Each voice on the Internet is inviting us into a new way of knowing and of gaining power and freedom. It all begins here.
here every day, out of my inquiry into the nature of creativity and its implications for human consciousness, the emerging new world culture and the foundations of 'meaning' and 'relevance'. These concepts have been recently pushed aside by the mainstream of international art, but remain the central things
as we as artists and creative thinkers feel compelled to explore further.
– to transform things into new and more relevant structures. I'd like to start out with some new insights I'
received recently on the connection between visionary art, value and inter-connectedness.
Insights that are arising here every day, out of our inquiry into the nature of creativity and its implications for human consciousness, the emerging new world culture and the foundations of 'meaning' and 'relevance'.
POWER OF ART.
TO HEAL, TO EXPERIENCE THE TRUTH OF HOW CHANGE TRANSFORMS OUR TIME CONSCIOUSNESS.
INTERCONNECTEDNESS
We value only those things which bring us a sense of connectedness – family, religion, love, community, patriotism, sport, sex, power, physical abundance and entertainment in all its forms – all lead us into a sense of connectedness (real or imagined) to something larger than ourselves. When new tools for realizing our inter-connectedness emerge new value is the result.
The dream emphasized the nature of value is inter-connection itself. What brings connection is intrinsically valuable – what prevents it is ultimately worthless. Before the dream lecture continued I anticipated the next part – the Internet provides greater interconnection than anything in the history of humanity. It is an engine for the creation of new value and the ultimate evolution of human consciousness. We're at the edge of something entirely new whose real effect is still decades (maybe centuries) away from being fully realized.
art and sphirical conscsiousness.
To my amazement, as the light shifted
in my environment, I saw an image of a beautiful landscape of in perfect proportion of images spanning the canvas.
The canvas was radiating light in gold as a exquisitely beautiful images of faces shown, faces with lines still moving thru the art, as something very familiar yet truly from the past.
The image of Jesus appeared amoung the faces and was placed on the upper portion of the canvas. I understood that the nature of inter-connectedness is both transcendence and my abundance of pure joy.
Another miracle in time from which millions of lightning-like emanations were constantly flickering and moving for seconds yet witnessed.
In the moments that my awakened was
to understand the miracle of time from Ancient Jerusalem and
that of my purest passion was not present in a parallel time frame
essence manifested the art over the past Indeed, this was my mission and life path to
bring forth "interactive" art to feel a deeper connection to the essence of Jesus and the soul of my essence.
Jesus shared with my soul 7 years ago
of how intimacy, perceptions and time shift our awareness to create clarity in the
relationship with the inner self.
'Value', for the first time became equated with 'meaning'. The search for meaning and the search for value are the same. Suddenly it made such sense!
I wondered after waking from the awakening, how does art shift in awareness by what we hold in our consciousness?
What creates the art to shift, concerning how light and discernment arise out of creating change thru the beliefs we formed and hold true for ourselves and our perceptions.
The answer materialized in my mind as soon as the question did. Art is about connection – always. Art connects us to each other across time and geography. Art is our vehicle for connecting artist to viewer, culture to culture, ancestor to descendant. Artists use art to discover inner truth – to connect ourselves to our own essence and enable us to realize fully that we are ultimately inter-connected. Art has always been about our connection to meaning, spirit, identity and the comprehension of transcendent mystic truth. Art, in all its forms, is primarily concerned with interconnection. Its function is simply to celebrate all that exists.
When we're learning to be artists – to take it seriously and develop a sense of life-long commitment to our art - we're really learning about how to share ourselves. We create valuable art by making things that a lead to connection. We create worthless art when it leads us away from connection. As current cultural structures subside in the face of modernist and post-modernist insistence that change is essential, we all are forced to struggle to discover meaning on our own. The agents of power and wealth struggle to survive the spiritual changes occurring in us, by imagining that they can simply proclaim the existence of value by paying extraordinary sums for artwork which supports their taste and privilege. This designation must of course be supported with rapidly increasing bestowal of wealth as a ritualized exchange of power and the enforced perception of value. Despite the astronomical increases in prices being paid for the artwork of a select number of living artists throughout the world, value and wealth are separating – a sign in itself of changing human consciousness. The outmoded 'values' of materialism and coercive power are being replaced with an emerging commitment to human rights, environmental awareness and the search for meaning in direct experience rather than cultural proscription. A generation ago, film and television created a trans cultural fusion of ideas and images, heralding the beginnings of the first generation of feminists, counter-culturalists, environmentalists, among other things. Today entirely new cultural identities aimed at transformation and evolution of spirit are emerging in the same way. The Internet is bringing forth an even more powerful machine for inter-connectedness and value. The 'next new thing' is the realization that inter-connectedness itself is a manifestation of essence. It is our nature – the nature of everything to move towards the awareness that all things are connected. As you read these words, we are connected. As you log-off the net – we're still connected. As you sing, or write, or paint, or love, or dream, or struggle, or weep, or become lost in your own thoughts, we find deeper connections.
often advise artists who make art about their dreams that it is far more effective and powerful to dream your paintings, than to paint your dreams. Come and dream with us for a while.
Mike Grady, April 5, 2007
THE POWER OF CHANGE
The Sense of Being Sought by "Another" One is not likely to describe easily or reliably the underlying motivations that have led him to understand how Change is activated by living in the NOW time. It is too easy to read back into past situations and experiences what one sees very clearly at the present time. Somehow it seems that there never was a time when I was not spiritual, though there certainly have been times when I have felt strong revulsions against certain forms of how we interpret the pure essence of Jesus and what I know to be merely transformational visions.
One thing that has frequently been present is the desire to see and know myself as I really am. Another has been the longing to achieve serenity and inner integrity where there was much that was chaotic and broken. More important has been the urgency of a moral imperative which through the years has come insistently and persistently to place life under radical tensions.
But in looking over my past experience, I cannot resist the conviction that it has not been primarily my seeking and searching that has been important, but rather the awareness of being sought and found by a higher presence.
It is possible that I am reading certain present attitudes into my past; some developed by my childhood perceptions, somehow or other the thought that a purposive, personal, active Reality has gone forth to meet me tends to dominate my thoughts more and more. In my best moments it is most natural to think of a Living God who has "invaded" the chaos and confusion of life to give it strength and vitality and hope It is He who 'fashions' and 'creates' and 'finds,' and thus gives existence. It is He who 'speaks' and reveals His will, and sets life before its imperative. The sense of moral obligation is His commanding, and my response is the will to obey or disobey.
The language of the Bible seems to express my own experience best of all. Moses' characteristic responses to the divine impulsions, Elijah's forlorness before the mountain cave, Amos' encounter with Amaziah the priest, Isaiah's dilemma in a national crisis, Jeremiah in the presence of the collapse of his world, Second Isaiah's sense of mission, Jesus' vision as He comes out of the baptismal waters--these situations have an authenticity about them which seems not merely personally convincing but almost universally recognizable. And I suppose that the influence of the Bible as a Scripture wrought from the heart of the world's life has accounted largely for many of my attitudes and the forms in which experience has been clothed. But paralleled with the appreciation of the Bible has come some understanding and appreciation of history, first of all the history of the Semitic East, but also the history of our own modern times.
But whatever the underlying psychological forces that have been at play, for me religion has simply been a guiding light.
Indeed, it has been the only real possibility. Other ways seem to have led to dead ends. In the only kind of world I have ever known, and in the kind of world that historical records reveal to me, relative loyalties are not enough. Hebrew Christian faith places life in a context of dynamic meaning and cosmic support; it kindles living by placing it under absolute commands which are adequately expressed in the Old and New Testaments; it provides a goal in the fullness and richness of its conception of the Sovereign Rule of God.
James Muilenburg, 1896-1974. American theologian.
Written for The Choice is Always Ours.