Tonight the sun passes into Leo – so here comes the picture to the month.

According to spiritual astrology, the heart centre is the seat of the soul and is ruled by Leo. Leo is the expression of the I AM, the sun of our being. The lion is the symbol of the personality which is to be transformed by the soul. The highest point of illumination in us is the head centre, and via this centre a yogi establishes contact with the sun centre of our planet, Shamballa. On a still higher plane there is a relation to the polar star.

The painting took some inner preparation before I began the outer work. To start with, I did a print-out of a colour spectrum wheel with 7 layers per colour shade. I photographed an icosahedron cut in a rock crystal and used the form of this Platonic solid of 20 triangles as an expression of rounded-up matter, or the “diamond body” of the spiritual matter which an initiate carries. For the meditator inside the crystal, I chose a picture of a statue of an Eastern goddess in a blessing posture which I took some years ago in the home of friends. I placed her face into the centre of the triangle pointing upwards and placed the picture of a lion with its head in the middle of the downward triangle. I put the colour wheel into the background with its centre at the heart centre of the meditator, symbolising the spectrum of the one light manifesting in 7 layers of creation. The colour of Leo is gold, and so the lion radiates a hue of golden light.

Behind the colour wheel I included a photo of the Dhaulagiri (meaning “White Mountain”) of the Himalayas as a symbol of intense aspiration towards greatest heights. On the front of the meditator, I placed the symbol of the sun. I shaped the headpiece exceeding the pyramid as an etheric representation of Shamballa which the meditator contacts via the head centre. Atop of it you see a star symbolising the polar star forming a triangle with two other stars.

See more pictures on the site with my paintings.

09 April 2014, pencils and photo work

A week ago we entered into the sun sign of Cancer – time to highlight the new picture to the month.

Music is under the influence of Cancer and of the Moon. Pure, sublime music is associated with the Divine. The soul naturally responds to high quality music, and we get absorbed into its enchanting vibrations. At the beginning of creation, when space begins to awaken, there is a first group of cosmic Devas. The scriptures call them the Gandharvas, the musicians, because they are the intelligences who produce periodicities and durations. They are the blissful Devas, the musical waves beyond creation. The musical hierarchy is presided over by Soma, the cosmic lunar principle, which exists on all planes. In astrology, his energy is presented through Neptune; on the planetary plane it is Venus; on the plane of our earth it is the satellite Moon.

In the centre of the picture you see three spheres representing the moon principle, composed from photos of the moon and a Chinese ivory carving. I placed a picture of the constellation of Cancer in the background. The outer, bluish sphere is touching a lower sphere representing the reflective principle or the transmission of the lunar energies to the Earth.

In the upper part of the picture you see three angels with flageolets, taken from the works of the English Pre-Raffaelite painter Edward Burne Jones (1833-1899). I worked them over to represent the Devas of the musical hierarchy. The musical vibrations penetrating the cosmos are visualised by the rays descending from the cosmos.

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02 March 2014, pencils and photo work

We are just entering into the sign of Gemini. Gemini is related to the mind. So for the picture of this month I tried to illustrate an aspect of the universal mind principle. Our mind is its reflection. And both unfold in great cycles of time. Sounds complicated? So come on for an exploration.

The Eastern wisdom describes the unfoldment of the creational activity in tremendous time cycles called Manvantaras. They cover periods far before the creation of our present earth and go into cycles of far distant future times. A Manvantara is ruled by a solar intelligence called Manu and the Manu presiding over the present cycle is called Vaivasvata. Vaivasvata is the son of the Sun; he is the mind of the Sun and is also called the light of the soul. The Sun is called the weaver, Vivasvata; he weaves the globe of light around itself. The very meaning of Vaivasvata Manu is “the weaver of the light of the soul”, of the divine plan on earth.

This painting visualizes Vaivasvata Manu as emerging from the Sun in the background. Behind his head you see the radiance of the solar light and his headpiece has the form of the solar material shown in images of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT). His youthful face reminds of him being the son of the Sun.

The sages describe the creation as emerging from out of a golden egg. You see a golden egg-shape in the background and the Manu surrounded by a wheel of 14 egg-shaped figures each containing the colours of the rainbow, representing the 14 Manvantaras and the 7 planes of each creation. The whole is contained in a huge lotus, the symbol of unfoldment. Vaivasvata is in the midst of the lotus, and inside the Sun you see a higher octave of the lotus out of which the Manvantaras emerge.

Creating this picture was a strange experience. It seemed that it didn’t want to come out. And while working on it, I wasn’t satisfied with the way it developed and on several occasions wanted to destroy it. In the end, I realised that my concepts of how the picture should look like were blocking its emergence.

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09 February 2014, pencils and photo work

A friend from Argentina sent me the link to a lovely poetic short film: “LILA” (9 min) – a film without words but with a lot of heart.

In the “Making of” Carlos Lascano, the director and writer, says:

“The story reflects a day in Lila’s life, a dreamy girl who can’t resign to accept reality as flat as she perceives it, using her imagination to modify it. The way we perceive reality often comes as a result of an imagination exercise in which sometimes only changing a little detail we can modify the whole.”

A perfect description of inner visualisation work.

Wikipedia has more about the talented film maker from Argentina now living in Barcelona. He is doing artistic and commercial films using a mixed-technique of animation and work with actors in combination with new technologies.  You can also see the film on Vimeo – when I saw it first there, it didn’t run well, now it seems to be ok.

Lila is visualising subtle bonds of love – a print-screen from the video (c)

Today, at Easter, we enter into the month of Taurus. So here is the picture to the month.

In the symbolism of Puranic scriptures the flow of life is described as the cosmic waters of space that had to be brought down to earth from the plane of the creator, Brahma. There was no one on earth who could receive the intensity of the fiery flux called Ganga (Ganges) but Shiva, the Lord of Divine Will. So a solar king ardently prayed for a long time until Shiva agreed to receive Ganga.

Shiva, who carries the crescent moon on his head, opened his hair, and when Ganga came down, she was caught in the hair and her impact was reduced before she was allowed to descend from his head to the heart and then to the planes.

The head of Shiva represents Shamballa and the heart of the planet is Spiritual Hierarchy. The human beings live in the planes. Each year in Aries, a new annual impulse is received in Shamballa and in Taurus it is passed on to Hierarchy and in Gemini to humanity.

For this painting I chose a picture of Shiva with a beautiful smile. I transformed it a bit, added the crescent moon onto Shiva’s head and placed a picture of Mount Kailash into the background. Then I created the sphere with the downpour of the energies onto Shiva’s head and from there, changing colours to golden yellow, down to earth. The air is filled with the flow of etheric energies.

It must be like this to stand in the full flow of life.

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Desert Breath is an immense Land Art Installation dug into the sands of the eastern Sahara desert bordering the Red Sea in Egypt. Covering an area of about 100.000 m2, the construction of Desert Breath began in June 1995 and was completed in March 1997. The team was founded in 1995 by: Danae Stratou (installation artist), Alexandra Stratou (industrial designer & architect), Stella Konstantinidis (architect), for the purpose of creating this project.

On her website, Danae Stratou writes: “The project is rooted in our common desire to work in the desert. In our mind’s eye the desert was a place where one experiences infinity. We were addressing the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind. The point of departure was the conical form, the natural formation of the sand as a material…. Desert Breath still exists becoming through its slow disintegration, an instrument to measure the passage of time.”

You can have an aerial view of Desert Breath from Google Maps.

Printscreen from Google Maps (c)

“Desert Breath” Land Art Installation, by D.A.ST. Arteam, Egypt (1997)

“Pleiades” is a fantastic dance performance by “enra“, a Japanese troupe which combines dance, light and music to a multi-dimensional composition. They describe it as “the ultimate fusion of images and live performance”. They are thus manifesting etheric realities on the physical plane. See more about their work on their website. The author and the artists of “Pleiades”.

A picture from the “Pleiades” video by “enra” (c)

Tomorrow there is Spring Equinox and the beginning of Aries. Aries opens the astrological year and stands for the birth of spiritual man. It also symbolises the birth-place of an idea, of a spiritual impulse taking to a form.

The butterfly is a symbol of the soul. Just like the caterpillar is totally different from the chrysalis, the butterfly emerging out of it is again a totally different state: its light movements make it difficult to believe that such a being comes forth from the previous states.

In this painting I tried to illustrate the state of transformation we go through on our way to spiritual birth: you see a human head like a cocoon from out of which emerges a being of light with wings like a butterfly. I constructed the head using different layers of a picture of myself fused with a picture of Master CVV. In front of the head you see the merged pictures of an enlarged empty cocoon, a chrysalis with the butterfly still inside, and a butterfly just emerging – pictures of a Plain Tiger from an Indian friend. There is another butterfly in front of the head, like emerging out of it, and other ones are seen flying into the vastness of space.

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The signs of the zodiac have their correspondences in the body. Pisces is not only associated with the feet but also with the area above the head, with the pineal gland and the pituitary body. When the higher consciousness awakens, a light starts to manifest between these two glands and gives rise to an ascension via this higher bridge of light beyond the limitations of the body. Pisces represents the ascent of man into God; it is therefore also called the sign of completion, of the meeting of the “alpha and omega” of creation.

For this picture I used a picture of Jesus and of the transfiguration of the Christ, from a painting of Fra Angelico (1442). I transformed this painting and fused the face of the Christ with a picture of Maitreya. I arranged two photos of sunrises on the front of the image of Jesus, thus generating the view of the radiant etheric centres. I increased the intensity of the eyes which are observing the observer and created a fusion of the subjective and the objective spheres.

For the upper background, I warped a photo of waves rolling onto a beach, producing the impression of the vastness of the etheric ocean of space associated with Neptune, the ruler of Pisces. And the colour of the sign is that of the pure sky in bright daylight. I further worked on the head centre in the middle of which you see the blessing figure of Christ.

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28 October 2013, pencils and photo work

The Wisdom Teachings speak of Agastya or Master Jupiter as the oldest member of the Spiritual Hierarchy. Since time immemorial, he has been a great sage on the earth and his deeds have been described in the Puranas. In South India, he is also called Agathiyar and worshipped as a Siddha having his abode in the Nilagiris or Blue Mountains. He is closely linked to the energies of Sirius and on the zodiacal level he presides over the sign Aquarius.

The creation of this picture was a paradox for me: I pondered upon it for few weeks. There was the initial impulse for the image of Agastya but I thought it must be something else – and no thoughts came. I felt frustrated but finally followed the original impulse to do the picture with a photo of a statue of Agastya. For the background, I took a photo of the mountain in the Nilagiris which is said to be the location of the ashram of Agastya. Then I integrated a photo of Sirius. Using the computer and pencils, I worked on the colours and details of the expression. When the picture was ready I was thrilled about its radiance.

30 September 2013, pencils and photo work