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.
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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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.
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Aquariel 
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