The following essays are by Kaz Maslanka and Karl Kempton and are presented here in reference to the Digital Art Guild show on spiritual art.


ON THE DANGERS OF SPIRITUAL ART
Kaz Maslanka

I feel that one of the most dangerous areas of contemporary art comes when the artist makes him/herself a target by embracing spiritual concerns. Our society enjoys pointing fingers at the inadequacies of institutionalized religion (there are many) and ignoring the archetypical ideas of the spirit that have brought us the wonderful icons of the past. These spiritual metaphors have manifested themselves throughout history in many forms always relating to the culture of the artist. Many of the ideas of religions are obsolete and don’t function well in societies as diverse and ever-changing as ours. The artistic challenge of spirit is an extremely difficult task especially when trying to use historically loaded iconography of current dominant religions. I think many of the artistic phobias associated with the spirit are due to our experience of so many ‘so-called’ spiritual artists, who have created cliché kitsch or dogmatic concepts that accent the hypocritical ideas of the church or yet have forged an audaciously different direction aligning themselves with likes of aliens from other planets. Also to note, there seems to be a direct conflict between science and the spirit, which is anxiously evident when scientific minds address spiritual matters. I believe the problem is based in the illusiveness of Truth in both arenas. There are many that think that Truth is defined by science using the language of mathematics. Others believe Truth is beyond logic and only evoked through the metaphoric language of a spiritual ritual. Then there is my personally distasteful category of those who think that Truth is defined by their particular religion or should I say defined by their particular church. Focusing on the later idea we see that human nature tends to have many conflicts and from a historical perspective, one of the most destructive is the religious “us versus them conflict.” I see churches tending to promote this kind of behavior due to its doctrine being fed through so many egos. On the same line of thinking, the testosterone of the self righteous seems to have made its way into religion and spiritual matters to set up so many of the conflicts that we humans engage in. Many have died and continue to die in spiritual wars created by the religious intolerant.

The fact that the conflicts exist, illustrate how illusive Truth is. It seems to me that science is no better when it comes to Truth. The eminent scientist David Boehm points out that science does not find Truth, its purpose is to correlate experience. Also in this vein, we can see that there are those who provide great arguments against the platonic nature of mathematics pointing out numerous problems with using mathematics as a true model for reality. I see the bottom line being that the terra firma of veracity is constantly shifting; therefore, we must accept this fact and move on. The eastern mystics use the metaphor, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”.

I believe it is the function of special artists to assimilate as much information as possible from the diverse cross-planet cultural ideas not limited to including the concepts of science so that they can re-contextualize, synthesize and synergize their metaphors to be acute and pertinent to the global culture today. They must fully embody the ideas of love and tolerance as if the ideas were new so as to debride the cliché skins attached to them. As impossible this task seems, it is the challenge of those artists to reconnect the loose strands of past archetypical works and re-contextualize them to breathe new life in today’s world. Their job is not to run from the spiritual confusion that permeates the ever-changing cultures on this globe by hiding in some self-conceived scientific illusion of truth without spirit. That is not to say that science cannot be the new religion … it can. However, the spiritual scientist must connect the magical and irrational mind to scientific metaphors so that our spiritual understanding can be flexible as science metamorphoses. The past mytho-spiritual ideas were always based in the science of the times. It takes courage to navigate through the mental minefield of past ‘truths’ finding new veracity that resonates in ones psyche as they express it and expose themselves to the ridicule of being an irrational kook.

I believe the special artist/poets should focus their efforts to make metaphors current to our historical and sociological condition. The purpose of a metaphor is to bridge the infinite to the concrete. Many people feel that past mytho-spiritual/religious metaphors are absolute in the notion that they permanently point to the infinite. Personally speaking, I see the veracity of metaphors being temporal with their cultural relevance having different half-lives. What can confuse matters is that the half-life in some metaphors have existed for such a long time that they seem absolute. There is an argument that the Bastian elemental ideas and Jungian archetypes are absolute. Even if this is true, the metaphors employing those elemental ideas always need recontextualizing to be relevant to the current cultural thought. The frustrating aspect for the artist is having so little control over the fertility of the inspiration process. I wish I could say that artists had full control over the source and production of their metaphors. However, it seems to me that their strength, viability and temporality are a function of graciousness, imparted from the muses. I believe it is though the struggle and success with life that these special artists acquire the molecular building blocks of a vocabulary that becomes the means of their expressions. These ideas logically coagulate around an infinite idea provided to them by the unknown.

 

 

 

 

The Offering

The following consideration is an offering for poets and poetry's
audience troubled with the present state of consciousness found in
American composed poems and exhibited by American poets as we
ride these last waves of the 20th Century. When discussion divides
the groupings of poets by alignment and philosophy, contemporary
poets are usually categorized as academic poets, who range from
the workshop, confessional to the language poets; non academic
poets, who range from the street, environmental, Beats, bar-gutter-
sex poets to the general rebel; avant garde poets, who include
experimental, sound, and visual poets; and independents. All groups
and most individuals, further divisible by geography, race and sex,
jockey relentlessly for ego based power and position in a small
arena with smaller rewards. Many see this action as the moment's
reflection within the wider politico-socio-economic environment,
that it is the poet's function to drink of the god of communication,
Mercury, and polish her/himself as a mirror. This mercury, a liquid
metallic poison, is also in today's world substituted by the poet for
the psychic killers of alcohol, drugs and other addictions further
inflating wounded egos. The attempt at the beginning of this
century to replace religion with art and the cult of the poet or artist,
a poor idea to begin with, has led to a complete failure.

Part of the failure from my experience is that the poet has not
cleansed the inner most part of the self from where the poem is
born or passes through from the regions of the Unspeakable. By not
pursuing the inner world to its highest regions of consciousness, the
poet has not made deep meaningful wisdom direct knowing
by being in touch with the Unspeakable part of her/his diet to
nourish him/herself, inform the poem or call forth the wave upon
which to set the poem in motion to inform, nourish the audience.
Generally speaking, deep meaningful wisdom in its long universal
tradition available by direct experience is nearly non existent in
American poetry. Where it appears, where the inner work takes
place at this moment, it ascends from isolation. There is at present
no organized formal or informal group or groups.

Currently, an unknown number of American poets participate in
various mediation and spiritual explorations and disciplines. Some
remained within traditional Christian ways. Some have learned
Asian methods and returned to Christian roots. Others have
abandoned their roots altogether. Others attempt to integrate
various paths into a new universal way. The initial fruits of this
inner work are only now appearing, and thus it is too early to
make any general predictions. There is no central or informal group
in place, though there may be a constellation forming on the rising
horizon. First there was Transcendentalism, later the Beats of the
Beatitude Vision and perhaps now a Third Wave of experiential
mystical poetry is being born.

It is in this context I propose another grouping of poets. Before I
do so here is a quick frame or outline to consider (One): Quantum
physics shows all matter is interconnected.  (Two): Ancient through
middle ages and contemporary mystics and god-realized saints,
sages, gurus and transmitters have directly experienced this
connection (along with other deeper connections yet to be
discovered by Western science); particularly those of India say the
connection is Divine consciousness out of which everything is
made.  Three: Traditions from a wide variety of mystical lineages
are in their way scientific, empirical bodies of tested knowing
handed from generation to generation. The ultimate experience can
not be claimed without proof. Thus, mystical literature is a body of
experiential knowledge, direct knowing, not faith. (Four): The
subject matter of the Asian poet, particularly Sufis of Islam and the
self-realized sage, yogi, saint, and teacher/master (yogi, guru, saint
or transmitter) of India focuses first upon the separation from the
Divine or the Beloved. The poems abruptly change course upon
Union, mystical wedding or a hundred other such metaphorical
codes for enlightenment. The poems change from being outside,
within the world of duality to song from a place of union that
imagination can not but guess about. Charted within the poet's body
of work, the autobiographical artifacts, are the steps from
separation to merging and then direct sourcing from union as a
single view point, or more rare the 1,000 simultaneous eyed view.
The poems turn towards the people to ecstatically celebrate the
Divine and to teach. The separation from the Beloved was
misunderstood or consciously reduced from the spiritual to the
material plane by converting the Divine Beloved into a human of
the opposite sex in Asia. As this poetry moved to Europe it reached
its heights at the end of the Dark Ages among the Troubadours and
informed the notion of romantic love in Europe. In the 6th century
in India Bhakti (devotional) poets launched a movement strong
enough to alter the spiritual vibration of India to a deeper
devotional resonance.

By the current era Western clock, we soon pass out of this century
that is nearly the same 100 years Eurocentric culture has been
turning and examining in its scientific hands the unconscious
precincts of consciousness. Whether Muslim, Christian, Buddhist,
Hebrew, Taoist, Hindu or other traditions, the deep experience of
the mystics, the self realized, or the God realized has been tossed
aside as modern science and its psychology tries to invent its own
wheel.

The offering is a view of consciousness. By consciousness, its
largest and basic definition, I mean that which makes, is the world
we are in and of, that which is the substance and glue holding it all
together from basic material forming the sub-atomic building blocks
to the Divine Consciousness. At the same time this is an attempt to
outline the consciousness of the poet, her/his field of awareness
consciously informing the poem. Conscious and unconscious intent
is a meaning behind the meaning, the particular frequency or surge
carrying the poem to its audience from the poet. There is a
significant difference between the intent and the consciousness
behind Shakespeare and Rumi, for example.

This is not about one type of poet automatically regarded superior
in the creation of a work of art, the best poem or that kind of
discussion. Such a discussion is beyond the present scope and
would digress into the realm of types of poems and the various
warring and allied poetry schools and movements. However, I do
suggest that at the apex of poetic expression are found the mystical
poems, some of which became religious texts written a few years
ago, hundreds to many thousands of years ago, vibrating
throughout humankind to this day and lifting many onto the path of
seeking self knowledge by the example set by the poet. It was not
the fault of the poet that later individuals for ego purposes turned
some of the poetry inside out into religious dogmatic fanaticism,
that the spirit of the poem was turned into strict, narrow exterior
message contrary to the original interior meaning sourced from the
Unspeakable for individual spiritual guidance and development.

The broad brushed categories, the types or levels of poets to be
outlined are the poet, bard, shaman, seer, mystic and the self-
realized sage, yogi, saint, and teacher/master (yogi, guru, saint or
transmitter). The realized poet has gained the truth of self knowledge
by merging with the Ultimate or Divine That Which Is. This poet
is living Gnosis.

The realized individuals don't just happen to write poems but their
vision, word and voice are those of the poet. Some consider that
self-realized teachings automatically issue forth as poetic speech,
that one of the tests of a self-realized teaching is that it is poetic,
that only through poetry can the Unspeakable be approached. Nor
is it to be assumed that the self-realized poets are uninvolved in
daily affairs; the act of being a poet places them within the
boundaries of community, small or large, aiding its individuals'
development. Their holding of daily experience transcends the
accepted norm of a surface ego centered in surface sense-mind
consciousness repeatedly overwhelmed, washed over or subducted
by the unconscious. Theirs is a self knowing merged with the
deeper rooted Self, the source of all that is; that is to say they live
connected within to the source of the creation. Their inner layers of
consciousness and outer life and expression as conscious action are
united as one and the knowing is actualized experience of being one
with the totality.

These thoughts, feelings, intuitions and sensations are not meant to
be argumentative, nor accepted as a definitive analysis but rather
viewed as a probing into areas generally not discussed in poetry
circles by poets or their audience within the larger circle of the
world dominant Eurocentered culture. While in too many
communities in North America the word poem still means rhymed
verse, in too many poetry circles the poetry of self-realized poets
goes unrecognized. Nor are the category boundaries impermeable,
inflexible or mutually exclusive. One of the many sparks triggering
these musings is that the current best selling poet in the USA is the
13th C (C.E.) sufi poet and master Rumi, founder of the Whirling
Dervishes.

The Load Is Light

As a tree branch stripped of its leaves pulled through a tight fist, the
meaning and function of poet was reduced to maker by the Greek
philosophers who had gained dominance over poets by capturing
the role of naming and defining. A shift in consciousness moves
understanding from direct intuitive, sensation or feeling to thinking.
The shift to pure intellect in part is exemplified by Plato's quoting
Socrates "I am a lover of learning and the trees and open fields
won't teach me anything only the men of town. But I will follow
you throughout the countryside like a cow following waved fruit if
you hold a book before me." It was not the poet but the rational
intellectual philosopher who tutored Alexander, and who translated
the Alexanderian invasion experience of India. It was not the poet
who may have been able to fully or in part translate the deeper
aspects of the Indian experiential yogic sciences fully informed by
the self-realized Indian seer-poet, the Rishi, who already for
hundreds if not thousands of years was on intimate terms with all
aspects of consciousness. Later transmissions from India and
Western Asia were folded into the Christian desert mystics,
channeled through coded double meaning works, occulted, or
moved through European Christian Europe as heresy. The use and
application of the term poet and his function in society followed the
conquest of the Greco-Roman cultural sphere crushing and
replacing tribal shaman-poet traditions in Northern Europe and
elsewhere during the European conquest of the planet. Rome's
invasion of Britain was an effort directed at the destruction of
the druids, among them the poet-shaman-priests.

The bard, the shaman-poet, in Keltic and Teutonic lands in B.C.
(before conquest by Jovian and later Christian Rome), offers a
glimpse into the northern European poet tradition. Contrary to
today's use in which bard is assigned to the few preeminent poets
from the finest select group of poets (Shakespeare or Whitman
from our cultural lens), bard was a designation of a particular class
of high poets. The Bard, or the master shaman-poet, stood next to
the king or tribal leader as prime minister or prime adviser.

Compare poem with the Teutonic word for poem, rune, full of
bard-shaman overtones: mystery poem or part of a poem, chant,
song, spell, incantation (a tree branch with all its living leaves). The
bard or shaman-poet in pre-Christian Europe was the holder of the
tribe's or nation's story, the knowers of the sacred calenders, the
many alphabets, the travelers to psychic realms riding rhythmic
chant or incantation waves, the healers, etc.

The earlier, apparently non martial, egalitarian, matri-centered
culture of Old Europe (a line across northern Greece up the
Adriatic across mid Poland to Kiev, and down to the Black Sea)
remains to be explored in the area of its bards and shaman-poets or
kin. The letter M has been traced from the paleolithic caves of
25,000 years ago Western Europe to Old Europe circa 8500 to
4500 B.C.E. Old Europe Œs indigenous script appears to be the
tap root for linear A, a making for profound implications and a
rewriting of history to herstory.

Of interest particularly for visual poets, poets who compose poems
for the eye, is the repetitive application and patterning on sacred
vessels and other sacred art with the Old Europe script suggesting a
visual analog of vibrations set in motion by chant and incantation.
Repetitiveness of symbols and/or script in pattern is universal and
prehistoric. Incantation, chant or song with or without psychotropic
drugs can elevate or move one to altered states of awareness and,
as with any task, the doing is made easier by mastering the process;
this is also universal and prehistoric. It could be that the earliest
visual poems are the rock art, picto or petro glyphs, signing
solstice, lunar and stellar patterns kinetic and fully alive only at the
astronomical moment of alignment: a shaft of dawn solstice sunlight
running tangent to or bisecting a solar sign or the sun lighting the
face of a carved lion sign or touching female symbols signing an act
of creation. The language of lunar counts has been found carved
into bone dating back thousands, tens of thousands of years and
other significant language based imaging most probably composed
by the shaman-poet or kin-type.

The shaman-poet is a complex field of interior and exterior action
and consciousness yet to be fully compared and contrasted with
poets such as seer, mystic and those of self-realization. The fields of
awareness overlap in certain areas of inner consciousness expansion
but in others are very distinct in purpose and intent. The basic
positive formation of shaman powers is for the healing of both
physical and spiritual disease. The American Indian influence has
formed a positive, idealistic, and in many cases a naive reaching out
to shamanistic ways in American poetics. Perhaps the positive side
of the coin is that shaman like consciousness can and in many cases
is aiding or attempting to aid in the healing of individuals and the
culture. The other side of the coin, the playing at shaman-poet and
the lack of responsibility and thorough grounding in a traditional
instruction and environment of the shaman-poet role forms a hollow
poetic voice. Generally speaking, the shaman belongs to and is
involved with both the exterior and inner worlds of psychic powers,
and is not focused on or striving for liberation (from the mind and
senses), for complete self-realization. This is not to say shamans
have not crossed over to reach the realm of full self-realization. The
powers of the shaman are ignored and considered traps or detours
along the path of realization by yogi experience and sciences of
India. Ignoring these powers is not judgmental; one's task is to
reach a specific spot in the forest, not become lost in a beautiful and
aromatically overwhelming field of flowers along the way.

Anti-academic, anti-intellectual (not anti-rational), pro-irrational
(embracing subjective intuitive and body-sense experience as valid),
disgusted with or disillusioned by materialistic economic philo-
sophies ranging from corporate fascism to Marxism, extreme pro
environmental politics thereby balancing the materialists destruction
of the natural world, the shaman-poet seems at this moment
to present the next logical step taken or to be taken by poets not
caught by the stripped down definition and role.

Originally published at:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/Poet-Statements/state001.html

 

Spiritual Calling
Call for art:

The Digital Art Guild is calling for art to be included in the upcoming show at the Art institute of
California – San Diego which will run from June 15th thru July 25th. The themefor the show is your reaction to spirituality or spiritual ideas. Your reaction can be positive or negative. The curators for the show will be Kaz Maslanka and Karl Kempton.
For those who may ask 'What is spirituality as opposed to religion?' the answer would be that the principles of spirituality are common in all religions. How those principles are experienced or expressed is what makes the world go round … or sometimes makes it stop and weep in disgust. For those who feel a bit stifled I have presented a short list of spiritual principles in which you may choose one or more as inspiration for your piece or you may recognize a principle not listed in this list.

Spiritual
Principles:
love
patience
tolerance
honesty
open
mindedness
willingness to change
acceptance
gratitude
balance
be
in the moment
attitude adjustment or perceptions.
know thy self
live
and let live
life is not without pain but suffering is optional
no matter
where you go there you are
forgiveness
let go and turn it over
I can't
but we can.
face everything and recover from your fear
Courage is not
without fear
Stop fighting
freewill
goodwill
I don’t know
What
goes around comes around
We are all one
doing something nice and expect
nothing in return

Because we have limited space we will probably accept one piece per artist so that we can display as many DAG artists as possible (the limit is approximately 25). However, the curators would love to see up 10 pieces per artist submitted so that we can get a good look at what you are doing. If you would like write anything about your work that you would like to share with us then we would be happy to read it.

We do need to charge a bit for those who make it into the show -- $10 for an image up to 24" and $20 for oversized images.

The deadline for submissions is April 22nd 2009. Please send jpg’s no greater in size than 1500 x 1500 (pixel dimension). The images don’t have to be new work but please don’t send work that has been shown with DAG before.

Send images to <kazmandu at aol dot com>.