This embroidered carpet rethinks a well-known yantra, the STAR OF DAVID. The upward-pointing, (now invisible) rising triangle can be thought of as the "formless" principle of spirit, or consciousness. The downward-pointing triangle is the realm of form, or materiality. Joined, they symbolize the mystical marriage of heaven and earth, the state of peace, of self awareness, of
NONDUALITY.
They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Soloman and all his wives.
In the body of the world, they say, there is a
soul
and You are that.
but we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone..
-Rumi
Whose idea was this,
tohave the lover visible
and the Beloved invisible?
--Rumi
Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
-Rumi
As archtypes yantras are not so much created as discovered. When images captured by science penetrate deep into popular consciousness, we may suspect that they are in truth yantras. The famous Edgerton Splash is just such an image. Yantras work on an intuitive pre-verbal level, but if one were to try and define the import of the Splash, it seems to have something to do with the mystery of time. Both sub-atomic physics and Buddhist metaphysics agree that time is not a unbroken flow, but rather a series of discrete and irreducible moments, not unlike a movie film. This is apparently perceivable in deep states of meditation when consciousness is freed from an attachment to the idea of time itself. It may be that this Splash image offers us a fleeting glimpse of a deep and perceptive state of being.
Another scientific archtype which has captured our imaginations is the Black Hole of astrophysics.
The Black Hole has truly entered into popular mythology as a combination cosmic vacuum cleaner and ultimate mystery vortex. We get our first clue from astrology as to its possible relationship to consciousness. Black holes are some of the most distant phenomena in the universe, and in astrology, the further out an object is in the heavens, the further in it is in the psyche. So the Black hole would be a analogue for something right at the threshold of the Great Mystery Itself.
This works rather perfectly. Gnosis, the direct experience of divinity / Ground of Being is universally describe as indiscribable. Indescribable because it is a state of perfect unity beyond subject, object, or the dynamics of words. An early Christian manual on meditation calls the approach to Gnosis "entering the Cloud of Unknowing," where everything the votiary has brought to the experience must be released, even Jesus, even the experience of a personal self. There is no way for the searcher to know what comes next, or do anything to reach it--only surrender. Zen parables are fond of monks clinging to roots hanging off the edge of unlit abysses.
In all, the parallel here to Black Hole dynamics is uncanny. Its great vortex draws all things toward an "event horizon " out of which comes no information, and beyond which there is no return, only an end beyond even material existance. Attraction and annihilation are familiar themes among mystics. Rumi says, "I am iron / resisting the most powerful magnet there is," while annihilation, in the lauguage of Sufism, is called "fana." Elegantly, the fana unity-state at the unknowable core of the Black Hole is called a "naked singularity" by astrophysicists.
And even more elegant is the proposition that anything-anyone that completes
passage through the Black Hole nothingness will emerge whoosh out a corresponding
White Hole. At the end of the dark night of the soul, Grace. Utter surrender,
then enlightenment. Rarely do science, spirit and art.work so seamlessly
to create a new mythology of truth. One can easily image the Black hole
figuring prominently
in a some future "theology."