Rose Cross Meditation

Since I no longer have the Rose Cross painting that hung in my office for half a decade, I decided to draw a similar replacement to remind me of the 7-fold spirit nature of man and to not neglect my own spiritual practice. All of the images below are drawn or painted by me. The first image below is just my latest iteration of the rose cross, representing, among other things, the 7-fold nature of humanity :

Physical body (mineral)
Etheric body (plant/life body)
Astral body (animal/dream consciousness)
Ego or “I” (human)
Spirit Self – Manas
Life Spirit – Buddhi
Spirit Man – Atma

Rose cross
8/2021

This looks a lot like the pencil drawing above but it is smaller and does not have the 7-pointed stare or the flames at the end of the cross. They all take time to do. I am not going for realism with this type of work. It is more contemporary symbolism and color expression that act as aids to direct inner meditative experience and seeing

Quote from Occult Science posted on Southern Cross Review‘s 

Rose Cross, Stephen Hawks 2013

This image is from a decade earlier using Stockmar watercolor paints on thick paper.

I have tried to meditate on this Image off and on for quite some time. My experience, working with this image has taught me more about my own inner state than anything else. When in a conversation with Maria St. Goar I remember her saying that, for her, one of the roses kept flying or floating off; this is a paraphrase but the jist of the conversation stayed with me. My use of color in art is a step beyond what I actually experience inwardly on a regular basis. That is not to say I don’t have an active inner life or even some inner experiences of color, but there is a kind of leap I have to make in inner visualization to the outer artistic form. I am seeing through the darkness as though in complete void to perceive anything. It is the intuitive aspect of visual experience that I experience inwardly, the thought and feeling. I can ascribe direction and project geometrically into inner space. I intuit meaning first not stable static form of image, or even living image, except that it can never seem to be pinned down  and is in constant motion. When trying to meditate on the image of the rose cross, it is much more difficult than simply having one flower not want to conform to a patterned circle. Sometimes I join an earlier study with this meditation just to alleviate some of my frustration with the long, though persistent task of realization and revelation. I connect each rose through the seven pointed star. One of the things that I found fascinating about the mathematical relationship when trying to determine seven equidistant points  on a perfect circle was how the numbers looked in relation to each other. It seemed you could only approximate the degree on the circles curve. You could of course describe the point mathematically but had to make an approximate choice when actually marking it on the circle, or so it seemed to me. You could approximate in both directions and split the minute difference. This also seemed to me to come down finally to a choice. Another interesting phenomenon to me was the numerical relationship that the approximations had to each other, recycling numbers in a regular repeating pattern adjusted for each point.

https://www.anthroposophyforprisoners.org/inner-work/rose-cross-meditation/