Sacred openings and visualizing birth


Entrance to the Lomas Rishi Cave in India, 3rd c. BCE

In renowned German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s extraordinary Bubbles, the first volume of his larger Spheres project, Sloterdijk devotes enormous space the the impact of the feminine–its physiology and forms–to the formation of human knowledge. Images are plentiful in the book, and one of the images is that of the entrance to the Lomas Rishi Cave in india (page 274).

At 663 pages, Bubbles is a big book. In the section of the work where the image of the cave is found, Sloterdijk discusses the importance of cave imagery more broadly to human life and thought:

Mortals, those who are born, have their beginning and their end in caves of origin. One day people will even call for the entire horizon to become cave-immanent, and the phenomenal world will then have to become interpretable as an interior landscape (263).

All truth-seekers in metaphysical times are therefore returnees to the womb. They strive for what seems prima facie unattainable: they wish to tie the end of the search to the beginning of life and reverse birth through radical struggles against themselves. Who is the hero with a thousand faces if not the seeker who journeys out into the wide world in order to return home to his ownmost cave? The tales of heroic truth-seekers celebrate the womb-immanence of all being. Wisdom is the realization that even the open world is encompassed buy the cave of all caves

For Sloterdijk, a woman’s interior is a birth cave and a place of exit and entrance, but it is also a deep source of human knowledge.

Visualizing Birth has previously discussed the power of using cave images in preparation for birth as a rite of passage. See Cave Opening Visualizations. Like other cave openings and entrances, this entrance to the Lomas Rishi Cave in India provides those preparing for birth with an incredible image of a layered cave opening that even looks from the outside like the female anatomy of the vulva.

Cave openings are powerful images to look at and visualization in preparation for the opening that occurs during birth. Towards the end of her third trimester, a woman can imagine opening like a cave. Other Visualizing Birth images that are helpful in this way include visualizations of opening flowers. See: Blooming Flower Visualizations, (Video) Blooming Rose and Tessa Venuti Sanderson’s Golden thread breath and Blooming Rose Visualization for Dilation