141 [82.] ‘Freeways Dissect the Sacred’
Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas 5′x 4’1987
Chapter Three
In which:
-In Hawaii there is an unexpected message from “them”.
-Agnes, the California Earthquake and the Taj Mahal.
-The Dali Lama.
-The Battle.
-The Dragon Man, Total Identification and Mother Theresa (I met her there.)
Bishop, let me speak for a moment about art. This might not be so interesting to you. So, you might want to skip ahead to the next action around page 272. But, the art theory below is pertinent to the conclusions of this story fast approaching. The conclusion definitely will be of interest because it requires a response from you. You should consider these as ‘notes on a process’ rather than a thesis at this point:
Perhaps what distinguishes ‘modernist’ from ‘traditional’ thinking is that the “moderns” discarded entirely their own (occidental) mystical systems that were the basis for a universal definition of the world and human personality, largely Jewish and Christian with an undersheen of older religions. This denial, in part, opened the door in the 19th and 20th centuries to discover in a new way what it meant to be a human being in the face of the commercially sucessful, technological wonders, and martial horrors of the 20th century. That had some drawbacks, like the suicides and mysterious deaths of many of these explorers.(See note #22, Introduction) But it was a brave venture.
Some have expressed this traditionalist/modernist distinction in terms of how we communicate. Traditional culture with all its definite taboos, rituals, cosmologies, used symbols with specific references. A picture of Christ or the Buddha referred to something generally understood within a “structure of assumptions.”* Modernist thinking abandoned such comforts for “metaphor without reference.” In this I believe that they hoped for greater authenticity and honesty in response to the challenge of individual experience and assumed the possibility of freedom from personal bias or cultural “structures of assumptions” about life and the world.
Once when queried about the Aristotelian notion of Art being a reflection of Nature, Jackson Pollack replied, “I am Nature.” (Landau, pgs. 161,179,242.) Thus one’s life and art becomes the direct experience of absolute as well as personal Being without artificial intermediary agents, such as priests.
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*(Mary Douglas, from, “Peasant and Jew”, Lionel Rothkrugh Historical Reflections. Spring 1983 vol. 10 No.1. University of Waterloo, Ontario.)
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Though the Modernist’s interest in direct experience might be more empathetic with various mystical schools of divine union and realization, even those of the Church.*
Modernism, sailing full spinnaker at the turn of the century, culminated in Abstract Expressionism of the New York School and Existentialism in the ’50s.
One of the alternative trends has been a re-exploration of ancient symbolic systems. Hopefully, my interest in the Tibetan Mandala, Byzantine Icons, shamanistic and monastic sacramental practices…
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* Rothkrug, “Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions”, Historical Reflections, Vol. 7. Sp. 1980 “…argues that the Renaissance, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation proceeded largely out of regionally distinct sequential mutations in patterns of collective intercourse with departed souls.” That is, it was a war for control of Europe’s spiritual penitential systems. If we generalize, and say here that those “penitential systems” represent attempts of individuals and cultures to deal with the relationship between this world and the “other world” or more generally to determine an ontology or cosmology, then perhaps we can say that the 19th and 20th century Modernists were still at it and what we have now is the result of that battle.
I was first heavily influenced by the power and insights of Modernist art and the altruistic concerns so fervent in the Sixties. Then I began religious studies and practice.
My art now is an aspect of a larger conjuring and practice to effect a larger goal. (The manipulation of symbolic and non-symbolic perception is the modern warrior’s craft.) I hope that this story displays some of the potential in this understanding. That goal is nothing less than full, absolute ‘realization’, “Deification”, (Third Century Church Dogma), for myself and everything else. Here. Now. I use any ‘means’ available in this world and the ‘other one’ to accomplish my goal because we are at such a desperate moment that I believe requires a radical creativity. Not only is the culture and the environment torn, but the very fabric of physical brain is at odds. Art against Religion. Religion against Science. Right Brain against Left Brain. The traditional, more… “natural”, mindset is pushed and stressed; indeed enslaved, to produce technological wonders that amaze and destroy. All too fast. All too greedy. Compulsively greedy.
To moderate this imbalance, I have tried to call up all the “agents” operative within the world’s “personality” to effect a turn away from the lemming’s cliff. In working this ‘magic’, some of the paintings and sculptures from 1987 to 1989 (immediate post Yemen) reflect the venomous, cathartic, eruption of death and destruction characteristic of the personal and universal evolutionary cycles that this story of the warrior’s path has tried to unveil and effect. The art work that followed returned to an earlier approach of simple colors and spiritual curiosity characteristic of my first post-college work. But then it returns to issue of identity, the ‘warrior’s action’. It is the issue of our times. It is the issue of all time.
Thus, Bishop, I dreamed dreams of Power. Then…, I disappeared.
INDIA:
“We will be with you there.”
That was the communication as I lay in bed that evening ‘innocently’ reading a novel, towards the end of my rest stop in Hawaii. I assumed ‘there’ meant Varanasi, but perhaps it was the whole venture in India. The ‘they’ that was the source of this communication came from deep inside those islands. It was a ‘Power’ or deity(s) ready to aid in the battle. I related this to the communication from ‘them’ at Stonehenge also seeking salvation, completion. (Part I, Chapter 7.)
I didn’t pay much attention to it, went on with the novel, but accepted their support. Panikkar had told me not to force anything, just let it develop. That is fine with me, since I have become disinterested with this whole esoteric complex. Though, at the same time, I feel very much the veteran in all this in the sense that I feel calm and detached from any anxiety before the battle. Not much else happened in Hawaii, except a strong earth/mating/sky ritual in a beautiful and powerful place on Oahu. Also, the night I arrived, the islands were struck by rare south winds that brought torrential rains. I left Friday the 13th, October, 1989. It was a full moon. As I left, I felt my body sparkling around the navel chacra, the center so important to the performance of Chinese Martial Arts, especially Tai Chi. It is the amoral center of all things from a personal pint of view. The experience was uncomfortable, but beautiful.
In India, I first visited Agra, the Taj Majal. I met a strikingly beautiful young man there, Raj, in a chance encounter as we strolled around the Taj. We met again later, and began a conversation that went on long into the night at my hotel. He was hoping I would set him up with a beautiful foreign girl. There was high sexual arousal in all this. It was earth/mating/sky talk, along the abyss of Sin. No physical contact, no culmination. I spent the next afternoon in my room with a migraine. Slowly, without considering it to be especially significant at that moment, I spread out sacred images and the few power objects that I had with me. I constructed a spontaneous ritual. (It reminded me, curiously, of the disastrous Yemen ritual. I left Agra. When I arrived in Dehra Dun, I was taken immediately to see Agnes. She is my deeply catholic friend who runs a leper colony there. A holy woman. Her first words were about the terrible earthquake that hit the San Francisco Bay area, my home. It hit between my meeting with Raj and doing the ritual the next day. This is too uncomfortably like Yemen. (Refer to Russian earthquake.) Soviet empire changes dramatically with Gorbachev; the flame of Communism is going out in the world. The Mother of God at Fatima asked for the conversion of Russia; I am the servant of heaven…; Do you think…?? Somehow, if one believes such communication, I think that She wants something more than a shift from radical Communism to radical and just as destructive Capitalism, or another narrow-minded Theocracy.)
So, the journey to India began.
When I was at the Taj, I remember thinking how sick I was of death: the fires, earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, storms that seem to characterize poignant moments of this journey. The Taj Majal is beautiful, but it is a tomb. There were dogs eating something, a corpse perhaps, out on a sand bar in the river that flows by the Taj. So much death. Can’t be separated from life. “Where else can we go?”
Then, from several days record in my journal:
…yesterday–clear light realization. Experience of clear light. Clarity of understanding, love.
…Today, the fourth black widow from the dream, the crippled one, subject to sin and karma, unlike the three strong ones!! Not permanent disability. Can be healed. Soon all four will be strong.
…Last night had strong sense of dark presence. Today used the warrior’s diamond bladed steel sword in an infinite space of black and gold to fight some beast, toxic, the belly of the beast. Black Widow is very agitated. I have been sick today and last night. Medicine keeps me going.
…Had great interview with the head of the Nyingmapa. I felt good and at peace there. At Catholic Church where I am staying, there are conflicts and problems among themselves. They have been good to me. But… usual parish issues. The place is a strong place though and the church is an ancient building… The universal monastic archetype is stronger for me though.
The battle is raging. What is this beast and where is it from? Terrible. The ritual knife is unsheathed, engorged. The rosary and the crystal are emitting great power.
The Lord
The holy Lord is my
only
attraction…
only hope.
Dreams, wonderful dreams last night. Water, swimming, horses, hills.
Bus ride to Dharamsala. I spontaneously begin to send Chris great volumes of traveling webs. Then I send great volumes of energy into universe. It is coming out of the marrow of my bones. When I begin to run out of my own, I begin to draw it up out of the earth.
Arrive in Dharamsala. Terrible dream of smallish elephant… dead or unconscious next to a pool of bloody water… important totem for me. Next day, I become very sick, still sending silken webs but they come from the earth through my skeleton, my bones– I send the webs.
I got so sick after that. I was taken to the hospital last night with hell of a migraine, felt like the top of my head was coming off, …and giardia. My friends thought I was dying or having a heart attack. I was not conscious enough to tell the difference.
still sending webs… time before, time after…
Read Indian edition of Time Magazine. Oct. 30 contains section on Southern California earthquake and Bush as environmentalist. Ironic twist. Another “amusing” twist in that issue is that the Third World is holding First World hostage with environmental issues. The Soviet empire is crumbling… What about the Western empire……
Thus, begins the turn of Being… Bishop (Being being dynamic anyway and quite capable of turning on its own!)
Varanasi is yet to come!
Dream:
I am in an urban nightscape surviving among street gangs but the gang members are not really hostile to me, only challenging. It is really play and practice. Then I am confronted with a real “enemy,” big, young, muscular, adult male confronts me violently, up close about to attack. I panic at first, but then I remember Tai Chi. I relax, chuckle and melt out of his attack. This as I wake in time to call on other resources, since my expertise at martial arts is so limited and would crumble in the face of his obvious skill and power, ferocity and strength. Myself? Another? (He is the figure from Pescadero beach dream and vision of the fiercely handsome young man. Part I, Chapter 5.)
Christ is the divine Matrix of Mystery; Jesus is the human being. Christ is neither man nor woman, but the deeper mystery of Self.
I am given a surprise, private audience with the Dalai Lama!!! We talked about many things. I ask him about the path of the spiritual warrior. He said that we must promote peace in the world, but the inner spiritual life is always a battle. In the face of violence, one must always return compassion! Towards the end, I told him the above dream. He said, ‘Self’ is always what we have to battle.
My self? The universal self? Other selves? It’s enough if it’s only mine. Remarkable therapy this, if it is. In any case, in the power and spirit that came from that interview, I have forgiven those who have hurt me. They are the more long term victims of their personalities than I. Perhaps the angry young man from the above dream was the result of this damage and subsequent repression of normal male expansion early on. Now, I understand the anger and frustration. It has also been a tremendous empowerment because I had to search so far in this world and the ‘other’ for an understanding of the issue of Self. Myself, the Other Self. And now feel the power to heal all.
Dream:
I’ve gotten to a very beautiful place, but I’m quite lost. No knowing the way back to town. Beautiful young people dive finely nude into beautiful ocean. I stand in the golden sand, waves lapping about my feet. Then, decide to climb up the mountain to get a better look at things. We’ll see…
Days later I “met” the dragon of the shrine in the mountains above Dharamsala: ‘spring grass in an old orchard.’
New grass pierces between orchard pebbles
an infinity of green blades
I walk along the golden shore
ancient waters lapping across my feet
“Awake, I must awake”
I, but not just I
I am watchful…
(I am Nepsis)
The old dragon smiles, the new…
pierces between old orchard pebbles.
Very positive. (Agnes has told me stories about the warrior saint, George, taming rather than killing the dragon, an important dynamic in mankind’s dealing with the forces of nature and the development of agriculture (technology). George as perhaps you know, Bishop, means the “farmer” or earth worker.)
There was a sense of culmination about this meeting, amidst long, long periods of waiting for one thing or another and disconcerting emotional adjustments to being in India. Have had remarkable good luck with the Tibetans and my research.
Late in my stay in Dharamsala, the dragon from the mountain shrine came into my room and brought me something. The dragon turned into the body of a large man and left that body with me. It was barely alive. It was naked and male, though genitals were hidden in shadows. Absent? This ‘dragon-man’ was well formed. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I let it be. Then, I went to Sarnath in central north India where Buddhism started. The ‘dragon-man’ remained with me. His eyes were cavities. Not that he was blind permanently but his eyes were hidden in shadows. Burnt out. I did not know what I was supposed to do with him. So I just let him be, to see what developed. After a few days the solution presents itself. We both are taken to a place on the grounds of St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo where I’d done rituals in the past. ( Once in the seminary, a friend asked me to heal him of a bad headache. I did. That night he had a great powerful dream. The next day we were walking around the grounds as he told me about the dream when inadvertently we came to the place where I had done the rituals and buried sacred objects in a small pit. He said that that was the location in his dream. In his dream, I was a shaman with others and I was showing him ‘how to do it’. I had a hand full of pebbles that I threw down on the ground causing fire to shoot up out of the little pit.)
This was the place where the dragon man from Dharamsala and I were taken! For days I shamanized over him. He was dying. There was only a little ‘chi’ left in his body, in the naval chakra. I increased that and drew it up the central channel to his crown. He was mightily enlivened with a crown of light around his head and now opened, seeing eyes. But it is wrong somehow. It is crazy, evil light. All wrong. This goes on for days. He is laying still at that place in the seminary grounds. I now have the steel staff from Yemen. I strike the ground over and over again, as in Yemen, but all around his body prone on the ground. I am conscious at this point that I am striking whatever it is that is consuming me and the world. I strike with increasing frenzy, all around his head. Then by “accident” I strike him right in the middle of his forehead. I am shocked. Terrified. The great steel staff has pinned his head to the ground. I’ve killed him. Terrible mistake. I’m supposed to heal. I immediately try to heal him but the image fades out of my consciousness. I feel terribly, dangerously stupid.
Then, after several days I realized that what I did was the right, necessary thing. I had driven the staff right through the third eye. The staff was now gone. The Dragon man is not dead but asleep, resting. The wound is healed/ing. He is resting in that place, a beautiful golden white light suffuses the whole vision and thus it remains.
Just yesterday, 1/11/90, from that light, a vision developed of the Himalayas where the dragon lived. Then, that extended as the vast psychic structure of the earth ‘risen’ and characterized by that white, golden, clear sparkling light. All the sacred places from twenty years of pilgrimage connected, became one body somehow. Very beautiful. Great energy and peace.
In order to survive India, I went through three schedules of antibiotics, two trips to hospital emergency rooms, and am just recovering from mild pneumonia contracted on the return trip. Exhaustion no doubt was the cause. Now that I am recovering, I feel great (having lost 25 lbs.) Though I’m not sure there are that many such pilgrimages left in me.
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8 MANDALA PAINTINGS
103 [30.] Head of Christ
Mandala.
Oil on Canvas 24″ x 18″ 1980
‘Religious Studies’ begin to show its influence on an art once Modernist, then Christian, now those and something more…
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97 [60.] Unexpected Face
(Cruciform Mandala)
Oil on Canvas 3′ x 2.5′ 1983?
I had been working on mandalic and cruciform themes in this and several other paintings in a series. Long after I finished this work, someone pointed out a face that dominates the center of this composition. I’d never seen it. Thus, the title. Ideas about the human form as the mandalic analogy for all reality, as well as Celtic and Greek notions of the head as the seat of the soul, play in my curiosity about this painting.
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143 [84.] Mandala: India I: Head of Christ. Protective Mandala
Oil on Canvas 2′ x 2.5′ 1990
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144 [85.] “Mandala: India II: Deity of the Mandala. Uncommon Protective Mandala”
Paintings #84-87 were painted upon my return from India in1990. I had journeyed to India to study Tibetan Buddhism (1980); in particular, Tibetan Mandalas, (1990). Paintings #88 and #94 continue the influence of this study and practice. (Painting #30, 1980, reflects an early interest in this complex of themes.) The Mandala in Tantric Yoga, like the Christian Icon and its theologies, is the Great Art of Divine/Mundane union, theSymbolon. This practice and product requires the reconfiguration of intellect, emotion, imagination and physicality of the practitioner for re-creation of the whole human person in its ‘true’ or ‘divine’ image. In other words, this attempts full, true ‘conversion.’ That is the intention for both the practitioner and for the world. Thus, an actual mandala or madalesque (truly iconic) art carries that same intention: the ‘salvation’ or ‘realization’ of individual and world by seeking and telling—being—this truth. This is the touchstone for the whole of NEPSIS.
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145 [86.] Mandala: India III: Deities of the Mandala. Uncommon Protective Mandala
Oil on Canvas 24″ x 18″ 1990
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146 [87.] Mandala: India IV: Mediator
Oil on Canvas 36″ x 30″ 1990
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147 [88.] Mandala: V: Nature is the First Mandala. The Human Being is the Second
Oil on Canvas 5′ x 5′ 1990
All of these “Mandala” paintings indicate aspects of the Tibetan Buddhist Mandala that particularly impressed the artist…
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94.
165 [94.] “Who Told You You Were Naked”: Theopoeisis: A New Innocence
(Uncommon Protective Mandala)
Oil on Canvas 12′ x 8′ 1996-99
Centerpiece of SSU Newman mural triptych, #’s 94, 95, 96.
When Adam and Eve are found hiding from God in the Garden of Eden, God replies to Adam’s complaint about being naked with the above query: “Who told you you were naked?” Before the Resurrection and after the creation of Adam and Eve, this question might be the most important moment described in the Bible. How do we lose our innocence, i.e. our natural relationship with the divine spirit… and everything else? This painting in combination with #93, #43, (and #84-88!), comment upon the ‘answer’ to the problem of the Fall in Genesis–the Christos, or our christic identity—or as Panikkar would have it, a “New Innocence.” The old innocence is lost. It cannot be reclaimed by modernity. But there is the possibility of a “new” state that comes from the influence all the “wisdom traditions” of the past and the altruistic intentions of our own secular age. In relationship to the “New Innocence” is the ancient Church teaching about, Theopoeisis, the Rhythm of God, or the movement of the divine spirit in creation. This refers to an early, predominant teaching, or spiritual method, in the Church concerning how such original innocence is rediscovered in one’s life. To live life according to the Rhythm of God, is to discover one’s true identity, and holiness as the completion of nature, the integration of knowledge.
The “horns of light,” yellow shapes around the central figure are a reference to mandala themes. See #84-88.