The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but something that you can become.
It is very easy to take for granted the phenomenon that we are each alive, but we must try not to.
When we gaze into the eyes of our beloved, we’re staring into the eyes of a sacred mirror, and we recognize our oneness.
You are one with the same force that provides the spiral arms of the galaxy. That universal creativity. It’s also what you are as well. And when the mystic eye is open and sees that, a person is forever changed !
I felt I had dissolved into a pure energy state and become one with the magnetic field surrounding the earth.
The creative principle is less about dogma and more about opening ourselves to the evolution of consciousness.
In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.
It is the prayer of my innermost being to realize my supreme identity in the liberated play of consciousness, the Vast Expanse. Now is the moment, Here is the place of Liberation.
Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.
To bare our souls is all we ask, to give all we have to life and the beings surrounding us. Here the nature spirits are intense and we appreciate them, make offerings to them – these nature spirits who call us here – sealing our fate with each other, celebrating our love.
Artists are most themselves when they are out of their minds, transcending the ego skirmishes of conceptual thought, and intuitively relinquishing control to the greater Creator.
Do solemnly swear to love, honor and obey my soul, my path to realization and relationship with a higher, deeper creative power, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, from now and forever more.
When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.
Art is a delivery system for worldviews.
The web of life, love, suffering and death unites all beings.
The inevitable consequence of love is the building of temples.
I think that that’s why artists make art – it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
Journeying through secret doors, curving corridors, and connecting rooms into the mountain was like being digested by the different organs of a deity.
It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.
There is a need for individuals to find ways of transcending their limiting identities, of periodically committing egocide. The submission to God by following transformative spiritual practices can more safely engage the death-rebirth transcendence axis. Some cultures have elaborate and cathartic rites of passage for every stage of life. Our culture has not fostered safe death and rebirth rituals. So people create their own, consciously or unconsciously.
Certainly a painting can be reductionistically described by its physical properties only: its shape, the paint, the design, and so forth. But every artwork that exists is both an individual thing, a whole unto itself, and simultaneously a part of the matrix of forces that brought it into being.