What is Love?

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A vulnerable angel – 1968

What is love?

We are supplied with a super-abundance of beautiful wise words written or said by other people, and we tend to put them on the wall or make altars out of them. Master R told Anne Davies, “Love and you shall know”.   We need to discover our words from the heart, as they speak themselves.

He said further, “A loved creature, like the Frater’s dog, or like the little bird, has compared to yours, a short incarnation span.  You don’t really shorten that span by loving an animal, but you do plant in that creature something far beyond the usual enfoldment.  Death comes to all bodies, and the death of wild creatures is seldom as quick and merciful as that of these two.

“Yet death is but a door.  Nothing dies but bodies.  The essential being lives on, and whatever has received unselfish, loving care, has been given a tremendous impulse forward, so the power of that love makes possible a very rapid advance in the scale of unfoldment. Not because you loved them did they die, but because you did love them are they farther along the path than they would be, but for that love.

“Never fear to love.  Never stint the outflow of that divine power.  What grief and pain seem to be associated with love come always from attachment.  Love seeks not its own, because love never feels itself to be separated from its own.” 

Anne asked, “What if love is not returned?”

“No, Soror.  Love seeks no return, because love knows there is always a return.  Outer manifestation of response is not necessary for love.  Loving is giving, and love feeds itself in giving.  It is we with our short sight, who fail to know what love knows always, that nothing can separate anyone or anything from love.  The whole world came into being by love, is maintained by love, and continues by love.  

“But apart from philosophy, your little bird sings more happily than here, and your dog is closer to you this minute than ever he was while in the body. This we assure you most definitely, and if we are false in this, then is all the rest of our teaching worse than nonsense, for the whole mystery of the universe is the secret of love,
and the triumph of love over death is the supreme victory.”

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I was deeply touched with this passage when I first read it, about ten years ago.  It affirmed that whatever I might think or doubt about channeled Masters, here is the Wisdom itself – pure gold.

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Turning inward, discovers the inner Teacher, and this is the relationship without which there is no love.   It takes practice.

Love is here and now in expression:  the connection to gravity – but one needs to be  co-creative with it, even when just sitting still.   There needs to be some Mars mixed with the Venus, to see and be the violet ray.

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Always flowing with the unbroken connection with the One?   This is misleading.  Of course it happens when I write, because the words come up from that deposit in the subconscious, which is laid down since early childhood in this lifetime, and in invisible lifetimes preceding.  It is the threads in the tapestry.   Very rarely does a human being manifest it all the time.  They do exist but they are few.   The rest of the day – when it seemed so simple just to stay here – is consumed in the usual nags and frets of the dreamer.

Each time, that place is woken, with a fresh insight.   Yet it is an unbroken thread.  Come to it afresh, each time with the ongoing problem and pain in daily life – ask.   The dialogue, corresponding with my own subconscious, awakens love.   Love is a universal quantum, like gravity:  a sense of passionate well being and peace, like a well or a mountain spring.   It isn’t attached to a person, but is easily made to – at the drop of a hat.  Then we start projecting! – that is the convention, in great literature and at the movies.   All the great  romantic love affairs in history have unhappy endings, because they drove themselves into that end-game.  The human collective soul grows to expect this, and to draw nourishment and entertainment from it.

However, Love loves individual human beings in a myriad ways.

John the Organist – in Liverpool, 1968

Love cannot be confined.   It is a limitless reservoir from which we drink:  no cup can contain it – (that is the illusion we mostly live by).   But the cup is emptied and is dipped again.   This is according to our own bio-rhythms which sleep and wake in a linear sequence, like waves.

Fact is – there are samskaras and types of Karma embedded in the embodied soul. They all need active expression, to become conscious, transformed and therefore released, and none of it happens overnight. What we get is a kind of fabric – the stuff we have to weave in life, like earning a living;  the state of the human-world; or being a parent or partner.  The worries and tensions are interwoven with the bright thread which is love-eternal – the star-born.   The secret is in detecting the thread, and bathing in it, for a moment at a time;  finding what activity sustains or allows it NOW.   My way is writing or studying.  Your way might be Yoga or studying, or ritual, or parenting.

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Constant attention to the Divine is not a practical proposition in life – unless one is a monk It initially inspires, but puts pressure on the student, and further distances him/her from WHAT IS.   When we are inspired, it is at that focused moment ALL THERE IS;  and it lives for ever.  There is no clue in that moment (Key 11), of the small and huge frustrations and fatigues of daily life which cloud it over as the day goes on.  The adepts had just as much trouble as you and me, whenever they were not actually transmitting.

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It is hard for me to notice the cosmic Love, when I am right in it, in the strange shapes it presents, here and now, which are not as expected.

It is hard to trust life just as it is;  but to trust it, is the key.

Sky angels over St Malo – 1986

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Paul Foster Case had quite a troubled personal life – I gather, from biographical snippets online – and must have drawn enormous solace from the huge task he was given to do – to write all the books and hundreds of Lessons, to build the School of the Adytum.   The Great Work must have kept him happy and on even keel.   He was the vessel;  and captaining the vessel was the Magid or Master R.   When it all began, Paul got so attenuated with the rush of kundalini-shakti, that he was ordered by the Master to ground himself by drinking wine and eating red meat for a year – so I have been told.

Paul was a master organist – in his heart and soul, as well as in his musical gift.   Music takes practice – feet and hands, keyboard and pedals.   So does Love.   Babies learn to walk first, to run to their parents and be welcomed with joy.  Every single one.

1978 her first steps, 13 months

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The writing, speech and prayer, touches the Hermit’s peak, Key 9, which is eternal:  but the bulk of our life is embodied in Key 18 which is the time it takes.

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I saw many people go to neo-advaita Satsang and try to grab what they found there, and take it home.  But they couldn’t.  Why?  Because they were trying to get it from someone else, sitting there and shining and making their heart buzz.  It fades, like an after-image of the sun.  Anyone who wants to, and is good at it, can sit and give Satsang and channel the accumulated focus of all those hopeful and receptive faces.  It is a splendid feeling.  Wisdom flows back.

A ROGUES GALLERY of Satsang teachers in London, 1 April 1999
I collaged these portraits together for April Fools Day –  pages of an old journal.

Oh, Angel – 1988

John de Ruiter and Francis Lucille

Ramesh, Wayne, Mira & Ranjit Maharaj

Arunachala sivalinga, Bernardo Satyananda & Isaac Shapiro

Catherine Ingram and … ?

Arunachala children

Douglas Harding’s 90th birthday – the late Alan Rowlands is to the right

But to attend to your organic inner language of the same, takes time, passion and commitment.  It takes really valuing and savouring the earliest feelings in childhood, good and bad.   Here, you are a pioneer.   No one ever expressed them, but you.  But when you say and discover them, you may go out, and a book will fall into your hand from a shelf somewhere, and show you that these unique feelings and flavours were and are all over the Ancient World and its ageless wisdom, as archetypes.  ( That is how Kabbalah discovered me.)   The Ancient World is here and now, like looking down into clear water.

Attend honestly to what feels Real for you – beyond speech, and before literacy.  Touch it inside.

Then you will find, when you study the Tree of Life, or any spiritual path, that you have been there, heart and soul, and recognise it and the Lessons in principle, with your life and leaf, with the blood vessels and capillaries through your body.  This is love – the holy greeting.   The smallest response is That.   It is the still small voice.  It is NEVER the big billboard.

small angel, 1956

The distractions of 21^st century human life – as in any century – are immense.   Nobody expects you to be awake all day.   No one is.  It is fluid like the sea, and like a sky of storms and sunlight.   If you are on the peak for long periods, it tends to stagnate and to form for itself a pedestal;  then come all the problems of Key 15, which close up the open sky of Key 6 and put it into the boxes in Key 20, whence arise again the Delivered ones;  your interior holy Family.   Resurrection is salvage.

Holy Guardian Angel beckons with the trumpet note which is known uniquely and privately to your inner self.  Find and hear it!   (Keys 20 and 5.)

Visualisation – and keep it simple – instructs the flow of the blood and cells, as in the Lessons on the Hermit and Virgo.  From that kindled vitality arise the pictures of the soul, with your breath:  prana..

The great problem in spiritual work is Dryness.  That is when we cannot quite form a living connection – relationship with what we are studying or praying.  It is like going to an exhibition and just looking at pictures by someone else.  Yet we know it is the soul’s own ground, and our true nature, else what are we doing with prayer?   Intuitively, instinctively, it is known … “only connect.”.   The sense of being separate, is the problem.   And it comes from making many ardent possessions of thought, and capturing them for security:  identifying with them at Hod.   The entire business is transacted between Tifareth and Hod, Key 15:  solve et coagula.  Solve et coagula – again and again.   Renewal.  Mirth at my extravagant delusions.

We tend to be misers with our gold.  One who keeps his gold in a box, cannot enjoy it.   We all do this more or less, because life and the economy is scary and we are insecure.   We were taught to, by our parents, and we teach it to our children.  So the insecurity manifests, globally.

Alchemy.   I have psychological scars from youth, in relationships.  This ground was given me to work with for the rest of my life, like a patch of garden.   It is often heavy, and I get depressed.  Transforming pain, and the reactivity from it, to something creative which forgives it – because the creative something is part and parcel of that trauma’s quintessence – is my job, the job which Upstairs gave me to fulfil.   I am certain I perceived and accepted the whole thing before I was born.  Then it had to do its time – the meeting, the falling in love, the psychological abuse, which triggered dormant dragons in deep past Karma which needed to be exorcised and delivered to the Light.   It was and is long, slow and thorough.   I find it really difficult to be straightforward and honest with someone, when the words don’t come.

So I value the terrible times, because of what underlay them, like gold in the dark mine, and erupted through them;  because of what they really are.   Gold!   Philosophers’ gold, ultimately.   There is no real discovery in the spiritual life, without the earth bound stress of realisation … digging out the gold by whatever way is given.   Jesus said Use your Talent.  You know what it is.

The flowers in spring push up gently through the resistant membrane of the ground.

http://footage.shutterstock.com/clip-2436923-stock-footage-crocus-in-spring-sweden.html?src=rel/2436881:7  ..

The gold in the rocks and minerals of earth, is congealed Sunlight.   The same flows in our veins, as red and white corpuscles.   It breathes us in and out.  We breathe.  JHVH.

When a certain depth is touched, there is no one who can heal it but myself;  so I was unable to work with therapists. (Each time I tried, it was a fiasco!)    I turned to my creative gifts instead, which were put here, for this reason;  to investigate their source, language, and transmute the darkness into light.  It still goes on.   To begin with, it was extravagant and on a chattering high.   Over the decades, it sobered up and became more rounded.

I am  close to two persons who survived hell.   Living with their courage, and with their tiny organic changes which spread eventually far and wide, is Alchemy.  Today I grieve.  There is much pain in my life at the moment.  But I think it teaches me about myself, where I come from.

THE KEY TO IT ALL IS CONCENTRATION … on the living Thread, like doing a carving or writing a poem.   Focus.  Focus is love.

Many seekers are babies being weaned off formula.

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I listened to Oscar Wilde talking through a medium – this was on Elene’s blog.  He began with petulant impatience on how dim most people are, and ended with a drift of spiritual platitudes which sent me to sleep – I was very tired.   But it is entertaining, humane and interesting.   He was reluctant at first, to divulge his name.  He said it had got him in a lot of trouble.  It is very difficult for a soul on the inner planes, to get through our linear fog screen.

The one on the right is a much better drawing.  I am always surprised by what happens when I turn the photo upside down and draw from that.  The volume and modelling are better.  It is something to do with seeing just what’s there, without short cuts, or habits;  attention.

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Link to “What is Thought?” in my other blog

Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

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

Mysteries of Master R – Part 7: Apprentice to Mystery & Science

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16 October 2013

So called “Mysteries” are clear, scientific secrets.  What is a science?  The linguistic root is knowledge – self knowledge by experiment.  What is a secret?  Something which desires to be known – and known in the heart.  What is the laboratory?  A life-work in my soul and body, tried and tested and ongoing.

I do not relate much to projections upon Count Saint-Germain – Master R – as a glamorous, mysterious figure.  The Mystery there is set upon an altar, and does not alter things for real.  From him is purported to come much new age channeling.  I read a little of it, some of it seems excellent, some of it is platitude, and as I have not studied those writings comprehensively, I am not in a position to comment.   I got involved in a St Germain society about ten years ago, for a while.  Some of it was good, but the medium became corrupt and demanded a large house and income.  The lesson I drew from this, is never to rely on someone else’s version for verification.  See into my own life as given.  It is all there – hands to the plough:  seabirds hover and swoop.

The Hermetic Table of Alchemy states:  Visita Interiore Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem – “Journey into your own centre (earth) to put things right, and discover the hidden Precious Stone.”  

The seven initials – one for each chakra –  spell “vitriol” – an alchemical paradox.  Vitriol is sulphuric acid, and it also means “a harsh criticism”.  Alchemical vitriol is that same power to turn inward, “without hatred or envy“, and – from brewing the wisdom of the ages – to see outward and adjust our world according !  The art is performed with sulphur, salt and mercury … Hokhmah, Binah, Kether.

Vitriol transforms to Elixir.  (see http://www.crcsite.org/printTabulatext.htm – Interpretation and Explanation of the /tabula smaragdina hermetis, in The Rosicrucean Archive).   Alchemy is homeopathic, transmuting toxins and eliminating the rust.  Upon sound psychological observation the Chariot of the Spirit is drawn.  Psychology is the wheelbase of all occult and esoteric study.  Self knowledge is the essence.

“Rocky” – The second in a series of paintings (1986) where the trail opened inward, rather than upon outward portraits of life. In the centre are pilgrim and cloven footed gate keeper. To the right is a train with all my current acquaintances and friends as passengers. On the rocky cliff is a mythic Greek bull, myself naked, and a mother trying to protect her baby from the sea. The man clinging along the cliff to save himself, is a conductor – the personal ego. The ship out to sea is the vessel. It was a mixture of dream images in the pot.

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My relationship with Master R – who counsels civilizations rather than single students – is based on my working interest in Alchemy – a chosen, pragmatic focus.  At such moments I become attuned to some of “his” way of seeing things, and my patterns of life then verify it with subtle rhymes that I recognise with my life pattern.  It is a working relationship of the soul, rather like duet playing.  It takes practice.  Willingly keep practicing!

This Master is not an individual.  He is a way of seeing things trans-personally.  It is a way which subtly alters the environment from within.  I have a whole article yet to write, about how I discovered a way to contact him and the other great teachers in his plane, by drawing, waiting tentatively – a kind of surrender to the unknown – and then having to do it myself.

A hallmark is that I am not told what to do.  When in great difficulty, I try something, leave it open, and then the smallest nudge indicates: right or left.  Open or close.

Piano duet 1999 – I am the left pair of hands, and all ear for my friend who is a much more competent pianist. It is autumnal and tumbling. He had an attractive curiosity about life.

This morning’s plan is to copy his first full painting in the Trinosofia, like I did the 12th.  It prefaces Section Two in the Trinosofia, because Section One is introductory, and written from a prison – the human dungeon.  Section One warns the reader against abuse, indiscretion and the Inquisition.   Section Two is an inner liberation.  It takes us into the interior, deep under Mount Vesuvius.

However, as soon as I sat down – after a long search for my sketching paper – words started to come.  “He” wanted to say something about scientific attitudes.  I have the gist of lifetimes in my bone and blood.  I ploughed my talent into the secrets of the universe, and discovered it is one and the same.  I only write down “his way of inspiring me”, by having toiled and verified the same for myself.  I get annoyed with trendy young Professors on TV who declare “astrology is a load of rubbish” without the courtesy or discipline to study the basics for themselves.   Theirs is NOT scientific thinking, it is belief, and belief takes ignorant short cuts.

The problem with scientism is when it fails to incorporate the observer who is “real science” by genuine trial and error.   The problem is the practitioner’s failure or unwillingness to incorporate the Heisenberg principle – (that the observer’s consciousness influences the experiment;  that a wave particle may be detected in position OR in motion, never both at once).  The Heisenberg principle is the observer, inseparably.  The problem is the false separation.   As J.Krishnamurti knew and said, “The observer is the observed.”  But what academic ambition could tolerate that?

The Table of Hermes also states, “Let all obscurity fly from thee.”

On a broader canvas, modern science – which in Quantum theory approaches the vision of the Vedas – is divorced from the medium which is Gaia – ourselves – our Earth and biosphere, weathers, oceans, creatures and volcanic interior.   The whitecoat is divorced from the laboratory bench, because he seeks to manipulate a new toy, something commercially viable for the tiny humanosphere.  Whereas, an Alchemist IS the bench, the laboratory, the elemental table, as handed down through thousands of years and the distillation of many civilizations.

Trinosofia figure 2, photo of the facsimile on my computer screen.
De Givry said of this figure: “It represents a man gazing into a prophetic cup forming a magic mirror. The conjoined signs of the Sun and the Moon are seen against the pedestal of the table; at the top, a super-position of different coloured rectangles indicates the phases of the Work, and the double sign of the Lingam in a circle emblematically recalls the Hermetic male and female. An inscription in Greek letters and made-up characters gives a formula for the composition of Gold/the Sun King, by means of a mixture of gold and silver regenerated by vital mercury. Linked to the blue rectangle giving this formula, is a red rectangle inscribed with the rule for the furnace fire in Hebrew characters.
“The Hebrew letters in the red panel are translated: ‘On account of distress, they shall cling to the Bestower. The wise who are wearied with worldliness, shall turn to wisdom, the bestower of all good things.’ “
“The letters in the circle are Greek and translate to “the Light of revelation”. The inscription in the blue rectangle describes the quickening of the soul seed (Aries) and of the breath upon the waters. The number 62 appears, with an admonition to open the holy gate (clairvoyance) with the aid of the vessel or cup … adepts drink the water by which the soul remembers its own substance and origin …”

Alchemy, Freemasonry and the esoteric schools of Europe, were Master R’s hobby when he dressed as a diplomat among kings and nobles.  When I feel him – or who? – drawing near, it is like a river flowing into my back from behind, and over my shoulders … playful, pleasurable and awesome:  joy, truth and tearful.   The connection with him is my natural Yes.  My years of refining my tools and studies in his working channel are the current: apprenticeship.  The Master goes away to attend to his stuff on the inner planes, and leaves the apprentice to work things out.   The Master outside and embracing space and time, dips into it at will, condenses himself to a heavier medium of thought for a quick visit, dissolves back into light, presents a countenance through the sky colour changing clouds which his apprentices  recognise.  The light rejoices the fields.

The Master comes to the way of love, because love always meets its own, and “truth agrees with itself” as Paul Foster Case has said.   “Love, and you shall know.”

Right now, we are carpenters, builders of furniture and carving at a bench, and both wear leather aprons.   The Master is better known, however, as a jeweller.  In this drawing, his profile and left eye looking down, is across the upper right corner, and when I drew it, those were planetary orbits coming near, and detailed chippings into the soul, releasing gems.

It was 1988:  I did not know then, that Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were conjunct, entering Capricorn.

Jeweller 1988 – or gem maker from planet orbital planes

His eye has compound vision – multi dimensioned – yet is deeply attentive to one thing.  The shared lens is “concentration”.  Those may be cones of sight, or simply one-pointedness.

Having hinted at what a Science might be – the expression of a path of knowledge – let’s look at Mystery.   Any so called Mystery which stands in front of the mystery of why am I here at all?  Why aren’t I you?  Why is the nose on my face like this?  Why do the flowers grow that way, and how do the lambs dance out of their mothers? … is a camouflage.  It conceals and congeals.  Mystery is the “plain to see,” or as a friend once put it – “the Miss Trees”.   Because life and the economy are hard, many of us prefer to go to the cinema or stare at a smart, smart phone, and be frightened of robbers.   The Greater Mystery is nude.

The figure on the right was drawn when I was seven or eight.  I guess this post is inspired by my classic dream last night of walking up Finchley Road and talking to people and then discovering I had no clothes on at all, which up till that moment, felt perfectly natural.   There was nothing to cover myself with – my aging defects and blemishes – but a large book, which was inadequate.   That tells reams !

The Mystery – a hidden treasure which loves to be known – resides perhaps at the heart of all the conventional interpretations of being stark naked in a dream.  I feel the connection.  In my dream as I woke up, I found some transparent nightwear in a small shop, to go home in, which did the job less effectively than Aphrodite’s hair!  My dreams poke fun at me.  I love it.

Revenons a nos moutons.   It is time to tackle that new drawing.

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Not knowing Greek, I had to guess at the letters and shapes in the blue rectangle; also the online reproduction of the facsimile blurs them. The coloured planes behind it are the elements. I gave it a grey background, to suggest the cave.

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What fun I had with this!

For Master R’s writing of the inner journey, see my new Page in the title bar – Trinosofia Texts.  I particularly love where he says, “Without reproach of the past, without fear of the future, I went on.“

FROM MY JOURNAL, 17 October – Yesterday was interesting after the naked dream.  I began a new Master R post in Aquariel, tugged into writing about science, a hobby horse of “his” – and I began to realise the naked dream was coming up through it with an alchemical meaning of its own … and at last began the new Trinosofia drawing.   It took a very long time, as the two figures in the original are clumsily drawn, and the anatomy is very difficult to copy.  The original in colour is online, and though much better than the xerox in my book, the repro is low-resolution and the lines are fuzzy.  The two figures are naked, but she wears a peculiar black skirt or shawl round her waist, and black boots.  I made her skirt an indigo velvet colour (saturn).

He wears nothing but a pair of red strappy sandals with yellow soles, (mars-mercury colours) and is very muscular.  He bends over the blue “table” on which stands a golden cup and a lance-head/sword.  He gazes in his feminine mirror.  With a turquoise wand – the scorpio force – she touches his third eye, making him an Initiate.   In the painting she lays it across his left shoulder as if knighting him, but in the text it says clearly, his third eye, his forehead, so I decided to follow that.  I also altered the position and shape of her legs.

They are an extremely dynamic couple.  They ignite an alchemical Great Mystery – a fire self-combusts on the night-sky floor, near where the sun and moon conjoin, and it bends towards him.  This is the secret fire, which quickens him.   I worked on through the evening, with time off for my friend H’s visit (during which I wept, as we talked of painful stuff) and watching Grand Designs on TV and then I fell asleep on the floor for an hour and a half – final session midnight until about 2 am, I filled in most of the panel detail, background etc.

It is beautiful to copy and savour the precise Alchemical Colours, the reds, blues, yellows, green, violet, indigo, knowing what they signify.  The Mystery throbs to life.  It is right that he is muscular, for this is the tonicity of Mars.   Her breasts and upper body are plump above her dark skirt, and she has an earnest expression.  She is Isis, with long flowing brown hair, curly, and she looks like Morgan in Dion Fortune’s Moon Magic.   With the robes on she would be regally dignified;  with the absurd concealing skirt and boots, she isn’t, she is rather a comedy – just like I feel if caught undressed – but she presses on with the job.   She represents the man’s encounter with Mother Nature, himself mother naked, from birth, as he will be, in the grave.   Above them are beautiful plaques hanging, red and blue, with alchemical letters.  I’ve done the red one/hebrew letters, and have just the blue one to do, this morning.

I love the way the colours so unexpectedly come to life and sing together.   It is the good Prang crayons I use, and the long practice with the Tarot Keys.  Alchemy releases the inner rainbow, and Master R’s art did the same, in his day.   The “originals” in Trinosofia are actually copies of his work which disappeared.   He said to the Cases in 1947, that they are good copies.

The cross depicts the deep room the neophyte came to. The doors leading from it are red (faith and universal medicine), sky-blue (purification/elixir of life), black (labour, making material gold) and white (philosophers’ Stone). On the north wall over the black door by which the neophyte entered, was hung the painting.

As well as Science, I touch on Mystery.  I said the real Mystery is “existence” – more so than anything put on an altar.  But I fib, because I am unable to bathe in the Mystery, with all my worries taking up the space.   Nevertheless I know that an Initiate does bathe in it and is washed clean.   With the drawing, something of the Greater Mystery is touched and unveiled:  the keys which deeply nourish the soul and link with Eternity.   The Greater Mysteries, as far as Master R is concerned, have an essential ceremonial in them – something is at first blindfold, then unveiled – viz the symbolism of me going naked up Finchley Road.

Always it is an exchange of man and woman – as demonstrated in colour in the drawing, for the blue plaque is above the man and the red plaque above the woman – hers is a right-pillar active role;  he, like Gevurah on the Tree’s left pillar, receives.   The man who is about to be initiated into the Greater Mysteries, strips and bows to Her.

Passion does not fulfil the heart.   Life softens and ripens the fruit of love.

“When the heart is deeply moved, it likes a little ceremony.”

Up came my Nakedness in Public.  I have been struggling with my worry about A …  I have tried to keep cool and okay and not think about it.  But I decided to talk to H, who is always inviting me not to bottle things up but have it out with him.   And alas alack – the emotional pressure, my thick voice, my tears in eyes – all the work I have done on myself seems useless.   And how foolish I feel then about my esoteric studies – to non-esotericks like H, they must seem to be my escape route.   On and on I go with this traumatic pressure inside unchanging.

None of us, he said, live our lives without making significant mistakes.  They make us grow.  He began to outline a few of his own.  We live with them for the rest of our life, but it is not negative, because of what we do subsequently.   It is our responsibility.

I live with my feeing of having done wrong …  Address this, because otherwise my expectation that bad things might happen,  materialises.  I am wise when silent and writing of it, and I am a mad merrygoround when trying to drive the chariot with someone else;  when trying to speak of it.   It is so frustrating.

A healing colour combination, the other day. The blue is meant to be indigo, but my camera saw it differently. Indigo is Saturn, root chakra, Orange is Sun, the heart, and Red is Mars, navel chakra. Tarot Keys the Lovers and the Sun are both in the solar orange frequency: the tone is D-natural.

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The core problem is Worries.  The habit of worrying about anything  I depend on, like my bike making funny noises,  or my laptop behaving oddly.  if it seems not to work properly, guilt slams in, and a sick tension inside, I did something wrong.   This must be seen to, because it is a chronic condition, and it may get worse as I get older.   It says I have let someone down.   I neglected.   I didn’t look after her.  I had a fantasy, a playground, and it wasn’t true.   I let down even the Great Work.

So that is also the inappropriate naked feeling in the street – suddenly uncomfortable where I was insouciant.   The guilt feeling is so backed up, that when I speak of it to anyone, it makes it worse, the sound of it, the stuck wheel.

Enter Art Therapy!   My dreaming re-booted, because of this plan: I shall go to an art therapist to explore this thing in clay and collage, hands on, rather than struggle with speech.  It feels somewhere refreshing and discharged, to have dreamed busily again last night.  I dreamt of a wacky commune by the sea.  They had a huge communal bath-tub outside the house, and the rooms inside were like Mick Jagger’s in the “Performance” movie.  I had long conversations with wild hairy drop-outs and old acid-heads,  and am amazed at their colourful personalities and their faces – how did my mind invent them in such detail, and their life-stories?  Then I dreamed of a complex citadel or town of many levels, and suddenly I saw through a window, the rocky summit of Mont St Michel, just outside.  My way forward would traverse the peak.

I felt relieved, after what my friend H said – about what we do with our mistakes –  but the turbulence takes time to settle, and I made supper – brown rice and lentils, tin of spiced sardines, some beetroot, tomatoes, coriander and cress and a bit of curry powder, golly how delicious – and went straight back to my drawing.  The rice and lentils boiled dry and burned on the bottom.

The turbulent location takes relief in its stride, it is a circuit of tension and relief, it is self-important and doesn’t move.   This is the substance to address.

The Inner School isn’t concerned with time.  It doesn’t make immediate changes, it chimes up the process which then takes time to clear – many years, as I now know – or lifetimes – being human.   Facing grief – turning to face the wind.

Therapy with the Inner School opens spectacular insight, and the feeling of great seismic shifts and clarity and progress – and then a bewildered disappointment on discovery that the situation in the surface has not eased.   The emotional upset – the trauma deep down – is as intractable as ever.

Remember:  the seismic shift is REAL.   Deliverance is certain.  But the Karmic stuff remaining – the slow fuel – takes time to consume and release.   Many years of Capricorn.

This is also the meaning of the fire under the Initiate, which blows towards him.  His legs and body glow.  He is being speeded up, confronting the fire directly, even as he drinks the water of life and is touched by Isis.   Life isn’t easy.

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A strange image! It heads this section II of Trinosofia. The reproduction I copied it from is itself blurred, so I don’t know what the figures are at the “tunnel” entrance. Or is this a convex shape? I left my perspective deliberately a bit awry. A portal of some kind … to an underworld or interior realm – it doesn’t anywhere say “abandon hope”.
I had a dream of bricks looking watery, like an Irish or Highland stream with its .autumnal glints – the flow of “snake water stone”. I may work on this a bit more, sometime.

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And I have an aim.   I want to be and live like an Initiate, discreetly camouflaged to the social terrain of today, because this is the real way.  It is like “toning” the colour in a painting, to a plant or stone in the hedgerow.   I want to work with persons.

It seems to take decades to weather the raw Stone.  I must NOT appear as a wild occult loon, or have sticky opinions about it – and that is tricky, because the juice of the inner School ignites the personal ego to burn-off.   Dignity and discretion!   What layers and layers of training there are – and how far off this ideal still seems, even if – like my glimpse of the rock and lichens of Mont St Michel last night  – i can almost reach and touch it.

This morning I read and reblogged Lissa’s wonderful article about Trauma.  Her insight and her “damascan discovery” reach right in to my Trauma zone, and illumine the subconscious strata from which my habitual worries sprout:  for give.

We give to each other the Fruit of Life.

Orpheus. Note the strata of the soul, behind him. He rises like trees, from the core of the Earth and ancient hieroglyphic history.

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Peace, peace.  The opening phrase of this Sonata by Master R, is beautiful and gentle.  And the finger-friendly pair of Minuets at the end!

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

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

Begin an Inner Journey – My House of the Psyche

A meditation from the beginning of September – I had highlighted it then, for a post; so here it is.  It is followed by another Saint-Germain violin sonata, and something my mother wrote a long time ago, about the sea.

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Master Key

The house before me has an oak arched door … a room of the soul directly.

The door is reddish brown, heavy and strong, with tongue-in-groove planks perhaps, hung in a masonry ogive like a church.  An iron key from Tiruvannamalai market opens it.   Breathe down into the belly and go in.

Tiru key, pyramid, devon pebble and jug

It is fresh inside as if scented with spring hedgerow blossom, discreet;  adjust to the low light.   Interior space.  A black cat perhaps is curled on the floor.  The floor varies.  It might be a green carpet, or it might be old wood floorboards, like my upstairs at home.   My hallway or entrance here is more spacious than at home, a square room with books shelved around it on the walls, and not much else.   The books are more for wallpaper than for study.   Like lifetimes, I have read them, and now they rest inside their motley covers and spines, like “My War”.

Let’s have just one chair here:  sometimes two – for a reader.   It is like my white armchairs, but of natural wood.   My entrance hall is a library, but in the far left hand corner there is a door:  go through that – there are stairways in a well, one going up, one going down.  Can walk straight through into a violet tinged room or space which is Yesod.

Tree of Life detail – Malkuth, Yesod

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My Sefiroth and paths are not cluttered or furnished much:  they are colours.  The entrance library has all the data.   So here, I can just reach for a book which attracts me on the shelves.  At the moment I see Stephen Szegedy Szuts’ “My War” (1932) and in it the story is told in crisp brush drawings; each has a title which is listed in the contents page.   The first drawing is of waking up on a beautiful morning.   The facial expressions and the swift Magyar touch, are vivid in my inner eye.

Two drawings – Awakening and Flowers are Speaking, by Szegedy Szuts

The message of the book is the dawn of consciousness through the monstrous world-war which the lemmings run to :  wake up to “Stop the Killing!” – but the objector was shot.   I also see through this, the atmosphere of Stephen’s house and studio above the Cornish sea. It seemed to be overhung with flowers, and Gwynedd dragging her hip around the rooms, and a small crowded kitchen sink where Stephen washed up; and upstairs in the studio where we children slept, Stephen’s strange abstract paintings watch us all night long:  they are eyes and swords and hollow ways:  personalities – like this one I painted with a knife, many years later:  it took just 20 minutes.

Ikon 1987

My house of the Psyche is simply what happens when I sit down with my coffee each morning, and “reach for a book”.

I have to let earlier forms fade away.  Why?  Because my inner ruler doesn’t work with them, and they are in the way.   So leave go all the rules about garden cave library, or hallway, butler and housekeeper:  be still.

His daughter, mistress of the geese – by Szegedy Szuts 

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There is a garden, where I am just now.   It is a rose garden, and I am seated on a stone-cut tier around the central fountain.

It is the rose garden which is seen from above in my  Black Swans picture – I painted it while listening over and over to the cyclic splendour of the Credo in Bach’s B Minor Mass. Black Swans was inspired by a visit to a stately home near Staines, with a Henry James atmosphere.  It has a mass of simultaneous perspectives.  The swans were tragic princes.

Black Swans 1986

Rest here:  hear the water, breathe the scent of the roses … remember also Liszt’s St Elisabeth Roses tune.  It came naturally with the roses and their scent.   There is a drowse of honey bees.   The garden is quite unlike any ground I have to tackle in life.  It needs no maintenance. It is a rest-place, and the fountain is the well of my soul.   The fountain is also Hebrew-letter AYIN, embleming the Capricorn Devil Arcanum;  behind that spectral Shadow, is the Guardian Angel’s light.   When you look down on a fountain, it is an eye:  a fountaining point with a circle around it.

And there are stones:  polished pebbles – hold one in hand and polish it further.   Jewels are stones – flower-stones – which have been polished so much by being touched and held, that they shine.   Jewels are Himalayas brushed by an eagle’s feather once every hundred millennia or so.   And so a jewel may transfigure everything it touches.   DNA.   The equations of the serpent of the stars are sacred.

Zodiac with Ophiocus the Serpent-bearer constellation

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My house of the Soul goes no further for the moment.   Establish the garden and the entrance library.  Put my old ideas about it in the fountain and let them wash away.   The air is stripped naked.   Keep attentive to my actual map, its unfolding.     I am going through the door, like Alice past the oak tree;  but the door is in my Self:  all things in the deep cohere, and combine and are One.

Obviously my house begins with books and shelves;  because every genuine inner journey starts with writing.   Sitting down with the writing is my door and Tiru key.   The Tiru key is Ramana and Self enquiry.   It is with me for ever.

In my entrance library, there IS a colour painting of the Tree of Life, just like in here.   It is on the wall among the bookshelves; or propped or on a stand.   This I can look at first, before journeying to any Sefira or Temple.

I have a feeling in the Master R Aquariel series, to travel the Trinosofia in it.

I see and hear combine harvesters, the smell of cut grain – the harvest time of Virgo.  The shrine of the soul:  and sweeping my shrine which is a cave.   I see my Zodiac Hermetic temple – the dinnerplate drawing.

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Tao Tree of Life, with the moving polarities Mars/Gevurah and Venus/Netzach (through Sun, Tifareth)

Sketch of another version, with the polarities or “eyes” at Gevurah Hesed, balancing the Soul triad

A sketch of the Great Triad Netzach, Hod, Malkuth, touching Daat

An older sketch, one of many insertions of the Tree’s 10 Sefiroth into the Seal of Solomon

… and another one

Notes etc … but the design is interesting

There was much experimentation, every which way

A contemplation for the technically minded:  most of these sketches (except for the second one) were done when I was first studying Kabbalah, and I worked with a different path system from the one I use now.   A good way to get to know the Tree and bring it to life, is to play with it in all kinds of ways:  the period of Hod, Sefira of learning.

Regarding the Tao Tree above, top left, whose “eyes” are at Gevurah and Netzach:   I had a comment-conversation with someone in blogland yesterday (i.e.30 August), about putting the Tao-symbol’s “eyes” at Gevurah and Hesed instead, so it makes a spirit level. This centres the Tao on where the paths of the Priestess and of Strength intersect, just above Tifareth.  The circumference passes through Kether and Yesod:  Malkuth is outside it as the root.

(I like this idea, but for me the Tao is always coming into balance, to earth; and so the first version illustrates it better.)

If the Tree glyph is “folded” along the line of the Tower path (Hod-Nezach) with Malkuth resting on DAAT (the known-world in the unknown), the base becomes Yesod, the Foundation of the Tree:  the personality.  The meaning of this is that “the Real world” is so much more than we think we see or believe.

Malkuth is a gateway to a Mandala – to the inner Temple of the Tree, embracing it as a whole.  This is how it is, with an inner journey.   Malkuth has all the data.

Number Ten: the (1) is part of a discarded didgeridoo made by my nephew

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I stay with the entrance library and the rose garden for the time being, moving freely from one to the other.  They are aspects of my Malkuth – the root or base of the Tree of Life:  its manifestation in my physical world. Malkuth is my alchemical vessel or craft.

The bluish-violet glow towards Yesod is in the dark beyond the stair-well.   It corresponds to the path of GVPh Key 22, between Malkuth and Yesod, which in Kabbalah is called the path of Administration:  our body as the temple.  The stem of the Tree.   Then Yesod (local ego) is the  personal expression of the transpersonal, and I shall visit it another time.

It seems to me that the paths and Sefiroth into the Tree of Life are scattered with little jewel stones here and there – like the glow worms who light the way – the stars.

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For me, the arcana of the Tree of Life and Tarot keys, are – for that period of focus – a way of hearing or writing music.   It awakens me inside:  happiness is concentration, a keen third eye.  What counts on an interior journey, is not events and images – we all experience these individually – so much as the kind of focus, and travelling with it.  Then there is a lens, and the Companions of the Light know where to shine through it, into the ground, and offer their counsel.   Wisdom is the still small voice.  It seeks an accurate tonal perception – a clear window – to speak through.

Through Beauty is my Way!   In the sacred geometries I enjoy great beauty … it is within all the weathers.

To withdraw from the contemplation, just be in the library and “come down the Tree”.

Then I am outside the door, looking back at my plain grey house-of-the-psyche – (it has trees growing up it, to each side) – with the key in my hand.  I am in open country which is the situation of my life.   And on with the day.

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The Adagio in this Violin Sonata by Le Comte, has great charm, and some tender key changes, rather improvisatory.

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Here is part of a letter my mother wrote in 1960, to her father, Jim Ede – I discovered it the other day, on a visit.

“No I don’t think it’s really true that there is a special need for the sea.  I do know just what you mean and when with the sea, a certain need is often deeply fed and satisfied.  But what there is for us in the sea is there also in the trees and sky and clouds and grass, if it is there in our hearts to respond.  If we have to seek it out by road, rail or air specifically at chosen spots, it hasn’t really any significance, it’s just another kind of telly.  I do think we all need sometimes to be alone and quiet and in communication with things which are not man made – but if we feel that the sea has this focus which the sky has not, then I think we need to sit down quietly and empty ourselves of chatter so that we can be more receptive.

“Mind you, I have a fearful feeling for the sea myself, and often a powerful yearning – but I think this yearning is very physical – so much so that it goes right back to the beginning of life in the earliest oceans.

“Inasmuch as there is no separation of the physical and spiritual, I suppose you might call this a spiritual need – but I don’t really think it’s a need at all.  I think all we need is here, where we are.

“Today I was crippled/bad back – but even if this was to go on for the rest of my life, I don’t want NOT TO BE any more, just because I can’t run on the hills and swim in the sea.  These are just ways of being myself by becoming for a moment the moors or the sea.  But if I am in direct communication with everything about me, then there is no ‘ME’ as an entity apart from all else, and so I no longer need to lose myself in the sea or the telly or social welfare or anything. 

“I think it is up to each of us to make our lives quiet and simple so that we can understand these things.  I am very very privileged, because I have been allowed to grow in comparative freedom.  But I am no more privileged than any other human being ought to be.  We have stunted ourselves so terribly – so obliterated our natural abilities and perceptions, that most of us after we are two years old, can see nothing as it really is, but only in a warped and twisted light.

“… …Loving is true living, and we all fall short of that.”

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A painting I did in ’86 – a London meadow behind the houses across the road, with a twilight stroll and the street upside-down through it; a pair of hedgehogs play among the cow-parsley

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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.

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