Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What makes Burning Man special is the location: a 9-mile circle of gypsum, an ancient dried ocean bed. The ground is like a flat crust with no plants or insects, a perfect outdoor gallery for monumental interactive sculpture and architecture.
The more religions are fixated on having a dogmatic sense of truth, the more likely they are to blow each other up. So being open to God as a creative principle could provide for a new kind of dialogue between the faiths, which I think is crucial at this time.
Religion comes from the word 're' or again and 'ligare' meaning to bind or tie back. The purpose of religion is to unite the self with God or the creative force. Music, sacred spaces, and meaningful icons are the way we conjoin our minds with the transcendental.
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.
Enlightenment is not so much a hard-won achievement, much less a "creation," but instead is deep relaxation and recovery of our natural condition. You come to see the evolution of the soul, the soul's journey, as a realization of what has always been there in the first place.
I use a lot of different words for God - infinite intelligence, primordial, perfection or universal creativity. All of these, to me, are God. And 'God' is a word, I think, that some people feel uncomfortable with, so they can use another word, you know? It's the great mystery.
It's kind of hard get outside of your own frame of reference. To one degree or another, we all go through our breakdowns and we can recognize our lives as a path to awakening or not. We can take our breakdowns as a way to sensitize us or as an excuse to blind and dull ourselves.
Share your presence with others, no boundaries, completely, openly, lovingly. Love is what makes us alive, that is why we feel so alive when we love. Service is being available to love. Life is the combustion of love. That we love ourselves here, that is the true magnificence in the mountains of being.
A work of visionary art can shock a person out of their normal thinking patterns and help them to see the world in a new way, helping them to transfigure their perception of reality. Obviously, it's only one of many potential catalysts to healing and transformation, but I think it can be a significant one.
Visionary art sure has played a vital role in my own "soul's journey," and I would say it's been important for many artists and viewers throughout history. Visionary art is one of the primary ways that human contact with higher subtle dimensions gets translated into our communally shared physical dimension.
I would like my art to be about the possibility that each of us has to realize our connectedness with this great Spirit, whatever you want to name it, our inherent Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, primordial reality, the ground of being, God. Whether you want to go for a personal or impersonal perception of Spirit, is up to the individual.
Humanity has to start noticing that we are One. We are connected with the net of beings who are the life of this planet - and before we take them all down, we ought to see what we can do to preserve this unique and extraordinary family. That's what I think the wounded healer would do. We're all wounded in one way or another. The question is, can we heal?
The artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. Our scientific, materialist culture trains us to develop the eyes of outer perception. Visionary art encourages the development of our inner sight. To find the visionary realm, we use the intuitive inner eye: The eye of contemplation; the eye of the soul. All the inspiring ideas we have as artists originate here.
The many faces of Collective Vision united by the mandalic eye-field suggest both expansion of consciousness and sharing of consciousness with other beings. The painting was based on a profoundly ego dissolving entheogenic mystical trance where I heard the words, 'Infinite Oneness... the Oneness should never forget the Infinitude and the Infinitude should never forget the Oneness...'
The journey of the soul is a vast, interconnected web, a meshwork of beings that are all working out their individual karmas in a collective gumbo, retaining the special flavor in each bite of life. But, the mystery of where we're going, in terms of whether we're going to have a planet that's worth living on after we finish abusing it, whether we'll wake up in time and stop ruining the water, land and skies is a big question mark.
I've always been fond of the idea expressed in Buddhist art, that there are certain objects that, just by seeing them, can plant a seed for liberation in the individual. That class of objects is called "liberation through seeing." Certain Buddha images are like that, but if it were possible, I would like to find contemporary non-traditional sacred images. Maybe it sounds pretentious, but most spiritual paths point to the possibility that we all can access the deep, absolute dimensions of reality.
During an Ecstasy, LSD or mushroom experience, many people feel unbounded compassion for others and themselves. During a trip, the typical boundaries of our identity dissolve and you're able to experience your unity with all dimensions of reality simultaneously. It can be overwhelming, but it can also be a guidepost and affirmation of the soul's mission in life. A good trip can help us see and feel how perfect, beautiful and precious the world is, despite news reports to the contrary we get from CNN.