Discoveries in Tarot and the Garden 2011, Day Three

Posted on April 27, 2015 by janeadamsart

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24 May 2011 – Notes from a BOTA study group
Contemplating BOTA TAROT Key 20.

We colour our own BOTA Tarot Keys by the book, to receive and embody their resonance.

Gabriel appears four-dimensionally, obeying no law of foreground or background time, but here, out of his cloud ring. He is an Archangel of Water, with fiery wings. The horn he blows is straight down the middle: the design traces the Tree Sefiroth. The horn is the spinal thread on which the chakras are strung: the inner flute. It calls the uprising child, whose arms outstretched form a Y or V.

There are seven planetary rays from its bell, and twelve zodiac rays from Gabriel’s cloud, plus a thirteenth – the horn itself: AChD, AHBH (13 = unity and love).

Note that Key 19 – the Children of the Sun – sheds 13 YODs, and how the rays of the Sun shine concentrically around. In Key 20, the 13 YODs as rays, are focused into the human condition, like a bird’s wing indrawn.

The Sun rises with Buddha’s intimate detachment as the children “cook” in their grassy vessel with sunflowers. Then Archangel Gabriel in the Judgement, the Annunciation – (for he the messenger, struck Mary’s child with divine awareness) – engages intimately with each human soul.

madonna at table 1957

Gabriel’s right hand is over his heart and his left hand over his belly. This is said to be a good mudra to summon sleep and align one’s bodies.

The stone coffins float on the waters of the subconscious: they are not only linear third-dimension cells from which the cultivated humanas grows, but also the athanor of the Children of the Sun: their protecting wall.

These Children grow up into parents: their child becomes the androgynous Union of the World in Key 21.

The woman’s gesture L is active. She smiles, because at last she is understood. The man’s gesture X over his heart is surrendered, he now looks up and receives the Archangel directly. L V X: let there be light. Let this be no mere salute.

What is Judgement? How is it different from Justice? The design echoes and develops Key 14 on the path of Probation, in which the human beings are the lion and eagle in Ezekiel’s vision. (The lion and eagle receive alchemically, the water which burns and the fire which flows.) Where Justice holds a Karmic balance, the Judgement commands an Ascension to a higher level. The Archangel Michael in Tarot Key 14 is often depicted holding the sword and scales of Justice, Key 11.

Visually, the design in Keys 20 and 14 fits over Key 6 the Lovers too, whose Archangel is Rafael. (see further down)

The subconscious responds to images. Each of the Tree of Life’s 22 paths has a Tarot Key. We contemplate the Tree visually and as a whole – the paths of intelligence and influence.

Through the Four Worlds of Jacobs Ladder, the paths of ZAIN (sword) and SHIN (tooth) “overlay” each other. The Hebrew letter ZAIN (the Lovers) is the descent of Understanding and discernment from Binah into Tifareth, the heart centre. Letter SHIN (the Judgement) is the element of promethean fire reaching Malkuth, the ground.

Pictorially, the Archangel is veiled from the Lovers by the cloud, and pierces THROUGH the cloud to the lovers of the Judgement. The Judgement is an overall cosmic grace, receiving Volition (Gevurah) and Benevolence (Hesed). The qualities of Gevurah and Hesed are constraint and expansion, the balance.

Then where is the fourth Archangel? Key 15, the Shadow, masks Archangel Uriel of the lightning flash – and presents our greatest challenge, at all levels. There are organisations. “Give me a spiritual contact and I will organise it!”

Examine the different attitudes of nakedness in the 22 Keys – how the man and woman in 15 seek to exploit and disguise it, and how in 6 and 17, the nakedness is unabashed and loves itself: the natural state.

In Key 17, the chakras in the woman’s spine are “interior stars”. The pool is all of them, reflecting the evening sky. Her foot rests lightly on the waters of the soul. This Key is also called “Meditation”, and from the same pool the evolutionary path of Key 18 will emerge – as she sees it. The hebrew letter Tzaddi resembles a fish-hook which we let down into the deep.

Painting of Arcanum 18, 2002. The idea here, is to sit with the star-woman by the well. Look up with her, through the Tree’s Sefiroth from Malkuth to Kether. Yesod is the pool of evolution, with crayfish, guardian dog and wolf. Tifareth is the golden Sun just visible at the horizon of the long path to full humanhood. Daat is the timeless presence of our unknown Guides. The ‘third eye’ Tzaddi is Key 17’s ‘fish hook’ meditation. Kether is the White Sun. The side Sefiroth are coloured in the Queen Scale. Each Tarot Key is modelled on the Tree of Life.

In Key 20, the Judgement, the great sea water congeals to ice mountains – the density of the Spirit of Ruach. We receive a fountain breath right down the centre of Key 20, from above to below, like Genesis. Let the horn wake the flute.

One of the most helpful pointers for me, was when we spontaneously saw that the seven stages of spiritual unfoldment – F’s question, doing his tarot Interpretation exam – are not just 15-21, but INCLUDE the two septenary levels above them in the Tarot Tableau: the tonal depth enriches and opens up the dimension.

BOTA Tarot Tableau, showing the three septenaries and all the intermediary relationships of the Tarot, like a keyboard.

Are the coffins in Key 20 tethered to land, or do they float? We agreed that they float, and we also caught sight of the opened lids, representing all the Karmic history which limited the parents: the child has no lid but the infinite Archangel – the Law of resurrection or growth through the planes. Those floating coffins are like the silhouettes I’ve been discussing (in previous post), pasted on the infinite, wobbling in the water surface like oil. The human Family arises like a living iris from flat-earth outline theory.

The Iris flower symbolises Key 14: the rainbow. Michaels’ wings are of fire through droplets of water.

There is an outline, and there is the living truth: they intersect at a right angle – this is displayed cryptically in the red cross flag attached to Archangel Gabriel’s horn. The red cross flag represents also the white work and the red work. The white work is spiritually inspired. The red work applies it to the earth vessel with the help of Mars, the secret fire.

It was agreed that different souls’ responses to kundalini – whether it be presented in picture form or internalised in body awareness – should not be generalised.

The flag also represents the rosicrucean vault proportions – 3 : 5, 5 : 8 – the golden mean. The cross on it echoes the man’s hands, crossed over his heart.

renaissance angel, 1957

An African told me two dreams he had, which helped him to understand one of Warren’s books perfectly (Halevi). In the first dream, a priest told him he is Jewish. In the second dream, he was shown in a graphic diagram, just how souls drop into incarnation along the line, in such a way that it changed his life. Then he could read the book, which before, he couldn’t grasp.

There!

This day of Tarot is, as it were, the other side of yesterday’s Deva page. They co exist happily, like palms together.

renaissance madonna, 1957

Each Tarot Key has a musical note, related to its colour vibration, as in Pythagoras. We learn these in the BOTA correspondence course lessons.

The council lawn mower passes back and forth, below my window. Its motor has a tonic note, to which I spontaneously chimed a fourth above; and suddenly struck a beautiful edgeless chord or vibration. This is how we can “play” the Tableau visually. The notes of Mirth, Awakening, Meditation, Embodiment, Realisation, Ascension and Completion along the base of the Tableau make chords with the Keys above them.

The lawnmower note turned out to be the first I blew on the whistle – an E. E is yellow, the tone of the Fool and the Magician and Strength. The tonic is B major – magenta – Key 18 the Moon: the questing way of embodiment.

Very nice to see these Keys together – how the Fool leads the quest, and the Magician and Strength contain and focus it.

F said yesterday, it is difficult for him to grasp the chakra correspondences in the bota system. It takes time. We have to live with it and let it grow and inform, like the Magician with his plants.

VALE

Discoveries in Tarot and the Garden 2011 – Part Two

Posted on April 22, 2015 by janeadamsart

I am dipping back into an old diary – see previous post.

22 May 2011 – Pentacle: Dark Pennies and Victory Falls

AVE. Some strong spiritual leaders of humanity “clothe their higher bodies with physical matter, by stepping down the vibratory rate of their personal vehicles. The greater number are men and women who came into earth-life in the usual way” through the birth canal.

(Quotation from Paul Foster Case)

Every one of us has the unfolding, dormant or active potential of master of humanity: magister. Ramana and other sages relate to this, in each soul they see. The “grade” is omnipresent, for it is our true Self, and it is mostly unnoticed.

It is a remarkable thing to creep into the embodied arena through that tiny little door and fall into the storms, milk and wiped slate of babyhood. Our deepest privacy is what we no longer remember, because our memory’s data base rests on learning to read. Before literacy, there is usually an awakening contact with the tribe of past lives, their fruition in this one – the magic of childhood.

The magi move with ease, when their bodies have grown up through the dramas of puberty and infancy. Hold this impression: the magister in me through a string of births: the oak inside the acorn: the presence of the magister in every time and place, is a lode star: I keep returning to talk about it.

My writing in the mornings consists of: spiritual contact, study and psychology – the daily application – for instance, tales of the garden at Alum Way reflect for me in their textures and patterns of leaves, the contact of the deep. They do, because there is love going on there – enough to much amuse the magister: enough to ground the settlement: enough to reflect the law. Human love is a servant to the transpersonal. Instinctively, it makes me work hard and develops my dedication.

Yesterday I sowed the first grass seeds along the edge of the garden where the rubbish dump used to be – I knelt and stroked them into the earth. The man came along at that moment and teased. In the evening we watch Grand Designs, following persons who build their dream mansions, and all the problems of construction, relationship and planning – a roof which turns out to be too high, etc. And look at me! My Grand Design in reverse, removed a mountain, and I end up not high on the roof but hands and knees on the ground, like this – smile.

Ramana used to say, when you dig a well, or realise your Self, all you do is remove what isn’t there. All that stuff blocking it is space. For much of my life I fantasised Capricornly about building or creating some big thing bare handedly – it turns out to be this space, and it gives me confidence at various levels. Only with our hands touching earth do we realise the heavenly motions.

Yesterday I also painted both gates green – a brighter park-bench Venus green which the man bought and finds more cheerful: his instinctive signal to the Zombies (neighbours) – my green is bigger than yours – and re-organised the back “subconscious” wild garden, moved the tip-rubbish to the other side of its entrance, sorted out the woodpile/long lovely privet poles for fencing, and raked up the man’s grass trimmings. The Zombies were busy trimming the elderflower tree by the street – they have plans for their little front garden; with their fear of the man, they use their back garden less. I do not have the social skill to speak to them at present, but I enjoyed the feeling of them working near me: the Meerkat – who has turned blonde – sweeping up leaf-litter by the bins. The man’s way with the Zombies is now quite sensible – keep distance: aloof courtesy.

Now yesterday – my insights from the garden clearance begin to dew – I jotted that it doesn’t matter to be wrong or mistaken. The magi too are constantly adjusting focus: like one who draws. The fixed fear of making mistakes is egotistic.

I saw when dozing the other day, an image of the Victoria Falls – there are pictures of them in Prof Cox’s universe book, a magical place of rainbows falling (of course) on himself – the fast moving flood tosses turbulent white. On the brink, bushy islands or trees part the vast spill. I saw this too from a distance, like teeth and gaps, or silhouettes, and imagined myself caught on one of those tree-clumps between the thundering waters: identifying. I flit like a butterfly by an abyss – cliffs of fall. The subconscious distils to me the image. The dark places where the trees cling to rock, along the wide white bite of the falls, shocked and awoke me. Jung says “unconscious” material floats to the surface and shocks the dreamer.

Similarly: the patches of the finite – vibrant bodylife, and its moods and dreaming cityscapes – are pasted on the infinite. They – the silhouettes – are on a plane merged with the grey Infinite, yet distinct, like threads of oil on water. For some reason the silhouette being not tilted but resting in the plane, pleases me.

I swim in your silhouette, your shadow on the grass – a little pool. Circles – pennies – of the soul that can lie a little overlapping one another as vesica pisces without invasion, are a tender discovery. I don’t think it is possible in a relationship’s early stages to venture this, because too many karmic defences and compulsions are being processed. In the early stages there is infatuation and quite a lot of psychic rape.

Lay the coins – the shadow discs of the soul – together, move their edges over one another, then back. The fish where circles overlap, is a fluid oval, and from it the Angel or the Child rises. Relationship – as spiritual practice – is a field where the shadow discs quiver together like leaves in the breeze. It is whimsical or it is conscious. The clean parting is as important as the merging. That is why the Lovers’ hebrew emblem is ZAIN the sword whose tip parts the ways. It applies to partnership and to the binary relationship within my self.

(“And” is VAV, the Hierophant. This is because the hebrew letter VAV means a hook or nail – something that joins things together or bridges souls – and even signifies the grammatical conjunction “and”.)

The shadow discs lie in the field, deep blue with night. One may look into the other, and empathise, withdraw, empathise. To speak is not necessary. They throb.

Yesterday was not really optimum for planting grass, with the Moon in last quarter. However my incentive to carry through, was strong – the Moon in Capricorn, and Mercury, Venus and Mars in Taurus. 21 May, my daughter’s birthday, is also for me, a moment of the Magi; they reveal their face. The gardens – all earth, with some timber piles, a few new shrubs and garlanded with trees – are a beauteous space in readiness, an invitation. This week is also the man and my 5^th anniversary. There is a curious and welcome spiritual relaxation – take it or leave it – with things. Removal of anxiety is truth.

But see: keep clearing: pause in the inward turned writing, which is on a daily base repetitive, and be silent; hear and see. The world was rumoured to come to an end, yesterday.

The gardens are a lens, responding also to my meetings with Jung and Master R at a plain round table in a secret garden by a hedge. At Alum Way, I am busy in the garden: here at home I see and rest in it.

Thus the coins overlap and part. They are pentacles. The pentacle is a yantra of the bare soft earth, that I tread level in a circle with my feet, for planting. Pentacles are stars, five-petal flowers, and seals of Solomon; pentacles are magic rings. My ideas of circles of grass in squares of ground should not be applied too literally. The magic gestures are in my writing: the material and the plans are his. I watered everything yestereve copiously with Marion’s hose: but it rained a little anyway, in the night, and now the wind sings in a bright sky with leaves.

The rainbow waters of Victory descend through my flute. This is Fall – the endless falling of the Light. Light loves gravity. Light is also gravity – curved as space around the spheres. Gravity is endless and everywhere – the falling. In some parts among the stars, it condenses locally and vorticises to black holes – the birth of stars. Black holes are old collapsed stars. Their singular rebirth shines through the other side of the spangled cloth. Stars are infinite, even though they die. I am infinite, even though I die. I see above the clouds: my face is every where. Is gravity the speed of light?

The lesson of the brown pennies lying in the field, is when I see into your dark with you; I rest with your reality; it is a mystery how we touch.

In the day, the sparkle in your face breaks mine in a smile: your eyes as bright and dark as a child; your bravery in the battle field: your cock and your crisp wit like toast: your deep voice and will power in your chest and throat: your brown impulsive hands: your flaws: your broken teeth and smokers cough: your unfettered expression of your vulnerability: your emotional zest.

It is wise to keep distinct, my depth perceptions and the surface pools. They marry and entwine in time – it is the hourglass of the stars. Where I live as a membrane or sounding board, it is unwise to define too much. The circles on the water expand, contract, change shape to rods and amoebic globes, disappear and reform; the five mobile islands where Hokhmah dips his hand.

VALE

Ah! a thought while blowing out the candle: my present drift away from esoteric groups and ritual is because I am being assisted by the nature Devas whom I honour in the garden. I’m glad to be reminded of the Devas. This clarifies much, and puts the adventure in context. The Devas spell out things of life very clearly, and dispel hobnobbing.

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 2012-2015. 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/

Discoveries in Tarot and the Garden 2011 – part One

Posted on April 20, 2015 by janeadamsart

Glancing back … In 2011, I studied Tarot, Alchemy, reclamation and relationship. Physically, I sanded down, varnished and restored the floors of a small concert venue in Highgate, and at the same time removed (by hand) a ten year rubbish dump from a string of neglected gardens in Alum Way near Golders Green – the task took almost 9 months. In my journal I reached ground zero and celebrated my daughter’s birthday:

21 May 2011 – ON BIRTH, HEALING AND THE GARDEN

Summer gives me a greatly extended day: getting up with full daylight, is at 5.45, earlier than ever. I finish writing between 8 and 9.30 usually; then all being well, I am active until eight or nine in the evening – how do I manage in winter? The body clock contracts accordingly, so everything adjusts. In winter I watch more TV and (obviously) sleep more, because I hit the hay about the same time.

Each morning before I write, I open the Tree of Life. I say Warren Kenton’s Invocation (“let us gather together, draw together, let us form a vessel to catch the dew of heaven. Let us rise up and go to that holy place of meeting, and gather there with the Companions of the Light; and let the veil of Heaven be drawn back. Hear this: Malkuth, Yesod, Hod …”).

With the Invocation, I do Dion Fortune’s hand mudras – The Good Shepherd, Those who Sailed West to East, The Builders – and repeat Actaeon’s vision to – “part the waves, kiss the lips, turn the wheel, fingers touch numbers of the clock, enter the cave, find the jewel, and climb the mountain, through the rainbow.”

I let it dance as a physical instrument, to earth it, feet on rosewood floor. At the end of writing, I blow out the candle and “come down the Tree.” I used to neglect this, but was taught that closure is proper. In ritual I am lazy – it is pared down to the essentials – but dedicated. This sounds right. It is a hand-clap to summon and thank the guardian angel. It diminishes my weevils and opens the sky. Ritual is a statement of embodied intention: ascent.

The drawing above, is of Dion Fortune’s mudra – three gestures with the hands were transmitted to her in trance. I drew them embedded in the slanting wave-contours of Glastonbury Tor. The peak is a mental-plane arena – ring of stones, winged angel and chalice, in a subtle vesica-pisces geometry. The vertical circles intersect the horizontal one – like my painting of the Grail Table with the Tree.

The Tor angel is a cut out silhouette window of light within the tower. Recall the silhouettes we see each other as; my day’s changing modes are silhouettes. A rare opportunity permits my intimacy with another silhouette; to deepen objectively and be aware. The invitation to enter another’s room, and vice versa, rubbing shoulders, should not spell out each others’ codes, but empathise. Our vesica pisces: the circles, as on the Tor peak, enter each other just a little. Creative imagination is the Empress dressed in green. Out she comes! lush, like an apple.

Venus is lush like an apple. Yellow, green and red, with black and blue are colours of alchemical antimony, a kind of transformational corrosive, or quickening. She is pregnant, about to parturate, seated on a stone bench – cool stone to her distended fanny. Swollen seed splits. Golden stars of the zodiac dance nonchalantly around her head; her gaze eye to eye, is direct: relationship.

At 9.15am, thirty four years ago, I saw my daughter rotate out from my thighs, slippery, greyish dark pink, flecked with blood, vibrantly athletic and alive, her father’s face, her well formed female sex, her strong trumpet cry – the lady’s a survivor! In this light, the Angel descended through me a moment later, with an overwhelming maternal bonding instinct: love.

How perfectly it all fits together ! When a royal child lies in her cradle in the fairy tales, the godmothers who gather round, are zodiacal powers of love and of compromise – the gifts for life. They are titanic feelings. Every mother who has looked at her new child and been struck by lightning, knows them. Nature!

Nature is the goddess – and when I next see Ris (she says she wants a quiet birthday on her own, but might change her mind later and let me take her out for a nosh), ask her a bit more about the Goddess or feminine energy she’s reading about, and the totem stick. She told me the other day, about seven daughters of Eve, and mitochondrial DNA.

7 daughters of Eve, by Ulla Plougmand Turner

Ancient women of Gaia at first trusted the masculine deity as he rose – made trade with him – and then, as he abused them, they became atheists.

When a deep perception is on the way, it is like the child coming through the canal, and my thought in-draws silently, and waits. Labour in its fullness, is the natural coming and going of the breath. My labour hurt a lot, but after I was allowed to push with it, the massive commitment with nature replaced the pain. The essence of labour is not violent, though the sensations in transition are extremely so – the waves knock against each other. The essence of labour, as during the pregnancy, guides the little voyager through the portals; she rides her vessel through oceanic storms of emotion – which there were. Whatever the mother’s argument, tension, grief or release, that little presence deep inside, is kept safe in harbour as she grows.

The ancient women of Gaia trusted the man in the field, planting grain, and he betrayed, abused and confined them.

This fable works its way organically through the soul, like a baby through the birth canal, until it is delivered to the air. When the fable is embodied, she is conscious, and may choose to forgive. For as long as there is no “for give”, it must be born again. Eventually the forgiveness – the wholeness – is accomplished, and then there is movement.

Whatever the lifetimes in my daughter’s private inner soul, unknown to me – an outline emerges; the depth of her Karmic compassion as a certain trouble took form. Her soul was emboldened to reconcile it. Her father lost his creative path in life, and abused us with his rage and disappointment. She does not wish him ill. She may have interacted with him in previous lives, as I did, or he may have been called upon by destiny to play the bully. He knew not what he did. At a certain depth, and taking time, the action of individual souls upon each other is archetypal and transformative.

For me, Karmic issues seek a conscious breath and transmutation. If an ancient woman is abused or blamed, if men exploited her, lifetimes may fill with revenge, directed outwardly or inwardly, sometimes inflicting and sometimes receiving, sometimes as the man and sometimes as the woman. Long shadows are thrown across history, for ourselves to embody with life, growth and awareness. In time a maternal environment is found, which is alchemical, and accelerates things: we meet our full nature … and let it go.

The fertile green plants all down her stair and filling her balcony, are symbolic. On my way to Warren’s meeting on Thursday evening, I saw her sitting in her doorway among them – she has an open view up to Hampstead from her roof-terrace village – and so I sent a text, and she waved back.

Karmic issues are subtle, powerful wave-trains. It is too simplistic to make them tit for tat, because they criss-cross also (as in the Nasca lines of birth chart aspect patterns); Karma is an echo chamber. When I walk in the sea with Mercury, my soul is raised enough to glimpse the divine dimension which seems to us (who live within its walls, waves and thumb-print whorls) such a labyrinth. I see the simple noble outlines, and at the same time, their complexity; a vast world. It is a great honour to behold thus: to walk in the sea with Mercury.

Illustration from Alchemy & Mysticism by A Roob

Speaking of which, Mercury through Gemini rules The Lovers, Tarot key 6.

My daughter’s Tarot template is:

Individuality: Sun on Gemini cusp – The Lovers, key 6
Personality: Ascendant (and Moon) in Cancer – The Chariot, key 7
Problem: add 6 to 7 = Death, key 13, “Scorpio force” (the movement)
Solution: subtract 6 from 7 = key 1, the Magician, Mercury (the focus)
by what Means?: subtract 1 from 13 = 12, the Hanged Man: the Waters
Integration – sum of the previous five = 12, the Hanged Man: or 3, the Empress.

Ris tarot template, Sun Gemini (Lovers) Ascendant Cancer (Chariot)

jane tarot template, Sun Capricorn, Ascendant Virgo – only four keys, because problem & solution are both 6. The sum of the four keys reduces also to 3, the Empress.

I knew Key 12 was strong in her template: which means “reversal”, the capacity to invert a wrong and to change things round. The womans’ staff she told me about some weeks ago, is the caduceus or ankh. She has electricity and healing in her hands, still awakening, being born in the Year of the Snake.

The Tarot Keys are godmothers, the bringers of the forces.

In 1969 when I first knew him, a mantra arose, concerning her father Mr V: Give way to the Force. For-give. I intuited in those early months, a transgression which would be my life’s work and instruction, to forgive. I saw the tender child in him, not fully formed; and the soldiers around him. I projected furies with and through him, as well as an obsessive romance and fear. I enacted the woman bruised and scorned. In those days – he was 34 then – he was attractive, intense and tentative, feeling his way. I was fascinated by his warmth, and by the cold steel in his nature. He was vulnerable to my drama, as his ego was not secure, and his path was at a forking of the ways. I was just 20. I wanted a child with him.

The little fish who swam towards our first encounter and knocked at the door for life, was born seven years later in Gemini. She persisted and prevailed.

To forgive, does not erase from the slate – no one can do that except the bearer, with God. It goes to a hidden place and it opens wide. To forgive means to give away my enmity; to move apart; to respect that soul’s providence and freedom as a whole. To be able to forgive and move on, is a personal boon; I am not jailed, I am out on parole. To forgive is the holistic LAW OF THE UNIVERSE; and the Law is movement: and movement through the fields and seasons of life is Key 13, the “scorpio force”.

My friend Lyn is writing an autobiography of the scorpio force through herself. She told me she has trouble with the amount of “I” in it. I told her Actaeon left the I out of his first draft, and it was contrived and read badly. Perhaps the answer is, to ask from time to time what this “I” is – Self-enquiry. Then it becomes objective, and the dimension of cosmic mystery restores the Life. So why not study … the human who is closer to me than my heartbeat? All else is speculative.

Meanwhile, at Alum Way, there is the man, my friend David. We’ve been together for five years; we are reclaiming the string of overgrown gardens next to the woods and the brook. My building of rough timber fences is now approved of by the man; with the addition of some long apple branches, the fabric starts to flow, and is strong. Yesterday I almost finished the digging. In the corner of the garden where the recent rubbish is stacked, the earth was packed with broken pots and old barbecue coals and litter, and has died to dust, it is filled with tough thatches of dead corpuscular root fibre. Nothing will want to grow there except – possibly – nasturtiums which are said to like infertile ground. It might be a good place to put the man’s fishpond. The man wants the rubbish pile remnants to be moved into the woodpile garden, away from his sight, until it can be dealt with. But the woodpile garden is my little subconscious sanctuary – as well as being the first place last year, that I entered and cleared. Why not put it further back, in the nettle garden which no one is bothering with at the moment, and cut it up into bags for the municipal dump?

looking into the tip

Before …

… and After

For me these gardening details are psychology. After digging along the border, I raked, levelled and trod a room-size area where the high rubbish tip used to be; to lay the first turf. It is incredibly exciting and creative. Around the green “mandala”, we can seed grass and wildflower, to watch it grow. I found the man in good voice with these plans in general. The place which is trod and prepared for grass, is a magical dancing floor at dusk; darker than the lumpier ground around it.

The “I” in narrative is fine, so long as the dimension is alive through it, of a story working through a local i, like a sonata through a cello.

I’ve been reading in Self Enquiry April 2003, Jim Pym’s article on spiritual healing. It is very interesting. It is for him the attentive practice of “I do not know, nor do I try to fix it”, which clears the space for God.

The man had a bad day yesterday, with his back. He can live with a lot of physical pain, but not the fear and tension that rises to his head from it as it accumulates. His GP referred him to a pain management clinic, where they can try out drug changes. I heard (when I had toothache) that to alternate pain killers is more effective than to use just one, which habituates. He draws the line at morphine. Clive up the road wears morphine patches and he says he’s not going there. Alum Way is tenanted by brave souls in pain, crying a little in their beds at night. The Welsh lady downstairs has almost wasted away, but is as wiry as a root, thanks to the bottle. The man pulled strings through his social worker (a large black lady called Lolita whom he manipulates with great skill), and the council came along at once, and mended the steps and re-concreted the front path – he is delighted with his will with A Way. He made prints in the wet cement with stencils of a rose and a boat, and a magendovid. I told him the magendovid looks more like a paw print. He said he will make his dog walk in it. Through the ages, the cave dweller marks his dab.

Spiritual and sexual healing does not remove his pain – yet – but it does open up his resources and inner soul strength. It is a long-haul circuit. As a “soul gardener”, he manifests a physical garden and an Eve. His Aries will is powerful. My lovership with him, and in the garden, is for the whole. Does this rare opportunity stand equal with writing great screeds and getting published and influencing people?

VALE

Quantock hill waters

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

Alchemical Ethics: Part Two

Posted on April 3, 2015 by janeadamsart

Grail Table Round, 2002

D asked me to say to him out loud, “Yes I am a difficult person.” This was after I took Maya out into the field to play ball for two hours, hearing him say an hour and a half, but he said 45 mins, and I had left my phone behind and he was climbing the walls convinced I had lost Maya. In fact he had a frightful day with one bloody thing after another, I spilt codliver oil in the car, and he lost the car keys at home and panicked – I picked through the dustbin and he found them in the kitchen drawer. I am a difficult person and I find myself hard to live with. I didn’t like that very much, but it is true. It is a life-long battle inside my fractious personality, trying to limit damage when with others, i.e. not to do or say things chaotically, or increase my own tension by badgering, etc.

What a curious illusion this is!

I saw the truth … each of us, every single worthy human being is difficult for themselves or others to live with. Those whom I love are often irritating, overbearing or even downright scary. It is our elemental side; our vulnerability. This is how we are, and how life is. In daily life I search what I think is right, and get stressed when the words vanish, because in summation it isn’t. I am bullied and chivvied by my ethical ideal. When my vision clears, it is plain that the superego ideal doesn’t work; it has no power.

hermit, 1987

Though ethics are broad cosmic commands – the platonic streams of light in the river – they are not written in any obvious way in the sky. We have to rediscover the melody, and to improvise. The ethic rarely stabilizes as a plan. When interacting with others, it changes perspective with the light, and the desired action may turn out quite different.

Greetings of glad tidings, 1989

This is because the ethical waveband plays a human instrument not in isolation, but as a developing social being – a keyboard or orchestra. The issue must interact and co-respond – the “finding” is not what I meant to find when my mind was closed. With new humility, receiving a more open perspective, I am chastened for the umpteenth time: I was a crusader wearing blinkers. I know nothing.

Let me try to grasp the way ethics are social, interactive, relational and creative.

I didn’t do it – I dropped an egg to see what would happen: Cornwall 1955

Yes there are Dharmic cosmic strands of consciousness. But the business of being human is scratchy. The ethics are not dished up on a plate. A hen roams and scratches in the ground for the grain which drops out of her nether end as an egg. The henyard is an earthy mess with disturbed grass-shoots. Images interlink just now, of golden yoked egg, the planetary orbits around the Solar atom – and which came first, chicken or egg? – the elliptical miracle produced from that feathered backside, is found among some nettles or a nest of hay, and boiled for breakfast. Hen and egg are a great work without beginning, to which the cockerel appears incidental. The cockerel makes the louder noise, standing at dawn to lift his pinions and announce the sunrise: cock crow, YOD – and poor St Peter’s discovery that it had crowed three times, and he had forgotten the courage of his ethics. He had cringed, denied and slept while his Teacher awoke in the garden all night long. His courage was clouded by the self-preserving fears of his surface mind.

cockerel, 1987

Yes, in myself, this happens daily – the waters are muddied, and I put myself on trial.

Who has the right to do that? Who is the judge?

Sanatana Dharma

An aspect of ethics is courage – the courage to remember and speak up for what the heart knows is true – the Sanatana Dharma or optimum way to grow at all levels. For those today in prison or under torture for freedom of thought and speech, any failure to protest their conscience is a far worse fate than physical suffering, electric shock or being murdered. For men and women whom regimes attempt to crush, the ethical imperative is simple. The lamp shines in them strong and clear. They speak.

As humans we are a process so incomplete – racially about eight years old in terms of infancy – that an ethical realisation should bring a daily, hourly practice of compassion for the way we know not what we do. I know not what I do. For give.

seagulls and plough, woodcut by C.F.Tunnicliffe

The intensive study of spiritual matters and platonic virtues leads straight into the field of life where I churn up mud and feel lost. This is the task of embodiment. Kabbalists say our embodied life on earth is the hard School where our work in the soul is applied. There is no evolution in the soul, unless we plough the physical field. Life on earth – with what it flings at us at every level – is a difficult training.

The manifold crisis today which humanity faces, is a progressive force for transformation in the collective soul.

cockadoodledoing 1987

The ethical waveband appears an eternal verity: but it is not static. It is implanted in the human psyche in order to grow and generate life through each small human. My evolution is a difficult imperative: a combat with failure. The failure is relative, and mostly imagined. Who is responsible? Whom do I try to serve? When I am out in the playground of my primary-school, how am I with my companions? A very early memory arises from village school age six: we sat in pairs back to back on the see-saw: I faced the middle: without thinking, I shifted further and further back and pushed the boy sitting behind me and facing outward off the plank, and onto the ground. When he got to his feet, his nose and mouth were bleeding gristle. Maybe my guilty thoughtlessness was planted there, for the image arises of its own accord now: trust the subconscious. On Her akashic scroll, all is recorded, all is synchronistically delivered.

Astronomer with spinning top and cockerel 1988

Be holy, whole, well, sound. The philosophers’ Stone is the universal medicine. When Yesod and Tifareth – moon and sun – are One, I am EBN (hebrew for Stone) – child with father/mother.

“Never forget human is a social being, and the highest resonance of this is love. The lilies and roses in the Tarot Magician’s garden are symbols of knowledge and love. The hebrew number 53, EBN, Stone is the same which describes the Sun and the Garden by gematria. The red roses in the Magician’s garden are the completion of the Work of the Sun. Without love there is no fulfillment.

“Garden, Stone and Sun are the One Thing. The flowers are fed by the chemical elements of decomposed stone, and grow by the power of the sun. When we really know this, we cannot help loving our fellow humans: this is revolutionary. The highest piece of philosophy in nature is love. Skill in this comes from long practice.

We fail more than we succeed, but our small successes and breakthroughs are of homeopathic quantum.

(Adapted from Paul Foster Case)

I found in the Chaldean Oracle some pure alchemy: “For from the (YOD) Source, naught that’s imperfect spins or wheels … The soul must have measure, rhythm and perfection, to spin, circulate or throb with this Divine Principle. The Father/Mother does not sow fear, but pours forth persuasion … controls from within and not from without; controls by being, by living within, and not by constraining.“

an early impression of the muscle of heaven with earth 1987

Saturn approaching my natal Cheiron and square to natal ascendent and Saturn this year made me feel confined, anxious and unable to complete my tasks. Recognising this, relaxes it. This tension will be shaping my path – between Saturn’s butter-pats – until November. So go with the flow!

And now go within. Be within the field. What is here?

In a field of flowers, the long grass warms my bare feet, encircled with mountains and hills. Over the last twenty-odd years, love shed its turbulence into a deeper strata of acceptance. Do the beautiful. Go with Grace, one thing at a time. The strata of acceptance under the earth mirrors the ethical aurora borealis of a clear blue sky – Beriah. As above, so below: be joined!