Kali in the Spring – a Contemplation

In this free improvisation on a pair of Kali Yantras, Western and Eastern Mandala traditions alike share the sacred geometric form and its Tantric alchemy. My next post will feature my original illustrations of the Yoga Wisdom Goddesses or Mahavidyas – including Kali – for Kavitha Chinnaiyan’s thoughtful book and teaching: “Shakti Rising”. The book was published in 2017,

Here is a sketch of Mother Kali’s ecstatic great lover, the Bengali saint Ramakrishna:

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Early writings from Journal – 3 October 2010

Outside there is a gale. The house is a ship.  Today I contemplate the two Kali Yantras my friend in Australia sent.

Mother Kali’s four gated field is red. Eight rose/lotus petals with indigo stems encircle a big black sphere. Inside the black sphere is a Tetrahedron: five white womb triangles with a white bindu or apex, point towards you all her dark, cosmic power: AMA the dark womb is herself so powerful she is almost Yang.

(February 2019 – I drew for today this freehand copy:)


Marriage of Tetrahedrons

In the East and in Platonic wisdom the Tetrahedron is nature’s most stable form. Whether the apex points downwards (female/Shakti triad) or upwards from baseline (male/Siva triad), the Triad is produced to rest on any of its four sides.  No wonder that in the Western Mystery tradition J H V H is named Tetragrammaton, with the hidden fourth-dimension factor which seeds it.

In the Tetragrammaton cycles of YOD HEH VAV HEH, the second-HEH grows from centre of the triangle YOD HEH VAV, giving birth to new YOD, new cycle. So the second HEH in the cycle is pregnancy! The letter HEH in Tetragrammaton has the female function, but in Tarot Alphabet, HEH’s character is male, assigned to Aries and the Emperor. The Yin is so filled with fertility, she comes forth as the Son, the Yang.

 

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The strange potency conjoins man and woman, of whom the most uncompromisingly transformative is woman.

I begin to get a feel of Kali, her luminously dark velvet field, her awesome sexual shout, her red tongue, her necklace of skulls …  In today’s first Yantra (Yangtra!), the womb triangle/tetrahedron accommodates Siva’s fiery light through her body, without disturbing the total blackness of her sphere.

Mother Kali in India needs strong devotees, for she upsets their lives and floods their villages. Ramakrishna of Bengal embodied her devoted Tantric playfellow . And he was a crazy wisdom, often off his head.

Ramakrishna in samadhi, 1879

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Perhaps Kali arouses a man’s chaotic feminine oracle, but in a woman she becomes peace, a peace with gleaming eyes, white, black, red, softening to indigo rose violet in her valleys.

Kali is the wild weather that flows from the Himalayas.

One of the tributaries of Ganges is Kali Gandaki, which flows from the Tibetan watershed between those regal 8,000 metre consorts Dhaulagiri and Annapurna – the man and the woman, each is a mountain range. Dhaulagiri is priapic and dramatically visible. Annapurna is mostly concealed behind a vast shadowing cirque of Nilgiri or cloud mountains.

 

Ganges is a royal water serpent through the plains.
Supposedly, my natal Neptune in Libra (square Jupiter in Capricorn) epitomises my life-long offerings to Dhaulagiri and Annapurna.

Kali is a Seer.
VALE

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Siva Kali detail – Sacred India Tarot 2011

Kali 13, sacred india tarot publ.Yogi Impressions 2011

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A word on Yantra …
Yantras are geometrical constructs of Tantra – an art of touch and fluid union. One of Tantra’s translated meanings is “the web” or connectivity.  In these sketches I romp through a few Western forms and symbols of Yantra:

 

 

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PART TWO – October 2010

AVE

Six is the lily, with a six starred sun inside. The man blossoms into feminine. The Lovers are soul triads which marry. Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, nor do they spin. Solomon in all his glory is not as these.

Within the Flower of Solomon’s Seal or Shield, Solomon in all his glory is the Temple and the intuition. The Star of David – Solomon’s son? or father? – is ABEN, the Stone: the fluidity of the Philosopher’s stone or elixir: the Seal becoming the son.

Lilies grow with the roses in the Magician’s garden. The rose is grown from the heart of the Cross formed of six squares: the rose is wrapped  within the Cube of Space.

The rose has multiples of five petals – her cultivation and extravagance.

Five is the female rose, pentagonal star of humankind representing the five limbs or senses.  Red is the colour-tone of Mars and of desire. “Five” suggests 1+4, 14 the gematria (number) of DVD (in Hebrew, dovid) the Beloved; and also of Gold – the work of the Sun.

 

The latin Cross (it folds up into a cube) is the field. The Star is higher consciousness. The inner Pentagram is humankind, and the root, flower and seed of human desire.

Kali the goddess is black and fierce. In Kabbalah she might be seen as Binah’s AMA, the dark womb.

The Chamundra Kali Yantra has five pink-red petalled concentric waves: the centre one is a Seal of Solomon (double Tetrahedron) coloured red – inside a white octagon of two squares. Like the great Sri Chakra Yantra, she draws inward and flows outward simultaneously: very quiet and at peace. She opens from inside a black field of Four Gates.

So she also expresses the Akasha Tejas tattva, or (in the western School) the whole Tree of Life inside an egg (field) of AIN SOF, the Endless. With six in the middle, she emanates as five rings, and is enclosed in a field of four.

 

(February 2019 – Like the other Kali Yantra in this post, I draw it for myself.  To embody Her birth-giving energy, I copied the computer-generated  version  I was sent.  The physical contact allows Nature’s irregularities to occur – as blown by wind and wave.)

Yantras are fertile seeds and signs. They need to be seen four-dimensionally – that is, as a tree or fountain.  They rise through the orbital system or cross-sectional rings of time.  They suggest the growth of the tree from root and shoot, encompassing all its seasons, seeds and bird-life.  This Yantra has Priapus in the centre, 8-pointed, white and red, surrounded by four pulses (orgasmic time-rings) of the Rose, and then again by the Cube of Space which is black. Priapus contains the feminine of the male flower, and at the heart is a white bindu. So, the Chamundra Yantra is Mother Kali’s kundalini shakti or kus. How sweetly these things translate.

And … in this light, this Yantra, a drawing to come some day, and how to see it? – how Siva couples with this full-blown dark-rose kus of Kali. Siva is nearly always painted white, though sometimes he has a peacock-blue throat. His is a Yogic phallus. He sits in Yoga (union) and it points up within him, and inside him there is Mother Kali absorbing it all, and creating a wild, rumbustious universe.

Any such focus is good, for holding the mind quiet. The Yantra is held loosely, lightly in my being. Note how between the dark-rose outward petalling, the Akashic space lightens from black through indigo to sky. BINAH – the cosmic sphere of Understanding: stand-under the waterfall.

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The above is some writing I discovered from nearly ten years ago.

Below is the sketch and my original portrait of Kali in 2016 for Kavitha’s book “Shakti Rising“.  See my next post for originals of the other nine yogic Mahavidyas.

Sketch for Kali in “Shakti Rising” by Kavitha Chinnaiyam

Mahavidya Kali: in “Shakti Rising by Kavitha Chinnaiyam

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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. See also Aquariel

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2019. 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/

 

Arcanum Seven – Shabat Shalom Baruch

 

 

 

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paul mandala 17.11.13. detail

This post waited in my Drafts for some considerable time!  I was kept busy with my book of the Tarot Arcana (from which this writing arose), and with finding out, and with living. Now I recall the place of rest: shabat shalom … and baruch, the blessing.

Our dear old friend Issy Benjamin “left the market place on Sunday evening 25 October, and has gone home. Heaven is home and earth is the marketplace. We are in constant passage between the two (African proverb).”  He was nearly ninety.

The Star, the Cross and the Crescent!  (See the vimeo above).  Develop in the inner and outer life the golden seed – each of the middle eastern prototypes holds my deep affiliation, life-effort and love.  As agonizing as the conflict at present is, so shall it one day flower and unite humankind.

star cross crescent

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Script of altar, bird, torch in the Trinosofia, meaning 'the body of the wise man shall be concealed'

Script of altar, bird, torch in the Trinosofia, meaning ‘the body of the wise man shall be concealed’

Great love embraces the tall white hall of Issy’s shul, where I went for sabat shalom. Hidden behind an angle there was a skylight, and this reminded me of a dream I once had, in which were windows cut through the ceiling to Adonai – in the shapes of the Hebrew letters – through them you may talk to god without intervention or interference or screen of speech.  Why?  Because those apertures from above and below are cut through stone, the shape of the language and its covenant.  Nothing else but the Law, the cosmic Torah, can be spoken or heard through them.  And so it is with all languages through which God spoke – Arabic, Persian, Phoenician, Egyptian, Sanskrit – our origin.

Always go from where you are right now, because access to the sacred architecture is a given;  it is not seen all at once, it grows on you as soon as you surrender your nature to the joy of the gift.

When a soul literally sheds the physical embodiment, he or she is present in any time and space right now, to tune in with.

islamic patterns 1 :Keith Critchlow

Hexagram, from Keith Critchlow’s ‘Islamic Patterns’

When the centre is open, the six directions through my core are simultaneous.  Turning to face them, is something I should remember and not forget during the day. The KABOD, the glory of God has this private stealth, and may be rediscovered at any moment. The expression ‘The chosen people’ may derive from what we choose to meet each other with – the scroll we unroll and open to each other in the eager reading of the Book.  It derives from ‘choosing’ to connect with Issy and with other souls now beyond the box of naming, yet vital in their essence.  There is an intimacy of the emerald table – as above, so it grows below:  the currency ascends through the descent.

I feel and endure the descent, but later on like yeast it rises and leavens the loaf, spreading it far and wide.

Diagram, cube, weathercock

My solar atom is a weathercock – a cube of space;  the six directions N E W S and up and down;  the holy hexagon, the cube of Solomon, a metaphysical spatial reality.  As soon as I am aware of it, I know my purpose, and gently it flows into concentric raindrop circlings of humankind:  I know it and I become still.   I become still not with my intention which is a confused and muddy pool, but as soon as I am aware of the grace flowing in and out.  Then I am in my natural shul.

paul mandala 2015 - detail

I was picturing Issy there, in his usual seat, with his white shawl wrapped around him, and his sparkling joyous gravity.  I feel he was an architect in the medieval flowering of sacred geometry and alchemical science, when Jewish and Islamic sages worked together. When – like him – we are called back into the Scroll, we are all the names that were ever given us on earth – and so we have no particular one, we are nameless!

Issy B

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Torah

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When I ask where and what is God, and love of God, God happens when a tabernacle opens.  When Yeshua stood with his friends on the mountain, their tabernacles opened to each other, and they KNEW.  The place of rest is the crystal receiving-set through which the Greater Mystery pulses.  In the silence the sages come to life:  the holy mountain.

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Arcanum 7 The Chariot

1 magus - Version 3

In the Tarot, Key Seven awakens this knowledge and response.  It fields and fences the Magician’s ‘house’ or BEIT with CHETH the enclosure.  It takes a while to tap the portal;  but this morning again it stood open – it flows through here.

The Seventh Arcanum rests within the sense of expansion.  It is a seven pointed star.  The Seventh Arcanum reminds me now that each Tarot Key is a holy transmission, a contemplative and living silence.  The enigmatic image releases a quantum of shabat shalom baruch:  a commitment.  The prayer does not repeat;  it is new born.

For Issy:  Go Well!

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Seven Branch Star

How to make a seven point star – with the 51-degree angle in the Druid’s Cord

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jacobs ladder

Jacobs Ladder – the Four Worlds, Aziluth (Divine), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formative and Psyche) and Assiyah (Material world)

Mysteries of Isis, part Four – The House of God

Labyrinth and Rose Cross

Labyrinth and Rose Cross

 

Masters Eye Cover - Version 2

Part 4 in the “Isis” series. This Meditation on the Virgo constellation and the Gothic art was written in 1992.  It is from my book “The Masters’ Eye” – inspired by Louis Charpentier’s “The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” (R.I.L.K.O.)

Contact me if you would like a copy of “The Masters’ Eye”.  I produce it from home (275 pages) but might be able to turn it into an ebook.

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roof, chartres

roof, chartres

In the House of God, the Cross represents the IAM (AHAM in sanskrit, AHIEH in hebrew) or AIM of Solomon’s temple. It was laid sky to ground-plan for the Common Era; in the cruciform shape of nave and transepts.

The horizontal beam of the Cross is warp and weft of the great picture of the universe. On this loom is strung the imaging or spectrum of the five senses: our body and terrain of perception.

The vertical beam, soaring limitlessly Above as Below, and effulgent through the sensory fabric, is the essence of our Self. Its spectrum, like Siva’s fiery column, transcends the narrow horizontal band of the senses and their story of space and time.  We see higher and lower octaves of the same instrument. (Link to “Cathedral Building“)

Essentially, the horizontal beam manifests time and space. The vertical beam intersects this tapestry at any given point of life, as cognition or awareness, before and after birth and death, and in the depth of dreamless sleep. It is anterior to the ‘evidence’ it illumines. It brings into play our hidden dimension.

netzach hod temperance sketch_0001

The heart of the Cross is a fluid point of stillness wherein the two planes meet. They create upon each other a factor of vital resistance: the birth of an evolutionary consciousness. The vertical beam is masculine, the Creative potential; and the horizontal is feminine, the balancing inertia or momentum: (or rajas, tamas, whose “balance” is sattva.) In the ground-plan of the Cathedral, the vertical is laid along the meridian west to east, Earth’s rotation to sunrise.** The horizontal crosses it, south and north, as do the Pillars of Solomon, to uphold the cosmic temple.

**Sunrise, itself motionless to the rotating surface of Earth, is “outside time”. Sunrise encircles our local measure and engirdles Earth. To the Temple plan, sunrise is the metaphysical centre of gravity, or “sky” unchanging

So we have first the creative principle, the idea upon the ground, a map or sacred diagram laid out along our axis of sunrise. From this arises the actual fabric, like a plant: the Tree of Life’s integrity on the columns of Jakin and Bohaz. The equilibrating of active and passive “poles” of construction, manifests this principle. A draft sketch is translated into an arch, a portal of height, breadth and depth. It manifests for us in three dimensions.

ogive chartres vault

Paradoxically, the visible, audible and tangible, is a worldly cross-section through the numinously unseen. The grace and proportion of the building, altering the consciousness that enters it, is an echo only of the Light which was its inspiration. It is the ripple or projection upon the sensory field, of all time, all space, and simultaneously it is neither.

Nowadays, a hologram is created by projecting laser beams to cross each other at right angles. An image is created in space when the mutual-interference pattern of their rays precisely fits. Upon this principle the perceptible universe is strung, and sustained. The same image-ing of three dimensions, from the galactic to the miniature, will manifest an apparently solid picture of reality, wherever you cut through the projection. You pass your hand through empty air, and yet the picture remains, like a standwave.

The same applies to apparently impregnable infrastructures of our mind, emotions, karmic dragons, and sorrows of life. What are these really? Who holds the lamp which illumines the inner space, like clear sky?

The Cathedral is a projection onto the physical plane, of a “hologrammatic” revelation, achieved by cross-fertilising or marrying that plane with its numinous perpendicular, in sacred geometry.

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In twelfth century gothic art – (Fulcanelli’s argot or art-gothique, the slang of the Philosophers’ Stone) – the Knights of the Temple did not depict the Crucifixion. Their true Cross is in the natural ground-plan of heaven to Earth, as drawn with a circle round it by stake and string. This circumscribed cross is also an ancient form of the Hebrew letter TAV, which signifies completion.

 

The Christ, an ancient, immanent, unfathomable mystery uplifted in stone and earth, is in the Templars’ sanctuaries Un-crucified. The body of nave and transepts lies upon Earth to receive Heaven. This follows the law of mandala and yantra construction, which diagram the laws of tree growth. The holy Spirit so earthed, engages with the commodity of the world. And the gothic Temples to Notre Dame in northern France represent each a star in the Virgin constellation, as laid out over the land.

The real meaning of “the Virgin” is “she who is ripe”.

child madonna sketch 1957

At the time of harvest she is the fruitful womb, receptacle for implantation, one that is in readiness. The Spirit is seeded deep into matter, into the cave or oracle of Earth – the grain, the bread of life. In an earlier age, Our Lady was Isis of Egypt who reunited the fragments of the body of Osiris into his wholeness or Divinity. She has her counterpart in Hindu cosmology as Parvati, Mother of the universe, Daughter of the Mountain, shakti power of manifestation and abundance. In Greece she was known as Demeter and as Ceres, from whom the grain sprouts.

Her Knights, being Hospitallers or Guardians of the Sanctuary (routes of pilgrimage) enlisted in the early part of the twelfth century Common Era, the support of the Church, whom they funded. They made an offer which could not be refused, to build Houses of God. Their spiritual sponsor was the great Benedictine Bernard of Clairvaux.

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But these Knights were not mere Crusaders. They were messengers of Great Mikael, archangelic slayer of Dragons clerical as well as secular: who, looking deep into the dark dense coil of Baphomet, liberates and raises up the Light – as consciousness. A hundred years or so later, the Church, frightened of their rival power, accused them of devil worship and burnt them at the stake.

Here, time as a Great Circle clashed with linear or ‘tick tock’ time. By then the Knights had seeded a number of soaring Temples of Light into the soil of Mother Earth in northern France; and more were undoubtedly planned to fill and peg down the entire constellation; the vessel for the Divine Child.  The Black Death followed their demise as an Order, fragmenting time, space and continuity. The Black Death flowed around the gothic sanctuaries which transcended it.

“Gothic” is a strange word, as handed down to us, for it has acquired paradoxical resonances of horror, caricature and over-elaboration – I believe this is due to the plague’s shocking spectre in our deep cellular and racial memory.

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imponderables rose cross

The Order reappeared several generations later as a Rosy Cross fraternity, and from about the seventeenth century onward, was reorganised into the Degrees of freemasonry.

From the fertile soil or compost of the Black Death, had sprouted a strange Renaissance flower – Botticelli’s Aphrodite – and the later cultivation of a deductive science to investigate and ravish her.

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small aphrodite

Hokhmah and Nezach on the Tree
I find a resonance or echo here with the birth of Aphrodite in greek mythology, from the castration of Uranus the god of Revelation. In those legendary dreams, Uranus, the Sky of Stars, lay with Gaea, Earth. Gaea grew tired of the incessant titans Uranus begot on her, and called on their young son Chronos – meaning cycles of Time and therefore limitation – to do the job. The procreative organ of Uranus fell into the sea. It stirred up a titanic froth on the wave, from which emerged the comely figure of Aphrodite, goddess of Desire, pulse of nature’s beauty, and of attraction.

In the geographical solar system, the polar tilt of both Venus and Uranus inclines at a virtual right-angle to that of the other planetary bodies. Mercury, Terra, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto all rotate more or less, west/east. The rotational spin of Venus and Uranus is north/south, almost into the plane of their orbits.

That innocence, inner science, or in-formed awareness of their association is shown in the ancient myths, whose Masters possessed no measure more than their ear to the ground.

Chartres, saints

Chartres, tintagel heart cave

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From “Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral” by Louis Charpentier:
“The currents in old Earth are numerous and various, but here at Chartres we are concerned with one that is especially sacred, capable of awakening a man to the spiritual life. The DIVINE is born here, and no material influence may be allowed to trouble or destroy it. The Hill of Chartres must not be polluted. That is why, among all the french Cathedrals, Chartres is the only one in which no king, cardinal or bishop is interred. The Hill must remain virgin.”

This paragraph declares the Resurrection of the Christ. Here there is no merely dead seed.  The telluric pulse at Chartres is particularly potent. Here under the Mound in ages past, was enthroned a Black Virgin, Our-Lady-under-the-Earth, as a focus for pilgrimage and inner purification. She is our subconscious, so she is the ageless Isis, Demeter, Belisima.

Scorpio & Virgo glyphs:  phallus and womb

Scorpio & Virgo glyphs: phallus and womb

The currents in old earth – like the mesh of chorionic villi, those tiny vessels and fibres of lifeblood which embed the embryo in the lining of the maternal womb – are the same subtle meridians of the Dragon or Serpent energy which flow along the leylines. In the landscape, as in our body, these are gathered and released or contained at acupunctural power-points – (see in Charpentier’s work, and below, the map of Virgo Our Lady of the Constellation in France) – to invoke Archangel Mikael’s protection, and for gestation.

Virgo constellation:Chartres 4

These ageless foci of authority or power, are condensers. They are dolmens or druidic circles of stones. They became towers, temples and churches to Michael and Maria, the Guardian and the Mother of God. The Michael and Mary leyline in England runs from the eastern part of the country through Ogbourne St George in Wiltshire through Avebury and Stonehenge, Glastonbury and a succession of tumps, mounds and chapels across Sedgemoor, Devon and Cornwall to St Michael’s Mount in the bay of Penzance. A friend I visited in Ogbourne, where George slew the dragon of Albion, has a well inside her house sunk deep into this Line. Her guests have interesting dreams at night.

To “slay” or pierce the Dragon, harnesses its creative strength. It can be tamed and trained to become a strong and willing servant or alliance to the higher power. This corresponds to the Karmic “leyline” of tendency (ascending and descending Lunar nodes, known as the Head and Tail of the dragon) in our astrological maps. Where the Moon’s orbit around the Earth crosses the path of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, these are the Lunar nodes.

The Knight is the seer., The Dragon is his personal attachment to the mortal coil to master. The Dragon, as electric current in the copper wire, is coiled around a MAGNET, the treasure of the Source, our inner elixir.

1992

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madonna ikon

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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/

 

 

Nesting Tetrahedrons – the Point from In Between

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tetrahedral cube 93

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When a triangle’s centre point is produced into the 3rd dimension, perpendicular to the plane, it forms a Tetrahedron – whose sides are four equilateral triangles, the most stable form in platonic geometry.

nesting soul tetrahedrons

nesting soul tetrahedrons

Nested Tetrahedrons: Unity of Above/Below, Point, Centre, Sides

Existentially, the 4th dimension extends individuated consciousness, to encompass as a whole, the world, the passage of time and space, community and nature’s eco-system.

The Tetrahedron in this sketch, contains a small inverted Tetrahedron.  The four points of the inverted Tetrahedron touch from inside, the centres of the upright four surfaces.  This demonstrates connectivity through centre-point, faces and polar opposites, as a philosophical tool.

In India, as in western Alchemy, the ascending triad is male, Siva.  The descending triad is female, Shakti.  Upon their equal inter-wovenness rests the lattice of our universe – nature, conception, orgasm, childbirth.

This Sri Chakra Yantra (from my drawing, tattoo’d on someone’s wrist) shows the interwoven lattice, through nine horizontal “strings”.  The centre dot, the bindu, comes from in between the lines which form the triangle-bases: yet upon it, the whole design depends, for the point is infinite.  Around it, the womb triangle (flattened shape) holds the Siva Shakti pattern in place, and draws the consciousness inward.

Sri chakra yantra - tattoo'd on someone's wrist

Sri chakra yantra – tattoo’d on someone’s wrist

We can enhance our relationships, our work and our human tantra with these contemplative models, which touch on the 4th dimension, perceptually.   The mysterious point from in between, touches itself always.

 centre corner cube

From triad, the extended 4th point includes awareness of the breath, and unique centre of gravity – as shared with every human being, creature, flower and rock.

This factor through empathy, liberates.

Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light!

Being the point from in between our mother and father, forces us to be honest – the capacity to receive both sides.  True to the point from in between the “mores” , we are vulnerable, unfixed and fluid – a spiritual and human growing-curve.

Philosophically, the Triad is a realization of the One through Two. The One is always dynamic, like the child through the parents.

seal solomon tetra

My contacts with friends, colleagues, society and serendipity are interrelated.  The same deep connection flows through all. The contemplation is a Oneness? …  moving towards oneness.

sex spirit integr

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Jung’s therapeutic aim was to journey with his client, into the “don’t know” point – into the mysteries of existence and the creative potential they release.

ha App0115

In my portrait painting days, a “connection” became tangible in the space between myself and my sitter.  It was like a let-down reflex.  I knew then that the work could be handed over to its Knower in the centre field.  However hard it might be, it would turn out well … because it was already Known.

The connection feels like a third entity – where my subtle body receives and welcomes the other’s “imprint” –  and it is full of life.  Something relaxes inside.

When A (a healer) and C “connect”, they arise out of duality in the same way. They embody and share this aim:

A C triad 1

The moment where past and present converge, holds its own future.   We receive our “future” through integrating time and being in time.

What is “past” is the deep well beneath my feet:  the root of my tree.  Past and present together are a paradox through which I move forward, and empathise more with others …

– “the intra-connectivity:  an observer’s ripple through the human quantum field – the butterfly wing effect” –

Sketch for Ushas, the Vedic dawn

Sketch for Ushas, the Vedic Dawn Goddess

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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/

**

 

Three Trees of Life

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Old Kabbalist

An Old Kabbalist – from a commissioned portrait of Master Hilarion

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1:  The Tree in a Group Process

Here below,  is a Tree of Life I painted for my friend “Actaeon” in 2004.  Beginning a new series of working groups in the Tree of Life, he decided to keep the Sefiroth for the time being, blank and white.   He called it a blank glyph for the teaching – for his students’ inner experience to furnish for themselves, and for himself also, to learn from them.   The teaching is two-way. Some of them had not studied Kabbalah previously.

As the teaching and sharing process entered the Tree of Life day by day, it was fascinating to observe how – spontaneously – the archetypes and laws of nature fell into place.

The idea is that we learn from our inner attention, creativity and relationships, far more than by the book.   So the Sefiroth – the Emanations – and symbols, were left open.

The group is an intimate and interactive one.  It travels up and down the Tree on an interior Journey.   It combines in a dynamic way, dream work, visualisation, yoga, chanting, Kabbalist teaching, therapy, healing and group sharing.  The aim is to integrate body, soul and spirit as a group vessel, invoking the holistic beauty of the Tree.  It addresses the wounds between masculine and feminine.  It is an oral teaching, and it refreshes and deepens itself perennially.  It is guided through the Tree of Life, and it is not written.

Tree of Life 2004 - blank teaching glyph

Tree of Life 2004 – blank teaching glyph

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For this year’s Circle, Actaeon asked me if I felt able to paint in the Sefiroth, as the group is by now well established.  I did this over the weekend, using acrylic colours.  I listened – and danced – to the Pink Floyd  “Dark Side of the Moon“.   I had not done any painting for a while, and I was out of practice.   The contact awoke.

The Sefiroth “pictures” – see below – follow a visualisation process up the Tree of Life, for this particular group.   Malkuth is a garden, Yesod a cave and Hod is the library.  Netzach is a tree whose wood we enter.  Hod and Netzach represent our biological mother and father – the relationship dialogue.

Tifareth is the meeting with our Inner Teacher, in the triad of the Soul.   Gevurah is a fiery dragon;   Hesed is a pyramid of ice which melts in the heart and releases our nature towards compassion and forgiveness.  To it I added instinctively the Swan – Hamsa, the bird of Brahma.   The swan’s shape echoes that of Jupiter.   In Vedic astrology, Brahma is the deity of Jupiter, who is “Guru” – dispeller of the soul’s dark night.  In Vedanta, the swan is the cream of the milk.  Jnana, knowledge, floats on the lake of bhakti, devotion.

The non-Sefira Daat is a quantum leap, from Hesed (Love and Expansion) to Binah (Understanding).  As the Karmic knots which bind, are cut, the group journeys in the “chariot” or Merkabah.  Daat is the Greater Mystery behind the Tree and within each Sefira, where dimensions touch.

The darkness on which the Tree appears is En Sof – “without end”.  Binah is the womb of the Great Mother:  Hokhmah is the seminal Father, and Kether is the Holy One.

(My earlier post – https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/the-chakras-part-1-the-journey/ – contains more detail.  See also The Seven Year Cycles on the Tree of Life.)

I used the traditional Queen Scale colours – the tones of the Sefiroth as perceived in Beriah, World of Creation.  The four colours in Malkuth – russet, citrine, slate and olive – are the elements: fire, air, water, earth.  At their centre is the Akasha-Tejas Tattva – red Mars triangle in Indigo Saturn oval.  The root and navel chakras when linked this way, and integrated, are a subtle key.  It rises into the heart from the heart of Earth’s core of solar energy. It opens the interior Gold of Alchemy.

The descending Water triangle in Yesod (personal) and the integrated Seal of Solomon at Tifareth (the Self), are self explanatory.

Tree of Life 2004 - with Sefiroth filled in, November 2013

Tree of Life 2004 – with Sefiroth filled in, November 2013

Unfortunately this painting is difficult to photograph – the colours don’t come through well.  I need a more sophisticated camera.  So here are the newly-painted Sefiroth, in close-up, to show their detail:  click on them to open the Gallery.

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4 Jacobs Ladder for Actaeon

This is a Jacobs Ladder I painted for Actaeon in 2004.  It shows the Four Worlds – Emanation, Creation, Formation and Physical, as interlocking Trees of Life.  The divine thread on which they are strung, from heaven to earth, is known as the KAV – the centre axis.

“The KAV, or middle column line of Divine presence that permeates Existence, makes up what is seen as the fifth ‘Great Tree’.  (11 Sefiroth, Malkuth to Kether). Together with the forty Sefiroth of the four Trees, they make the Fifty Gates spoken of in some texts.”

Zev ben Shimon Halevi, The Path of a Kabbalist

The Four Trees superimpose through Tifareth at each level.  In the real Universe, all phenomena interpenetrate.  The vision of the Four Worlds was described by the prophet Ezekiel;  it has been rendered in various ways, and can be interpreted concentrically.   Through the shells of Earth’s crust, the forces of nature, seasonal cycle and human growth … the Tree’s sacred geometry lends itself to the Flower of Life in any direction.

At that time, I did not want to label the Sefiroth, or cover the diagram with descriptions and words, but to let my thought remain in colour and be silent.

the tree in flower of life ja

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On the left is a template.  The arrows show that we ascend AND descend the Lightning-flash:  as above, so below.  On the right, the Tree for Actaeon’s group process begins in Malkuth, with the Zodiac signs corresponding to the planetary positions on that day.  This horary chart on the Tree gave us subtle data of the group dynamics, and whether to emphasise feeling or the intellect.  With Cancer ascendent, the feeling nature predominates, and is given space to find its tempo.  With Scorpio at Tifareth, Hod and Binah, hidden wounds are likely to come to light, for healing.

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A tree in Devon - Malkuth, showing three paths from the base

A tree in Devon – Malkuth, showing three paths from the base

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2:  An Applied Tree of Life

Halevi teaching

Readers of Zev ben Shimon Halevi’s books will appreciate the way he – a practical Capricorn philosopher, with Moon in Gemini – applies the Tree of Life to hundreds of situations and developments in everyday life, in government and in history.  His drawings demonstrate how the principle works.

Here is a typical example.  My fellow student Jonathon gives monthly Astrology classes.  In one of them, he showed us on the Tree, the process of a buyout he is involved in, in the business world.   It had just reached completion.  It was fascinating to hear him explain and demonstrate the pattern of thesis and antithesis, agreements and setbacks since 2008, through the global financial crisis:  the delayed but timely exchange of contracts, after a period of reflection:   the accurate realisation of the whole.   He was in awe, himself.

Here is my drawing – a copy of what Jonathon showed us on his screen.

A Tree of Life showing the process of a business merger in financial services, over a period of some years - the process down the zig zag lightning flash from Kether (conceiving the project) to Malkuth (completion).

A Tree of Life showing the process of a business merger in financial services, over a period of some years – the process down the zig zag lightning flash from Kether (conceiving the project) to Malkuth (completion).

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3:  An Astrological Landscape

A good way perhaps, to landscape your own!

A painting of Christopher’s chart on the Tree – An inspiration perhaps, to visualise and landscape your own!

He has:  Malkuth in Virgo (the whole lower landscape with its Companions), Yesod and Hod in Capricorn, with the goat and rock strata, Netzach in Scorpio – (where still waters run deep), Tifareth in Sagittarius, Gevurah in Virgo, Hesed in Taurus, Binah in Aquarius, Hokhmah in Virgo and Kether in Scorpio.

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Friendship in Winter

Friendship in Winter

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As I “sister” alongside Actaeon’s group work, the theme emerging there, is:  to begin – always and again!  to heal deep wounds of the Mother, the feminine – in our ancestors, our daughters, sons and brothers, and in life right now.  Scorpio, with the leaves turning brilliant and sinking into the ground, is a time of concentration.  There is no end to taking the Light into the shadow.

woman unveiled

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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/

Numerology and Platonic Forms

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Kabbalah 1990 207

To grasp abstract concepts in their beauty, it helps to make them visible.  In the ancient world, numbers were – and are still – dynamic shapes, letters and states of transformation. The numbers are symbols of life.  The five Platonic forms or solids – tetrahedron, cube, octohedron, dodecahedron and icosohedron – give volume and depth to the play of number.

Many Renaissance masterpieces – not to mention the medieval Cathedrals – were constructed consciously or subconsciously on the perfect proportion of the living Numbers:  for instance the 5 : 8 of the golden mean.   It nourishes the subtle body and expands the spirit in recognition.  And so they stand …

My numerology 1-10  remained stable for the 20 years since I wrote these two pages below.  It was influenced by the works of Mouni Sadhu and Elisabeth Haich.  Refinements came later, with the Builders of the Adytum Tarot:  for instance I would now call the conduct of Four “organization” or “reason”.  Initially I called it “benevolence” for the Fourth Sefira on the Tree, Hesed or Grace.  Hesed expands into the dominion of space, the blueprint of time collected in Binah.

Numerologic Arcana are based on the simple premise 1 – 10.  Where this moves up the sides of the pyramid to the apex, our cultural systems are in general agreement.   The cosmic principles are unaltered by local interpretation.

So here is my own view !

Numerology 1-6

Numerology 7-10

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Here (below) is a cartoon of the fourth dimension.  Zero dimension is the point, whose geometry is spherical.  It may shrink or expand infinitely, inward or outward:  it thus contains the All or One.  A line is a movement of the point, becoming 2:  its equidistant projection forms 3, a triangle.  A further projection from the flat triad is 4 – an equal sided tetrahedron or solid.

Each subsequent dimension is a perpendicular movement from the last.  So a line is extended laterally to become a plane.  The plane projected into three dimensions, is a cube – our landscape of life.  The inner life – the conscious connectivity – exists perpendicular in every direction to the three-dimensional sensory world.

Where do we put our attention?  It is a matter of conditioning, since infancy.

point line plane copy

Here is Ouspensky’s fable of the flat-earth beings’ surprise when a Great Being (who is their God or Brahman) dipped Her fingers through their two-dimensional world, as through water’s surface. Five apparently unrelated disks or islands appear unexpectedly, move around, change shape and disappear.  But they all belong to one hand, and to some inconceivable Face or purpose. Such is life, when we are disappointed or astonished by so called Miracles – and they have concentric ripples!   Such is the thread of our hidden lifetimes and our fantasy of death.  Such is the connectivity of an atomic particle, which nods or rotates in unison with its twin sister, even when the two are separated far beyond any signal of light.   Such is the cosmic web.

Tao doodle '94 j&d11

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Now here are a collection of pictorial 3’s, 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, in no particular order.  I studied for a long time in Mouni Sadhu’s The Tarot (1962) the Tetragrammaton First Family of JHVH, and even how to breathe with it at times.  It is my philosophical root.

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Finally:  Speaking of the Tetragrammaton reminds me of Gurdhieff’s Enneagram.  In the circuitry of a musical octave, are two intervals – where a quantum leap is made.  I do not remember now – are they the semitone 3rd/4th?  and 6th/7th? (diminished 7th).   Help me someone, please!   In general life, our intentions are propelled by 1st force, resisted by 2nd force, and carried through (if possible) with the perseverance of 3rd force, from a higher dimension – the height, depth and breadth. The thesis/antithesis structure is applied in a practical way, to life.

For me, the beauty and depth psychology is in the Enneagram’s interplay of numbers – rather than the later method of attaching personality types to it: which seems to me to be guess-work and rather unscientific.   One can only go by experience.  The topic is open to discuss!

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enneagram math

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My next post on this subject will include Johannes Kepler’s system of 5 platonic solids each interleaving a planetary orbit;  his chalice, and the 5 platonic solids among the Sefiroth on my Tree of Life.

rebbe & rebbetzin yuletide '94 j&d11

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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/

Tales from the Watershed: “House Life”

Another old wives’ Watershed Tale – (See under Categories in sidebar)…

daffodils in Alex Pollock

But first …

Celebrating Easter, last week’s equinoctial Full Moon, Pesach?  My secret of the golden flower is buried somewhere in the grim weather here – a biting cold, sad wind, grey like a gravestone, the trees have nothing on, and are shivering, little birds are huddled under their wings.   Holy things are shrouded.

My ingredients are basic:  visualise fluffy yellow chicks and daffodils:  the full Moon radiance through my window.  In London, she blushed silvery pink.  Symbolically unleavened bread suggests its opposite:  the Presence, the yeast:  Ascension, timelessly.   The bread of life is pounded down to wait, to rise.  The spores are stars.   In Hebrew, Bethlehem was the House of Bread.

Both faiths – Hebraic and Christian – combine great loss, grief, rebirth and joy, within the elder pagan Spring Festival … the Passion of the Passover and of the Cross.  For every woman, childbirth is her Passion and Renewal.

The symbolism in the Hebrew Names for the Moon, including Levanah, is for me, breathtaking: see the above link.  But I might add a more Kabbalistic one later.

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sunshine boy with house 1954

sunshine boy with house 1954

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Part One:  “House Life” – Dreams No 275    November 1976

IN THE kitchens of this large house, we romp about and slide down chutes of dry mud.  Many people live here among great rooms and staircases, and the place is semi ruined.   In the spacious warmth of its untidy mysteries, great chunks of life are lived and games are played, as in the womb.

parties in gathertegen 1954

parties in gathertegen 1954

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Once it was a house I wanted to rent.   It had then a large clean kitchen.   I rode my bicycle very fast up the road and back again to talk to a priest about it – to Father William, whom I asked to instruct me in the catholic Faith – a stout, red-cheeked Jesuit at Farm Street.   He is jovial, for he knows he’s on the Rolls Royce escalator to Heaven.   He strolled with one of his wealthy Mayfair parishioners to and fro along the road by the trees, in his smart black cassock and heavy gold watch.  He told me, alas he could not receive me into the church, unless I promised not to have sex with my unborn baby’s father occasionally – to whom of course, I was not married.   My logic to try and keep the relationship stable for my child to grow up in, went further than the Jesuits’, and I’m afraid I was angry, and very rude to him.   The J’s were touchingly kind, however.   They passed the hat around.  They gave me a pram, two dozen terry nappies, a pile of babygros and two big boxes of groceries from Sainsburys, so I didn’t have to spend a penny.   That is logic!

house lit up and the moon

house lit up and the moon 1954

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Father William changed his job. He now belonged to a church next door to the house, which was both Catholic and Anglican, and more permissive.

And in other dreams, the house belonged to an elderly Jewish gynaecologist whom I have painted portraits for.   He is a wealthy gnome, performs abortions safely for very distressed ladies, and loves to keep a woman on his arm.  I had bad dreams about him being a terrible dentist – all my teeth shouted and hurt.   He is a bright magpie with his possessions; every treasure he owns must be of great market value, and he was sure that I would be, one day.   He showed me and some other visitors around his lusciously furnished domain.   The property was vast.   It covered the area of many streets.   It was a great field.   It was busily inhabited by anxiety, hope and drama.

It is easy to get lost in this house.   It has staircases, galleries and big musty rooms at different levels.   The opulence is tarnished, it developed a patina of neglect.   It is rather  warm because the windows are not often opened, even in summer.

chimneys and balloon 1954

chimneys and balloon 1954

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Then it became another house.   I entered it several times through the garden gate.   In the sultry night both indoors and outdoors, the house stood four-square and Georgian in its garden or space.   It had large windows, some of which were lit up from within.   Like the kind of house and garden which children draw, it had a fence around it.   It was also very stately.   It was alive, big and heavy, and shadows lay with oppressive sensitivity in the worn and flaking stone.   On some nights that I went there, there would be only one light on upstairs.   My baby’s father lived there.   But the night that I remember, three or four windows were lit up, and I could hear the sombre sound of his typewriter upstairs.

fragmenting house & dreamer, 1987

fragmenting house & dreamer, 1987

I went up the path to the front door.   I opened this door, inserting my key into the delicate chambers of the lock and turning it with great deliberation.   I could feel the shape and teeth of the key probing inward.   It was a Yale, the same as the ones that I keep outside my Greencroft Gardens flat, in the garden wall, and which he asked me to move to a different hiding-place so he wouldn’t know where they were.

The keys to this house were given to me in trust.   How long would I be permitted this privilege?   As I went in I said to someone boldly,  “What a barn this place is.”   Some parts or sections of it were not fitted up and lined with a skin of plaster and damp-proofing as a house for people is.  They were like the farmyard, with walls of mud.   I knew my way.  I was fond of the different textures and moods of this house.   I never knew what to expect, because the walls within it were porous and unsealed.

A vague, oppressive fear also kept me on my toes.   Life in it could change as rapidly as the weather over the moor.  Bruised and broken soldiers in the walls, awake and bleed.  I reached the upstairs landing.   Here several doors opened off a wide balcony or gallery to other rooms.   I could still hear him writing.   I didn’t want him to stop.   I didn’t want to disturb him.   He did not live alone here.   Other people inhabited this house as well.   But he heard me arrive, heard my voice say “What a barn this place is”  and he appeared on the landing and might be very angry.

My memory of what next happens is vague.

We were in a room.   It was an upstairs dining room, bare, with a long table.   I lay on my back along a bench.   This house is inhabited by a group of people governed by a matriarch and a patriarch.   The old lady wears lace and musty-smelling clothes, the sort you might find in a Victorian fancy dress box in an attic,  and she is very powerful.   In long Saturnine waves, her dominion increases, because the patriarch, the old man, is now dying.   He has a long white beard.   He visibly fades and wanes.   Lv – my baby’s father –  tells me I must, for his sake, and with all my loyalty, concentrate every atom of my strength to resist the persuasive authority of the old matriarch and her mockery.   An intense battle of will is developing between him and Her.   I try to stay on his side.   It is very hard to fight off the dominance of the old lady, which is ascendent in myself; for the old man, moribund, is failing fast.  I need to be neutral, but do not dare.  If I am neutral, Lv will feel abandoned and betrayed, and abandon me:  so I play the old game.

What of the relationship, this three-fold tension between us  – the grandmother, Lv and myself?   She and he are absolutely opposing forces, yet they work together.   He is not shouting now.   Centred, quietly decisive, refined, he survives minute by minute, a cataclysm in his soul, which we struggle to protect with conscious spells.  He is himself, an unborn child.  I might lose the thread, any moment, and fail.  He needs me to fight, and not  succumb to the old woman, he tests my metal with his fate.   If I lose the fight, I forfeit my right to those keys.   Because of her very great age, She is stronger than he, but he holds one card :  to be beyond the law.  To answer to no one.

I have wondered who these unknown people are, in the magician’s house.   Are they anima and animus, or are they his parents?   His father is dying, is mortally ill in Hungary.   He hates  his mother,  he hates all mothers.  He hates Her.   The old people and the archetypal miasma that surrounds them, come from a place where I was not.   I don’t know whether or not I came clear from this battle, whether it happened in my soul, or in his house.   Some of the spaces in that house are not lined, and they are not contained, either.   In the extreme difficulty of combating the astral magick power of the old matriarch, I was what she was becoming.

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16th C midwives & astrologers

16th Century:  midwives & astrologers – womens’ work and mens’ work, back to back:  practical feminine and romantic male – Our human nature both sides!   I’m glad I drew/copied this, rather than just paste the original engraving.  It gave me a direct insight. I am moved to draw something when I wish to embody it.

“De Conceptu et Generatione Hominus 1587” by Jacob Rueff (copy)

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After this, I began to have dreams about a pregnant lady, as I always do when my bladder fills.   The growing womb presses on it.   I have to get up two and sometimes three times in the night.   She was overdue, poor thing.   I transferred to her my discomfort, so that it was she who ran around lonely in the night, though she always found helpers in streets and on country lanes near Taunton.  She seemed to have been pregnant for years.   This was all very well, but I was still looking for a lavatory.   I found at long last a row of them in one of the barn-like scruffy areas of the house – I was desperate for relief –  a great big open place of hard earth and timber props like the pigsties of derelict Rome.

a minim on the stave

Then I found myself in the kitchens – still wanting to go –  by the fuel burners and the chimneys.   I sat at the table and looked at a book.  It was a picture story, like a strip cartoon.  The rows of pictures came to life as I turned the pages, so it was no longer a book but happened to me, as botanically described:  the story of a penis.  He was shown in every state of arousal and repose.  He glistened red like a rare flower, he lived and grew within two loamy darknesses of many hues, in a garden.  I forgot I needed to pee.  “A rose in dark soil is penis love.  The penis is a seed.  Children grow up,” it said, under the pictures.   What a tender, strange thing!  I was moved almost to tears.  It first repelled, then I rode it.  I didn’t know anything at all about sex.  I had never heard of it.  This was a plant, a botanical process in the garden:  my education.  I was at primary school – a biology lesson.

lovers 2 j&d6

I recognised it is his.  I began to grow up.  In each successive picture, it curled and grew like a serpent.  I saw the whole genitalia, in a secret earth among the roots, like an illumined manuscript.  He was a sperm, with two “heads” like fishes, one at the growing tip, and one about half way down, like a branch.  The long sperm grew some more, and moved its glowing crimson flower in my garden soil.  As I learned, it penetrated, the bud grew up, right up my spine to the back of my throat to speak, I desired – pain, pleasure, bad girl, heart’s desire – what if I wet the bed?  I need to pee.  The occult work is such a LABOUR.  But I have no choice.  He carries me like a flood.  I bore down as it came, I didn’t care if I wet the bed, I pushed out the newborn child to him, the child he conceived from so deep inside.  Love.

IMG_0822 - Version 2

In the garden, conception, orgasm, childbirth, are One and the same.  Fused with heaven and all human history, the One indivisible moment outshone everything I knew.  It blew the fuse.  I was a child.

To receive is simultaneously to give.  It doesn’t matter, if the linear world pulls time apart into different times, and does not see the eros Rose, or if we see for the time being, only our fantasies, and suffer.  She washes out for ever deep down, those sad soapy sexual beliefs that rocked us to sleep.   A Rose is the risen:  the law is for giving.

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I woke with it, but slept again and dreamed I bled.   The blood came in thick drops,  brown in colour.   Had it made me miscarry?  I looked and willed the blood not to be there.   But it was.   I made up my mind that this is a dream, and woke at once.

Finally I dreamed again about the house.   It was now enormous, of many many storeys.   I lived very high up in it, in Greencroft Gardens.   I went visiting down the road, and lent my spare keys (the ones I keep outside in the garden wall) to my best friend’s husband the Architect, who wanted to fetch something from my flat.   He came back.  The keys were sometimes of metal and sometimes of soft balsa wood (for building model boats), and so frail they might break in the lock.

balsa boat

Next, Lv visited me and I gave the keys to him.   I was glad he wouldn’t find the Architect inside.   In all innocence it is not right that these keys be passed around, for whatever reason.  He said the whole building gave him the creeps.   He was feeling rather jumpy.

A “Watershed” Dream – November 1976

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Jung with pipe

“Jung looked up at me and said, “When a man’s anima meets a woman’s animus, it is bound to be A HELL OF A BUSINESS.”   (Joseph Campbell)

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Part Two: Sacred Geometry

The following Easter-bunny reflection is based on Nassim Haramein’s seminar “Crossing the Event Horizon” (2005, published by The Resonance Project), which I just began to watch.

Kabbalah 1989 pentagramic pattern

A rose is a rose is the risen:  the law is for giving.  The “House Life” dream telescoped everything I would later study of Kabbalah and the Tree of Life.  It was stored in my cellular memory.

How borderline we are!  The language we use is a projectile interface.  It moves with light and shadow:  easily the Veil is imagined as evil:  lived as devil:  eve, the level responsible for it all.  Indeed she is:  She is the subconscious – God’s own womb, no less – the oven to bake the bread;  the house of life.

Archetypal forms of the soul, are sacred geometry. Sacred geometry opens the understanding, visually, with less need for explanation.  As we can browse beautiful tetrahedrons, blueprints and isotropic vector metrics online, to our hearts content, here are mostly, my old doodles of discovery and photos of nature – of water, wood and sky.

Nature - the bottomless

Nature – the bottomless

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balloon

My “House Life” dream gestates  the point.   A single point – like a full stop –  is said to have zero dimension:  yet its geometry is of the sphere. It contracts or expands infinitely, according to magnification.   No balloon is inflated – the cosmic Doppler shift – without an emptying lung.

Who is the blower?   Who blows a black hole into a widening star?

Every law arises from its opposite.  We are not nouns but verbs – the transition.   Respiration in and out, is the law of Kalpa aeons:  cosmic speech and stars.

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We are fluid points of transmission, the stars are not fixed.   A point, or dot contains in infinite series,  EVERYTHING.  A circle is a magnified point.   When we begin in the womb, we are nothing.  But as the interior process unfolds, we are everything!  Every thing is ensphered by its boundary which is No thing!  A boundary – a circle or sphere – contains the potential of Infinite interior division.  This is our union.  Each of us centres no thing:   the tiny mustard seed when opened, is empty.

“In a painting, as in life, keep the centre empty, for light to flow into it.”

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When we are illumined, the dots join up.   The relevance of this to everyday life, nature and each other, is love.  I am empty for You.  I am built open.   It becomes intuitive:  the natural state.   As some of us begin to see things in this way, it tinctures homeopathically the fantastic off-centre slavery of today’s world.  Oasis develops, and is gradually contagious,  like evening stars one by one coming out:  shalom – peace.

Does peace then, emerge from its opposite? – the tension we see around?

Consciousness, and therefore All, begins from one place only:  HERE.
This point, which is All.

soul tetrahedrons

soul tetrahedrons

“The most stable structure in Nature is the tetrahedron.”  The nesting of infinitely decreasing Tetrahedrons inside themselves, is identical to the human mind’s manner of mental invention, pastime, panic and creation.  Absolutely ANYTHING when focused, creates its own expanding rationale – the menu on your screen.   So practice peace!

(This lifetime, I have a private leitmotif – it dropped into my mind when I was twenty.  I had a job at a second hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road, and scribbled my thoughts on brown paper bags:  “Turn it round.  To forgive, I must give way to the force.”   It felt very profound. There was a house in a storm. This Karmic theme which reaches a long way back, concludes or bears fruit, now.)

Justice is done, but not in a place where I can see it.  Trust is the unbroken love of life, the Underbeing:  sur-render.  Render unto heaven’s law and rejoice in the fresh clean air.  The Point is subtle, and fills everything.   Tifareth:  beauty.

parent tetrahedrons

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I meant to write just one para about the Point circumscribed by nothing: the point being everything tucked up inside it, a sleeping child. In India it is called the bindhu, and on it the entire cosmic lattice depends. Today I ran aground in slack water, low tide, I needed to curl up and doze for the day – holy black bare Saturday:  tomorrow the little fluffy sunshine chicks come out.

bumble bee 1954

bumble bee 1954

So I awaken through a sleepy bumble bee – black and yellow stripes.   Easter Sunday is the last day of March.  The clocks change to summer time, with the Risen Bread.  That is a beautiful alignment!  even with wind-chill frost on the ground.

Remember the Sun’s golden semi-circle, the arc of the day:  the secret of the Golden Flower.

This year is a bardo of endings through beginnings.  My festival, my true worship, is the Unknown:  the no thing:  and like the mustard seed, fulfilled.

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The full blown Eros Rose is also FOR … GIVE.  As you see in the photo above, of the rose in an egg, it spirals to petal from the centre sensory point.   Nothing matters or happens, but this.  The Chymical wedding is deeper than the human veil.  The human veils Shekhinah.

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floweroflifeheader: Nassim Haramein: davidicke.com

floweroflifeheader: Nassim Haramein: davidicke.com

Sperm, fertilization, vesica pisces, gestation of the embryo, earth,
Sol, Star, sacred geometry cycle, you and me

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GALLERY

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Ready to post this, at last.  Happy Easter !  The Sun is having another go, this morning.

Daffodils in Douglas Hardingdaffodils in Douglas Harding

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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/

Some Trees of Life PART TWO

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Tree of Life as an Alchemic Vessel   ja/2003

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“The Flowering Staff”  ja/2002

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Poplars and London Night Sky   ja/1987

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Spring moves under Earth    ja1969

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

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

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Body   ja/1998

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Cosmic Egg and Tree-dance    ja/1999

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Tree of Life, an Instrument    ja/2001

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Psychedelic Avocado    ja/1973

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Woodland Path   ja/1986

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Tree dancers by a Brook    ja/1997

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Rock river flow    ja/1997

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

This blog is  a vehicle to promote my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books) – along with many other creations in house.  

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

How to Draw the Sri Chakra Yantra

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

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

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

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

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

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

            TWO POEMS:  June 1989

Goat/Crab Landfall

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

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

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

.
.
.
And the second poem ...

.
   Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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Introduction to Sri Chakra Yantra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

On the Method:   The Ocean of Beauty

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

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

(Talks with Ramana Maharshi, p.380)

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

What follows is an initial exploration along these lines.

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

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

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

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Construction

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

One Vertical Diameter, divided into 48 equal parts

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

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

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

One Bindhu point at the Circle’s centre.

This is purusha, the unborn, undying source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemplation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article & Illustrations copyright(c)Jane Adams 1994-2012