Shakti Shekhinah Sakinah

In all the major religious traditions there is, or was, the concept of a feminine manifestation or Presence of God.

Hinduism

Shakti from Sanskrit shak – "to be able", meaning sacred force or empowerment – is the primordial cosmic energy and represents the dynamic forces that are thought to move through the entire universe in Hinduism. Shakti is the concept, or personification, of divine feminine creative power, sometimes referred to as 'The Great Divine Mother' in Hinduism. On the earthly plane, Shakti most actively manifests through female embodiment and creativity/fertility, though it is also present in males in its potential, unmanifest form.

Not only is the Shakti responsible for creation, it is also the agent of all change. Shakti is cosmic existence as well as liberation, its most significant form being the Kundalini Shakti, a mysterious psychospiritual force. Shakti exists in a state of svatantrya, dependence on no-one, being interdependent with the entire universe.

In Shaktism, Shakti is worshipped as the Supreme Being. However, in other Hindu traditions of Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Shakti embodies the active feminine energy Prakriti of Purusha, who is Vishnu in Vaishnavism or Shiva in Shaivism. Vishnu's female counterpart is called Lakshmi, with Parvati being the female half of Shiva.

-Source Wikipedia

Judaism

The feminine, creative, transformative Presence of God is called Shekhinah in Judaism. Shekhinah is associated with the Throne of God and the holiest precinct of the Temple. She is said to reside within the Ark of of the Covenant. As a Pillar of Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night, the Presence of God, the glorious Shekhinah, guided the people of Israel.

Shekhinah is a feminine noun in Hebrew and derives from a word meaning 'dwelling', while the Hindu Shakti means 'power'; however, it may not be a coincidence that the two words are similar, both referring to the feminine power or manifest presence of the Divine.
In the Talmud, Shekhinah is the power which caused the prophets to prophesy and King David to compose his Psalms. 

"The Shekhinah does not rest amidst laziness, nor amidst laughter, nor amidst lightheadedness, nor amidst idle conversation. Rather, it is amidst the joy associated with a mitzvah that the Shekhinah comes to rest upon people, as it is said: 'And now, bring me for a musician, and it happened that when the music played, God's hand rested upon him' [Elisha]"

-Talmud

There is a tradition of the Shekhinah as the Sabbath Bride. This recurrent theme is best known from the writings and songs of the legendary mystic of the 16th century, Rabbi Isaac Luria. Here is a quotation from the beginning of his famous shabbat hymn:

"I sing in hymns to enter the gates of the Field of holy apples. A new table we prepare for Her, a lovely candelabrum sheds its light upon us. Between right and left the Bride approaches, in holy jewels and festive garments..."

A paragraph in the Zohar starts: "One must prepare a comfortable seat with several cushions and embroidered covers, from all that is found in the house, like one who prepares a canopy for a bride. For the Shabbat is a queen and a bride. This is why the masters of the Mishna used to go out on the eve of Shabbat to receive her on the road, and used to say: 'Come, O bride, come, O bride!' And one must sing and rejoice at the table in her honor ... one must receive the Lady with many lighted candles, many enjoyments, beautiful clothes, and a house embellished with many fine appointments ..."

Christianity
In Christianity, the inspirational powers of the Shekhinah have been absorbed into the figure of the Holy Spirit.

Islam

The Islamic form of Shekhina, is Sakinah, and is associated with the quality of Divine Tranquility. Sakinah is mentioned several times in the Koran.

According to Ali, nephew of the Prophet Muhammad, "Sakinah is a sweet breeze, whose face is like the face of a human".
Ali's son Hussein, named one of his daughters Sakinah. The name has now become popular in Islamic countries.

Wittgenstein

"There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas."
-Wittgenstein, Tractatus 5.63I

"There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul..."
-Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916

Stop Thinking

Another great quote on thoughtless awareness:

“Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don't care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need;
I alone possess nothing.
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharp;
I alone am dull.
Other people have purpose;
I alone don't know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.” 
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Don't Think

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
- Ray Bradbury, Writer

Most of us have heard elite sportspeople talk about being "in the zone" when they are performing at their best. They usually mean an effortless state in which their mind is free of distracting thought, where they are in the present moment, where nothing else intrudes, not even themselves.

The painter Claude Monet said that he tried not to think while he was painting - just to see.

While we can easily understand that the idea of doing things in a state of thoughtless awareness works for physical activities (which painting could be classified under), it's harder to imagine this being possible for writers. 

To all you writers out there, all I would say is: try it; see if it works.

Naturally, the making of great books - like anything else - also requires years of hard work, practise and training, as Ray Bradbury would be the first to point out. "The Zone" does not make itself available to the lazy.

Thanks to Mark for suggesting this post.

Happy Birthday Sophie Scholl

“I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties.

It forgets the great way home that lies before it.” 

“The sun still shines.”

(Last words spoken before her execution).

“Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone” 

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.”

-Sophie Scholl

Greatness

"I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing.
…The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honour."
— “I Think Continually”, Stephen Spender.

Religion

'Religions are in the end too complex, wise and fascinating to be abandoned simply to those who happen actually to believe in them'. 
- Alain de Botton

Although describing himself as an atheist, the Swiss British philosopher Alain de Botton talks about the 'deep self' - the self which transcends the everyday needs for material sustenance, and the chatter generated by superficial social interactions.
He has identified several important functions, common to the world religions, which help us to stay in contact with this deep self, and become more human. These include: educational principles unique to religious movements, religious art and culture, collectivity, the setting aside of time for contemplation.

While he shares the modern suspicion of ritual and religious indoctrination, he recognises that there are positive aspects to religious rituals, for example, the combination of aesthetic and moral principles in the Buddhist tea ceremony; art and code of conduct each reinforcing the other. He sees scheduled religious rituals and festivals as a way of repeating and reaffirming valuable life lessons, to combat the innate forgetfulness and lack of willpower the vast majority of us suffer from, our immersion in the mundane.

Crucial scene from the film Red Cliff in which the beautiful noblewoman Xiao Qiao delays and instructs an arrogant and ruthlessly destructive warlord through a tea ceremony, and so helps to bring about his defeat.



While religion is not everyone's cup of tea, anyone who has studied architecture would have to admit that it has produced some of the most beautiful buildings in the world. I had little interest in Islamic culture and religion, until I visited the Alhambra palace and gardens in Spain, many years ago. One building convinced me that I was missing out on something. Not that I converted to Islam, but I saw immediately that aesthetic subtlety of that degree is based on something true and worthwhile.
I had similar experiences at the Acropolis in Athens, and at Chartres Cathedral in France.
I see it as a sign that a religion is going off - becoming a corporation rather than a source of spiritual renewal - when it starts to build ugly buildings. As de Botton points out, this is not a superficial attitude; it's not judging a book by its cover. A lack of aesthetic awareness is usually a sign of simplistic or prejudiced thinking.
What springs to mind are photos I have seen of hideous concrete blocks housing the administrative headquarters of certain religions, towering disrespectfully over their own most sacred shrines.

Monuments to Introspection

From the time of the Pyramids, monuments have reached for the sky in an effort to impress, while the step wells of India are monuments to introspection. They are inverted pyramids, reaching into the earth, to find water, the source of life. The abstract qualities of the architecture impart an awesome sense of purity, stillness and sacredness.

The top two images are of Chand Baori in Rajasthan, while the lower three are of the recently excavated stepped tank at the ruins of the Vijayanagara capital at Hampi in Karnataka. Hampi is identified with the historical Kishkindha, the Vanara (monkey) kingdom mentioned in the Ramayana.

Divine Silence

The knowledge of God is received in divine silence.
-St John of the Cross

Letting go of Aesthetic Attachment

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

- Toni Morrison, Tar Baby.

Many times in the past, my enjoyment of the beauty of the natural world, has been lessened by a nagging desire to paint it, or record it in some way, even where this is impracticable, for example while driving. This desire to record can stem from the good intention to share the experience with others, but it can also be a kind of attachment, a desire to hold on.

The realisation that you are the Self - the Self which is not different to the world - leads to a kind of detachment from the world and it's beauty. But this detachment is not a lazy neglect, nor a cold lack of love.

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi likens love to sap flowing in a tree: if, through attachment, the sap sticks to one part of the tree, the whole tree dies.

Attachment, even aesthetic attachment, is not love; it is a kind of possessiveness and stagnation.  Love and Beauty (which are really one and the same) must be flowing (current) if they are to produce enjoyment.

The Self is a state of Bliss so inseparable from Love and Beauty, that it has no need to possess them. What you are, you no longer desire.

Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded, 

But must be current, and the good thereof 

Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.

- John Milton, Comus

In modern usage, the word current means 'contemporary', but at the time of Milton, I suspect it meant 'flowing'.

I am Eternal Bliss and Awareness
I am Shiva, I am Shiva.
- Sri Shankaracharya, Tad Niskala, 8th century.

The Black Goddess

The Goddess Melancholia. An illustration by William Blake to a poem by Milton.
The word melancholia derives from the Greek melas, meaning 'dark' or 'black'. Here, perhaps, Blake is recalling the Goddess who, in India, is known as Shri Mahakali, the dark-bodied destroyer of evil.
Milton uses the word melancholy to signify a mood of poetic introspection, not a depressive state. Melancholia was one of the four "humours", or temperaments, of ancient Graeco-Roman medicine (the other three being: choleric, sanguin and phlegmatic).
According to Humourism, the well-being of the body and psyche depends on these four qualities being in balance.
The humours are akin to the concept of the gunas (energy channels) of yoga philosophy, and doshas of Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine).

But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy,
Hail divinest Melancholy
Whose Saintly visage is too bright
To hit the Sense of human sight;
And therefore to our weaker view,
O'er laid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.
-Milton, Il Penseroso

Robert Eisenman

The American scholar and poet, Robert Eisenman, has uncovered a radically different view of the origins of Christianity. His study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular, has revealed that the earliest Christian community, led by James the Just (probably the brother of Jesus), was suppressed and almost written out of history by a violent figure with close ties to the corrupt Romanised dynasty descended from King Herod. Eisenman and other scholars have identified this figure with St. Paul, writer of the book of Acts. Paul himself, in his letters, admits that he helped to murder the followers of Jesus, before his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, and that he was a boastful person who changed his ideas, chameleon-like, to ingratiate himself with those around him. 

A primary source, known as the Clementine literature, tells that James the Just was thrown down the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem by a violent assailant, attempting to murder him. James' attacker is referred to simply as 'the enemy', but the word 'Paul' is written in the margins of extant manuscripts. 

Over the years, Eisenman has been a tireless campaigner for the release of the Dead Sea Scrolls for international scholarly examination. He sees parallels between the political, religious and ethical stance of the Scrolls and that of James the brother of Jesus, whom he identifies as the scrolls' 'Teacher of Righteousness', and sees 'the Wicked Priest' and 'the Man of Lying' as two different adversaries of the scroll community, the Wicked Priest being the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus, James' executioner, and the Man of Lying, St. Paul.

James' community were Jews, based in Jerusalem, who recognised Jesus as a prophet. The group were referred to as 'The Poor', even by Paul himself, which suggests that they may have been identical with a Jewish Christian sect known as the Ebionites, known for their rejection of Paul as a corrupting apostate. The name 'Ebionite' means people observing a vow of poverty, in the sense that they rejected the materialism of the Romanised elite in Judea.

For Eisenman, the Jewish Messianic community who wrote the Scrolls, were part of a resistance movement to the corrupt, collaborating Herodians and their priesthood. They were marginalized by a Herodian named Saul (Paul of Tarsus/St. Paul) and the gentile Christians who followed him. This version of Christianity, as it later emerged from a gentile milieu as led by Paul, transformed the apocalyptic militancy of the Ebionite/Essene Zaddikim into a universalist peaceful doctrine. In this manner, Eisenman sees the doctrine of Christianity as largely the product of Pauline dialectic and apologetics. In so doing, Eisenman attempts to recover the authentic teaching of Jesus and/or James from the obscurity into which it seems to have been intentionally cast by resultant orthodoxy. As he puts it at the end of his book James the Brother of Jesus, once you have found the Historical James, you have found the historical Jesus, or alternatively, “who and whatever James was so too was Jesus”.

Paul as an Herodian

Hand in hand with these theories went Eisenman’s identification of Paul as a Herodian, based on the view that Paul's version of Judaism was so peculiar that, more than anything else, it seemed to represent the interests of the Herodian Dynasty both in Palestine and as it sought to extend its influence into Asia Minor and further East into Northern Syria and Mesopotamia. He covered this in a series of papers and books beginning in 1984 and found the proof of this in Paul’s own salutation (if authentic), at the end of his Letter to the Romans, where he sent his greetings to his “kinsman Herodion” (i. e., “the Littlest Herod”) and “all those in the Household of Aristobulus” (the putative son of Herod of Chalcis and the ultimate husband of the infamous Salome – in fact, their son was “the Littlest Herod”).
He also found it in Josephus’ picture of a curious member of the Herodian family, an individual he also calls “Saulos” who actually seemed to have many characteristics in common with “Paul” in New Testament portraiture. Not only was this “Saulos” involved in an appeal of sorts to “Caesar,” he was also involved in violent behaviour in Jerusalem (although on the surface, at a somewhat later time); and it was he who made the final report to Nero in Corinth about the Roman reverses in Jerusalem which resulted in the dispatch of his best general Vespasian from Britain.
Finally he found this in Paul’s own outlook, his philosophy of “winning“ or being a “Jew to the Jews, a Law-keeper to the Law-keeper and a Law-breaker to the Law-breaker” also expressed in I Corinthians 9:19–27. In his own identification of himself as of “the Tribe of Benjamin” (Romans11:1 and Philippians 3:5), a claim he might have felt Herodians, as Edomites, were making for themselves, and his founding “a Community where Greeks and Jews could live in harmony, etc.,” where there were “no foreign visitors,” as well as in the easy access he seems to have had to positions of power, and his own Roman citizenship.
To complete his arguments, Eisenman cites the matter of an unidentified “nephew” of Paul, seemingly the son of Paul’s sister, resident in Jerusalem (Cypros married to the Temple Treasurer Helcias? – see his genealogies at the end of The New Testament Code and James the Brother of Jesus) who has unfettered entrée to the Commander of the Roman garrison in the Tower of Antonia who, in turn, then saves him from “Nazirite oath-taking” “Zealot”-like Jewish extremists who take an oath “not to eat or drink till they have killed Paul” (Acts 23:12–4) — Eisenman identifies this individual as Julius Archelaus, the son of this Saulos’ sister by the name of Cypros above. Nor is this to say anything further about his Roman citizenship or his own philosophy of paying the Roman tax to Caesar and seemingly placing Roman Law above Jewish Law as an expression of “the Righteousness Commandment” of “loving your neighbor as yourself” in Romans 13:1–10.
(Wikipedia)

Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy, are amongst other figures who have identified Paul as a corrupting influence on the teachings of Jesus. Some have gone so far as to regard Paul as one of the false prophets the appearance of which Jesus himself warned.

To Find Yourself

To find yourself, think for yourself.
- Socrates

Samuel Palmer on the Art of Etching

"The charm of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows; so that almost everything either sparkles, or suggests sparkle... those 1000 little luminous eyes which peer through a finished linear etching."

Palmer was the central figure of a group artists, influenced by William Blake, known as The Ancients. He was a friend and disciple of William Blake. Like Blake, Palmer had visionary experiences as a child. Contact with Blake reawakened this gift for the visionary, which was expressed in his paintings and etchings.
Since its rediscovery, the mystical, Blake-influenced work, he produced while living in Shoreham, Essex, has become a major influence on contemporary British artists.

The White Buffalo Calf Woman

Bronze statue of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, by Lee Leunig and Sherri Treeby

The White Buffalo Calf Woman is central to the spirituality and culture of the Lakota Sioux people. Lakota oral tradition relates that she appeared to them from the north as a beautiful young woman dressed in a brilliant white dress to give the tribe the sacred rituals which form the basis of their religion. She also took the form of a sacred white buffalo calf. When she left the tribe, she told them that she will come back in the future.

The medicine man Crow Dog explains her importance:

"This holy woman brought the sacred buffalo calf pipe to the Sioux. There could be no Indians without it. Before she came, people didn't know how to live. They knew nothing. The Buffalo Woman put her sacred mind into their minds."

Perhaps the sacred pipe (chanunpa) represents the tube-like shushumna nadi, the central channel of the subtle body, through which the Kundalini, passes like smoke. She explained to them that it represented the living breath of the Great Spirit.

The pipe, is the holiest ritual object of the Lakota, and was traditionally loaded with a mixture of sweet smelling herbs, roots, leaves and barks, of which tobacco was only one ingredient. The smoke was not inhaled, and the use of the pipe was reserved only for very special occasions. It was in no way habitual nicotine abuse.

The Illusion of the Knower

The Self never undergoes change; the intellect never possesses consciousness. But when one sees all this world, he is deluded into thinking, “ I am the seer, I am the knower.”
Mistaking one’s Self for the individual entity, one is overcome with fear. If one knows oneself not as the individual but as the supreme Self, one becomes free from fear.

The entire universe is truly the Self. There exists nothing at all other than the Self. The enlightened person sees everything in the world as his own Self, just as one views earthenware jars and pots as nothing but clay.
~Shri Shankaracharya (probably 788 CE - 820 CE).