And it was one of those 'Aha!' moments...one where I find a link that connects so many cornerstone images I’ve been working with, such as the Dot- the concentrated still point of possibility & potential, the Sphere- the whole and complete in absolute form, and the Circle- a line that ventures out and comes back upon itself.
It also speaks to me on a personal level of aging and time. Both of which are staring me down these days... 'Time is a slippery fish' (Robert Frank)
Below are some notes from the book- 'in a nutshell' so to speak. But please, if this interests you, I highly encourage you to purchase the book in its entirety which full of amazing images.
I'm wishing everyone a Bon Voyage as we head into a new year. We have a lot of work to do.
And in honor of Ram Dass 'You can do it like it's a great weight on you or you can do it like it's part of the dance.'
In gratitude and with many blessings your way,
Michele
The Mystic Spiral- Journey of the Soul’ by Jill Purce:
The two dimensional spiral is one of the most ancient symbols for eternity since it may go on forever. It does not ever need to be seen as a symbol for the absolute because by it’s very nature it is never complete.
We begin a point. A tiny fertilized egg. The point has a location but no dimension. It is total possibility.
All manifestations are contained within and extend from the point, to which it also returns. It starts in infinity & ends in infinity- through coils of manifestation in time and the relative world.
Expand the point, it becomes a sphere, a sphere of wholeness.
Life is a path ‘through’ time, a continuum. Only if it were possible to come back to the same point would it be a circle. The path of life is the time between the point of total possibility/potential and our physical death- the return to a rounded conscious entity.
In TIME, these cycles are spirals. Even the earths orbit around the sun is a spiral in time, each year different that the last.
But the right way back to the beginning is by going on.
To actually go back would be to go against the order of things, to get sucked into the downward vortex. There can be a return to the center only if there was first a departure from it, just as there can be no contraction without expansion.
The spherical vortex issues from the point and contains it. It returns to itself, while still being nothing other than itself, which is yet All.
The Labyrinth is also a spiral and one that returns. It is a representation of the cosmos and all the cosmos, the world, the individual life, the temple, the town, man, the womb- or intestines- of the mother (earth), the convolutions of the brain, the consciousness, the heart, the pilgrimage, the journey and the way.
The expanding spiral that creates and protects the center, and the contracting spiral which dissolves it, are both concepts implicit in the labyrinth.’
It is cosmos to those who know the way, and chaos to those who lose it.
There is a fundamental principle of rotation of the physical universe. The embryo grows from the navel in a spiral. And the absolute- ‘Navel of the earth’ takes its symbolic form in pillars, poles, mountains, temples, spires or ladders.
The serpent or dragon that coils around the world tree or mountain- the central axis, the Axis Mundi is the world of illusion, the coils of manifestation.
Thus, there are two approaches to the Divine, both spiral. One is an inward process of regeneration and integration, a concentration into and through the center; the other is the outward pilgrimage.
Every cause is the effect of it’s own effect.
We conceive infinity in our own finite terms.
