The Limits Of Sentiment And The Experience Of Creativity

As an artist I have an understanding of what moves people and how it moves them. Often a physical flourish, a color scheme, a tonal quality in sound can give a viewer a sensation or an emotional response. This can be very powerful and I am sure this is something family to all. It can take one into a different perspective of their experience and in so can be very provocative and enticing. Many people spend their lives creating cultivating these experiences for others, are driven to it even. It is an act of conjuring up form from an internal pool of ideas and images.

What happens when an artist makes decisions is that what has churned up inside is then made into a more or less concrete piece. It exists in time and space. It is something that has been solidified from something flowing. And this artistic statement affects others thoughts, feelings and perception. However this can speak to a way of experiencing that is solidified.

The internal movement felt in viewing artwork can be called sentiment. It can also be thought of as how the piece makes one feel. That which is displayed in the work which gives the response of sentiment in the viewer can be called the mood of a piece. The mood is based on a certain set of referents, elements that make up the composition, that collectively relate to each other. These compositional elements are interpreted and associated in the viewer to create sentiment within them. The physical colors, sounds, actions, images, characters and so forth become ideas upon which the viewer creates a story and emotion.

Although this response is of the moment of viewing and this will fluctuate over time, still it is rather specific to the elements that have been introduced. And as provocative as the experience of art can be it is often only a veneer over the immense possibility and power of association and creativity which exists within us all. It is the cooling form of the churning magma.

Sentiment of course exists in us in everyday life, art only manipulates its existence. Sentiment is a way of interpreting the things we experience, a way of putting them into perspective. It is a way of understanding but also in the same manner a way of insulating us as well. It is the creation of a story with emotion that helps us to act and move, but it is based on a limited set of elements. These specific elements are the elements our minds threw up to us and which we grasped onto for use in interpreting a specific circumstance. But even as a sentiment is settling there are still a continuing amount of elements that are being introduced from within us. The action of association and creativity pours on. Some of these may be disturbing to us, as could even be the unrelenting flow that comes. The orientation offered by one sentiment may be preferable to the disorienting experience of several forming at once. By choosing the understanding of one we protect from the knowledge of many.

It is my assertion here that we all have this great facility for creativity and association on going within us at all times. I can see it in myself and I have no reason to doubt it in others. I also know that the more clearly I can see this font of creativity the more amazing is the experience of it. When I compare this to the moments when I feel sentiment I know how much less the sentiment is. Even when sentiment is very compelling it is far less compelling than this experience. Looking at the sentiment I am distracted from the greater flow from which it was formed. The sentiment, the notion, is the little boat going down stream away from great powerful spewing surge of the font from which it came. Feeling the sentiment, reflecting on the notion, makes me forget what gave it birth and in so feels to me a the little death. All I have written above is an extrapolation of this. It is a personal experience of my being's make up turned into art criticism.

Then to return to art criticism, and even to propose an artistic direction, making art that is overly concerned on creating mood or on the manipulation of sentiment will yield a work that reflects a limit within the viewer. Art that may use sentiment and mood but use it to point to the greater creative actualities within us all will reflect to a greater degree the depth of personal experience already existing within. I think the artistic endeavor can be more than creating a statement to be pondered or felt but a way to enable the viewer reflect on their relationship to the art and in so to reflect on their own experience of themselves and their ever present world.

How To Fall In Love With A Rock (A True Story)

This is something I wrote for an online forum about an experience I had in spring of 2008--->

I haven't posted for quite a while but I think I need to write about this. As of late the change of perception which turns my surroundings into a magical land full of detail, vibrancy and association has been coming almost everyday with moderate duration at the least. In this situation I believe my task here is to relax and observe, not get too excited about the occurrence, be a detached but attentive witness. It remains to be mostly a spontaneous happening which I can elicit it to a degree, but not consistently to the highest plateau it can take me too.

Last Sunday I went with my friend to a drum circle in the redwoods, a regular gathering for the folks in the area. After sitting in the circle for a while, clapping rhythms to the drumming, I decided to take a short walk. I had already been already feeling the edge of the excitation I described above above and wanted to take a look around. I found a trail that took me around some trees to a secluded spot on a small sloping hill in the sun. I began to observe my surroundings and to feel the change coming in me. Next to the trail there was a nice rock formation protruding from the ground which I decided to stand next to. There I began to concentrate more on my body and surroundings to elicit the experience even more. Soon I was standing with bent knees while intense kryias were racking my body. I was feeling the intensity of the exicitation as it was running through me. This is not something unknown to me, but I was taking the time to bring it on as fully as possible in a natural environment which I don't remember ever doing before.

After a short while I decided to return to the group. I was already conscious of the fact that someone might come up the trail and see what I was doing so I was already feeling conspicuous. but I wanted to keep the feeling in my body while returning to the group so took my time going back so that I could. I walked at a moderate pace stopping at times to overcome my self-consciousness as it came while approaching the group. It came to mind that there was something I was carrying on my back the way the sensation felt from the hips up the spine to the shoulders and head. I played with the idea of that I was bringing back what I had found to the gathering. 

Soon enough I was back at the circle with the excitation well enough in form. I didn't know what to do with myself at first but noticed a standing woman next to me who was shaking. She seemed like she could have been having kryias as well but possibly it was a ritual exercise of some sort. In any case it allowed me to let go of my self-consiousness and to concentrate again. I was looking about the people in the circle and letting it come on while trying to relax, not shaking so much but pacing a bit and allowing it all to grip me. My vision was definitely enhanced and all looked particularly beautiful and intriguing to me. Eventually the excitation was such that I began to shed tears at what I saw before me, relaxing to let them flow naturally. 

Everything around me in all direction was vivid and intricate. I looked at the ground and decided to pick up a grey colored rock about the size of my fist. If everything was so amazing to me then this ordinary rock would have to be too and so I wanted to investigate it. After I picked it up I began to roll it in my hands looking at it. It became the most beautiful thing there turning in my hands. I was filled with awe and began to sob and shed tears stronger than before. I began to feel a great connection to the rock and although I didn't think of this at the time but it seems that it became my beloved. Soon I thought of putting it back on the ground but also felt that I needed it near me. But knowing it was a rock I thought it best to just let it go and dropped it back to the ground. I then sat in the circle for a bit witnessing all that was happening and then walked around the group a short ways. I had paternal feeling for the participants that somehow they all belonged to me in a way.

Now I am trying to be cool about this all as that is my main directive, but, as intense as it was, I cannot help but think what falling in love with a rock can mean for me? What does this experience say about all my efforts and desires of procurement and all my struggling for the avoidance of suffering which all come back to me soon enough? What is there that I can bring from the one side to the other to inform me on a better way of living? Or is there a lesson like this here to be found at all? If falling in love with a rock is absurd then what in our lives would not be absurd? Should I try to cultivate this again? And to what purpose? Should I in the future be nervous when I am with my lady friend while passing a rock for fear that she will become jealous? Certainly it is a long path from the ecstatic to the normative. It is one I am becoming more familiar with, despite all the questions .

Reasonably I can make no decision here. But when I think of it intuitively I hear that this is about stewardship, taking care of others, the other. I am not sure how falling in love with a rock logically leads to this but that is what I am hearing and maybe I will learn more later.

However, as a last note, I think the best lesson already learned was allowing the rock to drop back to the ground. 

Archived Words

I have recently removed some written items from my website and am posting them here. They were written between 2003 and 2006.

In Search of a Context

It seems that I am displaying an unusual behavior, but not one unnatural. There may be precedents in the Charismatic Christian community with their physical reactions to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Also spiritual possession ritually practiced in traditional Caribbean and other cultures may hold some insight. And religious stories of rapture and visitation in European historical mythology may have some similarities. I do not make a claim to a connection to a spiritual power regardless of what I have experienced in my life. But I can say that I am having a very profound response to something the nature of which I cannot explain and that this response is one that is deeply human.

I have a background in art, in the techniques and in critical and conceptual analysis. I am an artist and so I put this experience in a context of art. Particularly I can say this because the behavior comes out the strongest and in fact revealed itself under the efforts of mark making. And although I do make pictures and want to investigate the images that come about I cannot consider that image making is the central purpose for what I do. However in contemporary art this poses no problem. So I assert that my investigation is within an art context although this investigation may well point to other aspects of culture and belief.

The spiritual context seems to hold great weight in its relevance to my uncommon behavior and it is one I will not discount due to the cultural authority it possesses. However I will not look for explanations that present general interpretations of what I am experiencing. Instead I will investigate various contexts as an inquiry to see what can be revealed or uncovered. And this I will attempt to present through my efforts in conceiving and fabricating events and artifacts as an artist in a contemporary world.

Abstract versus Automatic

When I see works that are abstract I am amazed by how the artist did them. People will call my work abstract but it is not. Abstract means to diverge by degrees from a starting or reference point. This is not the process I undertake.

I believe others like Jackson Pollock in the pure drip painting and Henri Michaux and Mark Tobey in many of their works are similar. Obviously these artists early on worked from forms and got further and further into abstraction derived from those forms but at some point the connection broke. André Masson is noted as giving inspiration to Pollock and Gorky with his automatic drawing experiments and I think this is the difference. It is that break into automatic drawing that makes this work separate from abstraction.

When I see an exceptional abstract work I can see the intense understanding of form. But in contrast I do not consider form when I work. The results in my art making seem to approximate this type of imagery but the process is organic, not derivative or contemplated, and so is in fact not abstract. I might say the same for the artists I have named above; their art making is more on an organic response level rather than based on a great concern of form.

Automatic artists were not and are not really concerned about picture making. One look at Pollock's work will tell you that. But I suppose he had the inspiration and courage to make that break, which ties his work in closer to the surrealists. For myself I must say that concerns of picture making hinder the process and I have had to do much work to put what comes to aesthetic ends (and I realize that these ends do not represent the central nature of the work.) However, it seems to me on viewing abstract works that picture making is the guiding goal. And that is why they are so beautiful.

I cannot present an explanation for what this organic response is but I am thinking of the results as a naturally forming crystal. Patterns reoccur in my work, most noticeably a drift to the left lower corner (which I have corrected to a degree with a more balanced posture.) And sometimes series of images will have very similar characteristics. Where this comes from I do not know but it is something I am discovering and not conceiving. On viewing the work of the artists listed above I think I can see the crystal emerging in their imagery. And to me this organic form that shows itself makes it incongruous to apply the term abstract.

However the question remains, if the goal of this type of work is not picture making, what is the purpose in delving into an organic response and how does that tie into contemporary, historical and anthropological concepts of art?

Not that I need to prove the point any further but who has ever called their children's work abstract? And are the painting elephants really capable of abstract representation?

Art Making While Asleep

Many times after a day of art making when I am laying in bed and falling asleep in my mind's eye I am in front of an image and I am drawing and moving in the way that I do. Then suddenly, in accordance to a gesture I see myself making, my fully relaxed body makes a swift, strong and languid jerk, as if I was used as a whip.

I have also been awakened from my sleep by such a powerful jerk and then remember dreaming of doing my art. And I wonder, am I not really doing the same thing as when I am in front of my images, even though I am asleep? And then, so what materials are involved?

Hmm.

When this impulse comes in these cases afterwards I sometimes try to recreate the exact physical sensation. I cannot. The movement seems to emanate from a physical place inside that I do not consciously know how to move.

Even while drawing sometimes the impulse comes so strong that I cannot seem to even hit the surface with the marking tool. At these times I let go of the tool, look at the image and let the movement come again and again until I am too tired to continue, paying as much attention as I can to what is happening. And again comes the same question, What is really different here? Am I not still making art?

The State of the Ecstatic 2006

The previous posting to this section of the website was made over two years ago. I decided not to add any words for a time, my discoveries always being so fragile and elusive that I needed to be gentle with them. But over the past couple of years my experience has expanded and what was formerly very ephemeral is becoming more familiar. And new insights appear continually.

I have found that my experience correlates closely to what in the Hindu tradition is called the Kundalini. A book documenting occurrences of Kundalini called "The Kundalini Experience" by Lee Sannella was the first document I ever read which I feel accurately details what I experience. The spontaneous and involuntary movements that come in these cases are called kryias, a word from the same tradition.I have found that what I do can come away from the art table. I have discovered many things that when I give them my concentration become stimuli to the ecstatic experience. These are functional stimuli that elicit the excitation that makes the experience. The excitation however is always spontaneous. That is the excitation does not come through a direct effort but comes as a reflex like response to the stimuli I concentrate on.

One of these stimuli is a way of looking into my images. I do this to test my response to the image to help me decide what to do next. Some images seem to elicit a stronger response. I also have found that I can see in my images a great depth, a deep physical three dimensional relief. And then sometimes a greater vividness comes which is difficult to explain but has more to do with my relation to the image than the image itself. I try to compose the image to bring this effect as forward as possible. However I have recently done some images that I respond to very strongly but which on an objective level don't seem to be as interesting as others. This is something I am now considering.

This is a list of what I call my approach, a series of reminders to keep my concentration on the stimuli when I work. First there is a highly effective four word prayer of personal construction. Then thinking the word "Gravity" has me imagine a downward force penetrating through my body and my mind to relax them. When I am at the palette sometimes I point my marking utensil towards the opening of a cup while looking into it. I discovered this early on when I found that dipping my pen into the ink well also could bring a response. While painting, thinking the words "Spirit Forward" or "Spirit" brings my attention to that which draws for me. It is a kind of surrender which also incorporates a certain attention to the tip of my marking utensil. "Look" reminds me to view the image in the way I do as discussed above. And recently I have discovered something new which elicits a very intense response when I am present enough to get to it. It is still very elusive and builds upon "Look". I am calling it the "Great Witness" as it entails intensely observing what I do while also being profoundly detached. This yields intense excitation, much movement, distinct perceptional alterations and a welling of emotion, but as if I am watching myself do this from a distant, calm and quiet place. I have repeated this approach so I know it functions.

For me making these images and objects is a practice of eliciting the excitation and the ecstatic experience that comes. That is the central aspect of what I do. I no longer need the art table in order to do this as I now have other ways available to me for eliciting the experience. However I still like the idea of using the excitation to create an artifact as it did when it first came to me. This bridge from the very internal to the external, which seems to bypass my participation in its span, is still very compelling to me. In all honesty though I must add that the results of this practice are varied. There are many things to be concerned with in making an art object besides eliciting an ecstatic experience. Although a physical artifact is always produced the depth of the experience is never as consistently intense as it can be at times. I must constantly work to keep up my concentration and find that things are shown by degree. This flux is part of the practice.

Stigmata

Trying to wash the stigmata away that keeps gushing beneath the faucet as it flows diluted red down the drain forever but the hole doesn't rinse away. It gets deeper, deeper than the width of a hand as it reaches into the well of all blood.

O Stigmata, O Bleeding Stigmata, you stain my life with ink down to each finger which cannot move and not write endless lines of flowing blood flowing like lines of blood flowing like life.

O Blessed Stigmata, please stop your flowing as I am obliged to drip lines of endlessly flowing lines writing the history of all blood lines that connect all life and this I do not want to do.

Stigmata says, Do you know the flow is endless? The lines are endless? I will use you until you are empty and then I will take another to let flow the well of all blood to bleed the endless blood of all blood that writes endless lines of life's blood endlessly.

You are blessed and the bleeding is a bleeding of the blessed blood that flows endlessly until it flows in you no more. You are blessed and you will write the flowing lines of all blood flowing like lines of blood flowing like life.

You are blessed, blessed to bleed the blessed blood of all blood, blessed to be obliged to bleed the endless lines which writes the history of all blood that connects all life. You are blessed to bleed until there is no more blood to bleed. And when you are fully bled then you will be written endlessly in the endless flow of all blood that flows into lines of blood flowing like lines of flowing blood flowing like life.

A Sacrament of Tears

Boy, why do you cry?

I see the death of everything
I see the birth of everything
There is nothing to do but cry

 

In The Merging Of The Actual And The Imaginary I Can See The Divine

The title of this entry can be seen as a poetic statement, but the notion comes from functional explorations yielding palatable results. I find the workings of my interior landscape, the interaction of psychological agencies, to be far more complex and curious than this sort of thing is generally spoken of. On reflection I find it's formulation is in no way apparent.

When I began to draw automatically and had the flood of intense experiences that were part of that, I began to question my beliefs, beliefs I didn't realize I had until they were challenged by these experiences. I had accepted ideas and conceptions of how the mind works  without realizing I had, and I began to see that these ideas were most probably not very useful to me, if only because I accepted them without question. As a response I began pay attention to what was already there in my perception, observing outside of any ideas of interpretation of what it is or how it should work, just to give awarness to what was already there.

One of these things I did is what I call closed eye viewing. SImply I would just close my eyes and look, attempting to see it as clearly as possible the scene under my lids. This is not as easy as it might appear. It requires a certain kind of relaxation that was difficult for me to achieve.  My reaction often to was to try and use my muscular ability to do focus on what I was seeing, but there is nothing there to focus on. The image is internal and requires a mental form of attention rather than the reflex of the eye. I made it a regular daily practice to look deeply at the patterns and colors that I saw, what I have recently learned are called phosphenes.

I began to wonder if these closed eye images have a physiological or psychological function beyond just the phenomenon of their occurrence. Most of us just ignore this aspect of our being, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a greater interaction within us. It could be just noise, but it could be functional noise too. 

Another kind of internal imagery I began to be curious about is mental imagery as related to imagination and dreams, most commonly thought of as primary to internal workings. During this same time my dreams and mental imagery began to become increasingly vivid, often shocking me in their vividness. 

I can loosely define two types of mental imagery, one is envisioning, as when one asks you to image an apple, then imagine it on a pedestal, then imagine the pedestal coming out of a bed of roses, and you can see it, more or less, in your mind's eye. The other is spontaneous imagery, related to dreams or to the muses. The former has to do with control of the mind, the latter with surrender to witnessing what the mind throws up.

As an artist both ways are important. But for me, the culmination of witness to spontaneous imagery has been very provocative.  At some relaxed moments I am given a show of amazing objects and scenes. They are complete, extreme in detail and curious in formation. In the past, as the progression of images flowed, the amazement of seeing what I saw would shock me out of continuing to view them. Much like in closed eye viewing, I wanted to focus in on the image I was seeing, but the peak of my attention made the images evaporate. I have since become much more relaxed and adept at keeping my composure when viewing in this way, and over the past few years I have seen many very strange things. Very often they are art objects and graphic images, sometimes seen in the flipping pages of book. I call these Night Visions. I have recorded many and have let many, many more go on into oblivion.

Early on in this investigation, I pondered if the images of closed eye viewing, the phosphenes, are related to the formation of spontaneous mental images. This idea came from the notion that contemplation on seemingly random or scattered types of patterns brings a greater or more comfortable level of association, an idea that has been commented on its use through out history. Phosphenes  themselves have a scattered and loose pattern, similar to many things in the world, and they are always with us, in fact, within us. Perhaps the activity of phosphenes act as a stimulus to open association and the formation of ideas and images. Perhaps it even functions during dreaming.

Of course this is all contemplation on its own. I have no way of proving what might be the relationship between these two activities. And I wonder if there is even a way it could be approached. But on a few occasions, when awakening and looking at what was under my lids, as was my practice to do, on a few occasions I did notice a dream image fading into a similar color and shape in what I saw in closed eye viewing. So I am inclined to believe there is a relationship of some sort.

However, all the above is just the background to what the title of the entry refers to. These are thoughts and practices from a few years back which I no longer engage in as fully as before. But I still ponder them. As I did recently, in the morning lying in bed. I had the idea to focus on both kinds internal imagery, both the phosphenes and mental images, as clearly as I could. Certainly they occur simultaneously in our being, but I found attention on one diminishes the attention on the other. I wanted however to see how clearly I could see both. 

With a little mental balancing I found a pretty strong focus on both areas. On achieving this I discovered it resulted in a great deal of excitation, even exhilaration. I had an expanded sense of internal space and with eyes still closed began to see patches of white flashing from various directions. I do not recall it being overly intense, but felt a definite strong and notable ecstatic response. I have seen similar internal white spaces or lights before, sometimes with an extremely high level of ecstatic excitation, so I interpret their occurrence within that realm. And this also reminds me of the proverbial inner light in discussions of rapture.

A few days later I attended a dance event at where I often do my practice. Within the event I reflected on the balance of attention I had recently reinvestigated and decided to see if I could recreate it within this group setting. I set my attention on both my surroundings as well as on the flow of images in my mind, or maybe more specifically my mental space, finding a balance of focus on both simultaneously. I discovered this brought an opening to an intense excitation. Everything looked as it usually does, but was also utterly different and new.  It seemed as I was looking into a vast, amazing new world. This shift was extraordinary to witness, which I stayed in for several minutes. The stunning wondrousness of it is what I call the divine, as it is so stunningly wondrous. It is the quality of my experience of it that makes me call it divine. This experience was provocative beyond a certain threshold that makes it important for me to note.

Most of my investigations are soft as repeated results are very elusive. When I see a correlation, as between these two events from different days, I note it as significant.  But when I try to recreate experiences it is not uncommon that I do not find again what I hope or expect. As such I have not tried to reach this again and feel better to hold the notion loosely. All these efforts take a certain internal posture that can be compromised through effort. Things come around again, as the history of this telling makes clear. I learn over a span of time. 

However, an ending note of speculation; I can say no matter where we look or what we look at there is always a certain amount of noise in our perception coming from our eyes, our nerves and brain. I wonder, beyond what I wondered before, if the incorporation into our awareness of this inherent and always present noise, that which we generate continually, is functional to an experience of witness to the divine.

The Inverted Picto Man

I have a symbol I have used from time to time in my art. It is the inverted picto man. I got it from the early days of when I began to draw automatically. That was such a radically different experience for me that everything I thought I knew about myself and my world felt upside down to me. Where as before I would use feeling to insure a gesture with integrity now the gesture was coming on its own, the feeling issuing from it's action. I was no longer drawing for effect but was the effect of what I was drawing. 

What was incredibly challenging in the first couple of weeks of doing this automatic drawing was the fracturing I experienced in my being. The control center of my mind was no longer in control when I was drawing. Some other intelligent part of my being was moving and directing me, and the controller was absolutely frantic at losing its illusion of control. It was literally screaming at me. But the drawer was not affected by this. It's movement was not hampered. And it was powerful movement, which was in no way based on knowledge or habit.

My body was speaking and making art. I was not sure I even liked the art it was making but the experience was so profound I could not do but continue. There were so many questions that arose then, questions I wouldn't have been able to formulate a few weeks before. And one thing I questioned was the validity in an objective disposition to the world in the face of such profound subjective workings. Generalizations, categories and assumptions became highly suspect from seeing which part they arose - the controller, the thinker, the analyzer and the habit maker - a part I could then see was not even half of my make up.

The picto man is a generic symbol of man. It is purely an indicator of man, or a man, without any greater complexity. It represents the idea of man in a completely objective way. And what was being challenged for me was the authority of this objective view, an authority that seemed never to be seen as influencing, but merely accepted as being so. I put this symbol upside down as this seemed to represent the new sense of the complexity of my subjectivity and the authority that represented to me, as my world view had been turned on it's head.

In 2003 when time I did mock up of this image above I burst into tears. It had a great deal of import to me. The image seemed to represent quite a bit what I was feeling and thinking. The inverted picto man as symbol is mirrored by the physical markings which result from a powerful introspective response, one which shows a pattern of the complexity of the subjective. I did series of about twenty of these drawings and displayed fifteen in a series.

From that point on I pretty much eschewed the use of representational or graphic imagery in my work. I wanted to discover what this pure automatism would develop into. I have seen the image evolve, perhaps as the movement has evolved within me, and have explored it to formal ends. I knew eventually I would reintroduce representational material, but I am glad for the pure investigation without it. Also I wanted to make this an addition which rests on ideas and questions about the relationship of ecstatic to more normative experiences. 

How I am introducing these representational images is through the use of stencils and with rubbings. Paint applications are still primarily automatic so the representational elements still come directly from my ecstatic approach and are integrated into that application, hopefully in a way which shows both the spontaneous and methodical, and the relationship between them.

Below is the first painting I have done with stencils. I decided to bring back the inverted picto man symbol as this ties the work back to my own history in this art making. Multiples always work well in my art.

Why Call It Kundalini?

I do know that my experiences correlate to documentation of Kundalini awakenings, but that to me is neither here nor there. I had these experiences for a few years before I read accounts similar to what I was experiencing. And although inquiry into teachings and documentation about the Kundalini often proved interesting and enlightening the label of Kundalini best served only as a title to a collection of such material, not most of it beneficial or accurate to my found direction. What I had discovered that was of the highest profundity to me was a very new and vastly more intimate view of my own subjectivity. In no way does the idea of Kundalini affect this perception. It is my own relationship to my inner workings and to my unfolding ecstatic experiences in which the import lay. This is where I learn the most.

Unfortunately Kundalini as a subject is a bit volatile as the occurrence of it is highly coveted. There is a whole culture of reverence, mystery and verification surrounding it. I had already known of the Kundalini through Kundalini Yoga as taught in the US by Yogi Bhagan, but none of the explanations about Kundalini in those teachings described what I was experiencing. Mostly they were generalities in very mythological terms about the types of attainment available through the Kundalini. What I was experiencing was very specific and direct, so the reference never came to mind.

In researching Kundalini on the internet I often find a certain effort towards authority  in the Kundalini experience through indicating benchmarks of growth and denouncing other's claims of authenticity or level of attainment. This covetousness would be a major distraction to me and my growth. I do not care to compare experiences for another's authentication as I have nothing to prove. As stated the label of Kundalini is superfluous to my experience and growth, I have no reason to claim or defend it.

The nature of my experiences are completely unique from all other experiences of my life. The onset of them was an entry into a completely novel perception, one which continues to astound me. There is no way for me to really describe them. And the problem of then saying that they are of the Kundalini is that the concept of the Kundalini is known by many. There are many books written about this and its history in human practice. However these books cannot penetrate into this perception or give an experience as I have, (at least I assume they cannot.) In this respect the five thousand year tradition of the Kundalini is only five thousand years of hearsay about something which cannot well be described. 

For me it has been a great endeavor to communicate my experiences through my words and my art in an accurate a way as possible, a very complex challenge. And I hesitate to identify what is ineffable by something that many people feel they can understand or even know through the great length of literature that has and still is being generated about the subject. Whatever Kundalini is most probably do not understand it. However many people really want it. The want for something one does not understand cannot be the want of that thing but of something it represents to them. I in no way want to associate or address what I experience to this want in others. If I could I would like to give the discovery of an experience of the great complexity and vastness of one's own subjective authority. Speaking of the Kundalini seems to me a diversion from that end.

Elements of the Ecstatic Experience

I wrote this in November 2006 to post to an online group. What I describe reoccurs much more regularly in my life and has become very much more pronounced. I used to have dreams where it seemed the culmination of my experiences had finally been fulfilled (wish fulfillment I suppose) where my vision got very fuzzy and I felt dizzy. This was a rather accurate preview, but it is more like the heightened amount of information I am perceiving is what is causing this response. That is, due to what seems a loss of filtering, a more singular (and more familiar) focus is compromised.

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I have made a list of the four most prominent aspects of my own ecstatic experience. This is an attempt to describe what this feels like to others who may have questions. It is surely not very accurate as the experience as a whole is rather unique in character and not exactly like the those which I am making an analogy to, but close enough. All these elements can be experienced at the same time as well as independently.

1. Convulsing of the body-

These are what we call kryia. These can be gross movements or small and more global. As this is involuntary it is a bit like shivering. And in fact being in a cold environment can enhance them.

2. A searing feeling in mind and body.

This is probably what we call bliss. Some analogous experiences are the hot flash one gets on hearing some very disturbing news, hearing a very high pitch and loud sound that makes the head reel and even the rush of heat before vomiting. It has a very disorientating feel to it.  Although none of the analogies are pleasant this experience is often very pleasurable but not always exclusively so. Awe and panic are often hand in hand here.

3. An heightened experience of color, detail and movement.

This seems to be the classic description of a peak experience. The only analogy may be a chemically induced psychedelic experience, but for me the ecstatic experience is more subtle and more intense, there is no hallucination to get in the way. With this level of detail everything commands my attention. Also I am very aware of the movement of the scene as I pass through it. I cannot but see my view bouncing as I walk, trees turning as I pass and so forth.

4. An increased sense of association.

The best analogy for this is the fever dream. I think this may be what some famous thinkers call entering the mythic experience, an experience where everything appears as living. Objects in view seem somehow related, or they strong conjure mental images, or both with the connection in the association being very vivid. The associations can be very, very rapid, faster than I can actually reflect on. They are also shifting and shift away from associations that I would normally make, again leading to disorientation. This also distorts normal perception of size and separateness.

This last item deserves a bit more. I think that the mind finds meaning by analogy, the structuralist view. And I think the mind creates a matrix of analogy. As attention vacillates between the different elements in this matrix it is a motor that gives the sense of meaning. But when this facility starts working on an heightened level, indiscriminately using mental and objective elements, the sense that everything is alive and responsive starts to prevail. I do think that this way of being is very beneficial for me, especially in being an artist, as long as I am reminded that this is in the subjective inquiry. I also know that this way of being is so inconsistent with the generally accepted world view that an acceptance of it as something valid and beneficial is a bold assertion.

I also want to note that all my analogies are to things that denote a compromised individual and in so none of them are necessarily desirable. This does not make it easy to put my ecstatic experience in a positive light. However I do have faith in what comes to me as a culmination as well as not disavowing that a compromise is being made to my normative being. And I prefer the greatest accuracy in describing what my experience is, even if the description feels aversive, over a beautiful categorical statement that does not really explain anything other than itself (such as being at the vanguard of the evolution of man into a higher existence.)