Bird Consciousness
Bird Consciousness
Bird consciousness represents the element Air. When the Dark Moon eclipses the Sun, fearful birds may drop from the skies.
Great wisdom is shown in such fear. Try to catch a feeling of this cosmic reality during a solar or lunar eclipse.
The kalahansa is ‘the bird outside of space and time’, who can descend into space and time. Hansa is Sanskrit for ‘swan or goose’. Various Hindu gods and goddesses use the swan as their Vahana (vehicle) for transportation.
The first spiritual beings descending into the ‘flesh’, became birds and created their own language, purer in sound then later developed earthy languages by mammals & humans. The ‘self-sacrificing’ pelican is the bird in Christian esotericism.
The Greeks regarded the swan-song, sang only at the very end of its life, as the most beautiful among birds. The death-song of the bird has its own level of meaning, because the lower degrees of the Mysteries lay at the portals of struggling with death, such as in Tchaikovsky’s end of act II in his Swan Lake ballet, or Saint-Saëns’s cello/dance the ‘dying swan‘:
This dance is about transforming a human into an angelic swan, by using the whole body. This form appeals not only to the eye, emotions and imagination, but penetrates the soul via the eye.
The Language of the Birds, or Green (vert <> ouvert) Language, the unintelligible tongue ‘of angels’, is the secret or hermetic language of esotericism, and occultism, where a single word has both an inner and an outer meaning. It is used by initiates.
They act like joking songbirds, jokes which few understand, because it is communicated in ‘gay speech’, a fool’s-like code of graphic and word symbols that have a different meaning then what is normally understood by ordinary people.
Human voice creating sounds of nature
They know that nature can manifest only through dualities. Their bird-like leaping is a sacred form of dance.
Read the book of David Ovason, The Secrets of Nostradamus. Nostradamus hid the meanings of his quatrains, by utilizing an "occult blind, bird, gay, or green" language and astrological code that was popular among 16th Century esoterists.
Plate from The Most Holy Trinosophia:
You see an ancient altar with flames burning, a base, made from two interlacing bronze snakes, supporting a single candlestick, and a bird, in flight. Just as the flames of altar and candle lift the Soul of Light upwards, so will the bird.
This crane-like bird has black feet, a silvery body, a red head, black wings and a golden neck. This describes a crane-like alchemical bird, whereby black is Saturn, silver is the Moon, red is Mars and gold being the Sun. The word geraneion(Gr) denotes crane as a bird and as a crane to lift things up.
The pine is always green and is thus seen as a symbol of longevity, as are cranes, as their long life and white feathers represent old age.
They also represent high status as the crane is regarded as
‘a bird of the first rank’ in the imperial hierarchy.
The 8 cranes represent also the 8 Immortals, legendary beings of Daoism, who attained immortality through their studies of nature’s secrets. Each represents a different condition in life: poverty, wealth, aristocracy, plebeianism, age, youth, masculinity, and femininity. Together they symbolize prosperity and longevity, because the number 8 is pronounced very similar to the word ‘expand’ as in wealth.
Combine the two and you experience the sacred crane dance, where you are lifted from your physical body, towards the stars! Way before the Sufi whirling dervishes, who dance this way to find inner stillness, there were the esoteric schools of dance in Italy, and the dancing Vedic god Shiva.
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The initiate Pythagoras saw dance as an attempt to replicate the movements of stars/planets through space. A neophyte recorded how he was allowed to leave the Earth’s surface: His guide lifted him, until he was floating beyond the Sun. "I saw globes spinning and earths gravitating towards my feet."
For all the fear he had felt, the experience recounted was a foretaste of what is now called Astral Travel – a journey into the starry world of Spiritual realms.
Through stillness or dance, we are ‘craned’ upward by invisible forces into the Spiritual realms. As denizens of planet Earth, which is in a perpetual dance of wobbling around its center, orbiting the sun, who is orbiting the center of the galaxy in a dance-like roller-coaster trajectory, we are already in motion. Thus, all meditation is conducted in dance.
The threats to this inner dance of silence are from inner and outer attacks, arising from past karma. These attacks (vasanas) rise in the mind, one after the other. Sanskrit literature compares them to ‘waves upon the sands’.
What is the nature of this crane-dance of life, in which we are slapped by waves of karma? It is the outer dance – whether it lifts us to the Heavens, or merely leaves us whirling in space – depending upon another dance: the inner dance.
This is the inner dance of the blood. The circulation of the blood is the thing which measures our inner dance: it is an inner sea, whose ‘beating waves’, like the vasanas, measure inexorably the ebb and flow of karmic imperatives.