Introduction

The electronic version of the PhD “Catalog” referenced repeatedly below has been lost.  However, one may substitute here the LETTER TO A BISHOP, or INTERSTATES, THE NOVEL, since these longer works follow the same format: Images and captions composed in counterpoint with prose narrative, both fiction and non-fiction, to carry their meaning.

This Introduction presents elements particularly influential to the contents of this art catalog, and therefore in turn, represents these elements as similarly influential for the whole of the larger, creative collection. These works and themes produce a network of meaning and expression. Specifically, Chapter Five explores the formal artistic approach taken by works represented in the catalog, as well as its principal theological and cultural considerations. The influence of comparative religious elements is explored as the effect of mandalas, icons, and Abstract Expressionism is discussed in reference to the contents of this art catalog. Different attitudes toward human physiology and related cosmologies will be referenced as the meaning of this particular combination of the art, story, and intentions in the catalog are considered.

“EBACY ’91,” in Part I of the catalog, concerns a sequence of events extending over a period of six months in a youthful, quasi-religious and academic community wherein one might not expect esoteric or artistic phenomena of note to appear. The catalog and its story present an integration of various cultural, religious, and artistic elements: religious community, aesthetic values, exoteric, i.e., Christian, and esoteric, i.e., Tantric, religious principles. In this, a series of occasions develop from the ordinary to the extraordinary, even sacred,1 inebriation. The success or failure of the ‘experiment,’ described in the catalog, operates within the context of the volatile effect that contemporary technological culture has on the potential for such archaic, arcane experience. As such, this document represents techniques and traditions found in such categories as Shamanism, Tantra, and the eastern Christian Hesychasm, as well as in Modernity, as Panikkar calls the whole of the Modern Age to the present time.

Both the visual art and the literary work from the creative side of this dissertation are meant to carry, express, and catalyze the ‘spirit’ or ‘energy’ of the experience that is discussed here. This particular ‘energy’ is characteristic of the subject of this dissertation, this particular Shift of Consciousness. It indicates a particular, intentional formation and usage of human consciousness.

However, a more specific and underlying element of cohesion for the catalog is in the presentation of the energies: Divine Energies (created and Uncreated) of the Hesychasm, Prana and Kundalini of Vedic lore, Tsa (Tibetan), Chi (Chinese), Ki (Korean). This phenomenon, overtly related to many religions, is closely connected to certain ‘techniques’ for the shift of consciousness that seem, in the artist’s Catholic perspective, extraordinary. Among these are: psychoactive substances such as peyote, San Pedro cactus, alcohol, etc.; torture motifs such as found in the Plains Indian Sun Dance; and others that involve extreme physical, emotional, or psychic exertion, including transsexual trauma; and various other asceticisms and yogas.2 Extraordinary as these might seem to some, they are secure in the anthropological inheritance of serious religious practice. The energies weave their way throughout our topics and play a role in theological consideration involving Von Balthasar’s ‘self justifying inner-radiance.’ Von Balthasar’s precepts describe clearly the relationship between aesthetics and mysticism from a Christian perspective as is developed later in this chapter.

Another understanding that lends a cohesive effect in the catalog is a mystical vision that sees all reality as a body of interconnected elements. At one end of a spectrum this might be represented by the sublime Buddhist teachings of subject/object unification or by the highly exalted Body of Christ. At the other end, the unitive body might be seen in the more pragmatic effects of sympathetic magic, for example. This perspective sees the world as a great, multi-dimensional switchboard in which one might make the right gesture or action, or say the right word in the right kind of altered state, to connect with paranormal power and effect a magical transformation. The attitudes about prayer in the catalog story, “EBACY ’91,” fall somewhere in this spectrum between Christ and the Magi.

The catalog operates within the aesthetic and comparative religious emphasis of this dissertation on these levels:

A. Drawing from a large corpus of methods used to alter consciousness, the catalog refers in particular to the high frequency with which ‘sacred drunkenness’ is found in the history of religion. I personally witnessed this phenomenon during Shamanistic rituals among the Buddhist and non-Buddhist people of the Helumbu and Khumbu regions of Nepal and the Christian and non-Christian Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico. Examples can also be found among the ecstatic sects of Judaism; Hasidic weddings for instance, among others.

B. Emphasizing this phenomenon attracts attention to more important but less titillating issues. Though part of the aesthetic criteria of a work might be its ability to attract attention, just so that it will be read or looked at, though that was not what primarily motivated this art. For instance, in 1987, a mural that I had painted a couple of years earlier gained national attention because not only did its detractors not like the blue ground behind a nude figure of the Christ but they felt that our Lord was sexually aroused. I do not have a problem with the fact that Jesus might have been aroused, since the resurrection would have to be one of the most exciting moments possible. But notoriety was not originally the intention of the mural. It was meant to be a 20′ x 40′ icon. It was the central object of a larger complex of prayer, pilgrimage and ritual meant to effect the same intention as the works represented in this catalog. The mural was intentional to a great degree and the events in Part I of the Catalog happened spontaneously on their own. So, were these guided by some muse or holier spirit, or less holy spirit? What spirit guides an artist or a shaman to do what must be done? Is such compulsion a form of mental illness? Is such illness an unavoidable part of the Shamanistic or artistic motivation? How is such to be judged aesthetically, morally, spiritually?

C. The first miracle of Jesus Christ was to turn water into wine at a wedding for which there is no evidence that he did not participate fully in the celebration. Though, it is usually assumed that he would not, which says more about the traditional assumption than it does about the Christ. Traditional scholarship connects Christ to the Old Testament prophetic tradition, but it is also undeniable that the Old Testament develops out of the more ancient mythic pool of the Middle East and further, out of forty thousand years of universal, Shamanistic, Animistic, and agricultural religious evolution. I do not suggest that Christ used or did not use such techniques as mind altering substances or torture, etc.-though he was fully tortured before his final and greatest miracle.  But I do suggest his sympathy with the natural flow between the sacred and the ordinary found in such immediacy in archaic and agrarian society.

D. As stated above, examples such as sacred inebriation, sensational for some, are important members of a body of techniques that includes prayer, meditation, music, dance, stories, poetry, icons, mandalas, rituals, psychedelics, ascetic practice, and various yogas which have been and are still used to alter consciousness for the sake of achieving a multitude of spiritual, atemporal states, even absolute realization or divine union. I believe that art is a major “technique” of this kind still accepted by contemporary secular society. As such, it remains an important spiritual influence. Art not only expresses and explores, but leads. Perhaps this applies more to artistic elements operating in the mass media rather than just the fine arts. Such art influences the public greatly and therefore is an issue of ‘ordinary’ power, as well as esoteric and elitist interest. This understanding about the function of art will be developed further as this section progresses.

The assimilation processes operating as tools of influence in the ongoing formation of cultures and personalities are another salient aspect of the general topic here. Panikkar refers to this important process of assimilation as mutual fecundation.3 The suggestive connection here in this regard is to the agrarian, pagan and Dionysian, experience in Shamanistic and agricultural religion. The experience described in the catalog has such agrarian roots, because of the particular Asian cultural influences involved; Korean, Buddhist, Christian, and Shamanistic. This is contrasted with the apollonian, urban sobriety–nepsis,4 that has dominated formal Christian practice since the early Fathers of the Church clarified what was and what was not appropriate Christian practice. “Nepsis” is an important concept in the development of Christianity referring to a state of spiritual attainment that is clear, awake, sober, and watchful preparation for the advent of the Lord in one’s inner life and in the world.

Mircea Eliade and others postulate that the story of the Fall (Original Sin) in the Old Testament is really the poetic memory of a major transition for a hunter-gatherer people to the development of agriculture around the top of the Persian Gulf, a garden lush local at the time.5 This reference evoked in me an intuitive response that later connected with the evolution of the Tibetan mandala… and refers to the development of civilization itself in Mesopotamia.6 The stories of Christ and Genesis could be interpreted as a call, often repeated and progressively developed, to return from the empires of civilization to a less ambitious, less ego-driven mindset–hubris–that allows for a personally closer relationship with what eventually became identified in absolute terms as God. There is more than a suspicion in the catalog that Christ not only understood the Original threat in such a move away from the natural, but recommends a lifestyle more in the direction of our Shamanistic origins or even a yogic vision. This is a direction very different in either its sobriety or a more Dionysian, even Tantric format, than the direction of historic,7 urban-based empires as that of Sumeria, Assyria, Rome, and others, including our own. Panikkar warns and comments repeatedly about the significance of this departure.

Temporal rule opposed to atemporal consciousness is contained in the contrast between the more primordial Shamanism, and civilization. Panikkar’s work, Blessed Simplicity, deals with the topic of time at length and with great nuance. It is a fundamental, corporate shift of consciousness in history that leads away from nature to technocratic civilization.

A Christian example of a body of techniques for such altering of consciousness to more atemporal realization would be 1700 very sober years of Christian monasticism or the more universal archetype of the monk, which is the topic of Panikkar’s book, Blessed Simplicity.8

The Shree Chakra Mandala is an excellent Asian example of a highly nuanced technique for altering consciousness, for within this format the personal body and the body of the universe and God achieve union. Temporality reaches completion in the matrix of atemporality.9 The cosmotheandric nature of reality in Panikkar’s ontology addresses this issue.

Thus, Part I of the catalog refers to processes found in many cultures and religions that seek a practical format for obtaining a unitive experience of temporal and non-temporal being according to Dr. Panikkar’s thesis about the significance of this phenomenon. The catalog does this by referring to a series of art exhibitions dealing with this subject and by presenting short works of fiction that in a closely related way also treat this topic. Originally, the hope was that this presentation of art and story would, in a distilled and Zen-like way, help the viewer/reader make the necessary connections to obtain such a visionary experience as well as comment upon the existence of such unitive processes. The degree of success regarding this intention is discussed in Chapter One of this dissertation.

Part II of the catalog refers to the artistic and metaphysical development that is the larger context in which Part I fits. It does this symbolically by representing the cosmologies, beliefs, (i.e., gods, God, or science), spiritual experiences, (from kenosis to sunyatta), and psychic experiences, (psychokinesis to rainmaking) that are the self-identification of people(s) of various philosophical or religious understandings. This is more fully developed in regard to one of the art works from Part II as I evaluate this work according to the formal precepts of a well-known art critic.10 This analysis includes political and cultural as well as aesthetic and theological ramifications.11

It would be superficial to view this representation of works in the catalog as merely eclectic or encyclopedic because of the wide range of moods, references, and themes exhibited in its works because: (1.) Each work, especially in Part II, represents whole series with dozens of members and (2.) these works are meant to express not only the artist, but the environments of his endeavor as he moves from art school and family, to monastery, seminary, comparative religious study, travel as a pilgrim, and Shamanistic practice.12 By exploring the context of his attitudes according to this study’s methodology, I comment upon Panikkar’s epistemology.13

As we explore the catalog and the connections that it makes with various world traditions in art and religion, it is important to understand that certain attitudes about the human body and psyche constitute the fulcrum upon which this dissertation turns. At the heart of these particular attitudes is the ability to shift consciousness in a religious context. To understand this ability is a key necessary to understand the mystical framework that supports Panikkar’s perspective as well as the attitudes that explain the art in Part II of the catalog.

The story in Part I of the catalog develops out of and refers to the context represented in Part II of the catalog. Part II is taken completely from the contents of “Nepsis.” “Nepsis,” later known as LETTER TO A BISHOP is a narrative grimoire in the form of a very long letter from a priest to his bishop. It describes his motivation and that which, or who,14 guides him in actions that cause the bishop to suspend him. It is this larger complex of consciousness represented by Fr. Adam’s doings and relationships in “Nepsis” and the other literary works that is being excavated by the discursive processes employed here.15

The art of the catalog has been both a vehicle of investigation into some of the non-discursive territory of this topic, as well as providing artifacts, i.e., art works, from these forays into the unconscious, the realms of power16 and meaning.17 The art itself is meant to be a catalytic agent that provokes experiences and response, attention and care, hopefully in some of the audience as well as the artist.

The first exhibition mentioned on the title page of the catalog was at Liturgy Santa Fe in Berkeley and was a “works in progress” show that allowed an environment of the art works to be set up in a neo-gothic architectural space. Many of them were ‘in process.’ That is, I was still working on them as I gave a number of seminars to the public on the Mandala, Shamanistic art, and my own work. The following Bade Museum exhibit was the public presentation of pivotal, finished works of this larger process. The final Grace Cathedral exhibition was a quiet denouement to this series. The art program at Grace Cathedral was famous, but has just been ended after twenty years of operation. Mine was its last, real exhibit of creative art. I hope it revives If the demise of this respected program is a gauge of the current state of the arts in America, one cannot determine conclusively, but this experience, without doubt, contributed to the regretful even dismayed temper of attitudes regarding the American art scene as expressed in Chapter Seven’s conclusions to this dissertation.

The captions to the art works in both Parts I and II of the catalog play a very important role that is discussed later in this section when I discuss Abstract Expressionist titles. But briefly, some feel that titles to such abstract works are superfluous. I, along with many of the Abstract Expressionists, feel that they indicate in an important manner the milieu out of which these works develop and help the viewer to find landmarks of meaning to better appreciate such work. There is perhaps a kind of superficiality to such titles with references to other peoples’ religions, and mythologies, etc. But I think that they represent the secular, modernist movement’s attempt to deal with the unavoidable ontic questions of our existence and therefore are religious gestures if seemingly superficial when compared to the major, ancient, religious traditions that actually produced such references.  The catalog intends in its structure, content, and references to explore possible directions for such secular, modernist intention since we have now moved into what some call a postmodern milieu.18

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  1. Sacrifice, “to make sacred,” is a concept of fundamental importance in Panikkar’s schema. This is true for both his evaluation of time and culture in traditional, archaic or modern setting. Specifically, sacrifice for Panikkar is that action and intention which draws the worlds of time and non-time together. In this sense, sacrifice is the ritual fruition possible because of the proper shift of consciousness. See Chapter Four, Section II, p. 80, for more about Panikkar’s perspective. Panikkar does not deal with inebriation but the Catalog does. See essay on Shamanism, p. 22, in Section I of the Dissertation  on the NF Table Of Contents for more about the primordial function of sacrifice in the context of Shamanistic initiation. [↩]
  2. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, p. 33ff. [↩]
  3. Mutual Fecundation: See note #11 below. [↩]
  4. For the convenience of the reader this following reference is repeated here. Nepsis: A New Testament Greek work meaning to be “awake, watchful, sober” as the five maidens with sufficient oil for their lamps were in Matt. 25, 1-13. This Gospel story indicates the formal preparation and practice that are necessary in the faith, according to talks given by Archbishop Timothy Kallistos Ware at Immaculate Heart Hermitage, Big Sur, Ca. Spring, 1977. Nepsis is a point of comparison with Buddhist notions about waking up that are central to the significance of meditation. It is a concept that governed my own study and practice, until certain contrary Tantric concepts took over with the Yemen experiment. See “Nepsis” summary, p. 221 in this dissertation. [↩]
  5. . Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985) p.29. Or, Smithsonian Magazine, “Garden of Eden, Myth or History”, (May, 1987). For a good reference on this general topic, see any of Martin Noth’s works on the mythic context of ancient Middle Eastern culture and religion. [↩]
  6. Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra (London, 1973) p. 160. An interesting connection here is that, according to some authorities, the Tibetan Buddhist mandala and stupa derive from the Vedic altar and that Aryan/Dravidian format from the sacred space or sanctuary of the Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Ziggurat. [↩]
  7. Atemporal” versus “historic” consciousness is a major theme here. See R. Panikkar, “Time and Sacrifice–the Sacrifice of Time and the Ritual of Modernity”; as well as Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya. [↩]
  8. Raimundo Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity, (New York, 1982). [↩]
  9. Giuseppe Tucci, Theory and Practice of the Mandala, See Shree Chakra Mandala in Tucci appendix. [↩]
  10. See Appendix #6 of this dissertation, p. 342, “Window.” But in general, the whole of this critique is governed by values found in Panikkar’s categories, such as: The “Cosmotheandric” nature of our existence, (Cosmotheandric: Cosmos + Theos (God) + Andros (Humanity); temporal and atemporal consciousness); “Dialogic Dialog” (Discussion is not enough, one must know the “other’s’ tradition and experience well enough to present it so that the “other” could claim it); and the “Mutual Fecundation” of cultures and religions, for its philosophical perspective (Mutual Fecundity means that cultures and religions are the product of many mutual influences and are not derived from any single, ‘pure’ source.)  [↩]
  11. Attitudes about justice are endemic to the ‘spirituality’ in the Old Testament prophetic tradition and very much emphasized by Panikkar, in this regard. See Addendum to Section II, p. 93, under Justice. [↩]
  12. Shamanistic content is in evidence by the particular nature of the paranormal phenomenon in the Catalog’s main story, EBACY’91, as well as some of the art, plate #20 in my catalog, for instance. [↩]
  13. Mutual fecundation would be an example of such in Panikkar’s attitude. [↩]
  14. Fr. Yang, my first monastic teacher, was raised a Buddhist and became a Benedictine monk; he was an artist with a Ph.D. in Diplomacy from Louvain. He once told me that he did not feel that Westerners could really become serious Buddhists because of the degree of submission required of meditator to the Guru in Asia. The psychic preparation required, developed from birth by Asians, runs counter to so much of what is endemic to the occidental psyche. So the issue of a “guide” becomes major as one is trying to learn about world religions, the interior workings of human perception and culture. Someone like Panikkar becomes particularly valuable, since he makes the bridge by the ‘accidents’ of his life; i.e., his father was an Indian Hindu, and his mother was a Catalan Catholic. He speaks perhaps 20 languages and is deeply versed in both religion and science. The first of my guides were, artists (my main painting teacher was the prominent Abstract Expressionist, Hans Burkhardt). Then I was taught by some remarkable Benedictines and Trappists, then by my “root guru” in Tibetan studies, who was one of the top Nyingmapa Abbots from Tibet, and for the past dozen years there has been Pannikar himself. “Nepsis”, p. 221, this dissertation, depicts this process of “path and guide” in some detail. Also see Chapter One, p. 20 this dissertation. [↩]
  15. See Appendix 1, p. 221, in this dissertation for “Nepsis” summary. [↩]
  16. The Buddhist “realm of Power” according to Ven. Shinzen Young is the world of the gods that is the psychic ethos for the world. See Appendix 3 of this dissertation, p. 256, for general essay on Buddhism and Shinzen’s curriculum vitae, Appendix 8, p. 379. [↩]
  17. Such meaning might be gained from metaphysical training, religious philosophy, experiential access to an inner-radiance that is self-justifying in its worth, or perhaps, just a relationship with God, or a process that engages Nirvanic bliss. [↩]
  18. It will be helpful for understanding the overall catalog presentation to analyze one of the art works from Part II of the catalog. This analysis is according to the critical format of a well known art and religion commentator, Thomas Martland. This will, among other things, demonstrate the difficulty in finding the appropriate aesthetic category for this catalog or the artist’s intentions in its works as the artist moves in these works between actual experience, the artistic expression of such experience, and a discursive analysis of both work and experience in a postmodern milieu. This critique is meant to be representative and can be found in the Appendix 6 of the dissertation, p. 342. [↩]