For Solstice

Posted on December 20, 2012 by janeadamsart

Walk tall, breathe deep, open heart and arms.

The key of pilgrimage may open the door of the mundane into the transcendently spectacular, without ever leaving home.

The life condition had forgotten or taken for granted, the door of perception. Realisation within all the surfaces of the world is revealed, tender and subtle. With this key, the Vedic sages mapped the stars and sciences, through observing the dance of light, the sound of nature, her atoms, within their own contemplative and “seeing” spines, and walking through all seasons. They loved.

So let the waterfall run down the spine that bonds us: the music of the waters.

body tao tree

The centre of the Sun core is infinite. Planets – planes – are formed in the radiating field which cools, becomes visible, consolidates around him. These like the Rose petals, are Shakti’s dance around Purusha “the Unborn”. They precipitate, as thought does.

The core of a straight conifer stem with its branches twirling, is … the unmoving core of the dancer. And he the Dervish in order not to dizzy, “spots” his inner poise of prayer as the world whirls and rotates around him. Dance is born from within the unmoving fire stem as a barely perceptible oscillation; whose arc, like a pendulum, births a pulse, a circuit or triad – Time.

And so from Sound, a wavelength, an OMKARA within or beyond the audial spectrum, a Universe, coheres centrifugally. A concentric ripple floats out from the core. It becomes thought. It becomes mind.

To be the perception within the perceived, let it run down spine like water, as current, to the ground. The wave in water conducts the current which is “fire”.

OM SHANTI. Wishing you joy, peace and a Yule log to warm the cockles of your heart, this special Solstice 2012.

Go well!

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.

Other blogs: (click on image)

Reckless Fruit (2)

Reckless Fruit (1)

Aquariel

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/

Watershed Tales -The Tree is a Fountain: The Man in the Ravine

Posted on October 30, 2012 by janeadamsart

This post, and the next few – though probably not consecutively – will include a story from my Watershed collection. In the mid 1970s I went through a very difficult time, which flowered at night – or under earth – into hundreds of vivid dreams, many of them visionary.

I wrote them all down, and years later, began to de-code and compose some of them into stories. They became my experiential laboratory; the archetypes arose.

I call it the Watershed, because it is like a mountain ridge. The “waters” from it, irrigate the channels of my whole life and landscape around it, far into the past and future. Because of the Watershed, I don’t perceive a life-time as a linear progress, but as a solar orbital system: a sphere. A pulse.

My spacetime diagram is of a leaf dropped on water: the concentric ripple. The same are soundwaves, light cones, and the Watershed: from which the events of a lifetime descend and flow to manifest in all directions …the way a tree grows. We are not normally sensitive enough or “programmed” to detect the wavelengths of warning and encouragement which come from “future” wisdom. But they are there! and hindsight always reveals them.

A peak of intensity in any lifetime irradiates the past and future equally. It is that life’s gravitational centre and purpose to be. It is like the circling beam of a lighthouse.

Thus we are seen from “Above” – like ourselves looking down at rain-circles on the lake.

Comprehending this, is in the way we breathe consciously. What is the fountain breath?

The fountain breath is this, in whatever shape or teaching it takes, up and down, root and shoot.

Invoking the very best in life: peace to all beings: a prayer for a friend in pain, or those in the storm: a drawing together of the Great Work … light the candle, focus the third eye, and stretch open armed a Tree, a Chalice, an Albion witch, moving a little with the dancing Ch’i.

The Tree’s branches receive the sun. The sun bedews and sparkles in them. The sunlight trickles down them into the trunk. The trunk with all its oaky bark flowing upward is a fountain, resplendent from the ground. This is “meditation”.

tree diva

Think of the trees everywhere now, whose leaves turn gold and fall, preparing for the winter nude, the cold deep dark waters of polar tide – the tide beneath the waves; receive back into essence the wet, wild kingdom, Mother Ceres of the tiny seeds that grow – Persephone in Hades – in the ground.

Ceres & John

Drenched I am with the rain, the frost and sea salt, dark and drenched and wet my wood: and vibrant is my capillary in the sky, its leafy burden shed. Vibrant are my fingers in the silver sky – the throbbing of the festival.

Here is one of my Stories of Life –

“The Man in the Ravine” … Dreams No.189 27 September 1975

Events led me down the valley into this very deep ravine.

It is like the tale of the Water of Life. Three princes set out to find the Water of Life for their sick father. The first two were walled up in a ravine along the way because of their churlish behaviour. Others, I know, have been here before me, and come to grief. Perhaps I’ve come here to find out what happened to them.

The ravine had sheer high cliffs that walled it around three sides. It was a cul de sac. So deep down was it enclosed that in here it was always night or a very murky twilight. If you looked far up, right up the mountain walls, you could see daylight or the sinking sun. But the base of the ravine was not much larger than the floor of a large room or hall. To reach its depths you went down a natural stairway of rock, a kind of ramp. Over the floor of the ravine you had to pick your way over the mud and over the puddles of water murkily shining. It had a warm and velvety miasma. I explored it carefully. I had to cover the whole of it or reach the enclosing wall over on the far side, what was I looking for? Because assuredly I was seeking out something. What happened to those poor fools right down in this darkness from whence if you looked up the walls you could see, like a great rose, the day above? The place was repugnant.

Suddenly I stepped in some soft mud and was sinking. I had waded into one of those bogs that suck you down and down into the morass to drown. I fell full length on the mud and struggled to get my right foot free of the all-enveloping ooze, and I succeeded. I pulled myself out. Then I went over to the right side of the ravine where there were some big stagnant puddles, and began to wash my feet and sandals which were covered with sticky smelly mud. From there I watched the bog where I had almost sunk. It was displaying a curious activity. A sort of waterspout or turbulence of liquid mud began to jet out of it like a fountain. Out of that unrest came a small solidity, a box or a square tin; it fell and lay upon the quivering mud. Then out of that mud came a man!

A man lived here, within the mud, within the bottomless floor of the ravine. He emerged, a stocky sort of man. The place had been disturbed by a question, and out he came. It was extraordinary that he should live and breathe down under the mud. He had a malign power.

We had a conversation, him by his bog-hole and me by the puddles where I’d been cleaning my feet. He is a sorceror. He causes in me very strange physical changes. A certain look from his eye immobilizes all my nerve. I can see him a little. Stocky, squat, with dark curling hair. The lines of his face flow downward.

“What is in the box?” I ventured to wonder.

“I am,” he said.

That makes perfect sense. The box is discarded. It contains me. The mud erupting flies apart into disjointed brown crescents of time. Between them are swirls of chaos. The newborn cannot read the signs. Lots of animals live down here. My right arm has gone. But now I have three heads, and I see and believe in a different world from each one of them. I am terrified. But I have been told to open to my fear. Now I am an animal, a creature I do not know. Now I have branches like lopped limbs from a tree. This branch waves from one of the rock walls of the ravine. But this one too is deep in the silty floor. Yet another strains in the sky in a great bolt of wind. All over the ravine is scattered the (w)hole not I. It is the darkness. It is the vivid strength of the man in the mud, his trident, his trident touches and jerks me into three-plane being.

I am the Great Cat. I am the life that runs in cold metallic vein through the fish. I run like a rat, the colour of the ground. I am the bull and the goat and the twins. We are having a kind of conversation, him by his bog-hole and me … ah yes, that is it, he has stopped the time. The quintessence of each animal spirit broods in this place where no beginning ends. “You are too mercurial …” but my shoulder has burst. I cannot describe it. I fall yet I stand. I have no control over any of these changes that succeed one another rapidly as air. They are all in his alien hand, whatever he draws or gestures, that I form, and then form un-begun suddenly an owl. The bird is shrieking. The form like soft clay silent is putty and quicksilver in his alien hand, my penance. This is not me. It is according to his powers. I accept this, for I trust him. I have no choice but to trust him. There is no other way save submission to these curious disturbances and transformations. Some of them are painful like fire and blood. Some are nauseating, and some are cataracts of water: it is a tempest buried in earth. This is where I am. I am here with this man of the bog and his powers, and that is that.

That is clay on the potter’s wheel. That is the bed of the river.

“Water,” I said to him “the Water of Life.” (I think the others were devoured by the bog).

“You are their successor,” he replies “but you didn’t succumb you know, to what drowned them” “What was that?” “It was the walls you know. Walls they rode themselves into, grew up around them. These people were interested only in their own ends. You must pay the price. But we can speak. Here we may speak. There never was any prince with whom I could hold conversation. This is unique you know. You must stay. You are the first of them returned. So I must hold you here.” And thrice with his wand he struck me. Water gushed from this rock, this matter. Life. Cried out.

I am the prisoner of the man of the bog who till now killed everyone, the wrestler without a friend. The angel is all of the night. A curious friendship seems to be developing between us. In this dim grey light we became close. He came over to the puddles where I am and I stroked his arm a little, to teach myself to like him. He didn’t bite. He didn’t stomach-sickeningly change me into anything else. He emerged, a stocky sort of man, so darkly invincible that my strange commitment to him must be total, else I die in darkness, unseen. I surrendered. There is no escape from the ravine.

Once he told me, gesturing skyward, that in the east with dawn, there rises the lotus of a thousand petals white and pure. It floats over the azure sky, the tip of every petal blushes with gold, but earth dark, deep and dank holds her underwater root. He said that in the west this flower sets. It furls into a great rose, rosy red song of the heart, the scent of the Spirit. I have to learn to love and obey the one who reveals to me such things. He is stronger than me. Many of me that came down here before, have come to grief, and are prisoners. My bond with him may release them. “You are their ransom,” he said “if you survive. There are more to come, Proserpine.”

Whether or not I wanted to escape from the ravine, I cannot now remember, nor what I did in captivity. I know only what the hostage knows. He was stronger than me.

This post combines a Pluto initiation with the fountaining tree of life. The pictures and images for this, proceed in waves, an alternating current.

Tree lovers, Quantock hills

Dark Hades and Persephone the day.

Trees love, by a creek in Arizona

Descend: look down from the cliff top through trees to Sea – (Alet, St Malo, Brittany 1988)

Stone slab and secret hieroglyph (language) 1987

Hermes and Persephone 1987.

This drawing has many Hadean elements: three ears of wheat, the Goddess under earth, the ferrying of souls. The curving spinal column is a “shorthand” reminder of my ancient lizard nature, containing all those souls and deaths of life and consciousness to come – in horizontal mode. The ears of wheat are seasonal appearances. Hermes Trismegistos, top left, oversees.

Pluto and Persephone ’87

Persephone meets her subterranean dark lover. Alchemical engravings often feature a Saturnine gentleman with an injured leg. I used to see this in my dreams also. It is a place or a someone where some healing or completing or time is needed. And time and the way it unfolds and manifests, is Karma !

Plutonic Mysteries (1)

This was the first time I twigged the graphic relation of the Venus and Mars glyphs.

Plutonic Mysteries ’87(2)

Looking down through spinal chord into a Yab-Yum of sorts. I didn’t know the terminology when I did the drawings, and had not heard of Kundalini. The language arose spontaneously. It was explosively satisfying to create and combine the light and darkness. I drew quite slowly and thoughtfully in the surfacing storm.

Elephant trees: Alet, near St Malo, Brittany ’87

Studying Castaneda’s books at the time, these drawings explore and outline the space between the branches and the leaves – my defining lesson as a visual artist.

Conference in the Wind: Alet, near St Malo, Brittany ’87

Another outdoor study. Tipp-ex is a marvellous enhancer, depending what you are drawing.

Tree space atoms ’87

Living upside down and inside out like this, was scary and exhilerating – every atom of the air alive. Space and the feeling of interior and outer space, is the key. That same awareness implanted the dimensions of the Cube of Space and the Tree of Life, yet to come. It acts subconsciously nowadays, but informs my life and work, generally.

4our Trees

They form a four-towered “tower of alchemy” – the vessel, our body, the Tree of Life all in one. For a lucid and detailed guide to this practice, combining Kabbalah, the Grail, Yoga, breath work and Tibetan Buddhism, see The Tower of Alchemy by David Goddard, Weiser books 1999.

Caduceus Tower Tree 2002

Here is everything combined – the caduceus or healing polarity, the Kabbalah Tree, the levels of the Tower, an oyster idea, and a stimulating problem for the right and left brain: try to draw the solar and lunar spirals, both hands simultaneously, crossing over, without stopping or leaving the paper.

Grail Trees 2002

Sanctus sanctorum: rose cross: the trees’ rings: oyster shell: pyramid: pearl

Fountain linga

A much more recent drawing, done earlier this year. I copied it from a photo of a carved Shinto shrine in The Cosmic Embrace by John Stevens. Apart from reminding me of the Fountain symbolism in trees and human beings, it makes an unusual door-knocker.

….

Tree Spirit ’88

This image combining bud, yoni and encircling growth of time, is in my mind’s eye this week. It is like a baby’s hand in utero.

The Chakras on the Tree of Life (1992)

There are seven surrounding sheaths, probably for the planets. The sheaths of a tree become its bark. They fountain through the crown, and encircle again the root.

Roots in the Quantock hills

Tree seed Siva Shakti Yantra

31 October, this morning’s thought before posting: regarding cosmic synchrony, with life’s small details. This is more apparent to some of us, than to others. The visibility depends rather on the type of astrology pattern we are born into – and whether we can honour or whether we resist what we are given.

If it is hard to see synchrony as a whole, if daily life is frustration, fog and violence – focus on any one event, relationship or understanding, that has harmony. Cultivate it like a rose in a garden. Be creative with it. The principle invites its own, and gradually expands and links to its own – the osmosis of oasis. It is like a pattern of fields slowly becoming visible as fog or impediment clears:

“the silvery light that gleams around the clouds
breath taking, undulates
a floating, patchwork cloth of fields
whose margin into faery fades …”

But we have to keep practicing. That part of life which is magical or wise – it is not just an island. Keep giving it attention. The unfaltering principle is Self created. If I put my money on connectivity, sooner or later the connections appear for real, and are sustained. It is a dialogue, Self reflecting: but left to right, always changing.

1988

This self portrait was done without a mirror, with left and right hand simultaneously; building the bridge through the brain’s sides, subconscious and self conscious, crossing over. Here’s looking at you! The power of my left hand, which falters in life, is where the Teachers are.

Profiles welcome across atlantic; 1987

My heart goes out to all whose homes and lives are devastated in the big East Coast storm, and have to rebuild, recover and be prepared.

At election time: a wake up call. It makes the campaigning circus look somewhat irrelevant. Who looks best able to respond? Who has the gravitas and the troops? Who is truthful and trust worthy in emergency? Open question.

Elephant sky 1998

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BY THE WAY …

“The Man in the Ravine” echoes and invoked a certain spine tingling sound – for me – in Liszt’s late piano piece Sunt Lacrimae Rerum. It is in the Third Annees de Pelerinage. The music plummets to a fracturing, jarring depth and height: then into the abyss enters a Hungarian lullaby, far away and ancient like an angel, tender as a child – a strangely integrating alchemy. My favourite recording of this, if you can find it, is by Zoltan Kocsis; but this Youtube of Nyiregyazi playing it, has an antique curiousity value; and Liszt’s manuscript is displayed with it. The link in caps will find it on google, and other interpretations. Or the weblink, pasted onto your address bar, opens the video:

LISZT’S MANUSCRIPT – “SUNT LACRYMAE RERUM” (NYIREGYHÁZI) – YOUTUBE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzuO1B1p2PE

On the Liszt topic – (see my 11 August post Maestro – Some Views of Liszt) – there is more material on his and other composers’ work with Rosemary Brown – including recordings and sheet music – on Elene’s interesting blog, Elene Explores. (http://elenedom.wordpress.com)

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

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

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

Beyond the Box

Posted on September 23, 2012 by janeadamsart

Sarada Devi, the wife of Ramakrishna

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

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

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

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

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

Theatre Arunachala Vichara

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

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

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

Coastlines meeting socially

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

In bird watching mode

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

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

wood bird yantra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tree yantra

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

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

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

Sri chakra yantra

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

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

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

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

The Tailor of the Dark Field

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

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

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

Listen to the sound   
unseamed   
where waters meet;   

my point opens   
the way a diamond   
shines.

from Siva Poems, circa 1994

Tetrahedral Tree of Life (1993)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouni Sadhu

Orbits meet

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

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

Sacred India Tarot Archive: Creation of World Shakti & Nataraja

Posted on September 17, 2012 by janeadamsart

The Sacred India Tarot Archive, by Rohit Arya and Jane Adams

ardhanariswara at elephanta, mumbai

Rohit’s Notes: Autumn 2003

“The World – Nataraja but as Ardhanirishwara.

“This is an easy card in the sense that we need only the classic Nataraja dancing figure as shown in the illustration. The dwarf under the feet of the dancing god should NOT be left out, it is a vital part of the process. The choice of Nataraja as Ardhanarishvara is to indicate the completion of the Fool’s journey to a transcendence beyond the roles and attitudes of gender.

“What I would like in the arch of flame that surrounds the Nataraja, is to turn it around into Ourobouros The Serpent of Time, eating its own tail. It is also called the Worm of Time, or the Dragon of Time. Ideally I would like a dragon-like snake around the Ardhanariswara, but it should clearly be made of flames. The picture we send you should be of some help in creating this flame circle round the dancing god.

nataraja serpent dragon ref

“The background can be the consistent cosmic background we have used in all the other cards. This card should be kept simple, as the archetypal imagery is so powerful, we need nothing else.”

nataraja ref

Jane’s Notes: September 2012

This card dictated its own evolution. We ended up eventually, with TWO World cards – Siva Natarajan and World Shakti.

first Natarajan Ardhanariswara

Jane’s Notes: 2010

The deck’s first version of the World had Nataraja Ardhanariswara (Lord whose half is Woman) inside the dragon Ourobouros, and dancing on a demon. The illustration was somewhat cramped. It lacked space, and none of us were very pleased with it. Later on, an Ardhanariswara occurred spontaneously in the Minor Arcana, in the Lotuses suit (Cups).

In 2005, when completing the Suit of Lotuses, I painted the Queen of Lotuses, Rati the wife of Kama, as we planned. But Rohit and Gautam decided to upgrade this exciting Kundalini goddess to the World Shakti Herself, and to commission a new Rati for the suit of Lotuses.

As a result, we have a male AND a female “World” – Siva and his Shakti.

Shakti is the Sri Chakra Yantra herself, centred on the linga sarira around which is coiled the World Serpent. The design was inspired by an 18^th century tantric ritual painting.

ritual painting 18th century ref

In the palms of her hands are yonis which look like seeds. The serpents emerging from behind her breasts are the Sun and Moon – ida and pingala. The kundalini force, wrapped three and a half times around the Siva Lingam, is just awakening; the lotuses are a fountain of life, and so are the daisies.

World Shakti

What is expressed here, is the male vertical penetrating the female horizontal plane, timelessly; the living combination of chakra (wheel or mandala) with the uprising sap of the tree of life. Egg and sperm … the one crosses the other; they are unity.

Here also is the mystery of prakriti – the substratum of all manifestation: the ‘lattice’ of our world, in Solomon’s Song.

In the Western deck, the World card is traditionally and mysteriously hermaphrodite, being a return to the Bride dancing within the atom – the rotations of our world.

JA’s hermetic Tarot 21, The World (1991)

Correspondence: Rohit to Gautam – 6 April 2005

“Gautam – I think the queen is the best card ever done till today, but it is probably a waste for Rati. We could easily put this up as a World card. Rati is not so powerful, but we can rename this the Tripura Sundari – the essence of feminine supremacy, the female World card. The male World card could be the Nataraja, not the Ardhanariswara, so we will have two World cards which is okay. Hinduism is conflicted as to whether the ultimate form of god is male or female … … (correspondence continues regarding the Knight and Queen of Lotuses) …

“… it is the ultimate female Shakti depicted there, so we use it as one World, the Nataraja becomes the male World card, completing the journey of the Fool Rudra Siva – now Nataraja.

“It will be a slight drag for Jane, but really this card is too powerful, there is also a lingam which completes the Siva imagery which began the Fool card. I think Jane has reached an inspired vein in these last two cards, the Kama is actually the ithyphallic hunter Siva who has dalliances with the wives of Rishis in the forest of reeds near Chidambaram.

(Minor Arcana -Kama, the god of desire)

“I think Jane has to be troubled to draw the Queen once more, but it is her own fault for being so brilliant.

“This feminine Shakti is the best card till now, perhaps the new Nataraja will match it. Let her draw a Nataraja as she deems fit; I am certain something amazing will emerge, and that will be our second World card. Perhaps she could incorporate a Mahamritunjaya yantra in it, but beyond that I do not want to make any suggestions while she is in such an inspired state. Rohit.”

ardhanariswara ref: sculptures

As the Sacred India Tarot has a male and female death, similarly we continue to break new ground with a male and female World.

Shakti’s consort is Nataraja. So our new Nataraja – Lord of the Dance – was done a considerable time later than the other Major Arcana – almost the final painting in the whole project. His face is indrawn to bliss of the newborn, like a sustained orgasm. Like Rudra, the divine prototype through The Fool card in Sacred India Tarot, he holds aloft the drum and the flame, which infinitely open and close our kalpa – (aeon) – with a cymbal crash.

Natarajan

His other pair of arms bestow blessing and protection. In his lower right palm are the red and white triangles of the Sri Chakra Yantra. His left hand points inward, balancing his stance. His body is smooth and ageless, empowered by the emanations from planetary Kundalini and the cosmic yab-yum yantra created by his lower body.

This Yantra is – I think – of Bagalamukhi: the hypnotic power of the Goddess. It is a six-point star of Siva and Sakti triangles, with an added Shakti-feminine triangle.

David Frawley writes of Bagalamukhi: “A very beautiful woman walking by can make a man stop and lose his breath. The cosmic feminine power has a capacity to stun, stop or paralyse. These are aspects of the Goddess Bagalamukhi … Bagala means literally a rope or bridle – Mukhi means ‘face’. Bagala is a Goddess of speech, and as such is related to Tara and regarded as a form of her. When sound becomes manifest as light, Tara becomes Bagala. When the brilliant light of speech comes forth, then Tara gains the effulgence of Bagala and causes all things to become still. Bagala is thus the stunning radiance that comes forth from the Divine Word and puts the human or egoistic word to rest. … … What is our Self nature? What is the I Am in itself once divested of all transient identifications with which we confuse it? Such enquiry will bring the mind to rest.”

From Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddesses

In the deck itself, you may notice the serpent foreground is replaced by the traditional demon which was in the earlier design: Siva makes the personal ego his dance floor. In the new Natarajan however, the serpent power IS Siva’s laid back rotational ecstasy. They turn perhaps in opposite directions like the figure of eight: an electron’s double rotation through manifest and virtual states.

Note: the World Serpent was introduced to the deck through Vishnu, the Magician.

Correspondence: Rohit to Gautam – 16 April 2005

“The World is now a stunning card … What is there to say? It is as good as the female World, the kundalini snakes add an inspired touch to this composition. I think this card is a genuine achievement. I am deliriously happy. Rohit.”

The Sacred India Tarot Archive, cards 0 – 14 can be found at http://aryayogi.wordpress.com SITA cards 15 – 21 are on janeadamsart.wordpress.com also. TO BE CONTINUED/

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

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.

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

In Touch: Art as Healing

Posted on August 22, 2012 by janeadamsart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quantock ponies 2009

He art

Sunflower and Paddle Steamer

looking at me

Line dance 1

Line dance 2

Learning to

Learning (2) – a painting done in 2007

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

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

Ode. This is moon talk, soul talk.

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

Flower, a despair of Painters.

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

flower the Despair of painters 1988

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

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

The Elephant’s Child

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

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

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

Quantock heather path after rain

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

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

22 August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Compass: Go High, Deep, Far and Wide

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

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

Tom’s Torch of Time – an Olympic Relay alchemy

Posted on August 8, 2012 by janeadamsart

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

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

Here is the flame from within it, looking up.

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

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

Four seasons electron figure-eight

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

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

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

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

Torch bearer (1955)

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

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

Leda & Swan (1957)

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

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

Draw a Yantra

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

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

Cosmic egg and wood grain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure of Eight, by Elisabeth Tomalin

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

Tom Heatherwicks Seed Cathedral

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

Tom’s Torch – the Miracle

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

The horizontal yantra rose into the vertical stem.

Torch bearer (1954)

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

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

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

What is my Crossroads? What is your Crossroads?

How does the river flow and feel?

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

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

Sunflower

Relay – Centaur, Athene and Child (1987)

Solomon’s Seal: Flower of Life

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

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

Snowdrop: In touch, across the Seas (1988)

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

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

Sacred India Tarot – Creation of the Tower

Posted on August 1, 2012 by janeadamsart

THE SACRED INDIA TAROT: CREATION OF THE TOWER CARD –

Siva destroys the Triple City with a single Arrow

Siva Tripurantaka

Jane’s Notes, August 2012

Our process material for this card is unusually scanty. I can find no images sent by Rohit, there is just this small picture (above) which I found online. There is not one word in my journal, about drawing Siva Tripurantaka. It was done immediately after the Devil card – Mara and his Three Daughters. It was difficult to compose (see Rohit’s notes, below) but satisfying to do. Rohit’s archetypal interpretation penetrates the core of this Arcanum – the dismantling of falsehood, the revelation of Truth by a single arrow.

In the west, the Tower card has a bad reputation. It suggests catastrophe, the snap of a tension build-up. But when we look deeper, this card is also called the House of God, and the thunderbolt destroying the tower, is the Lightning Flash down the Tree of Life – from the Holy One to Earth. The themes are awakening and speech – from the Burning Bush to Moses – and it is ruled by Mars. Enlightenment shocks. A chrysalis cracks open to release the butterfly. Eggs break for birds to hatch: seeds in the ground dissolve to root and shoot. Our food beaks down to release vital energy. It is fitting that in the Sacred India Tarot, Siva the Creator-Destroyer rules this card.

The Shattered Tower (from Jane’s Hermetic Tarot deck 1991)

Black Babel awaits pre-destined hour. 
Thunderbolt shatters the stressed out Tower.         
Lightning sets a crooked house aflame.                  
Built on fattened thought of name and fame –         
except the Lord build, how can it flower?

Welcome the crash of so called doom! 
Not invariably a cause for gloom, 
for in the tumbling down of adverse fate 
is a hidden blessing, aye true and great. 
Old walls falling, reveal the room. 

The edifice of this petty mind 
must be destroyed, to "salve" the blind.

Alan Jacobs 1992

Rohit’s Notes – September 2002:

The sons of Taraka, who had been slain by Skanda, with great austerities regained their race’s domination over the universe. They had three strongholds, floating cities from which they controlled the worlds. One was of iron, another of silver, and the last of gold. The boon granted them was that death would not come until their three cities were simultaneously destroyed by a single arrow. The cities would align in one straight line only once every thousand years, and that too for a single instant. Vishnu agreed to become the missile for this venture, but all his strength would be taken up in destroying the cities. Somebody with greater strength had to shoot him at the precise moment and impart this Will into the flight, so that the divine missile could crash into the Tripura.

Siva took on himself the combined strengths of the gods, for only then could Vishnu be launched – it needed that much power. This earned him the name of Mahadeva, the Great god, for he could bear the burden of the powers of all the gods, without collapsing. Brahma drove the chariot, and at the fateful moment when the cities aligned, the Great god let fly, and the three cities and most of their inhabitants were smashed out of their flying security.

This will be somewhat of a challenge to depict, as the traditional sculpture focuses on the dominant figure of the Great Siva Mahadeva releasing the arrow. The cities themselves are shown in a corner, if at all – as the act of the god, not the destruction, is deemed significant.

Since the Tower is about the smashing down of the negative and irrelevant, the pompous and pretentious, we need to focus on the cities. I would suggest we keep Siva in the picture, as we do not want to lost the positive energy that brings. We can have him upon his chariot, in the classic posture of having released the arrow (who is Vishnu/thunderbolt) in the lower left hand corner of the card. We can show the three demon cities made respectively of gold, silver and iron, aligned in a dead straight line in space, and being devastated as the arrow smashes through them.

That will mean the line of action in the card will be from lower left corner to upper right corner, with the destruction of the cities in the middle and upper two-thirds of the card. We can show the cities blowing apart, on fire and so on, whatever seems dramatic. The iron city is black, the silver city comes next, and on top is the golden city. In the upper section of the card, which may be somewhat vacant because of the manner in which the action unfolds, we can show a human figure riding away on a bull. This was a demon devotee of Siva saved by Nandi.

Sacred India Tarot card 16, The Tower

Jane’s Notes (Retrospective)

In fact this cosmic bull and rider figure conveyed to me the release of Taurean stability after destroying that unstable demonic investment. I sensed the astrological aeon; a unique alignment within our present era, through a “tipping point”. Ten years ago, iin 2002, the stock market was still on a crazy roll. Sooner or later, a crash was inevitable, falling to a level of reality-based securities (the Bull again.)

Our Tower in the west is split by a lightning flash from heaven to earth. Siva’s Tower – his bow-shot – opens up the heavens from below.

The Tower is a profound alchemic symbol of transformation by heat. Towers and turrets proliferate in alchemical art. It is also called athanor, meaning furnace or oven.

My journal does record: “On 21 September, an earthquake turned over Britain’s sleep, about 1AM – ten kilometers deep, a shift of plates, as happens here once a decade or so, to about 4.8 on the richter scale. It heaved, and tension released. There are many more earthquakes in Britain than I realized. I didn’t feel a thing, but tremors were noticed in N E London. The epicenter was Birmingham – it has a big rock under it; London has an artesian well. The reports are not of waves, as in my recent earthquake dreams, but a juddering sort of vibration. It threw a few persons out of bed, damaged some buildings and cut power lines.

“Kabbalistically: British fault-lines are DEEP down in the subconscious, under the ground. Their quakes make less surface disturbance than more sensitive zones elsewhere.

“There is tension all over the country, against what the government wants to do in Iraq.”

Correspondence: Gautam – 24 September 2002

“The rise of energy through the card is wonderful. It’s exceedingly dynamic, and we are very happy with it as it is.”

These verses on Siva’s Destruction of the Three Cities, were first drafted by Alan Jacobs in about 1992. Jane revised them recently, and added a few details:

Three demon sons of Devil Taraka
became ascetics to earn a boon.
Impressed by their self mortification,
Brahma granted gratification -
they craved Eternal Life!
“There is no escape from Death,” said he.
“Choose again, for felicity.”
.
 “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 - ”
.
Satan Maya conjured in space 
three invincible Cities 
of brazen gold, silver nacre and black iron 
for these devils to overwhelm the world.
.
They broke apart the sacred 
and violated all known bounds.
The gods begged Brahma to destroy these towns 
whose magic centres fly about at will, and 
just once in a thousand years 
for one single split second, align! 
.
Said Brahma their Creator: “who 
but Lord Shiva the Destroyer can?”
.
As aeons into chaos plunged, 
Shiva 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. 
He made from the host of gods his chariot and bow, 
strung those demon citadels on the eternal NOW, 
and loosed his arrow … PFATTT! 
What chance Tripura against 
the One?
.
As with lightning in reverse, 
heaven’s thread was pulled 
together, and cracked 
the show.
.
Unwilling to burn time 
and space to ash, Siva then held back his fire, 
and let the White Bull, 
his sperm among stars, roam free.
.
All the fecund planet peoples jubilant, 
resumed their natural state 
as the worlds came back 
to balance.
.
Ramana who lives on Siva’s hill 
says: “mind turns inward with dispassion. 
Realisation is slow. The One Self 
permeates triplicity.”
.
Brahmin priests steeped in holy lore, 
say the cities 
gold, silver and black, are bodies 
causal, subtle, gross, 
which ruled by desire’s shrouds, 
bind mens’ souls.
.
Brahmin priests say Siva destroys 
the demon cities' grip, 
right Now within 
the “where?”.
                                    1992: 2009

Alt:

... made the host of gods and cosmic forces 
into his chariot, arrow and bow.  
He, the mighty One then 
aligning the cosmic tides, 
loosed his single shaft 
and so destroyed 
to smithereens 
.
(the three demonic cities)

In the late summer of 2002, we all lived in the shadow of the twin towers. But in my experience, conscious work along this path – the path of the Tarot Tower – has almost invariably – and unexpectedly – revealed my inner Guru – dispeller of darkness. Communications open!

Neolithic (2)

Posted on July 31, 2012 by janeadamsart

Rock trail

31 July 2012

Some visitors are colliding fish, but some are sperms and stay.

I feel suddenly my Neolithic lifetime and message by the river, with the impression of axes to grind. In the Neolithic life I knew about the heart of stone and flinty chip flake vein and water, it sang in my blood. When I make an edge or point, it is a jewel. It converges facets and ridges like a mountain, an emerald, a diamond. It is a weapon. Its target is my food and fire. Because those facets flow and curve along the stone’s yielding paths, it is a Himalaya peak. It is warm, it flows and throbs. From its chafing with another, flies the spark; the primordial hearth-fire. I cradle in my hands the smoking tinder, like a birds nest. As a human I carve and erode stone, like the sea does, but quicker.

Sands

Conventional gems in the jewellers trade, are trapped in little velvet cases and sold into marriage.

The Stone of Life in Sadhana is chipped, sculpted, chiselled. As the teeming decades pass, the Himalayan blade emerges, translucent, delicate, unadorned.

The Sword of Sadhana is a pencil being sharpened: alchemy’s immersion through fire and flow.

River falls

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

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

Robert – Popeye the Sailor Man

Posted on July 30, 2012 by janeadamsart

From “Robert Adams” group on facebook –

“Many people call me, they want me to talk about this, or to change some of the things I do, or to do this, or to do that.

If I were a minister or a philosopher and rehearsed the program, and had a written text to go by, then there can be changes.

But I am what I am, and that’s what I am, I’m Popeye the sailor man.

I do not plan anything.

I do not have any rehearsals.

This body just does what it does.

What you see is what you get, nothing more and nothing less.”

– Robert Adams –

Robert: It has no end (1997, a posthumous portrait)

‘Student: I think part of the problem is, speaking for myself of course, is that I don’t believe it will happen. I feel it happens just to a favored few, like Jesus or Buddha or yourself. What’s the sense of trying it if it’s not going to happen?

R: Well, if you don’t feel it’s not going to happen, what can you do? Go see a movie. (students laugh) You’ve got to realize you are greater than you think, and you’ve got the same power within you as everybody else does. It may appear to be asleep, but as you work on yourself, work on yourself, work on yourself, you will awaken it. And one day it will become stronger than you are and take you over completely and you’ll be free. But you’ve got to keep on working on yourself and stop putting yourself down. That’s the worst thing you can do is to put yourself down. That’s blasphemy because you’re putting God down.

Think of yourself as a higher person, love yourself, worship yourself, bow to yourself. You are greater than you think.’

Robert Adams ♥

myself ear Robert

A post from thewondrousdharma.com today:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

~ Marianne Williamson

This is from Marianne’s 1992 book, ‘A Return to Love’. It has been erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela’s inaugural speech.

Vessel, Spine, Mooncrab

“Let us form a Vessel”

In my mind today, with Popeye the Sailor Man, is this sketch (1987) of being the boat – spine and ribs. Down the hatch … The vessel is a taut membrane to the pressure of the deep – a parchment or papyrus for the pen. Of course, the wisdom arrives from the deep as looking-glass script, and we automatically convert it!

Awareness tackles what comes along – sharp rocks, islands, lighthouses, sharks, sunshine, storms. It is jaunty and nautical. Down in the hold is a sense of gold – space of the boat’s shell, with along it, the curved flourishes of the hardwood keel. The keel is six inches thick, and it goes right down into the deep. In the golden space of the hold is all the boat’s furnishing of life, en passant … but I do not see it. The keel is spine, the golden space is breath.

Now I am the sailor man! The hands are because I was playing the piano, touching keys, practicing Cesar Franck. The claws – oars of lateral sensitivity – each side, are my Moon-Crab sign. We travel space through day and night, the deep.