Drawn from life
The Liquid Armature is a direct representation of my own three-dimensional inner world. It is the world I work from every time I sit with a student. Drawn from life the way a portrait is drawn from a face. I trained as a sculptor long before I trained as a therapist, and I have put about three hundred hours of that old craft into it.
What it is
The model depicts my inner experience on the path of spiritual evolution at one precise moment: right before I moved into abiding awakening, where I have lived ever since.
It exists to be used. It is a world map and a bridge between me and my students, and you can explore, ask questions, and compare your own inner experience to it. I use it to identify where I am and where another person is on their spiritual path.
The world of the map
Nearly everything in the Liquid Armature, apart from the crystals and the pyramid, is one line making different movements. The line is the form, the humanness. The crystals and the pyramid are the emptiness, the spiritness. Follow the line from the bottom and you will have walked the whole map.
It begins in the Basin. The pool is emptiness itself: the infinite potential, the alive nothingness, the empty shimmering dark, the pregnant void. This is the world before experience, where our spirit comes from and where it returns upon death. Out of it rises the Droplet: one particular spirit coming into form in a human body. The initial gold atoms are personal transmission, the first expression of spirit in the human world. They change shape and combine in different ways to form all of the world of experience, including the crystals and the pyramid. Transformed, they become human life force.
From the Droplet the line rises as the Central Channel, a solenoid tube of gold atoms spiraling up through the core: your life force. Where humanness first touches spirit, the Personal Transmission is born: your calling, your own suchness, longing joined with unconditional love. At the very tip, the current takes its final form as the Sword: Manjushri's sword, fierce love made into a physical, energetic blade, what you use to move through the world and be yourself.
Around this axis spirals the wooden armature, the structure of the personal self. At the start of a life, the energy moves from a straight line to a sine wave to a spiral. That spiral is the shape of the whole form. The wood is weathered and dense because a life is. It carries body sensations, emotions, thoughts, and memories.
In the gut sit six sets of nested circles: the six foundational events that first form a self, held in the body as raw somatic structure. This is the deepest, densest layer, where the stuckness lives. In the heart, the same six appear again, one level up. The gut holds what happened; the heart holds what it felt like.
Beside them hangs the Möbius, the emotional self, ringed by its four polarity pairs: fear with awe, shame with belonging, anger with love, sadness with joy. Each pair feels like opposites and behaves like one surface with a twist in it. The depth of sadness I became willing to feel became the depth of joy I was capable of feeling.
Above the heart, the line flares into the funnel: thirty-six rings and each ring is a self. The single self you feel yourself to be is not one thing. It is many selves, all interconnected, all feeding upward into one story. Freeze on a rock wall today and it may be a five-year-old who fell from a playground, still unhealed, doing the freezing.
At the crown, the story closes its circle. The Narrative Ring is the self you take yourself to be, one full cycle of a life: birth, life, death, emptiness, rebirth, with the end and the beginning at the same point. Eight Emotion Beads ride the ring, the grieving cycle turning around a still center of emptiness: fear, shame, anger, and sadness fall toward the center; awe, belonging, love, and joy rise out of it. When you go from nothing to existence, the first experience is awe.
Inside the ring is the Narrative Lens, the filter the story creates, looked through out at the world and in at yourself. It highlights whatever validates your story and screens out whatever would erode it. As you heal, it filters less. In time it becomes one small window among many.
Behind everything stand the three crystals: the Padparadscha at the gut, the Emerald at the heart, the Phenakite at the mind. They are the sensing organs of spirit, doorways between the spiritual world and the human one. Every facet is a perspective, and the crystal itself is the field in which paradox is held. Each crystal casts a cone of light and the cones together form a second armature, an armature of light, standing parallel to the wooden one.
Every element here has a fuller definition in my own words, waiting inside the model.
How the map is used
The map is terrain, not a ladder. There is no sequence of stages to climb and check off. There is a landscape, and you are somewhere in it. When my students explore the model and compare it with their own inner experience, what surfaces first is often a blind spot: a whole region they have never looked at, or have looked at only through the lens.
One example of the terrain. Trauma stored in the gut can first be seen from the Phenakite in the mind. Viewed from there, from many perspectives at once, the story loosens its grip. Once the mind lets go, the Emerald can reconnect you with the emotions that were missed when the wound was made. Then the Padparadscha lets the body finally feel what was underneath the words all along. The mind loosens, the heart reconnects, the gut feels. That is one path through the terrain, and it is not the only one. My work as a teacher is to reference my own history on the path, help you lean one way or the other, and make the complex and difficult terrain of spiritual awakening easier to navigate.
Whose world this is
The Liquid Armature is the shape of my inner world. The specifics of your inner world are unique to you. While everyone's inner world is unique they are all governed by the same laws. Selves are born and die, the grieving cycle turns continuously, emotions exist in pairs, and spirit moves towards consciousness. Seeing the shape of mine helps you find the shape of your own. The model is a map that helps you navigate and master your inner world.
An invitation
If the Liquid Armature stirs something in you, if it enlivens your own inner fire of truth, then I invite you to join me and our growing community in Satsang with Scott, sitting together in truth. We meet on Zoom every Sunday. It is donation-based. We want everyone to have the opportunity to take part, and the only prerequisite is your own commitment to truth and to your own spiritual evolution.