time.  It marks also the capillary interchange by prana into the physical blood cells and body, as Consciousness embodies.   This happens in the womb, and in every moment of life.    Daat is emphasized in the little Tree of Life sketch which seems to grow out of the back of the sleeper’s neck.  By the door frame near the top, is an owl creature or demon – a projected shadow from the Light of Angels’ feathers, onto the world.

The Angel’s wings are great waves of galactic ripple, through planetary systems.

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After I drew this, I dreamed my front door was irreparably broken in, during the night, right round the frame;  it had been replaced without support, and just hung there.  I took out some loose bricks.  I was afraid, but I found some lost things – a pair of child’s shoes.  Then I saw my demon, a black, lame, prehistoric creature;  the Shadow limped away over the fields, sticky, prickly and woebegone.  Compassion for it.

Life being cracked open.   Time comes.   The heart shape is lying asleep in the ground, in the Earth of Leaves, like an embryo in the womb.

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As Dawn Breaks through Tears 12.6.01

EMBLEM FOUR:  A Landscape representing an Island.  The sun rises and the stars shine.  Inscription – Aurora ab Lacrymis:  “Dawn breaks through Tears.”

The rising sun strikes his dark material from sleep, like a spark on flint.

It seems that coal rises.  Carboniferous life is the ancient island, dark against the light, the ancient residue of trees, melting to gold, to fire, like the young volcano off Iceland:  ice and flame.

The sea is Consciousness.  The island is a heartbreak.

Tifareth is a ray striking the rock.  It might be a precious gem:  our Stone, or Self.

There are birds of liberated energy or emanation:  the ions which are aeons – the current of static electricity.

There is a ship of souls:  a movement, journey or quest.   There is a lighthouse: a soul on the rock.

The water in the foreground, is rippled like deep sand.  When we clear the view, like rubbing the sleep from our eyes, or polishing silver, the Sun and Galaxy (stars) are seen together.  All is One Mater, materia.

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 Bitter Sweet 29.12.01 (Ramana-birthday)

EMBLEM FIVE:  An Orange-tree bearing Fruits, of which the inner part is sweet while the rind is bitter.  Inscription – Dulce Amarum:  “Bitter Sweet.”

Nostoc – the alchemists’ dew which is gathered at dawn.

The “pith practice” of alchemy is called the Fountain, and in the east it is Kundalini yoga.

The Orange is a mercurial tonal vibration from the Sun.  It transmits warmth and energy.  On the Queen Scale Tree of Life, Hod (reverberation, the Glory) is orange.  The Zodiac has twelve juicy segments.

Citrus fruit is tart at the root and in the pith.  Taste and flavour:  Malkuth, our ground.

Amor = Love.  Amar = Bitter.   These are working opposites.

Tifareth is a seed in the very centre of the tree, right in the white pith or core, at the dawn skyline.  The Heart of the Tree is where all its branches open.   Yesod is where the roots form together a base, and clasp the ground … like a child in utero.   Plant your treasure.

The year’s ending is the seed of Light;  in deepest Yin, sages are born:  the darkest hour has the deepest light.

The sky has ripples of light, like sand crescents: the vesica pisces – fish of Pisces.

The roots are Karmic strands and lifetimes drawn together into the lens which is this Tree.  Where they form one stem, a Yesod or personality grows, at ground level.

“Let us form a vessel to catch the dew of heaven” – to focus an individual, a group or a School.   The parents are implied, in full.

Deeper in the sub-soil is the Kingdom, Malkuth, the host of our interconnected bodies of Light.

The mist above the roots of sunrise – Twelfth House – is the aura. Tifareth is where the aura interfaces/becomes the Malkuth of the Beriah tree – the branches of heaven.

It is universally, a capillary process, both ways.

The citrus orange in earth looks like a ring, like a serpent eating its tail:  the DNA.

This was the first new Emblem in the series – after a long gap – having done some Grail study, and “fountain practice”.  There are thoughts of the One – the Tzaddek wherever on earth – who holds the Axis of Consciousness for this age.

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 Sweet Savour:  Cube of Solomon  2/3.1.02

EMBLEM SIX:  An altar with a fire upon it, in which a heart is burning, sending out a sweet odour.   Inscription:  In Odorum Suavitatis – “Sweet Savour”.

Here the notes are pictures, rather than words

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And here is the Second part of “Twelve Rosicrucean Emblems”:

The Beyond within Appearance 4.1.02

EMBLEM SIX (2):  An altar with a fire upon it, in which a heart is burning, sending out a sweet odour.  “The Beyond within Appearance”

The rose and the star

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Lily of the Field 10/12.1.02

EMBLEM SEVEN:  A pure white lily in a flowerpot, standing in a garden.  Inscription:  Virginei laus prima pudoris – “Purity is the fruit of modesty”

Studies of the Tattvas – five senses and seven interior stars

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Solomon’s Lily in Earth 12.1.02

EMBLEM SEVEN (2):  A pure white lily in a flowerpot, standing in a garden.

The roots, bulbs and rhizomes are all our interconnected lives and stories.

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Companions of the Light around the Table in the Flower 13.1.02

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Discrimination 2.2.02

EMBLEM EIGHT:  An Angel separating wheat from chaff by means of a Sieve.  Inscription:  Dimittit Inanes – “Renounce the chaos of irrelevant inanities” (NB I do not have latin, and am guessing from the dictionary – help with this and Emblem Seven and the next three titles, would be appreciated!)

The sieve is a Ring of Time, an orbit, a zero.  Through its mesh, the bread of life is sieved.  The watchful Angel is planted in the landscape of all our lives;  the sieve is a lens, or medium within which forms a crucial awareness of our destiny, and how and where to act and what not to do.

The landscape integrates cosmos, fields, pebbles, flowers and watery ocean patterns:  those are all types of soul.   Birds fly into infinity.   Horizontal and vertical planes intersect and flow.

snowdrop 1969

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Solomon’s Seal

EMBLEM NINE:  A Ring with a jewel, exhibited upon a table.  Inscription: Honori Invincem.  Perhaps “Honour is Invincible” literally.   This and the next emblem were drawn at a much later date, some years apart.

The seal of Solomon containing the Cube of Space, rests on the rivering grain of the wood, the seas, shells and sky.  The jewel is extracted from nature, from the natural state, and developed, undergoing hardships along the way, like humanity.   We are talking of a process of centuries, millennia;   yet alchemy is a quickening, an acceleration of our themes of loss and rediscovery, throwing our life’s activity into high relief.

The jewel and the rivering table, are two views of Time, juxtaposed.

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 Atlas 14.4.08

EMBLEM TEN:  A Globe illuminated by the full moon.  Inscription:  Plena sibi et aliis.

My journal of that day says:  “Creative insight applies to life. (a struggle).  My task is to draw it.  Drawings help. Drawings embody the light.  The Emblem Ten drawing – earth globe, moon, moon’s etheric aura around the planet – is  Earth bound – the World. 

“In this illustration, Atlas (muscle man) holds the world on his shoulders. He is the trunk of the world tree.  Strange eye-rose spirals emerge near him.  They are Time and samskaras – births of the mind.  The cloudscape is as seen from a higher plane;  the full moon and the composition do not suggest a linear mode, but a sphere – the Yin Yang interplay, the near and distant points (which are circles) of light and darkness.

“All is illumined.  The full Moon has a crescent umbra.  The Earth has wrinkled continents – Indian ocean faces – note the burden of the mountain range watershed, which wrinkles its Himalayan nature through Arabia, Turkey, Caucasus, Greece, Alps …  our problem of civilization perhaps;   the itch, the Mediterranean rift of cultural activity … an impression of weights.

“What is suggested here, is a global consciousness beginning to replace a local “tribal” consciousness.

“Atlas is the philosopher, Gaia is his brain, a whole planet is on his shoulders!   Actually he is headless.  The face is the front of the brain.

“My latin dictionary is NO help for the inscription, Pleni Sibi et Aliis.

“Nothing as yet on polar alignment … but managed to draw an alignment/core of approx thirty degrees through North Pole, Finland, Istanbul, Nile, Zimbabwe and East South Africa to Antarctica, taking in the longitude curve.

“Mediterranean is like a hot centre or whirl-spout mandala.   This drawing developed the way it has, with no fixed plan, except to draw my globe without the Americas for a change …  it didn’t take long.”

IMPRESSION today of Atlas:

I chose this image to draw, which combines a potentially peaceful scene, with utmost stress and weight bearing.  2008 happened to be a somewhat trying year for me –  between a rock and a hard place!

If Atlas agrees to be an ornament, he might relax inside his pillar.    If he looks carefully, he might find his ears are wider apart than he can ever stretch his hands.  His head is space for the world and all the universe, to Happen in:  a universal axis.  All he need do, is remove his head gently.

How can anything “work”, until I find myself out?  What is the way Home?

Reflect on … how time was once a local village, rising and setting in a linear way.  Now time is a community of the dawn, around the globe, at all times this moment, a sphere.

As Douglas Harding would say, look carefully at WHAT this hand is pointing to … what is seen?  why, the emblem of Emblems:  empty for the whole wide world, to happen in!

The emblem of Emblems:  “Look for yourself”.

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

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.

Yeshua and Magdalena

The Last Supper

This was inspired by the Chalice and Blade symbol in The Da Vinci code some years ago.  The core of this book, which moved me, is that the Grail is not an altar to posses or seek in isolation, but an open and eternal secret in the ethical art of life and love.  The same invitation is in Dan Brown’s other thrillers also.  Leaving the centre empty, so the light flows in – is the Grail!   The mystery is in the heart of life’s family, around which the world buzzes.  It grows a Seal of Solomon, the lily in the field;  and for me, no more need be said.

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Yeshua and Mary

This, and the portraits which follow, was commissioned by Anne Dorcas in Montreal, in 2006, within a series of the Ascended Masters.  The Hebrew “Yeshua” spelling is JHShVH – which means “JAH Liberates”.

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Rabbi Yeshua

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Our Lady:  Shekhinah

 From Matteo di Giovanni’s Madonna of the Girdle, in the National Gallery

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Yeshua and Magdalena

“Magdala” means in Hebrew a tower, and in Alchemy and Kabbalah, a vessel to catch the dew of heaven.

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Mary and Gaia

An “Earth” meditation – our global community

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Archangel Rafael

God’s Messenger.  This drawing was done a little earlier, at the same time as The Last Supper, above

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Jesus (in the distance) by the Sea of Galilee.

 These two sketches were done in about 1968.  See also my poem When Yeshua went up the Hill to Pray, in the earlier blog, “Portraits and Poems of Eclipse to Ramesh – a Revision.”

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“Loaves and Fishes”

Yeshua breaks bread with the outcasts

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Madonna and Child

Copied from a book of Renaissance art when I was about 7

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… and a tree-of-life spirit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

This blog is  a vehicle to promote 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.

Some Trees of Life PART TWO

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Tree of Life as an Alchemic Vessel   ja/2003

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“The Flowering Staff”  ja/2002

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Poplars and London Night Sky   ja/1987

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Spring moves under Earth    ja1969

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Rosicrucean Emblem No.7:  a Lily in a pot in a garden    ja/2002

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Western and Eastern Philosophies on the Tree of Life:  the 3 Gunas   ja/1995

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Body   ja/1998

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Cosmic Egg and Tree-dance    ja/1999

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Tree of Life, an Instrument    ja/2001

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Psychedelic Avocado    ja/1973

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Woodland Path   ja/1986

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Tree dancers by a Brook    ja/1997

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Rock river flow    ja/1997

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

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.