Holos: The Nine Limbed Torus

Posted on July 27, 2015 by admin

In our on going explorations in embodying Sacred Geometry, we continually cycle back to the torus, and the corresponding torroidal field, one of the primary patterns of cosmic creation. It is time to add a whole new level of torroidal intelligence to our somatic journey, and to do so, we will bring in my ‘across the street in Ojai’ neighbor Brian Berman, and what he is calling a HOLOS, a symbol for one humanity.

Brian, a spiritually awakened sculptor and peace activist, had an inspirational vision in 2012. It began as the illusion of his separate self dissolving into wholeness, emptiness and deep silence. Only Being/Knowing. Then a thought arose as a spark on energy that then dissolved back into the silence. Then another. Forms coming and going. Then, an image of a torus appeared, emerging from his heart as strands of energy spiraling out from stillness, and then spiraling back into the infinite stillness at the core of his heart. He recognized at once that the torus was a symbol of unity, of many linked as one, rooted in the infinite. From his many years as a peace activist, he realized the possibility of using this image as an international unifying symbol for all engaged in bringing peace to the world. And it did not hurt that, while on a 2014 pilgrimage to Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai, India inquiring about using art in a spiritual way, he got a clear ‘bring this into the world’ message.

The center of the Holos represents the infinite, wholeness, stillness and silence, the Source of all creation. The nine spirals represent the emergence of any and all forms, from atoms to galaxies, and everything in between. Think of the holos as a three dimensional expression of the pranavah, the sacred syllable ‘OM’. The nine spirals can be seen as linking three equilateral triangles, each of the 9 apices being 40 degrees apart on the circle. Nine is composed of a trinity of trinities. According to Michael Schneider in ‘The Beginners’ Guide to Constructing the Universe” “nine is considered thrice sacred and most holy, representing perfection, balance and order, the supreme superlative.”

We are going to take this unique torus and use it to help clear out the chakras and invite it to provide an organizing intelligence for the water and collagen molecules in the Living Matrix of the body. Finding and differentiating the nine strands may take a while, but we are all in this for the long haul, so be patient. Consider this like the Vajrayana Buddhist practice of mandala visualization meditation. Much to be revealed in the future as we play with this!

In any comfortable sitting pose, align yourself with heaven and earth and bring your attention to your heart center. Feel the spherical volume, above/below, front/back, right/left, alive, fluid, spacious. Now convert the sphere to a torus, opening the center like in a bagel, so now the center is emptiness. Stay open to heaven and earth and stillness and begin to notice how the tissue in the heart region is responding. In the holos, ascending energies move clockwise and descending energies move counterclockwise. Let the field and your imagination do the work. Try not to help muscularly. Find where your energy field is weak or distorted, or overworking. (My right posterior quadrant is challenged). Now imagine the limbs differentiating, lengthening or spiraling to help create space. Visualize the empty space between the solid limbs of the holos. Feel it from above and below as in the very top picture. Try moving it around; up and down, right and left, forward and backward. What does this do to your feeling?

If we combine the holos with a hoberman sphere, we can expand and condense both the empty center space, as well as the nine spiraling lines, in a gyroscope like action. This action really awakens new possibilities in the holos. Feel how the centrifugal expansion increase space between the lines as they rotate outward. Feel the spirals rippling through the fluids and tissues as the chakra line stabilizes. Same with condensing centripetal action. For most of us, the heart space (prana vayu) needs more expanding and the belly space (apana) needs more condensing.

The well known sacred geometer extraordinaire, B.K.S. Iyengar, (how many different triangles can you find in this trikonasana?) describes this phenomenon in “Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali”, in his commentary to sutra II-46: “Conative action is the exertion of the organs of action. Cognitive action is the perception of the results of that action. When the two are fused together, the discriminative faculty of the mind acts to guide the organs of action and perception to perform the asans more correctly; the rhythmic flow of energy and awareness is experienced evenly and without interruption, both centripetally and centrifugally throughout the channels of the body. A pure state of joy is felt in the cells and the mind. (For a deeper discussion of this, see Samyama in Asana.)

The holos field is a fractal, so it can be found all over the body. Imagine it to help to open any place that feels restricted. Take it into your limbs, head and tail until it finds its place. The center is always stillness and the energies emerge and dissolve again and again, moment to moment, day by day. Take time to help the larger field and the mini fields also, stabilize. Find the patterns in any pose, at any time. Let them settle and stabilize. No hurry, no worries.

Celtic Yoga

Posted on July 21, 2015 by admin

One of the fascinating joys of the awakening process is the discovery of another brilliant and charismatic teacher who captures this amazing moment in unique and deeply insightful ways. I am a bit late to the party with my Irish Catholic brother John O’Donohue, who very unfortunately for those of us still here, passed on in 2008. But, wow, is he is opening the eyes of my soul in unimagined ways with his amazing imagery and use of language. As his brother Pat says in the introduction to “Four Elements: Reflection on Nature, “he wrestled the terms of reference that were used to think about ‘soul’ from the religious institutions. He carried them outdoors to the landscape and let them free among the elements. Here they danced their dream of possibility…”

He reminds me a lot of one of my other mentors, Thomas Berry. Both were Catholic priests and scholars who found tremendous spiritual depth in Creation, the manifest world of earth, water, fire and air. While not formally a monk, John also found deep healing in solitude. The powerful forces of Mother Nature shaping the landscape on the western coast of Ireland were his inspiration, providing an invitation to plunge into the inner world of mystery beyond the seen and the known. Without needing the formality of asana, he knew the body to be a gateway to the soul, that the body is immersed in the soul, and not the other way around.

He lived a life of integral spirituality with vitality and joy. And he was at home with the deep pain of loss and despair and other afflictions of the human psyche and soul. To John, all is sacred, all holy. To lead a good life, all one requires is solitude and friendship; longing and belonging; being deeply engaged with one’s own inner world, and deeply engaged in sharing that journey of self discovery with others. And to recognize that even on the inner journey one takes alone, we can befriend all we encounter. There is no ‘other’.

Here are some of my favorite observations from John.

From Anam Cara: (Irish for ‘soul friend’ or, friend to your soul)

“The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld and human world as one. The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them.”

“Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity. Under our feet is ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.”

“If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness in holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.”

“Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Nowhere else is there such intimate and frightening access to the mysterium. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize and inhabit this adventure. … Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and the universe. The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us.”

‘Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies and spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.”

“At the deepest level of the human heart, there is no simple singular self. Deep within, there is a gallery of different selves. Each one of these figures expresses a different part of your nature. Sometimes they will come into contradiction and conflict with other. If you meet these contradictions only on the surface level, this could start an inner feud that could haunt you all the days of your life. They are in a permanent war zone and have never managed to go deeper to the hearth of kinship, where the two forces are not enemies, but reveal themselves as different sides of the one belonging.”

From “Four Elements”

“How can people be so sensitive to the dignity and independence of landscape?….Landscape has a vast and wonderful presence. … But landscape is not merely extensive; it is full of opaque depths. The depths of landscape reach down into eternities of silence and darkenss. But they are not the hopeless depths of a black inferno, for at their ultimate level they rest upon the tender emptiness of the cosmos.”

From “Eternal Echoes”

A Blessing

May you listen to your longing to be free,
May the frames of your belonging be large enough
   for the dreams of your soul.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing
   whispering in your heart that something good is
   going to happen to youMay you find a harmony between your soul and
your life,
May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place,
May you know the eternal longing which lives at the heart of time
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within,
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment and despair
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and
   embrace you in belonging.

Krishnamurti on ‘Understanding’

Posted on February 26, 2015 by admin

Spiritual teachers have the delightful challenge of trying to articulate the ‘(already I’m in trouble here!) inarticulable. There is general agreement on the two points of view available to the human consciousness, although the words used to point to these two vary. For the overwhelming majority of humanity, the dominant, and perhaps only point of view is that of limitation and impermanence. This is the world of forms. All forms are inherently limited and impermanent, whether we are referring to a thought or a galaxy. In this ‘world’, our self sense is composed of pieces: ideas, beliefs, memories, likes and dislikes. There is never stability or peace of mind for me as everything that is ‘me’ is constantly shifting. We can struggle and fight to hold on to something, trying to keep this ‘self’ intact. We build grand edifices out of beliefs and philosophies, we align ourselves with religions, political parties or cults, trying to find our ‘self’. But in the end, these edifices are castles of sand. Finding our ‘self’ here a hopeless proposition, but one we cling to lifetime after lifetime.

On the other hand, it is possible to ‘see’ the world from the eyes of wholeness, where absolute silence and stillness echo through eternity as all forms arise and dissolve in their own time. This is the Absolute, Buddha Nature, Brahman. Here, the “I am” rests in its own wholeness, with no separation, no division, no other. “Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam” says Patanjali. There is no struggle to become, or to self-improve. The Self is already whole and complete. This does not mean that life, in the world of form is without challenges and struggles. To embody this teaching in the world of form with death and disease, is difficult. But we do not have to make the innate difficulties ‘personal’. They are not about ‘me’. They are just as aspect of being alive, in this body, on this planet, in this moment. We feel, we act, we learn, and we keep moving along. Or more accurately, life just keeps flowing through us, as the forms come and go.

In the following quote from “The World Within” , reprinted from the current edition of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America newsletter, Krishnamurti uses “Understanding’ to point to the realization of “Unbounded Wholeness” and describes the human struggle to ‘recognize’ this.

“Understanding is not to be gained eventually, in the distant end. That which is not understood continues, and that which is understood ceases to be. Understanding is not accumulative; there is no experiencer who understands. What is incomplete remains as a memory, giving continuance to identity, to the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’. That which is understood and completed ceases to be, as it does not leave traces, memory. Understanding can exist only where there is freedom, not where there is bondage, not when the mind is crowded with memory. The end, the goal makes for and strengthens memory, and memory or accumulated experience does not bring about understanding. Accumulation creates a self-enclosing centre, separative, exclusive, and what is enclosed is never free, and so the experiencer can never understand. The experiencer is ever experiencing, and so the experiencer is ever incomplete. He can never understand, for understanding lies in freedom.

How can there be surety, certainty in freedom? That which is free, immeasurable, is beyond all comparison; it is beyond and above all opposites. He who is uncertain craves for certainty, but is not all existence uncertain, insecure? Death, disease, old age is upon us, which creates impermanency; yet we seek certainty in the impermanent. In death, in decay, in the transient we seek surety. How blind we are!

“But we must surely live in this world. Who will give us our daily bread?”

In seeking the Real, bread will be supplied; but if we seek only bread, then even that will be destroyed. Bread is not the ultimate value; when we make it into the ultimate, there is disaster, there is murder, there is starvation.

Through the transient seek the eternal. There is no path to it, for it is ever-present.”