The Rising Sun
The Total Solar Eclipse
The Midnight Sun &
The Blue Pearl
A 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT ~ April, 2024
The Rising Sun
NASA photograph, Total Solar Eclipse 2024
The Midnight Sun & The Blue Pearl
The atman manifests countless dramas in His nonbeing.
He Himself becomes the stage, the actor, and the
costumes. . . The inner Self is the place where
he enacts the scenes in which He wears
strange and various costumes.
Siva Sutra 3.10
The senses are the spectators who watch the Self stage the
drama of the universe in the theater of one's own being.
The sport of the atman is constantly observed by the
five organs of perception, the five organs of action
and the fourfold psychic instrument. [A yogi's]
inner experience teaches him that the whole
world springs from his own Self.
Siva Sutra 3.11
Swami Muktananda, Nothing Exists That Is Not Siva
Introduction
In the yoga I practice the teachings state that everything in the outer-world originates from within, everything emerges from, Siva, the divine Self. The most recent major cosmic event which has occurred for those of us who live in the Rochester-Canandaigua New York area, was a Total Solar Eclipse. On April 8, 2024 the Sun, the Moon and the Earth became perfectly aligned, such that the world within its Path of Totality (in Western New York) was cast into darkness for three minutes and 30 seconds.
The Total Solar Eclipse was an extraordinary example of what C.G. Jung termed synchronicity. On a more intimate scale, the True, living Symbolic Photograph is an image which has conjoined (in perfect alignment) an inner-image with its corresponding outer-world image-counterpart which have fallen together acausally (unintentionally, by grace) and which was consciously perceived (by me, the picture maker) as personally meaningful--meaningful enough to create within me the impulse to want to make an exposure with a camera. This kind of synchronistic experience occurs in what Henry Corbin calls the Intermediate Imaginal world, a world that exists between the world of sense perception and the invisible spiritual-divine world of the Self. Indeed, Corbin says the place of origin of all True symbols is the Imaginal world.
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This multi-four-layered project began as a 12x12" revision of an earlier blog project I had published on March 9, 2018 entitled The Rising Sun ~ Prelude to An Exhibition. I thought of the blog project, in part, as a Prelude to a mini-retrospective exhibition of my photography that was to open a few weeks later at the Alice Wilds Gallery, in Milwaukee. The blog project was even more multi-layered than the one before you now: it contains fifteen section headings which cover a lot of conceptual territory which I thought would help prepare visitors for the gallery exhibition.
This project was intended to focus primarily on the Rising Sun photographs I had made after New Year's Day, 2018 in response to a talk Gurumayi Chidvilasanada presented during a live-stream New Years Message video program that went out to devotees around the world on the morning of New Year's Day, 2018. Her Message talk was followed by a dharana or guided meditation in which she invoked visual imagery that carried me into a deep state of meditation. The imagery that unfolded within me inspired the sequence of photographs you will be seeing here in this project, in their 12x12" inkjet printed blog versions. (More details are available in the earlier Rising Sun blog project.)
This project follows another "12x12" revision project published on April 5, 2024, As Above, So Below ~ The Water Mirror In the Temple & The Inner Voyage which, as you can see from its title is also a conceptually multi-layered project that deals with several related themes. There are only three symmetrical photographs in the project; in the project before you now there are ten 12x12" versions of the Rising Sun photographs, each of which is a four-fold symmetrical photograph, an image constructed with one source ("straight" photographic) image, multiplied four times and conjoined in such a way that each image is reflected in itself above & below, and left & right.
As I was working on this revised Rising Sun 12x12" Inkjet PROJECT I began hearing more and more media coverage about the forthcoming Total Eclipse on April 8. I eventually started recognizing the "synchronistic" (meaningful acausal coincidence)
between the Rising Sun project I was working on, and the forthcoming Eclipse and wondered how I might include the ideas and images together in this project.
Interestingly, within the 15 titled sections of the introductory text of the earlier Rising Sun project I had included the themes of Synchronicity, the Midnight Sun, and the Blue Pearl in addition to the True, living Symbol.
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My experience of Gurumayi's guided meditation (dharana) on New Years Morning, 2018 was an interior experience; and similarly the experience of The Midnight Sun and The Blue Pearl are interior experiences. Interestingly, where I live in New York State (in Canandaigua, NY) none of the eclipse was visible because of cloudy conditions. In fact, as the total eclipse was just beginning to happen in Cananadaigua, NY my wife Gloria and I were gifted with a stunning view of dark purplish clouds coming rapidly over us as the light from the Eclipse was diminishing (on the other side of the clouds). Just as we experienced Total Darkness, we began to feel gentle drops of rain falling on our faces, and thy continued to fall upon us throughout the the entire Time of Totality of the eclipse (3 minutes and 30 seconds).
(Note: I invite you to visit this Wikipedia link which talks about Meaningful Coinincidence in relation to a Total Solar Eclipse. Also, I wanted you to know I will define and provide more textual information on The Midnight Sun and The Blue Pearl following the presentation of the Rising Sun photographs, below.)
This Image of the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse was posted on
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I have made 12x12" inkjet prints of all the images you will see in this project in my ongoing attempt, since February 2023, to create an print archive of my favorite images from the blog projects I've created since I initiated my blog cite in late 2010.
Most all of my photography projects constitute individually, and as a whole, an Inner Journey, in part because of the nature of most of the images: I'm referring to the presence of grace that pervaded my experience of making most of the images. Indeed I credit all images which function for me as True, living Symbolic Photographs to the grace of my Creative Process.
True symbols are open ended in their potential for new and ever-changing meanings. For a serious contemplator, a True living Symbol functions something like a mirror in which they will see experience their own internal personal meanings in relation to their experience of the image. The meanings can fluctuate from one moment or viewing timeframe to the next. Actually, perception of the image is only the beginning of the contemplation process; "listening" to what the image has to say to you (in the form of a silent dialogue) is the second major part of any process of contemplation, and contemplation is the other essential part of any True Creative Process once the photograph has been created. (Visit my blog project regarding contemplation.)
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Following the presentation of the images, I will continue my Introduction with commentaries on selected images, excerpts from Henry Corbins writings about The Midnight Sun, I have included some additional images not presented in my Rising Sun sequence of ten images, and I will provide some important texts regarding The Blue Pearl.
(Note: I also want to mention here the importance of an alternative viewing option available to you in relation to my published blog images for those of you who seeing this blog project on a desktop or laptop computer. Please try clicking on each blog-published image once, and then once again. This (hopefully) will place the image in a dark tonal viewing space and provide you with an enlarged image of the highest possible viewing quality. I invite you to visit this blog link I have prepared which offers more technical details.)
Ten Photographs
12x12" inkjet print revisions
of earlier "Rising Sun" blog project images
plus two Midnight Sun & Blue Pearl images
Image #1 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"Self-Illuminated Underground Chamber in the Center of the Earth"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #2 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"Blue Lightening: The Initiatic light in the Night Sky"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #3 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"Snow Angel"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #4 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"Solar Eclipse"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #5 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #6 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #7 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"Earth Angel"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #8 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"The Rising Sun"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #9 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun"The Midnight Sun" & "The Blue Pearl"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #10 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun
"The Midnight Sun" & "The Blue Pearl"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Introduction (continued)The collection of ten images above may suggest a visual narrative, or some kind of cosmic event, but like all internal-spiritual Journeys the "narrative" will never be clear because as travelers within the Imaginal World, we can't really possibly know what the strange, other-worldly, mysterious-numinous images mean (at least intellectually) because True, living Symbols transcend human language (i.e., language which is based in dualism). Symbols at there most essential nature, are sacred images, visual embodiments of the Oneness of Being. The photographer who facilitated the Symbol's emergence into the sensible-visible world has no more right to tell you what the image "means" any more than some other person you might know who saw the image. Titles may give you some kind of lead into the image, perhaps something about what the picture-maker thinks or feels about an image but, my advise is this: never trust what any one tells you, especially the artist, when someone claims they know what an image means.
I have a history of experience associated with each of these images, and that is a kind of meaning I can share with you, but that's not going to give you your meaning. That has to come from you, from some deep, sacred, silent place inside. The power of any image that is functioning as a True, living Symbolic image is its ability to take a contemplator inside that sacred space, which I prefer to call the Heart, which the yogic sages say is the dwelling place of God or inner Self. The Heart is the inner "temple" of the divine Self. Contemplation is a way to access Self-Knowledge via an image that is alive with grace, that sacred Creative Energy: known as chiti shakti, Supreme Consciousness.
Five Eclipse Images
NASA photograph, Total Solar Eclipse 2024
12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun/Solar Eclipse
"Solar Eclipse"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
12x12 version: "Persephone and her mother, during an eclipse"
12x12" "The Eclipse of the Circles of the Face of Light"
12x12" "An Eclipsed Masked Face & It's Shadowed Face"
Solar Eclipse, its Shadow & the Human Psych: when the Moon comes between the Earth and the Sun, and some part of the Sun's light is blocked and appears as an absence of light, or Shadow projected onto a part of the Earth's surface. ~ This cosmic event is known as a Solar Eclipse and it seems to me that cosmic event corresponds to the way the Ego aspect of the human psyche (the Moon) separates us human beings (the Earth) from the "Light of the divine Self, God, Supreme Consciousness" (the Sun).
The great Yogic & Sufi Masters, etc. . . . say that God, the divine Self, exists in ALL Created things, and at the same time transcends all of its creations. The Moon's shadow projected upon the Earth corresponds to that part of the human psyche (often referred to as the Shadow) which a human being wants to deny or hide from his or her self and others. This part of the psyche is also referred to the unconscious aspect of a person's psyche. (Click here to learn more about the Shadow)
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The Midnight Sun
Image #9 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun/Solar Eclipse"The Bursting Light of the Midnight Sun & The Blue Pearl"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #10 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun/Solar Eclipse
"The Midnight Sun"& The Blue Pearl"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
I want to share with you some textual excerpts from
Henry Corbin's fascinating book
The Man of Light In Iranian Sufism in which he writes about
The Midnight Sun. Corbin's words may shed some light on why I identify several images in this project as being simultaneously
The Midnight Sun and
The Blue Pearl, and how one image becomes transformed into a yellow
Rising Sun.
When I look at the first two images in the Rising Sun sequence (see the images here below) I see in the first image that it is (as titled) "secreting its own light" from within the dark "Underground chamber in the Center of the Earth." And in the second image my title informs us that I am seeing, once again, "secreting an Initiatic light" from within itself in the form of "lightening," which illuminates the darkness of a "Night Sky."
Both images, which originated as snow photographs, were inversed tonally after they were transformed into symmetrical photographs; that is to say, the images have been turned inside-out relative to their original display of dark, gray and light tonalities.
"Self-Illuminated Underground Chamber in the Center of the Earth"
"Blue Lightening: Initiatic light in the Night Sky"
The two dominate colors in the
Rising Sun project are Gold and Blue.
Swami Muktananda has a lot to say about
Blue Light, the
Blue Pearl and the
Blue Person. The symbolism of "Golden light" is pretty clear, I think: Gold is the alchemical symbol for purification, for divine purity or
Perfection. And Corbin has a lot to say about
interior light, the
Man of Light and the
Midnight Sun. ~ We'll begin with Henry Corbin.
The "bursting into flames" of The Midnight Sun
Corbin explains how the Midnight Sun is an "initiatic light" that "bursts into flame [as the Sufi Traveler] approaches the inner summit" of his ascending spiritual Journey which begins "in the darkness of night." The Journey is an "ascent that leads to the light of Perfect Nature."
The light of The Midnight Sun is, he says, a light "born of the Divine Cloud of Unknowing." It is a "primordial [archetypal] Image of inner light that figured prominently in the rituals of the mystery religions . . . [for example] the light carried by Hermes into the heart of an underground chamber."
The light of the Midnight Sun is "Self-luminous [uncreated, archetypal]; it is the light of the Inner world, the mundus Imaginalis (the Imaginal world); it is the light of the soul, the light of Consciousness; the "light of dawn rising in [the Cosmic North / the Celestial Pole, ] the Orient-origin of the soul . . ."
In every instance here we are dealing with imagery from the Imaginal world, a "world," explains Corbin, "that exists beyond sense perception." Again, Corbin writes in his book The Man of Illumination in Iranian Sufism:
These archetype-Images, which precede all empirical data, are the organs of meditation, of the active Imagination; they effect the transmutation of data by giving them their meaning. ~ The Midnight Sun may be the divine Night of superconsciousness irradiating the field of light of consciousness, and it may be the light of consciousness overcoming the Darkness of the subconscious, of the unconsciousness which was hemming it in. In both cases a burst of light rends the tissue of ready-made answers: the fictions of causal relationships, of linear evolutions, of continuous currents, everything that bolsters what people have agreed to call the "sense of history."
Corbin's "Man of Light" has been given many names, all reminiscent, he says, of the "Midnight Sun." For example Corbin writes about the Angel of Light, the Black Light, the Face of Light; and he quotes the great Iranian Sufi mystic Najm Kobra who in his writings referred to a "Guide of light", "the Sun of the Heart," and "the Sun of Knowledge."
I will close this section on Corbin's Man of Light and the Midnight Sun with the words of Najm Kobra. The quote, taken from Corbin's book, is an account of Najm Kobra's own personal experience of the "Circle of the Face," the "Face of Light" and a "sun of the Spirit" which becomes visible from "behind its diaphanous [cloud-like] veil":
When the Circle of the face has become pure it effuses lights as a spring pours forth its water, so that the mystic has a sensory perception that these lights are gushing forth to irradiate his face. This outpouring takes place between the two eyes and between the eyebrows. Finally it spreads to cover the whole face. At that moment, before you, before your face, there is another Face also of light, irradiating lights; while behind its diaphanous veil a sun becomes visible, seemingly animated by a movement to and fro. In reality this Face is your face and this sun is the sun of the Spirit . . . Henry Corbin from his book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism.
"The Eclipse of the Circles of the Face of Light"
Corbin's "Meeting Place" : the "Imaginal World"
& Jung's "Synchronicity"
Henry Corbin writes quite beautifully and at length about the Sufic "Intermediary World," the Barzakah, though he prefers to use the term Imaginal World ( Imaginalis mundus). The Imaginal World is an invisible, timeless, spaceless "place" that exists, says Corbin, between the spiritual and physical worlds. The Imaginal World is the "meeting place" where the spiritual turns (transmutes) into the physical, and where the physical turns (transmutes) into the spiritual. The Imaginal Intermediary World is where "the world of pure Ideas in their intelligible substantiality meets with the world of objects perceived by sense perception." The Imaginal World is the place of Origin of True, living Symbols; the place of Origin of True, Sacred Art.
Corbin's phrase "meeting place" invoked for me C.G. Jung's writings about synchronicity. I have written frequently about how, at the heart of the
symbolic photograph there is an experience of
synchronicity, the spontaneous
acausal "falling together" (coincidence) in time and space of two events perceived and experienced in a deeply personal
intuitive way as inexplicably
meaningful. The experience of synchronicity is often accompanied by feelings of surprise and
numinosity. Indeed, the experience of a
Total Solar Eclipse is such an event, the mysterious, perfect alignment or
cosmic coincidence of the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth.
We live in a dualistic world; our egos (maya,"the mist of illusion") break everything in two, into opposites. True, living Symbolic photographs re-unite separated inner-world and outer-world corresponding counter-parts. True, living Symbols return things back to their Origin, their Unitary Reality. True, living Symbolic Photographs are the grace-full visual embodiments of the Oneness of Being.
After I first meet Gurumayi and experienced her grace, and then later, after having studied Siddha Yoga with Gurmayi for many years, I gradually came to an understanding that it is indeed grace which transforms a photographic image, "turns" it (transmutes it) into a True, living Symbol. A symbol's divine-spiritual Creative Energy (Chiti Shakti) is that subtle light of Consciousness, that Inner Sun, that Light of the Heart which we experience, if only faintly or ever so briefly, in an image that functions for us as a True, living Symbol.
In this regard, I am compelled to say that my Creative Process, the making of Symbolic Photographs and the contemplation of Symbolic Photographs, is thus not just a matter of aesthetics, philosophy or theosophy; it is a matter of grace, a matter of inner experience, a matter of Seeing with the Eye of the Heart, and, as such it is for me a matter of life or death--that is to say, it is a matter of re-union, a return to wholeness, or remaining stuck in ego-separation.
Swami Muktananda
The Blue Pearl
Image #9 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun/Solar Eclipse "The Bursting Light of the Midnight Sun & The Blue Pearl"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
Image #10 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT Rising Sun/Solar Eclipse
"The Midnight Sun" & "The Blue Pearl"
(A four-fold symmetrical photograph)
I have devoted an entire blog project to The Blue Pearl, complete with pictures and quotations about the Blue Pearl from Swami Muktananda, and particularly his spiritual autobiography entitled The Play of Consciousness. The quote that follows, from his autobiography, is one of the quotes I included in my blog project The Blue Pearl:
As I gazed at the tiny Blue Pearl, I saw it expand, spreading its radiance in all directions, so that the whole sky and earth were illuminated by it. It was now no longer a Pearl, but had become shining, blazing, infinite Light--the Light that the writers of the scriptures and those who have realized the Truth have called the divine Light of Chiti. The Light pervaded everywhere in the form of the universe. I saw the earth being born and expanding from the Light of Consciousness, just as one can see smoke rising from a fire. I could actually see the world within this conscious Light and the Light within the world, like threads in a piece of cloth and cloth in the threads. Swami Muktananda ~ from his spiritual autobiography The Play of Consciousness
The yoga texts say that the Blue Pearl is the heart seed. Just as a seed sprouts, explodes, and grows into a huge tree, likewise this Blue Pearl contains the entire cosmos within itself. The yoga texts urge us to see all this through meditation. This is the fruit of the inner yoga, activated through the awakening of the Shakti. Swami Muktananda, from a talk published in Darshan #77-78 a SYDA publication
~ Visual Epilogue ~
Three Symmetrical Photographs
Transmutation of the Rising Sun
& Concluding Words by Gurumayi
The Blue Pearl / Midnight Sun ~ Symmetrical Photograph ~ Epilogue Image #1
12x12" "Exploding Light of the Blue Pearl" Symmetrical Photograph ~ Epilogue Image #2
The Rising Sun (#2) ~ Symmetrical Photograph ~ Epilogue Image #3
The supreme Being, who is the supreme radiance, is beyond all darkness. Look at the sun in the sky; it can be covered by clouds, it can be hidden by trees, it can be concealed by mountains, it can be eclipsed by the moon. However, there is a greater sun within, which can never be covered by anything. It continually blazes, it continually burns inside. This is why, no matter how shrouded we are by illusion, there comes a point in our lives when we feel, " I want to know the Truth, I want to know God, I want to know something beyond the life that I have grown accustomed to."
You have this yearning because the great sun is continually blazing inside, burning away the mist of illusion. Gurmayi Chivilasananda, from the SYDA Foundation publication: Resonate With Stillness
This blog version of the 12x12" Inkjet Print PROJECT
The Rising Sun / The Total Solar Eclipse / The Midnight Sun & The Blue Pearl
was announced on my blog's Welcome Page April 15, 2024
Please visit the Welcome Page to my blog The Departing Landscape. It includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating from the most recent to those dating back to the 1960's. You will also find on the Welcome Page my resume, contact information . . . and much more.
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