The Cosmic Heart© Spiral
Throughout human history, people have recognized the life force of nature, referred to as ECK, Prana, Ether, Od, Chi, or Cosmic Energy. Inherent in all things, this life energy has been represented by spirals or serpents to symbolize flowing, spiraling movement. The spiraling motion is used to energize water and air in our natural environment.
The Cosmic Heart© spiral is designed in conformance with the laws of a "spherical whirl". The Cosmic Heart© spiral creates this life force energy flow along its beautiful, geometrical form, generating an energy field. To better understand the energy flow it is recommended you rotate the Cosmic Heart© on its vertical axis.
The sculpture will increase energy levels in a room, thus improving the wellbeing of those within proximity of the sculpture. The spiral's vitalizing capabilities can be seen through the increased growth and healthier appearance of plants located near it. The Cosmic Heart© spiral can be used as a Feng Shui tool to vitalize certain areas of your home, as a means of inspiration while meditating, or as a decoration in your home or office to simply enjoy. Placed in your bedroom, it might heighten your active dream state.
The Cosmic Heart© spiral is hand-made in Austria from copper 20 carat gold plated and is a design by Michael Kauderer.
Size: 4.7" x 4.7" x 6.5"
>> Order The Cosmic Heart© Spirale now, click here!
The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul
by Jill Purce
Flow, form and symbol
Like all existence on the descending scale of realities, the spiral is a symbol. lt denotes eternity, since it may go on for ever. But because we necessarily conceive infinity in our own, and therefore finite, terms, we are forced to limit the limitless. lt is only by imposing limits that we can make infinity accessible to us. Thus, in practice, the spiral will end; on paper, in two dimensions, we have in this space-time world to stop drawing it.
The universe and man's consciousness (the macrocosm and the microcosm) consist in a continuum and a dynamic whole; this can be expressed by the spiral when, instead of ending, it is drawn either round a sphere or a doughnut ring, so that it joins up with itself by spiralling through its own middle. This symbol, which is perpetually turning in on itself expanding and contracting, has an interchangeable centre and circumference, and has neither beginning nor end: it will be referred to here as the spherical vortex. The perpetual inturning of the spherical vortex has analogies in nature with a stable form of flow created by the movement of air and water. This form, observed by blowing a smoke-ring or letting a drop of milk fall into water that has been allowed to settle, is called by scientists the vortex ring.
Within the totality of the universal continuum, we are limited by space-time to successive and analytic observations of its parts. These parts, the transient formations of nature's perpetual motion - although never perfect - seem to us to approximate to an ideal. In so far as the archetypal flow and growth form assumed by the mushroom, the embryo and the brain embody a forward impulse which turns back on itself, they demonstrate exactly the forming of a vortex ring.
Many formations in nature, although both constituted and caused by dissimilar phenomena, are not only similar to look at, but have identical mathematical descriptions. This would suggest that together they form a higher overall order outside that limited by our concept of linear cause and effect. The spiral movement which creates a centre and a 'whole' is also that which - combined with gravitational contraction creates the solar systems, their suns and planets. The galaxies too are probably created by the inward spiralling of interstellar gas. These are the macrocosmic movements and cycles, mirrored in man the microcosm, which provide him with his model for all things cyclic, from sleep and emotions to time itself. The same vortical laws govern the movements of water, which composes nearly three-quarters of our physical bodies.
Water is the pure, potential and unformed matrix from which all life takes its being. Consequently, the characteristics of its vortical flow, its ephemeral but changeless configurations, remain in all things as a testimony of their origin. lt is from the involution of the unformed waters that the egg crystallizes by the turning in on itself of energy, of matter, or of consciousness; and all these are one and the same.
This order, reverberating down into the microscopic and subatomic levels, both structures and reflects our consciousness. The full significance of organization, which was obviously known to the Greeks since their word kosmos means 'order', is again being demonstrated by the physicists, who say that matter actually consists in its own movement and organization. Similarly, the growth of human consciousness is the continuous refining of its own organization, the ordering of its individual microcosm.
Although this process is built into the structure and is inherent in the natural evolution of man, it is one which can be facilitated and hastened with the aid of maps and guides. These maps are the mythological and religious systems which have been evolved by previous travellers, pioneers of the Way. Such a refining is alchemy, the transmutation of the natural man of the base metals into the spiritual man of pure gold, by repeated breaking down and building up (solve et coagula).
The following pages describe these maps and the ways in which man has understood the spiral of his own awareness. This spiral is not one, but many, which together constitute a spiral of multiple dimensions, in which each winding is also a complete spiral and each spiral just a winding. Furthermore, we are the spiral and all the spirals within. We need, above all, to become familiar with the nature of its movement, and consciously to make its laws our laws, like Edgar Allan Poe's sailor, who, by careful observation as he sank into the maelstrom, understood the nature of the vortex and was carried up by the spiral that had sucked him down.
The simple two-dimensional spiral has a number of remarkable properties. lt both comes from and returns to its source; it is a continuum whose ends are opposite and yet the same; and it demonstrates the cycles of change within the continuum and the alternation of the polarities within each cycle. lt embodies the principles of expansion and contraction, through changes in velocity, and the potential for simultaneous movement in either direction towards its two extremities. On the spherical vortex these extremities, the centre and periphery, flow into each other; essentially, they are interchangeable.
In the relative world - that of time, space and their corollary, motion - the potential of movement in either
direction manifests as choice; hence, in three dimensions, the spiral may be imagined either as the aspiring upward
spiral or as the downward vortex. The spiral is inherently asymmetrical, and any choice of direction along
the vertical axis also determines a right- or left-handed path: the choice of travelling with or against
the sun. That the latter, widdershins or ,sinister' direction has the associations it does is an
indication of man's dose relationship with the movement of the beavens: it is said to be the entropic,
unwinding movement from order into chaos, or, according to C. G. Jung, away from the conscious and
towards the unconscious. By virtue of this important asymmetry the spiral can be superimposed on its mate of
opposite-handedness only by turning it through another spatial dimension:
a flat spiral must be lifted out of
the page through three dimensions, or a spiral of three dimensions moved through four, and so on. Direction is thus
an indication of the dimension, and in traditional thought the 'world', through which the spiral turns. Since our
world is predominantly right-handed, the world above is thought to be ,left-handed', a passage through another dimension
being implied. According to the Jewish mystical tradition, the Cabbala, there are four worlds, all of which exist
negatively beyond their positive existence. Not until one is outside the relative world of space and time is there an
end to the possibility of rotating an asymmetric figure through the next dimension in space to coincide with its reflection.
The universal spherical vortex is perhaps the most complete symbol by which we can map our cosmic journey. As William Blake wrote in his poem 'Milton':
The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its
Own vortex, and when once a traveller thro' Eternity
Has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun . . .
Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and the earth
A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity.
The evolutionary spiral
There are within every one of us three stages of knowledge. This is the spiral process by which not only individual man but the cosmos itself becomes realized; for it represents the course of evolution. Thus in the early days of humanity, as in childhood, there was no separation between ourselves and the outside world, until we, individually or as a race, became self-conscious. As a result of successive windings, our individual and collective ego crystallized, and we could see ourselves as subject, and as distinct from the world, which became the object of our scrutiny. As we looked, the continuum differentiated into 'things'. Each branched into more things, which in turn branched into even more, until the continuum had developed into a hierarchy; language, which once flowed in verbs and processes, broke up into nouns and connectives.
The third stage for the individual is that of intuitive knowledge or enlightenment, in which subject and object again become one. In collective terms, this return to a continuum implies not only the need for a new language, like that which physicists are trying to develop, but that the analytic and quantitative world is winding itself into a new simplicity. At the widest extent of the spherical vortex, the turn is long and slow before we are gathered up into the momentum of the contracting vortex of collective enlightenment. Each person who is integrated, realized and truly individualized becomes universal; and the extremity of differentiation of individual consciousness leads back into the Totality. In this spiral, every one of us all over the globe is like a light becorning gradually brighter, until there are so many and so intense, that there is one light, the light of cosmic consciousness, or what Teilhard de Chardin has called the 'psychical convergence of the universe upon itself': the Omega Point.
The breathing cosmos
Because any description of the Absolute must be limited, we are able to reveal it only by using symbols, which cut directly through all the layers and windings of our consciousness.
There is no space here to do more than touch on the profundity of these symbols; but they will be referred to throughout. Each is unity, either as the point or circle. Since a symbol cuts through all levels and therefore dimensions, they must also be visualized in three dimensions: each circle as a sphere.
The function of symbolism is to go beyond the 'limitation of the fragment' and link the different 'parts' of the whole, or alternatively the worlds in which these parts manifest: these worlds are successive windings of the spiral. Each symbol is a link on the same frequency with the world above, a vertical bridge between objects within the same 'cosmic rhythm' on different planes of reality. In other words, each symbol links up with its 'correspondence' on thc next spire. On a flat spiral, each point of intersection between a radius and the successive windings would be the successive manifestation of a symbol, traced through the respective worlds from the densest to the subtlest level of cosmic manifestation. We, like Plato's prisoners in the cave, can see merely the shadows of the images of the real objects, which themselves arc only the manifestation of the Ideas and Archetypes (or Immutable Essences). In other words, even the ,originals', let alone the physical manifestations of nature, are but symbols of the metaphysical realities; and even these last, by virtue of their multiplicity, arc but 'parts' of the One Essence.
lt follows, therefore, that all manifestation, or all that we experience, is symbolic, and that 'the whole of existence is a continuum which is ordered in itself. lt has no manifest appearance and thus cannot be observed immediately by sense perceptions, but its inherent dynamism manifests in images whose structure participates in that of the continuum' (Wang-Fu Chih).
lt is significant that, while the simple two-dimensional spiral is one of the most ancient symbols for eternity, it does not ever seem to have been a symbol for the Absolute. This is because it is not a whole; it can, by its very nature, never be complete.
The implication here is that all our conceptions of the Absolute must be more than unlimited extension: they must contain. In all traditions God is seen as containing everything within himself. All manifestation extends from, and yet is contained within, the point, to which it also returns.
So, while the two-dimensional spiral starts in infinity and extends to infinity, passing through all the intermediary coils of manifestation in time and the relative world, it is only symbolic of the spherical vortex. This, one of the most ancient symbols known to man, is most familiar as the Yin Yang sign; and, although this was restricted to the Far East, the spherical vortex existed in the West possibly even earlier. Certainly it is found as the double spirals carved by Megalithic man.
When the flat double spiral is moved up into three dimensions, it has its origin and end in the opposite poles of a central axis: the central infinity, or axis of consciousness.
The spiral has actually returned by winding on to its source. Its 'end' is not a second and therefore relativating infinity, as implied by the single spiral. The duplication of the One is simply the One looking at itself, and in so doing becoming subject and object: this is the duality by which all is known.
Keeping this dual picture in mind, we now have a third element: relation. This distance between subject and object is knowledge; hence, in Japanese, the word meaning 'to understand' (ivakarn) literally means 'to be divided'. On the Cabbalistic Tree of Life this space is actually called Knowledge, or Daat, and is the invisible point on the central axis between the Crown (Kether), I AM, and Truth (Tepheret), I AM. lt is understood as the link: Eheieh asher Ehieh: 'I AM (subject) that I AM (object).' This third principle is the mirror of consciousness by which pure Being looks at itself.
In the Islamic tradition it is said: ,I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the world.' On the spherical vortex, the hidden treasure is the point of origin. In order for the One to be known - for there to be consciousness of the treasure by the treasure - the world was created. The cycles of becoming, the rounds of existence, spiral on and reveal their source by the creation of a vantage point: from its own opposite pole the source may view and hence be conscious of itself. The separation of heaven and earth gave the light of consciousness by which all is seen and which all is seen and known.
This cyclic becoming appears in mythology as the protecting serpent or dragon which coils around the World Tree or Mountain - the central axis, the Axis Mundi.
This dragon is also the world of illusion, the coils of manifestation, which the hero must destroy on his quest for truth, for the treasure, the incorruptible diamond of the Self at the still pomt in the midst of things.
This theme recurs in a more or less explicit form in most traditions: the world materializes and man spiritualizes along the same spiral. lt is the breathing of the cosmos.
With the exhalation the spirit contracts, creates, and involves or winds into matter; this is the creation of the world by the breath of God. With the inhalation, matter expands and evolves or unwinds into spirit. Man is the heart and microcosmic controller of this pulse. By becoming conscious he is inhaling - effecting the return breath.
We breathe in only to breathe out; this is true of the universe no less than of man, who was created in the same image. This is why the life of each person is conceived, in so many mystical, religious, and mythological systems, as the conscious unwinding of the original coils of manifestation.
Looked at on a single spiral, the path to consciousness has to be seen as a return along the same path; on the spherical vortex, the return is a continuation. At the point of maximum contraction, the expansion begins.
The alternating phases are described by the Cabbala. As each individual spirals down the Tree of Life, he involves into matter, being conceived in Daat and born in Malkuth or Kingdom; he thus brings heaven down to earth at the moment of birth, at which point the process is reversed, and through life he spirals back up the Tree, evolving or aspiring into spirit. He takes earth back to heaven, remembering in consciousness his original path. Indeed, all recognition, all knowledge of life, is a conscious remembering of the pre-conscious knowledge of the involving path.
The idea of unwinding was familiar to W. B. Yeats, who wrote:
Unwinding is the inhalation or expansion of the great breath. lt is also the returning of the original impulse: the curling round on itself of the natural world, from the planetary orbits to the mushroom, from the recurrence of our experiences to the circulation of our subtle energies.
Bei einer flächigen Spirale würde ein Symbol an jedem Schnittpunkt zwischen dem Radius und den Windungen in neuer Form auftreten und sich durch die verschiedenen Welten von der dichtesten zur feinsten Ebene kosmischer Manifestation durchhalten. Wie die Gefangenen in Platons Höhle können wir nur die Schatten der wirklichen Objekte sehen, die ihrerseits nur die Manifestation der Ideen und Archetypen (oder unwandelbaren Wesenheiten) sind. Das heißt, selbst die »Urbilder«, ganz zu schweigen von den Naturerscheinungen, sind nur Symbole der metaphysischen Wirklichkeiten, und auch die sind aufgrund ihrer Vielzahl nur »Teile« des Einen Wesens.
Jaunting, journeying
To his own dayspring
He unpacks the loaded pern
Knowledge he shall unwind
Through victories of the mind.
lt is for this reason that conscious breathing plays such an important role in every form of meditation. Man is echoing the cosmic rhythms, the eternal creation and dissolution of the universe. This also accounts for the importance of the word and breath in so many cosmogenies, and, by extension, the idea of the creation of the world through the naming of things and the letters of the alphabet; this appears in the Cabbalistic, Arabic and Hindu traditions.
In Islam the breath is the 'Divine Exhalation', the manifestation of the Creative, the feminine principle of the One, analogous with the Hindu goddess Sakti. Manifested through this creative breath are the Divine Archetypes or names in the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet. The alternating breath of 'continuous creation' are the origin of the Sufi ritual, the dhikr. This is the invocatory 'remembrance' of the original Divine act, in accordance with the saying of the Prophet: 'He who does not vibrate at the remembrance of the Friend, has no friend.' The pulsating breath and rhythmic invocation of the sacred Names culminates (as in the whirling of the Dervishes) in cosmic movements and vibrations of the whole body. With each outward breath the Divine Principle is manifest. lt is returned ,back to the Divine Essence at every moment on the phase of contraction, and remanifest and externalized in that of expansion' (S. H. Nasr, Three Muslim Sages). Every moment of existence is thus integrated into its transcendent origin.
These alternating phases correspond to those of the waxing and waning moon; according to the Sufi mystic Ibn 'Arabi, her twenty-eight phases correspond to the letters of the Arabic alphabet, the forms of which are themselves traditionally derived from the lunar shapes. Moreover, since the letters are also phonetic, their form, sound and inner meaning as Divine names (or lines of force, or causes of the universe) are closely related.
The moon, whose cyclic rhythm we may not only watch by night but readily perceive through our emotions, has provided man with many associations for his awareness of the spiral, not least in its relationship to the rhythm and spiral flow of the water which constitutes the greater part of our physical bodies.
The two eternities
Situated between the poles, on our journey through the spherical vortex, we see at either end our source and goal. We are pulled in both directions, since the longing for the womb, described by some psychologists, has its counterpart in the passionate longing of the mystic for union with God.
For the first part of our lives we are predominantly outgoing, externalizing and developing our individual ego as a basis from which to cope with the world around us.
This is the development of our first consciousness of self as a separate entity.
Starting from the pole, our initial windings are expanding. They start small, so that in the beginning it takes less time to complete one cycle. The relative speed of development and growth in a child, as seen from the outside, is prodigious in the beginning.
Setting out as children, we have an enormous journey - our entire sphere to wind round - before we reach home once more. Each turn or cycle takes gradually longer to complete; objectively, the development gets slower, and the windings become gradually more stable as they approach the equator or turning-point. We can see the same development in two dimensions on the Yin Yang, where at the fullness of one cycle the seed of its opposite offsets the balance and causes a reversal of direction, after which, on the vortex as on all homeward journeys, the speed of rotation increases.
Each winding marks a containment and a completed cycle in the development of the whole; but, as each is a part of the whole, the completion is also a beginning, so that the spiral shows the endosure and 'rounded' quality we experience, and the equivalent points reached at every new winding. The recurrent moments of crisis and decision, when understood, are growth junctures, points of initiation which mark a release or death from one state of being and a growth or birth into the next. 'How many times,' said Yeats, 'man lives and dies between his two eternities.'
Most traditions, mythologies, religions and legends describe these two eternities, the two ends of the life spiral. In psychological terms, for example, that from which we part with such reluctance is the undifferentiated matrix of the unconscious, an existence bathed in the pre-egoid memories of the watery abyss of our life within the womb. Everything here seems to have been easy and perfect, eternal and deathless; this was the Golden Age and Paradise, and that from which we were expelled.
The dawning of consciousness was a self-consciousness. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge we saw ourselves objectively - from outside and hence naked - for the first time. This was the first sign of our development, the turning round in order to observe ourself and the consequent delineation of an identity and 'whole' within the unformed ebb and flow of unqualified bliss. This state is described in many of the creation myths, which are at once microcosmic and macrocosmic. The first phase in the ego's development appears mythologically as the cosmic egg. In the Hindu tradition it is the Golden Egg of Brahma, floating on the waters of chaos: the first tentative separation, while still floating amid that which it contains and composes. Astrologically this is the phase governed by the moon, for the moon controls the waters and reflects the sun, as the ego reflects the Self. The egg is formed by the inturning or involution of Being.
If the beginning ofour journey was the Golden Egg or the Golden Age, its end is the rediscovery of that which we lost, the Golden Fleece or Alchemical Gold. But the right way back to the beginning is by going on. As the Tao Te Ching says:
Going on means going far,
Going far means returning.
To go back would be to go against the order of things, and to get sucked into the downward vortex. There can be a return to the centre only if there was first a departure from it, just as there can be no contraction without expansion. As one leads to the other, so the initial expansion and exploration of the developing being is checked by its return from unlimited dissipation into the infinite. Thus delineated, the 'ego' is contrasted with that which is outside the boundary, a God transcendent, and returns to dissolve its own delineation, to find God within and immanent.
The goal is at once a perfection of and a release from the self. Although these can be two distinct aims, it is also through the knowledge necessary for perfection that there is a release. The annihilation of the self in God, which is the Eastern goal of Nirvana, is also the release from the coils of Maya or illusion, the rounds of existence, and hence the passage from the spiral on to the central axis - the Centre in the midst of conditions - which is also the realization of the source in one's own being.
For what the centre brings
Must obviously be
That which remains to the end
And was there from eternity.
(Goethe, Westöstlicher Diwan)
On some paths the centre is dissolved; on others it has, by virtue of sheer perfection and knowledge, become transparent. In the Hindu tradition, the centre is called the 'Diamond Body'. This still point, free from the emotional turmoils of everyday existence, is described as something indestructible and unchangeable. In other traditions it is the Rock of Living Waters, the Ka'aba of the Heart, the Philosophers' Stone, the Stone of Sure Foundation, the pearl or jewel. The centre hardens, its transparency increasing, until, indestructible, it has the clarity of the diamond.
Seen on the flat spiral our journey can begin in infinity and move inward to the centre, the concentration of infinity into a point. Infinity is thus reached through a process of ordering and concentrating. The One which is everywhere can be found in the centre of being: a concentration of the One as everywhere into the One as centre.
This organization and concentration is implicit in the diamond, whose constituent carbon atoms, while the same as those of graphite and of coal, have here reached a state of maximum order and perfection. lt is the clarity gained by such an ordering that is the goal.
The spiral journey which begins in transparency, at its most fluid in the unformed waters, comes to its final transparency in the perfection of the diamond.
More about the Cosmic Heart Spiral© from Zilla Adams
The "Cosmic Heart©" is an exquisitely beautiful master-work of art. The gleaming kinetic sculpture has graceful lines and gentle spiral movements which delight and mesmerize the eye. The piece is suspended in mid-air and, when revolving gently, it creates harmonies of form and motion that appear magical and hypnotic. The outer egg-shape and inner spiral move in opposite directions, even though they are one connected piece rotating in only one direction. This appears impossible, and yet, it is happening right before ones eyes The piece symbolizes The Spiral of the Cosmos, i.e.: the celestial energy moving downward while the earths energy moves upward - simultaneously The egg and heart shapes combine to represent The Birth of Unconditional Love. The harmonies and rhythms are based on the ancient mathematical proportions of the Golden Section, or Golden Mean, found also in the egyptian pyramids and great cathedrals. The opposing spirals replicate the spirals found in the DNA molecule and the ancient greek Caduceus, the symbol of medicine and healing.
It is compelling to watch and yet calming to the mind. The viewer experiences an almost hypnotic level of relaxation, yet feels stimulated and energized. So, it has scientifically based, utilitarian functions, as well as, artistic merit.
The creator, artist/engineer Michael Kauderer, combined the many elements of fine art, mathematics, Devine Geometry, modern physics, Feng Shui, metaphysics and the Healing Arts to convey The Essence of Reality.
It is suspended by a nearly invisible monofilament and can be hung anywhere. It comes in copper 22K gold-plate, is gift-boxed and ready for shipping. No further assembly necessary.
Zilla Adams, Hawaii