Big Top

"When all visible light is extinguished, one finds the light of the self."

- The Upanishads

"The Sun of the One I love has risen in the night,
Resplendent, and there will be no more sunset...
I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart, and I
said
"Who are you?" and he said, "Your Self."

- Al Hallāj

"...mystics come to this innate capacity through a process of letting go of the ego and the conceptual system. This is especially clear in William Chittuck's article on Ibn al'Arabi, the Sufi who teaches that it is but self-centeredness that "conceals the sun" of the innate character of the self that is, God's own self manifestation within the self. Through the annihilation of the self, and, 'abandoning' our egocentricity or giving up our 'delimited consciousness,' we reveal the innate 'sun' within."

- The Innate Capacity:
Mysticism, Psychology, and Philosophy
edited by Robert K. C. Forman

"Then only will you see it, when you cannot speak of it; for the knowledge of it is deep silence and suppression of all the senses."

- Hermes Trismegistus

"This serpent power, Kundalini, cannot be described fully,
even by one who has succeeded in awakening it. When it awakens, it
shoots through the body like an electric shock, and trembling and
amazed, the person realizes that a powerful event has taken place
within him. This is only the beginning. The whole body trembles. A door
seems to have been pushed open through which a flood of light flows
from some unknown world, a light of incomparable radiance."

- Kundalini Manifestations - Lucid Dreaming
by Sirley Marques Bonham Ph.D.

"St. John of the Cross...taught that when darkness-within assailed the contemplative, insight and God's presence would soon follow. Appearing there between the two "armies"--or two severed poles of a believer's being--God smiles and responds intimately and at length."

- quotations and commentary

"God works by contraries so that a man feels himself to be lost in the very
moment when he is on the point of being saved. When God is about to
justify a man, he damns him. Whom he would make alive he must first kill.
God's favor is so communicated in the form of wrath that it seems furthest
when it is at hand. Man must first cry out that there is no health in him. He
must be consumed with horror. This is the pain of purgatory . . . In this
disturbance salvation begins. When a man believes himself to be utterly
lost, light breaks."

- Martin Luther
Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, pp 82f

"It is only when he listens to God that Job is finally able to let go of all that he has lost. Compared to what he has seen, his former wealth and social position, and even his health and his children, sink into comparative insignificance…There is no new information here. What is new is a paradigm-shattering experience of the world and of its Creator. The most important lines in the book may be,

'I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eyes have seen you.'

Before the Theophany, Job had known God only by report ('by the hearing of the ear'). He had thought of God only in terms of the conventional ideas that, along with his friends, he had inherited from tradition. Now that he has 'seen' God with his 'own eyes' - now that he has encountered the God who is really God - all those conventional ideas drop away, and with them Job's complaint against God."

- God's Answer to Job
by Wes Morriston
Religious Studies, 32 (Cambridge University Press,1996) 339-356.

"In The Psychology of Meditation, Claudio Naranjo and Robert Ornstein describe the process of meditation as culminating in the dissolution of the ego. In Buddhism, this is called reaching nirvana, "extinction", through the state of emptiness, sunyata, which literally means "no bottom". In Islam it is called fana f'illah, or extinction into God. This state is paradoxical, for it is the "emptiness which contains everything." It is the peace of which the Desert Fathers called "hesychias."

- Living from the Center

"The kingdom is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal.
While she was walking on the road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke.
The meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realise it; she had noticed no accident.
When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty."

- Jesus of Nazareth
Gospel of Thomas 97

"As Teresa of Avila says:- 'in the centre mansion in the interior castle of our soul', we find the Lord of the castle, we find Christ,"

- Sunyata, Emptiness And Self-emptying, Kenosis

Throne room of Castel del Monte

"Castel del Monte... is oriented eastwards, with the main entrance and the so-called Throne room oriented towards the sun's rise."

- Altamura and Castel del Monte: the exception and the rule by Consorzio Idria

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Big Top | pg. 2 - Echoes of Camels and Needles | pg. 3 - The Crimson King
pg. 4 - Beelzebub | pg. 5 - Demon est Deus Inversus | pg. 6 - Prophets Chained for Burning Masks
pg. 7 - Kundalini | pg. 8 - The Dweller on the Threshold | pg. 9 - The Alchemical Wedding
pg. 10 - The Woman Clothed with the Sun | pg. 11 - Circe | pg. 12 - Ouroboros
pg. 13 - And there a Swan is Born | pg. 14 - Spiral

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"It is by death that the Divine Child enters into the Promised Land
and becomes the saviour, which was the same experience of the crucified Christ..."

"Psychologically, this can be seen as the death of the ego and the
differentiated ego functions, which return the human child to the state
of original oneness or to the state of the undifferentiated functions of
sensation, feeling, thinking, or intuition, the instinct that becomes the
archetype of the Divine Child. Mystical experience described in all major
religions appear to support this idea."

- The Genesis Model
by Gerry Anne Lenhart

"XIII.Death represents the permanent and final end of a "life." This could be either physical death or the lesser deaths that occur when we pass from one phase of life to the next (adolescence, marriage, children, etc.); it is any major transition, normal or extraordinary. A principal characteristic of such transitions is that they are irrevocable. No one, not even a god, can bring back from the dead someone whom Hades wishes to keep. Those few who have journeyed to the underworld and returned (Heracles, Orpheus, Theseus and Peirithoos), have been permanently changed by their confrontation with Death.

XIII.Death follows XII.Hanged Traitor (Hanged Man), since the Traitor represents the conscious choice to let go, to hang over the Abyss, and put your life in the hands of Fortune. This is the only salvation possible to the Traitor, but still it must be accepted willingly before it can take place. When it is, we move on to Death, which is the cusp dividing the old life from the new.

Thus Death represents a time for grief and mourning, for accepting the inevitable, for recognizing that the birth of a new generation requires the death of the old. This is the price paid for progress, indeed, for any continuation of growth; it is the coin paid to Charon to cross the black River Styx into Hades realm, the dark divide between one life and the next."

The Lord of Death is paid in bitter coin
For dissolution, hoping he'll rejoin
The scattered parts, far better rearranged,
For callous Death's decrees cannot be changed.
"Accept thy fated end," he doth enjoin.

- The Pythagorean Tarot
by John Opsopaus

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