Sahlan Momo

Bombastic! These are not thoughts these are stones, milestone of a human condition in which the self is both in itself and in the other. The other and the I, the eternal contenders turning partners to bear witness to a recovered unity. No longer the I and the Other, the other and the I, the other…  The other? Words.

Words made up of letters, of interrelated meanings, engaging in mental tours with no outcome. Words.

Words of subtle content spacing-out the thinking mind. Behold! A sparkling consciousness is at work in the innermost chamber, transmuting its ashes to leap to a farther mansion: its dwelling place as co-creator of the realm. To contribute by means of words & deeds to the mesoteric dimension[1] is an ethical chore, the inner-outer categorical imperative of all and each of us, a duty and a joy.

Sacred[2] languages and belle letters sacré. Words. Words to depict the nospace and its fulfilling absence: the void, both in the usual condition in which we perceive it as still, and, as yet, as a fixation.

In depicting the universe, letters, words, phrases, concepts and ideas are linked by unbinding meanings leaving no traces behind their unfolding. The collective mending process[3] c’est en route, the élan healing humankind from its vikarma is gaining pace in the secular time.

In itself, the concept of time is nothing but a notion enclosing an illusory idea (eidon) devised by the thinking mind to keep track of History. Ideas as entities gravitating above the human tier, related by virtue of meanings and encapsulated in words interconnected by subtle underlying relations are defining and enclosing their shadows wanting for light, in its physical and metaphysical meanings, bearings, senses and acceptations.

Words and languages, logoi and logorrhoea: a suite of golden letters are emerging from Logos to write the manifestation, deciphering, naming and holding their own universe. Nothing but particles, barely aware of their doing, at times attuned with Logos, a times relenting dharma’s discourse in disclosing the veil. Indeed, is this alternating state of consciousness to give rises to the perception of a next level. A game and a play: Lilā is at work.

Life, absorbed by the fragrance of the rose and by the ubiquitous skin of a body of light, is starving for beauty. The living sign is begetting its language by the unified toil of perception and action, by the active contemplation between the shams of the inner, and the pretences of the outer still dwelling in duality. Duality, a spacetime epitome, is leaping to merge beyond māyā, throughout the gate of Eden and its two guardians – the polarities – standing at the limen and asking for credentials. We do not have credentials, we do not bear personal records, if not our life-long starving and swearing for truth, that Truth sought by many an found by a few. Beware! An unprejudiced individual I is emerging from the abysses of nowhere, neither light nor sound where there yet, no darkness nor silence before the Big beat. The lost paradise will never be found, for is still thriving in creating itself, as a metaphor of course. In pursuit of knowledge, human language takes avail of metaphors to exemplify the horizontal plane of reference more effectively than reality itself[4] – an evolutionary device crafted by the thinking mind to keep tracks of its own history spiralling on the saddle point[5] of an improbable turn.

The perception of the world in terms of a quantum interplaying modalities at all levels[6] may indeed be useful, but deceptive is alternating one polarity to the other, for none of both are real at once, unless māyā relinquishes the veil. Young wood is flexible, as a bamboo bent by mundane affairs, surrendering its might in favour of wind (rūḥ) so not to break down, but old enough to stand any inflexible blow. Engaged in this dualistic prospect, it is only a thing as simple as the binocular vision to confer depth to the vision[7].

Letters. Letters to lovers, to family, to the human tribe[8]. The impression that things exists outside of ourselves is due to a sub-function of the process of time that, as a sunbeam on the surface of water reflects and conceal reality form consciousness, for, it should not be forgotten, bilocality is a sub-function of nonlocality. Metaphor & symbol are enchanting and hiding themselves behind their own meanings: the former is translating reality on the same horizontal plane; the latter, is referring to a vertical order of reality. The mesoteric realm combines all aspects, horizontal and vertical, all planes, all quadrants and tires, the whole of reality into the one initial nuqta[9] pulled off with bravura by the coming together of the polarities. The collective Buddha is shaping up. We uphold responsibilities for our own words, for our own tongue, while the sacred language of gods is translated and conveyed into the human jargon by a cosmic jester[10].

Holding a critically cognitive attitude toward the manifestation, although feeling light and joyful inside without any sensible reason and beyond any reasonable doubt, is a step heading to mindful detachment – a term nowadays too much in fashion. The widespread tendency to stay on the surface to avoid diving into the inner world disconnects the language from its mesotypes[11]. Shunning the inner dimension by only perceiving its solid materical aspect is indeed a childish deceit. Humankind is on puberty, transiting to adulthood. We need enlightened people to lighten the way in this transitional darkness. In such a barely unbearable stage, even the apparently smallest and most insignificant sparks of light might be contagious. Behold! We are falling into a linguistic trap, into its web. Language is a device crafted by angels[12] to communicate and relate with humans, to pool and share knowledge of a realm otherwise inaccessible to them. No pure spirit could appreciate the taste of a strawberry on a cup a whipped cream, nor the lightness of a caress on the back, nor the smile of child, nor the pangs and joys of love without this physical body, a sine qua non to allow and advance farther and further the evolutionary élan, so that, in virtue of its acquired experiential carnal body of knowledge endowed to the human condition, it can transits beyond the last contingences of mundane affairs. Another step toward the true human dimension has been accomplished. This is the time of action, of constantly adjourning consciousness; at this tier, getting lost into details while loosing sight of the whole is embarrassing for a society pretending to be the best of all times. Human language is transmuting into its next expressive level of multiple relational meanings to finally take hold of the uncapturable untold. Words?

If language is a vector of meanings[13], their attractor beyond the spacetime construct is indeed the dimension linking them all in a single cluster. In writing, the constant change of plan of reference by the authorial I turns the text into a meta-text, whose plan of reference is no longer the spacetime platform, rather the dimension where beyond and before have no longer any meaning, for, at the end of the quest, such as a distinction belongs to its portamento and gait, that particular bearing of its previous existential cause, situation and provision.

The digital era has brought up its own dialect of visual signs, of figure of thoughts to communicate feelings in digital format without fearing to get lost in them. The tongue between God and humans, the language of visionaries, artists, dreamers and prophets, is a eudemonic infra-language based on a very, very personal code.

“Are you sure that Japanese women have it horizontal?” asked the youthful Western novice to Daisetz, the Great Ignorant, “I’m not sure of anything and I’m sure of nothing, if I cannot reach it, I throw my hat at it and, in most of cases, the hat-holder is just there ;-)”.

Another piece of conversation to flow into the dustbin…

I imagined, I suspected, and I knew it: you appear with the Moon, and disappear with the Sun. I didn’t hear from you for quite a while after the white nights spent on the sofa. Your breasts really impressed me, it must be amazing kneading on them, and then, slowly, very slowly starting perceiving the fragrance of Eros nearby… lower, just a bit lower, descending into the magmatic moist darkness harbouring the whole universe. Also sprach Zarathustra the night he dreamt off. I really hope the full Moon will bring us good luck and that the dream will soon become true.”

More rubbish to drift in the trash…

So all this to say what? / It wasn’t me to come forward, / Nor somebody pushed me from the back, / Thou attracted me more than myself. / But who am I to say that? / You are an inspirational being, / take good care my dearest; / woman’s tears are powerful stars in the night of the sense.

Dreamers, visionaries, prophets and foretellers are unemployed today: this is the time of now[14]. They have lost their holistic vision into a too fragmented reality. Too many false words are whispering in the ears of the fools that the time of change has come, that reading the autograph of life implies empowering the mending process of the mind so to enable the golden letters of the alpha-beth to be read. There is something by the name of Love that has been called love, something by the name of Us that has been called I. It is hard to abide to polarities and forgotten dreams, for speculative matters are so far very practical stuff, the stuff of the dreamers. To perceive a reality neglected by our peers does not necessarily imply the negation of that reality, at worst, it witnesses a neglected myopia. The thinking mind has its own language to communicate with the world: it molds matter, for both share the same vibrational field; in matter of spirit instead, it cannot reach out as, by consistency, sprit is way subtler than matter. The old Greek culture devised the brave artifice of the gods to make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible world; their mythology served a people refined in their harshness yet resolute in accomplishing their mission, being it in the Agora, at Salamis or at Thermopylae.

We use the langue as a proprietary matter, almost confidentially, the collectivity of a common language is still to be found, if ever. The major three human centres, the intellectual, the emotional, and the sexual[15], figuratively sited respectively in the head (thoughts), in the heart (feelings/emotion), and in the sex – the land of Eros ibn Kaos chasing a Venus in pyjama, and of the erotic rasa[16] – correspond to the anthropomorphic residency representation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religions as possible codes of interpretation of the reality, binding together (reliegere) a coherent system of signs around a spiritual core at the kernel itself of reality, are verily perishing. Their very true essence is spirituality, the transcendental attractor, the other polarity, and the attractor itself. The time of religions as we conceive them is finishing, is coming to an end on the historical plane. Spirituality is taking the lead in human affairs, it is no longer a matter of faith or of faiths, this is the time of evidence, the time of the spiritual-material experience, the manifest and the manifested are sharing the same semantic and experiential plane, jointly moulding into their unique becoming. A transitional time to pure spirituality is most probably laying beyond the first and the last illusion.

Captured by a libido in disguise, beyond the formal logic another paradigm is available to the magnificence of Lilā, the cosmic game enacting the world. Being an aware agent of change, co-creating the play by consciously participating in its making is indeed one of the few viable exits from the tunnel of dispair in which humankind with all its most celebrated humanity is currently dwelling. The art of entertaining people with magic illusions, the art of mesmerising the players on stage, the art of being invisible to the ordinary sense, the art of appearing and disappearing at wish are the prerogative of the charlatans in command on the deck. Humankind as a whole is awakening from an abyssal nightmare lasting since the inception of time, it is becoming conscious of being a conscious being transiting to a further stage. We need to interpret the language of visions – not that of the night dreams – to decode humankind’s consciousness for the third millennium; a macro trend already is at sight on the ground of well-forged experiential data, tangible both at individual and at the collective level, with its possible scenarios and prospected outcomes. It is not a dissociative fugue of identity on the plane of the personality to take hold, rather the perceptual sharing of a state of consciousness spiritually inclined, closer to the liminal level of the personal identity, opening up to the other, a river and a bridge: to swim or to walk? Both.

Language is a non-descriptive retrograde normative metacognition statement. Airy people, with their heads in the clouds, are getting acquainted with a state of absentia from the ordinary normative experience of being, of presence temporarily lodging in that richer perimeter of a reality closer to truth. Reality, as beauty, is in the consciousness of the beholder, part and parcel of the being. To co-create – analogically and descriptively speaking – to co-operate and share knowledge on the mundane plane of the innermost perceivable reality, as an imago dei, equates co-creating a human normative image decrypting the reality beyond the veil. As spacetime retains in its manifestation the former three-dimensional plane of representation; once globalized in the mesoteric dimension, spacetime retains also the individual signature of the action, but does not prevent its course. Languages are signs constructs, the ongoing product of wise knowledge implemented on the ground of the being; are agents of change, glocally speaking.

This is the trendy meta-language of spanda, the meso-language between the human and the cosmic plan and partaking of both, the midway at the horizon of the century. Indeed this is the very reason why, more now than ever, enlightened leaders are needed at the helm, for the current leadership of the world is, at its best, a tool in the hands of an illiterate child of a genes in extinction, deaf to the language of the ‘other’ – none other than itself – unable to fulfil its humane mandate of service. Unaware of the constantly changing present, of that being that for them will never be, our leaders are beating around the bush a past forever gone, confined within the limits of an unpaired monocular vision, deprived of prospective and depth, and narrowed by their egotic I.

Leadership and governance arts are ethical affairs, normative stance, not aesthetical commodities. The artifex is mastering unknowable and knowledgeable noetic content in its athanor; ideas are transmuting in tangible facts. Even though the aim is not the goal at the end of the human journey, and notwithstanding a major dose of bright creative imagination, it is not the inspiring vision of Muses and Gods[17] to make our day, but the seautonic vision leading into this very moment. In the atemporal present alien to our leaders, bound as they are to a compulsory delirium for a retrograde historical function, they are fastening their heads to their back while hissing nonsense with their forked tongues, figuratively speaking of course. Uninformed of the present, let alone of any human prospect, they are yielding into the irreversibility of the historical time – if only they knew… that time is a mind construct, an interrelated pattern of empirical data processed within a well-defined framework of an ordinary state of consciousness, and not the ticking of their rolex…

We are dealing here with the collective consciousness[18] taking awareness of being conscious, a self-reflexive act upon itself. Words are words, abiding to their meaning even in transitional times. Time & space acts on words by accumulating and sedimenting history; space & time mould matter, whereas the collective intelligence interacts metahistorically with a spirit still to be enslaved from an icy imperial ego. The current collective perception of a shared global consciousness is gaining consensus; entelechy is at work, boosting the engine to its limit, restlessly overflying its boundaries to finally landing into the other. Here the sexual analogy is patent. The gender issue of contemporary societies is rooted in the primacy of the male over the female, the classical missionary representation incubing its dream in a succubae partner. In the timeless play of Lilā, positions are constantly devising new spatial floors. In the ritual ecstatic transitional unity, thoughts and emotions are at rest, while bodies and souls, senses and feelings, the I and the other are combusting sprit and matter engaged in a blissful dance. In the orgasmic euphoria spacetime is abolished, consciousness dynamically rests on the saddle point of the last human equation, rhythmically bending at both sides, digging its individual and collective becoming into the tangible reality. The orgasmic experience is necessarily bound to time, a permanent orgasm is yes conceivable but yet unpractical in ordinary human affairs, and for many a good reason… while, in transitional times, a permanent state of crises is normative instead.

Indeed, the mesoteric dimension allowing the energetic flow between polarities seems to be the most advanced state of descriptive consciousness known at this very moment in time, giving rise, meta-physically and noetically speaking, to the language of the two realms. As long as the conscious attention focuses upon just one of the lands, only that specific landscape can be enjoyed. But as soon as, with a conscious act, we set ourselves in the middle position with all centres aligned in combine on their axis, a state at times called receiving, or active contemplation takes place, and the dance emerges. It could shape up as a very codified ritual; or be apparently encoded and devoid of any construct to an external eye; or inform any whatsoever seemingly ordinary act. As a ritual sequence, it can then be replicated in praying and normative postures, shamanic rituals, or highly elaborated fertility or transition rites through which access higher states of consciousness, as among indigenous people, initiated groups and the like; if encoded, it bears the envisioned form of sheer reality, or cleansing healing techniques; if informed in ordinary acts, it fuels them with a subtle radiating energy rebounding in the surroundings but leaving no karmic debris. In any instance, it singles out the dualistic perception of both states, of the I and the Other. The act of reaching out of consciousness (kūn), its ontological need to be manifested, is a legacy of the initial surfacing of the individual consciousness in historical times, when a sign, and systems of signs, were received and devised to disseminate its content.

Recaptured our libido in disguise, let’s move on to the next historical confine of the I. This limit is a construct engendered by the asynchrony working of the thinking mind, the feelings and the sex centres, unable to perform life as a trio in their useless attempt to capture the Self. The Self and the I are of very different substance and nature – at times recognizable as energy, at times as a waving quantum pattern. The former is the spark; the latter is the spark’s identity assumed on the historical plane, by definition its chronological rendering in history. The binary modality of the thinking mind to perceive reality in complementary terms is the sole means to make sense of a seemingly incoherent whole unfitted to be grasped in its entirety by a twofold device. In reality, reality is better perceived when the three centres are aligned on the axis mundi uniting, in a bi-dimensional representation, above and below. Humankind as a whole is moving to a collective state of consciousness driven by its collective intelligence. The agent is accomplishing the action, performing on the stage of the world on the name and behalf of the community, receiving intelligence from the bottom of the pyramid that, once elaborated, is offered back to society in a coherent and effective manner in view of its best utilization for the common good. This ongoing double energetic flow between the base and the top, and vice versa, and their converging at halfway, expressed in terms of middle outcome of a bottom up-top down encounter, is graphically represented as the central meeting point of an ascending and a descending triangles, joining in their middle to eventually give rise to the Seal of Solomon – Solomon the Wise, who, for love of impartiality took Sheba on a glass floor. This is the accepted position of leaders, those whom in secular times should serve the community and lead us into individual growth, social justice, economic development while protecting humankind rights and the environment for a global sustainable historical future; those whom from the heights of their isolation make believe to posses the broadest sight on human affairs because of their temporarily privileged condition at the top, and whom are instead the predatory herds of a rotting corrupted system.

A certain amount of hermeneutic skill is definitely needed to follow the thread and don’t get lost in the selva oscura of the existence, in the dark night of the soul in its self-transmuting attempt to decipher life in the sparkling third eye relentlessly gazing (theorein) the same old landscape. These are operative annotations that I don’t know if I will ever have enough time and patience to reorder in a more traditionally acceptable format. Kaos and Cronos are embroidering their historical narration into the mantel of māyā, allowing only their own projections on the osmotic membrane between the two worlds to be perceived as a mantra uttered by Ein Sophi, by Sophia bint Nūr in its mundane manifestation, to then engender human language. Here the signs, the ciphers, the letters, the alphabet, the narration and the discourse are at once creating multiple layers of meanings, a sort of crypto narrative leaping out from the literal, to the analogical, symbolical, meta-symbolical and hiero-historical meta-language. As on the development path we can learn from what seems to be a mistakes, or when a deviation from a pre-established path supplies new insights, so none should ascribe these seemingly negative turns to the dark side of the Moon – Lilith is not here, she just left the vision to turn into a black Madonna, the chthonic powerful feminine energy, abreast of the I in the dreamers’ cave. This is her time to wake up, to get out of her fissure and start co-creating a novel layer of a perceivable reality in which consciousness is King & Queen at once. Certainly post-gender studies are a promising new discipline, a new field of investigation while transiting to an androgyny stance. It is not a matter of loosing the gender identity, rather to letting surfacing the other polarity. The Feminine is much needed in leading human affairs. The mesoteric dimension with its unipolar and univocal expression is gender-neutral, is the verbal third person pronoun, the it that is neither me nor you, nor she or he but, unbiased to all effects as an identifiable entity of a further degree of differentiation, it surges, rises, surfaces and emerges to the self-awareness of being, in her exquisite feminine capacity to accept, retain and beget the vision. The gap between idea and act is what makes history; hiero-history is bestowed when idea and act are strolling alongside on the path, united, no vikarma is generated by their partnership, idea-act are coeval, are one, while the action is inscribing them both in history. The historical plane within the time construct is one of the possible tier of the manifestation, Reality is shaping itself up at once in Haven and Earth, even though there is neither haven nor earth but just truth comprising them both.

Conscious change is not a matter of days, or of weeks, and not even of years, conscious change is a life-long joint venture pursuit within one own self. At dawn, when the soul (jiva) self-contracts at its minimum liquid boundary, dew appears nourishing the tin air with its fragrance, ready to sacrifice itself to the Sun (sacer facere). As Shams appears, dew disappears: individuality is offered to collectivity in a sacrificial act, retaining the individual awareness in the collective consciousness by transmuting its own identity into the new state, no much room is here left to the I, but the filling void of creation. The endless alternating between the two realities makes it hard to keep the helm fast. Riding the tiger on a razor blade while stirring the dinner soup is still fun, enjoyable at times, as riding the chariot pulled by horses yoked to an improbable end.

You took me by surprise not showing up at our date, unexpected I may say, for last night we spent hours courting instead of sleeping tout court. Yes, I would have loved exploring your depth, but it seems that there are other priorities at the moment. Never mind, if one day you would like sharing thoughts, feelings and all the rest in a much brighter encounter, please let me know; or, if you ever happen to land in this windy corner, just let me know as well: your cup of tea will always be here, in my company of course 😉 Take good care fast mobile fox, and be aware of the wolf, you never know…

So said Zarathustra slipping out of his daydream of a cosmic duality embedded in wherever slant of the creation, of context and scale, epitomised in the human attempt to perceive beyond the veil the reality embodied and declined over millennia in ten thousand languages with different names, God, Javeh, Allah, the Comics principle, the Absolute, the Tao, Brahman, Atman, the Creator, the Ultimate Artist or whatever other principle supposed at the beginning of the manifestation, the original mould where, so to say, spirit and matter are yet undifferentiated, constantly getting acquainted in potentia, pooling and sharing knowledge beyond the proprietary rights of who, by definition, cannot belong to any but to the whole.

Chance is the name we give to our incapacity to perceive the subtle threads liaising entities and events past the illusory door. We are not here by chance, we are not writing and reading this lines by mere coincidence, chance does not exists, is a mental construct, as time. We are here because our deepest self is attuning with dharma, unaware of its feat for the blaring turmoil darning the shroud for a personalized experience of life. Chance is that all this might even make sense. Whatever that means and whatever it takes.

References

* This text does not follow the rigid schemata of plot and discursive concatenation of a usual narration, imposing its hierarchical sequence over the textual structure, rather it pursues the internal requirements of the material utilized. It is an account articulated by its own rhythm, challenging its development in each and every phase, led by the meaning and sound of he words framed by their emergence in the complex and restless scriptural wave of the authorial I questioning its own hermeneutical key.

[1] By mesoteric dimension I mean the existential osmotic dimension right in between the esoteric and the essoteric realities, relating the so called inner and the outer realms and allowing the flow of energy from and at both ends – represented in writing with the dash sign (-) in the spiritual-material locution – epitomising the emerging of the mesoteric world at collective consciousness. See, S. Momo, “The Mesoteric Leap”, in Consciousness and Development 2.0, Spanda Journal, 3(1): V-XII. A dimension similar to Corbin mundus imaginalis, (Cf. [H. Corbin], S.Y. Sohravardi, L’archange Empourpré, Paris: Fayard, 1976; and H. Corbin, L’Homme at son Ange, Paris: Fayard, 1983 – [Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1970]) in its mediatory function as receptor of the metaphysical impressions, but differing from it in that it further embodies them into empirical experience. See also the concept parāpara in the Trika school (Vijñānabhairava, tr. R. Gnoli, Milan: Adelphi, 1989).

[2] The term sacred draws here on the accepted dichotomy paralleling sacred and profane coexisting on two different planes but ex-communicating and unrelated to each other, homologous to the I and the Other firmly grounded in their divided stance. Cf. G. Dumézil, Flamen-Brahman, Paris: Geuthner, Annales du Musée Guimet, 1935; M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, San Diego: Harcourt, 1987; and R.D. Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois, 2006.

[3] Cf. the concept of tikkum olam (עולם תיקון) in Jewish speculative eschatology, G. Scholem, On the mystical shape of the Godhead, New York: Schoeken, 1991.

[4] Neither Saussure nor Barthes will flatly abide to this statement, nevertheless it makes good sense.

[5] The saddle point is both the maximum reachable by a mathematical function, and the highest point of equilibrium between the two realities, constantly keeping its balanced instability by paradoxically (para, beyond, distinct from; doxa, opinion < dokein, to think) flip-flopping between the two states of being. It is indeed this very flip-flopping condition to give rise to the entelechy, the élan, or the intentionality (Heraclitus, Bergson, Brentano) here assimilated to spanda, the initial movement of consciousness of the Kashmir Shivaite Tantric tradition (Cf. Abihinavagupta, Parātrīśikā-Vivaraṇa, (trans. J. Singh), Dehli: Motilal Barasidass, 1988; M.S.G. Dyczkowsky, The Doctrine of Vibration, Dehli: Motilal Barasidass, 1989; [ed. and trans. J. Singh] Spanda-Kārikās, Dehli: Motilal Barasidass, 1991). Spanda is the subtle vibration springing forth from the coming together of the two polarities – shiva shakti, yin yang, male female, high low, past future, horizontal vertical, end so forth – and giving rise to the whole manifestation, to all what is perceivable with ordinary and non ordinary eyes, to the visible and the invisible, to the inner and outer, lahir and batin.

[6] Cf. E. Lazlo, Science and the Akashic Field, Rochester, VT, Inner Traditions, 2004.

[7] The analogy with the binocular vision is clear: to perceive the reality with one eye only – from and through one dimension only, being it the spiritual or the material – consents the reading of a flat, bi-dimensional reality only, without depth. To acquire the third dimensional prospective, the capacity to perceive spatial, mental, historical and spiritual depth, to single out the meaningful traces of reality in its becoming, to perceive the realty as a system of signs, therefore the whole range of reality, or the spiritual-material visions, a binocular sight is forcibly needed. The emergence of the Western iconographic perspective in the Renaissance (Cf. A. Paronchi, Studi sulla dolce prospettiva, Milan: Martello, 1964) parallels, in my understanding, the collective take of awareness that, at that time, reality could not only be perceived and represented on the plane in a bi-dimensional rendering, but that also the notion of time, as a historical perspective, could be added to the visual representation. In many as diverse classical iconographies, as the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Persian, to name a few, or in the West until the Middle Age, all representations are flat, bi-dimensional, for they portray the metaphysical mental space of the image, their imago celeste, not the physical one. Of necessity, these images are devoid of the tri-dimensional prospective representation and, moreover, in the absence of the a physical light, are unable to throw any shade on the representational plane, being the shade the outcome of the interposition of a physical body between the source of light and the receiving dense matter. Thus, Paolo’s dolce prospettiva, is a conscious metaphysical sign emerging form the plane of the present, and not just considering its past. At this stage the Word takes on the capital letter to diversify from the secular word: sacred languages bear witness and hold strength even in their minimal representational signs – as in the Arabic script the letter alif [ ا ] representing the axis mundi uniting Heaven to Earth, the  nuqta under the letter ba [ ب ] signifying the beginning of creation, etc. (Cf. K. Krtichlow, Islamic Patterns. An Analytical and Cosmological Approach, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976).

[8] An passant, under this light, the Biblical 12 tribes could be seen here as a cumulative symbolic number, a fundamental concept in language. The number 12, read either in a sequence, as in 1 [unity] and 2 [duality], or with its terms in a different position, as in 3 (1 + 2); or as 6+6, or as 4×3, always refers to a cosmogonic paradigmatic unit embodied in concepts such as the twelve months of the year, the twelve apostles, the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve imam, a dodecahedron, and so forth. Metaphor and metonymy are strolling alongside the tide of life. Under its symbolical umbilical (ὀμφαλός) numerical value, Twelve is a power number, at once a figure of speech and a figure of thought.

[9] Krtichlow, Op.Cit.

[10] This is the hermetic, mercurial function of all liminal deities, e.i., Hermes in Greek mythology, the Roman Mercurius, the Javanese Semar, the Hindu Pushan, the Korean Munshin, or the Candomblé Ellegua, often also charged with a psychopomp and or a shamanic task. Specifically on the jester and trickster function, see C.G. Jung, the § “Trickster” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9 part 1 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, (Princeton and London: Routledge, 2nd edn., 1970).

[11] With mesotype I mean a minimal noetic unit, a quantum entanglement on a saddle point convening its image on the mesoteric osmotic dimension (supra 1n).

[12] Deities, devi, devta, amesha spentas, malāʾikah, etc. all entities made of subtle qualitative energetic patterns.

[13] Cf. H-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York: Crossroads, 2004.

[14] With Now, I mean the awareness of being in time, punctual, accomplishing both mission and goal, with gnōthi seauton inscribed on the pronaos of the soul.

[15] A classification drawn upon Sufi sources (Cf. [A. Bausani] Ikwan as-safa’, L’Enciclopedia dei Fratelli della Purità, Naples: IUO, 1978; A. Schimmel, Deciphering the signs of God, Albany: SUNY, 1994; and the related material assimilated by G. I. Gurdjeff who allocates the sex centre as a sub set of the moving centre, comprising the three distinct functions of sex, instinctive, and motor. See P.D. Ouspensky, The Fourth Way, New York: Knopf, 1957.

[16] See Vijñānabhairava, Op. Cit.

[17] Kṛṣṇa & the gopis are a of this shining meta-iconographic symbolical example.

[18] In its basic conception, the collective consciousness reminds the Jungian findings on the collective unconscious, but differs from it both in that its spatial bi-dimensional representation rests above the plane of consciousness while the collective unconsciousness is beneath it, and because the former does not bear archetypes, but mesotypes instead.

About the Author

Sahlan Momo is an Italian artist, a publisher and a philanthropist. He has been university professor of History of Art, and is founder and CEO of Semar Publishers, founder and Chair of Spanda Foundation, and Editor-in-Chief of Musiké. Int.l Journal of Ethnomusicological Studies and of Spanda Journal. Mr Momo has served as Chair and Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research and scientific institutions, has authored radio broadcastings, books and papers on art theory, spirituality, consciousness, development, and has been the recipient of several national and international awards and honours. Email: sahlan@spanda.org.