Creanativity

the birth of light in us all


When I was seven, an Irish Catholic family with four children roughly my age and a grandma called Nana moved in next door. Michael, Mary Ellen, Margaret, and Suzanne all went to Holy Martyrs, the school at the back of the mysterious church I passed when I rode my bike to the store. I loved to ride by when the church doors were open and you could see the candlelight in the darkness and smell the incense, but the sure footsteps of the nuns frightened me.

Nana’s room, crowded with old-fashioned furniture, religious statues and lace, was fascinating too, as was her two-tone 1947 Buick named Darlin’, and the real player piano she provided for the rec room. But what I liked best about Nana’s things were the little figures she set out in a stable once a year to tell the Christmas story.



I remember how Margaret and I cut fresh straw for the manger, and Mary Ellen lit the candle hidden behind the nativity scene so that the light fell right on the baby. We weren’t allowed to touch the people and animals, but more than once we slipped into Nana’s room when she was out and played with them.

At an estate sale last summer, I found a similar nativity set. It came in a bag with some other little figures, people and animals from around the world, and I couldn’t resist it. When I set the little scene out later, the other small people and odd animals seemed to want to be part of the story, so I let them.

Most of this fall I’ve been transcribing Ganesh Baba’s manuscript, Crea Sadhana, a yoga manual. At the time I set up the nativity scene, I was typing a section on swabhava, the quality of unfettered consciousness and pure love that yogis aspire to. Swabhava is the essence of a thing, the quality that makes it itself, the pure awareness that radiates from newborns (and enlightened beings) but is lost as babies grow, filtered by experience, buried under layers of enculturation and belief.

On a windowsill near me as I typed was a picture of the Hindu god Krishna as a young child. Looking at Krishna, I suddenly got it: the child Krishna and the baby in the manger represented the same quality!



Krishna

A little research led to more connections. The same quality of radiant purity is associated with Tiferet, the central sphere on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and with Avalokiteswara, the Buddhist god of compassion whose thousands of arms touch everyone. In the Pythagorean Tetraktys, it is represented by the central stone in the pyramid of ten, the only one that touches all the others without ever touching the outer edge of the triangle.


Avalokiteshwara

Spontaneously, I moved the candle to the front of the nativity set, so the light would shine on all the faces.

The nativity scene continued to unfold its symbolism to me: Mary and Joseph represent the prime polarities, yin and yang, positive and negative, which come together to create anything new. The child at the center, creativity manifest, is love.

More research revealed a traditional esoteric message in the nativity. In ancient times, the concept of Christ was symbolized by the Greek hieroglyph, the image of a flame (Rho, parallel to the Egyptian Ra, the Sun or fire god) rising from crossed sticks (Chi, paralleling the Chinese concept Qi, life energy).


Greek hieroglyph “Chi-Rho”
(from which the word “Christ” comes)

The guests at the nativity are associated with the seven steps of the esoteric path to liberation, seven levels of consciousness, the lower levels represented by the four animals and the higher ones by the three kings. One by one, the levels of consciousness are purified by the fire of understanding, the rubbing together of the two sticks of opposing ideas until the fire springs up and burns away the evidence of the old polarity.

All the figures together reflect the same seven steps of manifestation and three of the unmanifest that form the hierarchies basic to most esoteric systems. As Joseph Campbell explains, no matter where the systems originate, they have the same basic structure because they arise from the same human body/mind complex carried by the same spinal column and nervous system.

The only thing that still bothered me about the interpretation was that the animals represent lower stages of enlightenment than the wise men. Surely we are moving into a time of more sophisticated understanding than that. Finally, I exchanged some of the wise men for wise women and arranged all the figures in a circle so the light would shine on all the faces with equal intensity.



May the long time sun shine,
All love surround you,
May the pure light within you,
Guide your way on.
Traditional Sikh song sung by The Incredible String Band


Wishing you love and light in these dark times,

Eve