Gazing Into Blue

In the symbolism of Hindu art, Krishna's body is the color blue. This blue color is signified by the seed syllable Shyam, another name for Krishna. The sound of this bija mantra expresses Krishna's boundless sky-blue essence. The color blue is the vibration of infinite beauty before it takes any form.

At the heart of Vaishnavite philosophy is the esoteric teaching that this formless blue essence has a transcendental form. This form is not composed of matter, but of pure mathematical symmetry, the mathematics of the void. It is from the algebraic symmetry of the vacuum that creation is generated from nothing, a teaching not only of ancient Indian seers but of modern quantum physics. And it is within the transcendental symmetry of pure mathematics that the body of Shyam crystallizes.

Just so, 11th Century Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen gazed into transcendental emptiness and saw the lineaments of a cosmic human form. She called this form the mysterious "blue man," as portrayed in one of her visionary mandalas. Was this the cosmic Christ? Was it Krishna? Are they one and the same?

In the final canto of Dante's Divine Comedy, guided by his muse, the feminine intuitive power Beatrice, the poet ascends to the beatific vision. He gazes through the empyrean of the celestial rose, which contains in tier upon tier of petaled consciousness all saints, enlightened souls and bodhisattvas.

As Dante's vision penetrates the void at the center of that flower, he sees three interpenetrating spheres that "circle the square": the quintessential symmetry at the heart of all matter and energy. With a final breath of transcendence, just before his vision falls back into finite mind, Dante sees the lineaments of a human body, composed not of flesh but of seeing itself, the very form of the formless, the Christ-all-ized vacuum. This vision is at the heart of Renaissance art and alchemy, "man the measure of all things," as expressed by Leonardo da Vinci's drawing, "Vetruvian Man."

The Eye that is humble enough to gaze into the center of the smallest atom, sees the womb of galaxies. The Eye that is courageous enough to penetrate the darkest radiance, sees the amethyst at the heart of No-thing, where zero engenders infinity. This Eye will not be satisfied by the impersonal. For there is a secret deeper than the Absolute: the secret of Hildegard's Blue Man, the secret of Krishna's sky-blue body, the secret of Christ's humanity conceived in the womb of the Mother Void. Beyond abstraction, beyond the Un-created, beyond the merely One, this Eye will gaze into the face of the Beloved.