26/03/2022
I share a similar motivation toward expressing the spiritual in my work as Romantics like Blake, the Symbolists and early modernists, and now a postmodern visionary movement. Our problems are the same, "How do we create sacred art outside of a specific sacred tradition?" Prior to the modern era, most artists who were creating sacred art were working within various traditions. There is Christian icon art, Tibetan Buddhist Art, Jewish and Islamic calligraphic art, Ta***ic and Indian art, the various religions have had various but specific sacred forms or models which are repeated with some variation but mostly with an aim toward reproducing the pre-existing form. Contemporary sacred artists, working outside of specific traditions, must find personal "original" forms which characterize their own mystical or spiritual experiences. I put the word "original" in quotes because new sacred art still draws upon essential and archetypal symbology, the medium of truth for all established spiritual paths. In the throes of a mystical experience the divine imagination will shamelessly plunder the world's spiritual traditions and ransack the collective unconscious in order to deliver fresh, honest universally meaningful images. The artist ecstatics who have had psychedelic mystical experiences are documenting the transcendental domain from observation.
In his book The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto writes of the "mysterium tremendum", the experience of losing control and of awe, dread and terror when confronting the Transcendental. Like Rabbi Hillel said, "God is not just flowers and bird songs, God is an earthquake." There is a categorization of aspects of the mystical experience put together by William James and Walter Stace. These categories are some of the most important common denominators of the mystical experience. First, a sense of oneness or unity within oneself and with others or with the whole of existence. With unity comes a sense that ordinary time and space have been transcended, replaced by a feeling of infinity and eternity. There is an ineffable or undescribable nature to the experience, something beyond words. The mental chatterbox shuts up and allows the Ultimate and true nature of reality to be revealed, which in some strange way seems more real than the phenomenal world which is experienced in ordinary states of consciousness. In the same way that we waken from a dream and realize the more "real" nature of our waking state, in the mystical state one awakens to a higher reality and notices the dreamlike character of our normal waking state. When people do begin to describe the experience or reduce it to words, these statements seem to be inherently paradoxical or illogical, such as "form is emptiness, and emptiness form" or "Thou art that". These are true statements coming from the perspective of non-duality, the problem is that rational discourse is dualistic. Perhaps that is why poetry or various art forms may more strongly convey the nature of the mystical state. With successful spiritual works of art, our dualistic rational mind may be temporarily transcended and we fuse with the mystic state being symbolically transmitted through the art.
Featured art: Ecstasy, lithograph by Alex Grey
