This box was a gift for a Yoga teacher who espouses the idea of “cultivating” found in sutra I.33 (translation by B.K.S. Iyengar):
“Through cultivation of friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference to pleasure and pain, virtue and vice respectively, the consciousness becomes favorably disposed, serene and benevolent.”
The premise is a synthesis of two concepts: prayer flags that send forth prayers and wishes every time they rustle in the breeze, and a reclaiming of Pandora’s Box as a positive force, radiating blessings and auspicious thoughts every time the box is opened.
The graphic on the lid is the Sanskrit word, hrd, which can be translated as “heart of the soul”. Raising the lid is synonymous with opening access to the heart of the soul. As the lid is lifted, the four sides/panels descend earthward (perhaps not as elegantly as prayer flags fluttering in the wind, but along those lines). The four panels represent four paths of yoga: karma, action; jnana, knowledge; bhakti, devotion, and astanga, the eight limbs of yoga.
In the middle of these four panels is an altar-like platform highlighting the Sanskrit word, AUM. The abstract design of the word allows it to face north, south, east, and west simultaneously. Each of the four panels flips open to its left so that eight panels surround the altar of AUM, each indicating the eight limbs/petals of astanga yoga in Sanskrit.
I attempted to use the vocative case of each of the Sanskrit nouns (paths and limbs) so that direct address (“O trees, O nature”) would become an aural invocation, expressing a profound wish of “belonging” for all living beings, by complimenting and complementing the vibrational force of the primordial sound AUM.
