The Still Point

 

Very interesting illuminations burst across from the fusion coming out of initial readings in two texts. Titus Burckhardt, in Sacred Art in East and West, details how the essential form of a holy structure composes the symbolic themes connected with line, square, circle, and center point. Each of us in our daily work and play, especially in our craft and art, engage with and are mediated by these inevitable structures.

        Burckhardt explains how these elements lead to two- and three-dimensional crosses, mandalas, icons, and on into altars, temples, and other spaces that support contemplation of the divine. Themes include the centrality of sacrifice, transformation, even the containment and resolution of “all cosmic antinomies” (p. 25). Temples extend from altars, the significance evident in this footnote 

“Union with the Divine Essence always comprises, as phases or aspects of a single spiritual act, the reintegration of all the positive aspects of the world—or of their interior equivalents—in a symbolized ‘hearth,’ the sacrifice of the soul in its limited aspect and its transformation by the fire of the Spirit.” (p. 28)

   The physical structures express the fully human along with the cosmos: 

“the temple has a spirit, a soul and a body, like the man and like the universe…the architect of the temple identifies himself with the building and with that which it represents; thus each phase of the architectural task is equally a phase of spiritual realization. The artist confers upon his work something of his own vital force; in exchange he participates in the transformation which that force undergoes by virtue of the sacramental and implicitly universal nature of the work” (p. 47).

   Huston Smith in Forgotten Truth elaborates the multiple dimensions of the cross, including: “a horizontal cross is a mandala, a sacred enclosure, round or square, with typically four approaches to a ‘hidden treasure’ that lies at its center” (p. 23)

“For the point at the center of the three-dimensional cross that gives rise to the order of nature concomitantly creates the souls that inhabit that order, not just in the moment of their conception but continuously, instant by instant as they pursue their trajectories. . . If it strikes the reader as presumptuous to equate his personal center with the center of the cosmos, he must be reminded that physics requires him to do just that because space is relative and curved, the center of the physical universe is for each observer the point from which his observations proceed…The Hermetic formulation is exact: ‘God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.’” (pp. 29-30)

   Smith elaborates in a footnote at the bottom of the page with a quotation from Meister Eckhart:

 “‘The soul that enters into God owns neither time nor space…But it stands to reason, if you consider it, that the space occupied by any soul that enters is vastly greater than heaven and earth and God’s entire creation. I say more: God might make heavens and earths galore yet these…would be of less extent than a single needle-tip compared with the standpoint of a soul atoned in God’” (p. 30).

   Reflections on these texts along with “meditation of everyday life” (referenced on p. 31 by Smith) lead to a sense of being directed to release all reactions, such as those spinning off the political miasma that tumults about us, to let these go into the "black hole.” 

“Passage through the ‘gateless gate’ (Mu Mon Kan) that guards the holy center can be disorienting. If it takes the form of a powerful satori it can feel as if one has been sucked into a ‘black hole’ where physical laws are destroyed. When eyes have accustomed themselves to the new, ethereal light, however, one sees that no movement has occurred. Length and breadth had already withdrawn into the cross’s horizontal center; now the vertical axis too collapses. Renouncing the space it had embodied to make an important but provisional point, that axis now withdraws the ontic, value distinctions that once it metered. . . Superfluous and ego-aggrandizing activity must be stilled, but the stilling of such activity clears the way for pure effectiveness—action that is powered by force that is concentrated and energy assembled” (p. 31; Smith follows with quotations from the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu, Pascal, and Eliot’s “still point” “where there is only the dance”).

        Let’s release all the worries for dear ones, let every trouble of the world be taken into this still point. This the only way to love. The way to the Only Love.