William Steig

William Steig, Author of The Caldecott Award for Juvenile Literature for his book, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble wrote this as part of his Caldecott acceptance speech:

"Art... has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe; and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead to useful discovery."

We know the mystery of things through art! Art enhances our sense of wonder! Wonder is respect for life! ... And I am all about respect for life.

My experience is also that I know the source of creativity through art, not because I can categorize that connection and make lists out of it in some left brained, logical way, but because I can have a relationship with that source. It is an ongoing, shifting relationship and the terrain is unpredictable, at least from my side of things... It is often difficult to wrap my arms around and ever, ever call it "done." It is not struggle, though, unless I let it be. It is not a wrestling match, unless I let it be. No, it is more like a dance with something so much larger than me that all I can do is be swept up by the universe's music. The first step is simply showing up for the dance. That's the piece that is just me. Everything after that is a two way street, a partnership. I take no enormous credit for anything that comes out of me other than that I am so willing to let the mystery of it all work through me. Paradoxically, this is the best tool I know to get to know myself better!

At its best, Life is Love is Art, my friends. Living this philosophy naturally encompasses a deep respect for life; this seems a worthy goal to me.

The Quantum Brain, Spirituality, And The Mind Of God

by Ervin Laszlo

Systems philosopher, integral theorist, concert pianist

When our brain ("a quantum computer" as I saidin my previous posts) connects us to the world, that experience of connection is the same source from which artists and even scientists draw inspiration and creativity. The quantum connection of our brain can serve us as a subtle but trustworthy compass -- one long known to traditional peoples and cultures but largely ignored in the modern world.

The experience of connection is also a source of spirituality. The great teachers entered a deeply altered state, had a spiritual experience, and when they returned to their waking state, they endeavored to capture it in words. Their words became the scriptures venerated by their followers.

The spiritual/religious experience has been basically the same in all epochs and cultures. It has always been an experience of oneness and belonging. William James described it as the sense of entering into union with something deeper and larger than oneself. The experience of people in all epochs and walks of life confirms that James was right: we are like islands on the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

Although the basic substance of the spiritual experience has always been the same, teachers expressed it in different ways because they were only able to approximate their experience through the words and symbols of their time and place. In each time, and in each place, these symbols and expressions were unique and different.

Over the centuries these differences intensified. Groups and communities of followers, intent on maintaining their identity and ensuring their coherence, froze the original pronouncements into sacred doctrines, and made the doctrines into holy dogmas, sometimes further honed to serve their followers' social and political aims and ambitions.

In the final count the differences between the doctrines, religions, and the insights of spiritual traditions are not differences in the substance of the experience that inspired them. They are only the differences in the way that substance has been expressed and communicated.

But how does the spiritual experience itself come about? Today we have a better answer to this question than we ever had before. A spiritual/religious experience can happen at any time and in any place, but it usually occurs in an altered state of consciousness. In that state, as psychiatrist Stanislav Grof notes, we can apprehend anything that exists in the universe. We can even apprehend universal archetypes and mythical beings.

The altered states that give rise to the spiritual experience can be purposefully induced. As traditional cultures have known and practiced for millennia, the experience can be triggered by dancing, drumming, rhythmic breathing, and also by the use of psychedelic substances (although these can be dangerous to health). Prayer and meditation is the royal road, and their depth and efficacy can be enhanced when practiced on altered-state-conducive "sacred" sites.

Churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues were built to facilitate the spiritual experience of the faithful. Traditional people have often gone further: they have sought spiritual transformation even through "temple sleep." This meant spending a night in a venerated location, trying to incubate dreams for initiation, divination, or healing. Dynastic Egypt had special temples for suppliants who would fast and recite prayers immediately before going to sleep, and Jewish seers would spend the night in a grave or sepulchral vault, hoping that the spirit of the deceased would appear in their dream and offer guidance. In Greece there were over 300 dream temples dedicated to Aesculapius, the god of healing, and in China the temples where state officials sought guidance were active until the 16th century.

The spiritual experience usually comes about in altered states, but what does the recurring substance of the experience signify? What is that "something deeper and larger than ourselves" to which the experience seems to connect us?

An answer to this question is given by every religion, and today it can also be given by science, if only hypothetically. Science suggests that the spiritual experience opens the brain, with which our consciousness is associated, to an extended range of information. This information is real, but it's not always received. Here by "information" I don't mean the information we produce when we talk, write, or act. I mean the kind of information that scientists now discover underlies everything in the universe.

Information is entirely basic in the universe. In the latest conception the universe doesn't consist of matter and space; it consists of energy and information. Energy exists in the form of wave-patterns and wave-propagations in the quantum vacuum that fills space; in its various forms, energy is the "hardware" of the universe. The "software" is information. The universe is not an assemblage of bits of inert matter moving passively in empty space: it's a dynamic and coherent whole. The energy that constitutes its hardware is always and everywhere "in-formed." It's in-formed by what David Bohm called the implicate order and physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field (also called physical spacetime, universal field, or nuether). This is the "in-formation" that structures the physical world, the information we grasp as the laws of nature. Without information the energy-waves and patterns of the universe would be as random and unstructured as the behavior of a computer without its software. But the universe is not random and unstructured; it's precisely "in-formed." Would it be any the less precisely informed, complex systems could not have emerged in it, and we would not be here to ask how this on first sight highly improbable development could have come about.

Science's answer to the "what" question refers to an entangled, holographic, non-locally connecting in-formation field in the cosmos. In my books, in greatest detail in Science and the Akashic Field, I discuss the evidence for this field and note that the Hindu seers referred to it as Akasha, the fundamental element of the cosmos. In recognition of this feat of insight, I am now calling the information field of the universe the Akashic Field.

But how does science's answer to the question regarding the fundamental significance of the spiritual experience relate to the answer given by religion?

For the world's religions the larger and deeper reality to which the spiritual experience connects us is a numinous, divine reality. It's either a spirit or consciousness that infuses the natural world (the "immanentist" view), or a spirit or consciousness that's above and beyond it (the "transcendentalist" claim). Traditional polytheistic religions were leaning toward the former, while the Abrahamic monotheistic religions (with some exceptions) embraced the latter.

The difference between a divine intelligence immanent in the world and one that transcends it is not negligible, but it is still only a difference in interpretation. The "raw data" for both positions is the same: it's the spiritual experience, a quantum communion with universal oneness. In the Western religious perspective this is communion with the spirit that infuses the cosmos, identified as God. Deepak Chopra writes, "Spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality. This domain of awareness is a core consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect, and ego. In religious traditions this core consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which in turn is part of a more universal domain of consciousness referred to in religions as God."

Our experience of the core consciousness of the world is ultimately an experience of the universal domain of consciousness Western religions call God. The experience itself, if not its interpretation, is the same in all religions, and in all religions it inspires a sense of oneness and belonging. Michael Beckwith affirms that "when you strip away the culture, history, and dogma of every religion, the teachers of those religions were teaching very similar principles and practices that led to a sense of oneness, that ended a sense of separation from the Whole."

Science's answer to the question of what the spiritual experience connects us to is immanentist. The information that underlies the universe, the Akashic Field, is part of the universe. This doesn't mean that the immanentist position necessarily states the ultimate truth; it only means that science can only take an immanentist position. Scientists are limited to speaking about the natural world; they must leave speculation about transcendent realities to poets, philosophers, and spiritual masters. 

It's time to conclude. If the substance of the spiritual experience is always and everywhere the same, differences in its expression and interpretation are secondary and not a valid cause for conflict and intolerance. The world to which our quantum brain connects us is fundamentally one, whether its oneness is due to an information field within the natural world or the work of a divine transcendent intelligence. To enter into communion with this oneness has been the quest of all the great teachers and spiritual masters. And to understand the nature of this oneness has been, and is, the ultimate quest of all great scientists. Still today, physicists seek the one equation that would anchor their famous "Theory of Everything," the theory that would account for all the laws of nature and explain everything that ever happened in our integrally whole universe. Einstein said that knowing this equation would be reading the mind of God.

The Eyes and Souls of Artists

"The artist must not only train his eye but also his soul." -Wassily Kandinsky. 


This is also true: "The artist must not only train her eye but also her soul."


Creativity is spiritual practice. Like any meditation, it shows us our stuff. No escape. 


"Develop a working relationship with that stunning, bewildering, driving source of mad desire and infinite depth: the world itself whispering lovely things to you constantly." - MC Escher


"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own: but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude " - Emerson


"Half of what you know today will be obsolete in five years. That prospect should fill you with excitement." - Vimala Blavatsky

Benjamin Shine

http://www.benjaminshine.com/

From his Biography: "Shine's fabric-portraits have generated a following of collectors including Baroness Thatcher, Sir Edmund Hillary and President Obama, with works exhibited in public locations including Deutsche Bank, Woburn Abbey, The New Zealand High Commission, Ligne Roset and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York."

It's not hard to see why. Unique, beautiful and unusually crafted. Here are three of my immediate favorites:

Nude Study - technique development

Mixed fabrics woven through hessian canvas

90cm. x 90cm.

Sir Edmund Hillary
Treated Nylon Fabric through steel eyelets on blue anodised aluminum
4ft. x 5ft.



The Space Between Light and Shade
Single length of pleated and pressed tulle behind plexiglass
3ft. x 4ft.

Hockney and the iPhone

David Hockney uses his as a sketch pad. Reason #3,897,234 to love the iPhone. 

David Hockney's iPhone Passion

By Lawrence Weschler
The New York Review of Books

After two decades of regularly finding himself caught up in all sorts of seemingly extraneous side-passions (photocollages, operatic stage design, fax extravaganzas, homemade photocopier print runs, a controversial revisionist art-historical investigation, and a watercolor idyll), David Hockney, now age seventy-two, has finally taken to painting once again, doing so, over the past three or four years, with a vividness and a sheer productivity perhaps never before seen in his career. This recent body of work consists almost entirely of seasonal landscapes of the rolling hills, hedgerows, tree stands, valley wolds, and farm fields surrounding the somewhat déclassé onetime summer seaside resort of Bridlington, England, on the North Sea coast, where he now lives. Some are intimately scaled but many are among the largest, most ambitious canvases of his entire career.

The paintings have been widely exhibited—in London (at the Tate and the Royal Academy), in Los Angeles, a broad overview in a small museum in Germany this past summer—though not yet in New York, a situation that will be rectified in late October by a major show, his first there in ten years, slated to take up both the uptown and downtown spaces at PaceWildenstein.[1] The buildup toward these shows has found Hockney busier than ever (he is still in the process of completing a dozen fresh canvases as I write), but not so busy that he hasn't managed to become fascinated by yet another new (and virtually diametrically opposite) technology, one that he is pursuing with almost as much verve and fascination: drawing on his iPhone.

One of my favorite tidbits from the interview:

"People from the village," he says, craning back over that shoulder, "come up to me and tease me, 'We hear you've started drawing on your telephone.' And I tell them, 'Well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.'"

Read the complete article here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23176

Bass Notes

While art might be the melody society hums to itself, artists are the bass notes.

You only notice them when they're gone.

-- Reposted from pleasefindthis.blogspot.com

Artists and Money

Money is a paper craft, a work of art that symbolizes energy, effort and exchange.

Money is nourishment. When money comes into my life, my needs are met and my spirit can be at ease to create fully and with joy.

Money waters project seeds, helps them grow and then gives back to the community. When I receive money in exchange for sharing my gifts, I am able to share more and more. I invest in classes with wonderful teachers and purchase art supplies and buy art that inspires me and go to galleries and buy books and every time I do, money waters the creative dreams of all of those people who were a part of that exchange.

-- Jamie Ridler
www.openthedoor.ca

•••••••••••••••••••••••

It is interesting, I think, to ponder the fact that only recently have artists been left dangling over the abyss of financial ruin. The great families of every civilization... have long regarded the support of artists and artisans as part of their responsibility to the health of their communities. Only post-industrial revolution attitudes have been scornful of artists as "real" contributors to society. Before that time, artists were regarded as cornerstones to the health of society. It seems to me that we are well on our way to returning to that attitude.

-- Sally Wallach

Recipe for a Happy Life

Notice the little things. Close your eyes and feel. Run your body hard every so often. Make someone else smile. Drink lots of water. Cook your own food. Rest. Learn how to play with children - and dogs. (They can both teach you how to be a better person.) Explore your heart's desire, no matter what it is. Do good things for your neighbors. Eat ice cream. Spend time in nature. Bask in the sun. Let hurt feelings go. Love deeply. Tell the truth. Do work that matters to you whether it pays or not. Live within your means. Be completely transparent with someone. Dance. Seek out music that makes your heart sing. Use your voice. Say what's in your heart. Notice intuition. Plan backwards from your dreams to make them real. Find people who encourage and inspire you. Let yourself trust. Love yourself in a million little ways. Pay attention to your heart. Have faith in what it tells you. Stay curious.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

Art and Ephemera

When you work with light as a photographer, as an artist, you no longer are working with the material world. You’re working with things unseen – the ephemeral. Light, time, intention, emotion, sense of place, connection, relationship. Of course the material world enters in – how else could anything be recorded? - but what makes magic in the world of the visual artist is capturing a view of things that are fleeting, that do not last, things that lie behind the veil of substance, and showing them, sharing them, with the world - or at the very least, the few people in it who resonate with your point of view.

Suffer or Be Free

To do meaningful work in the world, you must frequently forget who might be watching and listen to the sound of what lies inside you. But in this process, do not forget to bring your intuition and knowing back to the world again. In lives that grow, this cycle is continual and each step informs the next: Silence is followed by action. Action is followed by silence. There is no room for suffering in lives lived in this way because they are led from a well-honored inner spark that manifests outwardly as a kind of gentle personal stewardship of your unique talents and strengths. When you take action from this place, regardless of outcome, those actions will create right relationship for you between what is internal and what is external. In other words, meditate.