2015
Capricorn – Ascent, Peak and Descent
Image of the Month of Capricorn Capricorn is called the Mount. The experience of the mountain peak symbolises initiation, the summit of long and intense striving. After having reached the top, you have to return to the valley in order to share the essence of your experience and to guide other seekers. About eight weeks before creating the painting an image of the Sri Yantra and of beings of light descending onto Earth came to my mind. Later, while in Santa Fe, Argentina, I saw an image of Mount Aconcagua, the highest peak of the Andes and also outside the Himalayas. The Aconcagua is the seat of an etheric ashram of the Master of the Violet Flame and Violet is the colour for entering into the subtle worlds. Only two days before I started working on the painting the details arranged in the…
Sagittarius – The Upward Journey
Image of the Month of Sagittarius The archer with bow and arrow is the symbol of Sagittarius. Sagittarius is a fiery sign related to long journeys and, on the spiritual path, to the journey towards higher states of consciousness. The key-note is setting a goal and striving with focused attention. The central channel of the spine, the sushumna, is regarded as the seat of self-consciousness; it is the arrow in us. In Eastern symbolism the sacred sound OM stands for the bow with its string. You set yourself as an arrow on the bow and you string it by withdrawing deep within. With a stable mind you then shoot the arrow upwards. This is the upward journey of the soul. Meditating on the image of the month, I saw the lighted central column with the energy moving upward through the centres. I…
Exposition in Berlin
Exposition in Berlin
Scorpio – The Heart of the Turtle
Image of the Month of Scorpio The turtle is a symbol of the individual who turns inward towards subjective life. He withdraws into the cave of the heart and experiences the inflow of the light of the soul. The Vedic seers visualised the convex shell of the turtle as the upper part of the head and as the micro-version of the upper dome of space with the North Pole above the head. They saw the seven stars of the Great Bear in the region of the head centre. Similarly, the lower pole is understood as an inversed dome or a dish, in which the southern star called Sirius or the Dog Star is visualised in the human body near the tip of the spine. An image developed over some days in meditation: A turtle with a radiant heart appeared; it was the dome of space inside the head with the luminous…
Exposition of the "Images of Synthesis" in Berlin in 2016 / NEW: ludgerphilips.org now also in French and Spanish
From 28 December 2015 to 26 June 2016, you can see a large selection of the "Images of Synthesis" in the Art Café "Café Bilderbuch", Akazienstrasse 28, D-10823 Berlin, Germany. All the images will be presented together with an explanation of their symbolism, from the wisdom teachings, and the way they were produced. Warm thanks to the WTT group of Berlin for their help! If you cannot come to Berlin, you can do your own exposition by printing some of the images yourself or by getting them printed with an Art Printer. Here you find all the paintings in high resolution for free. The website ludgerphilips.org is now also available in French and in Spanish. A big thank you for their free help to Murat Cevik (Switzerland/Turkey), who realised this site and prepared the extension; to Helena…
Libra – From the Periphery to the Centre
Image of the Month of Libra The spiritual path is from objectivity to subjectivity and via the subtle planes to the reunion with the divine centre. In the movement through the zodiac, Libra stands for the complete unfoldment of objective life, where you can lose yourself in the “scales of the balance” or return to the centre of rotation, which corresponds to the centre of our existence. Objectivity is horizontal life, subjectivity is vertical life, and both need to form a right angle, a balance in the centre. When I was inwardly searching for the new image, nothing showed up until there was a window of time to start working on the image. I perceived a horizontal and a vertical line formed by galaxies. I started searching the “Google quarry” for elements to approach the inner image and…
Virgo – Mother Nature Protecting the Solar Child
Image of the Month of Virgo Occult symbolism is a way of describing subtle truths, which to a common understanding appear as contradictory or nonsense. An intuitive approach helps gain deeper insights. Virgo stands for the slow unfoldment of the soul on the spiritual path, secretly growing through crises in the womb of material life. The aspirant is compared to a child, whose soul / Sun silently develops a pure, virginal nature under the protection of Mother Nature. Nature again is a reflection of the spirit and thus is compared to the Moon, who is the ruler of Virgo on the subtle planes. Meditating on the painting for the month of Virgo, I received the image of a chasm at the bottom in which there was the soul and at the top the head of the Divine Mother. The chasm was like penetrating…
Leo – The Tree of the Universe and the Cosmic Teaching Principle
Image of the Month of Leo Leo is related to the heart centre; it is the heart of Spiritual Hierarchy. In the Vedic symbolism Leo is called the dog, meaning the Dog Star, Sirius. Our planetary Hierarchy is a replica of the Great White Brotherhood on Sirius whose Lord is Dattatreya. He is the teaching principle in the universe. The Eastern Puranas compare the space globes of the universe with the fruits of a banyan tree and the suns with the seeds inside the fruit. Many trees line the roads to the garden of God. This reminds me of the astronomical concept of superclusters of galaxies called Laniakea (Hawaiian ‘immeasurable heaven’) which look like flows or branches of huge trees. In the background of the painting I put a clustered photo of the known universe and super-imposed on it the…
Cancer – Narada’s Neptunian Music
Image of the Month of Cancer Sublime music can raise the consciousness beyond the mental to the level of the soul. This quality is related to Cancer. When music is properly used, it can open the awareness to cosmic planes of consciousness. Such experiences of oceanic consciousness are governed by Neptune. The cosmic teacher working through the power of divine music is called Narada. He is the cosmic musician whose thought, word and deed are musical. He bestows the word of the Lord with the sounds of his musical instrument, the Veena. Pondering on Neptune, an image came to my mind which I had seen some decades ago, a round stone with a face. I finally found it googling – it was the famous “Mouth of Truth”, a stone face from an ancient Roman fountain probably representing Oceanus. I used it…
Gemini – The Messenger of Light
Image of the Month of Gemini Gemini is ruled by Mercury, the Greek Hermes; he is the Lord of Speech. Gemini is related to the vocal cords and Visuddhi, the throat chakra. Through the vocal cords, the air connects the inner with the outer space. The word is expressed through our breath by the messenger, symbolized by Mercury. In meditation, the throat centre is also the entrance into the element of space called Akasha in the East. The doorway of Gemini is symbolized by the two pillars of the sign ?, representing the polarity of seeming opposites or the dual nature of the mind. The colour of the Gemini and the throat chakra is described as a shade of green which produces blue; it has a great healing effect. The crystals of copper sulphate give an idea of this colour. In this image, you see…
Taurus – The Bull and the Lingam
Image of the Month of Taurus The lingam is a fundamental symbol of creation, of the primary form emerging from the formless state. The expression of the divine Will is like a spark on the background of boundless blue. It has six projections from its centre, the six dimensions, giving the form of a double pyramid, which is also understood as a form of the lingam. The divine Word comes forth through the vibrations in space which are compared to the roaring of the bull of Shiva. In Taurus, the constellation Rohini known in the West as Aldebaran is considered as the Eye of the Bull or the point of utterance of the divine Word. This eye is located in us in the third eye on the forehead. In the temples consecrated to Shiva the Lord in the form of a lingam should be seen through the horns of the…
Aries – The Ruler of the Solar Dynasty
Image of the Month of Aries The earliest legends of the history of India mention two dynasties, the “race of the Sun” and the “race of the Moon”. The Solar Dynasty of the “Sons of the Sun” was the first ray royal dynasty, to which Lord Rama belonged. Master Morya, who is of fiery nature, belongs to the Solar Dynasty and is its last representative. He is the Master of the sun sign Aries and represents the Fire on our planet. For this painting I used the photo of a huge solar eruption and one of the crescent earth to symbolize the descent of the Sons of the Sun onto our planet. In the background I created the path of descent and spheres of blue and red indicating the process of reception. At the bottom I placed a picture of Master Morya and merged two crowns for his headwear, with a solar…
Pisces – The Tablet of the Universe
Image of the Month of Pisces In Eastern wisdom, the content of space is called Akasha. The impressions of the past cycles of life are recorded in the ‘Akashic records’, a kind of subtle photography. In ‘Spiritual Astrology’, Pisces represents this ‘tablet of the universe’ on which an initiate can read the past, present and future of the whole creation. Pisces also preserves the information about the human frame and its relationship with the frame of the cosmic man, which is hidden in the depths of our consciousness. To illustrate the opening of the sacred content of space with its subtle records, I used an image of the stained glass windows of a Gothic cathedral, which I transformed and duplicated. For the cosmic man I extracted from an Indian painting the face of Ishvara, the Master…
Aquarius - Apollo and the Song of Light
Image of the Month of Capricorn On a very subtle plane, colour and sound converge and become one. This plane is related to Aquarius and to a supra-cosmic musical intelligence whom the Vedas call Vena the Gandharva. The Vedas say, he merrily sings the “song of light”. The Greek Apollo is no other than Vena; through his influence the sound- and light principles of the higher planes are expressed in identical scales. Meditating on these correspondences, an image arose in me of Apollo with a musical instrument super-imposed on his face and light pouring down from above. For the painting I chose a black and white photo of a head of Apollo and converted it into light yellow. I found the picture of a beautiful classical instrument, the “Viola d’Amore” (Viola of Love). It is used like a violin…