I am not very fond of theories, although there are some very nice ones, and for many people they mean a lot, or almost everything.
In any case, I prefer to listen to the law after experiencing it; then I know that it is a real law. The opposite is also correct: one relies on a road map that can show us or guide us on the steps to take, more or less. I explain: the map always happens on the mental level and the mind tends to create its images and thoughts and can stay focalized on it.
When I go to a museum and I am offered an audio tour, I never take it: I want to face the phenomenon with all my soul, and for that I don’t need a guide, only my sensibility, my heart. What’s more, if I like the exhibition, I leave feeling euphoric: something or everything has touched my soul, my soul has been nourished by that powerful vibration.
This is why art in general is so evocative and can help us in such a profound way to understand things.
An example: the night skies of Van Gogh, the great Dutch artist, the suffering man with his ear cut off. It could look like the drawing of a child; it is like the drawing of a child, painted with that consciousness, only in this case it is an adult who is having a hard time, because he himself does not understand the magnitude of what he perceives. And, above all, because he has lost his self-control.
So, are those huge scrolls full of stars a symbol, a metaphor for something else, an inner state? I think that the starry sky that Vincent paints is the sky that he is seeing, with all its movements and vibrations, on a higher level of perception: it is the reality that he is witnessing directly, without intermediaries, like the drawings of a child.
I mean by all this that consciousness is before the act and the act and perception are but its reflections.
The adventure of the change of consciousness, of its development, is that it has an immediate consequence on the life you live and its perceptions.
The French poet Baudelaire speaks in his poem “Correspondances” of the attunement of consciousness with the whole universe; obviously, with the universe with which our particular consciousness, or that of the moment, connects. Then, things are symbols and smile at us with complicit, familiar glances.
The gods were really in the Greek temples. That’s why they were sacred places and people went to talk to them, to ask them for things, to practice rituals, to do everything that one goes to a temple for. The gods had already inspired the architect with the golden ratio they wanted for their house. The stones of the Parthenon were already long before in the mind of the goddess.
Nature. One can see it as landscape, one can describe it as a biologist, or one can immerse oneself in it, being nature itself. Or all at once.
To lose oneself is to find oneself. To surrender is to fully recover.
We advance in a spiral and languages change as the eye becomes limpid: it is then a faithful mirror of things.
And what is this about knots? We could define the knots as the vibrations of the universe that we receive and emit, like parabolic antennas, and which make up our most evident reality, all our actions. It has always been said that the best way to be a saint is to be next to a saint. It does not have to be a physical saint; it is above all a magnetic one.
Sufis know a lot about these kinds of connections. The “magic circle” was the secret society in which everyone was connected: the butcher, the spice seller, the errand boy… Normally no one realized what they were up to, not even sometimes the relatives with whom they lived. That’s why sometimes they were surprised to see at the burial of their relative the top of the city’s spirituality. They didn’t know that their closest self was an initiate.