The Health and Spirituality Yantra

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My journey in 1991 was a major turning point or “seeing”, from which I later on wrote The Field of the Dead, on eclipse and standing stones – to be published here shortly.   Meanwhile, my coastal Sadhana from Strumble Head to Pwllderi youth hostel continues –  a rediscovery of views and friendship …

Sunset, Cap Frehel from Alet in Brittany, 1987

August 1991:  Sunset

Earlier this summer, in France with my sister and her children, I went walking and devised a way to contemplate the Star of Solomon alchemically:

Sunset Star and Sulphur Symbol

Quicksilver is the descending triangle.  It is the silver sea, reflecting light … and it is the receptive Mercury or mind whose power expands up the stem, with the thermal fire of concentration.

Gold (or sulphur/fire) is the ascending triangle, the inner or Divine Signature of all things.  It pre-exists the silver sea, but only appears when the silver sea is in a prime state – receptive concentration.   Drawn to a point, receptive concentration becomes “fire” (spark) or flame.

Now see the points – the apex – of both triangles, the one above, and the one below.  The silver point reflects when focused, the point of the gold.  When alchemical mercury (the mind) is one-pointed inward, it transmutes.   It reveals … gold.

“Before time began, I am.”   “No mind, I am the Self.”  “Before Abraham was, I am.”

It rises like the flame symbol:  the primordial radiation.  This is prana, the breath of the sea.  The gold seems to be born in the silver…  but only because the silver reflecting it, gives up into it herself.  This is Self surrender.  Silver is the lunar organ of response to the Sun’s light.

**

Now, in Pembrokeshire last week, at Pwllderi youth-hostel on the cliffs near Strumble Head Lighthouse, I watched the sun set:

Silver sea or tide, quiescent and still.

The sun, the Great Sage, cannot be seen.  He descends behind a horizontal bank of cloud which ends a little above the horizon.  But the quiescent silver reflects with a slowly growing intensity, his light behind the cloudy veil.   On the distant water, a golden egg is laid.  A tiny line of dazzling fire gradually fattens to an ellipse – a vesica or lens of fire – upon the silver element.  It becomes too bright to look at.   Then an elliptic shadow of gold begins to form beneath the fire.  It draws light into itself as it embodies slowly a sphere and then a pathway to the seer here.

As the reflected fire disappears into the expanding path, I see at last the Sun’s golden echo on the water.

Now the echo lengthens rapidly, as shadows do.   Subtly, a misty gold pathway awaits the Lord from horizon to the seer.    Then the Star Himself emerges, unbearably fiery, molten radiant gold – shield the eyes!   Everywhere lights up;  the sea is ablaze.   Phoenix!

An unseen bank of mist lingers along the horizon.  Very soon the star of gold disappears into it, the path fades and the sea turns grey.

The use of symbols is rooted in Nature’s object-lessons.  Sunset is not just a photo;  it berths and births right now.   What is seen?

On another evening, the Sun did not appear.  A part of the sea blushed softly gold for a time, in a bridal mist of expectancy, as if embracing something which could not possibly be seen.

**

Hey.  With reference to the point, or needles’ eye in meditation’s silver sea, I just came across this, in The Mountain Path (summer 1991) – from Sri Ramana’s letter to Ganapati Muni:

“When the mind having pure sattva (calm and purity) as its characteristic, begins attending to the ‘I … I’ which is the sign of the forthcoming direct experience of the Self, the downward facing Heart becomes upward facing, and remains in the form of That (Self).”

Ramana Puja

And this, from a conversation with S.S.Cohen:

“Bhagavan,” says Cohen, “you said yesterday that there exists in the human body a hole as small as a pin-point, from which consciousness always bubbles out to the body.  Is it open or shut?”

Ramana replies, “It is always shut, being the knot of ignorance which ties the body to consciousness.  When the mind drops away in the temporary Kevala Nirvikalpa (limited bliss/peace), it opens but shuts again.  In Sahaja (unlimited bliss/peace) it remains always open.”

“How is it during the experience of ‘I … I’ consciousness?”

“This consciousness is the key which opens it permanently.”

**

The Self is not a fixture.  The I … i which Ramana speaks includes the fluid dialogue, small-I into the I – the brook and the Sea.  Self is stability, which appears to be fixed, but encompasses everything.  Small i darts in and out of I, like tadpoles.

And David Godman’s comment:  “If the Heart becoming upward facing, is the equivalent of this small consciousness-emitting hole opening, then this is another instance of Bhagavan saying that abidance in the ‘I … I’ – (pulsation of pure being) – “is the way to make the Heart open permanently.  When the Heart is permanently open, the world which was previously assumed to be external, is experienced not as separate names and forms, but as one’s own Self, as the immanent Brahman.”

**

Stormy sunset: St Malo 1987

**

Lighthouse Scrible:  Kabbalah

One evening, I walked to Strumble Head Lighthouse.   It is about five miles.   I went “up the mountain” first, behind the Youth Hostel.  This landmark can be seen from miles around, and from it you see the whole of the Welsh “Lands End” as if from an island.  Around it flow, like ocean currents, the fields great and small, of vivid agricultures.

Below the summit’s rocky tumuli I found a road towards the lighthouse, over the undulating fields.  When I got there, night had fallen.  The light is a revolving sequence of One, Two, Three, Four dazzling flashes clockwise, over the farmland. During the dark interval, One, Two, Three arms of light sweep the sea beyond.   The fourth seaward beam re-emerges in blinding light, as the first of the four landward flashes.  The fourth of these is the first over the sea;  and so on, in perfect sequence.

In numerical spiral, the four pulses are dovetailed into the Dance of Three:  the primal circuitry.

An electron dances a dual revolution of matter with the dark sea of anti-matter.  Each side – like a seed, or the ventricles of the heart – reflects and gives rise to the other.

TETRAGRAMMATON is the unspoken Name (J,H,V,H) of God.

In the Hermetic art, TETRAGRAMMATON applies to the four fold fertile rhythm throughout Nature and Creation.  Without it, no heart would beat, no substance form.

Father is YOD, Mother is HEH, their Child is VAV, and their Family is YOD, inseminating the next generation and the next.  It is like the blood through veins, the river’s fall through valleys, and gravity’s gentle curve of the infinite.

Tetragrammaton cycle

**

Strumble Light is a squat building, white and very clean.  It sits on a green tufted panther of volcanic rock.  A light metal bridge over a narrow surge of sea connects it to the mainland.

That night, I sat and watched its cyclic light.  The glowing geometries of the multiple lens rotate, strangely hermetic, within its lattice window.  Rhythmic arms of the beam sweep the night.   A scribbled “Scripture” of light flashes along the pitch dark craggy cliffs – the Bible of an instant.

My walk back to Pwllderi youth-hostel and my tent, along this precipitous coastal path in the dark, is an adventure!   It takes about an hour;  it is rugged, and some stretches of it are unknown ground.

The path opens an instinct of itself ahead.  Sometimes it is lit by the flicker of JHVH.  For the rest, my feet must find it.   Attune them to the terrain:  hurry not!   Lean back, and let my feet carry me home … for they seem to know, like wild ponies do.

The script is again, as on my bicycle earlier – “Lean back into Now.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12547928@N07/7430530274/lightbox/

and I just discovered a photo of Strumble Light at night in http://judeness.wordpress.com/2009/01 - (star, light and houses) … a visual feast of a blog!

How often along these paths and cliffs, I thought of St Christopher carrying his sacred burden over the river.  It grew heavier and heavier upon him.  It clung to him like an angry old woman, like the tired body of the Spirit going uphill.  The higher you leap the heavier it gets, O Gravity, you Grave One.  Finally he reached the other bank, and set down none other but the Christ Child.  The act of kindness realized him.

Franz Liszt set this to music:  piano and baritone.

When I get really tired after a long scramble, it helps to become a child being carried home, ride pick-a-back on this body.  “Take me home!”   The trick is to let my hips and lower spine be shock absorbers:  roll ball-socket, loose and yielding:  let Yoga in motion be the auto pilot.   It is about degrees of unstressed awareness.  It takes practice.  It is hard when fatigued in life – difficult not to strain ahead and wish this steep slope were over.

Very subtle is the way my feet, in relation to an alert quietude of mind, seek and find rocks and pebbles for support or stumble … hold gently, firmly the ground, like hands.

… don’t get in the way of the goat, pony or alchemical saint -  Fulcanelli in La Mystere des Cathedrales makes much of St Christopher!  – who trundles homeward over uncharted and untrod terrain.  The starry constellations are received in moments when I rest, downward into the earthy, stony track, like a root.

Small stones glow.

Who am I?  the mobile root of the sky at night, en route.

Revelation flashes a Bible over the cliffs:  a lifetime touches, climbs and finds them.

**

Pwllderi is just visible in the background.

Friendship

On the sloping patch of ground behind the Youth-hostel, I made friends with a large, orange and yellow tent surrounded by a chaos of self sufficiency.   Her name is Oni.  She works with British Airways.  When she isn’t flying around in stratospheric cabins and being well groomed, she takes off with her portable cave, well away from the flight paths, turns into a shaggy troubadour and cooks lengthy feasts out of doors at midnight.  Hiking around burial grounds and standing stones with sketchpad and watercolours, Oni converses with unexpected outlines of Providence.   You could hear her cheerful voice from the other side of the field.

When she arrived, she pitched next door to me.  Oh no, one of those Talkers!   Will she go on all night?  But then we got acquainted.  “Come and have a bite,” she invited. “I like sharing things.”  And a gale of anecdotes and escapades flowed forth from this scamp:  a kindred spirit.   We quickly found our mutual affinities – to hang out!  Make no plans!  Travel alone and meet everyone!  Follow the weather, that trail of the unexpected which delivers up a musical mosaic so much Larger than Life!

As wind and imminent rain built up for the night, we sat beneath a drunkenly swaying GAZ lamp by the awning – I thought she was an entire family, she has so much stuff everywhere, but no, it’s just herself – and discussed life.  We dined on trout, baked potatoes and bullet peas mixed up with mushrooms which she cooked in foil over some kind of coal in the grass, in the dark.  The coal took forty minutes to become incandescent.   As the wind gusted and buffeted, Oni badgered back and forth;  we sipped airline Drambuies to keep warm.  She found also a half bottle of airline Medoc, and finally dished up supper in tin plates with the aplomb of a grubby eleven year old.

Presently we became aware that we had new neighbours.  Two young Belgian boys, struggling to peg their tent in pitch dark in the gale, appeared in the cluttered entrance to Oni’s cave.   Their hairy white shanks in very short shorts trembled knock-knee in the night like daddy-long-legses. “’Ow can it be,” they gesticulated “that you two sit out here like this, like midi on the Riviera taking ze sun, ‘ow can you be so strong and tough, look, we don’ know ‘ow to make this tent and the wind, cold, dark, and the legs zey won’t stop doing zis …”

Later, after I crawled back under my patched and archaic sway-backed canvas to sleep, I heard Oni calling me.   Jane, there’s a curtain of vertical columns of light!  Over there in the northern sky – I’m sorry but I had to tell you, you’ve got to look.  Isn’t it bizarre? … like aurora borealis without colour, but it must be, you know it IS THE NORTHERN LIGHTS!

I laboriously untied my tent-flaps yet again from the pole, looked out and saw it too.  What else could it be?  The stars were all out with it, very bright. Earlier today, the sea was glassy calm, and the Warden said the sea-birds were upset, the weather’s about to change, there must be something very unusual in the atmosphere …?   – and I went back in and to sleep feeling strangely happy and replete, my body into the hard ground.   It was the only night I slept well – the previous two nights I didn’t sleep AT ALL.   I decided to take a leaf from Oni:  invest in some up to date gear.

My cave is regarded with derision by herself and by a middle aged couple nearby, who are trying out a workmanlike eight-man edifice.  That’s not a tent!  You can’t go camping in that, it won’t last five minutes.  It’s a toy, you do it at school, you put it up in the garden … Ha ha ha!

My greyish-white old canvas and draughty sway-backed faded flysheet, is too genuinely an archetypal tent to be convincing:  and at least 30 years old.  It’s a snail wondering if it is an aeroplane.   However, when it blew really hard, it was Oni and the eight-man couple who got no sleep for the buffeting of synthetic fibre and the struggle to keep their nice modern caves attached to the ground.  They toiled off to Fishguard in the morning for a fresh supply of pegs, while I set out for another long walk along the coastal path to see the big waves.   So they ate their words!  My cave hugged the ground imperturbably as Gibralter with the wind blowing through it.

But on my walk, I began to feel bothered.  Shouldn’t I have stayed to help them?  I wanted to talk with Oni some more.  I felt shy and uncollected.  On my way back from Strumble, along a stretch of path straight as an arrow – a NOW through banks of golden gorse and flowering heather, who should be approaching but herself, rosy face, multi-coloured jersey and rucksack with sketching things, blond hair a-tangle.  We laughed, and wondered what we both look like when we are back home.  Oni was off for another long hike, then back to work in her metal tubes.  We didn’t quite know how to throw a line over into the passing ship, so we left it like that.  I had an idea.  When I got back I wrote my address on some paper and rolled it around her windscreen wiper.   I found her car with no trouble – it was unmistakable.  She had poured her cave straight into it.

A letter arrived this week:

“Dear Jane, I was very amused on returning from my hike to find the ‘Post’ had called! … I really enjoyed my few days camping and hiking in Wales.  Like you, I so enjoy hiking around and meeting similar unusual people, all roughing it for a bit.  I wonder how the rest of your walk went.  The weather has sure turned beautifully hot again – we’ve been frying in our metal tubes – the aircraft!   Yesterday we flew to Madrid – 110 degrees F!!   Glad we were only there for an hour.

“My last day’s walk was weird – total contrast.  A sea mist swirled round the Tors, and you could believe you were wandering around Snowdon.  But even in the mist I came across another of those wonderful brilliant hued rock gardens round the Tor summit.  Strange shapes of hikers flapped through the rocks, like lost souls haunting the wilds! By the time the rain set in, I was on my way home, in the evening, but I was so tired from the previous night’s disturbed sleep and re-pegging – I actually camped again, beyond Bath.  I was falling asleep at the wheel.  All good wishes, Oni.”

**

Coastal path 1991 – place of meeting!

After meeting her like that, the day unrolled many treasures.  Wild cloud-bank of mist drove in from the West and over the tor.  I raced to the top to see, greet and be enveloped in the cloud.  Next I journeyed to the end of the great Dinosaur headland, where the sky cleared again, and I began my exploration to the cove of purple sandstone.  (See On the Coastal Path with Krishnamurti and Ramana)

For it was Oni who directed me to those paths, south of the Dinosaur.  On one of her own big treks, she found and investigated a wool mill and a track leading down to a dramatic beach further down.  “You know I love those folded rock formations!  Weird shapes, colours, terrific …” – and she found a rope tied to a metal bolt, which dangled some thirty feet or so to the base of the cliff.   Down the rope she went.  “What a GREAT way to go for a swim.  You know, the swim I had in that beach is one of the best swims I EVER had.”

After I discovered the cove of violet stones, the spiral snake and titanic Hartland families, I too found that place, further down the coast, and swung down the rope to swim in bouncy peaked rollers coming in over the sand.  There was rather a lot of seaweed, and after my swim I found a large jellyfish stranded and collapsed upon the beach.  But the water in the slanting sunlight was a joy;  a smile for Oni’s naughty tousled shape, in that green place above the beach where the path descends;  her friendly grin like a carousing minstrel.   Surprised and slightly alarmed at a depth of affection like a sign-post.

We are connected, a long way back.  Somewhere, we were a pair of mates, mess-mates maybe;  and now the paths swing back together, luring us to Strumble in wild Wales.   I am at peace with whatever comes next, and the feeling fades, being just a signal.   Much there is to share and learn with this funny person.  Much of value.

Here is a drawing she sent me:

Leo Taurus by Oni

**

**

The Warden

Everybody, in the tide of walkers and conversations passing through Pwllderi, was seeing more seals than I.  They arrived back from the cliffs with their tales of spotting whole familes with babies sunning themselves on the rocks.

I LOVE seals.  To see one gives me great kudos, encouragement and hope, during a walk.  But try as I might, I saw only three.  And they were a long way off.  I was so jealous of those gifted walkers.   I was consoled by a few stewards of Neptune who also abound in these parts:  dolphins and porpoises with tall black dorsal fins rose suddenly in a swell of off-shore current, to snort and blow.  One pair was greyish white.

Mostly I saw only jelly-fish, hundreds and hundreds of them.  They quivered like phallic toadstools in the deep water along the “lions’ paw” headlands, and put the damper on carefree swimming.

Neither was I very successful in locating Ancient Monuments indicated on my map.  I got very exhausted floundering around in gorse, and trying to cross the country from one pile of stones to another while avoiding farms and barking dogs.   I am not a gifted tourist of Neolithic wisdom and energy fields.   I seem to dowse it only on the cliffs themselves.  I was extremely annoyed that Oni discovered so many more monuments than I did.   Holidaying on the coastal path, to rough it in the open, gets lonely and tiring.  I’m dragging my feet up some muddy lane.  Then suddenly, along comes a familiar face or pair of people I spoke to earlier;  their legs are scratched, they are trying to find a route through a string of cow-patted farmyards, they offer a drink and some chocolate, we start floundering around in the gorse together, seeking unsuccessfully yet another Gothic Site of Burial on the O.S.map.   The air lifts;  I rejoin my human tribe;  the tiredness is gone.   I am not a hundred-per-cent hermit.

Pwllderi Youth-hostel is perched over the bay between the Dinosaur and the slumbering lions of Strumble.  The Warden comes out into the sunset each evening.  He raises his binoculars to inspect the cliff-path in each direction:  the coming night’s clientele.  “Where are they?  There’s no one coming along yet.  As soon as I sit down to have me supper, blow me there’ll be seven of ‘em here won’t there, wanting to check in all at once.”

Mine host is a dedicated character.  He genially receives the motley tide of travelers through his shelter – a thin old billygoat with bushy old-mans-beard and two merry teeth, like the guinea-pigs he keeps on grass near the tents behind his house.   The terrain of his visitors is unpredictable, like the West Wales climate.   Sometimes a straggle of lone eccentrics … a group of vociferous Germans … efficient girls traveling together with maps and lists … families … hikers and bikers … a party of twittering school kids.   Some nights have a mushrooming of tents under his wing, and other nights none at all.  He collects ancient bottles, skulls, sheep bones and cacti.  These profusely decorate his panoramic verandah, where weary walkers sit, smoke and admire the sunset.  One of the cacti opened during my visit into a huge pink flower of love.  Mine host danced attendance, hospitably.

The Warden of Pwllderi is on excellent terms with the farming community of Strumble Head.  He looks out for their cattle.  They look out for his groceries.  When the weather is rough, the mutual assistance over the battered landscape is close-knit.  The plumber arrived for a long, lilting conversation.  He never gets any work done when he visits Pwllderi, so there are still no showers.   I sat on the drystone wall, bone-tired after a long day, and watched with vague absorbtion, two efficient young men unpack and pitch.   The plumber thought I was feeling sad, and began to scold the Warden.   “Look you, boy-bach, pwy ydy’r merch ifanc’ ma?  why don’t you cheer her up a bit? – you haven’t got that canoe of yours out for a while now, have you.   Take her fishing in it round Penbwchy Head and show her some seals!   Go on.  Don’t be so selfish.”

The Warden runs a little shop inside the Youth-hostel, as there aren’t any others for miles.  In his cubby hole by the TV he keeps a mirror artfully angled over his head, so he can see instantly when SHOP is required;  or the arrival of a new “cave” upon the back of its knock-knee’d snail.  As soon as you stop by the hatch, he appears tetchily and carefully balances his cigarette on a nicotine-rimmed shelf.  If he’s run out of eggs he jumps in his jeep and drives off to fetch some from the nearest farm.

There is a very beautiful and comely young woman in the house, who is referred to as “My Assistant”.  In the evening she puts on a white overall, and puts the suppers (pies from the local bakery plus tinned veg) in the oven – for those who are not self-catering.  He gossips.  She sweeps the floor around him.  Perhaps she is studying to be a Warden.  In the morning there is an invariable strident bellow:  “BREAKFAST!”

Self catering – like Self-enqiury – saves money and is flexible with time.  The kitchen gets crowded along a bank of baby bellings with polite travelers struggling to assemble toast, bacon, cornflakes and tea.  “So where have YOU been then?” snapped the Warden when I tottered in very late at night after cycling from St David’s, and asked sleepily for a tin of Irish stew.  It is oddly relaxing to prepare a meal.  The effort of my ride through many miles of dark lanes, still rings in my ears.  The wind again begins to blow hard.   Will my Rock of Gibralter stand another night of this?  Out again into the dark, with a torch, the busy work to re-peg.

My mother near Pwllderi, 2002

**

Those volcanic cliffs to Strumble – splayed paws of the Great Cat – you know what they also are, so rounded?   Seals.  The seals know their own.  Between each toe of the Great Cat are deep, Gothic caverns and archways.  Put my foot with that landscape, to wander.  Let sole and toes hold flexibly the ground along the trail, like a hand.   When the sole of my foot is sensitive and mobile, the rest of my body flows.   This sense also in my palm and along my fingers, reaches to touch … who knows what it wants, or grasps?

Discover then, my fellow monkey, that forgotten knowledge in your OTHER pair of hands which hold so lightly, yet so close the ground.   Have you a head?   Look, and see!

**

Satsang AGM, Ramana Foundation UK, 1994

 **

DRAWINGS BY ONI:

 Lift, by Oni

**

Crossing the tracks;  by Oni 

**

Stream lining – cycles to rebirth:   by Oni

**

**

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.

Orange Durga Yantra 11 x 14 Color Photograph (11-56)

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English: Sri yantra on a copper plaque. Length of a side : 11 cm (frame) ; 7 cm (yantra) Français : Sri yantra sur plaque de cuivre. Longueur d’un côté : 11 cm (cadre) ; 7 cm (yantra) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As we have seen in the previous posts, even if  read in different meanings and at different levels of understanding, the Sri Yantra is basically a representation of the principle of Creation/Destruction, or to clarify the meaning of destruction because it is not to be understood in its common meaning, it would be rather better to say “disaggregation”.

We’ve also seen that the first and main phase of this principle is represented by an intertwining of several triangles, and here we’ll elucidate this field of the Yantra. Indeed, we can notice that the number of intertwined triangles is nine, a specific and sacred number itself which represents the Universe; in the field of numerology this is the “perfect“ number, because once multiplied, the addition of the numbers that compose the result is always nine: 9×2=18, 1+8=9; 9×7=63, 6+3=9; etc…

So, in a numerological meaning, the number 9 is also a symbol of the Universe, and even if it’s in constant expansion (multiplication), remains always the same (result of the addition).

Nine is also a multiple of three, and this means that evolution, the Creation moves in triads (a reference to the Law of Three).

But, let’s look at the triangles: there are five with the vertex upward, and four with the vertex downwards; the five triangles recall the feminine principle, the four recall the masculine. Both series of triangles are generated from the central point Bindu, and they evoke the division from the primogenial unity in the two principles of what receives and what gives.

There’s also a relation with the subjective consciousness, represented by the four upward triangles and the objective consciousness that is represented by the five downward triangles.

This play of intertwining of the triangles describes the way the non- form has assumed a form and how the two opposing principles arose in this same form; there is another “message” that mustn’t be ignored, because it’s of great importance for our individual evolution that, in some way, reflects the evolution of the Universe in which we live: the necessity to integrate these opposing principles in a third principle able to englobe and transcend the first two.

So, the Sri Yantra becomes an impersonal interpretation of a Macrocosmos that isn’t masculine nor feminine, and at the same time, from a Microcosmic point of view, is proposed as a map for humans that must know, understand and overcome his own duality to realize the dimension of Oneness.

Sri-Yantra B/W picture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Sri Yantra explains the geometry of evolution that begins from the center, from the source, of the creation of various planes that form all the principles that rule the existence of all that we can experience. The more we extend our visual view in that symbol, the more we’ll notice that the triangles are surrounded by external circles and circles of lotus petals that represent the reality manifested in the perceivable world.

So, not merely a beautiful figure to hang on the wall as an exotic ornament to show to friends, but a tool of knowing, understanding and developing. The next time you see this Yantra, and other Yantras, remember these posts.

We mentioned in a previous post about the concept of “Creation/Destruction”, and this process happens simultaneously at every moment, even now while you are reading this post. Every instant is a movie frame of the reality in the eternal present. There is a moment, and the moment after, then, the next moment that has nothing to do with the previous. Such as in a movie, the Source- Creator generates perpetual movie frames in succession and at tremendous velocity, so that they give us the illusory feeling of  continuity, of a story that has a beginning and a possible end.

This description can be related to Julian Barbour’s “timeless physics” theory. But in our case, this is not a theory, it’s a fact that may be noticed by everyone who practices self-observation for long periods, and is experienced as a daily fact by anyone who has acquired an attentive, higher state of consciousness.

The image of “movie frames” allows us to understand the progression of our feelings, thoughts, of what we can imagine: we begin from one point, a moment, and something happens and we are happy or sad. But this is only an idea of what we expect or what we imagine.

The reality is that we live and experience only one movie frame at a time, we don’t live these moments in movement as in a movie. The dynamic we notice is only imagined by us, and we link every moment with the others as a base of our subjective remembrances and expectations.

The only thing that is objectively real is the movie frame we live in at this  instant; all the rest is a mental production that is organized according to our memory, in  which information acquired from the past guarantee and fortify, or as a base of illusory forecasts- hopes and  expectations, of what could happen in a future that doesn’t exist.

Life as we perceive it is not real. It’s an illusion. We live only a moment at a  time, and we link to this moment, remembrances and expectations or a vision projected into the future which gives us the illusion that time flows, that the movie is a continuous progression and that our life also flows with this flow of time.

The past no longer exists, it’s a product of our memory; the future still does not exist, it’s a projection of our expectations and hopes. The only thing that exists is the present moment, and every moment is followed by another moment, then another, another, another, and so on.

This doesn’t mean that the future is not predictable, or that an action we do now will not produce any effect: if we throw a glass, it will fall somewhere, hopefully, not on someone’s head, because it could obviously produce damage.

In every plane of manifestation, there are universal laws from which no one can escape. Nothing happens haphazardly, even if we could perceive it to be so.

Everything that happens is a consequence of our intentional or unintentional actions. We could blame someone else – God, the Devil, Fate or even the Universal Laws, but a great responsibility of what happens to us is determined by our lack of awareness.

The main thing that must be understood is that the perception of time, as we perceive it, is due to the organization of our mind that requires the memory or prevision to produce the following bonds of effects that give the illusion of a continuity.

Sacred Geometry / Sri Yantra / Sacred Space (Photo credit: Sarjana Sky)

Another practical aspect that is described in the chain of creation/ destruction in the Sri Yantra is the impression that things exist outside of us, that we are separate from the external world. Indeed, this perception is the result of a meeting of some fields of energy: we perceive an external phenomenon only when a series of circumstances matches; just to make clearer this statement that is difficult to be understood and accepted, we’ll give a figurative example; indeed, it belongs to the field of the spiritual path, not of the individual self- development, so it is far not only from the common view, but could be also far from the view of many people that follow the noble path towards self- development. For these reasons, we give the example: when we are at the cinema, we can enjoy a movie because there is a projector with a particular kind of lenses that uses a principle related to light to make the movie “manifested” on the screen.

It’s a similar thing that happens in a cathedral where a beam of light passes through the stained glass windows producing a specific gamut of colors- another example of the same principle. In both cases, the phenomenon is perceived only then when determined conditions converge in a particular relation inside of what manifests itself or, if you prefer, when these conditions express a natural, universal law present in our Universe.

These phenomena can be noticed and perceived by ourselves only when they correspond to a law. If these conditions don’t exist nor correspond to any law, we wouldn’t notice them and we wouldn’t even suspect their existence or the possibility for their existence.

We are part of a universal order that is “written” and described in the Sri Yantra such as in the above mentioned Ray of Creation (for those that are truly able to understand it, ignoring the mere, associative intellectual solicitations this Cosmological graphic produces in them). For this reason, we are subjected to the same laws contained and expressed in this Universe, because we are part of it: we can’t fly nor breathe underwater or buried  three meters under the ground.

We have the possibility to discover these laws not only theoretically, but also in practice, during our daily life: we can understand them, but we can’t escape the same laws, we have to be subjected to them.

Even our capacity of observation is related to these laws, otherwise we wouldn’t notice anything that happens inside and outside of us. When we lack of awareness, we are unable to grasp the reality of what happens, and even this aspect corresponds to a determined law, but we won’t speak here about that.

What has to be understood is that we are not separate from the external, we interact with it not only in this way, but in thousands of other ways; we are subjected to the same laws as all else that exists in this Universe.

This is what also expresses the central triangles of the Sri Yantra, that Creation/Destruction (or if you prefer, disaggregation) that happens at every moment according to determined laws that exist to make possible this cosmic play.

We live in a Universe, a dimension that is the result of an act of Love, a pure interaction and merging between the feminine and masculine principles. This act of Love is painted in the Sri Yantra – the symbolic representation of reality as it is.

Every cause brings an effect, everything we do will have a consequence. This is a Universal Law, and that law is also described in the Sri Yantra.

Another thing should be said: that the Yantras belong to the ancient Tantric Tradition, not the Tantra as it’s known today – a spiritual practice that involves a sexual act and often becomes a justification for an indiscriminate use of sex, but a huge and deeper body of knowing and teaching that has existed for many centuries.

It is said that the Sri Yantra is the most ancient among all the yantras and in the Tantric Tradition has the same value, weight and meaning of the Ray of Creation in the Gurdjieff  teaching.

One of the main aims of the Tantrikas (the Tantric practitioners) was (and still is) to reverse the usual way of focusing on what is manifested and touchable – the material life, and turn over to seek and experience of all what is manifested, what lies beyond visible appearances: the generative source of reality, of all that exists. From a macrocosmic point of view we could call it God, the Absolute, the Big Bang; from a subjective, personal, microcosmic point of view- the Essence, the Soul, the “True Self”.

So, we’ll say in advance (but this will be a topic itself for a further post), that the practice of concentration on a Yantra is turned to guide the practitioner’s mind towards the realization of the unmanifested.

The central element of the Sri Yantra is represented as a point called Bindu, and it represents the gateway through which the unmanifested “enters and exits”.

The real nature of the unmanifested is one of the things that can’t be explained in words, but foreseen or eventually realized (at least in part) only when one has achieved higher states of consciousness. It’s the mystery of how the unmanifested, the apparent “non- Being” generated the Being.

But let’s see what we can say about this central element.

So, from the center of the Yantra, all reality is manifested. Indeed, we can say that in the tantric view, the existence of the world and of the whole reality is intended as a perpetual procreation of what in Sanskrit is called Yoni (the vulva) that represents the feminine principle, and in the Sri Yantra is the downward turned triangle in the center of the symbol. As a consequence of the perpetual infusion of the masculine Seed, the Yoni becomes the gateway that creates all that exists in this reality (the universe our world, ourselves… all). So, the Yoni is the Mother Creator.

But, without the Seed of the masculine principle, there would not be Yoni nor the reality; indeed, if the Yoni is what makes possible the Whole to exist, the Seed gives this possibility. It’s the Essence of the whole system, but it’s not the object of perception, namely it’s non- manifested.

We could compare the masculine principle as a thought, a desire that is unmanifested, and the feminine principle as the receptacle that allows this desire to become a manifested action; or, the Yoni is the Big Bang and the Seed the moment before it.

In the Tantric view, the Seed is what generates the Yoni. The Yoni in the symbol is represented by the red triangle turned downward placed in the center of the Sri Yantra and the seed as the point in the center of this triangle that is usually white.

The Seed, this central point, is the Bindu.

The central white point is the Bindu

This primordial couple, the white point and the reversed red triangle, produces a series of interwoven triangles of which four are related to the masculine (with the apex upward) and four to the feminine principle (with the apex downward). This reciprocal interpenetration further begets a complex series of smaller triangles which represent the primordial creative forces divided into more defined forces.

The Gayatri is a pearl from the depth

Gayatri teaches the chanter her secrets

The Gayatri is a pearl from the depth

    It is a jewel among the treasures that our Guru and the Sacha lineage have handed down from generation to generation. To be initiated into this sacred mantra is a great privilege. The sound or even the thought of the Gayatri verse sets grace in action as we recognize the fortune we have in our life to live our highest ideals.

Mantra is the matrix of existence

    Sparkling in the sunrise and clinging to the fields, the morning dew appears by mantra. Then again it disappears by mantra, in the heat of the noonday sun. Everything that appears and disappears, in all of existence, does so by the power of precise sound vibration, pitch, length and tone, by a mantra.
The Gayatri Mantra is a vibration that sets up a condition of subtle receptivity and opens our way to the unconditional Truth. Like the buzzing of a bee contributes to the full web of experience, so too, the chanting of the mantra contributes to the full matrix of existence.

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.

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.

Let me try to enumerate my reasons for being one.

1. Hinduism has no Satan. So I need not look upon life as a perpetual fight against darkness. I need not have the feeling of being shadowed by an Arch Villain.

2.  Hinduism is not about believing, but experiencing. Hinduism doesn’t say that you must believe all that it says You can joyfully disbelieve many Hindu ideas without inviting curses from God, of all persons.

3. Hinduism doesn’t have eternal damnation. So you do not need to squirm at eternal retribution being awarded for some actions. Even human courts are prepared to look kindly upon a reformed criminal. Would God do otherwise?

4. Hinduism doesn’t go about telling other people that they are worshipping false gods. Thankfully, Hinduism is free from the worse-than-AIDS virus of conversion. It believes in a million ways to God…but none that is dyed in hatred and narrow-mindedness.

5. HINDUISM IS FREE FROM THE TYRANNY OF ONE SACRED BOOK. In Hinduism, Revelation does not Rail at me. Despite looking upon its Vedas as scriptural proof of God, there are enough traditions in Hinduism which give more weight to individual experience – anubhooti. ‘The words of the Veda return without reaching Him’, says the Veda itself. I appreciate this humility a great deal. I cannot stand scriptural inerrancy.

6. Hinduism adapts itself to the times. Once Hindus were used to child marriage ; now they have almost given it up entirely. I need my religion not to be oppressively unchangeable.

7. Unlike the Semitic religions, Hinduism believes that Man can become truly liberated in a spiritual sense. The word for such a man in Hinduism is, ‘Jivan Muktha’. Jainism has the jina and the siddha, the liberated soul, and Buddhism has the bodhisatwa (bound for nirvana).

8. Hinduism has had hundreds of Mahatmas who have lived the highest ideal. They are living proof of the divine life on earth.

 9. While being culturally bound to the Hindu way of life, Hinduism does not seek to be theocratic and take the law into its hands. Hinduism has no shariah.

 10. THERE IS NO ‘JUDGEMENT DAY’ IN HINDUISM. The law of karma says you are the maker of your Destiny. You are your own judgement day, every second of your life.

 11. HINDUISM LOOKS TO GOD IN THE HEART (you need not look to prophets, books and divine intimations amidst thunder and lightning).

 12. IN HINDUISM, God and divine beings are INTIMATE BEINGS CLOSE TO US. Unlike the followers of Abrahamic religions, Hindus don’t shudder at the sight of an ‘angel’ or of God.

 13. CASTE WAS INDEED A FACT OF HINDU SOCIAL LIFE, BUT HINDUS ARE LEARNING THAT IT’S NOT HINDUISM PER SE.

 14. HINDU MAJORITY INDIA HAS OUTLAWED UNTOUCHABILITY. THE TRUE SPIRITUALITY THAT HINDUISM FOSTERS, SHOULD MAKE MEN HOLD CHARACTER, NOT CASTE OR ITS ABSENCE, AS OF PRIME IMPORTANCE

 15. Hinduism has a spectrum of practices – yoga, tantra, mantra, yantra — to make for a higher consciousness in man.

16. I support Hinduism not for itself, but because it paves the way for a greater life of the spirit. 

My respects to you all.
Auspiciousness and Peace be to All.

It is said that one picture is equal to thousand words.

Picture – 1  ACTUALISM THEME PICTURE:

This caricature belongs to Existence itself. It appeared in a flash, in my mind, as I was relaxingly walking in my marathon 10 kilometer walk. But this flash is the result of 40 years of striving to understand the mystery of the Universe.

This can be used as an Yantra too. It tells everything.

The Eternal, Infinite Pristine Actuality – sees itself as Time, eternally. It sees itself, as the Universe, experiencing as planets, species, humans (as you and me, in our illusory blocks of ego, and instinctual passions). It goes on and on forever and ever, without any beginning or end.

Look at the even two circles, that has a DENT. In that dent you, me, and others exist. You can easily see, we are just our own illusion. It is all the Pristine Actuality that plays this game. But how powerfully we are caught up in delusion, born out of our own illusion, in the Pristine Actuality, WHERE NO DIRT ENTERS THE PRISTINE ACTUALITY, actually !!!!.

Picture – 2 SPIRITUALISM THEME PICTURE:

The first circle indicates the Conceptual Absolute.

The second circle indicates, the Illusory creations, as the religionists and the spiritualists affirm.

This way, God is a concept. This is ‘N O T ACTUAL’. A concept of the religionists and the spiritualists. A mind thing. Here creations are not ACTUAL, but imaginary ones.

So, this world is filled with wars and PEACE is missing.

CONCLUSION:

Only the ACTUAL FREEDOM as discovered, envisaged and gifted to the world by Richard, can give real peace and freedom to this suffering world. And the mimicked versions of Actual Freedom too cannot give Peace or Freedom.

Regards,

JUSTINE.

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©Copyright actualfreedomjustine.com: 2012.  All Rights Reserved.

THE CREATION OF THE SACRED INDIA TAROT

CARD 15:  The Devil – Mara with his Three Daughters

This is part of the Sacred India Tarot series, which is usually published by aryayogi.wordpress.com.   Due to a tech. problem in India, and because I found a paragraph which needed a small revision, I am publishing it also, here.   These entries – as can be seen in the previous one on Ganga – contain much process work as each concept developed transoceanically.   Additionally, life and dreams at night, fed in their  data.

Later in the deck, 6 of Pentacles depicts the Buddha’s Enlightenment.  The demon Mara makes a reappearance, trying to distract him with his raw power:  the Buddha keeps firm contact with the ground.

This cropped image from 6 of Pentacles card, of Mara and the Buddha, is relevant to the material of card 15:

Detail from SITA 6 of Pentacles

**

Here first, is an image Rohit sent me, heading his Notes; and under it is my first sketch for the ideas in this Arcanum.

Rohit’s Notes:

A very difficult card, as India does not have any such notion as the Devil.  It was a great struggle to resist using a Horned One equivalent, as the Celtic packs do, or a Pan equivalent.

However, Buddhist Mythology does have an Evil One – Mara.  Since the pack is an Indian mythology pack, and the Buddha is one of the greatest figures in the culture, I felt we can use this.  Mara plays the same role in the enlightenment of the Buddha, as Satan the Adversary does, when Jesus is in the desert, tempting and then trying to frighten him.

The illustration we will send of the blue demon, is a good place to start.  Please keep the skull headgear.  The costumes of the Balinese dancers are also a good way to depict him.  I am tired of the wild skins and hairy features of the standard packs.  “The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.”  I forget who said that, but the suave, dangerous aspect of the Devil is what we need.  This card should not be overdone, as we are going to use this again in the suit of Pentacles.

What we need here, is the Devil holding his three daughters and a couple of men, in the standard manner, with chains around their necks, all the human figures to be nude, as is the typical custom in depicting the chains of the Devil.  He should be given a vicious looking sword to hold too, the other hand having a musical instrument of some sort.  The environment should not be depicted as forbidding and hopeless.  The power of the Devil is precisely his offer of a high standard of living and comfort.

Can you communicate a sort of serpentine fluidity to the man?  His figure should dominate the card, but it should not stand in the typical still and straight divine posture.  The Devil is polymorphous, too easily swayed by circumstances, too eager to seize immediate advantage to appreciate the long-term advantage of standing firm.  An air of instability will convey the essential hollow nature of his power.

The Devil is in Jungian terms, the challenge of the Shadow, and is in that sense an extremely useful and necessary part of the human imagination.

*

Jane’s Process Notes – 15 September 2002

These are quite lengthy extracts again from my workbook.  The “Devil” card  is “made for artists” because through  realizing what we project, we strip down the effigies of our bossy Saint.  We meet and are challenged here by the raw subconscious material, and we are as putty!   Through this Arcanum, as we learn to see it, gleams truth.   Rudra enters the picture again:

*

Arrived at Caroline’s to meet Sparkie in a happy and curious-about-it frame, after a large and excellent calzone-pizza with A and two glasses of wine;  and left there later, weary and depressed.  It is very tiring to have to sit through this kind of thing in a hot padded room, late in the evening.  My bitchings about Satsang givers are not quite on the mark, so I shall refrain.   I liked Sparkie’s earnest lady helpers and the Teutonic gang with the electronics and the camera – the electronics broke down half way through and nearly started a fire.   That was rather a relief, because the soporific new-age-zen background tinkling, though at first quite pleasant, was getting on my nerves.  Sparkie didn’t attempt any rev-ups with me, though he really pulled poor A out on the mat, for “the Advaita movement in England”, because there wasn’t really anyone else there to work with.  So in the end, I chipped in, to support Alan, and said there was a movement a few years ago, with everyone going to everybody, but now they’ve all found their teachers among themselves and got married. 

Which basically implied – you’re superfluous, mate.

My impression is that Sparkie, a blond and bearded trans-atlantic Englishman whose home is now Germany, is used to talking now in German to Germans, and had a hard job connecting to Londoners … who prefer something a little more tongue in cheek.  In his view, the Western “spiritual tradition” meeting the East, is modern psychology, and he “does not dismiss politics”.  The opinions are his, and himself-centered.  His German ladies adore him – this is natural: devotion on the spiritual path.

I should try to go to things un-comparitively, but for one schooled with the un-person-centered vitality of Kabbalah and the delicious honesty and humour of its teachers, this little gathering was a tomb.   There was a table there, covered with dazzling piles of tapes and books and gleaming photos of Papaji messengers, with among them, poor patient Ramana, and even Anandamayi Ma … presented as icons, swept into this personality cult.

These musings lead me usefully into my rather heavy work for the coming week – India Tarot Devil, Tower and Star, to be guinea-pigged through my subconscious into the light.   For instance, Key 15 the Devil is in the western Mysteries, the artist’s card par excellence.  It covers the whole field of projectile-prakriti into enclosure and includes my recent “Initiation”, drawing portraits of inner plane Masters:  “Ah Netr Ankh”, Hail to the Lord of Life.  The enclosure is a projection of the Infinite into small forms of separateness, definition, solidity.  It puts the illusion into glass and makes it hard to touch.  (What an interesting sentence!)

Serious and be-scattered insomnia last night … I became aware of a whitish, fiery and incomplete figure in my deeps, with none of its limbs defined or ‘finished’ – a kind of fury, but objectively seen.  A rapid visual association brought up my drawing of Wild Rudra – glimpsed yesterday when sorting out my old drawings.

This drawing has already been used in our Notes on SITA, the Creation of Rudra: The Fool.  Here he is again, now occupying my Shadow.  That’s what it is, inside!  That is the spike of nameless angry heat, which destroys my rest and equilibrium when slipping towards sleep into the fleece of an idea or outlined shape.  It is Rudra the Wild Hunter before the dawn of the Vedas, the one that roars, Rudra the Uncreate who with his bow and arrow shot into Bison Prajapati’s balls just as Prajapati was about to penetrate his own daughter Ushas the Dawn  (India Tarot’s Star).  The seed fell to the ground instead, and became the gap of space and time and separateness within the unity of the Uncreate.  (Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Siva).  It became cattle, days and nights, destinies and Earth.   Yes!   The Devil – the raw-unconscious – reacts my nameless, sharp, zig zag feeling -  the falsehood of any sort of boundary.

Boundaries there must be, in drawing;  in the Yetzirah/Assiyah relationship (formation and the material world) and in the monitoring of empathies;  but in truth, boundaries there are not, and the outline and the manufacture of boundaries arouses Rudra’s rage against the Devil’s comfort zone, and artist’s bane.   Try to distinguish the level, so that the higher doesn’t get mixed so drainingly into the lower.

Saw too, in this Presence of Rudra, the lightning-flash energy.  I was at ease when limbs, hands and feet were kept open and unfinished, and I was un-eased when they were enclosed and “made”.  Let it break open anew, and smile!  Recalled also (subconscious efficiently delivers) that Rudra in Rohit’s India Tarot is The Fool, the Innocent Before Creation, the wild fury in creation’s trap.   I understand now why they wanted another Rudra-Fool, more terrible and wild;  so I drew the spiky dark lightning colours in the skies around his wild dance, descending through it into earth and mountain through his toe.

The Tarot Fool – eastern & western versions

The Fool in the Adytum (western Mysteries) emanates from Kether, the untrapped potential in the lightning flash before creation:  the flower in the bud.   How wonderful to bridge the traditions, their Light and Shadow as One.  How wonderful to be shown and to know, with my very being.

I held in focus this flickering and undefined presence – practicing a teaching of Francis Lucille’s: to include strange, unvoiced and unlined sensations, let them expand and inform … and at last fell heavily asleep because suddenly it was 7.45 and morning … and had my recurring nightmare of being “on Retreat” with my soul/spiritual group, and being alienated from it like a scapegoat.   I’m afraid my inner Rudra is always spoiling my security routines.  Never mind.  I’m glad to know my Rudra and be shown, like when Kali passed through here.

Yesterday afternoon, something lovely happened.  While tippexing the master copy of SE for the printers, I listened to the first four tapes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover … Lawrence portrays a certain discordant 1920s tedium, as read in Margaret Hilton’s schoolgirlie voice – and then at last Connie gets together with her gamekeeper in the wood on the second side of the fifth tape, and utter beauty against all hope, blossoms:  the full flood of erotic poetry unleashed.

It is a peculiar delight to be free from personal desire, and entranced by the pure beauty and primordial pulse of that erotic description;  to share in the event both male and female, with and as the subtle body.  Because I am free, it is “I AM”, without any buffers, as deep and strong as the sea.   In a pioneering spirit, Lawrence was the supreme and perhaps unique poet of the sexual act in our time:  its all-ecompassing nature and its fleetingness.  I listened and heard and was and smiled.  IT IS THE SAME AS MUSIC.

Fancy going along to Sparkie’s satsang after that!  It’s hardly fair.

16 September 2002

Slept much better, after restful day completing SE for the printers, listening to Lady C’s L, and managing to clean the kitchen … and had another Earthquake dream.  (See Notes on SITA: Death II – Kali).  This time, it was a two-storey house out in the west country somewhere.  I woke with the impression fast fading.  Again I wondered how neighbouring buildings had fared.  The ground reeled, and the house perhaps tipped a little, and dropped down at least its own height, into a gulf of silence;  yet no gulf of earth had opened and swallowed it.  The house was as before, with an outside and an inside.  I went to the bathroom downstairs, and there were no cracks in the walls,  and then I woke. 

It seems that oceanic waves pass through my marrow:  the vesica-piscean ripples, as the work of the soul ventures into … higher Yetzirah, or union.  It is also the alchemical Dragon (kundalini).   When I go out from my island into the sea, there are waves surrounding it, like a reef to surmount first.   I used to dream of seeing them.

… I have heard almost all of the 14 tapes of Lady C’s L.  Of course, the power and discovery of that first time, is unrepeatable.  It is the tragic and comic human paradox we have, that sex which touches infinity, creates its own destroyer, transforming to the weary weary linear story of man and woman and brat and do-you-love-me.  One knows – “tha’ knows” – already, and doesn’t want the story.  There is only ever the one time:  kiss it silent.

DHL – an early schoolbook sketch

…  Thinking of DHL, and the great black blight of the collieries, iron and money upon old England, of which he wrote with such passion and anger; and in those days saw and felt the destruction of humanity – this felt so perennial, that I stopped on my bike and made a note:

The interface of humanity with history, has always been that brutalizing agony upon kind Earth.

The difference in our humanity nowadays, is that more of us are involved with history.

That is to say:  seeing history as a blind, mechanical, unsolving force.  And seeing humanity – real humanity – as that which, like within flowers, manages to remain uncrushed.  Would Lawrence nowadays, recognize us as human?  And is not the turning inward and the flourishing of the esoteric wisdom, but a counterpoising accompaniment to ugliness? 

The Catherine-wheel of Cruelty and ugliness was always so, maybe in olden times more intensely so, but in smaller localities.  The tread of the wheel is in these present times wider.  At the same time, a number of specific cruelties become obsolete.  And after WW1 and WW2, no young lad goes lightly to war;  but also there is child pornography, and there is the waste of soviet-regime excrement upon the poisoned lands of eastern Europe, etc.  I think deep down, that I am not involved with ‘history’.   ‘Involved’ is also “caught up in”.  But I see.

17 September 2002

I asked for the Spirit Guardian’s help, and was reminded to touch base inwardly – my own heart-swept chamber.  One simply must deal with uninvited pests here.  One can see beyond them into Siva, one can dissolve them in the inner truth, point the ankh at them to sizzle them, laugh at them.  What, you again?

Today I have to draw the devil for India Tarot.  At the “Table Round” (a meditation), I saw clearly how the shadow side of this Key alienates and separates me:  how it becomes cut-out boring thoughts which are not mind, but mischievously say they are, and I feel outcast from sacred gatherings – exactly the dismissal from Eden into anatomy.

At the same time, the Grail shone bright, and practicing the Zodiacal colour spectrum around it, I returned to Capricorn, whose colour indigo, is the devil’s own, and whose sign I am – the creative Key of bind and loose;  creative usurpation, yet manifestation;  surfaces.  I went round to Key 15 and flipped his pentacle and pulled his beard.  His red popish eyes and pompous gesture of authority melted.  The chains fell off Adam and Eve.  Liberation always, is in my heart, and the old Goat is curiously the key to it.  He presents himself perversely, to be seen through.  He has no sense of humour at all.  He is also puritanical – behind my effort to keep all my thoughts pure of irrelevant genitalia or the gutter press, when in my citadel, and spank them if they are not.

Arcanum 15, from Jane’s Hermetic Tarot deck. 

“Baphomet” is an effigy or persistent thought-form;  but reversal of this word produces TEMOHPAB – Templi Omnium Hominum Pacis Abbas: the priest of the temple of peace for all humanity.   Much interior work consists of transforming our negative modes into their opposites – releasing the trapped creative energy as from a coiled up spring.   Through this Arcanum or “Key”, we arrive also at a deeper understanding of our sexuality.  The sum of 15 is 6 – the Tarot Lovers – Adam and Eve – who give each other truth, space and clear seeing.  As the man and woman in 15 become mature, enriching the self-conscious and sub-conscious dialogue in ourselves, the chains slip off them;  the Lovers are no longer bound by false belief.

Arcanum 6 from Jane’s Hermetic Tarot deck.  The Archangel is Hermetic Rafael, the healing face of God

*

18 September 2002

I began India Tarot’s No.15 – The Devil.  It is going quite well;  it is based on Mara who tempted Buddha, and should therefore suggest a Prince-of-Darkness imitation of the Buddha.  He is glamorous.  His right upper arm, waving the vicious sword, is very powerful;  the left hand playing the veena, is refined.  With the other two hands, he holds like reins, the chains of his three daughters and two men, all in their separate MATTER cocoons. He is skilled in the arts and other business.

He sits in lotus posture, has an enormous dark head and red eyes, and looks thoroughly unreliable.  I remembered he’s the father of lies, and the Alternative Guru – “God, as the ignorant conceive Him to be.”

But also, he is the supreme Key for the artist, and as Rohit describes Jungianly, the indispensable Shadow of real creativity.  His strength is where he cultivates his double nature.  He binds his daughters and their lovers to his theatrical and charismatic ability to stand in front of the light, and whirls his cloak like wings:  operatic passion.  It is best to see the joke in him.

Sacred India Tarot – card 15: The Devil:  Mara with his Daughters

**

And now here is someone behind that, whom I drew at the same time.  He emerged through the woods in a dream. I call him “Art the Gardener”, or maybe “Hiawatha”.

18 September 2002:   “He issurrounded by young trees and leans on a stick or spade, looking at me;  and the branch-patterns formed a heart around his upper torso and head.  He wears a cloth around his middle, Egyptian worker style … he might have elven ears somewhere.  He is somebody in my “library” or “gallery”, and I am glad I have drawn a picture of him.  There is a lot of roughly hatched deep blue sky showing through the taut autumn-turning birch trees.  I used cruder oil pastel, so as not to get too anal over facial details, and the face is left interestingly suggestive and open.  He is very beautiful and strong, he stands in a relaxed and flowing way.  He’s a bit like Christ among the thorns.

*

*

Perhaps Hiawatha …

19 – 21 September 2002

Interesting email from Vamadeva Frawley, in response to mine.  Ganapati Muni is up to things again.  I’m very pleased about this new correspondence, and hope it will go on.  Vamadeva has the highly-trained knack of reflecting or boiling down deep ideas into succinct sentences to ponder.  (see http://www.vedanet.com)  He sent me also Chapter One of his new and more poetic work on Agni, all in very short, simple and profound paragraphs… …  and in the post arrived a CD from my friend in Hungary, of an Italian/Mephistopheles opera she’s copied for me – perfect to finish drawing my India Tarot No.15 with … !

… The Grail touches earth.  In Botticelli’s last painting, The Nativity, angels embrace humans right down in the strata of the demons.

**

Correspondence:  Gautam and Rohit – 24 September 2002

“Dear Jane, we think the devil is the most handsome devil we have seen to date.  No change in him at all.  Should the bodies of the women be more defined in a voluptuous sense, or are they OK?  This card is looking fantastic.   With regards, Gautam”

**

**

The Beyond within Appearance 4.1.02

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

The rose and the star

**

**

Lily of the Field 10/12.1.02

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

Studies of the Tattvas – five senses and seven interior stars

**

**

Solomon’s Lily in Earth 12.1.02

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

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

**

 Companions of the Light around the Table in the Flower 13.1.02

**

**

Discrimination 2.2.02

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

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

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

*

snowdrop 1969

**

**

Solomon’s Seal

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

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

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

**

**

 Atlas 14.4.08

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMPRESSION today of Atlas:

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

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

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

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

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

The emblem of Emblems:  “Look for yourself”.

**

**

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.

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

  And God …

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

**

**

This Reveals the Way/Road 10.5.01

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

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

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

The drifting is an alert surrender.

**

**

By all, through All  13.5.01

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

**

In Thy Valorous Strength 5.6.01

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

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

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

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

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

Psalms

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

**

**

What is not Lost …  10.6.01

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

**

**

As Dawn Breaks through Tears 12.6.01

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

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

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

The sea is Consciousness.  The island is a heartbreak.

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

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

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

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

**

**

 Bitter Sweet 29.12.01 (Ramana-birthday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is universally, a capillary process, both ways.

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

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

**

**

 Sweet Savour:  Cube of Solomon  2/3.1.02

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

Here the notes are pictures, rather than words

**

**

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

The Beyond within Appearance 4.1.02

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

The rose and the star

**

**

Lily of the Field 10/12.1.02

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

Studies of the Tattvas – five senses and seven interior stars

**

**

Solomon’s Lily in Earth 12.1.02

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

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

**

Companions of the Light around the Table in the Flower 13.1.02

**

**

Discrimination 2.2.02

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

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

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

snowdrop 1969

**

**

Solomon’s Seal

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

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

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

**

**

 Atlas 14.4.08

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMPRESSION today of Atlas:

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

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

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

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

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

The emblem of Emblems:  “Look for yourself”.

**

**

**

**

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.

Key Six – The Lovers; Key 0 – The Fool

Builders of the Adytum deck

Behind Eve in The Lovers, is a growing tree and behind Adam there is a burning bush – a tree of little flames.  Solomon’s left pillar descends (fruit).  The right pillar ascends (fire).   So the water and fire trines interpenetrate.  The sacred geometry of Solomon’s Seal is plain:  the upper and lower points are the angel’s head and Adam-Eve’s hands.  Their hands do not quite touch – they touch the space – it is always evolving, drawing closer, into relationship.

The fire trine’s base line is their heads.  The water trine’s base line is the angel’s arms.  The upper triad of the hour glass descends into the ascending lower one.

Why is the sun behind Archangel Rafael in the Lovers, golden?   The sun in Key 0, The Fool, is white, a white sun.

**

Cube of Solomon’s Seal

The White Sun in Key 0, The Fool, is pure Spirit, Kether, the Self, before entering the prismatic spectrum.   Gold is sunlight congealed in the rocky veins of Earth – the star itself.   Gold is a standard currency of value.  In alchemy, gold is a creative medium.   To make gold, we must have gold, in principle, to expand.  Sunlight – the photon – warms every direction in space, unlike moonlight which is polarized.   Gold is the supremely creative metal. It will melt down, flow and re-form into any shape or design, remaining itself.

“If you are Tifareth, the Heart of the Tree of Life, you may live and be as you like, as you are gold.”  The white Sun of the Spirit is En Sof, without end or form.   The gold Sun of the Lovers became a manifest creation, a currency, a sovereign, an art of Life.

The eternal essence of gold is in the sun.  Thus it fires and flows, even when it is bound into a ring.  Golden is the inner nature’s active purity, refined by fire.

Roscrucean Emblem 7:  Solomon’s Lily in a Field

**

Archangel Rafael’s face, arms and hands are yellow.  In Tarot, this is the colour of Consciousness.   The Lovers depict self-consciousness (male) and sub-consciousness (female).  To live accurately, we should pause - to learn the Divine Law as reflected in the feminine pool of our nature;  otherwise we continue to act blindly from false, habitual premises.

The yellow colour, as an Intelligence, is associated with the higher Hermetic octave – Rafael – of the planet Mercury.  All colours have frequencies, or tonal vibrations linked to sound – the spectrum with the octave.  They impact our receptors as specific “Intelligences” or modes of being.  It is a work in itself, to re-sensitize the daily “soup” and discriminate those tones, all stirred around like dirty paint.

Pure yellow is a workaday projection of the gold.   In general, its vibration warms and uplifts, like a daffodil or buttercup:  the dawn.   In the Indian tattva system – the inner essence of the five physical senses – yellow is the cube of Earth:  paradoxically, this Earth tattva resides in the Crown chakra.   In Kabbalah, the Crown is Kether and Earth is Malkuth:  they interchange through the Four Worlds of Jacobs Ladder.

Tattvas – Interior Stars

**

The general meaning is that Spirit lodges everywhere in Earth, and manifests wherever the centre is refined.   In nature – amid tooth and claw – it does this readily;  among humans it is difficult, because we are a work yet incomplete.   Every detail has the long term outcome which the Angel sees, but we are unable to see, when our agendas cloud it.   Yet the Angel needs our evolving body.   Angels have no lower chakras.   Humans have the whole chakra spectrum, in potential.   We supply the Angel’s hands and feet, the living root.

**

Tetrahedral Cube

An “Angel” is a shorthand term, meaning “a conduit of cosmic Law.”    Angels are principles and tempi of the galaxies and atoms:  every rotation in our life.   The Angel represents the matrix of our inner Guardians and Teachers, or Maggidim.   The view from a higher – or deeper -  plane, beholds our landscape very differently.  It is difficult for us to see the fields and hills beyond and around the hedges and lanes we walk along;  so we need altitude for perspective.   It is difficult for the Angel to toil within the unique whorl of God’s fingerprint on our life and destiny.   Raised above the maze, we see the finger of God, the YOD, breathing vast life into Adam Qadmon as a whole;  and the minute detail of our self importance in the Mosaic.  The atom is in and of the whole.   This is salutary.

The Archangel in the Lovers is Rafael, whose overall colour tones are pansy-yellow and violet.   Rafael is Hermetic, an informed presence of healing and clarity;  discriminating the mixed pigments of life.   Yellow and violet tones are means whereby the Solar Gold shines through to us efficiently.  Their musical keys are E-natural and A-sharp – together, an augmented 5^th; a profoundly questioning interval, resolves towards a 6^th.

On the tree the dewy Fruit ripens and falls.   On the burning bush, the Flame rises and speaks.

The tree behind Eve – her kundalini – is brown, green and yellow, the colours which earth the electricity.  Adam’s intellect is incomplete – a blackened or lightning-struck tree – without the fertile root in Eve, as sub-consciousness.   Nourished essentially by Eve, it is up to Adam – our everyday, rational mind – to work the subconscious light and dark issues productively, and to evolve.   The subconscious is amenable to every suggestion or input.   Self consciousness has the key – with clear seeing – to order the amenities, improve health generally, and discard what is not useful.   The insight is always conscious – a turning towards the Angel, often against immense Karmic inertia-momentum.   We carry humanity’s full pressure of history in our DNA.   The DNA chain forms a double helix, like the Hermetic caduceus or Staff.   The snake coiled around the tree behind Eve, represents this:  the DNA cosmic pattern of all her potential children.   Our thought forms are our children, as much as those we bring forth and love.

Polarity

**

“The Lovers” portrays the need to look from higher than our local life-experience.   This applies as much to personal matters, as to politics, ecology and the world-view.  It is helpful to keep acknowledging a perception above and below the limited media spectrum – or screen – of our mass persuasion.

Patterns

**

The Lovers stand in a wide green landscape, giving each other space;  in the distance rises a tall mountain to the Angel.  The mountain is “Binah”, their understanding or blueprint – salt of the Earth – which links them to the golden heart of Nature.   It collects the grains of destiny, like an hourglass.   The green landscape resonates with Venus – her soft, non-resistant metal, copper, turns green – and with the garden of fertility, the multiplicity of seeds.   Through osmosis and photosynthesis, through the colour green, Sunlight is transformed and made available to us, as nourishment.

This simple fact has vast implications.   Yet it begins at home – in the greenwood of my life as given.   Only by turning within, can “I” – yours and mine –  begin our humanity’s response to emergency.  An emergency emerges:  a birth.   Gravity holds all the Universe together;  yet gravitons are – like single fish or starlings in a great flock – imperceptible; and each of us individually, with our staff of infinite DNA, is a graviton.   It starts at home.   It starts here and now.

Arcana 6 & 0:  The Lovers and The Fool

**

To sum up:  the man is full of potential, but suffers from ignorance.   He looks at the woman, who is fertile but passive.   She looks up to Rafael receptively.  She mirrors Rafael’s countenance, and the knowledge how to act, to the man.   Rafael beholds, embraces and gives them both the space to work out their destiny, their hands to touch, their space to for-give.

In another version of The Lovers, the message is again discernment:  the crossroads or point of decision;  the tipping point, whose heritage is centuries hence.

Lovers:  Crossroads

Ideas arising from a meeting of the BOTA group in London recently.

**

**

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.

(yan-tra)

MEANING:
noun
1. A geometrical diagram used like an icon usually in meditation

USAGE:
1. Yantras range from those traced on the ground or on paper and disposed of after the rite, to those etched in stone and metal.

For those of you who missed the last one, I’ll be hosting a Yantra Meditation every Wednesday evening at 6pm for the rest of July at the very lush eco/yoga resort Desa Seni here in Bali! Im so excited to be sharing this beautiful experience of these ancient yogic tools with all of our Bali friends, new and old and hope that you can come along to share in the fun!

Extending Supply Chain Synchronization Even Further
Even after the CSP’s fulfillment partner(s) are integrated into the synchronized supply chain and are interacting directly with order management system, receiving fulfillment direction, providing enterprise-wide inventory visibility and managing returns they still retain some ‘valuable’ pieces of the supply chain. They still own and control the software used to manage the pick, pack and ship operations within the outsourced warehouse facilities used to fulfill the CSPs orders.

By taking the next step and deploying a supply collaboration capability and a centralized network warehouse management system (nWMS) with associated operating procedures and facility processes that are streamlined to the business needs, the CSP becomes empowered to finally commoditize the entire last mile of the supply chain. By pushing inventory visibility out to the manufacturers and distributors (instead of relying on the 3PL to purchase on behalf of the CSP) and pushing the radio frequency (RF), RFID or light web client nWMS interfaces out into the 3PL partners, true multi-sourcing can take place and the same service level can be measured and expected across all supply chain network partners using the same methodologies and systems mandated by the communications provider.

A centralized supply collaboration solution helps organizations effectively manage the extended purchase order lifecycle, including all interactions with external parties.

It provides both internal and external users with immediate access to purchase/planned orders, allowing them to negotiate changes over the Internet; redirect orders and inventory; and resolve unexpected problems or delays. It further provides real-time visibility into all aspects of the inbound supply chain, resulting in improved communication with suppliers; lower processing costs, faster response rates on exceptions and ultimately, increased performance of their supply chain. Supply collaboration even offers the ability to promise goods that are inbound or still residing at the manufacturer’s facility. Since the complete CPE inventory life-cycle is visible selling against that inventory can happen anywhere in the supply chain based on business rules and conditions.

Key Capabilities:

• Central PO repository – Aggregate and manage purchase orders from multiple internal systems and divisions.
• Collaborative execution – Collaborate, negotiate and confirm order plans, shipments and notifications with suppliers via the Internet.
• Supplier Compliance – Enforce corporate and industry standards for supplier compliance, reporting, label printing and document formats.
• Flexible control of purchase order processes – Flexibly define metrics, track, and manage each supplier relationship according to business goals.
• Proactive Exception Management – Respond immediately to unplanned events or potential issues throughout the purchase order execution lifecycle.
• Analytics – Provide reporting and analytics infrastructure for defining, tracking and managing to metrics.

Business Benefits:

• Increased Revenue – Top-line revenues can be improved through enhanced customer service by reducing stock-out risks. Improved responsiveness to customer needs by reducing order cycle times can be achieved and you can effectively up-sell / cross-sell with a solid fulfillment backbone.
• Reduce Costs – Overall operational costs can be reduced by eliminating manual purchase order processing costs, through reduced fulfillment and inventory handling costs and by reducing labor costs with collaboration and exception-based management.
• Reduced Working Capital – Achieved through reduced inventory levels by better balancing / synchronizing inventory across internal locations and trading partners. Monitors and alerts help to avoid and rapidly resolve problems (shortages, delays, etc.) Reduce material costs by leveraging more aggregated buyer data and reduced cycle times via collaboration.
• Leverage Fixed Assets: Better utilization of logistics and warehousing infrastructure.

A networked WMS provides a central point of control over complex warehouse operations, across multiple facilities of varying types. With its service-oriented architecture and process-centric modeling capabilities, nWMS can be leveraged across all types of situations, from the largest facilities to the smallest stocking locations. It includes robust planning, execution and measurement tools for distribution managers, bringing operational discipline to the complex warehouse operations. The networked warehouse management system is process centric, notifying other systems or locations of critical events that occur within the network and make fulfillment decisions based on real-time information received from customers, partners and suppliers. Built to handle the most complex fulfillment requirements, it improves internal efficiencies through business rules-driven warehouse management.

Key Capabilities

• Planning, Execution & Measurement Tools – Use powerful task planning, management and monitoring tools to improve asset utilization.
• Business Rules-Based Operations – Leverage a full suite of business rules designed for high-volume environments.
• Real-Time Operational Views – Make immediate operational improvements using “dash board” views of real-time warehouse activity.
• Value-Added Services – Automate a wide variety of value-added services such as kitting, postponed manufacturing, packing and labeling.
• Ability to bring up and down warehouses quickly and from a central location.

Business Benefits

• Reduce Warehouse Operating Costs – Drive down labor and transportation costs by automating complex tasks and improving operational decisions.
• Improve Asset Utilization – Maximize the productivity of manpower, equipment and space using planning and execution tools.
• Improve Inventory Control – Gain tighter control over inventory and its movement, leading to reduced inventory levels and handling costs.
• Increase Customer Satisfaction – Reduce order cycle times and improve fulfillment accuracy through enhanced control of warehouse operations

Regardless of how far an organization decides to go with it’s supply chain synchronization, it’s critical that they begin the process of taking back the ‘value’ of their supply chain if they expect to be able to provider exceptional service to today’s empowered customer.

How Is The Hybrid Phase Achieved?
By bringing ALL the valuable business logic, sourcing, fallout, and billing event information back within the four walls of the organization, Any CSP can maximize the value of outsourcing partners by rendering them a commodity service provider measured on price and SLA criteria. Since all of the ‘value’ has been removed from the outsourced end of the supply chain, a multitude of 3PL or other supply chain providers can be measured equally on their ability to deliver goods accurately and on time for the lowest price possible.

Supply Chain Synchronization
Execution of the final phase in supply chain evolution involves ‘synchronizing the supply chain’ and bringing value back inside the four walls of the organization by controlling the software solutions directing and ultimately being utilized by the commodity components of the supply chain. By allowing 3PLs to retain order and warehouse management components they are also allowed to retain ‘value’ and increase the dependency upon them.

In order to completely own the supply chain value, the CSP should begin ‘synchronizing’ its technology solutions into the supply chain environments. By deploying a net-centric distributed order and eventually, warehouse management solution, a service provider is empowered with complete inventory visibility across multiple 3PL partners, resellers, vendors, distributors and partners anywhere on the globe and reduction of the huge on-hand inventory quantities with just-in-time inventory planning (many CSPs still currently ‘rent’ up to $20MM in capital from a 3PL partner to purchase inventory that the CSP is ultimately responsible for – there is no risk to the partner. The CSP also pays good interest rates to the 3PL for this service) that allows drastic reductions in capital held hostage with 3PL partners because actual inventory numbers are not known, the 3PL partners are not efficient enough and therefore accurate forecasting cannot be planned.

The ability to multi-source fulfillment that this model provides has many other benefits as well:

• No longer dependent upon a single point of failure in the supply chain – multiple sources for fulfillment mean less downtime and backlogs to customers
• Allows organization to push down requirements to it’s suppliers / partners and eliminate those partners that cannot meet organizational standards (Wal-Mart continues to be the leading example of this methodology today)
• Receive ‘commodity’ services from 3PL and carrier partners such as backorder, shipment and delivery notification allowing the organization to make operational decisions based upon that data
• Ability to control the software and associated operating procedures used by supply chain partners thus driving up efficiency and driving down cost to an even higher degree.

Own the Value, Own the Customer, Control Your Destiny
Many communications providers have become dependent on a single CPE outsource solution provider by allowing the control of their customer data and billing events; value components, to be located within their partner’s systems.

Most eventually come to realize that they have essentially become a multi-channel retailer and part of that delivery is dynamically managing visibility and fulfillment of CPE goods across multiple fulfillment partners and organizations that are geographically and systemically diverse.

Inventory synchronization solutions captures, aggregates, and provides visibility to inventory quantities at all locations in a supply network- internal and external.

They provides visibility to and control over all inventories in the network, including in-transit inventory. They increase inventory turnover and supply chain flexibility through global visibility and synchronization of supply. With both overall and granular inventory visibility, an order hub strategy with inventory synchronization powers real-time global ATP, and facilitates accurate, rules-based order fulfillment while synchronizing, and monitoring all inventory levels and movements to ensure identification and resolution of  exceptions and anticipation of potential problems. It enables companies to accurately fulfill customer orders while optimizing inventory levels across their business.

Key Capabilities

• Global, Multi-Site Visibility – View inventory at all network locations – whether owned or partners, etc.
• Real-time Available-to-Promise – Provide accurate, global inventory availability in real-time through any order capture or customer interaction environment.
• Network Inventory Monitoring – Gain visibility of all supply and demand across variable time horizons. Monitor net availability positions and establish re-order points and manage back-orders.
• Network Inventory Updates – Receive and update inventory snapshots from individual locations and/or individual adjustments as they occur.
• Flexible Segmentation of Inventory – Easily configure inventory categories and flexibly model your distribution environment.
• Inventory Reservation – Manage inventory against user-defined segments and reserve inventory against quotes or draft orders to ensure commitment.
• Supply Chain Event Management – Flexibly manage exceptions in inventory levels, movements and late receipts; and proactively resolve problems.
• Analytics – Provide reporting and analytics infrastructure for defining, tracking and managing to metrics.

Business Benefits

• Reduce Inventory Levels – Eliminate redundant inventory and improve allocation predictability with global visibility and rules-based sourcing.
• Reduce stock-outs and overstocks – Manage customer demand against a broader and deeper view of inventory and initiate re-orders or markdowns based upon defined triggers.
• Increase revenue – Maximize fill rates for greater revenue capture via global sourcing and rules-based allocation.
• Reduce costs – Optimize spend on inventory storage across the network based on order geography profiles.
• Improve flexibility – Leverage new fulfillment options that reduce costs and inventory levels, without losing control of inventory.

An order hub strategy with distributed order management helps to drive profitable sales growth by successfully managing order fulfillment across the extended supply chain — providing synchronization and control of all internal and external processes tied to order fulfillment. It provides the capability to manage orders from multiple channels and coordinate fulfillment across multiple inventory locations, suppliers, partners and business units. With distributed order management, you can dramatically improve supply chain efficiency, present a single face to customers and adapt to ongoing business evolutions. It makes the increasingly complex fulfillment process transparent and enables your company to harness its full growth potential while driving down supply chain costs.

A flexible, easily configurable process model system for order management and fulfillment automates the manual processes often associated with managing orders in an extended supply chain. Order management addresses the entire order process from order capture to settlement. Each order line easily follows a unique process based upon any order-related attribute or business rule. It automatically creates and tracks any processes that result from, or depend upon, the original customer order. Order management also dramatically reduces order fulfillment costs and significantly improves the quality of customer service.

It resolves the challenges of complex, distributed fulfillment of discrete customer demand, such as quotes, orders, replenish requests, etc. It encompasses all demand-triggered processes across the extended supply chain, such as drop shipping, procure-to-order, delivery and services. Order management enables flexible execution of the customer fulfillment life-cycle from quote and capture to source and fulfill to returns and settlement.

Key Capabilities:

• Order aggregation and global sourcing – Leverage a multi-channel order repository for single source of information, and globally schedule and source orders based upon key business requirements.
• Execute beyond the four walls – Model role-based relationships in the supply chain and coordinate fulfillment activity across all external participants.
• Flexibly control fulfillment activities – Enable customized, line-level order fulfillment based upon any order-related attribute or condition, and adapt to dynamic variations in process.
• Granular management of complex fulfillment – Automatically creates and tracks any order, resulting from the original customer request and manage all associated dependencies.
• Receive inventory updates from external partner systems maintaining enterprise-wide inventory and service visibility.

Business Benefits:

• Reduce Operating Costs – Eliminate manual processes, reduce error rates and exceptions, and efficiently execute distributed order fulfillment.
• Drive Higher Revenue – Scale to meet growth objectives, and improve ability to reach new customers and offer complementary products and services.
• Improve Order Fill Rates – Leverage rules-based sourcing, flexible fulfillment and event management to improve performance.
• Increase Customer Satisfaction – Provide customers with reliable order commitments, increased fulfillment options and real-time order status even across disparate external partner systems.

CSPs should look to an order hub software platform to allow then bring the ‘value’ components of routing logic, carrier/service selection, event and fall-out management, enterprise-wide inventory visibility and billing event control. Additionally order management should maintain the dependencies, state and resolution of all lines of a customer order, from services to delivery to CPE product.

Next time we’ll look at taking value back in the last mile – by owning the software used within the third-party fulfillment provider’s warehouse itself.

I first wrote a version of the following way back in 2005 for a very large telecommunications company in the US. If someone would have asked me then if CSPs would still be struggling with this issue in 2012 I would have flippantly dismissed the idea as absurd. I would have been wrong.

Supply Chain Evolution
The evolution of fulfillment and the supply chain is similar in most industries and telecom is no exception. When originally pressed to provide product fulfillment services, organizations usually attempt to handle it internally first. After some time they decide the hassle and effort isn’t worth it and they turn it over to an outside specialist. Finally, hopefully, they realize that certain parts of that service are highly valuable and they move to re-acquire those pieces of the supply chain. Certainly there are some situations where 100% outsourcing may make sense but for the majority of CSPs owning the value components of the supply chain is critical to success.

In-House
The first pass at handling fulfillment of any equipment, including customer premise equipment (CPE), is usually to attempt to handle it completely within the four walls of the organization. There is usually a grass-roots effort to pull some capability together and over time many of these organizations evolve into groups with a considerably amount of efficiency.  At some point though, the internal cost of managing custom software, owning or leasing facilities and managing part-time help get to be a burden on an organization that is focused on selling primarily, not shipping products.

Outsourced
The second evolutionary phase introduces the idea of outsourcing, taking certain pieces of an organizations business and turning those over to an outside ‘expert’ who specializes in that piece of the business. In the case of fulfillment and shipping services these ‘experts’ are many times called Third Party Logistics providers (3PL). In the telecom industry the outsourcing of CPE began to permeate in the early 1990’s about the same time that Caller ID boxes were coming into vogue. Sales of CPE equipment skyrocketed once invoicing for the equipment could be placed directly on the consumer telephone bill (this type of capability is a very strong ‘value’ component of many CSP supply chain partners).

Hybrid
The final phase tends to be re-examining the fulfillment end of the supply chain and looking for opportunities to bring the ‘value’ components of the supply chain back within the organization’s four walls without having to deal with the overhead and management issues that were encountered in the first phase. Technology is the ultimate enabler of this phase.

Commoditize the Supply Chain
The ability to commoditize the last miles of the supply chain is critical to driving out cost and driving up efficiency when working the external providers of fulfillment services in any industry, including telecommunications. By allowing outside integration partners and 3PL providers to control too much of the supply chain and its logical decision points they become ‘required’ components of the corporate supply chain.

Inevitably this is exactly what 3PLs and other supply chain ‘partners’ strive to do; their primary goal is to become so intrinsically embedded within the organizational supply chain that they cannot be extricated without much financial pain and business risk. This allows the 3PL to keep from becoming a price-based commodity partner and adds ‘value’ to their offering allowing them to many times maintain single sourcing and higher rates / margins on fulfillment services. In some cases external 3PLs are embedded in the CSP billing process, a highly valuable piece of the supply chain. The capability to interact with provider billing systems and drive billing events ties them explicitly to the CSP supply chain.

All of the value in the supply chain is within the supply collaboration, fulfillment routing, business logic, billing and fall-out or issue management. The box shipping out the back door is regulated to becoming a commodity offering measured by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for on-time shipping / delivery, shipping accuracy and cost.

By allowing partners to control the ‘value’ components of the organizational supply chain they take on a role larger than a ‘commodity partner’. Traditionally the three key components necessary for success are people, process and technology. By giving one or more away to a partner we limit our capability for supply chain success.

Inefficient Partners
Compounding the problem with the scenario listed above is that once control of the ‘value’ components of the supply chain is given away, the external partner(s) no longer has any incentive to continue to drive cost out of the supply chain. They are also now in control of the fulfillment end of the supply chain and will look to take margin wherever and whenever they can do so.

Partners often don’t possess the domain knowledge required to deftly handle the kinds of decision logic that a CSP has to manage. They also have sometimes hundreds of other clients that they are trying to become embedded with as well which sometimes divert their focus from the things a provider needs to accomplish.

Partners many times also need to add a large number of ‘client services’ personnel to work with clients like service providers in order to overcome their antiquated and stretched IT system capabilities. Bringing the ‘value’ back into the four walls of the CSP almost guarantees the ability to reduce headcount needed at the 3PL partner at the same time increasing order efficiency and accuracy.

In the next blog we’ll look at how communications providers can begin taking steps to bring the value of the supply chain back into their organization.

We began the evening with a short introduction about the ancient symbols and meaning of the Yantra, how they are used in meditation and the differences between Yantras and Mandalas.

With beautiful Balinese flowers or ‘bunga-bunga’ as it is said in Indonesian, we then all helped to create an incredible, colourful Sri Yantra on the floor of the Yoga Space. Starting from the inside and working our way outwards, as is tradition in forming these sacred symbols, we watched the formless take form.

As the full moon rose, and the Yantra was completed, we dimmed the lights in the open air Yoga Shala and joined hands in a circle around the Yantra. Together as one in the moon light, we chanted an extended ‘OM’ and invited the power of the Yantra to move through us and to do its work within each of us.

After the meditation, we took our beautiful Yantra creation and offered it up in a spirit of non-attachment. Throwing the colourful flowers into the air showering each other in a confetti of colour and petals.

A big thank you to Manuela, Desa Seni and all who attended and shared in the experience! And thank you to Tatiana Perim who took these beautiful photos below.

If you would like to experience Yantra Mandala Painting and Meditations and are in Bali, Desa Seni will be running their Summer Session’s through out July and August and I will be hosting Yantra Painting & Meditation workshops for both Kids and Adults to explore our creativity and the power of these mystical Yogic Symbols.

Manuela and Melina helping to create the Sri Yantra

The foundation – starting to form.

Adding the final touches.

Releasing the Yantra back to the Universe.

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ അടങ്ങിയിരിക്കുന്ന ഒൻപതു ത്രികോണങ്ങളും കൂടിച്ചേർന്നു 43 ചെറിയ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ രൂപപെടുന്നു.ഇത്തരം 43 ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ ദ്വന്ദമല്ലാത്ത അഥവാ അദൈദത്തെ സൂച്ചിപ്പിക്കുന്നു.ഈ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ മുഴുവൻ 8 താമരഇതളുകളാൽ വലയം ചെയ്യപ്പെട്ടിരിക്കുന്നു.തുടർന്ന് 16 താമരഇതളുകൾ കാണപ്പെടുന്നു.ഏറ്റവും ഒടുവിലായി നാലുവാതിലുകളുള്ള ചതുരം സ്ഥിതിചെയ്യുന്നു.

ശ്രീചക്രം നവചക്രം എന്നപേരിലും അറിയപ്പെടുന്നു നവ എന്ന സംസ്കൃത പദത്തിനർത്ഥം ഒൻപതു എന്നാകുന്നു.അതുകൊണ്ടുത്തന്നെ ശ്രീചക്രം ഒൻപതു സ്ഥിതികളെ സൂചിപ്പിക്കുന്നുശ്രീചക്രത്തിന്റെ ഒൻപതു സ്ഥിതികൾ ഇവയാണ്.

ത്രിലോകമോഹനം

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിന്റെ ഏറ്റവും പുറത്തായി കാണുന്ന മൂന്നുവരകൾ.

സർവ്വാശപരിപൂരക

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 16 താമരയിതളുകൾ.

സർവസന്ക്ഷോഭഹന

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 8 താമരയിതളുകൾ.

സർവസൗഭാഗ്യദായക

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 14 ചെറിയ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ.

സർവഅർത്ഥ സാധക

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 10 ചെറിയ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ.

സർവരക്ഷാകര

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 10 ചെറിയ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ.

സർവരോഗഹാര

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 8 ചെറിയ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ.

സർവസിദ്ധിപ്രധ

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന 1 ചെറിയ ത്രികോണങ്ങൾ.

സർവഅനന്തമയ

ശ്രീചക്രത്തിൽ കാണുന്ന വൃത്തബിന്ദു.
ഹിന്ദുതന്ത്രവിദ്യയുടെ പ്രതീകമാണ് ശ്രീചക്രം അഥവാ ശ്രീയന്ത്ര.ഹിന്ദുതത്വശാസ്ത്രത്തിൽ അധിഷ്ഠിതമായാണ്.യന്ത്രം രൂപകല്പന ചെയ്തിരിക്കുന്നത്.ശ്രീ വിദ്യാദേവി ഉപാസനയുമായി ശ്രീചക്രംബന്ധപെട്ടിരിക്കുന്നു.മഹാത്രിപുരസുന്ദരി അഥവാ ശ്രീപാർവ്വതിദേവിയുടെ പ്രതീകമായാണ് ശ്രീചക്രം കണക്കാക്കപെട്ടിരിക്കുന്നത്

നൂറു യാഗം ചെയ്യുന്നതിന്റെയും പതിനാറുവിധമുള്ള മഹാദാനം ചെയ്യുന്നതിന്റെയും മൂന്നരകോടി തീർത്ഥങ്ങളിൽ കുളിക്കുന്നതിന്റെയും ഫലം കേവലം ശ്രീചക്ര ദർശനം കൊണ്ട് കിട്ടുമെന്നാണ് തന്ത്രശാസ്ത്രത്തിൽ പറഞ്ഞിരിക്കുന്നത്..സൗന്ദര്യലഹരി സ്ത്രോത്രത്തിലും ആദിശങ്കരനും ശ്രീയന്ത്രത്തിനെ പലപ്രാവശ്യം പരാമർശിച്ചിടുണ്ട്

ശ്രീ യന്ത്രത്തിന്റെ നിർമാണം യോഗിനി ഹൃദയത്തിൽ വ്യക്തമായി പ്രതിപാദിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ട്.

പുരി ശ്രീ ജഗനാഥ്ക്ഷേത്രത്തിലുള്ള സംഘക്ഷേത്രം താന്ത്രികവിധിപ്രകാരം ശ്രീചക്രവുമായി സാമ്യമുള്ളതാണ്

The body is a Yantra where God resides.