Symbols - What does heaven look like
Desert
I personally find deserts beautiful places, peaceful, quiet, often with interesting local flora and fauna. A place where you can gather your thoughts and rest your mind. Places of such silence and stillness, you often feel close to the spiritual world without needing to sit and meditate. It is also clear that they are also ideal places to have spiritual experiences, a form of sensory deprivation chamber with the added inducements of thirst and hunger – or in other words fasting – to help you along. So if you were in the old days ‘cast into the desert’, the purpose may have been to ensure you had a good prolonged taste of spiritual experience.
If, however, you see a desert in your dreams, visions, or hallucinations, the symbolism can be – rather ironically – the opposite of what one may think.
Sometimes it is clear that a desert is just that – a cell with no software – an empty place devoid of systems, but more often, it is a place of temptation because it is the place of the Intellect – the conscious mind and the scheming self.
Why? The desert is associated with the Sun and heat as well as animals such as the lion. All these are actually related to not just the creative force but the Intellect and rather ironically the block to spiritual experience. Spiritual input is cooling but spiritual output is warming hot energy, as such it implies an output of spiritual energy but not enough input.
To be symbolically cast into the desert is to be denied spiritual input.
Observations
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- Ancient Egyptian - Legends of Sekhmet
- Auden, W H - Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest
- Automatic writing and automatic drawing – a letter from Comfort to Mrs Newton Crosland
- Billy Joel - The River of Dreams
- Blake, William - Around Golgonooza lies the land of death eternal
- Blithe spirit - The Destroyed City
- Cirlot on deserts
- Cirlot on snakes and serpents
- Coehlo, Paulo - The Alchemist - The desert
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - The Night Scene
- Crowley, Aleister - Book of Lies - Dust Devils
- Crowley, Aleister - Book of Lies - The swan
- Eliot, T S - Four Quartets - 03 Burnt Norton V
- Eliot, T S - Hollow Men 02
- Exodus 16
- Flamel, Nicolas - Uraltes chymisches Werk A Eleazer 1760 3rd illustr.
- Genesis - Mad mad Moon
- Gentling the Bull – 01 Searching for the Bull
- Grieg - Peer Gynt Suite - Anitra's Dance
- Grieg - Peer Gynt Suite - Morning Mood
- Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - Sacred Grove
- Ibn El-Arabi - The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq - At Dhú Salam and the monastery
- Ibn El-Arabi - The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq - Halt at the abodes and weep over the ruins
- Jami - All that exists in the created universe is illusion
- Jami - Perfume of the Desert - Hidden behind the veil of mystery
- Jami - SALÁMÁN AND ABSÁL – from 01 The Story
- Jesus - Luke 4 - And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost
- Jung, C G - The Red Book - On the desert
- Led Zeppelin - Kashmir
- Lowell, James Russell - Whereto, in all our hearts, as to the sea
- Moses - Deuteronomy 2 - The Desert Years
- Moses - Exodus 3 - The Burning bush
- Nerval, Gerard de - Artemis
- Nizami - Laili and Majnun - 05
- Nizami – Makhzanol Asrar (The Treasury of Mysteries) – from The Third Discourse 01 On the changing world
- Omar Khayyam - The Rubaiyat - A Ruby kindles in the Vine
- Potanin - Kam out of body
- Ricardo from Mexico experiences divine love
- Rimbaud, Arthur - After the idea of the Flood had receded
- Rumi - Rubaiyat - There are no signposts
- Saadi - The Gulistan of Sa‘di – 18 from The Morals of Dervishes
- Saadi - The Gulistan of Sa‘di – 24 from The Morals of Dervishes
- Shelley, Percy Bysshe - Ozymandias
- Sting - Desert Rose
- Sting - Love is the Seventh Wave
- Suhrawardi - Mundus Imaginalis - The crimson archangel
- Tirrukural, the - Book 1 Love
- Verlaine, Paul - Dans l'interminable
- Yerka, Jacek and The Taupo Times - The Black Cloud