Thanks to Nico, Terry (wherever you are) and Arthur for posting this wonderful interview.

Two friends and I sit by the fire together on the full moon.This month the full moon coincided with Dia de Los Muertos which falls just after Halloween, which is its turn replaced the more ancient Samhain. In most cultures marking this particular turn of the year, the veil between the worlds is thought to be thinnest, allowing easy contact with the ancestors.

So we welcomed the ancestors to our fire and we listened, pads and pens in hand.

My first guest was a very tall thin woman with bobbed hair and elegant clothing from the 1930's. I asked her what we needed to do to prepare for the coming transition. Her response:

Just release it all - let go - and you'll be provided for. Everything is already there but you don't see it. There is enough if you believe there is enough. Only the ones who do not believe there is enough will not have enough.

We have always provided and we will continue to provide if only you can see what it is we are giving.

You are facing in the wrong direction. Face the sun and the sun will give. The cycle goes on even into another phase: a phase of forthrightness, of courage, of listening, of giving, of patience and of generosity.

Your job is to give back what has been given to you. Offer up your gifts to the sun. What you worship you become. Become light. Transform those around you through the power of light and love, and laughter.

Have no expectations, have no preconceptions - they will only cause pain.

The new phase will be a relief. The way you live now is so much harder.

It will be like getting off the train and sitting in the meadow.

Relax, release, regenerate.

Our second meditation brought a truly venerable guest to me: Ananda Mayi Ma, whose picture graces my altar. She stood quietly until I asked a question about my yoga practice, which I put many hours into at this time of year over the past three years, but haven't this year. Is it enough, I asked? She replied:

The practice is enough. Nothing more is needed.

Sitting.

Being present.

Breathing,

Waiting patiently.

It is enough.

Practice is always, every moment of every day.

Remembering god, remembering the spark of god in everything, feeling god in you and seeing god around you.

It is in the eyes. Look into the eyes when you speak and the god in you will speak to the god in others.

Become god. We are all god.

OM.

OM.

OM.

Breathe in the present.

Breathe out the past to create the future.

In - out

In-out

Every breath creates past, present and future.

I am between the breaths.

I am you.

OM.

OM.

OM.

You may call me Mother.


As we sat waiting once more, I noticed my friends busy writing while I still stared at the fire. Then a figure rose from the flames, a fire woman, flaming clothing, flaming hair - fierce, frightening.

The fire cures the clay. You are clay. You are earth. If the earth burns, the clay will be hard enough to hold the water.

If the earth is to go on, we will be waiting.

We will hold you as the fire of transformation sears you.

Everything changes. Hold on to nothing

no thing

no idea

no plan

no hope

no earth

no sky.


I am the Queen of Fire.

Kali

Ereshkigal

Hellfire

leading to

purification

strength

dignity

power

wisdom

en LIGHT enment.

Called or uncalled, I am with you.

Check it out: The Crazy Wisdom of Ganesh Baba: Psychedelic Sadhana

I recently presented a version of this paper at the Science, Wisdom and the Future Conference here in San Luis Obispo.

Ganesh Baba’s Cycle of Synthesis:
a blend of ancient wisdom and modern science


Abstract: Swami Ganeshananda was a 20th century Indian yogi and scientist whose life’s work is illustrated a “simple” diagram he calls the Cycle of Synthesis. Ganeshananda’s theory postulates four analogous fields in a unified field theory, combining Einstein’s idea of a four dimensional space-time continuum with C.G. Jung’s notions of the collective unconscious and archetypes in a framework based on Immanuel Kant’s premise that a set of categories can encompass all thought, and his own orally-transmitted, experience-based understanding of the ancient science of vibratory chemistry, Tantra, and its philosophic counterpart, Sankhya.

Indian wisdom says that when the student is ready, the teacher will come. The day Swami Ganeshananda, or Ganesh Baba, came into my life, I was not ready. It was Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1979, I had two small children and a ramshackle country house to look after, and I was not looking for a teacher. So, waiting in line, to meet the elderly gentleman my friends brought from India, I was completely unprepared for sense of recognition I felt when our eyes met. I never imagined that anyone’s hand could feel so familiar or a face could be as recognizable as my own in the mirror. But then, it was so.

His upcoming cataract surgery in California allowed us three days together. I was eager to spend as much time with him as possible and he tried to teach me as much as he could in the time we had. In the end, I spent three years rather than three days in close contact with Swami Ganeshananda, but the understandings I gained the first three days are the ones that still serve as the lens through which I see life.

Ganesh Baba, formally Shri Mahant Swami Ganeshananda Saraswati or Giri, (c.1885 – 1987) carried several lines of teaching. In fact, he called himself a follower of every religion and a student of every science. Prime among these is the Lahiri line of Kriya Yoga. Lahiri Mahasaya and his followers taught householders a streamlined version of yoga, which until then was only practiced by monks and renunciates. The Kriya yogis modernized yoga and emphasized its scientific nature. Like Theosophy, Kriya, or “central action” yoga, rose from the fertile soil of the Bengali Renaissance, a social reform movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries centered in Calcutta, characterized by the synthesis of Indian and British culture.

Ganesh Baba’s other primary lineage is the western tradition of empirical science, as revered in secular early 20th century Calcutta as anywhere in the Western world.

By the time I met him, Baba was well into the sanyasin, or renunciate, stage of his life. He was a wandering monk, a sadhu. He left behind his family and work, his name and his history decades before coming to America. The stories he told of his past were teaching stories, not meant to be taken literally. We never knew his real age or his background before his renunciation, but I saw for myself that he spoke the language of any scientist he met. The Indian sage says, “A guru is like a tree. A tree provides fruits and nourishment, shade and protection from inclement weather, dry branches for fuel and the leaves, thatching material for the hut, but if you dig the roots, the tree will die.”

Ganesh Baba told me he was the oldest son of a middle class Bengali family, born at the height of the British Raj. He attended English-speaking schools, where he acquired an impeccable Victorian Indian accent and perfect flowing handwriting, and then university in Calcutta where he studied physics and attended the lectures of many the great physicists of the time: Einstein, Bohr, and Planck. The psychologist C.G. Jung came to Calcutta, too. Many of the ideas that shape modern thought were born in those years: relativity, quantum mechanics, the unconscious mind. Ganesh Baba embraced the new views enthusiastically.

Then, in his mid-fifties, Baba had an awakening which led him to abandon his secular life. For the next thirty or forty years, he tried to synthesize his scientific viewpoint with his spiritual path.

The Cycle of Synthesis

Beyond the inordinate grace of showing up in my life at all, the greatest gift Ganesh Baba gave me is the Cycle of Synthesis (COS). A Sufi word, ta’wil, wherein a powerful archetypal image unfolds greater and greater truths over time, best describes my experience with this extraordinary drawing. In symbolism, the closest Western counterpart to ta’wil, meaning is assigned to an image by the mind; with ta’wil, the image reveals its own meaning.

Even the name of the diagram is a succinct version of its central thesis: the COS is a continuous cycle of opposites becoming one another. Two processes are synthesized: the reversal of polarities (pulsation), and continuity, or infinite wholeness. In India, such a diagram is called an akhanda mandala, a centered circle encompassing the entire universe.

It is in the nature of such a diagram to evolve, taking many forms, adapting to the understandings each new viewer brings to it. What remains stable is its numerological and conceptual basis.

This version of the Cycle of Synthesis from one of Ganesh Baba’s unpublished notebooks:




The following version of the diagram, which cites some of the its historical sources, was created specifically for this article:





The COS describes a cosmos in which matter is created out of consciousness and evolves through Darwinian and “conscious” evolution back into pure, formless consciousness. The Western scientific worldview is opposite; from the Western perspective, matter and sense perceptions are primary; only what can be proven is true or real. Creation begins when matter comes into existence at the bottom of the diagram. The generally accepted Western understanding of what is real encompasses a short arc of the great cycle illustrated by the COS.

In the Cycle of Synthesis, Cosmic Consciousness, pure, formless, and subtle beyond human understanding, has no existence except through contrast; yet through contrast, it iterates into the fractal world of rainbows and musical scales we perceive as reality. As the frequency of the vibrating colors and tones decreases and their density increases, the world we know condenses – through the continuum of Kantian categories – into forms recognizable to our senses.

This “upside-down” view of the universe was not only accepted by humanity through most of history and by most indigenous cultures, but also, from the Greeks to the Founding Fathers, even Western thinkers gave primacy to some form of the divine in the cycle of creation and evolution until very recently--general acceptance of a material-based view of creation and evolution came well after Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation of the death of God.

When Cosmic Consciousness becomes aware of itself, the first form, Cosmic Intelligence, emerges. Intelligence, the most abstract level of existence, is the realm of Plato and Jung’s Archetypes, of the most basic and primal of the patterns that inform existence.

Intelligence then reflects and refracts into aspects and Cosmic Mind, an infinite series of perspectives, is formed. Then Cosmic Life, the idea of change, emerges, as each of the perspectives takes on a life of its own. Once there is Life, there are beginnings and endings, so Time comes into existence. Time moves on, creating Space, which in turn condenses into Energy and finally to Matter, each a more dense, more fixed, yet more diversified form of its progenitor.

The visible palpable universe of matter and energy is only a topographical expression of the space-time continuum in which space is the weave and time is the weft. It is a 4-dimensional continuum in which matter/energy is playing its dance of evolution in the theatre of the Cosmic Space-Time Continuum.
But what of the biological, the psychological and the spiritual components of the Cosmos? As a matter of fact, what of man? What about life, mind, intelligence and consciousness, the second half of the primordial octave of creation of the Cosmos? (Ganeshananda, undated handwritten notes in possession of the author)

Time creates the midline in the diagram; Baba calls it the “mirror” in his version above. Above the midline is the timeless world, and below, the world governed by time. The physical world is a reflection of the timeless, eternal world. As Swami Amritananda of Devipuram once remarked, “One cannot deny that psyche controls the physical. Every time you stand up, you overcome gravity with the mind.”

But the COS is a cycle of synthesis: every part of it is in constant flux, constantly becoming its own opposite. So, once created, consciousness-in-the-form-of-matter (known by so many names: the spark of divinity, the inner light, the sacred in the commonplace, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Christ, the conscience; the penultimate quantum of the penultimate field) continues around the cycle, becoming subtler and subtler, developing subtler and subtler understandings, until it evolves back into undifferentiated Consciousness.

The role of the human

Along with the divine (and its ordinary correlate, magic), the Western perspective discards another understanding basic to most earlier world-views: correspondence, the idea expressed by the alchemical aphorism, “As above, so below.” A quotation from Plotinus, the 3rd century CE  Greek Neo-Platonist philosopher, illustrates the perspective:

It is first of all necessary to make the organ of vision analogous and similar to the object to be contemplated. Never would the eye have perceived the sun if it had not first taken the form of the sun; likewise, the soul cannot see beauty unless it first becomes beautiful itself. And every man must make himself beautiful and divine in order to attain the sight of beauty and divinity. (Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful)

In a theurgistic cosmos, meaning is conserved when greater patterns are repeated in lesser forms. In the COS, the pattern set up by the creation of matter out of Consciousness and its evolution back to Consciousness is repeated throughout the cosmos, and therefore in the human being, whom the Upanishads say is the “mean between the macrocosm and the microcosm.”

The COS is divided into four increasingly subtle fields with the inertio-gravitational at the bottom, followed by the electro-magnetic, the bio-psychic and, at the top, the most subtle, the intello-conscious. The four fields are reflected in the human form as the physical, biological, psychological and spiritual phases of our existence. Evolution continues beyond the Darwinian physical and biological phases into the psychological, and ultimately the spiritual phase. When free will enters at the psychological level, evolution becomes a conscious choice. Ganesh Baba advocates Kriya yoga with its balanced approach to all four phases as the ideal path of conscious evolution.
   
A very brief exploration of the numeric basis of the Cycle of Synthesis

    In ancient, indigenous and most non-Western thought systems, numbers are more important as qualities than they are in counting. Using the language of electronics, and the words Consciousness and Spirit, and Nature and Matter, interchangeably, Ganesh Baba explains how the quality of twoness, or polarity, informs the diagram and the cosmos:

Nature is negative [as in the negative pole on a battery]; power is based on the principle of potentiality and polarity. There must be a higher and lower potential, a source and a sink, to generate power, and Nature happens to be that sink. The Source is at the higher potential and the sink at the lower end of the creative inflow--Involution [or creation]. The higher potential, the Source, is positive and is termed Spirit; and the lower potential, the sink is logically the negative counterpart of the positive source at infinity, Cosmic Consciousness. Their play of power or energy is the pulsation, or alternating, interpenetrating, vibration of the positive and the negative in their innumerable proportions and modes, permutations and combinations. (Ganeshananda, handwritten notes)


    The cosmo-numerological basis of the Cyce of Synthesis runs thus:

1 + 1 = 2      One becomes two when Consciousness becomes aware of itself.
1 + 1 + 1 = 3     Once two exist, there is a third: the first, the second, and both.
2  x 2 =  4    The two also squares itself, creating four,
2 x 2 x 2 = 8     and cubes itself, creating eight.
ad infinitum    Once an octave exists, it iterates endlessly.

The COS is always true to its numerological base: it is a multi-dimensional whole divided in two, four, and eight. (The element three, the number of creation, is implied in the versions I chose to include here but explicate in others.)

Needless to say, a short paper like this can barely scratch the surface of the complex system the Cycle of Synthesis describes. In addition, the drawing itself reveals more and more information as one studies it. In thirty years since I first saw it, the COS has slowly opened doors to greater understandings of the processes of creation and evolution, to the functioning and structure of the world around and in me, than I ever could have imagined. Perhaps it will do the same for you.



Amritananda, Swami. Personal interview. February 16, 2008.

Ganeshananda, Swami. c. 1960 – 85. Unpublished notes and manuscripts in possession of the author.

Plotinus. An Essay on the Beautiful. Tr. Taylor, Thomas. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/29510

Press release

This press release took me all day to write, but in the late afternoon it went out to over 60 local media outlets. I got two responses right off: an automated response from a reporter who's in Morocco for a month (sounds nice!) and a call from another who wondered if we might hire her nephew. I think we'll get some buzz out of it though.

Press release:

June 16, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts: Tom Neuhaus tom@sweetearthchocolates.com
Joanne Currie joanne@sweetearthchocolates.com
Eve Neuhaus eveneuhaus@gmail.com

Sweet Earth Chocolate Shop Grand Opening July 11

Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates announces the Grand Opening of its first retail shop on July 11, 2009, 11 AM, at 1445 Monterey Street, San Luis Obispo, four doors down from its present home above Splash Café-Artisan Bakery. The shop will carry an expanded assortment of their award-winning organic, fair trade chocolates as well as chocolate memorabilia, art, and cocoa-butter-based body-care products.

Chocophiles of every taste will find something to love in Sweet Earth’s broad range of delicacies — from the deepest of rich, aromatic dark chocolates paired with complex and exotic flavors (try the cinnamon ancho Aztec Truffle or the pineapple coconut Piña Colada), to the playful array of chocolates on sticks. New items also include creamy chocolate and peanut butter fudge, classic cherry cordials, and a line of vegan truffles.

Visitors enter the shop through a magical glass door created by San Luis Obispo artist Frank Zika set into a fanciful jungle of painted cacao vines. Inside, beautifully displayed chocolate is offset by bright hand-painted furniture and an eclectic assortment of books, china, tins and tools, all related to chocolate, from a 1943 ad (“U.S. Troops Fight on Chocolate Diet”) to a two-faced Peruvian drinking vessel. On the walls, continent-shaped collages display photos of chocolate production around the world.

As always, profits from sales directly benefit cacao farmers in Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire through Project Hope and Fairness; and, as always, Sweet Earth Chocolates are made from carefully selected beans grown in Fair Trade certified co-ops in Peru and Dominican Republic and are certified organic by CCOF. Sweet Earth is a local, artisan business and its chocolates will continue to be produced by hand on the second floor of Splash Café. Tours are available.

Tom Neuhaus, chocolatier and founder, learned his craft in Switzerland and from Jacques Torres at Cornell’s Hotel School. A professor in the Food Science and Nutrition Department at Cal Poly, Neuhaus also runs the student enterprise project, Cal Poly Chocolates. He travels to Africa regularly to work directly with the people of the cacoa-growing villages Project Hope and Fairness sponsors.

Contact numbers: Sweet Earth Chocolates (805) 782-9868
Joanne Currie (805) 544-7759
Tom Neuhaus (805) 441-6727
Eve Neuhaus (805) 441- 6739

Lately I've been spending a good portion of my time accumulating an eclectic assortment of chocolate things for the shop. Most of the stock is here now, and I've stopped looking for more for the time being.

Yesterday I ordered some postcards of old chocolate ads, framed three gorgeous chocolate trading cards

and an ad from a 1943 Life Magazine ("U.S. Troops Fight on Chocolate Diet"), and I cleaned the Godiva truffle trays that go in our big case. We call that case the Cadillac because that's what it is, an old one but a Cadillac nonetheless: sleek, curved glass and mirrors, gold trim. It's from St. Augustine, Florida. The other case is the Chrysler. In its previous incarnation it was a bakery case in a diner in North Hollywood. It has fins.

The new floors in the shop look great and the carpenter is working on the cabinets.

We're planning to open July 6!

Frank Zika brought the new door over today so we could see it in place and choose between several inserts. He does amazing work!

We chose this pattern but in a light azure blue. This is California, after all.

While he packed up, I took a picture of the interior paint. One wall is a rich (what else?) chocolate brown.

Here's the shop as it looks today. Its last incarnation was as part of a furniture store that took up much of the block. I've done drawings for what the front will look like - a new glass door and a radically different paint job - but it won't be done for another few weeks.

To get our plans okayed by the health department we're adding an ADA-compliant bathroom, a three bay sink and a mop sink, replacing the old carpet with linoleum (the expensive kind, too - they wouldn't accept our lower cost choice), putting in new wiring and a new ceiling, air conditioning and more.

This will be the retail area. It's small, just 20 x 30, I think. Behind the interior window there's larger area where we'll be doing packaging, shipping and storing the chocolate.