bright ideas closer together

This is my album cover.

Rules:

1: Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2: Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3: Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4: Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)

Saint Philip Kindred Dick

December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982

“I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed o…r explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, & for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation & presentation, analysis & response & personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.”

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”

“My major preoccupation is the question, ‘What is reality?’ Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I’ve written about fascism and my fear of it.”

The Artist as Shaman

Jackson Pollock is one example of the Artist as Shaman in the modern world. Through his paintings, he entered a trance where unrestricted by technique, the subconscious had free reign.

Pollock’s paintings are artifacts brought back from his own travels into the underworld of archetypes, stemming from his years of Jungian psychoanalysis. Greatly influenced by his childhood explorations of the Navajo reservations in Arizona, his interest was reignited when he saw a MoMA exhibit on Native Americans in 1941. Turning to Jung and Shamanism, Pollock used art to heal the discord he felt within himself, as well as becoming a mirror of America at a time when we had finally faced the possibility of complete annihilation after the dropping of the first atomic bomb.

He never planned a painting but chose to enter it fully immersed in the moment of creation, walking through a fourth dimensional plane where time and space become superimposed and ancient archetypes dance on a borderless canvas dreamscape. The correlation between his paintings and Shamanism can be seen in his statement here:

“I don’t work from drawings or color sketches. My painting is direct. I usually paint on the floor. I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area. Having a canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a part of a painting. This way I can walk around it, work from all four sides and be in the painting, similar to the Indian sand painters of the West. Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can. I like to use a dripping, fluid paint. I also use sand, broken glass, pebbles, string, nails or other foreign matter. The method of painting is a natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of the paint; there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.”

His large scale paintings with their swirling chaotic paint drippings were at once both the dropping of the atom bomb as well as the artists own turbulent soul, a microcosm/macrocosm. The canvas strewn across the floor was his stage where he assumed the role of the Shaman with the ritual itself becoming in essence a shamanic dance with paint.

As Shiva dances…

“Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant, everybody was the same color. It made angels out of everybody. A truly Christian light, painful but forgiving.”

Living in a place called Synchronicity

I’ve recently had the pleasure of discovering the art of Paul Laffoley when I stumbled on his work over a week ago while listening to some third-eye opening music mixed by a very lovely psychedelic myspace friend. Check out the music here

Well after pouring over Laffoleys work online, I found out it was the last day of his exhibit at Kent Gallery in NYC!

I rushed there as soon as I could, barely making time as the paintings were just about to be taken down. The people working there were really nice and let a friend and I in while they worked and even gave me an enormous free poster of Laffoleys: DIMENSIONALITY: The Manifestation of Fate

I found his visionary work to resonate deeply with me as it wove a thread of synchronicity through various branches of knowledge, bringing it all together in diagrams of giant mandalas. The paintings featured everything from the I Ching to the occult.

And then I saw THIS painting:

I felt a wave of lucidity rush through me as I gasped and remembered the dream I’ve had a few years back of UFOs operating using the “Om” vibration. I even posted about it just days ago in my blog “Aum, Cymatics and the Word” before even hearing of Laffoley! You can’t see it but radiating from the UFO is a light mandala at the center of which is the word “Om”. The sacred Aum is the word which vibrates into existence all of creation, and Laffoley illustrated this perfectly as a rotating mandala!

I just love it when this happens! It is the fuel I need to keep searching, the assurance that all is unfolding exactly as it should on the grand cosmic scale.

I don’t now about you but I feel time speeding up. Patterns are emerging connecting people, events and ideas in a place outside of ordinary space-time. We are living in the in-between now, a dream we are all co-creating in the presence of the NOW.

I call this place Synchronicity. See you there!

Silence…

“We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and the silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills.”

-Goethe