Exterior Spaces, Interior Spaces and Sonic Cartographies
One of the most enthralling passages I have ever encountered comes from the “Katha Upanishad”, a section of the Upanishads, one of the most ancient and seminal texts in the history of Indian thought. This work is forever entwined for me with memories of the National Library at Iyaro, in Benin-City, Nigeria, where I first read it, and with the images and emotions I associate with the location of the library close to the Iyaro Motor Park where vehicles took passengers to and from destinations all over Nigeria. The frenetic activity of the park, alive with human and vehicular motion, and the stillness of the library one had to pass through the motor park to reach, remain for me intimately interrelated, evocative of different but complementary forms of life in terms of relationships between gestation and silence and the arising of action and sound from the silence of incubation. The raison’detre of the inter-city terminus as a location from where vehicles could take one to faraway places in different parts of Nigeria became suggestive, for me, of unexperienced possibilities of being tantalisingly close by.
The motor park was a universe of its own, with a distinctive social structure related to the functions performed by different groups of people at the park. It was also recognisable by a characteristic sonic cartography, a sonic cartography being a map of patterns of sound shaped by the distinguishing acoustic forms associated with a geographical location. The activity within every setting creates a recurrent auditory configuration emerging from the repetition and distribution of particular sounds within that physical space. The sounds that defined the motor park were the shouts from the agberos, who solicited for customers for the vehicles, the calls of hawkers, the noises of cars and buses arriving and leaving. This universe of sonic activity was the expression of the dynamic space that was the motor park, the zone one had to pass through to get to the scholarly silence of the library.
The Katha Upanishad on the Transformative Fire
In that silence, inside another most memorable text, The Common Experience by Chohen and Phipps, I read a passage that has become central to my inner landscape, along with other entrancing lines from the Upanishads. My literal understanding of the passage is fundamental to my perception of the meaning of my life, that conception being a self instituted construct emerging from an interpretation of the influences creating my exposure to the possibilities of existence. That literal explanation of the Upanishadic passage, however, even though it remains inspirational, is beginning to mature into collaboration with another, figurative interpretation.
This latter perspective enables an appreciation of a broader range of hermeneutic possibilities in the lines from the Upanishads , expanding my understanding of those lines even though the cognitive goals they promise have not been fully realised by me after decades of some degree of consistency in their pursuit. This more pragmatic orientation also facilitates the application of the synergistic possibilities suggested by those lines to more immediately accessible goals directed at achieving the cohesion between mind and cosmos, the pursuit of the broadest possibility of knowledge of self and the world, which the lines urge as an ultimate goal. My broadened understanding also sensitises me to the contradictions involved in such a quest and the challenges demonstrated by different efforts in different cultures across time to achieve such a goal.
In the passage from the Upanishads, a sage expounds on ultimate human possibility:
Count the links of the chain : worship the triple Fire : knowledge, meditation, practice; the triple process : evidence, inference, experience; the triple duty : study, concentration, renunciation; understand that everything comes from Spirit, that Spirit alone is sought and found; attain everlasting peace ; mount beyond birth and death.
When man understands himself, understands universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire, offers the sacrifice; then shall he, though still on earth, break the bonds of death, beyond sorrow, mount into heaven.
Stylistic Analysis of the Lines from the Katha Upanishad on the Transformative Fire
What continues to enchant me in the years after my first encounter with these lines, leading me to read them repeatedly over the years, consists of the musical relationship between the lines, the diction through which the ideas are expressed and the total conception of cognitive possibility the lines generate. Perpetually resonant are the themes the paragraphs develop and the methods through which they achieve this: the imagery of fire as metaphorical for committed, consistent, cognitive and devotional activity and the cognitive transmutation of self achieved through that activity; the semantic parallelism between the actions described and the use of stylistic parallelism in depicting these actions; the conception of a unified aspect of being running though all cognitive activity and realisation, culminating in knowledge of that which is most intimate to the human being, the individual self, and that within which the self exists, the world.
The distinctive stylistic form of this translation is due to the collaboration between the linguistic and ideational sensitivity of the Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats, for whose work Asian and Western esoteric thought is central, and the more specialised knowledge of Purohit Swami on Indian philosophy. The passage is a wedding of words and ideas in terms of a rhythmic structure that dramatises the cognitive progression the passage so tantalisingly evokes. It encapsulates and reveals a quintessence of Upanishadic philosophy and much of global mystical thought and practice in a few lines.
The unique beauty of the Yeats-Swami translation is demonstrated in its foregrounding of musical cadences in the rhythmic form through which ideas are introduced, developed and repeated, opening up into new windows into the fundamental idea, the entire expression linked through artful use of punctuation, evocative of the sense of continual opening into new possibilities made possible by the image of the triple fire; the fire understood both as epistemic technique and as ontological possibility expressed in the conscious unity of self and cosmos. The two stanzas that make up the passage are unified through a rhetorical scheme consisting of opening-introduction, partial closure, further enumeration, opening, further disclosure, full opening and completion, unified by the image of the triple fire, culminating in a climax both musical and ideational.
Regardless of the stylistic individuality of this particular translation, however, the central ideas and their organisation recur in all the translations I have read of the text.
The Symbolism of Fire in Classical Indian Thought
It was only after buying a copy of the Upanishads through the impersonal, anonymous efficiency of the virtual information and economic marketplace that is Amazon while studying in England years later, did I learn that the sage speaking is Yama, Death, addressing Nachiketas, a boy who finds himself in the home of Death. As compensation for the inadequate hospitality demonstrated by Nachiketas not meeting him at home, Death offers the boy three gifts of the boy's own choice. Inflamed by desire for knowledge of ultimate realties, the boy asks for gifts of knowledge, even though Death tries to divert him to asking for materially derived satisfactions. The passage quoted above is Death’s answer to Nachiketas’ question about the fire that leads to heaven, where there is neither death, age, hunger nor sorrow.
I was later to learn, through my encounter with Surendranath Dasgupta’s inspiring work on the history of Indian philosophy and with the Mahabharata, the fictional epic that is central to the development of Indian philosophy and Hinduism, that the imagery of fire plays a multifaceted role in Indian thought. The development of this imagery demonstrates a fascination that extends from the sacrificial fires of the earliest Vedic rituals to the metaphorical conceptions of flame expressed in Death’s lines to Nachiketas.
The entire section of the Upanishadic discourse actually encapsulates various aspects of the symbolism of fire, from fire as central to the creation of the universe, to ritual involving fire and the metaphorical conception of fire in relation to the more abstract activities of religious effort, from study to alms giving.
The reference to a fire that leads to heaven suggests the link between fire as a physical component of sacrificial rituals, where flame burns in honour of the divine or is used in consuming something sacrificed to a spiritual entity, and fire as a metaphoric expression of a transformative process in which the self is transformed by the reconfigurative capacities of knowledge. Within this metaphoric conception the intensity created by committed action leads to a remaking of the self in terms of a form of being that suggests the intensity and dynamism of flame. The process culminates in the transcendence of the mundane through the burning away of the limitations of the self , breaking “the bonds of death” and mounting “into heaven”.
Heaven is not understood as a location but in terms of a state of consciousness, an awareness emerging from the unity of self and cosmos: “When man understands himself, understands universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire” leading to the insight that “everything comes from Spirit...Spirit alone is sought and found”.
What more comprehensive scope of meaning can be suggested as a goal of human aspiration? All disciplines, all sciences and arts and their goals as described in all human cultures are represented by this conception of the possibility of grasping an ultimate conjunction between the self and the essence of existence.
Those lines can be understood as encapsulating the world's efforts to make meaning of being. They can be perceived as integrating all possibilities of knowledge. They are a vantage point which facilitate an appreciation of the dialectical goals which can be seen as the summation of human understanding: to understand oneself and to understand phenomena in relation to oneself. This summation of cognitive possibility is an adaptation of what the English thinker Bertrand Russell describes as the two main goals of knowledge: to understand phenomena in themselves and to understand them in relation to each other. This adaptation of Russell’s summation of human cognitive goals is a conception related to Augustine of Hippo’s juxtaposition of attitudes towards knowledge of self and the world in his observation that people go to look at mountains and leave themselves behind, leading the North African to make the study of his own self and his mental operations central to his exploration of meaning, an epistemic and metaphysical orientation that might have later influenced the French scholar Rene Descartes’ influential deployment of self analysis as a starting point in his philosophical explorations.
Upanishadic Epistemology and Metaphysics in the Development of a Conception of Ultimate Knowledge
What exactly does the author of the Upanishadic lines mean by “... understand that everything comes from Spirit, that Spirit alone is sought and found” and “When a man understands himself, understand universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire”?
These lines suggest an identity of being between all aspects of existence that constitutes all these otherwise separate forms into aspects of an ordered scheme, a cosmos. This universal identity is what the passage refers to as Spirit. The lines also indicate that a knowledge of this identity as it is expressed in oneself enables an appreciation of that identity as manifest in the universe as a whole.
This appreciation is not described as something purely ratiocinative but in terms of “union”, a conjoining of being between one phenomenon and another.
This interpretation is reinforced by other lines from the Upanishads. The central vision of the Upanishads is the unity of being, often expressed in terms of the convergence of this unity in the human self. The conception of the human being as cosmic axis is depicted in a variety of ways, developing a dialectical relationship between the vast and the small, a relationship between the constitution of the human being in terms of the structures of body and mind and the spirit that underlies the cosmos. The “Brihadāranyaka Upanishad”, another luminous text I first encountered in the same book in the Iyaro library, invokes the various constituents of the human person, from breath to mind, and correlates each of these with a particular natural form in terms of an underlying metaphysical principle: “The bright eternal Self that is in wind, the bright eternal Self that lives in breath, are one and the same...The bright eternal Self that is in the moon, the bright eternal Self that lives in the mind, are one and the same...”
The Correlation of Self Knowledge and Understanding of the Cosmos in the Symbolism of Sri Yantra
The Geometric Symbolism of the Yantra
The ideal of knowledge of self and knowledge of the world indicated by the lines from the Upanishads are summed up for me in terms of another discursive space, again from the philosophical and religious genius of India. This discursive form is the yantra, a geometric depiction of cosmic forces and cosmic form, used, among other goals, as a means of reflection upon the relationship between the metaphysical structure and development of the cosmos and the human being.
The structure of the yantra is composed of a balance between invariable and variable elements. The actualisation of the relationship between these twin possibilities in particular examples defines the specific forms and the associated symbolism of the variety of yantras. A yantra is invariably composed of relationships between geometric forms. These forms are the central dot or bindu, concentric circles, triangles and squares. All the geometric forms are arranged in a concentric formation around the bindu, which is at the centre.
Sri Yantra
The particular yantra that most compellingly sums up for me the ideal of an integration of knowledge in terms of a correlative understanding of the self and the cosmos as depicted by the Upanishads is known as the Sri Yantra. Like all yantras, it is evocative of movement from the self to the cosmos and from the cosmos to the self, distinctive and correlative movements also depicted by the lines from the Upanishads. This centripetal and centrifugal motion is evoked by the relationship between centre and circumference that are a central feature of the yantra. The centre of the structure symbolises the primary point of manifestation of the cosmos, symbolised by the bindu, while the circumference evokes the range of manifestations emerging from the primal centre. The progression of this process of manifestation is visualised through a succession of petals and circles arranged around the central point and the enclosure of the entire ensemble within a rectangle of four extrusions or “gates”. A powerfully realised aesthetic form is created which generates a compelling visual appeal independent of any knowledge of its symbolism, an appeal that facilitates an appreciation of its concision and scope as a symbolic form.
Adapting the basic idea from the classical sources, the centre could also suggest the self while the circumference could depict the manifestations of the self from that centre. In using the yantra as an aid to reflection on the cosmos and the self and the relationships between them, one could adapt one’s contemplation to this symbolic visual progression, moving from the centre to the circumference and from the circumference to the centre. One could also conjoin the conception of the yantra as symbolic of the cosmos and the yantra as symbolic of the self through reflection on the understanding of the self as part of the cosmos, and of the cosmos as realised through the self.
Sri Yantra
The motor park was a universe of its own, with a distinctive social structure related to the functions performed by different groups of people at the park. It was also recognisable by a characteristic sonic cartography, a sonic cartography being a map of patterns of sound shaped by the distinguishing acoustic forms associated with a geographical location. The activity within every setting creates a recurrent auditory configuration emerging from the repetition and distribution of particular sounds within that physical space. The sounds that defined the motor park were the shouts from the agberos, who solicited for customers for the vehicles, the calls of hawkers, the noises of cars and buses arriving and leaving. This universe of sonic activity was the expression of the dynamic space that was the motor park, the zone one had to pass through to get to the scholarly silence of the library.
The Katha Upanishad on the Transformative Fire
In that silence, inside another most memorable text, The Common Experience by Chohen and Phipps, I read a passage that has become central to my inner landscape, along with other entrancing lines from the Upanishads. My literal understanding of the passage is fundamental to my perception of the meaning of my life, that conception being a self instituted construct emerging from an interpretation of the influences creating my exposure to the possibilities of existence. That literal explanation of the Upanishadic passage, however, even though it remains inspirational, is beginning to mature into collaboration with another, figurative interpretation.
This latter perspective enables an appreciation of a broader range of hermeneutic possibilities in the lines from the Upanishads , expanding my understanding of those lines even though the cognitive goals they promise have not been fully realised by me after decades of some degree of consistency in their pursuit. This more pragmatic orientation also facilitates the application of the synergistic possibilities suggested by those lines to more immediately accessible goals directed at achieving the cohesion between mind and cosmos, the pursuit of the broadest possibility of knowledge of self and the world, which the lines urge as an ultimate goal. My broadened understanding also sensitises me to the contradictions involved in such a quest and the challenges demonstrated by different efforts in different cultures across time to achieve such a goal.
In the passage from the Upanishads, a sage expounds on ultimate human possibility:
Count the links of the chain : worship the triple Fire : knowledge, meditation, practice; the triple process : evidence, inference, experience; the triple duty : study, concentration, renunciation; understand that everything comes from Spirit, that Spirit alone is sought and found; attain everlasting peace ; mount beyond birth and death.
When man understands himself, understands universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire, offers the sacrifice; then shall he, though still on earth, break the bonds of death, beyond sorrow, mount into heaven.
Stylistic Analysis of the Lines from the Katha Upanishad on the Transformative Fire
What continues to enchant me in the years after my first encounter with these lines, leading me to read them repeatedly over the years, consists of the musical relationship between the lines, the diction through which the ideas are expressed and the total conception of cognitive possibility the lines generate. Perpetually resonant are the themes the paragraphs develop and the methods through which they achieve this: the imagery of fire as metaphorical for committed, consistent, cognitive and devotional activity and the cognitive transmutation of self achieved through that activity; the semantic parallelism between the actions described and the use of stylistic parallelism in depicting these actions; the conception of a unified aspect of being running though all cognitive activity and realisation, culminating in knowledge of that which is most intimate to the human being, the individual self, and that within which the self exists, the world.
The distinctive stylistic form of this translation is due to the collaboration between the linguistic and ideational sensitivity of the Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats, for whose work Asian and Western esoteric thought is central, and the more specialised knowledge of Purohit Swami on Indian philosophy. The passage is a wedding of words and ideas in terms of a rhythmic structure that dramatises the cognitive progression the passage so tantalisingly evokes. It encapsulates and reveals a quintessence of Upanishadic philosophy and much of global mystical thought and practice in a few lines.
The unique beauty of the Yeats-Swami translation is demonstrated in its foregrounding of musical cadences in the rhythmic form through which ideas are introduced, developed and repeated, opening up into new windows into the fundamental idea, the entire expression linked through artful use of punctuation, evocative of the sense of continual opening into new possibilities made possible by the image of the triple fire; the fire understood both as epistemic technique and as ontological possibility expressed in the conscious unity of self and cosmos. The two stanzas that make up the passage are unified through a rhetorical scheme consisting of opening-introduction, partial closure, further enumeration, opening, further disclosure, full opening and completion, unified by the image of the triple fire, culminating in a climax both musical and ideational.
Regardless of the stylistic individuality of this particular translation, however, the central ideas and their organisation recur in all the translations I have read of the text.
The Symbolism of Fire in Classical Indian Thought
It was only after buying a copy of the Upanishads through the impersonal, anonymous efficiency of the virtual information and economic marketplace that is Amazon while studying in England years later, did I learn that the sage speaking is Yama, Death, addressing Nachiketas, a boy who finds himself in the home of Death. As compensation for the inadequate hospitality demonstrated by Nachiketas not meeting him at home, Death offers the boy three gifts of the boy's own choice. Inflamed by desire for knowledge of ultimate realties, the boy asks for gifts of knowledge, even though Death tries to divert him to asking for materially derived satisfactions. The passage quoted above is Death’s answer to Nachiketas’ question about the fire that leads to heaven, where there is neither death, age, hunger nor sorrow.
I was later to learn, through my encounter with Surendranath Dasgupta’s inspiring work on the history of Indian philosophy and with the Mahabharata, the fictional epic that is central to the development of Indian philosophy and Hinduism, that the imagery of fire plays a multifaceted role in Indian thought. The development of this imagery demonstrates a fascination that extends from the sacrificial fires of the earliest Vedic rituals to the metaphorical conceptions of flame expressed in Death’s lines to Nachiketas.
The entire section of the Upanishadic discourse actually encapsulates various aspects of the symbolism of fire, from fire as central to the creation of the universe, to ritual involving fire and the metaphorical conception of fire in relation to the more abstract activities of religious effort, from study to alms giving.
The reference to a fire that leads to heaven suggests the link between fire as a physical component of sacrificial rituals, where flame burns in honour of the divine or is used in consuming something sacrificed to a spiritual entity, and fire as a metaphoric expression of a transformative process in which the self is transformed by the reconfigurative capacities of knowledge. Within this metaphoric conception the intensity created by committed action leads to a remaking of the self in terms of a form of being that suggests the intensity and dynamism of flame. The process culminates in the transcendence of the mundane through the burning away of the limitations of the self , breaking “the bonds of death” and mounting “into heaven”.
Heaven is not understood as a location but in terms of a state of consciousness, an awareness emerging from the unity of self and cosmos: “When man understands himself, understands universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire” leading to the insight that “everything comes from Spirit...Spirit alone is sought and found”.
What more comprehensive scope of meaning can be suggested as a goal of human aspiration? All disciplines, all sciences and arts and their goals as described in all human cultures are represented by this conception of the possibility of grasping an ultimate conjunction between the self and the essence of existence.
Those lines can be understood as encapsulating the world's efforts to make meaning of being. They can be perceived as integrating all possibilities of knowledge. They are a vantage point which facilitate an appreciation of the dialectical goals which can be seen as the summation of human understanding: to understand oneself and to understand phenomena in relation to oneself. This summation of cognitive possibility is an adaptation of what the English thinker Bertrand Russell describes as the two main goals of knowledge: to understand phenomena in themselves and to understand them in relation to each other. This adaptation of Russell’s summation of human cognitive goals is a conception related to Augustine of Hippo’s juxtaposition of attitudes towards knowledge of self and the world in his observation that people go to look at mountains and leave themselves behind, leading the North African to make the study of his own self and his mental operations central to his exploration of meaning, an epistemic and metaphysical orientation that might have later influenced the French scholar Rene Descartes’ influential deployment of self analysis as a starting point in his philosophical explorations.
Upanishadic Epistemology and Metaphysics in the Development of a Conception of Ultimate Knowledge
What exactly does the author of the Upanishadic lines mean by “... understand that everything comes from Spirit, that Spirit alone is sought and found” and “When a man understands himself, understand universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire”?
These lines suggest an identity of being between all aspects of existence that constitutes all these otherwise separate forms into aspects of an ordered scheme, a cosmos. This universal identity is what the passage refers to as Spirit. The lines also indicate that a knowledge of this identity as it is expressed in oneself enables an appreciation of that identity as manifest in the universe as a whole.
This appreciation is not described as something purely ratiocinative but in terms of “union”, a conjoining of being between one phenomenon and another.
This interpretation is reinforced by other lines from the Upanishads. The central vision of the Upanishads is the unity of being, often expressed in terms of the convergence of this unity in the human self. The conception of the human being as cosmic axis is depicted in a variety of ways, developing a dialectical relationship between the vast and the small, a relationship between the constitution of the human being in terms of the structures of body and mind and the spirit that underlies the cosmos. The “Brihadāranyaka Upanishad”, another luminous text I first encountered in the same book in the Iyaro library, invokes the various constituents of the human person, from breath to mind, and correlates each of these with a particular natural form in terms of an underlying metaphysical principle: “The bright eternal Self that is in wind, the bright eternal Self that lives in breath, are one and the same...The bright eternal Self that is in the moon, the bright eternal Self that lives in the mind, are one and the same...”
The Correlation of Self Knowledge and Understanding of the Cosmos in the Symbolism of Sri Yantra
The Geometric Symbolism of the Yantra
The ideal of knowledge of self and knowledge of the world indicated by the lines from the Upanishads are summed up for me in terms of another discursive space, again from the philosophical and religious genius of India. This discursive form is the yantra, a geometric depiction of cosmic forces and cosmic form, used, among other goals, as a means of reflection upon the relationship between the metaphysical structure and development of the cosmos and the human being.
The structure of the yantra is composed of a balance between invariable and variable elements. The actualisation of the relationship between these twin possibilities in particular examples defines the specific forms and the associated symbolism of the variety of yantras. A yantra is invariably composed of relationships between geometric forms. These forms are the central dot or bindu, concentric circles, triangles and squares. All the geometric forms are arranged in a concentric formation around the bindu, which is at the centre.
Sri Yantra
The particular yantra that most compellingly sums up for me the ideal of an integration of knowledge in terms of a correlative understanding of the self and the cosmos as depicted by the Upanishads is known as the Sri Yantra. Like all yantras, it is evocative of movement from the self to the cosmos and from the cosmos to the self, distinctive and correlative movements also depicted by the lines from the Upanishads. This centripetal and centrifugal motion is evoked by the relationship between centre and circumference that are a central feature of the yantra. The centre of the structure symbolises the primary point of manifestation of the cosmos, symbolised by the bindu, while the circumference evokes the range of manifestations emerging from the primal centre. The progression of this process of manifestation is visualised through a succession of petals and circles arranged around the central point and the enclosure of the entire ensemble within a rectangle of four extrusions or “gates”. A powerfully realised aesthetic form is created which generates a compelling visual appeal independent of any knowledge of its symbolism, an appeal that facilitates an appreciation of its concision and scope as a symbolic form.
Adapting the basic idea from the classical sources, the centre could also suggest the self while the circumference could depict the manifestations of the self from that centre. In using the yantra as an aid to reflection on the cosmos and the self and the relationships between them, one could adapt one’s contemplation to this symbolic visual progression, moving from the centre to the circumference and from the circumference to the centre. One could also conjoin the conception of the yantra as symbolic of the cosmos and the yantra as symbolic of the self through reflection on the understanding of the self as part of the cosmos, and of the cosmos as realised through the self.
Sri Yantra
Correlations of Physical, Mental and Sonic Space
The opening imagistic and conceptual cartography of this chapter develops a relationship between various forms of space: between physical space as constituted by the Iyaro Motor Park and the National Library at Iyaro, between physical space and its associated sonic space as represented by the relationship between the motor park and the sounds that characterise it and between the library and the silence that defines the central activity taking place within it, and between all these spatial forms and the textual space actualised by the book I read in the library which opened a door into another textual space, the space created by the Upanishads, which the book quoted.
The opening paragraphs of this chapter create a structure of relationships between space as literally understood and space as metaphorically conceived. The literal spaces are made up of the motor park and the library. The metaphorical spaces consist of the sounds and the silence associated with the motor park and the library respectively. The book read in the library can also be understood literally as a space constituted by the extension of the book in terms of the dimensions of length, breadth and thickness. The encounter with the ideas evoked by reading the book, however, introduces us to another spatial dimension that is metaphorical: the world of ideas and the mind that engages with them. This culminating encounter in the progression from motor park to library demonstrates that the central spatial relationship at play in the entire dynamic tableau is that of the relationship between the senses, engaged through the ambulatory motion from one point to another, and the mind of the person in motion between physical, sonic and ideational spaces.
All these spatial experiences are engaged with and interpreted by the space represented by the consciousness of the person who experienced them and tries to correlate them in order to facilitate the development of frameworks through which to make meaning of his own life. This consciousness is the mental space constituted by the individual’s perception, in both a visual and a cognitive sense, and is mediated through the space embodied by his own body, that being the primary spatial enablement, the primary context, through which he is able to engage in the ambulatory motion that enables him to encounter the conjunction between physical, sonic and textual space that emerges from his movement through the motor park to the library.
A number of issues are foregrounded by these considerations. These are the image of embodiment as a primary means of encountering various spatial forms and the characterisation of space in literal and metaphorical terms. The literal conception of space is represented by the depiction of the physical spaces of the motor park and the library and the metaphorical is exemplified by the description of the sonic environments of the park and the library as well as the textual spaces constituted by the book and the ideational worlds it opens the mind to, as well as the perceptual and cognitive structure represented by that mind.
The relationship between sensate apprehension of phenomena-visual, sonic and tactile-and ideational configuration also emerges in the continuum of symbolic forms of which the yantra is one expression. The yantra is understood to represent a point in a scale of depiction of metaphysical conceptions. This scale is one of increasing abstraction. At the most basic level is the anthropomorphic, in which the conception at issue is presented in terms of a humanoid form, demonstrating characteristics related to the material activities of human existence. Along those lines each yantra is associated with a deity who is a cosmic entity or force depicted in anthropomorphic terms. A deity associated with the Sri Yantra is Tripura Sundari, who is described as lush and buxom, her beauty so striking that one look from her can transform the most unattractive man into a person whom ladies would race after, regardless of the consequences.
At the next level of symbolism is the abstraction represented by the geometric form of the yantra. At this point the only remnant of the anthropomorphic characterisation associated with the yantra is the understanding that the triangles facing upwards represent the male principle, Shiva, while the triangles facing downwards embody the female principle, Shakti. The union of these positive and negative polarities creates and sustains the cosmos.
The third level of symbolism is the most abstract. At this point, the anthropomorphic and the geometric, both being visual expressions, are transcended in terms of sound. At this utmost level of abstraction, the complex of symbolism that constitutes the Sri Yantra is represented by sonic form, the vowel and consonantal combinations of the Srividya mantra, one version of which begins with the primal syllable Om, described as expressive of the sound through which the universe came into being and is sustained in being.
Our ideational journey began, and culminates, at this point, with the Upanishads, where, as his discourse with Nachiketas progresses, Death expounds on the significance of this sonic form:
Nachiketas asked: ‘What lies beyond right and wrong, beyond cause and effect, beyond past and future?’
Yama replied: ‘That goal which all the Vedas [the primordial sacred texts of which the Upanishads are a culmination] glorify, all self sacrifice expresses, desiring which people practice Bramacharya, a life of sacred studies and holy life, that goal is Aum [Also written as Om].
That word is eternal Spirit, eternal distance, the ultimate foundation, it is indeed Brahman [the name given to the cosmic spirit] :that word is the highest End’.
Swami Paramananda’s commentary in his translation of the Upanishads : What name can man give to God? How can the Infinite be bound by any finite word? All that language can express must be finite, since it is itself finite. Yet it is very difficult for mortals to think or speak of anything without calling it by a definite name. Knowing this, the Sages gave to the Supreme the name A-U-M which stands as the root of all language. The first letter “A” is the mother-sound, being the natural sound uttered by every creature when the throat is opened, and no sound can be made without opening the throat. The last letter “M” spoken by closing the lips, terminates all articulation. As one carries the sound from the throat to the lips, it passes through the sound “U”. These three sounds therefore cover the whole field of possible articulate sound. Their combination is called the Akshara or the imperishable word, the Sound-Brahman...”
Good Morning, Sunrise
Victor Ekpuk
In this painting by Nigerian artist Victor Ekpuk, the spiral is a sign from the Nigerian graphic language nsibidi,meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity. Ekpuk’s strong palette of warm reds [and]cool blues contributes to the overall sense of animation
From the National Museum of Art
http://www.nmafa.si.edu/ex
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