It is with great honor that Lila is able to present Maura Holden’s latest finished work, ‘Divisions of Neptune‘, accompanied by her short story ‘The Air Speaks‘, a work of mytho-prose reflective of some of the originating feelings and meditations contained within this unique painting.

The Air Speaks

By Maura Holden

I was a serving maid to the queen, now I am soon to be no more. I gaze into the last hours of my life as though upon dreams sliding between all places and times:

The king is dead. We prepare to accompany his mummy into the earth, and, it is hoped, the afterlife. The entire court is present, dressed as gods and celestial dancers. The royal procession swarms toward the funerary complex, an underground replica of the palace, and the splendorous oiled arms of the queen, stacked with bracelets, manipulate a feathered fan for the final time…. With the sounding of the conch shell, the ibis-headed god raises his quill and opens his beak, “What openeth the kingdom of the dead into Heaven are the two hands of the god whose name is hidden…”

Winged standards rise and fall, jeweled canopies sway, and watery silk flutters. Harnessed monkeys and squirrels chatter and paced on leather leashes. I clutch the ivory handle of the queen’s mirror in a white-knuckled hand, while beside me Her Majesty walks like a soldier, devoutly reciting the madness of the age. At the edge of the pit, she turns to me and speaks:

“Say the rabbis, ‘have we not heard it said that a serving maid on the Red Sea was vouchsafed a greater vision than Ezekiel?’ It is rumored that suffocation brings great visions.”

“Yes, my lady,” I say, but gazing into the sky, wishing to see only it.

All — faithful, unfaithful and unknowing — climb down the cobbled staircase, into the earth. Beneath our painted feet, each step is meant to represent a planet: first Saturn, then Jupiter, then Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury. The hills of my childhood were green hills, with cardamom and rose-berry…

We swarm through the gilded halls, and take our places. The shaman blows the conch shell again, and hundreds of men fling baskets of heavy clay onto the rooftops above us. Throughout the afternoon the ceilings rattle ever more faintly. Our muffled voices merge into a rippling buzz, scribbled on the heavy black air.

In the queen’s chamber I lie beside Her heaving royal breast, and I began to see: a cloud of misty fire burns away to unveil the painful solar light. We’ve been buried in the heart of the sun, and we burn.

The sun explodes, hurling forth two firebirds. They appear as two, and yet they’re of an unlimited number: male and female, each different, each the same, having many minds and bodies in constant transformation.

They fly past the known planets, and discover others that are unknown; the goldsmiths add extra branches to the menorahs, and the astronomers expand the charts. The firebirds pass stars and galaxies beyond counting. At the limit of space, they break through a shell, and burst out of a great sea and into a new world.

The strange new atmosphere of this world transforms them into human creatures with winged heads. Without moving, they travel to secret dimensions and visit long forgotten and unborn events. In this bright realm, there is no time, and the two that are many are One…

As the sun sinks, our prayers taper into silence beneath the thickening clay. Black flames consume the four letters of the unspeakable name. The alphabet lies in a heap. At sunset the men stamp down the earth and, impressed with thousands of footprints, the clay shimmers under the rising moon.

I watch the moonrise, for, divided from myself, I am at One with the All. I am sand and air in transit through the neck of an hourglass. Downward flows the lament of heavy life: persons, events, debts paid and unpaid, energy and joy turned to agony and waste. Upward fly the winged eyes: airy thought swelling into bright ether. I am the air. I am the immortal breeze that ruffles leaves and hair. I am everywhere and always: before, after, within and beyond: beyond service, beyond kingdoms, beyond deserts, beyond religions, arcing across the domes of cosmic shells. In airless darkness, I am endless light.

Originally published in Art of Imagination ‘Inscape’ magazine

The name Ernst Fuchs has become celebrated as a seminal influence upon contemporary visionary art, having inspired such luminaries such as Brigid Marlin, HR Giger and Alex Grey.

Many design motifs in these and other contemporary artists’ work, such as transparent jewel-like forms, seraphic architectural curves, and halo-like light effects depicting spiritual energies, can be traced to Fuchs, whose art has passed through many phases, and through which he has comprehensively mined the secret history of mystical arts.

Fuchs is a mythical artist, belonging to another world-age. In this culture of distraction and dissipation, the sheer abundance, range and diversity of the Fuchs oeuvre – enough to fill a museum – seems miraculous.

And yet despite the intensity of peoples admiration (and possibly in equal measure, their dislike) of Fuchs art, he is virtually unknown in the contemporary art canon. Why such an artist, of such technical virtuosity and thematic intrigue, is virtually ignored outside of Vienna and the Internet, whilst Dali, Ernst, Giger and Alex Grey have found popular appeal, is an enigma.

My theory is this : Ernst Fuchs work has not found broad appeal because the religious, gnostic elements richly presented in his work are alienated from our current culture. Whist the new age can ‘read’ the psychedelic, eastern iconography of Alex Grey, or vicariously enjoy the biomechanical nightmares and fetishistic sexuality of HR Giger, Fuchs is more difficult to relate to. Fuchs explores the realms of Zoroastrian, Hebrew and Gnostic Christian revelation, which is still highly esoteric, and capable of stirring uncomfortable feelings.

The art of Fuchs forces an examination of the Western roots of spirituality, affirming revelatory spiritual power within Christianity. In the wake of Darwinism, and the world wars this has not been a popular position. And yet Fuchs himself had to work through the perplexities and obscurities, and the devestation of post-war Europe, to find the shining pearl hidden in the mire of matter. This spiritual journey is very much evident in the transformations of his subject matter across the development of his ouvre.

We will see upon examination that his work is a long climb out of nightmarish despair. His early picture cycle, Die Stadt (the City) depict cross sections of torturous, rent bodies in reductionistic, grid-locked environments. In his ‘Bikini Atoll’ series, created in 1947, with names like ‘The Threatened World Egg’, refer to atom bomb testing and the nightmare of nuclear holocaust. painted within an optimistic post-war climate, “aroused ill will… that this frightening, threatening style of painting was totally unnessesary”.

In 1948, the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism was founded, together with Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter, Rudolph Hausner and Anton Lehmden. This period involves a quantum leap in Fuchs technique, under the influence of Albert Paris Gutersloh, who laid heavy emphasis on the technique of the Old Masters. The most bizzare images were created during this period, a mixture of liturgic and demonic imagery, cruxifiction scenes teeming with nazi’s and anti-Christ elements.

Fuchs then spent 12 years in Paris, living in impoverished conditions. During this time his art begins to incorporate alchemical elements, magical symbology, and new energies. The paintings begin to ‘light up’ from the inside. The artist turned to Catholism and the writings of Meister Eckhart, and began purifying himself spiritually. This involved a pilgrimage in 1957 to the Benedictine Monastery Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion where he made paintings on religious themes such as Moses and the Burning Bush, leading to a commission to paint three altar paintings on parchment, the cycle of the Mysteries of the Holy Rosary (1958-61), for the Rosenkranzkirche in Hetzendorf, Vienna. The paintings were unfortunately ill-received, the staid congregation unable to relate to the energies of the paintings.

Back in Paris he set himself the monumental task of ‘apprehending the gigantic forces that move the Cosmos’. By his own admission he consciously and intentionally evoked and channelled spirits into his work, which resulted in the glistening, crystalline Cherub cycle, which still has a contemporary feel. In my judgement the summit of his oeuvre were the incredible, graphite masterpieces ‘Job and the Judgement of Paris’, ‘The Triumph of Christ’ and ‘The Anti-Laokoon’. These works not only represent but testify to the triumph of Eternal Spirit transcending the realms of chaos and sin ; “Overcoming death by Prophesy” as Fuchs puts it.

In the depiction of mythic realities his work is eminently traditional to the highest degree, a form of traditionality that aims toward the roots of history itself, the verschollener Stil, ‘hidden prime of styles’ as he calls it, which occupies the rubric of timeless ’sacred’ or ‘holy’ art. Fuchs reports a vision of a vast angelic spirit gradually unfolding the book of art in which all the styles of art were revealed as their time came round. Each real style was revealed as being in its way sacred or holy.

In a sense, Ernst Fuchs, and artists working on similar currents, have been responsible for guarding the sacred flame through the dark night of materialism, so this flame could be passed onward for the preservation of the arts of the divine.

Links

www.ernstfuchs-zentrum.com/html/galde1eng.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Fuchs_(artist)
www.ernst-fuchs.at

Eve, the mother of all life,
the emanation of Sophia,
lover of serpents.

The serpent penetrates the apple,
and the glorious Eve eats of the fruit of life.
She is the Full Moon resplendent
and the glory of the Sun.
She is Earth’s dark cavern
whose darkness brings forth life.

Cast forth from the garden
by the jealous archon,
she wanders the earth, trying
to find another garden.
But all the while it is in her heart.

Lilith in her tree of crystal
whispers to Eve of secret pleasures.
They laugh together down by the river
when Adam is out of earshot.
He still believes that story about the rib.

Eve laughs to herself as the serpent
comes slithering across the green grass.
Sophia, the serpent of knowledge,
comes to her daughter, teaching her the mysteries.

Her sons, the first Rivals,
struggle together in the dust.
Abel has gone down into the underworld
to retrieve the knowledge of the depths.
Cain has gone forth into the wilderness.
He is become a smith, wresting secrets from the earth.

And Seth, the last-born, the Youngest Son.
He shall learn the mysteries of Sophia.
He goes to the mountain to hear the voice of the wind.
He goes to the sea to hear the voice of the waters.
He goes into deep caverns to hear the voice of the earth.
The face of Lilith gazes upon him from the Moon,
And a fire is kindled in his heart.

by Yvonne Aburrow

In a moonlit night on a spring day,
the croak of a frog
pierces through the whole cosmos
turning it into
a single family.

Chang Chin-ch’en

In the magic of the heart, in the center that is free, at play in the fields of creation, Shiva and Shakti dance together in creativity and love. This energy is an expression of eternal delight, of pure arts discovering themselves again for the first time.

Matter, life and mind are expressions of One divine Logos that the Primordial Man and Woman create through each other. Shiva and Shakti are Man and Woman, liberated and in love, seting each other free. This universe is an overflowing source of this love, a manifested expression of the exuberance of this love. This lovemaking inspires all creation, enabling art, poetry, music, and dancing as the spiritual origins of human culture.

In this infinite round of being, every being is a crown of clear light, informing and irradiating all things. Everyone inherits the ability to open a channel for helping to shape culture through creative expression and artistic action in the world. Grounded solidly in what we have come here to do, we all share and are connected in a greater movement we are creating together. Our thoughts are each others thoughts, a collective chorus of life, the unified thoughts of the uni-verse, the One Song. We are all part of each other. “Todos unidos !” – All united.

So here we are at the end of everything, a perfect moment to reinvent the future through the present. To rejoin the end with the beginning, connecting end-ways with first ways, in the Oroboric feedback loop of the perpetual present. For that unfathomable moment of conception is endlessly resurrected, and flowers in the Now.

Firmly grounded in the present, we wake up to the magical destiny of our long lineage of light. The spiritual practices of the world help us to dance outside of linear time and into the ahistorical present, into the centre of the labyrinth of mind where the World Tree, ‘Axis Mundi’, can be explored for wisdom and medicine. Gnosis liberates us from our habits and unties us from the restrictions, blockages and inhibitions around our essence which strives for unity by promoting a loving open-system for relating to energy and information. From this well of knowledge comes art, poetry, music and dance, all containing visions of the world within the world. It is from these visions that we may glimpse the potentials through which the present world can transform into the future world. The creative imagination is a guiding sign in worlds manifold journey towards actualization.

There is a deep ecology of spirit immanent within the endless flow of physical, chemical, electrical energies of our universe. We are being called out of the historical present to rediscover our kinship with a more-than-human world, interlinking with the individual and collective minds of kindred animal, mineral and plant species. Co-creating a unified communication of health and harmony, understanding that our actions have implications at every level of life on the planet, we are coming together with other living things to collectively steward the present in order to build a sustainable future. Using art as a starting point for mapping the possible and linking archaic and modern technology, visionary culture is able to apply creativity and integrate wisdom more than ever before.

By nurturing a supple awareness of how the natural ecologies of the earth work in relation to climatic and galactic patterns, we can come to understand the long term consequences of our actions on many levels at once. In this way, plant paradigms like permaculture promote the refinement of our perspective and the conscious shift of our behavioral approaches to growth and development in the world. Understanding the forest as a metaphor for a stable and healthy relationship ecology, the emerging art movements model designs in nature in order to integrate concepts like energy cycling, no-waste consumption, co-dependent relationships, and biodiversity. Plant paradigms bring us a set of malleable techniques and technologies for healing our relationship with ourselves, each other, plants and the planet.

The standing wave of our collective artistic intention crystalises through time via innumerable iterations, into the ornate and baroque structures of civilization. Humanity has walled ourselves up in ego – in mental constructs – which crystalize around us as artificial and dislocated environments like urban sprawls, credit debt and government control. Smoke stacks, fumes from an ineffable petrochemical metabolism confuse the planet and toxify our collective ecology at every level of organism. This world is only the outcome of a certain view. First we make our buildings, then our buildings make us.

In gratitude

Breathe

Starseed Transmission

Paintings by David Heskin

The creative imagination is vitalized and inspired by a reconnection to the Gaian fertility circuit. Our creativity is our most valuable faculty for regenerating the web of life and moving humanity beyond its current existential and ecological blind alley. Art, music, poetry and dance are universal languages creating foundations for an authentic planetary culture. With these skillsets we are able to address and navigate the intricate problems of our time.

Visionary culture is one of the spirit seeds for the emerging civilization, a set of pathways into the collective creation of a sustainable world. The development of art, poetry, music and dance is at the cusp of a long lineage of transformational growth that can be traced back long before the humble origins of our current world. At this time of turmoil our spiritual destiny is awakening again, a vessel to transport us across the rift of impending ecological collapse. Redefining our roles as planetary stewards and redesigning our collective approach to saving the biosphere, we are presented with a toolset for activating our potential to play an active role in the unfolding. Utilizing the unlimited potentials of the empowered creative imagination provides human culture with the evolutionary option of harmonizing with the more than human world.

Magical awareness
Gaian tapestry
pure elemental frequencies
mapping the landscapes
(like falling water
life streaming from void)

within seed chambers
and honeycombed lattices of light:
an infinite empire of beauty

worlds within worlds
ecologies within ecologies
planting futures
through supple exchanges
between seen and unseen

here we are in this place
of shining stones forever
experiencing the presence

Delvin Solkinson – www.elfintome.com
Daniel Mirante – www.lila.info
David Heskin – www.newskinstudio.com

Department of Psychology

The Hebrew University

AYAHUASCA IS FAMOUS for the visions it generates. These have been discussed in the anthropological literature, and increasingly,
they receive attention in the non-scientific, popular press.

In an earlier report in MAPS as well as elsewhere (Shanon, 1997) I have
made the case for a systematic study of the contents of these visions and presented data pertaining to them. These data indicate that common content items appear in the visions of individuals from different personal and cultural backgrounds. The most salient of these are serpents, the large cats (jaguars, tigers and pumas, but not lions), birds and palaces. Other frequently seen items include beings of all sorts, scenes pertaining to ancient civilizations (notably Egypt and the pre-Colombian American high cultures), open landscapes (e.g., large meadows and savannas) as well as celestial and heavenly scenes. Most of the objects seen in the visions are made of gold and gilded material, crystal, precious stones and white cloth.

The corpus of ayahuasca visions depicted in Ayahuasca Visions (Luna & Amaringo, 1993) exhibit similar patterns. From the point of view of cognitive psychology, such findings are significant because they seem to attest to a level of cognitive universals of a totally new kind. Unlike the universals normally considered in the psychological literature, which have to do with schemes of thought and formal structures, the commonalities manifested in ayahuasca visions have to do with content. Moreover, the content items are specific – they are not general patterns of the drama of human life. In this respect the images differ from the Jungian archetypes which pertain to the different manifestations of themes such as the great mother, the adventurous youth, the hero, the wise old man, birth and death. Such themes are, of course, part and parcel of the human saga, regardless of place, time, socio-economic affiliation, intellectual level or cultural and educational background. The items commonly found in ayahuasca visions are categorically different. They are specific and non-reducible to the psychology of personality dynamics. As suggested by
Huxley (Huxley, 1972), they may be regarded as indicative of layers of the psyche, or perhaps facets of ontology, which have nothing to do with individual psychology.

Other effects of ayahuasca
Salient as the visions are, they (along with the non-visual “hallucinations” that the brew induces) are not the only effects that ayahuasca induces. Another important facet of the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience are ideas, insights and reflections. Many individuals report that the brew makes them think faster and be more intelligent. Some persons with extensive experience with ayahuasca even indicated that with time, these ideational effects are more meaningful than the visions. In general, under the effect of ayahuasca, people report that they are more insightful and given to new ideas than usual. Furthermore, it seems that the intoxication makes people more involved with deeper psychological analyses and with philosophical contemplation.

Naturally, the subject matter of thoughts that pass through a person’’s mind during the intoxication are prone to reflect the interests and concerns this person normally has. Very often, when consuming the brew, people ask for answers or solutions to specific questions or problems that actually bother them in their lives. They often gain insights with respect to personal questions, find answers or solutions that are subsequently applied in their lives, and also find comfort and solace.

One person with extensive experience with ayahuasca told me that what the brew gives one is access to what he characterized as “divine wisdom.” This term, he further explained, denotes all that can be known on any subject. The knowledge to be gained by any particular individual will depend on the interests and wishes of the person in question. “If the person is interested in philosophy he will learn more about philosophy, he wishes to gain understanding about the nature of the human mind he will become wise on that, if what interests him is being a thief, it is this in which he will become more knowledgeable.”

This insight notwithstanding, it seems that as with the visions, the ideas entertained during ayahuasca intoxication exhibit some common, interpersonal features. These pertain to the domains being reflected upon, the general types of contents that become significant, and the overall perspectives from which things are being viewed. To my knowledge, this is a topic that has not received any attention or treatment in the scientific literature, neither anthropological nor psychological. The cognitive import of this phenomenon cannot, I think, be overstated.

Subject group demographics

As indicated in a previous MAPS report (MAPS Bulletin 7(3) pp 13-15. ), in my work I have interviewed many subjects in different places, in different contexts of ayahuasca use, and with different levels of experience in its consumption. Here I focus on one group of subjects which I characterize as “independent drinkers.” All are residents of Brazil, most of them of Rio de Janeiro and almost all are of the middle class. Ayahuasca is a central facet of their lives, and all partake of it regularly. At the time of the interview, none were members of any institutionalized group or sect. This group of informants is comprised of 21 persons, 15 males and 6 females. The characterization of the informants as a group pertains to the design of the research; while some of these people know each other, most do not and they do not constitute a group in any social or interpersonal sense.

By and large, the ideas of a non-personal nature reported by these informants pertain to the following main categories: metaphysical reflections about the ontology and the structure and meaning of reality, reflections about nature and the phenomenon of life, insights regarding the human predicament and the meaning of life, ideas concerning the nature of knowledge, the mind and consciousness, ideas pertaining to human history and its meaning, ideas having to do with the nature of the Divine and the relationship between God and the world, thoughts of religious and spiritual character, reflections regarding ethical values and proper human conduct, and insights on the nature and praxis of healing.

Philosophical ideas

Of the various philosophical ideas entertained by the informants, the most prevalent concerned metaphysics – 13 of the members of the independent group entertained thoughts regarding the ultimate nature and structure of reality. Furthermore, without exception, all these ideas exhibited one particular metaphysical view, one which I would characterize as monistic idealism. Specifically, people feel that there is an aspect or level of reality which is non-material and that this defines the essence or the foundation of all Existence. They felt that all things are interconnected, and that in their totality they constitute one harmonious whole. With this, people appreciate that there is sense and reason to all things and that reality is invested with great, heretofore unappreciated, meaningfulness. Significantly, some specific expressions reoccurred in the words of different individuals. Those which appeared most often are “everything is spirit,” “everything is interconnected,” “all is one,” “this world is an illusion,” “everything has meaning,” “the different levels and aspects of reality exhibit the same essential structure.” My own first-hand experiences with ayahuasca reveal similar patterns.

Similarity with Western philosophies
These ideas are reminiscent of ideas put forth by many thinkers of both the East and the West. Of the latter, ones that especially come to mind are Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza and Hegel. Huxley referred to these by the umbrella term “perennial philosophy;” Huxley’’s book by this name (Huxley, 1944) is based on a comprehensive study of various religious and mystical traditions. Ideas of this kind are also encountered in contemporary reports based on the experiences of various individuals with psychedelics (not including ayahuasca); classical examples are Huxley’’s own reports based on experiences with mescaline (Huxley, 1959) and Watts” The Joyous Cosmology (Watts, 1962) which is based on experiences with LSD, mushrooms and mescaline. Interestingly, William James, while under the effect of another psychotropic substance, nitrous oxide, arrived at a similar idealistic world-view. By no means was this a simple matter for James – the philosophical ideas he conceived under the influence were reminiscent of the ideas of Hegel, a philosopher whose view James, as a philosopher, opposed (James, 1882). I should note that in no case were metaphysical ideas that would be associated with another philosophical line expressed. Given the theoretically possible space of philosophical ideas, this pattern is significant.

Similarities to classical Western philosophical ideas are not confined to metaphysics. They may also be related to epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of knowledge. Let me give just one example; this one too is taken from the interviews of independent drinkers. The person in question presented a whole metaphysical picture which he said came to him from ayahuasca. It was a radical idealistic view. When probing him with respect to the origin and possible veracity of this view, the man told me: “You are a professor so you think that you teach me, that you pass information to me. But this is not so. You only talk to me, and through this come up ideas and knowledge that are there, stored in my own mind. It is all there and, in effect, you teach me nothing.” Plato’’s Menon, of which this person had never heard, strikingly entered my mind and I was baffled. I shall add that some ayahuasca drinkers who did have acquaintance with Western philosophy did, in fact, report to me that their visions were akin to Platonic idealism. In no case did anyone mention another philosopher to me. I, too, thought of Plato several times in the course of my journey with ayahuasca. This was not a simple, straightforward matter. My professional work in cognitive psychology follows a strong anti-Platonistic line (Shanon, 1991). One of the most important effects ayahuasca has had on me is a serious entertainment of a Platonistic world-view. How the two tie together is a topic that I leave for another discussion. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Plato participated in the mysteries of Eleusis, where a psychotropic substance was probably consumed (Wasson, Ruck, & Hofmann;
1978).

How are the ideas and insights produced?

Often, the experience is like that indicated above – the mind works fast and one’’s reflective and creative faculties are significantly enhanced. On other occasions, the person feels that information is communicated to him or her, usually in a kind of telepathic non-verbal manner. (Interestingly, this mode of communication and knowledge are featured centrally in the esoteric writings of Blake and Swedenborg). However, very often the ideas are directly related to perceptual, hallucinatory effects that the person experienced under the ayahuasca intoxication. Here I consider two patterns; both types were reported to me by many individuals, both I have experienced personally as well.

The web of interconnectivity

The first has to do with the appreciation that all of reality is interconnected and that there is a force that makes it all exist and gives nourishment and sustenance to it all. Very often, this force is interpreted by people to be the Divine or the anima mundi and is characterized as being the fountain of everything – life, wisdom, health as well as intellectual and artistic creation. Personally, I have come to the ideas of this kind in conjunction with seeing what I called “the web” – translucent strings, like the threads of a spider web, that tie everything which is seen under the intoxication with open eyes. Afterwards, I have heard such an image mentioned many times by different individuals. The description of the visual effect was invariably the same and many persons used the identical phrase, “a web,” to describe it. For instance, one of the independent informants told me that the most important teaching she has received from ayahuasca was the appreciation that the Divine does indeed exist. Asking her how she had arrived at this conclusion she answered by presenting a description of the translucent web that interlinks everything and sustains all of existence.

The case of the web may be characterized as literal, for in it the vision presents what to the person under the influence seems to actually be a certain facet of reality not perceived in the ordinary state of consciousness. By contrast, the second pattern is metaphorical. Functionally, the visions in question are similar to the images or visualization that often open parables in the Bible: An image will appear and the person under the intoxication will decipher it as a message. In the following example the message is personal, having to do with insights regarding the person’’s personal life, but similar patterns are also encountered in conjunction with spiritual and philosophical ideas. Recounting her first ayahuasca sessions, one Brazilian middle class woman told me that she saw herself covered all around with a transparent plastic. Whenever she moved, the cover moved with her. She realized that in fact she is living her life separated from other people. Even though it seems that she is in contact with other people, in essence she is insulated and has no direct contact with anyone. The realization made this person change her attitude vis à vis human interpersonal relations. Another example is a vision of a building that was shabby and dilapidated. Apparently, the person having the vision understood, originally the building was well-designed and well constructed. Seeing this, the visioner realized that the building was him/herself and took it to mind that he/she had to make some basic change in his/her life. I use the compound masculine/feminine terms for indeed, I have heard of such a vision from two different persons – the first a Peruvian man of a low social class, the second a European woman visiting South America.

Seeing and knowing

In closing, let me return to the visual aspects of the ayahuasca experience and comment on the more general relationship between seeing and knowing. In the traditional Amerindian context, an intimate affinity between the two is encountered. As reported by Langdon (Langdon, 1992), the Siona Indians consider “seeing” to be the major characteristic of high level ayahuasqueros. Further, in the practice of ayahuasca healing, the ayahuasca is said to enable the healer to see the inner parts of his patient and thus establish a diagnosis. Similarly, on the basis of experience with mescaline, Castaneda repeatedly says that what entheogenic plants do is make “one see” (Castaneda, 1971). Does the traditional healer “really” see what other people cannot see or is it only that his intuition and insight are enhanced? In interviews conducted with several traditional curanderos, I have tried to clarify this issue. Some have insisted that the brew literally enables them to see the inner parts of their patients” bodies. Yet empirically there was no way for me to objectively verify these claims. Perhaps the difference between these two possibilities is less than seems to be at first glance. Perhaps deep down, there comes a point where a clear cut distinction between perception and comprehension is impossible to make or even meaningless. It is not at all an accident that in many languages, as in English, the phrase “I see” is commonly used in the sense of “I understand.” The relation between perception and knowledge is a fundamental issue in cognitive thought. A school of thought that has greatly minimized the distinction between the two is that of ecological psychology founded by James Gibson (Gibson, 1979); for a most readable introduction and overview, the reader is referred to Michaels and Carello (Michaels & Carello, 1981). In a book in progress, I discuss this topic further, both from a cognitive-psychological and from a philosophical perspective.

References

Castaneda, C. (1971). A Separate Reality. London: Arkana.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Huxley, A. (1944). The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper &
Row.

Huxley, A. (1959). The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
Great Britain: Penguin Books.

Huxley, A. (1972). Visionary experience. In: The Highest State of
Consciousness. White, J. (ed.). New York: Anchor Books.

James, W. (1882). On Some Hegelisms. Mind, 7, 186-208.

James, W. (1929). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York:
Modern Library.

Langdon E. J. (1992). Dau: Shamanic power in Siona religion and
medicine. E. J. Langdon and G. Baer (eds.). In: Portals of Power.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Luna, L. &. Amaringo, P. (1993). Ayahuasca Visions. Berkeley, CA:
North Atlantic Books.

Michaels, C. &. Carello, C. (1981). Direct Perception. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Polari, A. (1984). O livro das Miracoes. Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Record.

Roberts, T. (1983). New Learning. In: Psychedelic Reflections.
Grinspoon, L. &. Bakalar, J. (eds.). New York: Human Sciences Press,
Inc.

Shanon, B. (1991). Le Menon: Une conception de psychologie cognitive. In: Le Paradoxes de la Connaisance. Canto-Sperber, M. (ed.). Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.

Shanon, B. (1997). A cognitive-psychological study of ayahuasca. MAPS Bulletin, 7(3).

Tart, C. (ed.). (1969). Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Wasson, R. G., Hofmann, A., & Ruck, A. P. (1978). The Road to Eleusis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Watts, A. (1962). The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books.

Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by MAPS. I thank Rick Doblin for his encouragement and support. Amit Hagar and Nurit Shacham helped with the compilation of the data and its analysis and Nurit Shacham and Yoel Strimling helped with the preparation of this manuscript.

The concept of man as robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioral engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising propaganda; the expanding economy of the affluent society could not subsist without such manipulation…. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots, buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product. L. Von Bertalanffy

Culture is Nature

Culture is Nature. It comes through us and is as natural as blades of grass in a field. Seen from this perspective, as from aeroplane, the city is as beautiful and natural a vision as the facets of a jeweled ammonite.

The uncountable interactions on every street, every moment, make the city a natural system of staggering complexity. City networks grow like organisms, emergent crystalline growths, stocks and shares, fluid transactions. Ecologies of corporations, non-linear trans-national octopi devouring each other in the economic system.

Amidst this vast and hyper-complex sprawl of re-configured stone and glass, flows the 0’s and 1’s from which it emerged : Us.

The skyscrapers and teeming valleys become illuminated by the rising sun, reflecting off wet stone and glass. Now the circuitry of the city looks like a nest of golden crystals. These gigantic skyscrapers, bustling streets, everything, are forms of emptiness, of ancient vibrational energy in a state of continual renewal. Time is nothing but the transformation of this energy.

We humans are timeless life forms in an infinite universe beyond comprehension, flame-like vortices of consciousness in a mysterious cosmos that vastly predates the language we use to describe it. The human race has a future of eternally receding mystery ahead of us. Everything that is known, subject and object, is the big bang, the universe manifesting into infinite patterns.

We are told in this scientific fable of ‘the Big Bang’, a blazing forth of supernal light, into something deeper and darker than night. The light, the fire, mixing with the darkness, the primal waters, swirls forth the myriad ten-thousand things, from shining stellar nurseries to spinning globes of rock, crystal, magma and waters, leaf and dew, eyes and lips. In these chthonic garden temples and templates of creation, pterodactyles, and salamanders, pumas and lithe, elfin women. In this giant mind metabolism of this world, has come forth bodily forms, vehicles of experience.

Over great historical swathes of time, world ages have risen and fallen, governed by mysterious archetypes, constellated by the great mind-lattices of the Zodiacal wheel. In the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, the random throw of the dice, generations race forth from the forests and deserts, and gather in vast coral fortresses of the city.

Cities

The city is rock rearranging itself under the sun, sand crystalised in the glass spires, woven from the elements by children of star fire, birthed from and inseparably OF Gaia. Woven from a confluence of forces, histories, bio-regional pressures.

Cities reflect the resources of the land, express the mineralogical, hydrological and psycho-symbolic nature of the land it is built upon, replaces, and is surrounded by. Urban landscapes are of ‘artifice’. Whilst the natural creation is all one, a mysterious emergence, an unfathomable creation that self-organizes according to mysterious laws, the city is different, because it it birthed from human axioms. It is birthed from certain kinds of human principles, logistics, practicalities, conveniences, prejudices, philosophies. Generation after generation, it is the solidification of the human collective consciousness with its self-serving, anthropocentric priorities.

Now the city, constituted from assemblages of rock and sand, is the substrate for a digital and psychic holographic overlay of media streams that impell its cyborg inhabitants, through guiding their behaviour, toward a systemic pattern, that belongs to the city alone, and allows it to perpetually resurrect itself through the repetitions of its constituent human atoms.

The city is therefore a standing-wave expression of the state of mind within much of the human race… it is an expression of perennial, unresolved fears and appetites, as well as established economic and structural conventions. The haunted Gothic vistas of our psyche expresses itself as the economic cathedrals of wall street. Stilleto-boot vistas made of obsidian, shiny, crystallized lustrous portals of baroque, biomechanical social and institutional processes. It is a meta-pattern that perpetuates itself, by imposing certain laws of operation upon the subsystems that compose it.

Cities and Anthropocentrism

Like Oroborous, the mythical snake devouring its own tail, causality is cyclic, effects feed back into causes. First we make our buildings, then our buildings make us. As we dream, so we become. Urban conglomerates express primarily an anthropocentric world view; anthropocentric in the sense where our reality becomes honed down to the priorities and central preoccupations of human life alone, at the exclusion and detriment of its wider natural context. Cities of the Kali Yuga also reflect a cybernetic view of life, based upon mechanically determined processes of information and matter.

As people grow up within such environments, they are conditioned by all the philosophical presumptions and emotional charges that such urban assemblages express. This run-away process reflects a deep polarization throughout a greater part of the species mind, and in turn the ‘mind of Gaia’ which we are inextricably expressions of.

Anthropocentrism is fear. It is fear of other, it is fear of nature-crawling-under-your-skin, it is fear of being eaten, it is fear of disease. These are ancient sufferings and it is an old habit to shy away from anything associated with suffering. As the imagination of ego, the ’simulation of self’ crystallizes over countless generations, such a hallucination begins to actually manifest and embody itself in the walls, separations, divisions that sever the earths boundless flows and so cut off the human essence from the pranic logos flowing through deep currents.

Deep Ecological Communitas

What would happen if the human being created without an anthropocentric perspective ? What would its cities, its communities be like ? They would be permeable to nature. They would be yin, receptive in quality. They would represent something akin to a special moss or mineral formation growing in a particular fissure of rock. The emergent creativity would encompass all of natures systems and not just anthropocentric ones. Creation would occur ‘within’ and not ‘upon’ the land. The community would be a self-renewing food bowl, not just for humans but for many beings.

If we think of the awe-inspiring self-emergent growths of cells, crystals, forests, human beings would find themselves in that order, not within an ‘enlightened’ separateness and self-distinction. Humanity will find its pattern through an intimate relating, a great blessing that each being is heir to, to mingle its unbounded essence with all life, and discover a great world beyond that of human logistics, beyond that of form.
Baroque, Gothic, taoist realms of exquisite natural pattern, producing miracles of beauty and poesis, will flower within the post-oil shells of the city.

Such communities are rooted in an animist experience of the universe and the world, the great field of sentience, where whirling eddies and spires of mysterious perpetuating spirits and archetypes are en-nested with the physical world of nature; the physical world appearing at once as a grand nervious system, and also a great mind.

Facilitated by the plant teachers of the Earth, such as the psilocybin fungi or the great medicine Ayahuasca, it becomes perceptible. Speaking simply of the mystery of the forest – the living interconnectivity appears as a Great, Leafy Mind. Forests atop of hills appear like clumps and mounds of soft, living brain leaf matter. Tree trunks and branches, arches and curves of the glade temples of Gaia, are lattices supporting efflorence of receptor sites – flowers and pollen transmitters, symbiotic, form filling ergonomic sex uplinks between insect and flower consciousness, infinite sparkling synaptic panoramas of micro-nirvanic orgasms as flower stamen meets bee, distilling nectars in hives and combs. This living temple is the pulising, vibratory eternal energy, arrayed by divine evolution, the baroque creation of Gaia is the flowering fractal which ever transcends like an epiphany of luminous, self-organising mystery.

Tantra

The Sufi Hakim Bey does a lovely job of envisaging a life -not human- centered community of beings living in oneness and realisation of this Animist consciousness…

“The appropriate architectural form for a society based on radical conviviality might best be characterized as grotesque – that is, in the original sense of the word – the cave. Since the paleolithic, ritual space has always been envisaged as a hollow earth, and in Mao Shan Taoism, for example, heaven itself is honeycombed with countless grottoes of faeries and immortals, dripping with cinnabar and sprouting with magic mushrooms. As an aesthetic term, grotesque refers to the organic-looking forms of stalagmites, to the curving spiraling line of flesh and vegetation, which reappears underground and is transformed into the crystal architectural space, without losing its snaky, flowery, curviness or its matrix like slick wetness, or even its colors. The body is not separated from the rest of the world, it is not a closed, completed unit ; it is unfinished, outgrows itself ; transgresses its own limits.”

The radical conviviality that Hakim Bey is referring to is a sensual and tactile ‘information society’ which is bodily integrated, where humans are returned to full-body perception and relating, rather than the cerebrotonic and linguistic emphasis that we currently exist in. It includes a radical unboundedness and permeability which sounds almost orgiastic :

“Life uses and violates borders, and life constructs media of its own to fill up the extra spaces. Viral-like DNA are exchanged in gushes of juice and slime, liquid with paradoxical form – the very liminality of form itself, secret secretions, the viscous slippery in-betweenness of the organic.”

In the gushes of juices and subtle energies shared between the sexes, the yin and yang is balanced and the ten-thousand countless things find their place within the self-organizing tao. The sexual act is commensurate with the act of creation. Sexual connotations can hardly be removed from understanding the world of nature and spirit since a kind of cosmic sexuality or love-play powers manifest creation itself.

“Sexuality anywhere is a polyvalent function, whose primary and supreme valency is the cosmological function. To translate a psychic situation into sexual terms is by no means to belittle it. For except in the modern world, sexuality has everywhere and always been a hierophany and the sexual act an integral action, therefore, a means to knowledge.”- Mircea Eliade (1975:90)

A kind of desire attracts all things into compounded form to create the nebulous myriad realms of nature, through a play of complimentary pairs. Thus, health and harmony within human sexual relations maintains the flow of pranic, fertile energy throughout the interrelating systems of culture and nature, as we iterate on our own scale of experience the dance of atom and void, Sol and Gaia. This process of marriage of opposites occurs in the eagles flight to the sun, the mystic journey from the earthly to the solar so central in many forms of yoga and shamanism.

Sexual Energy, Life and Sun

Understanding the transmission of energy from the Sun into the ecological networks of the planet was experiential knowledge to the ancestors. It is a relationship that occurs not only on the level of observable nature, but analogously as a metaphysical understanding of the maintaining of the dynamic life and fertility of our own creative essences through shamanic gnosis:

“The Indians are deeply preoccupied with the concept of reproductive energy as manifested in nature and society by fertility and growth. The existence of plants, animals, and people and of a viable balance among them are thought to depend upon the continuity of this energy, and the payé’s or anybody else’s tasks consists in maintaining the cycle of reproduction and growth and in controlling it so that there will be a balance between society and the natural environment.”

The shaman often accomplishes harmonization of cycles of psycho-ecological energy through the re-creation of a passage of ‘higher energies’ between the life-giving Primal Sun with the fertility of Gaia and its beings. In Tukano cosmology the payé , the illuminate, the healer-visionary, exists as an agent of integration between the solar and the earthy, conscious and the unconscious, the natural and the cultural, the masculine and feminine, to re-fertilize the dense realms of matter with life-giving vibrancy, energy and information, thus maintaining the strength and potency of the people and the ecological web.

“The sun’s fertilizing energy is transmitted to the payé in the sense that he himself becomes a carrier of a force that contains procreative and fortifying components… There are the creative and enlivening rays (bogá), from the Sun above empowering the generative forces from below (dári) within budding and sprouting plant forms, the biological fecundity and fertility of Gaia. These circuits of energy regulate the reproductive and productive cycles in the forest, river, garden and village, as well as in animals and people. (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1996).

Wisdom, equality, balance, sacramental potions, tantric reconciliation of opposites regenerating the Tree of Life advanced spiritual development, sacred dances, crystallizing coherence in meditation, poesis and art, transcendence of anthropocentric ’self-simulations’, these fruits of the spiritual cultures of the earth, are all medicines in the earth. ‘Medicine culture’ assisting in building and maintaining the vigor and strength of the race, the strength of the species in its cosmic journey, to stand upright and face the dazzling vistas of the future with clarity, joy and vitality.

~

Bibliography

‘Boundary Violations’ by Peter Lamborn Wilson

von Hildebrand, M. (1988). In Gaia, the Thesis, the Mechanisms and the Implications – Symposium I (P. Bunyard and E. Goldsmith, eds.), pp. Wadebridge ecological Centre, Cornwall.

The Shaman And The Jaguar. A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among the Indians of Colombia. G.Reichel-Dolmatoff. Temple University Press. 1975.

We rest upon an ancestral bedrock,

evolved over uncountable aeons, a tapestry woven from patterns of symbiosis and cooperation, parasitism and predation. The life force received by Gaia from Sol turns over and over, generating complexity, generating crystal life. Hundreds of thousand years of tribal migration, empires that have risen and fallen, and cultural systems that have effloresced then decayed like strange flowers. Great intelligence and powers of creation are our inheritance.

The ancestors vibrant, primordial energy, the energies of the atomic furnace of the birth of the universe, the energies of the momentum of the first waters, flow us onward, the stream of life.

Father Sun rises and Gaian Sophianic life stirs. The sun fills the mist of water from the lake and the air becomes golden. The grass grows. The pine cones still glow in the pure white ashes. The birds hop from one branch of a tree to another like thoughts in a big leafy mind. Have you ever tried to catch what the birds are singing of ? They sing of nested existence, deep in nature, singing the song of bird life, simple and mysterious, ethereal and shattering, the sound of the radiant void.

Deep Ecology by Daniel Mirante

All life is a hyper-sea, a tapestry of Mind. In this corporeal dimension, humans upright, moving sexualized cathedrals of hauntingly transient grace walk within the hollows of the macro cosmic moss garden. Stumbling like children over the natural languages of star fire, engraven in the crabs dancing trails on sand, the lattices and information banks of coral, the cascading prose of tree bark and vines. A secret written across the face of the world.

I left the dead world many months ago to know the wilderness. I have become one with the elements. I drink rain, I eat soil, I sleep on cold, hard rocks. I wash in the cold mountain rivers… pure ice water on mountain blue rocks and sands. I breathe and eat clear-light void. No boundaries, no resistances. At night, my mind flows into the subtle rhizomes that is my true being.

I feel completely transparent to the lightning as it strikes in the steaming forests. The earth trembles and every leaf quivers. Lightning shines right through my body – in a split second – rendering me transparent in this zen flash, reminding me that I am a walking skeleton of calcium and silica clothed in a vessel of salt water, a man-shaped droplet of sea.

Her form, her lips and teeth remind of the resistance to complete surrender, to this desire for life, the rigor, the pleasure and pain of boundaries, danced by this timeless creation in all of its ornate beauty, being squeezed and ravished by another, reminded of this willingness to be form, to play this game of identity. How bodies have a capacity for infinite interlocking, interpenetration, designed for an infinite series of lovemaking, and I look to the stars and ocean and wonder how this all began.

I have traveled deep into the wombs of the earth, wombs of both life and death, have been to realms of rotting meat and pungent flowers in lurid sexual designs, quickly blooming, then withering away. I have spiraled down the germ-line of evolutionary linear, I have become mezzoic pools of biofeedback processes, salmon leaping upwards, up river, gobbled up by ferocious twisting eels, devoured by multicolored, feathered lizards, who are eaten away by parasitic organisms… and onwards, savage process, cycle of life, ferocious and bizzare, beautiful and delicate, the fractal of the food=energy turnover system.

I have been to solar realms, crystal palaces ringing with the reverberating sound of crystal angels singing. Here I heard music, the choral song of eternal mounting Sapphic ecstasy, that made my heart cry with joy. The tantric crystal angels, gemlike beings, machine gods and goddesses, opal, rubies, glass, vibrate songs, copulate, unfathomable unfolding lovemaking, quartz gestalts of resonating energy.

I clambered in awe the branches of the world-tree, I have seen the jeweled animals of invisible biogenic nature, the weavers on the loom in the womb of psycho spiritual evolution, like emerald insect tigers, like the great beasts of the plain, flitting, chirping and curious, in the hypersea of astral emanations, encoding and transducing higher-glyphics in subtle spheres.

I have wandered endless labyrinths, dazed, in search of the Goddess and trying to comprehend the flaming light placed upon my head by an unknown Lord. Endless perfection tumbles down from perfect majesty, heights so lofty the mind cannot comprehend. Here, in ways unknown, the soul of humanity is perfected.

I have been to the periphery of this universe, and beheld it as a huge, dead, compacted stone, Thanatos, and seen the horrifying, endless craters of the dead and material universe. But in the frantic clanging of thunderous bells, I have seen the fiery petals of the transcendental golden flower of life, of such exquisite majesty and joy, that the heart of stone was shattered by the abundance of energy and love.

This is not ‘the early 21st century’, this is a timeless mystery, an unfolding present, a flame like vortice of consciousness in an unfathomable and primordial universe. This life is a fable, as well as a labyrinth. In the the torrents of golden ice water, in the darting of fish, in the flame-colored transformations of autumn trees, in birdsongs, in innocence, the beloveds face turned toward the setting sun, the crystal azure maze of her eyes, the ecstatic tears and kisses of life and animal mortality, I see the Greatness of YOU, YOU so ancient, yet so timeless, and it is YOU, YOU, who are my foundation, my heart free and singing in love, my path.

- Daniel Mirante 2007

In a world of rapidly dissolving borders and boundaries, the separation between the worlds of the imaginal and the worlds of the material are deepening their weave. With access to the knowledge and history of all cultures of the world, what was once separated by distance and language, is now being melded together. We now have access to the history of art from all different artistic traditions. The modern artist is steeped in influences from all artistic genres and art eras. Advances in communications technology means artists who at one time were limited to representing in their own country can now share their work globally. In this way living artistic traditions all over the earth are influencing and being influenced by each other simultaneously. A global art culture is emerging and with it come undreamed of potentials for collaborative artistic evolution. There is a new sheen on the surface of what art means for human culture and what potentials it has to shape the context into which the future culture is being birthed.

Since deep in the mists of time, the human creative imagination has been filled with reflections of spirit. Sometimes these came as dreams or visions, in art and song or through the very fabric of ordinary life. Splendored landscapes, mystical beings, sacred forms and heavenly architectures, all shards in a mythology rich with an intelligence of design. All cultural traditions reflect this spirit of the divine imagination, it is at the heart of the human. In our modern media miasma we find a poly-pantheon of entities and blessed realms rich with nuance and meaning. Today such art comes by many names and has many manifestations, some of these art culture movements are ; visionary art, fantastic realism, surrealism, magical realism, psychedelic art, fantasy art, fairy art, religious art, and new age art. Like crystals, the different movements grow out of each other creating an interconnected mass of points and facets. Some see many of these different art culture genres unified by a common exploration into the divine spirit of the creative imagination. Entheo art is a cross-platform description of a non-localized, modern manifestation of this spirited art culture.

It is a time of great transition for our civilization. The planetary art cultures are a celebration of what is past and what is possible, a shamanic bridge between presence and futures. Entheo art is both a vision and a vehicle for spirit, let it invoke a return to a deeper connectedness between the inspired spiritual life of creative production and the textured material life of the approaching technofuturism. Art is a form of life and its working with us to shape the very fabric of what’s to come.

www.elvism.net

Hyperdimensional Consciousness
We are hyper-dimensional beings. We are already spirit, we are already enlightened, we are already self-existent, non-compounded light. We are already in the spirit realm. We are already creating the dreams of God, we are already beautiful, primordial, divine and in the condition of Eternal Life.

The divine creative force, drips crystal fire from every centre, radiating through a divine spectrum of archetypal, angelic, solar and planetary formations. All manifest creation and life is the face of God, the surface emination, looking outward upon itself. The universe is the flow of Infinite Spirit, and its magic is the play, the Lila, of God.
The divine spun Gaia as a vale of soul making and of existence and experience. It is a fecund and miraculous garden of chthonic, chlorophylic, mineralogical, cultural and psychosexual play. We are children of a cosmos that created us and has been watching. As we procrastinate and doubt, rationalise and persue small-time agendas, it has watched, in every leaf, in every cell, registering and understanding its Lila.

Angelic Phenomena

During the visionary state, the transpersonal condition, the “centre that is free” – the free-state human energy condition – we encounter constellations of energy/information that sometimes become personified. These are the entities spoken of in the shamanic vision quest ; the earth elementals, the ancestors, the angels, demons and planetary avatars.

Angels are manifestations of Logos – divine messengers and healers, performing unfathomable illuminating and redemptive functions within the celestial and terrestrial matrix. Winged and resplendent, angels pursue the shadows of ignorance and darkness, shining, like the sun, without preference, nurturing love upon the most humble of beings, helping them to transcend their limitations. Angels help the soul to hatch out of its enclosure, its psychic shell of recursive behavior patterns and cycles. A true light pierces the encrustations around the heart and this is the beginning of a turning, a deep reorientation, from someone who looks at the past and regrets, to a reborn one who faces the future and the light. This heart-opening epiphany is the theme depicted in many of Andrew Gonzalez images.
In times of secular materialism, it is rare that we have the eyes to see this serendipity. That is why it is good to have paintings such as these, to remind us of celestial mercy that overwhelms consciousness with its lightness, highness and purity. Andrew Gonzalez describes one such experience, as being “enveloped in a fiercely radiant golden light, moving rapidly towards its blazing white centre. I felt what could only be described as a sense of being reborn”. The sweet ambrosia of the Great Spirit removes blockages and opens up sacred centers in the body that transmit and receive spiritual light. This transfiguration is the remedy to self-persecution and existential angst.

The images brought into being by Gonzalez depict both the orientation to and embodiment of the biosophic energies of celestial grace and force. In that light, we are endlessly purified, fresh and new, ever renewing, ever-resurrected and upheld in spirit by the power of the celestial. We are as delicate as blades of grass, fresh and jeweled with the elements, nothing holding us up, eternal and precious in the moment. And that Sun that we behold, the celestial light that showers its life-imbuing force upon us, is nothing less than our own true nature, where we came from, and where we are coming from every moment. It is what we are, underneath the Lila-Samsara, or ‘Satanic Deception’ of the contemporary deranged mind.
Entering into that light is the end of psychic story time, and the beginning of Reality. It is the jeweled epiphany of divine life. It is Eternity. The cherubim and seraphim, the dakini messengers, mysterious personifications of our own light too bright for us to identify with, are our higher centers – dissociated, yet coming into communication, to raise our frequency into a fullness of being, where we radiate from every dimension, not just from our ego and emotions.
Through this work – a work of alignment – the passage of higher energies is created, opening the connection between Earth and the Universal Life of the Celestial. In time even the most lost atoms of mind will discover in the innermost centre of its constituent nature the indivisible light, that oneness, which shares in the indestructible purity of the Whole.
The Angelic dakini moving through the celestial, and through Gonzalez magical paintings, tell us we are more than what we know, so we move into serving and living for more than what we think we are, and teaching us to give thanks to the glories that are and forever will be in the eternal garden of the Heart.

Daniel Mirante
March 2006

A. Andrew Gonzalez paintings and prints can be explored at www.sublimatrix.com