A Resonance between Two Models – Leonard Cohen & Ramesh Balsekar

Read more of this conversation Part Two

During my visit to Ramesh in Mumbai, in early 1999, I witnessed the following conversation with Leonard Cohen, and bought the tape.
After I got home, I made this transcript:

Ramesh – You live in a Zen monastery, I am told?

Leonard – That’s correct, yes.

For how long, three or four years?

I’ve been associated with this institution for about thirty years – and about four and a half years ago, I was ordained as a monk.

I see. I see. Would you say it is a pretty stiff discipline?

It’s – very rigorous.

But you like it?

Not particularly, no.

Well that is honest. So what I would like to ask is this: the understanding before you came here, and what I talk about – how does it compare?

It was the resonance between the two models, yours and my teachers’, that led me to study your books with some diligence. And because of the experiences I received from your books, and because of the advanced stage of my Teacher and yourself, I felt it would be appropriate to come and sit with you.

I see. But you used the word ‘resonance’. Can you explain that a little bit, Leonard?

I found that during some of the rigorous retreats that we’re subjected to, I would find myself opening one of your books, specifically The Final Truth; and I would find that your writing would illuminate the discourses of our Master, and vice versa. It became urgent that I …

A similar thing happened to me. When I was with my – Nisargadatta Maharaj. You know Wei Wu Wei?

Yes, Sir.

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Particularly one book which a friend of mine gave me twenty years ago, which I knew was a treasure, but I couldn’t understand it – I kept it aside. So that was what used to be – what Maharaj said, and what was said in the book – amazing. …   You’ve been here for ten days!

Yes, Sir.

But you’ve been so silent!

I’ve been sipping at the nectar. It’s very delicious to be here.   On the intellectual level, your model becomes clearer and clear to me – your conceptual presentation – and so does my old Teacher’s. On the experiential level, I feel the weakening of certain proprietorial feelings about doership.

That is a very good word!   Proprietorial – me, mine!   I see. Now, this weakening – how do you mean this weakening, when did it start?   Did it start thirty years ago? Is that what you are saying?

I couldn’t characterize this seeking as spiritual. It was a kind of urgent …

You mean what started thirty years ago was not really spiritual?

No Sir.

I see. I see.

I don’t know if it is today. The description seems to pale in the urgency of the actual search, which is for peace.

Yes. Yes.

And you know, over the years, especially anyone who hangs around a Zendo meditation hall, is going to get a lot of free samples, as you put it. If you sit for long hours every day, and are subjected to sleeplessness and protein deficiency, you’re going to start having experiences that are interesting. It was a hunger for those experiences that kept me around, because I NEEDED those experiences.

YES! The HUNGER for those experiences. Yes! So?

I forget where we were. I’m sorry.

You said, experiences happened, and there was a hunger for those experiences.

There was a hunger to maximize, to continue, a greed to … a greed for those kinds of experiences develops. Which is what happens in monasteries.

I entirely agree, yes. There is a greed for those experiences.

Very much so. And I must say that my old Teacher puts little value on those experiences.

I see. In fact, did he WARN you against them?

Warns you, and BEATS YOU, against them!

With his stick? On your shoulder?

Yes Sir. We are not encouraged to take these hallucinations seriously.

But how effective are those beatings, Leonard?

Not effective at all. I’ve seen them more effective in the case of other monks than they were in this case. So I respect the system; it’s a rigorous system based on a very useable model, but it wortks for some and does not work for others.

Quite right. I see. And what you’ve been hearing for ten days, has it made some difference, do you think?

Sweet!

Some difference in this greed?   Can you explain that a little bit, please Leonard?

Your emphasis on the disidentification with the sense of doership, is crucial to the weakening of – the modification of that greed.   And by the grace of this activity, I have experienced …

You have tried it, during the last ten days?   I see.

Yes. Of course, greed arises. The hunger arises, legitimately, and without my bidding. The greed for peace, for equanimity, for balance, arises spontaneously. But I feel that somehow I don’t have any leverage on the apparatus. Somehow there is a sweetening of the whole experience.

I see. You see, what happens is – Wayne and I had a very brief talk a couple of days ago; we were both walking on the roof. He made a point that while certain practices bringing about these free samples, inflate the ego, could these practices also not inflate the ego to an extent where it bursts? Which is one way for the annihilation of the ego.

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That is a very excellent characterisation of this kind of practice.

I see. That is what it is supposed to do. But I told Wayne, the explosion will happen if that is the will of God, and if it is the will of God, that that bodymind organism follow THAT PATH. … … Ramana Maharshi used the words “Who am I” because in English there is a marvellous distinction between ‘I’ and ‘me’, but in the Tamil language and most other languages I am told, this distinction is not there. So when Ramana Maharshi said, “Find out who am I”, he really meant, “Who is this me I’m so concerned about?”

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If this process starts, it is the will of God. And if this process reaches a certain depth – every step is God’s will and the destiny of that body-mind organism – the actual arising of this question is there a me, out of DEEPEST FRUSTRATION, is what is perhaps called THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL   In the time lag between the arising of the question and the arising of an answer, the deepest frustration is the dark night of the soul. And the dark night of the soul awakens you into the answer: “There never has been a ‘me’. There is thinking, but no thinker. There is doing, but no doer.”   The thinker, the doer, the experiencer, comes later, and becomes proud, or has a feeling of guilt.   Thinking happens. A thought arises and leads to some action. And later on, the individual ego doer comes in and says “I had a brilliant idea which I put into practice, and now I am Bill Gates, making five hundred dollars every second.” That is how thought occurs. But the one who says ‘I thought’ comes later. And it was God’s will and the destiny of the mindbody organism that that should happen. Albert Einstein in his total humility, has gone on record as saying the equation came to him from outside.

I think that’s the experience of every artist and mind worker.

Yes. Nureyev the ballet dancer has said, “Nureyev dances best when Nureyev isn’t there.”   And the same thing is said by I suppose, any artist in whatever field … …   Bhagavad Gita says this: “Out of thousands of people there is one seeker. Out of the many seekers, there is ONLY ONE who knows me in principle.” … … Many Gurus, unfortunately, tie down their disciples, saying “Now you have come to me. You wanted to be initiated. Now our relationship is life-long.” You see? But to me, that is ridiculous. You initiated him, but who sent him to you?   That Source certainly has the right to send that disciple somewhere else!   Who is this Guru, to bind him for life?

In the Zen tradition as you know, monks went from one Master to another, in search of different aspects of the teaching. I don’t feel I am betraying my Teacher by being here.

Yes. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. In fact, Wayne told me, you told your Teacher.

Yes. He asked me to cook him one last meal. Because I’m his cook.

And what is his favourite dish?

Uh – salmon teriyaki.

Oh. Well, that’s – that’s my favourite dish too. I mean, the particular dish you mention, I don’t know what it is, but … salmon.

It’s just marinated in soy sauce and saki, ginger, pepper, for a certain period of time, and then battered.

So is cooking one of your talents?

It’s not a talent, it’s a duty. I cook for the old man.

So it is your duty to cook salmon for your Guru.

That is correct.

And it is the Guru’s duty to eat it, whatever way you cook it!

He is very cavalier with his duties.

I see. Yes. YES. So, Leonard, is he likely to ask you when you go back, what did you learn?

My understanding, he will discern exactly. I think the issue more urgent, is whether I stay there or not.

Yes. But if he does ask you – which is not impossible, is it? – what would you say, Leonard?

Well, we have – I would try to convey to him in the terms that – but he doesn’t speak English.

So you speak Japanese?

No. He speaks very very little English. I speak very little Japanese. But we’ve been studying together and drinking together for a long time.

What is his favourite drink?

I tried to introduce him to vintage French wine, which I consider a refined beverage, but he insists on drinking saki.

If you ask me, I’d prefer Scotch or sherry.

I agree with you. He did – he was very discerning about cognac.

Yes.

He liked cognac, and he established masculine and feminine qualities to the different brands. For instance he thought Remy Martin had a feminine expression, while Courvoisier had a masculine expression. None of these designations were taken too seriously after the third or fourth drink.

You see, that is the whole point, Leonard. The whole business is taken far too seriously. That is the ridiculous thing about it. There’s nothing serious about it, because there’s no seeker!   And who is serious about it? – the seeker!   You see? The seeking goes on, on its own course. So, if this question were asked you Leonard, is there a specific point which you learned from Ramesh – which is NOT what you had earlier – what would you say?   I don’t want to suggest an answer …

I would probably gasho to him. (Bows deeply)   And depending on the truth of the moment, whether I could step aside from the understanding and let the understanding communicate itself …

The answer is, “I don’t know”.   Is that what you meant?

It’s correct.

Then that is absolutely correct: “I don’t know what answer will come out.”

He has, you know, the Japanese rigour.   So he would question, he would listen carefully to my saying “I don’t know”. Because “I don’t know” is the answer to many koans.

No no. What I’m saying is: “I don’t know” is your answer to me. … …   Must be a pretty hard life there?

I’m given many privileges that the younger monks don’t have, because I have a family and obligations, so although I’m not free from the general form, which is very early waking up and long hours in the meditation hall and lots of work, I’m allowed to go down, into the city from time to time, to take care of my affairs and see my children.

Yes. I see. Yes. You have a family?

I have two children.

Two children. I see. And a wife?

I never married.

I see. So the two children are grown up?

They’re in their middle twenties.

Oh I see. But they’re on their own then, yes? – You have to help them?

They’re on their own, but I feel I can be of use to them. It’s difficult raising children in America. It’s a difficult manoevring and navigating through a lot of dangerous waters. So I’ve tried to stay close to them through some very difficult periods. A child growing up in America with money.

They have their own money?

No, I mean, in a comfortable surrounding.

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Yes. What is your relationship with your children? What advice do you give them – depending on the circumstances? The point is, how does one raise one’s children with the total acceptance that each child has its own destiny? Each child is programmed in a unique way. And yet you have to do your duty, as a father. What has been your experience, Leonard? Was it interesting?

My experience is to rely on instinct at the moment, and discard principles I myself received from my own parents, which were quite effective in their own way. I find for instance, that that the way I did it, or the way it was revealed to me –

Do they live on their own?

My daughter lives in my apartment, and I live on the mountain, and my son lives around the corner.

And you provide the money for them, or do they work?

They work. They work hard.

And they earn their own living then?

Yes, Sir.   But they grew up in a privileged environment. They didn’t have to work. They didn’t have to struggle.

They didn’t have to earn and learn?

No, they didn’t have to earn and learn, and not only that, but  they were exposed to things very early in their lives, as many American kids are. I had been through that myself. So I was able to react in a way that was unconventional. But having understood something  …

From personal experience?

From personal experience, I established a connection with the child on the basis of that common experience, rather than on a principle of right or wrong.

Quite right. Yes. It worked?

And fortunately, it seemed to work.

Oh? I see. In other words, you talked to your children not like a father to a son or daughter, but as one person who has experience of what they are experiencing.

Yes Sir, that’s correct; not only that, but having taken that course, it’s enabled a real usable friendship to develop.

Yes! Yes! In fact the relationship itself must have taken a beautiful turn.

It has! My daughter says, like “You’re really cool, Dad.”

That is the highest compliment, isn’t it. Cool. And the curious part of it is, this word is really the definition of the traditional word ananda. The traditional word ananda is translated as “bliss”. But my objection to the word “bliss” is, it raises expectations in the seeker.

It’s a tyranny.

Calm. Cool. Well, this is a great compliment from your daughter!

It was, it was.

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You are cool, Dad. And what about your son? What do they do?

My daughter runs a store for antique deco furniture. She goes to England and buys furniture and brings it back and sells it. She got a job with an antique dealer two years ago, who apprenticed her. And my son has just put out his first record with a big record company.

Oh well! So he inherited your talent for music?

Well, I don’t have much talent for music, but he has. People who know my work will, er … I have a kind of croaking delivery. But he actually is very musical.

What you are saying is, your son is better than you are – were.

He has strengths that are much more apparent!

And you have told him that?   So he must ALSO have said “Dad, you’re cool.”

He has.

The son being praised by the father. So you have a very good relationship with your children!

Thank God, I do.

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Again, God’s grace. You know what I say about God’s grace and God’s will? We use the word God’s grace when something nice happens. When something not so nice happens, and we know we can do nothing about it, we put our head down and say God’s will. So now, if somebody asks you Leonard, “how do you live your life?” – you are about sixtyish?

Getting to be sixty-five.

I see. How do you live your life? Does living your life present a problem? What would be your answer, from personal experience? Is living your life now, with this understanding, a difficult thing?

Well, if it is – and it’s been the experience of this being, that things come with difficulty rather than with ease – so I think the perspective on that programming is changing.

I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Things come difficult?

Yes, for instance I’m a song writer by profession …

You still write?

Yes Sir. And I’ve always found that I write one word at a time. With sweat and difficulty.

Like pulling out teeth.

It’s like pulling teeth, and it takes a great effort. I’ve written some decent songs, and people ask me about song writing, you know, they say “How do you write a good song?” And I always say, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.” I don’t know where they come from. I know that I have to sit at my desk or in my café or wherever it is, and sweat over it. Other song writers greater than I – and I’ve had this conversation with them – will give me completely different information. They’ll say, like “I wrote it in the back of the taxi cab” – you know, a great song. So it seems to be my experience, that things are difficult in just the way this programming works.

That is correct.

So the understanding now is, that this programming, unless it is the will of God to change the programming, is going to be as it is, but I don’t have to get involved in the programming. I can work at my desk as I’ve always done, but without that additional tyranny of disapproval of the method; because this is the method that …

… is supposed to be for you

… is supposed to be for me.

I tell you how I understand it. What you are saying is this: writing a song comes easy for some people. They can write one in a taxicab. For you it becomes much more difficult. But what you are saying, I think, is, that there is no wish that you could do what that other fellow is doing. Isn’t that right?

No. There is no wish.

That’s the whole point. You have accepted the way YOU write your songs, and you have accepted the way someone else is able to write the songs.

And deeper than that, Sir, there is – I’ve always had a sense of this – this perception of this bodymind orgasm – organism … !

The American pronunciation!

… has been that there is a background of anguish, of mental anguish, that does not seem to respond to any methods that I impose on it. So as that understanding deepens, I try less to impose any methods; and although the chatter and the activity of the mind continues, it doesn’t seem to have its poisonous sting.

Say that again, please? The chattering of the mind goes on?

The chattering of the mind, and the alleged anguish of the mind continues to operate sometimes in degrees of intensity that make one gasp or cry for help …

YES!

But with this understanding that is dawning, it seems that I am less willing to criticize or impose.

I see. Again, the same thing. You write the songs the way YOU are programmed to write, but there is no wishing that YOU could do what some others can. Doesn’t the same thing apply here? Isn’t that what you are saying?

Yes Sir. (Bows deeply). Yes, Sir.

Exactly the same thing. The chattering of the mind happens, but there is no wish that the chattering of the mind should become less. Isn’t that what you are saying? So whatever happens is accepted. Alright, there IS the chattering of the mind! It is the nature of the mind to chatter. It is the nature of the monkey to moan. So you let the monkey moan – the way he wants to! Therefore, the chattering of the mind may be there, but there’s no anguish. Is that what you are saying – as I think you are?

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It is. But even if there is anguish …

You mean, accept even that anguish is acceptance? Quite correct. Even if the anguish does happen, even if the involvement does happen, acceptance of it means “the cutting off of the involvement, when it is accepted.”

Correct.

So, even the involvement has to be accepted. Involvement happens – oh, alright, so it is happening …   Thank you very much, Leonard. That is exactly what I was hoping I’d get from you. (Obeisance).

First published in Ramana Maharshi Foundation UK Journal
“Self Enquiry”, summer 1999

Read more of this conversation in PART TWO

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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/

Grand Cross part 5 – Moon in Aquarius

23.4.14, Moon in 13 Aquarius – Tarot Keys 2 and 17: the Priestess and the Star

These Tarot Keys, the Priestess and the Star show in picture language, the Moon in Aquarius, to which they are assigned.

Aquarius is the Water Bearer;  and those same waters flow from the lap of the Priestess.  Half hidden, she holds a scroll of the Akashic record;  the Grand Cross itself is on her breast!  On the pargod or veil behind her, is woven the Tree of Life:  her head is Da’at, union;  the cross is Tifareth.   The Sefiroth are pomegranates.  She is in bud.  She sits between Solomon’s pillars of Jakin (Yod) and Bohaz (Beit) – the day and the night.  She is the whole of the subconscious:  she is everything in us before it flowers and sprouts leaves and lives.  The Priestess serves the tides of the Moon.

Key 17 the Star is also called “Meditation”.  You can see why.  The Great Star shines through the seven stars or chakras of her spinal column:  the well has concentric ripples like the rings of a tree.  The scarlet ibis in the background is Thoth – intelligence of the Priestess’s ripe pomegranates.   The Priestess is heavily robed;  the woman of the Star is mother-naked.

Picture-language such as this, serves to open the mind;  to contemplate;  to begin to think creatively, as the surface of the pool is quietened.  We begin to see.

Explanations and interpretations are irrelevant.

We begin to see differently.  In psychological terms, it is the capacity of the Moon and of Yesod, to perceive;  to open the way.   This Wednesday, the Moon in 13 Aquarius resonates through Jupiter 13 Cancer, Pluto 13 Capricorn, Mars 13 Libra and Uranus 13 Aries, an unexpected reflection;  as if above and below all the news and views, the hidden spring is flowering.   But we must look within to find!

It is a providential yoga.  It is an alternative view;  the innner benediction.

On the Tree of Life, the Moon is Sefira Yesod – sphere of the personal self, our childhood conditioning, the filtering vessel through which we perceive the world.   The word yesod means “foundation”.   The transpersonal Self is expressed uniquely through each personal ego or small self: each way the “i” is tempered. This is where we grow, and open out into the branches of the Tree, and the heart of it which is Tifareth:  the beauty.

Menorah – showing Hebrew Sefiroth; and Tree of Life, showing the Sefiroth in English. Sefiroth means sphere or emanation.

Many interpretations of today’s Grand Cross are locked into strutting sandwich-boards of doom.    So what’s new?  The symbols may be read as a closed-circuit or as a living spiral.  It is as old as the hills for the human monkey to look out there and project fear, drama and death onto what we view, and to give away to it, all our power.   During an eclipse period we are vulnerable to our negatives;  and it is Easter too.

What is the lesson now?  Seeing – and suffering –  a negative trend, keep the mysterious option open, wherein it swims.  Hold in consciousness both realities;  choose the limitless, and let the limitation within it, melt.  To access the power which knows the way, we need to look at life unfolding inside ourselves.  We tend not to.  It is more amusing, more horrifying and more dramatic to look at what the politicians and the corporations are doing.

Here is where it starts, and it takes strength to keep open, and to be in touch with ourselves where we really, really are.   The rest is hearsay, habit and a shrinking screen.

The Grand Cross mirrors human values and chivalry, as well as tension, challenge and change.

Ask:  am I a rigid frame, or do I dance?

“Move with the movement, keeping still, move with the beauty of the Tao in its flow of balancing, re-equilibrating. What seems dark to you is the water moving, and nature’s exquisite tendency to flow in and out of stress points. Sitting on the nub of what seems to be depression and insecurity, is a place from which to view the ebb and flow of life; without judgement, including the mood, without the mood. Tao is uncertainty. Don’t make it an enemy.

”Touch the muddy face with tenderness, and allow it to complete itself.”

These are thoughts inspired by Master Han, who wove his poems from the grasses and rocks of Cold Mountain in the 9th century AD:  here is a drawing of my own interface with him.  I had forgotten him!  Quietly he emerges from the dark corner of my soul.

old tao sage

So what matters?  Why does it matter so much
to me?  Who is “I”?
Let it go, dear heart, and be in touch.

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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 Kabbalist Meditation

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Tree of life screen, by Halevi

Let us begin.

Let us gather together, draw together.  Let us form a Vessel, to catch the dew of Heaven.  Let us rise, and go to that Holy place of Meeting and gather there, with the Companions of the Light.  Let the Veil of Heaven be drawn back …

Hear this:

MALKUTH,  YESOD,  HOD,  NETZACH,  TIFARETH,  GEVURAH,  HESED … 
BINAH,  HOKHMAH,  KETER

Lord, Thou art the Living Almighty.  Thou art YAHVEH ELOHIM, the One Reality. 
Thou art I AM.  
If it be Thy Will, let Thy Holy Spirit descend upon us this Night, 
that we may know thy Presence.  From Thee cometh all Grace.
Light candles:  Hokhmah Binah

“We are going to do a meditation on each Sefira of the Tree.”

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sefira malkuth – the physical world

MALKUTH

Let us centre our body in this room … feel the soles of our feet touching the floor … the palms of our hands … our centre column, the spine at rest in gravity:  a root descends, a shoot grows up from the earth …  the warmth of our interior organs, whose brilliant colour is hidden inside …  the movement of the breath.

What do we sense around us in this room?   What do we hear?  What do we smell and taste?   As the centre of a mandala, see inwardly around us, the shapes, the companions, and the furniture in this room:  the action of gravity:  … a sense of history:  the KabbalahTradition.

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sefira yesod – foundation, personal ego

YESOD

When you were a child, and perhaps before you learned to read, there was a feeling, a special flavour of being you.   What is it?   A plant, a smell, or a sound might recapture it and make you stand still wherever you are, to savour it.   It is an essence of infinity.   What images arise through you?    …   Near you are your parents … or one of your parents, your mother or your father. …   What do they feel like? …  your home?

Sometimes you see a mirror.   What strange sensations in your family puzzle you?   What is hard to understand?

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sefira hod – reverberation & learning

HOD

It is your first day at school.  Being taken there in a car, or by bus, or walking with your parent, what do you feel in your body, and whereabouts is that feeling?  A bit frightened perhaps?   excited?  anxious?

As time goes by, you learn to conform.  You are taught new patterns of play, patterns of numbers, arithmetic, and patterns which form the letters.  What is it like when those shapes at first mean nothing?   Slowly, they come to life as words, and spell together as stories.   How does it feel, to be able to read all by yourself?   To read the stories perhaps your mother read to you … but whenever you want to?   How does it feel to connect up, to draw and write the words?  to build stories of your own?   Difficult?   Absorbing?  Fascinating? …   And what is left behind?

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sefira netzach – power & nature cycles

NETZACH

You are a teenager, half grown into the adult world and its conditioning.  Your body and your perceptions change unpredictably.   Big waves of uncharted feeling throw you from one mood to another.

What is the essence of nature’s force of attraction through you?   How does it affect your heartbeat, the tides of your breath, and the warmth of your skin? …   Does it make you want to dance and sing and do dangerous things?

What is your emotional landscape – open countryside … or town?   Where do you fall in love …  for the first time?   Where is the place?

Reflect on this Triad of Feeling circuit:  Yesod, Hod, Netzach …  how it drives itself around, like an engine.   And become aware … observe within it your area of happiness … and your area of  stress or tension, as you rebel … or as you try to follow the rules.   And as you become aware, you find your body’s gravitational centre …   and a new element seems to enter – a wider, higher, deeper one, an overview.    What is this?

Who am I?    Let us form a Vessel.

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sefira tifareth – heart centre

TIFARETH

You are around thirty perhaps.  For a moment, you recall your forgotten childhood.   A sound in the street, a perfume or a place, might trigger the timeless sensation.  The sun shines into your soul, and you are ageless.   Raised like a sunflower over a problem or tension in your life, you contemplate it … and things fall into perspective.

The prospect opens into the soul …  your stem, in the divine thread, the root and shoot of the Tree of Life … the heart of the universe … in your own.

And you are aware, as you were when you were a child, of those sensations of stress and of happiness…   What are they?   What images do they form?

You see or feel the presence of your inner Teacher.

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sefira gevurah – constraints

GEVURAH

You are on a journey.  You may have made or realized something beautiful in your life, but it now needs crafting or editing.  The journey is a course of training.

What is now being refined … in the refiner’s fire?   What is your special field?   Or do you still seek it?   Who are your tutors in life, in relationship, in the Tree of Life, or in your job?   How is your life being shaped?

There are constraints  … which lead to opportunities.

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sefira hesed – opportunities

HESED

What closes up, and what opens out?    Catching a glimpse of the growth of planets in their galaxies, you receive the expanding sphere of Grace, of Providence:  as a willing participant.

Evaluating the soul triad – Tifareth, Gevurah, Hesed – observe a problem you have just now.   What decision or attitude to it, shuts a door in your heart?    And what action opens the same door in your heart?    Confinement … or letting go, let God.   Weigh the matter carefully, and let the insight make your choice.

From the Tifareth Gevurah Hesed equilibrium a great Triad of the Spirit opens … a quantum leap … to catch the dew of Heaven … the realm of Wisdom and Understanding.   Here are revealed the Companions of the Light, the Archetypes … trends of collective humanity …and a knowledge of your present lifetime’s principal themes;  of your other lifetimes as threads in the tapestry …  and of our Tradition.   What is your way forward?

And let the Veil of Heaven be drawn back.

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daat – knowledge, union

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sefira binah – understanding

BINAH

Sefira of Understanding:   the dark Mother.    Peace, be still.

 silence

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sefira hokhmah – wisdom

HOKHMAH

Sefira of Wisdom :  the seminal Father.   Peace, be still.

 silence

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sefira keter – divine thread

KETER

the divine thread uniting us, through Tifareth and Malkuth:   … the root, the shoot.

LORD, THOU ART GOD.   LORD, THOU ART GOD.   LORD, THOU ART GOD.

And come back into your body, come back into this room, and open your eyes. ~~~~~~ and come down the Tree.

*****

Hear this: Most Gracious God, Thou art the Living Almighty.   Thou art the Lord. Keter, Hokhmah, Binah,    Hesed, Gevura, Tifareth,   Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth       Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts … Thy Glory fills all the Worlds.

http://flickriver.com/photos/jackandjo/4378319759/
Sagittarian Archer aims up the Tree of Life, to Kether

This group meditation on Monday 25 November was led by J.A.

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tree of life with Toledo Tradition path system

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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 2012-2013. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

What is Thought?

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Early this morning I was sleepless, thinking about a very distressing situation. A couple years back, a friend’s student son had a minor accident while cycling.  The person he ran into, said she is fine, no worries.  He contacted her next day, to check all is OK, then got on with his life and forgot about it.  This year an injury-compensation shark persuaded her to sue him for £20,000.   It is tied up in legal knots.  There is nothing he can do.

I often get spam messages on my phone, inviting me to claim compensation for my Accident.  What accident?  Oh! … “suppose there was one, a small cafuffle outside Sainsbury – less than 3 years ago, so it counts.”  If I fall for that scheme, I give to those thieves a power to GRAB – against the law, but legally.

Be warned!  Carry pen and paper.  If you are a cyclist and you do bump into someone, check their ID and driving license (the same as for motoring incidents), offer cash for any immediate damage (to clothing or whatever), then have them write “The matter is settled and I have no more complaints” and sign and date it.

Be insured.  This must not be allowed to happen.  We must ride alertly and stay awake – we live among predators.

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With this going round and round, I heard an inner voice say, “God grants humankind the use of thought.  All thought is God.  Humankind usurps the power and use of thought;  you think it is your own.  It is stepped down to locality.  It is blurred out of recognition and becomes your false tale.”

(“God” is extreme shorthand for “the Love which is All”;  the Power that knows the Way.)

This is profound about philosophy and psychology.  It is the knottiest question in philosophy and in life.  I have the free will to see where I have gone wrong, and to want –  decide to do better.

But … I am bound hand and foot by the mood-results of my erroneous thought, and the type of action or non-action it generates.  That is not free will.  As humanity you and I have ancestors and genetic history, and those ways of thinking also bind us to create reinforcing Karmas or tendencies to act.  I do.  As I have resolved to do better ever since childhood, and failed, but keep trying yet again and failing, that shows how hard it is!

I have the use of thought – the thought whose form is God’s in every atom, every movement of the river.  Habitually I lock it in dark depressed crevices, the tendency is to slither crab-like into these.   But those rooms and boxes are imaginary scenes; they are not REAL.   They manifest loved-ones who have difficulty and distress with life.  They drag my spirit down.   Well!  Respect those loved ones and their real landscape.   A light gleams somewhere through the clouds:  accept how it is for them, and don’t label it with my guilt and pride.

God grants me the use of thought:  the Great Mind or Universal akashic memory which contains and flows through my small capillary.   In meditation I seek silence, which is near to hearing real thought.  Real thought is not verbal.   Words – even the most wonderful ones – are just offshoots from the Real.

Words however, have titanic power to persuade and to veil.   They are contagious and they take up residence in our heads and hearts.  Depressed persons struggle with listening to verbal abuse inside themselves, day and night.

God grants me the use of thought, but I am a THIEF.  I take it as my own and turn it into something which it is not;  and then that something becomes a Magna Carta to live by, and engineers its own phantoms – a supportive environment of dismay.

Think of that!  I am a thief, every time I worry.  No wonder it is so exhausting.  Humans demonstrate the extremes of theft, when we abuse, pollute, steal and make war.  Making a God out of Good is no good.  What is needed is to relax, let go and receive the natural state which is humanely homogenous … whenever and wherever we can.

I feel that even the extremes of evil derive from the fundamental theft of thought from God the All-One, and the delusion that it is one’s own.  Any disaster can escalate from that.   And all such towers fall in the end, because they are not truth.

A light worker’s job is to keep recognising this.  That is what I do, all my working life, I catch and try to field it upstream.  Once I was partially successful;  my environment turned benevolent from that point.  But mostly the hay-load of thought-stuff rushes downstream, creating rapids, blockages and samskaras for generations.

I have a deep perception of the springs of thought and sexuality;  it is where the dew rises, high on the mountain.  In that element is dynamic peace.   In that element, thought is breath or eros in and out like the tide;  there is no conflict or pain.

Yet life being what it is, the element un-thought is enabled by admitting and allowing my interior deep grief and pain.   Nothing reached is static.  It is dialogic, moving back and forth – conversational – sharp inner grief and its delusion converses with the Light upstream.   It is in relationship, like day and night, and is not avoided.   God’s thoughts are light and dark, and I clothe myself with the darker ones, to hide.   Unconditional love includes this.

Colour perception helps to clarify and detoxify my local thought.  A panel of orange, or yellow!   Good intention is not sufficient.   There has to be training – an encouragement of my mind-stuff to prefer a quieter and more spacious field.   It has to be enticed, like music, to concentrate.

Concentration is a faculty of JHVH.

A focused evil intention is deluded.  It is not allied to the concentrated Cosmic nature.   It creates suffering. Suffering blindfolds Reality, it scabs it over.   We are mostly scabbed over from remote evil inclinations, so that we suffer and scrabble to make ends meet, and obey the big media falsehood, and are distracted.

The Law is simple.  Do not cause suffering to anyone.   Be patient – have compassion with my own suffering;  and do not keep causing it.   It is my negative obsession or neurosis!   But cut the cackle and the pressure. Do what I feel and know is right for now, from moment to moment.  I am insuring my bike right now.

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“If we ask – enquire – whether mind exists, it will be found that mind does not exist. That is control of mind. Otherwise, if the mind is taken to exist and one seeks to control it, mind … is a thief being a policeman to catch the thief, i.e. himself. Mind persists in that way alone, but eludes itself.”

Talks with Ramana Maharshi
28 March 1935

… he runs hard to catch
his own leg he tries to snatch.

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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 2012-2013. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Childhood Part Three – Broomlands

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Years ago, I wrote down these childhood memories.  It was a time when I thought I had forgotten everything.  I started at age eleven, when I built a raft and sailed it on the pond, and worked backwards into time with whatever image arose next from my subconscious. It made me a “geological map”. It was a healing and integrating work.

This post is about when I was 8 – 10 years old.

The landscapes which developed my art and my in-built spiritual path – we moved house a number of times –  are of primary interest to me.  So it is the land and the flavour of the inner world I focus on here, rather than the taste of my mother’s cooking.  She gave me a lot of creative freedom.  The reach of childhood is so vast, that I can only touch on a few inches, here, and in the earlier Parts One and Two.

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Nymph, circa 1957

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We moved from Cornwall when I was nearly eight, to a farm in Surrey between a bluebell wood and a string of big sand-quarries.  Broomlands Farm is near Limpsfield Common.

In Cornwall, our “geological backdrop” was the white china-clay pyramids near St Austell – we saw them constantly from our house, changing colour to silver along the skyline – and the granite by the sea.  In Surrey it was sandstone:  the quarries were our playground, russet and old gold, amid the constant scratching sound of the miners.

Limpsfield Common began at a place I called “Treasure Wood” which sprawled into the distance as far as the eye could see.   The Treasure Wood was a place where fields and agricultural control were arrested by a heather-like tide of magic.   My mother did not allow me to go there on my own.   She let me go for my long solitary wanders within the radius of four roads roughly encompassing our farm under the North Downs.

GALLERY – most of these photos were taken on recent revisits to my old home.

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Our house was quite large and gracious in proportion, of mellow red brick with a rose garden in front,  a hen-yard by the bluebell woods at the back,  a long paddock to one side with a couple of tall dark conifers,  and the back door where the boots were kept.  The ridge of the North Downs was about a mile away, and the patterns of bracken and blazed out trails along it became a familiar seasonal script.  In front, between our garden and the quarry, was another paddock where bullocks tethered to posts trod gramophone records of earth around them in their grazing.

The prospect, looking down onto Broomlands,  was beautiful,  particularly when the azure of the sky fell down into the bluebell woods with radiance among the young trees in May;   but my father says this was for him a farm without a soul.  Perhaps it was the quarries in front,  great gashes in the land,  with lorries scratching by.  Or perhaps it was the farm men – he was the farm manager – none of them were skilled or bred to it.  We stayed there, as at Ventonwyn in Cornwall,  for two years.

Cupid and Psyche

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Here, under peer pressure from my new school, I became “a boy”.  I gave up my beloved dresses overnight.  I wore shorts and aertex shirts, and dirtied my knees.  My romantic passion rekindled with horses.  I saved up all my pennies to buy pony books by the Pullein-Thompsons and Pat Smythe, and longed fiercely to ride. At Broomlands there were at last riding lessons, firstly at Miss Aylemore’s Stables in Limpsfield, which were rather smart – six shillings for half an hour –  then with Miss Rogers in Edenbridge, at the far end of Treasure Wood.

Miss Rogers was a little old lady, a lean and white-haired horse-lover, like a small brown nut.  She wasn’t bossy like they were at Miss Aylemore’s, and she took her pupils on long, enchanted rides over the Chart common.  Her small chestnut ponies were new to me, and heaven to ride.  None of them were lazy.  They frisked along the woodland paths, they were eager fellow spirits.   I remember magical canters over small hills, the thud of hooves, the rockings and droppings along mud paths and bending along the ponys’ necks through glades of low branches.

At home I fostered lambs who had lost their mothers.  One of these tiny ones was called The Brigadier.  I don’t know if The Brigadier survived:  he made a noble effort.  Their bodies are thin, firm-fleeced,  damp and warm,  their thick black legs stand splayed with knobbles,  their smell and bleat is heart-tuggingly sharp, like their baby hooves,  and you can put your finger in their ardent sucking mouths instead of into yours, when you are getting too old for it.

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I kept pace with my parents’ love for music.  My piano lessons began at age 8, with Mrs Bickersteth, the vicar’s wife in Oxted.  She taught me the staves and the notes:  Eat Good Bread Dear Father are the lines –  and F A C E  are the spaces between.  Her husband became later on, the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

I heard music always at home. I heard them learn piecemeal to play string quartets; night after night I woke to the “mummy-and-daddy noise” of Beethoven’s Rasoumovsky No.One, in slow motion, note by note like a scrubbing brush.

In bed at night, the soul wrenching realisation would come that I was asleep through the music they played downstairs,  I’d missed it,  I’d betrayed it by not being there.   I got out of bed and sat on the stairs to listen.  There was a terrible urgency in this.  I tried to memorize the tempo of each piece they played, and sometimes even the key,  so as to repeat it to them in the morning.   Sometimes I had perfect pitch.

Music has come with wrenching pathos through my dreams and woken me,  and I realised I’d been dead to it.  I’m chilly and sleepy,  yet I can’t go to back to bed,  or I will miss it.  I’ll miss the joy they are having.   I’m outside, looking in – the jealousy of the outsider who has lost the trail – the jealousy of the child who is sent to bed too early; and the determination with which, on our family drives into the hills or in train journeys through Scotland,  I would force myself to be aware of each particle of the scenery.  If I didn’t, I was unworthy of it, and had missed it – the desolation whenever in my heart of hearts I twigged I was not really interested, it had closed its face and voice to me.

The great deities of my parents were landscape and music.  If I did not admire these with all my heart and soul, I considered myself a philistine.  Quince and Simon were not interested – Quince couldn’t see, and Simon didn’t enjoy long walks.  I flew into a rage with their indifference, being at the same time smug.  We squabbled and bickered with relentless violence in the back of the car until Daddy exploded into a bomb or a mood.  Rage and hate there is, when one is shut out of the house.

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GALLERY –  I obtained a copy of “My War” recently from a bookshop in Cornwall:  
the drawings here are part of the opening sequence.

Mummy was friendly with an abstract-painter called Stephen Szegedy-Szuts.   He and his wife Gwynnedd lived at Caunce Head near The Lizard in Cornwall, and they were magic persons.  I do not know if we knew them first in Cornwall, or later during the Surrey or Somerset periods, when we must have driven there for holidays with them.

Stephen had a halo of white hair, many wrinkles, and spoke in a sing-song soothing way.  He was old and mottled, and a wonderfully agile rock-climber.  He took Quince and me down the gully to the sea, and swam with us around the rocks like a seal.  He coaxed us shivering into the deep stony water among the big waves.  Then we climbed back up the gully to his kitchen, where he fed us every morning with a spoonful of: “When you have a cold,  always eat honey”  out of a large jar.  “In Hungary every child eats honey.  This is special honey from the acacia tree.  This is why they grow up strong and beautiful.”   He was, like many grownups, bossy.

Stephen told us tales of the winding Tisza river.   He had made and bound a book of his line drawings, called “My War”.  He drew in a funny biting way, like Gaudier,  and like the way he laughed.  “My War” was a tragedy, an artist’s poignant stand against “the killing”.  It had a fierce yet gentle earth-brown pungency, crisp on the page, like Jim’s pot-pourri or like rubbed red geranium leaves.

“In Hungary,” he told us, “ we have big fields of poppies and cornflowers, but no sea or rocky coast, because Hungary is quite surrounded by other countries …”  His house was untidy and overgrown with fruit trees.  We slept in his studio at night, we lay on the floor among an eery cabal of “unthought”  paintings.   They were strong guardian-spirits, and rather startling.  They saw in the dark:  he meditated, he emptied his mind to paint:  he painted what flew in and rested there.

GALLERY – these images from “My War” are online.
I don’t know for sure whether the painting – on the same site – is his.
I couldn’t find any of Stephen’s abstract works.  

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(And now I have the book “My War” itself!  It is astonishing how familiar to me and close to my memory the drawings actually are.  I felt them in my being.  Then I got the book, with its thick textured pages – a copy which belonged to John Fowles –  and I can see them for real.)

Stephen’s wife Gwynnedd had rosy cheeks and flat straight hair. She dragged herself heavily around the house because she had arthritis in her hip,  and was always in pain.  She smiled, but you could hear the pain in her voice.   She seemed shy and slow.  She was eclipsed by Stephen’s personality.  They drove a very old car, with a boot which opened up into a little seat behind.  It was called a “dickie”.  They put Quince and Simon and me in the dickie when they took us for drives.

We had a book at home by Kate Seredy, called The Good Master.   It was the story of a very naughty little girl from Budapest, who went to live on her uncle’s farm in the puszta.   It was about how she learned to live in the country, and to love her new family.   At first she was immensely naughty.  She climbed on the kitchen rafters, and threw smoked sausages down at her foster-parents.  She asked where the phone was, and where the taxicabs were.  Her new foster-brother Jancsi thought these were swear-words, and was shocked.

There were descriptions as the story went on, of the decorated Easter eggs and the lovely clothes they wore,  the petticoats,  high boots, and wide white pleated trousers to ride in, the high grass in the meadows,  the poplars,  the geraniums, the shepherd Pista who told stories,  the embroidered featherbeds where they slept.   They had herds of wonderful wild horses, and the little girl learned to ride.

My mother had a book of the Tisza Tales, an old 1930s edition,  with colour paintings in it by Willi Pogany.   I now have both these books.

goose girl & mermaid

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After Stephen died,  Gwynnedd had an operation and replaced her hip.  Suddenly she came out of eclipse and became a powerful person.  She tidied the house, got a new car, drove around all over Cornwall, and never stopped talking.  She said Stephen was a genius.  She kept My War and the paintings in his studio as a museum I think, because in later years I went back there to visit her, and saw them.  These buried memories just surface now, about the Szegedy Szuts.  I’m putting them here because it seems to be somewhere in our life between Cornwall and Broomlands.  I think I was just learning to swim.  Gwynnedd was eclipsed by Stephen, and then she began to shine.

Peter – my father – says he went to see Gwynnedd and to renew their acquaintance, just before she died,  around 1980.   She was now bedridden, but dignified, collected and lively.  She smoked steadily in bed, but didn’t set the house on fire.  In her youth she had been a very pretty music-hall artiste, she sang and kicked her legs about,  which our family considered rather shocking.  When Stephen married her, she did all the driving, he perched on her shoulder;  but after she became lame, he did all the washing up.

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A painting by Willy Pogany

Memories are bright leaves floating.  They enrich the NOW, for they are roots.  You have memories somewhere like these, or better still.

The sensation unsought of boundary loss, is near to myself.  It would come in my sleep, and sometimes arise and throb as daylight.  I’m a bed of something thick, enormous, red, black, yet colourless and unsounded.  It contains in my fingers, each a foot thick, its own shrill musical note of sound.  It is soft, yet massive like a valley or a round box.  It cannot be recalled, but from time to time over the years,  its echo comes unsought and stops, finds  and fills me.

It is found in the Broomlands landscape, a trace of it.  It vibrates with the gargoyle visions of Daddy’s war, that still sometimes came,  which exploded into a hundred grotesque red grimaces spluttering and flickering,  splitting the second – opening into vistas of golden palaces.   Yet instantaneously, it was gentle, old  and patient.   It only touches the border of awareness.  Its discovery makes me go still, so it is grace.  It comes unsignalled and then fades.

GALLERY – drawings from my “Art Not-Doing” series in 1987.
I had intended here, the red flower one which is about the breath and sensation;
but these were with it in my photo-file, and form a good sequence.

a soft furry serpent I dreamt about, between the keys – or teeth? – of life

Being the keel and timbers/ribs of the breathing vessel

walking down the street like a trumpet from heaven to ground

the “hermes” sensation – expand within the flower

Attachments …

… and loss: they’ve gone.

It is me.  I am not.  I am taken over.  It is huge, fat, warm and sharp.  It grinds, like my teeth.  The echo now comforts me, like something always known to me;  a smile within myself.  It has big hills and is the core of the valley.  It stops the clock.  Brave golden clock.  Blow, blow, dandelion seeds away.  A-tishoo.

brave golden clocks 1987

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My father’s parents lived at Fairmile in Chipstead.  It was at the edge of London, and not far away.  Mummy called their house  “The World’s Great Snare”.  When we went to stay with Granny and Granpa, we were told to mind we didn’t fall through the spaces of the upstairs landing to the floor of the panelled hall,  far below,  or we’d get killed.

Under the slippery wooden stairs they had a broom cupboard.  Inside the broom cupboard,  in my dreams at night,  more stairs descended,  dark and musty,  to a cellar underneath, hidden within the intensity of Granny and Granpa’s house,  and how careful you must be.  I came out into a long back garden with drystone walls around it.   It was full of blood.   It was full of dead beasts and bodies and white meat and blood and poor sore bottoms.  When Mummy had a baby she had a poor sore bottom.

I stood in the garden.  I had to find my way through.  She stood in the next garden by a wall, I could see her,  she called me.  Beyond her were the open hills and sky.  She wanted me to walk, to come for long walks with her.  I tried, but I could only move so,  so,  so slowly.

Other sensations were the discomfort of “jane”.    This would flood me with some force, and I cannot find it now,  I have to dowse … tentatively …  towards a once familiar misery,  whose imprint seems to have faded from my cells.  Alienation would enter,  a distaste for everything “important” that defines me,  and in which I am trapped.   I am named and placed, and sick.   It is acutely disagreeable, like being scolded and spanked.  It is acutely at odds,  as if I am a separate and phony entity encircled by the real world.  Perhaps it is like being deaf.  I vaguely remember –  yes –  a sense of dislocation.  Things are slanted, striated against me.  And I am too much.

I was fascinated by cruelty – to animals and to Queens.  I wrote stories of suffering Queens, who came back, lifetime after lifetime to the sad Karma of their own increasing beauty:   “She strived against progress.”  Many times I drew John Knox stabbing Mary Queen of Scots with swords, which disturbed my teacher at school – those sketches disappeared!

The inner world of a child is violent, erotic and aware.  The parents’ war memories are processed psychically; long fingers of history and the world’s shadow reach down the long leafy lane to Broomlands.  There is no “sheltered upbringing” in the collective subconscious.

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I walked behind Daddy in the field when we went to look at the sheep.   I put my feet in his prints, in grass, mud or snow.  This annoyed him and he asked me to walk up front beside him.

I became a boy for three or four years.  I wanted to be a jack-tar in a clipper sailing ship when I grew up, and I wished I could have the beautiful muscles of men.  I obtained a pile of illustrated magazines called Shipping Wonders of the World about the great schooners that used to ply the oceans of the world. For a while, they were wonderful in my inner life.

I reared a large lamb called Laddie whose mother rejected him.   We played together when he was full-size; I was his human friend,  he came to no one else.   Then he went to the slaughterhouse with the other yearlings.  This did not distress me, because it was the way of things.  I wished I might be the one to eat him.  I wanted Laddie to pass right through my body, into the lavatory and back into the earth.  My fair-haired friend up the road, Felicity, who did not live on a farm, was disgusted at this idea.

I found it difficult to make friends.   My ideas about life were often indigestible to them, and I was a misfit at school.   But once made, I kept them.   I had a friend called Marion Black who lived very grandly at Compton Chase on top of the North Downs, and kept ponies of her own.  She told me one day at school that she didn’t want to take sides any more with the ones who bullied, teased and mimicked me.  She said “I want to help you”  – like a girl in a school story:  I suspect her mother told her to.  We became close, and went riding together.

Young dancers in treasure wood

We knew the Winnicotts – they were old friends of Jim and Helen Ede, my mother’s parents  – and went to stay with Alice in her seaside cottage in Newquay, West Wales.  She had generously – we were told – left Donald so that he could go to live with Clare in London.  Mummy told us, “Alice is very, very vague.”  She lived on a cliff right over the driving waves, put out her tongue when she talked, and wore droopy cardigans.  She wasn’t a real grownup.  The sea-mist came right into her terraced cottage and put out the fire.  Quince liked the childish songs she sang, but I didn’t very much.

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Mummy gave Quince and me our first rock-climbing lessons in rocky amphitheatres which began where the little road along the cliff ended.  I think Simon must have been too little to come on this holiday.    I  sketched pebbles and  rocks on the beach with Mummy’s fountain pen.   We helped Alice with the groceries.  Alice’s fierce sister Pauline Taylor wore a jacket and tie and jodhpurs, lived inland, and kept a Palomino pony stud farm.  I was smitten with these beautiful dark golden ponies, the colour of burnt toffee with their white manes and tails.  I already loved them desperately, and longed to ride.

I’m having an argument with Mummy just now about this.  She says I had already begun to have riding lessons at Miss Aylemore’s in Limpsfield,  but it seems to me that at eight years old, the desire burned within;  the photo in her album, of that small girl in jeans holding by the end of a drooping rope, a dozing Palomino stallion, trembles with an awkward pride as yet unfulfilled;  the pony’s back is bare.

Newquay in Wales is a grey and weatherbeaten place of great charm.  I returned there often in my dreams, thirty years later.  The pebble beaches were now mighty chambers of dark rock dramas, some of them crumbling into the battering sea.  In slumbering harbour pools, I must have been a fish,  because in a dream in 1988,  at a time of breaking inward,  I was hooked with a line through my nose,  and pulled out from the water onto land.  It was very painful.  This always struck me as remarkable.  Fish are our dreams, they live in the deep.  The Companions of the Light in the upper worlds play the line;  they hook us sharply, to awaken into a higher element.  At first, like being born,  we cannot breathe,  for the air,  the hook, is too sharp,  it burns.  And why there?   Why at Newquay in Wales?

There was no more humiliating sight – also in Newquay – than that of two old people sitting in the front of a long old car with its nose pointing uphill on a steep street in Wales – I was eight – and looking patiently out of it while they press its starter again and again.  Sometimes it whines and they have to wait for a while.  This makes me sick.  It makes the blood pour out of my backside.  I want to smash it and them inside it to pieces.  It is the most horrifying and meaningless thing that I know.  It is monstrous and shouldn’t be allowed.  It is obscene.

Mummy and Daddy did all they could to help me with my fear of cars not starting.  I knew the starter was a little horn, which connected electrically to the spark-plugs.  When you pulled or pressed it, it made this sound.  That’s all.  But my rationale couldn’t reach the sick reality.  I think there was always a joy of relief and self-assurance when it started without any trouble.   Is this why I don’t drive a car, to this day? – I took my test three times but didn’t pass.   Inside the car – the in-carnation – there is for me, a loss of independence.

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These mermaids – one on each side of the paper – were drawn shortly after we came to Broomlands.   They appear to have been a gift to Mrs Willis, my primary school teacher in Cornwall – but I guess my mother didn’t put them in the post …

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The farm buildings and abandoned implements at Broomlands were a child’s paradise for games, climbing and exploration.  By now I was fired up by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five to hunt for secret passages.  We got inside the corn-drier through the grid, and crawled up the narrow, curved canal, down which the hot air blew when they switched it on.  By a miracle, this never happened when we were in it.  I often shudder now, to think of it.

We had to put on special old sandpit clothes to go in the great quarries near our house,, and take them off outside,  because the heavy yellow element stained,  it  permeated our fingernails and hair and everything we touched.  Sometimes we set off landslides down the quarry cliffs and ran all the way to the bottom with the plunging fall of sand.  We made a long, long slide where the sand had hardened.  Again and again we flew down it on our sore and tattered behinds.  Steep, rock-hard and perilous it was, till the weather changed and softened it again to wet dust and mud.  We came indoors, dark yellow from building labyrinths of interlocking tunnel systems, letting our hands meet under and over.

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My brother Simon was mad about lorries, bulldozers and long-longs.  He intoned their  holy names – Foden,  Atkinson,  Seddon, Dodge,  with the starry-eyed reverence I had for queens;  he knew all their cabs and drivers.  Some of the lorries were very old, rattly and raucous, with snub noses and bitter eyes.   They trundled up and down through the quarries all day long for Simon’s delight,  except on Sundays when they slept.  Bulldozers squatted in the pit like prehistoric monsters.  They slowly and throatily moved mountains and tracked caterpillar-trails across waste land.  When it rained, the gashes filled with long puddles and reflected the sky.  Simon loved anything on wheels that went brrrrrrmmmmm.

Simon had toy lorries and trucks, which worked hard all day.  In bed at night he sometimes sat with his eyes wide and shining, because he saw an angel.  Once, in a great strange bed in a different house, he was found crawling around at the bottom of it and crying: “I can’t find my place for sleeping.”  When life was difficult, or when he needed to be alone, he would go to his bed to booddup.  He rocked on all fours rhythmically, throwing his head forward against the cot bars.  The sound of his boodduping filled the house with a sense of peace.  When he wrote letters to Jim and Mam he told them about the lorries and then said  “I am very tired.  I’m going to boodup now.  Love from Simon.”  He found writing difficult and may have been dyslexic.  He had a lanky striped friend with floppy limbs, greyish head and ears, and bright button eyes,  called Blue Bunny.

Quince had her large doll called Judy and a friend called Big Teddy with golden fur.  But she could pick up a stick or a bunch of grass or piece of wire anywhere and turn it into a doll or creature, to people her long Tragic Stories, as I called them.  She  chewed grass stems to make hair for a girl,  and bent a piece of wire into legs for a boy.  She walked around all day, eyes and puddocks (chubby hands) busy with her wide world.  It was only discovered years later,  that she was short-sighted.  She hardly ever stopped talking, and when Mummy couldn’t stand it any more,  she made Quince sit on a stool in the kitchen and try very hard to say nothing at all for three whole minutes – sometimes she got through half a minute.

Quince liked eating sloes, unripe gooseberries and other strange sour things.  When she was very little, she made me shout with laughter by putting them in her bottom and pretending to be an Old Woman.  Mummy came up in a fury to scold us for not being asleep in our beds.  She took one look at Quince and burst out laughing herself.

When I wasn’t quarreling with Quince – we fought a lot – I listened to the Tragic Stories,  enthralled.  They were very dramatic indeed, and mostly about school; about friendships, abandoned children and betrayals.  Perhaps they gave me a reprieve from my Queens.

We had hens in the back yard at Broomlands, and kept cats.  We had a herd of dairy cows who were milked by machine.  When it was very hot, Mummy hosed us in the yard, along with the cow-pats. The cowman was called Mr Heritage, and his wife in the cottage down the lane, gave us jelly babies.  In the bluebell woods behind the house lived many frightened pheasants and a game keeper.

I went for long walks at dawn, through the woods – where I began to imagine Granpa Adams watching me after he died.

My dawn and sunset walks were mystic journeys.  Sometimes I crossed the boundary of the four roads.  I ventured up onto the rough slopes of the ever-tempting North Downs, to walk those paths that blazed at me from afar.  Or I would explore the whole string of the sand-quarries, easting my way along abandoned clover fields between them.

There was no point in farming these little isthmuses of land.  Here the quarries themselves were silent craters, scantily furring over with grass and willowherb.  Their creeks gleamed through the bushes.  This land is ever a warm land.  It is golden with summer and the slow buzz of insects.  It is intense with the wonder of the explorer who must go just a little bit further, and the lateness of the hour is approaching violet.  Unknown sandy paths entice my quest along secret cliffs to a ridge, a fence beyond which I must not go,  or I’ll be late home and Mummy will worry about strangers and bad men from London.

There are black cranes and dredgers and ugly buildings of corrugated iron, majestically dark against the flaming sky.  Why was the sky on fire?  Why did the sun seem to set in the east?  A horse canters along those gloaming fields.  There might be plains of soft exposed dry mud as far as the eye can see, like the tale of Rapunzel and the wandering prince.  I am taken to dreamland.  Worlds from different patches of time seem to merge and cohabit, and one leads on to another. I came home and told Mummy “I walked six miles.”  But it was probably no further than two.

“Woodland, 1986”. This is actually a drawing of someone I loved. But it is a view from the woods near Grubstreet, Limpsfield, down onto Broomlands and the quarries

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In springtime the blue sky fell to the ground.   The misty radiance of the bluebells pooled around the slender trunks of white  birches.    I got into trouble with Granny – Mother Adams – during her visit I rushed off on a walk or to see my friend Felicity.  Granny was in the car, just leaving, and she said “I am most offended.”  I had not realised she could be angry, but now I saw she was bound to be.  I had done wrong, and I didn’t know what to say. ‘Sorry’ was not enough.

Living now near Fairmile and the Surrey Tribe, we saw quite a lot of them.   Daddy said they all spent too much time indoors watching television, eating white bread, and breeding like rabbits.   His sister Betty had a brood of six, in an enormous property called “The Cottage” at Biggin Hill.   Her husband Jack was disgracefully rich –  he had a thousand pounds and drove a large Bentley.   Daddy proposed we should drive past “The Cottage” in our car and call out at their gate, “You’re a Jolly Unhealthy Lot.”  My parents were obsessed with garden vegetables and healthy ways of living, but suffered quite a lot themselves, from colds,  septic cuts,  bad backs and smouldering marital turbulence.

Daddy took some of my projects with my friends at school seriously.  With Deborah Nelson, Marion Black and Sarah Fraenkel,  a “Nature Club” was formed.  “You’d rather be a girl,” they jeered at me when they first came to tea and I had put on my best dress;  I turned into a boy overnight.  We never wore dresses, and we enjoyed tough boyish games.  We conceived our ultimate dare – to walk from end to end of the long railway tunnel through the Downs just north of Oxted Station.  We would lie down between the railway lines if a train came and we couldn’t find a manhole – wearing farm sacks to protect us if someone in the train went to the lavatory overhead.  Daddy supported our plans,  and made helpful suggestions –  to my private dismay and terror.  I was scared of the noise the trains would make.  Daddy was a great tease, and our great initiation at the last minute only, did not materialise.

Sarah Fraenkel and I played an easier game by ourselves, in the school playing-field:   “Let’s climb up each other and disappear!”  We tried as hard as we could, but fell into heaps of helpless laughter.  At the bottom of the playing-field was a mulberry tree where silkworms were studied.    The headmistress was called Miss Pace.   She was a small wrinkled person in brown;  she sang hymns in a quavery treble,  wore a wig, and was  strict but warmhearted.

I earned pocket money to buy pony books,  by scything thistles,  and by walking over the fields and across Limpsfield Common to school,  instead of taking the bus.   I saved a penny-ha’penny each way.

The book I wanted was called We Rode to the Sea.  It was a thriller about children, ponies and thieves in Scotland, the most beautiful country in the world,  and where the most tragic of queens had lived and suffered.  We had books at home about the hills, the lochs,  the skies, the glens and the gneiss.

A geological wall map of Great Britain hung in our house, with every sediment a different colour.  We saw the underlying shapes of everywhere we had lived.  Floating splotches and dots of the interweaving rock revealed our well travelled land.   The Yorkshire Moors were an amoeba of ancient pale yellow upon slanting primary-coloured striations.  As a Capricorn child, I am at home upon these shapes.  As a painter in later years,  I would potter absorbedly along a chance brush-stroke;  next to another colour it  brightened,  and I’d get lost in tiny places of wonder,  in the dreamy litany of the pre-cambrian and mesozoic strata that sleep under the fur of heather, field and forest,  and their sudden openings, faults, or “extrusions”.

Glen Trool, from Buchan Burn

High lochan on Eigg – April 2000

I was proud of my great romance.  The language of the Scots became my passion, the lilting geology of the Highlands.  I had a book of tartans.

At school we had to present a lecture:  I chose Scotland as my subject,  and described each picture of beautiful wild moorland in the book.  The teacher told me I used the word “very beautiful”  too many times.

Most of the children at school had rich parents – the last word in lipstick, pencil skirts and high heels – who collected them in large shiny cars with fine sleek faces.   Mummy and Daddy now drove a secondhand pre-war Rover with a long black bonnet and a tiny starter button.   It didn’t always start well, and I didn’t trust it.

Quince became in those days lame.  She had “cramp” in her right hip. She talked about her leg, how it hurt.  I sometimes felt it too.  Once after riding with Marion in her paddock on the north downs, I walked back to Broomlands, and the empathic cramp in my hip was so painful I barely made it back home;  Mummy came out in the Rover to look for me.

And ice I remember.  Ice in white sighing slabs and pools among the ruts by the sandpit.   What a lot of friendly local boys there suddenly were.  We slid, fell and skated the light fantastic winter sky.  When the year warmed, our games changed,  we became hunters and quarry,  the hare would set off with a bag full of torn-up paper and lay false trails, spoor and signals all across that land,  across the sandquarries and over the fields.   It was our last spring at Broomlands.

oaks in treasure wood

Daddy was anti-blood sports.   He quarreled with his boss, Major Leverson Gore of Titsy Estate, who wanted to foxhunt across the land and past our house.  In fact it was the hunters’ tradition to stop for lunch at our house itself ;  we arranged to be away on holiday when this was due.  Major Leverson Gore was at first a genial squire, and invited farmer Peter Adams and his young family to Titsy, outraging his mother with whom he lived.

Peter had a curious effect on his employers.  They were drawn to him, and he clearly kept a school tie somewhere, but they couldn’t decide which side of the salt to place us, at table.   Relations with Major Leverson Gore deteriorated sharply over the blood sports issue, and we moved to Somerset.  At the eleventh hour of our notice to quit, Peter got a successful job interview, and found our new home – a rambling manor near the Quantock hills, owned by Showerings, the Babycham people.   Here we settled down.

You can see Simon in the background, playing in the tidal inlet

When I revisited Broomlands, these horses were there. I was touched to find my fervent wish in the 1950s, materialised.

In Somerset, a couple of years later

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In the Treasure wood
are silver beech and golden oak.
Violin and cello, half quartet
sawing Rasumovsky* back and forth,
they carried on their backs the wood for the kitchen oven
to warm unmothered lambs inside.

Decoding “In Parenthesis” by David Jones
they reared brats, shut up the hens,
fed men and braying beasts,
dug garden, quarrelled, hurt their backs and
bashed their hands, picked
primroses, brewed marmalade and
drove to the winter sea for Christmas.

In their wood
with Eliot and Dylan Thomas,
Krishnamurti’s “pathless land”
rained
abundantly.

*Beethoven’s Rasumovsky No 1 quartet – their practice ground after our bedtime

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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.

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All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Sacred India Tarot Archive – Creation of Pradyumna, King of Lotuses

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Sacred India Tarot – Vishnu, detail

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Concluding the Suit of Lotuses in the Sacred India Tarot Archive, by Jane Adams and Rohit Arya.   The Suit of Arrows (Swords) will follow in this series.

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Rohit’s Notes – Pradyumna, Son of Krishna and Rukmini

“Pradyumna was Kama reborn, after Siva withdrew his curse.  He was born to the greatest devotee of Siva, who was Krishna, as a gift after his favourite wife Rukmini, considered to be Lakshmi, had been childless for many years.  This ties in the water element very well, as Lakshmi is the wife of Vishnu, i.e. Krishna who is also Narayana ‘he who sleeps on the waters’ – and one of her names is Padma ‘the Lotus’.  Their son therefore is ideally placed to be the King.

Sacred India Tarot – Kama consumed – detail

“Pradyumna is Kama – (the deity of desire and lust) – healed, the aggression and arrogance being tempered in the next generation.  The sins of the father are literally redeemed by the son.  He should be depicted as a Krishna clone, but dressed in lotus garlands instead of the peacock feather crown.  The same blue skin and captivating smile.  A river of sorts should flow near him, as he was kidnapped at birth and cast into a river from which he was rescued by the faithful Rati.  The Water element always predominated his story.”

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Jane’s Notes

The same thought runs through the Suit of Lotuses as a whole:  the transmutation of sexual desire into a realisation, that the root feeling which creates the world, the galaxies, the stars, the Laws, human beings and all creatures, is sacred.  Every manifestation is Siva Shakti.  It is not put on an altar to worship, because we are the potential walking altars:  reverence for Life.

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Rohit’s Notes continued – from his Book with the Deck

“Pradyumna is the son of Krishna and the father of Aniruddha.  He is also Kama reborn, with all the swagger and insolence rubbed out of him.  Being incinerated by Siva seems to have that kind of effect.  He is an almost perfect, positive role model – there is hardly much that is negative about him.  That is admirable, but it makes for boring appraisals of character.  

“The King of Lotuses has to go very much to the dark, before the shadow side takes hold.  The name ‘Pradyumna’ means ‘conquers all foes’, so it gives some indication of his stature and prowess.  He suffered the fate of all great men with even greater parents – an admiring obscurity.  It does not seem to have disturbed him at all.  Kama would have been shooting arrows in all quarters in frustration at being denied the limelight. 

“Kidnapped at birth by the fearful Sambara and thrown into the ocean to die, he was rescued and brought up in the circumstances already narrated in the Queen of Lotuses.  This rough beginning was residual negative karma from his action against Siva, but once that worked out, his life was smooth sailing. 

Sacred India Tarot Krishna restores dharma – detail

“This characteristic of turbulent origins settling down into the placid longterm, is typical of the nature of the King of Lotuses.  When Krishna was off on his frequent adventures, it was Pradyumna who by sheer reputation alone, protected the kingdom.  He was also a skilful administrator, and unlike Kama, there are no salacious stories about him.  When the power of desire is harnessed to worthy and nourishing ends, somebody like Pradyumna exemplifies that noble state. 

“… Friendly and helpful, but slightly remote.  Spiritual authority, teacher, guru, mentor, guide.  Likes to work with children.  The wisdom of emotional maturity – a true psychological adult is a wonderful thing to see… They read people well. Ability to take risks because of that talent,  Of all Tarot personalities, the most in touch with the feminine side.  

“(Shadow side) – Ends up creating dissonance instead of harmony when irritated or provoked … Without being outright dishonest, is still a misleading sort of personality … Seeks power by manipulation, never overtly.  Refuses to ask for help or even admit it is required.  Insight of the card: Is your life really as good and on track as you think it is?  Are you becoming complacent, even smug?”

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Jane’s Notes continued

I come to this card with a clean slate.  No current agendas or past material arise, to stick to it;  except whatever flows over from my Krishnamurti posts.   The sage, eternally young, has the high mountains at his back:  the roots and seeds of trees are his body:  a little river flows past his feet – the soul’s irrigation channel.   The pebbles along the bank are earth-jewels.  He holds two small blue lotuses – Krishna! –  in the Indian way, at his naval and heart chakras.  Otherwise he is the Lotus personified, rather like the Ace.

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Sacred India Tarot Siva Ace of Lotuses – detail

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Perhaps we all can try this:  sit here on the spot, as the lotus flower whose root is held in the earth, and watch the river flowing by.   Every meditational method advises to watch the river … watch the content of the mind, and let it pass.   Watch the breath, and discover the CALM.  Perhaps hold the breath for a while, and then let it go (this is kumbaka):  or inhale and exhale through each nostril alternately, closing the other with a finger against it.  Every little bit helps, to slow things down and gain perspective and … the peace.

Ramana recommended to watch the normal breath without fuss, like a rider on the horse.  He also taught “diving into the heart” – inhale, hold for a few seconds, dive into the ocean for the pearl ;  then let go, exhale.  It is non-verbal, and helps to clear out shadows in the subconscious;  it drives them up into the open.   Or dive inward after the emptied outbreath.   The shining sands are revealed for a moment before the water swells and the next wave comes.   Thought and breath share the same root.

Hridayam

He whose thoughts, embodying being,
sally forth, points to the heart.
To describe, may merely image mental part,
so realise your mind’s source is ‘I’. Then seeing
that, from which thought springs – Thou Art!

“If my heart is single, stem and shoot, 
whence my Yoga, in the root?”
“The heart of all, the whole receives. Start
near the pump:  hridayam as hrit,
in-draws, exhales the Universe, by Ayam lit.

“Your Self is One, you understood!
Let your heart’s ease – to right of centre is best –
sushumna’s stream to sahasrara flood,
and bow your flower in heart to rest.”

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(A play of sanskrit words:  hridayam means Heart.  Ayam is “this I”, and Hrit is “who?” – the base of Self enquiry.  Sushumna is the nadi or nerve current which passes through the spinal column from the root chakra to the Sahasrara (crown) chakra – ‘thousand petalled lotus”.  To make a picture of these things, is good.)

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Sacred India Tarot – Pradayumna King of Lotuses

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The Grail

Awareness flows from heart to body whole,
as impressions of the world arise.
Beholding these apart from sky, the soul
enmeshed in samsara’s snare, becomes unwise.
In Cup of Cups, by petals of pure light,
a circling moth’s consumed and swiftly dies.
In Light, by power of mind and sight
are limned and lost, the differing eyes.

Samadhi state, one pointed, firm, beholds in all,
sahaja – in nirvikalpa is their absence.
The wide world on body sense does fall
like rainbow prism;  and in heart is Presence.

The universe entire and myriad formed, is mind
whose origin is heart, here now to find.

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Samsara is the repetition of births and deaths – the process of worldly life.  Samadhi is peace and joy all-knowing, in meditation.   Sahaja samadhi is unconditional, and participates in the world without altering the bliss.  Nirvikalpa samadhi is like a trance – the worldly life is absent during it, and the samadhi is limited.  These two poems are from Sonnets on the Ramana Gita, composed by Alan Jacobs and Jane Adams for their better understanding of these teachings.   The Ramana Gita was a series of sanskrit verses – the young Ramana’s early discussions, collected and written down by Ganapati Muni, the sage with “poetry in his throat”.

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A princess being crowned 1956 – after botticelli

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It is not much use following sages and gurus unless I am prepared and inspired enough to apply their teaching to the First Person I inescapably am.   “If you see the Buddha on the road – kill him!”  Why?  Because he might be a glamorous projection or ideal, distracting attention from the First Matter – the Buddha nature I am given, to work on honestly.   This said, there is tremendous inspiration and grace in the company of a Realised one, not to mention Love – the core of human evolution and gravity.   The Elder Ones all agree on the paradox – to hold an I-thought (aham-vritti) and follow upstream where it dissolves … goes together with letting go our local ‘me’, when we serve and are fully present for others or for the One.   The first is raja-yoga;  the second blends karma-yoga and bhakti-yoga.   It goes on being very difficult!

At this point, I see how the Indian Self teaching draws together with the First Matter in alchemy, and with J.Krishnamurti’s gift for hearing a problem without comment, until it becomes conscious, dissolving and resolving itself.   Attentiveness is what it requires;  and patience.   “Keep practicing.”

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Sacred India Tarot 3 Empress

Sacred India Tarot – Visnu the Magician card

Lakshmi and Vishnu, from whom came Rukmini and Krishna, the mother and father of Pradyumna.

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For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts, Sacred India Tarot in the Categories, or Archive of All Posts in the title bar. Rohit Arya Rohit Arya is an Author, Yogi and Polymath. He has written the first book on Vaastu to be published in the West, {translated into five languages} the first book on tarot to be published in India, co-authored a book on fire sacrifice, and is the creator of The Sacred India Tarot {82 card deck and book}. He has also written A Gathering of Gods. He is  a corporate trainer, a mythologist and vibrant speaker as well as an arts critic and cultural commentator. Rohit is also a Lineage Master in the Eight Spiritual Breaths system of Yoga.  Earlier posts about the deck, including the first 15 Major Arcana archives are in http://aryayogi.wordpress.com   The deck is copyrighted (c) 2011 to the publishers, Yogi Impressions Books pvt, and available on Amazon and internationally.

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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 also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space. aquariel link All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

The Lighthouse Keeper – Part Two

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17 July                         PART TWO

I discover some thoughts in blogland which convert the esoteric learning curve and fascination, to Humanness, compassion, right living, mindful presence … which is what they truly are. They are atomic particles from a goldmine – the miners in the mountains, as the alchemists say.   Language slips away, into the hard graft, the Way of Life and love.

And I find another post, on moderation – enrich your life with simplicity, enjoying technology efficiently, but without excess.  The wealth is here and now.

I try to stay near the Hermit, for he is easy to visit across the starry water, and to find, and to cool my mind.  Enoch and the Well – see the post before “the Lighthouse Keeper part One” – was a profound contact.

The Hermit’s cottage is earth lined;  walls are minimally dressed, a plaster wash maybe, stone-flagged floor, and bits of rug.  When I go inside from the sunlight, I can just see an open fireplace for the kettle, and the table which sages and teachers have – the noble grain is scrubbed white.   There’s a bench and possibly a chair or two.   Enter this room at any moment, without even crossing the water:  a brief impression of the lake in my mind.   I am here, within the summer drone of outdoors.

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The Hermit is my Tarot Arcanum 9, and sometimes he looks like this.   He doesn’t  reveal too much.  Impression of a person of great delicacy, able hands.   His presence is a sweet altitude in my breath.

When I drew him in my Arcana in 1991, I was giving up smoking.  His is the Tarot of the Will: the deep impenetrable power which picks up life and helps to overcome old addictions, however painful it is to do so.

There is an absence of the sharp smoker in my breath;  an absence of other attachments also, as they wore away.   They become light cloths or rags – the sun burnt holes in them –  they do not matter.  Yet I feel a little bereaved of my romantic intensity. Sometimes there is a “flip-flop” – as Ramesh Balsekar would say – to a momentary surface sceptic, who lost that fuel, and feels tired.

The Hermit is the well:  the well of depth, delicacy, wonder and becoming.   His blue cap is YOD – I need the concentration.   I get scattered easily.

I cannot see many disciples rowing across the lake with groceries for him, but I suppose he has them.   Each is like myself, and feels uniquely connected.   He is yet Self- sufficient – our sense of “all-oneness” alone.   Between the physical and subtle worlds, he doesn’t need much to eat.  Like Master R, he is fueled by oats, honey and fresh water.   I am sure he keeps hens too.   He keeps bees and makes strong cider from his fruit trees.   He is actually quite busy.  Profoundly Virgoan, he manages to grow and grind enough oats and wheat for his bread.  There is some for visitors.  He is busy! – he is a smallholder.   Yet he has the gift of the Magidim, to increase his present supply – the well never empties.   He handles in this Way, the physical environment, by touch.   I can learn everything from this, bringing it back to accompanying my loved ones.

He is maintained physically through his well fed students.   We give him manifestation.

(There is a high Law in Creation (Beriah), which in the lower astral worlds (Yetzirah), gets perverted to vampirism.   Vampirism is not just the Dracula tales of old. It rampages through relationships, the media and the commercial world in the collective subconscious, and generates imbalances.  Its fuel is ignorance and greed).

But the Law between student/disciple and the Inner-plane being, is the Law of love – a two-way current of regeneration.   As Ramesh Balsekar used to say, there is no Guru until the devotee discovers and makes him so.   Guru manifests in dialogue.  Guru takes shape and eternal fluid form, according to the desire for interior peace.   Guru is not a person.  Guru is a sanskrit word, meaning “dispeller of darkness.”

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The interior contact established, is Antakharana or pipeline for the Maestri.   It is the conduit whereby an electron orbit of life, jumps to a higher one.  Through Daat – union on the Tree of Life – the quantum leaps.  Profound distress is often the prompt.   Out of the depth we cry to thee, and we leap.

When we find Guru, the dispeller of the dark, we pray together.  That means, there is an interior birdsong, the light of the Holy One … through the sap of each tree in the countless forest.   My Hermit’s eyes are amused; sometimes blue and sometimes brown.

“Find what you are gifted in, which no one else does, or is;  and develop that.”
Peace Mercutio!   and gratitude.

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Swan of Brahma

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Now I love the Hermit, who is Hermetic mercury.   He combines in his fragrant person, the Cube, the staff of Asclepius (one snake), the caduceus (two snakes) and all those quivers of the quick silver.   The highest region of alchemical mercury is the golden cube Tattva in the Sahasrara lotus “above my head”.   The nectar is collected in the third eye, which bows like a swan through Sushumna, to the heart.   My heart is a Sun with wings.   The staff materializes down through the lower chakras, and meets like a root, snake-entwined – the lovely Kundalini.   It is silent.

Sacred India Tarot Queen of Staves – Radha Ma Svaha

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Kundalini awakening opens inexhaustible secrets of the Universe.  They burst up through my column in a fountain of “write”.   There is no end to the play of the Fountain – the j h v h pulse.    As I grow older, I discover the silence is all the secrets of the Universe, and nearer than my breath.   Access to them – the key – can be turned to love or to self-inflation:  to Life or to live-backwards which is evil.   Of themselves the Mysteries are neutral – they get converted to human feeling and to Old Issues, expediently.   There is no end to Nature’s cosmic abundance – the empress:  wisdom and folly.

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The Empress, Arcanum 3

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The note in my mind just now is A-sharp – violet:  the meditation key.  Though my Hermit contact is so personal, I feel I can and should share him.   Why?  because the inner hermit is Archetypal – a type of home coming..

The lovely Kundalini is a Rod stuck into the ground:  she twirls like a distaff, spinning yarn. We are individually suited to perceive objective Teachers or subjective ones.   I am of the subjective type.  I develop my picture story, as an artist, a maker of windows.  However, their symbols and associations within my field, are an ancient Common land.  It is free for all who have the heart’s entry.  A fluid, shape-shifting firewall is not static.

Being a subjective type, means I co-create:  that my creations when mature, reside on the astral plane for other souls to access.  It gave me a lot of responsibility, to define over the decades, what it entails, and how to edit, and how to sieve the wheat from chaff.   There were and are deep wounds in life.   But the Process is a shining farm-labourer, carrying the sheaves for stacking, in scratched hands.

Wheatsheaf in the shape of letter GIMEL, with labourer in the field

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Sometimes my entire lifetime is joined together, all the impressions as  One.   Fancy admiring farm labourers when I was a child … because they showed me the essence of the Great Work which I would engage in – the Will.   Our soul knows infinitely beyond what we think we know, or are taught.   I have the same knowledge now, extending into the future.   What is it?

What do I know about my Self?  and the farm labourers carrying wheat?   There need be no verbal answer yet, but how does it feel?

Harvest and fertility.  My drawing of the wheat-sheaves stacked together, forms a Gimel.   But Gimel is the potential harvest of the Priestess.   While the Empress is Venus, and pregnant among standing wheat, the Priestess is aligned with Mercury.   The Priestess of the Moon is aligned with Mercury because she keeps the shrine swept, and holds the memory.   The shrine, a cave in the earth, is Virgoan, and thus Mercurial.  Recall and respect the Shrine in my everyday doings.

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What is my knowledge of the future?   Rather than speculate, which the surface-mercury does haphazardly and with fear, build and sweep the inner shrine each day:  creation – a conscious performance.

Where I am coming to now, is the job of the personal shrine.   This is the one which makes the contact.   Organised shrines administer the contact by committee to belief.

The personal shrine is a holy place.  By whatever means, it enters the wide world, beginning HERE.   In Halevi’s zodiac wheel, the 6h house (Virgo-ruled) is “Operation”.  Virgo as the shrine, and as the cosmic secretary, operates:  “le opere” are the works.   Transmission – as on military ships – is a morse-code operator.

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Cosmic clock – wheel of the Zodiac, by Zev ben Shimon Halevi

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My personal shrine suffers a continuing breakdown of shallow pride.   When we accept the job of Lighthouse Keeper, we accept this.   We live in a tower which shines at sea.  By hook or by crook, my dark tower of pride, my cracking seedcase, transforms to a tower of alchemy.

GALLERY – to view, click on any image and wait to upload

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A tower of alchemy – (and make of it precisely what I can) – shines across the sea like the Hermit’s lamp, and the vessels out there can see it.  The Hermit stands on a mountain guiding souls up the path:  the Lighthouse keeper stands in the sea – Hermes walks in the sea, carrying a globe and Staff –  the same.   I shall get submerged again during the day, but I write this, as always, with the commitment to transmission, here and now.

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Two illustrations from Alexander Roob’s Alchemy & Mysticism

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A note on HARPIES – when passing between Scylla and Charybdis:

When I look at my harpies – the spiteful scolds –  they stop what they are saying.  If I look at them, they cannot speak or screech.   Give it time.  They look horrible and hot and carrion, and they might change colour.   Mine are black like crows, and after a while they turn greyish, they start to fade and get weak and meaningless.   Harpies do not thrive on being held in the air and looked at.  They thrive on swooping – just as I am dozing off – and pushing and stabbing and being heard and believed.

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Dawn complaints drift slowly apart, like heavy clouds.  The nectar is a little stream on the hillside, as I touch up my recent Tarot reflection – a visual poem in itself, within Death and the Empress to each side.  I like the way the Priestess and the Hanged Man peep through the firm positions of the Chariot and the Emperor – I love the colour scheme.

Tarot reflection, July 2013

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I am depressed about the human monkey and all its unhealthy persuasion.   Deeply so – I have to wrestle with it all the time.  My small old fashioned sermons to myself are mocked by the disturbing glitter of DNA-meddlesome-technology.

Yet that genetic engineering stuff, the ‘playing god’, is itself ILLUSORY.  I see this now.   It is a trap – a religion even – capturing worshippers, consumers and fearful adherents.   When my Hermit helps me to awaken, I have perspective;   I see a scale of values.   I see the utter seductiveness of the monkey game, which has no understanding of the Great Game of cosmic balances.   The monkey game believes and fears, that we humans are all alone, spearheading the universe and bent on self destruct.   That primitive dark-ages concept prevails.   I feel something other, beyond and behind and inside the box.   Is this too, a daydream, a denial?    Who can say?

The one thing which is sure, is the Good.  The essential human values and friendship.  The right from wrong.   It has an utterly different flavour from anxiety-default-mode – or ambition – which crowds and occupies the race’s big brains.

Parallel worlds touch and mutually thrive.

The hanging man overturns the conventional occupation.  “Go on walking contrary to the way of the world.   Lift a stone and I am there”.   The hanging man upends the nightmare. With my Hermit in the cottage, is the moment smelling of bees;  eternity. Choose eternity!

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**

My adventure invites fellow travelers.  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 (c) janeadamsart 2012-2013.  May not be used for commercial purposes.  May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com

The Lighthouse Keeper – Part One

This is a two-part post – a couple of mornings in my journal.  I’d like to share with you, my inner journey to a Hermit in his cottage … one of the soul-Teacher’s archetypal faces.  He feels like a personal ‘lighthouse keeper’, but actually he resides in our common ground.   I like what he said to me, about bubbles and the river.

Here’s part one:

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Glade, 1986 – I painted this out of doors. Some of the slanting branches, verticals, and contours in the ground suggested a cube standing on its point.  I called it “a tumbling cube”, long before discovering “the Cube of Space” – it was a way of entering, and seeing things.  To the right, is a lens or an eye, looking in.  I left it so, because it felt authentic at the time.  Sometimes there is a dazzling gleam like that, through the branches.

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Preamble

In a guided meditation, You, my teacher … are whoever I wish you to be.  Yours is the changeful face, when I lie on the grass today, watching the clouds as they break, disperse and unite :   Master R?  Ramana? Dr L? Yeshua? Sarah?  Zofia …?

My drawings and and fantasy are wishful thinking, BUT – the contact made with an ‘answering activity’, is unmistakable.   Your faces appear from the universal Self behind and beyond the mask.   I am human and I love to love, to connect, to be inspired and change my mood.  And I feel depressed, but my boat stabilizes as I sit down and start to write – I begin to feel connected again.   The inner, deeper, higher plane comes to the daily habit like a fish.   The love is touched.  It is the height, the breadth, the depth …

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Solomon’s Cube

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There is a room of the soul, this thing and place that we are, with its symbols, diagrams and treasures, where we gather, where one of us lights the candle.  It is ANCIENT and familiar.  The perspective far outreaches the human monkey, and it just goes back and back.

The Magidim are guides and teachers of the Light.  You are my convenient belief system;  yet when I turn to you and ask, a certain perspective shifts;  so you are Real, and not just what I believe.   Through the interaction here in earth, you are more than the names and shapes in the clouds.

I long to apply the wisdom and understanding to daily life:  my field.   So my interest in astrology fades a little.   I have on my plate two challenging situations for “the Compass”.  I found from experience that when I peer at the astrology transits, it doesn’t really help my loved ones, though it gives me some perspective.   So don’t waste energy.   I am just looking.

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compass-musicians by masonicfind.com

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You are my underlying compass, you point to the north.  This symbol gives me peace, through regions of despair or nonsensical hardship.   There is more erosion …   sorrows about the human race.  My hope, energy and optimism diminish, and so I have to go deeper.   I am SAD.  It doesn’t matter.  This too shall pass.

You rest in the fluid, trembling a little, like the Hanging Man, and point to magnetic north – the mysterious occult Earth of Uriel – the Fountain in the letter AYIN, meaning ‘the eye’.   I feel a subtle Fountain of Life inside.  You are the Compass, Compassion – the Crossroads.

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Grand Trine chart, 17 July 2013, 6.33pm London

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Last week, on Wednesday 17th, a Grand Water Trine of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune came into resonance.   Saturn is flanked by the Moon and Dragons head in Scorpio.  Saturn is the elder, and the Moon is the young child.  A Saturn-Moon contact is often found in the charts of sages and seers.

Jupiter in Cancer, his sign of exaltation, is flanked by Mars, Mercury and the Sun.   With Sagittarius rising, there may be through 11th, 7^th and 2nd houses, an easing of our relationships in the group soul, a ‘making room’.   Neptune rides in his own ocean sign, Pisces.  Jupiter in Cancer and Neptune in Pisces both suggest, “Think big.”  The Grand Trine echoes last summer’s Grand Cross tension on the same date … in a profoundly auspicious way:  a subtle Event, or butterfly-wing.   Problems surface on the road, to be cleared, for the Way to blossom;  then we wake one morning, and life is simpler.    On the 17^th last summer, I walked above the Chess river, swollen by the rains, and my pocket phone rang at that moment:  a quarrel ended.

So open arms to the beautiful Grand Trine in Water signs, during this dry summer.  The ‘frequency’ ripples through Earth’s subtle body;  through the tiny limbed antennae that we are.

The Triangle and Tetrahedron are nourishing forms for the soul. Fresh water rises to cleanse my dark pond.   To see these forms, to feel them to the life, I need to be at rest and alert.  I become so, when I write …  it floats.   The Yogas converge, gently.

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The Journey

Name and face are immaterial;  yet they are luminaries.  About ten years ago, I was taught an interior journey to the Inner Teacher:  as follows.

I ride a long way through the forest till I get to a small lake.  In the lake there is an island.   A boat awaits me.  I scull across to the island, and the cool living water seems full of little fireflies like the stars.

I beach the boat, and walk up a path between fruit trees to the Hermit’s home – a cottage with very low eves and a blanket/curtain hung over the front door.   The curtain is raised, and the Hermit appears … and this is yet another face in the clouds, a Celtic Merlinesque one, the merry blue eyes.   He was nudging me last night.   So here I am!   It is as good a way as any, to come to the Inner Teacher.   He is called Menes, the inner hermit soul in Avalon.   But … in the sound of Avalokiteshwara which is like a river … he is my Boddhisattva.   Here I rest, to take in the fragrance.

The eternal being stands at his door, an old bearded man in a grey stuff robe, and welcomes me.   Bodhisattva.  I’d like to be a bodhisattva, in the Buddha of compassion, those who come back to Earth to shepherd particular situations.  It is what I do.   But he stands at his door;  it is hot and sunny outside …  it is cool and velvety within.   To me, he shines and I bathe.  I stand and bathe.

Beauty is Elder wisdom.  Silence, among the bees and birdsong.   He keeps bees.  There are hives.   My heart is full of need, so I lay my head on his feet.   Surrender the problem to the Holy One who IS the way, infinitely beyond my small parcel.   Did I bring anything – an offering?   I brought my heart with birds in it trapped, who want to fly.   So we have an understanding:  to open the cave of my heart for the birds to fly.   It acts before words.

Soul talk is timeless … an instant.    He lifts the curtain further, and we go inside.   He offers me bread and honey, and water from the lake.   The lake has many deep earth colours, and sometimes reflects the sunset or the dawn.   The lake is the Mysteries, because when it is illumined by the sky, I cannot see below, cannot see into its depth.   Everything is encircled by Mystery.  Trust this – and don’t struggle to work things out.

The encircling Mystery as a fact of Life tends to subvert courses of study.   They had their place and time. They trained the mind.

So – I ask him:  How do I – or what is training my mind now?   To keep the focus, the lens?  To polish the smear of life’s perils and disturbance and grief from the window?   Am I losing the plot?   I feel I shed my securities, they drop away.   My studies kept me happy, and still do, but to a lesser extent.  My studies help concentration, but I am no longer acquiring knowledge.

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Ring on table, Rosicrucean Emblem 9

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 He says:

“Do you want to stay in a bubble, or do you want to flow as the river?   No course of learning is permanent.  They are means to an end.   The end breaks open the graduation cell, and you feel the world rush in.   It bruises the nerve ends.   I say to you – keep swimming with Providence.   The landscape by which you find me, is roped and ridged with hills and valleys like water stirred by the wind, or ripples in the sand, or waves in the sea, the grain in the wood.   The hills and valleys have woods, villages and fields.   Convert the solid to fluidity:  be at home in every element – the tumbling cube.    Keep learning to listen, and ascertain your friend’s need, a situation’s need, without fussing and without suffering:  be flexible.  Be still.  We assure you – you are never without our regard.  You are never without the guide.   You have not strayed.   Where can you stray to? 

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“The oak tree – with the red queen pulling Alice along – is too vast to be run past, however fast you run.   The oak tree is your entire life and understanding.

“Consider this – study and working on yourself, has little time to stand and gaze at the oak tree in all its glory.   Be this the lesson of the present year:  stand, raise your head and look –  a deer in the forest.    We packed you full of learning.   Now receive.

 “Discard glamour, and embrace the Good.”

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I feel restored.   I have the silver key – the stillness inside.

At this point, my silver key and the Hermit’s silver key are in touch, and converse;  speech is unnecessary.   There is mutual reflection – the Self.   I am aware of his staff, the serpents, the caduceus, the quicksilver.   In his cool dark room with scrubbed table and fireplace, these are potent as the Ankh, the staff of life.   They nourish my soul.  They are not clung to.  They give.  And they are FOR giving.

FOR give, you said?

“For giving.”

What you give …  Will you please help me with my blundered talk in life?   This needs more practice than anything.   I get anxious and I say too much, trying to complete and make my point.   Also, trying to make amends.  Telling myself each time, to say much less, to keep it simple, the engine still gets flooded.   What to do?

“It is like the oak tree.  The oak tree is life.  Keep going.   Climb up it sometimes.”

It is time to leave now.   I will be back.     A heart-tune:  a shared musical note … what is it?  It is – and I guessed right – A-natural.   Indigo-violet.   The Intelligence of Administration:  the GVPh or physical body in the trunk of the Tree:  the World dancer:   The Akasha Tattva is an indigo oval, with a darker one inside.

The Hermit in his greyish green earth mantle, is surrounded by the Akashic darkness.  His foot treads a shining snow.   He is secretly on the heights, even on a summer island lake, busy with his bee keeping.   He has a honey smell.   It is the nectar in the herb garden.    Keep the little lamp alight.   It has all I need, for the lamp is the Cube, the Seal of Solomon, a solar hexagon,  directions of the Compass.   The World Dancer is the Compass, high, deep, far and wide.

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Touch third eye.  And return to the boat, and row back across the lake to the greenwood and my horse.  And come down the Tree!

My tokens:  triangle, tetrahedron, circumpunct – (the lake around the hermit’s house) –  The deep root of the oak tree, planted so long ago, that it is all my life.   The compass.  The way to the north shows where the other ways are.   x x

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Sun steed

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To be Continued /…

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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. 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/

 

 

 

 

Wheel of Colour and Sound

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Colour Wheel – the notes on the scale, of sound, colour and associated Tarot Keys and Hebrew letters. The 22 Hebrew letters correspond to 12 zodiac signs, 7 planets and 3 primal elements.

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I drew this colour wheel yesterday morning, with the guidebook.  It is in my current studies with the Builders of the Adytum – an essential tool in one of their courses.   What a Mandala …  a window !   I had no idea it would look like that.

NB – E-natural/Mercury (and also Aleph, Air) should be a lighter yellow than D the Sun, which is orange.) I used Prang colour pencils, they are made in the USA, can be ordered from the internet, and the colours are nicely related and in balance.   If you keep going over and over a colour, mixing it a little with lighter or deeper tones, it becomes surprisingly brilliant and satisfying.

On contemplating the colour scale or spectrum, we start with the strongest colour – Red. Here are my reflections on Red, before I started to draw the colour wheel:

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“Meditate on red – liquid scarlet – and pitch the middle-C, its frequency, and hold in tone and visual thought:  the red ray, the pitch.   The subtle warmth waveband of the pelvic Chakra universe.   The reservoir.   All the octaves of C.   Red is a slow wavelength, relatively rough and ready:  beyond it is off the spectrum, infra-red.   Red is the primitive will and sharpening of spears.   Though the wave is slow, red is Mars who acts off the cuff.   Yet this quality sits on Saturn (root Chakra, A-natural), deep indigo, wider cycle, higher frequency, towards the violet subtle end of the spectrum.   Once I have the note C on the pitchpipe, it sustains itself through my thoughts.

“Feed the subconscious with the Red/mid-C co-relation.  Saturate the inner sound with its colour tone and description, so that red becomes more easily visualised in itself.   Develop the red colour – what pervades at present is darkness.   Potentially the darkness could release at will the spectrum, the seven fold brilliance of hue.   Pretend I’m painting the interior darkness red with a big brush, paint it all in, splashy scarlet red.   Hot scarlet.  Dip in the paint.   Let my nose and the surrounding air be red.  So the organ of perception and distinction is the sense of smell !   A small area fills itself in, and prompts a spontaneous scarlet life.   The Will.   Thy Will, to energise mine.   My will is a slack rope.  Colour that slack rope red too.   My attention doesn’t wander.  Even my jumper is coloured in, red.   Steady red glow.   The C note.

“Paul Foster Case says that if we practice it for a few days, a week, the C tone will self-install naturally with the colour Red.  And so will the other tones as we go along.   The house in order – a training.

“Today then, I have red thoughts.   Red crimson are the deep organ notes of the soul:  the bass.  SOL feels red, and the mind quietens.   The texture quietens and is steady.   Every single thought and passing impression is red.  The fish in the water are red.   Blood is red.   The soul is Even-ness.   I seem to meet the Magid or inner teacher whom this colour enthrones:  he is seated in the red element, and holds the tuning fork.   Peace.   It reminds me a little of a certain Gevurah chamber which has scarlet, crimson and ruby throne and pillars;  one of the five pillars has a touch of the Venusian complementary, Green.

“So if I see a bit of green, it helps the red to glow around it.   Still, after this time of reflecting and hanging out and thinking, the C-pitch is steady.   Now the breath with it, passing in and out, lights up the panes and chambers, vermilion, crimson.   I draw in the Red ray, I bathe, I give it back.

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“A thought …  not ‘what do I WANT from a situation?’ –  but ‘What does this situation require – objectively –  to move with the Heart of Life ? …  and do I know anything about it at all ?’   I get it wrong often, but keep practicing – the INTENTION.

“Indeed …  ‘What is the situation’s colour tone?’

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“And a memory – when my daughter was tiny, she took some dark blue paint, and filled in first the entire piece of paper with it:  then her own hands and every part of her skin that she could see, right up to the fingernails;  not a single bit left out.   She saturated her world with the deep blue colour.   This is the way we learn, by concentration.  We are children.”

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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. 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/

Myths of Lord Siva – Tripurantaka

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This poem was a collaboration with Alan Jacobs.  It arose from his series “Myths of Lord Siva”, circa 1992, and it sits well with the Sacred India Tarot Siva/Parvati material.   I have pottered around with it from time to time, ever since Alan first introduced me to the wealth of the Sivaic language and archetypes in Southern India, and to the esoteric landscape behind Ramana Maharshi’s Self-enquiry.

Taraka Asura was of course the arch demon whose demise was destined only at the hand of Siva’s son, Skanda .

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Siva Tripurantaka

Demon Taraka’s three Asuric sons
became Ascetics to earn a Boon.
Moved by their tapas, Brahma
granted what they craved – Eternal Life!

“But,” he warned
“you cannot escape your Death.
If you would be happy, choose again.”

“Give us,” they said “three cities for a mere thousand years.
Then we’ll unite for a single Arrow
to finish us off !”
Replied rash Brahma:  “Yes.”

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Satan Maya conjured from virtual space
three titanic Cities
– brazen Gold, Silver nacre and Black iron –
for Taraka’s little Devils to ‘whelm the World.

They broke apart the Sacred, they violated all known Bounds.
The gods begged Brahma to destroy those awful Towns
whose magic centres fly about at will, and
once in a millenium, for one split second, align !

Said Brahma Creator:
“Who, Me?  Who else
but Siva Destroyer
strings that Bow ?”

As aeons into Chaos plunged,
Siva with his bride Uma, Daughter of the Himalaya
dallied, and held his fiery Seed.

At love’s creaming peak, He
the mighty One, aligned his Cosmic
third eye.

Fashioning from the grieving Gods his chariot and bow,
stringing three demon Citadels on eternal NOW,
he loosed his arrow … PFATTT !
What chance Tripura against the One?

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As with Lightning in reverse,
heaven’s Thread was pulled
across the sky
to snap and crack the Show !

Unwilling yet to burn
Time and Space to ash, the Lord
held back his fire, and let the White Bull,
his sperm among the Stars, roam free.

The fecund planet peoples
overjoyed, resumed
their long lost Natural State –
the Worlds returned to grace.

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The sage who lives on Siva’s hill
says: “mind turns Inward with dispassion. 
Realisation is slow. Who am I?
The One Self penetrates and permeates Triplicity.”

Brahmins pickled in priestly Lore,
say the Cities gold, silver and black, are Bodies
causal, subtle, gross.
In Desire’s shrouds,
they tightly bind and knot mens’ Souls.

Brahmins know for sure that Siva
Lord of the Dance,
consumes their learned Thread
right “Now”
within the “Here … ?”.

AJ JA 1992: 2009

Sacred India Tarot Siva – detail

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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. 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/