Who's on the cross?

There is a mattress on the floor. I am naked. Nine clothed people are watching. ‘Lie as you want.’ I flop. Arms outstretched, one leg straight, another bent, right foot on left knee.
‘Like that?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ says one of the men a bit too eagerly. Not cool.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ says another older man, posh, slow accent, ‘it’s perfect for Easter.’

So for forty-five minutes I lie like JC. I watch people’s eyes moving from their pencil to my body, pencil, body, pencil, body. Negative space. Curves. Lines. Their pencils forgetting I am a person, forgetting it is a body. Only seeing. Virgin like.

I say to the class that I would like to send an image of the drawings to someone as an Easter card. Would they mind? Perhaps Facebook it. ‘Facebook?!’ the art teacher laughs, ‘Really?’ I suddenly realise this could be so easily misinterpreted. Obvious to them. I suddenly realise that I am posting myself naked. Hmmm? I also start to worry that I could be misinterpreted as feminist ruining Easter for the religious folk. I go red.

I’m actually operating here from the deepness of my own personal religion, I’ve just sort of forgotten the surface social stuff, unconcerned with the Eternal Return, nor the ground breaking idea of it being the path of the feminine. Really, could I? Should I? ‘Seems a bit too much doesn’t it?’ I ask in all honesty. Naked. Facebook. But I really want to do this, because it is right. But it’s going to look wrong. I need to write about it. Blog it.

The model inside nods. I quiver, feel nervous.

Once clothed again I do take the photo. I know whose I want to take: the two men who are constantly looking, like air controllers, backwards and forwards between pencil and body; their flickering eyes seeing, not letting their mind invent. Mark’s work turns out to be just the ticket. He got the perfect perspective: the vagina is at the centre of the cross. Perfect. Underneath he has written, ‘The Temple’. Yes! Yes! That’s what I’m talking about.

--

People balk at Pregnant Virgin, at the Immaculate Conception. ‘You can’t be pregnant and also be a virgin! You just can’t!’ say the ones who are not prepared to go any further into something they think is codswallop. I sigh. It’s not worth it.  But once in a while there is a shine between the clouds, normally a quieter person, sensitive with an inquiring mind, who is not so quick to label. ‘For me,’ I say to Barbara and my mind wanders momentarily. She plays the second cornet in the Brass band, one of the people that I most like. Even though she barely talks she emits a wonderful presence, a deep personality. She reminds me of the phrase, ‘If you can’t understand my silences, you’ll never understand my words.’ When I stand by her I feel calm. I feel a soft, quiet, strong love that is stable, understated, real. ‘For me,’ I repeat to bridge the gap as I waivered in the silence between worlds, ‘it is when we become so empty, so void like, that we have gone through any thoughts, any feelings, to the other side, to nothingness. You know?’ She looks at me meekly. ‘Like when you lose yourself in prayer?’ I have to translate what I would call a blank mind of meditation into terms I’m guessing she would use. She was a high ranking Officer in the Salvation Armist. She nods, eyes full of warmth. At the end of the day it’s amazing how we are all talking about such similar sentiments, only with different words that all too often trigger us into opposition. ‘So we become a temple. We are nothing, nothing but a container.’ She nods again, smiles. I start to talk faster, excited that someone wants to listen to religious stuff, ‘Only when we are in this state, where our ego is waiting at the doors outside, can God enter into us,’ I say ‘God’ instead of ‘The Divine’, or ‘The Great I Am’, or ‘Higher Consciousness’. It’s easier to talk to religious people about god if they are thinkers and have jostling space around their words - God is not a scary word to them, no need to edit. Of course there are hours of debate behind what ‘It’ could be, but for sake of the argument we skip that question. There are plenty of ways up the mountain, there is no reason that her path be better or worse than mine. It’s just her way up. On my path God is often a tricky word, a rabbit hole; on hers it’s a signpost. I’ve gone off on one in my head, so I recap, ‘Only when we are pure of mind, pure of heart, can we open the doors for whatever is greater than us to enter.’ She nods again, from a place of deep recognising. We are still there, connected. ‘Sometimes ‘he’ won’t come. Sometimes ‘he’ will.’ I don’t say the inverted commas, but I think them.

I want to talk about Corbin who calls the place in the middle – where Man becomes Divine for the sake of Divinity and God becomes Human for the sake of Humanity – ‘Mundus Imaginalis’. Not imagined world, because it is not of the imagination, but imaginalis world. A place that is. A place that is not tangible, at least by the common senses. It’s a place that has sometimes opened to me after sitting ten days in silent mediation twelve hours a day, when by what feels like a miracle I manage to become empty inside - no desires, no needs, no thoughts, no emotions, no ME! - and I feel myself become nothing but light. Light coursing through me like a rushing, ferocious river. Voracious roars of silence. When and if it occurs, each time it is different. I guess in each person it is different. And, like in all great truths - the opposite is also true - it is a unifying Universal experience.

It’s like when you look at a baby, and suddenly you are floating in where that little soul has just come from.

It’s that place, we’ve all surely felt on our different paths up the mountain: moments of eternity that last minutes and change the rest of our lives.

--

Child’s play is wonderfully simple - once you get there. It’s getting there that’s blummin’ difficult.

It takes a heck of a lot of processing. ‘She’, the feminine that we find in all of us, men and women - our soul - needs to rub off the dirt she’s picked up of who she is not. She has to find how to brush off the psychic dandruff that burdens the shoulders of our egos.

--

‘As a society,’ says Thomas, ‘we are in the hero or the maiden, that place of adolescence that feels entitled.’
‘Yes,’ I agree. How can I not?

--

‘You know how you feel if you’re danced by a man who is firm and yet gentle?’
‘Ohh yes...’
‘That’s how it is to be conducted well too in music. If a conductor is good he brings out from the depths the very best of each of the players. It’s like we are all birds flying in formation, all intent on one goal.’
‘Wow!’
‘Yes wow!’

--

‘For me,’ I say to Barbara, ‘A key point in purifying ourselves into a temple, is embodying that what we do for others we do for ourselves, and what we do for ourselves we do for others.’

I have all the holographic ideas of the universe flash through my head. But I don’t mention it. The sandwiches are coming round.

--

I see one of mates from life drawing class in Curator Cafe. I always love talking to her. I’ve asked her what she thinks about posting a blog with a picture of a sketch. ‘I’ll write about what I’m trying to say.’
‘Do it!’
Somehow we get onto the holographic Universe and fractals. ‘They are patterns within patterns, I tell her.’
She looks at me with her beautiful blue eyes.
‘Remember the hologram of Tony the Tiger on the side of Frosties?’
‘Yes,’ she says and smiles,
‘Well,’ I swallow, ‘if you cut it in half then you don’t cut Tony the Tiger in half, but you get two, complete half sized Tony Tigers. Cut it in four, you get four, cut it in sixteen you get sixteen...cut it into a million you get a million tiny perfectly formed Tony Tigers.’
‘Wow!’ she says excited, ‘I want to try...’
But the wow is coming: ‘Yeah! But listen to this, if you put them all back together into the original hologram, and you look at say a whisker on the end of his nose, it’s just a whisker, nothing special, but inside it has all the information of the whole...’ I can never get over how amazing that is.

--

Change a part within us, and we change the whole.

That’s massive. That’s us in the Universe.

--

‘The cross,’ I say to Thomas, ‘for me represents the four elements, you know?’
‘Earth, water, fire and...’
‘Air.’ In my airhead I also parallel earth with sensations, water with emotions, fire with thought, air with intuition, ‘Jungian Psychology talks a lot about the balancing of these elements so that as they all align we rest in the very centre of the four directions,’
‘The centre of the cross?’
‘Yes...that’s where the fifth element arises, that of Ether, reminding us that we are part of the universe.’
‘I believe that since the times of Democritus it’s been considered as an esoteric place where atoms move,’
‘Yeah!’ I love talking to Thomas, he knows so much.
‘And where light is transmitted,’ he is turning me on, ‘where waves propagate.’
‘Exactly. And Higgs boson...’ I have to be careful being sapio-sexual. I could explode right now.

--

Ether allows us to feel we belong to a whole that is greater than our body, our surroundings and our planet. Ether gifts us with the physical sensation of our belonging to the Universe, Uni (One) and Versus (Version). So as we feel certain in ourselves forming part of the whole, we cast off forever the sense of existential loneliness.

Life is continually and eternally transforming and we become certain of our part to play in this party. We find we are certain that we are part of this whole that we know nothing about. We become more and more certain of belonging to humanity, to this living world, to the an organic world and in turn to energy and matter. We begin to feel this non-separation, no difference, the impossibility of isolation, which inevitably leads to religious feelings. Religion (re-ligare) means to re-bond, to unite again, and yoga means to re-yoke. We return to a sense of belonging to the Whole.

--

The actual Easter is today: the first full moon after the Equinox. The earth is receiving the most amount of light it has since the sun bedded down last Autumn. Horus has won over Set. Christ has won over the Devil. We celebrate the Light of the World.

In Wagner’s Parzival, Kundry suddenly finds herself splendidly awake in the middle of Spring. In The Magic Flute, Pamina comes alive in Spring. The Feminine. Spring. Flowers. Opening into a better world. New world. Fresh.

Flowers buds burst in gleeful surrender to the erotic nature of Spring in a virtue of giving. Nature bursts with joy, with life, with juiciness. Colours abound as the feminine, our Soul, awakens and comes into the world, sharing the creativity of her womb.

--

She circles around the truth, dancing, moving her body in closer harmony to her own nature, allowing.

She becomes less complicated, less ego controlled, more flow...she perfects herself in her purity.

By perfect I mean, in perfect harmony with what is. By pure, I mean of heart, of thoughts.

By all this I mean virgin. I mean she becomes the temple.

At the centre of the cross the Soul allows her ego to die.

She opens the door for God to impregnate her with its Light.

The Soul is once again a pregnant virgin.

--

‘Yeah, because as we surrender,’ I say to Thomas, ‘on the cross,’
‘Into Ether?’
‘Yeah, and into the heart of the matter at hand, or into our own creativity, into our own life...’
‘That’s beautiful,’
‘Yes, it is...’ I smile, I feel there is a beamingness between us, ‘it is as if we were allowing life to express through us.’
‘As if, we are!’
I nod, so glad to be accompanied.
‘I also believe,’ he says, ‘that when we express ourselves we are expressing and thanking Mother Earth...’ I love the dance of our conversations, ‘because effectively we are celebrating new life, after having survived winter...’
‘And what would we do without Mother Earth?’ His face is smiling, open.
‘And also fractally, within ourselves, the Spring of our Souls after the long Dark Nights of San Juan de la Cruz.’
‘It’s time to celebrate the light Santa Teresa!’
‘It is – that’s why I’m going to put that picture up...’
‘From your art class?’
‘Yeah.’ I go red.
‘That’s daring.’
‘It’s just, well, ascension is connected to the virgin temple. The vagina...’
‘The vagina?’
‘Yes, as true creative expression. The lower mouth as the Mellisae called it.’
He looks at me, a little shocked. Silent, slightly uncomfortable. I wonder whether to stop? ‘Well like,’ I continue, ‘as a portal into a deeper place...’ Blimey. I remember when Raimon Arola would get into similar tangles in his university lectures on Alchemy. I go even redder.
‘A celebration to the Earth of our bodies,’ he says kindly, coming back onto safer, more plough land.
‘Well yes,’ I say, ‘just a blog to wish people a Happy Easter and sow some seeds to flower into new, fresh concepts of who we are.’

'The' Moon heralding Easter above Riverford Farm 9pm 23 Mar 16