Posts Tagged ‘hermeticism’
Are you using and/or refining alchemy?
Are you using and/or refining alchemy?
Baba interviewed by Willi Paul at PlanetShifter Magazine
Actually, alchemy is a interesting connection point between East and West, because it gives us an opportunity to consider a different kind of vocabulary when thinking about India, and especially Oral Tradition. Spiritual India is normally represented in the West with a human sciences’ vocabulary of Comparative Religion or Psychology, which gives a very distorted result. But, if we should use the vocabulary of Hermeticism, with it’s focus on connecting with the Natural World, as opposed to mapping things according to the categories of discourse & connecting with only fickle ideas of the time, I find a convenient bridge to allow sharper commentary and interpretation.
I use Indian Alchemy, which I don’t think of as a science, but a knowledge that must be gleaned from Nature and one’s lineage, not on the basis of a rational methodology and discursive reasoning, but through experience, exposure, intimacy, and invocation. So, the task is an ongoing one of knowing oneself and knowing the Natural World, and seeing the mirror reflection between the two; there is no issue of refining Alchemy, as such. That being said, I have been slowly converting to more modern apparatus, and adapting to the technology that is readily available.
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The Edge of Indian Spirituality
Baba Rampuri’s speech at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, March 2008.
You can read the whole speech here.
The Edge of Indian Spirituality – The Oral Tradition of Naked Yogis
AVADHUT GITA – an unforgettable line
JNANAMRTAM SAMARASAM GAGANOPAMOHAM
I kept chanting it just under my breath. It was Thursday night. The evening arati rituals had been completed in Datt Akhara, Ujjain, and I sat at the feet of the Pir, Amar Puri Ji, the abbot of this ancient monastery, who was possessed and inhabited by the previous Pir, as were all the abbots back to when it all began.
We sing the line forty times. Do you someone’s trying to make a point?
It is Guru Dattatreya’s refrain, a line so powerful that it has never left me alone since the moment I first heard it. It MADE me chant it. It is a line that is central to the Tradition of Knowledge. And one finds curious resemblances with the Hermetic traditions as well.
Being a Westerner, my nature is to first consider the grammatical subject of the line-and sure enough the subject is “I,” aham and then the verb, an implied, “to be.” How do I translate the implications of having the subject so far away from the action, at the tail end of an articulation, as much for meter as for clarity, a final aham.
I am “the immortality of knowledge (jnanaamritam),” a mere lifting of a to aa, by fusion, takes us from death to immortality, a (no) mrita (death). Amrita is also nectar or elixir, and we translate it as the Elixir of Immortality.
“We got the juice,” says the Pir of Dattatreya Akhara. Well, he used the word, rasa. Rasa has many meanings; the most common is juice, and it’s often used as essence as well. But there can also be a transformative element in this essence, as rasa can also be Mercury, Quicksilver, a shape-shifter capable of transforming other things. Rasayana is alchemy or also rejuvenation of the body.
In the ancient Mediterranean, Mercury-Hermes was the “Messenger of the Gods.” Translated into Sanskrit that would be Avadhuta, a frequent name of Guru Dattatreya, and the name of his song.
The Pir had been an alchemist. He vehemently denied he had ever turned base metal into gold, but nevertheless had been attacked in his youth by robbers, looking for his loot. They couldn’t find his formulae, they were in his head. And he had no books. continue reading…
