India has great publishers and bookstores. Books are cheap and I’m always sending some home. Last week after a few months ten kilogram books arrived by sea mail. Currently reading the Sufi Message of Hazrat Iniyat Khan

“There is an ancient story in the East which tells that there was a wall of mystery. Whenever anyone tried to climb up the wall to look at the other side, instead of coming back he smiled and jumped over and never came back again. So the people of that country became very curious to know what mystery was behind that wall. Once when someone was climbing up the wall to see what was on the other side they put chains around his feet, and held him so that he would not go over. When he looked at the other side he too was delighted with what he saw and smiled; and those standing at the foot of the wall, curious to know what he had to say, pulled him back. But to their great dissapointment he had lost his speech.

The mystery of life has a great charm; every soul is curious about it; when one wants to explain the mystery of life, words are not adequate. There are many reasons for this speechlessness, for this silence. The first is that man who has seen what is on the other side of the wall finds himself among children when he returns. To him all the things to which people attach great importance and value seem worthless…”

From: The Mysticism of Music, Sound and Word
by Hazrat Iniyat Khan

‘The energy of a spinning toll is the perfectness of stillness in movement’

Said by an Aikido Sensei on National Geographic Channel. On Friday they did a special martial arts day!

The quote made me think of a dancing Derwish.
This summer in India my yoga teacher mentioned that the dancing Derwishes represent a distant branch of Kriya Yoga. This yoga is a very ancient technique. Long ago the Kriya method was still whole and undevided. Kriya masters traveled from the Indian subcontinent to Tibet and across the Middle East towards Europe. The tradition dispersed into pieces and changed, due time and influence of other cultures. Compare it to a body. The head is here the arms are there, but the body is not one anymore. Dancing Derwishes work from the hearth. Opening the hearth chakra is an advanced step in Kriya yoga.

Searching images for ‘Sri Yantra’ in Google brought me to the experiment below where the yantra is projected into three dimensions. The Sri Yantra can be used to meditate upon. The small dot and focal point in the centre is named bindu.
The transverse triangles represent the volume expansion of bindu, the emergence of 3-D space, of the original nature, of creation.
This experiment with the 3-D yantra is a beautifull illustration of an article I stumbled upon last summer. I thought to put them together here:

“The universe was not there in the beginning. Or if it were there, what had then become of it? One view is that it had shrunk to a bindu. Bindu means point. The universe had contracted to a point. That is just it’s way, now it contracts; now it expands. It is a perpetual cycle stretched over bilions of human years. Expansion is creation and contraction is dissolution.

In geometry a point has position but no dimensions. The position of a thing is in relation to other things in space. Since bindu is the is the contraction of the whole universe, of the whole time-space-mind continuum, it can have no position. Since it has no dimension, and since it is the contraction of time-space-mind, the mind just cannot grasp it. For a three dimensional mind to grasp a thing, that thing has to be three dimensional too. For the mind a thing without dimensions doesn’t exist at all. that’s why the bindu is beyond comprehension and equal to nothing.

For the bindu to burst into being again, to stretch out it’s withdrawn dimensions and thus expand again it needs a bang-start. The form of this bang-start comes from desire. The bindu desired to expand again, to burst into being again, to be manifest and to multiply. Desire heated it up to a fireball bursting with desire. At the extreme height of heat and pressure it just exploded. This explosion of bindu is called Bindu Vishphota. The explosion stretched forth, well outside it’s withdrawn dimensions. It startes to expand. It ceased to be nothing. It bounced back into being.

The present 3-D space is the volume of expansion of bindu. This volume is called Saguna Brahm (dimensioned Brahmn). This Saguna Brahmn is the 3D-isation of Nirguna Brahm (dimensionless Brahmn) that is the original bindu. Saguna Brahmn and Moola Prakriti (the original nature) are one and the same.

All that occupies the 3-D space is it’s own local temporary warps. By warping itself Nature creates all. The triangles with their vertices represent the expansion of bindu- the emergence of 3D space of moola prakriti, of creation. What expands Bindu into volume is its Brimhita bang, represented by the space enclosed by the tranversed triangles and surounding bindu. ”

Original text by K.M. Gupta in the Times of India someday last summer.
Images found with Google.

For almost a year I teach yoga and meditation.

If you live in Amsterdam and your Dutch is suffice. When you’re interested in learning meditation and raja yoga; come and do some yoga with us.

You can find more information here: www.georgelangenberg.com/yoga (Dutch only)