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Gene Keys Journal, 17 May 2015
The Shadow of gene key 10 (my IQ – Hod on the Tree of Life) is the self obsessive spiritual search – a circular path, “treading”(I Ching) the treadmill, whose realisation becomes that the goal cannot be found – or not the way it is thought to be found.
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The Gift is effectively when it turns into a spiral: live your own myth, naturally, through the Ring of humanity.
This is an archetypal and legendary pilgrimage: Wounded (gene key 25), you must do battle with your shadows (gk38), overcome your mind’s limitation (gk17), surrender your need to control life (gk21) and find your Self (gk10) before you can awaken (gk51). Naturalness is when and wherever the argument with life ceases.
The 17th shadow which limits the quest, is Opinion – which transmutes to the gift of Farsightedness and the siddhi of Omniscience. Gene Key 17’s title is The Eye. Its I Ching title is the Following. Treading and Following!
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Re Gene Key 17 (the Eye/Following), Richard Rudd writes – “All opinions are based upon seeing flaws in the geometry of life.”… “If you look within most human minds, you will find layers and layers of conditioned dogma – from books, scientifically proven theories, religious beliefs and/or traditional views. You will find minds that are desperately trying to become certain about life.”
That is quite a picture! Most of us – and in my bleak mind – consist of edifices of fakery. It is useful to become aware of opinions and their tension – the layers are like flaky pastry, or the piled pages in the Grand Canyon. Along Bright Angel trail the rock formations resemble legal bundles, with the brittle old pages curling. This is a powerful image.
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Leaves of a Book (from Poems of Eclipse, 2000)
Having lived my story,
who lives it now?
In the shadow of this tree
I prepared the mercury –
flaky pastry crusts
in loamy leaves of alchemy.
“It has the aspect of a stony crumbly flaky mass.
The crystalline layers forming substance lie
as leaves of a book, one over the other.
For this reason it is called the earth of leaves.
“This is the first matter of the Work expressed
as a book which is sometimes open, sometimes closed
as to whether it has been worked
or merely extracted from the mine.”
La Mystere des Cathedrales, Fulcanelli
Wondrous is our Art’s dark smell
lifted from the ground.
Sweet peace of sour nitrate,
tang of rain and essences sharp
recall my inner life’s fecundity.
Sweet peace settles now,
as when along Bright Angel Trail my arduous trek
delivered me before the gods
who rest their tired feet
within the Colorado waters
dividing the grand Canyon’s heat.
Into Cambrian strata shale
a great crack opens,
whose bookish spine
descending serpentine
beneath the desert shelf
feathers a tender greeny blush of aspens;
and above the mossy thread,
piled high as a giant pale,
lie un-numbered fossil pages petrified;
an alchemy, an earth of leaves within
alert akashic eyes
of lizards in their ancient sleep.
Poems of Eclipse
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A footnote to the poem’s last verse – “PALE – this word used for assonance with “trail”, “shale”, etc, and “piled” and “page”, but also suggesting wood pales (from Latin palum, stake) for making fences or boundaries; and the expression “beyond the pale” means “behaviour beyond acceptability or conventional definition” i.e. beyond the usual faculty for numbering, ordering or containing. Name given in 14th century to the part of Ireland where English rule was effective as a result of the English settlement of Henry II’s reign.
“AKASHA” – sanskrit word meaning “etheric” – “a kind of matter freer than even air, just as water is freer than earth, and air is freer than water. Inasmuch as objects partake of and associate with ether, they can have separation and distance from one another.” (Definition, Ernest Wood, and “Etheric Writing” – Aurobindo.) Alternatively, “the imprint of the universal memory”. Archival connotation – akashic records, by which everything in space and time is on subtle record, available to some seers.
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It was very strange and exciting to be down among all that. Through the biblical geology a bright green path gradually descended the desert – the Tonto shelf – feathered with aspens, and alive with a burbling brook: life’s secret cycle, flora and fauna flows through the mineralized layers of climate in the vertical plane. It is a long, long walk down to where the central abysses of the Grand Canyon suddenly open up to the gods enthroned among them.
And so it is when we open the well of our mind into vast space. It is not so much that I dethrone my gods, as … I now see them. When they commanded me, they were not visible, they were buried like the Sphinx, and when I was young, I could not understand why I was driven in certain ways, far from what I “knew” to be wise.
Visualisation is powerful. It only doesn’t work when I try to let someone else lead it. At present, it requires willingness and faith in what I see: to “tread”. This is what I discovered in my creative pilgrimage in 1986-89. Later, I came to Ramana and the great gods in Vedanta. It was all a vast excavation.
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“It is false to speak of realisation. What is there to realise? The real is as it is always. We are not creating anything new or achieving something which we did not have before. The illustration given in books is this. We dig a well and create a huge pit. The space in the pit or well has not been created by us. We have just removed the earth which was filling the space there. The space was there then and is also there now. Similarly we have simply to throw out all the age-long samskaras [innate tendencies] which are inside us. When all of them have been given up, the Self will shine alone.”
Ramana Maharshi
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With this image awake, which archetype unconsciously leads me now?
Down in the canyon, among archetypes whose hard strata the aeons of climate could not erode – they are left standing like spires – some are hidden behind others! It is an open question. Which one for instance, compels the depth of my two relationships at present? It must be one of those deities, rooted in time, and entirely right for itself. It comes forth to the play of my fingers, touching keys – like the music of the hidden Bright Angel brook: water in the rock, as Moses’ staff struck. There are elements of nature untouched by human time and wrinkled brows. They stand, they flow.
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They stand, and all around them is their realm and vortex: a landscape perfectly contoured to their worship. Such are great bass chords and roots of Life. I stand in awe.
The art of visualisation is to touch and see: to let it lead to the unexpected; it is not enough to just sit and hope. I touch the unknown, writing to love it, and when I write with both hands, it touches my lover and waits: it is my tantra. I am like a lizard or a rabbit: frequently I pause and am still. Nature in the Mountain (I Ching/gene key 52) pauses as the water of life fills her.
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Last night I saw a TV documentary on the Arabian desert. There is an irrigation by which the water from a natural spring is directed to flow along channels (artificial veins) built along sheer mountain ridges towards distant farms. The sluice is open to each farm in turn, for about 15 or 20 minutes. The cycle is determined by a sundial, a tall post whose shadow strikes small cairns representing each farm. When the water is released down one of these long winding ducts, it hurtles and leaps like an uncoiling silver snake. It is wonderful to see! It is wonderful to see the head of clear water surge and tumble through the dry rock vein.
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All creatures in Nature wait: the creative process waits to be filled: the breath, the sea-tide awaits herself. Adonai, Allahu, thou art God.
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Alan Jacobs in the Grand Canyon
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This painting is from 1987, when I was living in the spaces-between – it is developed from tables and persons (left and right) in a coffee-shop – the living “canyon” between them.
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Journal with Gene Keys 