Monday, I stumbled upon a book someone had ordered called In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. The title intrigued me because I have held a lot of trauma in my body from my shoulder injury and have found that the only way to move through it emotionally is through moving the body. At first, I needed yoga to heal my heart but I was actually doing more damage to my physical body in the process... until it gave out and I had to start from scratch. Two years after starting physical therapy and taking 4 months away from yoga before starting again from the very beginning, I'm starting to see more profound healing - mentally and physically.
My copy has not yet arrived, but I read as much as I could from the "look inside" feature on amazon & google books. My curiosity was piqued around page 15. Apparently, the author, Peter Levine, has observed that trembling of shaking shortly after injury or trauma is a physical reset - this is often stopped as it is recognized as a symptom of shock... but that can cause PTSD or stored trauma in the body rather than allowing the body to "shake off" what has happened and fully heal from the beginning.
In the first chapter, Levine speaks of instances of trembling or shaking in the I Ching and the Bible, as well as "at the climax of orgasm." (p.16) I thought immediately of another trembling that I have spent a great deal of time contemplating - spanda. Daniel Odier's translation & commentary on Yoga Spandakarika (song of the sacred tremor) was one of my most treasured books from the Chiang Mai "bookstore of requirement". This sacred tremor or vibration is the pulsation of the macrocosm... after the heartbreak of my first marriage ending - Odier's book taught me how to notice this tremor or spanda in everything around me and create a love affair between myself and the Universe - microcosm and macrocosm. This courtship between microcosm and macrocosm mended my heart and put me on the path toward falling in love with DRJ.
Odier writes:
"The whole Spandakarika says that the sacred tremor is the way in to this new manner of seeing and feeling things. This is not a mental process, but a dynamic that engages both body and mind."
He discusses Kasmiri yoga practices to bring about this state, but the state is not exclusive to these practices only.
"Little by little the body starts to resonate, as if all its harmonics were coming into unison in order to generate a total tremoring. When this total tremoring is born, it is as if we are introducing into our body a magic virus that is attacking allour mental constuctions and relaxing them completely."
This description always reminds me of a mutual orgasm between the microcosm and the macrocosm. I began to think of the Universe as my lover, my whole body as an organ of pleasure, signs of love in the quaking of the trees, the continuous movement of clouds... this notion of spanda cradled me when I was very fragile of both body and mind.
In reconnecting to this book and this idea recently, I was also reminded of another text I've been rereading and contemplating lately - Artemis Iota in Crowley's Magick Without Tears. The idea of spanda or trembling in orgasm or in the sacred or metaphysical contexts of the I Ching - but what of Crowley's assertion that the nature of the male and female orgasms are different?
"The essential difference is indicated by that of their respective orgasms, the female undulatory, the male catastrophic." (Magick Without Tears, Ch. 15)
I started to think about all the different seeming dualities that stem from this assertion...
masculine vs. feminine
Catastrophic vs. Undulatory
an event vs. a state
a point vs. an ever-expanding circumference
Hadit vs. Nuit
Shiva vs. Shakti
Yang vs. Yin
...and wondering how they connect with Odier's idea that spanda or the sacred tremor is the state of nonduality... "the ardor of the burning fire of love that is consciousness of the absolute unity of all things."
If one thinks of this as two seperate forces conjoined into one, it may be a bit heteronormative. In male+female sex magick - the moment of the simultaneous orgasm contains both the catastophic and the undulatory in a combined force - only through union of the two is the one annihilated to the none.
The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect and not two; nay, are none!
(Liber AL I:45)
For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.
This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.
(Liber AL II:29-30
But what of the union of these forces within a single being? What about Baphomet or Ardhanarishvara?
This made me think again of the union of the microcosm and macrocosm as the union of male and female - the point and circumference. 5=6. I thought of the Star Ruby and Star Sapphire that the priest and priestess frequently execute before mass at CNL. While I am versed in both rituals & I believe that they each contain a balanced completion independently, I associate Liber 25 more with masculine and Liber 36 more with feminine qualities. The red of the ruby as the red of the priest's vestments, the reference to the phallus, the odd number, the microcosm/point/Hadit in contrast with the sapphire's blue as the vestments of the priestess, the reference to the maternal sign of Isis Rejoicing, the even number, the macrocosm/circumference/Nuit.
Through Work, it seems that individuals have potentiality to experience this 5=6 within themselves as well as through sexual union/magick... each informing and complimenting each other in different ways.
Crowley writes of himself in Confessions:
While his masculinity is above the normal, both physiologically and as witnessed by his powerful growth of beard, he has certain well-marked feminine characteristics. Not only are his limbs as slight and graceful as a girl's but his breasts are developed to quite abnormal degree. There is thus a sort of hermaphroditism in his physical structure; and this is naturally expressed in his mind. But whereas, in most similar cases, the feminine qualities appear at the expense of manhood, in him they are added to a perfectly normal masculine type. The principal effect has been to enable him to understand the psychology of women, to look at any theory with comprehensive and impartial eyes, and to endow him with maternal instincts on spiritual planes. He has thus been able to beat the women he has met at their own game and emerge from the battle of sex triumphant and scatheless. He has been able to philosophize about nature from the standpoint of a complete human being; certain phenomena will always be unintelligible to men as such, others, to women as such. He, by being both at once, has been able to formulate a view of existence which combines the positive and the negative, the active and the passive, in a single identical equation. Finally, intensely as the savage male passion to create has inflamed him, it has been modified by the gentleness and conservatism of womanhood. Again and again, in the course of this history, we shall find his actions determined by this dual structure.
I've thought about this a lot about this in my magical work over the last couple of years - incorporating/experiencing more masculine or active aspects in ritual and invocation has given dpeth to my Work and I find it very valuable. I am a profoundly feminine person - that will not change in this lifetime... but I do think through ceremonial, invocation, and certain nuances of sex magick a potential exists to cultivate the experience of "a view of existence which combines the positive and the negative, the active and the passive, in a single identical equation."
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