Alex Grey and Sacred Anatomy by Daniel Mirante
“If we were to look closely at an individual human being, we would immediately notice that it is a unique hologram unto itself; self-contained, self generating and self-knowledgeable. Yet if we were to remove this being from its planetary context, we would quickly realize that the human form is not unlike a mandala or symbolic poem, for within its form and flow lives comprehensive information about physical, social, psychological and evolutionary contexts within which it was created.”
Dr. Ken Dychtwald from “The Holographic Paradigm” ed. Ken Wilber
Alex Grey, one of the most renowned visionary artists of the times, uses his art as a vehicle to explore and crystalise into representable forms journeys into subtle dimensions of transpersonal ecology and anatomy. He manifests wonderful, challenging and useful images to depict his exploration and understandings of the nature of Life, Consciousness and Being.
Alex Grey was born in 1953 in Columbus, Ohio. Since the early 1980s he has been exhibiting his work, and for the past 14 years has been an instructor in Artistic Anatomy at New York University. Grey is of the visionary artist and fantastic realist tradition, combining technical mastery with a vital and living creative explication of creative Logos. He is successfully marrying craft with inspiration, and at the same time reconciling some of the philosophical conflicts that currently exist between the vast archaic spiritual heritage of humanity with the contemporary modernist or reductionist narrative of the universe.
In much of his work, Alex depicts with stark realism the consensual, manifest realm of seemingly solid, dense 3-dimensional human bodies, with their extremely complex physiological systems. Alex spent several years employed in a medical school morgue preparing cadavers and studying the human anatomy ; therefore his paintings are anatomically extremely precise. It is this rigorous holding to observation, honouring the empirical, that lends credence for what is to come.
After representing the hidden and almost alienatingly unfamiliar biological processes, he takes us to what we often take to be the “real” boundary of our self – the dermic layer, the skin or surface appearance – and then beyond to the subtle electromagnetic, emotional, psychic and energetic aspects of our anatomy. This layering evokes descriptions of shamanistic healers x-ray vision.
These representations of life-force as it channels through and vitalises the denser maniferstations of energy reference the chinese meridian system and the cakra/nadis of Indian yogic physical practices. These images are a great educational resource and any student of healing wound find them worthy of study, they imply the seamless mingling of the psyche and the soma, and suggest the need for our Western medical system to begin to take the emotional and energetic body more seriously. Greys vision of the human psychic anatomy has been used by the Chairman of the Department of Alternative Medicine at the National Institute of Health in Washington, D.C. who uses it in his international slide lectures to illustrate this point.
Following on from this expanded anatomy comes representations of the archetyal aspects of the soma-psyche. Grey believes in cross-cultural communications as part of the spiritual globalisation process. His depictions of essence therefore have included the traditional imagery of the Buddha and Jesus as well as Gaia the Earth Goddess, and the Gnostic Sophia. His work is a journey into our essense, into divine and sanctified levels of our being. The question is, do we recognise ourselves in the reflections of these sacred mirrors ?
“Our subtle body is purified, uplifted and healed by visually absorbing deity and ideal forms. By projecting forms which are crystallized visions of spiritual illumination, Mystic art helps engineer higher mind states in the viewer.” asserts Grey. Indeed the experience of following the sequence of his Sacred Mirror paintings is one of being provoked into deeper awareness, and opening to healing growth.
The Sacred Mirrors series confront us with biological processes that are by nature transient phenomena. We are also shown how our emotional/energetic life is an inter-subjective territory, not something entirely private, fragmented or locked in our heads. We are also reminded that our growth experience exceeds the physical and personal, but includes the transpersonal, archetypal, and Divine. Alex enunciates that “Presence of Ultimate Reality absorbed through Mystic Art helps magnetize the viewer toward their own spiritual template and supreme identity.”
It is forgetting these farther reaches of human nature, that has caused such existential misery in the Western world. “Though the artist, their art and the viewer are all impermanent, art can provide evidence of contact with the universal creative force beyond time. Art has a function and a mission to interpret the world, to reveal the condition of the soul, to encourage our higher nature and awaken the dormant spiritual faculties within every individual.”
By integrating the physical, personal and transpersonal, and transcending in the spirit of love and acceptance several cultural and philosophical divides and historical epochs, Alex Greys work reveals the process of globalisation as more than just an economic phenomena, but potentially one of evolution into a new Pangaean consciousness through integration and the spirit of co-existence. “Artists at the dawn of the 21st Century have the unique opportunity to create a universal spiritual art. This art will be born from visions of the unity of all mystic paths and the re-emergence of sacred archetypes in the collective unconscious.”
Greys work holds to experiential empiricism – the pursuit of knowledge by observation and experiment. Because his work is about the nature of human life, Alex, in partnership with his artist wife Allyson, has explored first-hand the mysteries of death, sexuality, emotions, creativity, birth, and transcendent states. “The artists mission is to make the soul perceptible. Our scientific, materialist culture trains us to develop the eyes of outer perception. Visionary art encourages the development of our inner sight. To find the visionary realm, we use the intuitive inner eye: The eye of contemplation; the eye of the soul. All the inspiring ideas we have as artists originate here.”
In order to know such states of being, Grey practices entheogenic or spiritual techniques that serve as means to identify with various states of consciousness-being. Some of the observational tools Grey uses in his exploration of sacred anatomy is entheogens. Grey deserves credit for publicly acknowledging the role these powerful tools have in his artistic process. Greys entheogenic practice is deeply shamanic ; he understands them as culturally and personally integrative healing agents, and means of inspiration through the veils and sensitizing perception so that a clearer more refined awareness of the imaginal can develop.
Greys work emphasises our unity with the implicate divine energetic ground, the archetypal “inner world” that turns out to envelop, form and contain that which at first seems outer and objective. Each human being, as commesurate with this creative source, also share in this creative energy. We are each co-creators of an inter-subjective world, and our creative imaginations expressed through our arts are powerful facilitators of this healing and envisioning of the sacred essence of our world.
visit http://www.alexgrey.com
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The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
The chapel will provide a permanent public exhibition of Alex Greys most outstanding and widely appreciated works of transformative art, inspiring a vision of reverence for life while revealing our interconnectedness and encouraging the spiritual awakening of each individual.
To help support the Chapel, visit http://www.sacredmirrors.org