Sample Gallery 1

Photo Gallery Sampler

VIRTUAL QABALAH, DVD
by Iona Miller and Merlyn Morgan

also, see Kabbalah Luminata

http://kabbalahluminata.50megs.com/

http://kabbalahluminata.50megs.com/photo.html

Qabalah is the ART of being fully human. It is a technology for the embodiment of spirituality. The paths of the Tree of Life exemplify templates for all ways of being and becoming. VIRTUAL QABALAH is a first of its kind animated multimedia guided tour of the initiatory mindscapes of Tarot and Qabalah. Much like science, deep mysticism goes beyond beliefs to present direct experience. The whole system incorporates not only the brain and body, but most importantly the outside world too. This view is esentially circular and dynamic, not linear and fixed. Consciousness is access to a sensorium and/or informational input. We are modified by both incoming and self-generated sensory data...a cosmic feedback device.

FUTURE HERITAGE: The Qabalistic worldview is a dynamic system, a Whole which differentates itself into parts which then integate back into resonant wholes. The Tree is a general pattern of activity in an endlessly flowing substrate. It's a process, not a thing. Using visionary art and pathworking symbolism, the viewer witnesses the Qabalistic Creation story: emanation of the Spheres of the Tree of Life. Next, through a series of multisensory guided visualizations, he or she finds personal meaning by ldquo;climbing” the Tree, in an exaltation of soul and spirit.

HIGH TECH HYPNOSIS: Using congruent yet amorphous imagery at some points provides generic metaphors of transformation as templates or blank canvas for the subjective projections of each viewer, allowing them to identify with the generic aspirant in a personalistic, yet undefined, way. Ultimately, it is our sense organs which help us interpret the world and our experience through our perceptions. They help us make a distinction between what is "real" and "unreal." The emotional part of the brain, (the right, spatial lobe), cannot analytically distinguish a symbol from a symbolic representation.

CONNECTING TO SOURCE: In imagination or virtual reality it becomes a moot point. Fantasy, in fact, animates both our inner and outer worlds, and creates meaning. The on-going imaginative process of the psyche is the ground of being. Jung spoke of the psychoid aspect of psyche as the vast non-human action of the universal forces. Aesthetic flow and harmony appeals to the emotional brain, while systematic orderliness appeals to the cognitive nature, creating holistic congruence in the viewing experience.

PSYCHOTRONICS: This video DOES things to you: it resonates with and awakens deep layers of the psyche, “rototills” your subconscious mind in an organic way, planting the seeds of transformation, Cosmosis. Self-Regulation is the antidote to Corporate and Political Mind Control.

BACKGROUND:

New Media and Environments: We are entering an era of magical technologies which are relevant to the inner world of imagery and imagination. The thin line between imagination and reality is blurring. Eventually they will synchronize inner and outer perceptions. Through special FX we have expanded our ability to seamlessly manifest a visionary tale, and with Virtual Reality (VR) we can create an electronic representation of typical symbols of the psyche and interact with them. Even though these images have no concrete existence, they are influential in the process of transformation.

Self-Transformation: The practice of magick, a sacred technology, normally involves concentrated visualization activity coupled with immersion in the autonomous stream of consciousness. Since much of the training and practice in magick is based on a recipe, formula, or protocol, these can easily be programmed and standardized, using the Correspondence System derived from the traditional Doctrine of Signatures to guide an aspirant into a specific state of consciousness.

Self-Regulation: Biofeedback and brain machine technology could easily enhance that effect, facilitating Alpha and Theta brainwave coherence using binaural beat technology. Each virtual world includes a panoply of symbols related to a specific archetype. The aspirants journey through this world. In the process of positive interaction with these archetypal forms, the psyche learns to identify with transpersonal forces, but without egoic inflation. This leads to both a sense of expansion and experiential grounding, a greater sense of wholeness and well-being, a connection to Source. The objective archetypes are no longer simply intellectual concepts but a subjective experience which self-generates insight. Reclaim your brain from mass media and political mind control.

CAST:

Narrator/Guide/Mentor/Technoshaman: Turns out in the end to be the voice of journeyer’s higher Self, and/or Daemon (genius), or Holy Guardian Angel; always there, after all throughout all phases. In the end, the aspirant finds him/herself. Not revealed visually until final scenes, IF then. Vocals could be melds and morphs of male/female voice with vocal synth.

Oracles: Voice overs only (heavy echo type stuff; think The Voice from ‘DUNE’)

“Greek” Chorus: Respondent and clarifying Voice Overs; ritual murmuring

Trump Personifications: Tarot tableuxs of various Trumps, and their corresponding godforms in the correlated atmospheres and actions.

STORIES:

ACT I: The Physical Plane (Malkuth)
ACT II: The Astral Plane (Yesod, Hod, Netzach)
ACT III: The Mental Plane (Tiphareth, Geburah, Chesed)
ACT IV: The Archtypal Plane (Kether, Chokmah, Binah)

Even without an introduction, a one hour format only allows less than 3 minutes per Trump, including entry, immersion, and transition.

Obviously, each Trump storyboard needs to build on a synopsis of salient correspondences from the Doctrine of Signatures. Using proper intonations, colors, and keys we can quickly activate the subconscious, facilitating actual psychophysical reactions congruent with the various paths. That, after all, is what qabalah is all about: psychosensory evocation, multisensory experience which pyramids and builds on one another in a self-referential cascade of imagery. It brings order to the chaos of the uncooked psyche.

A template can be constructed for each Pathworking, which includes uniform elements which build a certain rhythm and expectation into the viewing process as it moves into more rarified spiritual territory and depictions.

Each path opens in the traditional manner, where a curtain is parted and the aspirant steps through. That curtain can be a morph of many tarot cards, but in the Hebrew Kabbalah it is the flaming Hebrew letter associated with that path, which would create a nice, dramatic transition. The card montage could be encountered after the letter “flies” in.

Symbols encountered can range from the godforms of the path, proper colors and landscapes, to corresponding animals, herbs, sigils, even cues for fragrances could be suggested as the olfactory sense is the quickest way to evoke the subconscious.

The vehicle of consciousness, astral or Light body can be represented in ever more rarefied forms, beginning with the meat body, then an astral body with human shape, which morphs into the Ruach or mental body which is geometrical in nature, and finally toward the Singularity of a massless particle: Pure Light moving toward the nonmanifest domain of Zero-Point Fluctuation, qabalistically Ain Soph Aur.

EXAMPLE JOURNEY CLIPS:

The most direct and exemplary paths of the Tree are those which rise vertically up the Middle Pillar, joining Earth to Moon (XXII), Moon to Sun (XIV), and Sun to Source (II).

II. The High Priestess:

Enter through letter Gimel
Tarot Montage
Vision of trekking on camel across desert, and encounters
Discovery of Lunar Temple with Priestess at Altar
Encounter with High Priestess
Etc. Causal Body

XIV: Art or Temperance

Enter through letter Samekh
Tarot Montage
Aiming the Arrow
Discovering the Temple of the Hunters, Artemis/Apollo
Artistic Inspiration
Etc. Astral Body

XXII. The Universe

Enter through latter Tau
Tarot Montage
Vision of the Mechanics of the Universe (Rising on the Planes)
Discovery of Temple of Saturn
Journey through a vortex to the Astral Realm
Etc. Atomic Body

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Follow Up Project:

VIRTUAL QABALAH II: INTERACTIVE

Through the arrival of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, we will soon have access to a fully programmable electronic "astral plane." Magic has always been a sacred technology, and combining it with VR makes for a state-of-the-art practice. In virtual reality, we can create a world which is, in essence or effect, "as good as" normal reality. Through the use of visual, audial, kinesthetic, and olfactory feedback, the experiential (rather than analytical) part of the brain is guided to suspend its disbelief in the synthetic reality.

The realization of a system of interactive fantasy will allow us, as artists or magicians, to shape the experience from the inside. It will allow us to re-shape ourselves, also. A central premise in VR is that you can manipulate your self-representation, or self-image. VR represents a cultural revolution in the way we view reality, nature, art, ourselves, and our relationship with transpersonal powers.

Interactive media will give us the ability to author moving images. When you can put your images in cyberspace, you introduce your own unique content into the experience. Background, or natural imagery, will be texture-mapped for ambiguity. Ambiguity is one key to the engagement of the imagination (Laurel, 1992). Communal virtual reality is also possible for group rituals, but requires a tremendously powerful computer to keep track of all the details which perpetuate a believable virtual space.

The realm of imagination has traditionally been the province of shamans and magicians. More recently, psychotherapists have entered the arena of imagination as guides to the heights and the depths. There are many different styles in the practice of magic from primitive to sophisticated. Magic is the ancient technology for dealing with lost or questing souls, while archetypal psychology is a modern counterpart.

Basically, there are three ways of encountering the inner world, reflecting the state of consciousness of the practitioner: 1). prototaxic mode, a "possession" or trance state where the ego is absent through regression; 2). parataxic mode, which includes art, archetype, myth, dream, and ritual wherein the ego is enthralled; and 3). syntaxic mode, which includes creativity, gnosis, and higher mystical states, where the ego is enraptured and eventually transcended.

Sophisticated magick, or Theurgy, has been practiced in western occultism through the centuries largely by an elite group of eccentric intellectuals. Many of them identified with the Rosicrucians, Masons, Gnostics, or other "hidden" orders. These practitioners of the mystic arts were the forefathers of modern sciences like chemistry, botany, medicine, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. Through magick, they learned a unique way of looking at the inner and outer world. This is the major premise of any philosophy: "Look at it like this..." The magical philosophy has left a tremendous legacy. The history of these alchemists, mystics, healers, and theurgists outlines one of the most interesting areas of human endeavor: consciousness studies.

The mapping of consciousness states and their corresponding typical experiences (plus how to attain them) forms part of the doctrine of any magical philosophy. The most widely embraced map is called The Tree of Life. The very foundation of the modern western occult tradition is contained in this circuit or glyph of The Tree of Life. It describes a hierarchy of 10 states of being (Spheres), and 22 characteristic modes of transition between them (Paths). All the corresponding symbolism of the human psyche is categorized according to this comprehensive basic structure. It represents all ways of being and becoming--all possible states of consciousness.

The philosophical system which the Tree represents originated in the Jewish culture. Through synchronism it amalgamated with the Gnostic, Egyptian, Arabic, and other systems. This synthesis became known as Hermetic Qabalism. In divorcing itself from its Hebrew roots, Qabala returned to the mythic domain of its informing archetype, Hermes.

In ancient Egypt, this archetypal energy was represented by the god Thoth, Lord of Magic. He presided over skills such as writing and translating. In Greece, as Hermes, he was the messenger between the realm of the gods and men--he who could fly into the heights or depths. Our modern forms of writing and translating have moved into information processing via computers. Information processing is fundamental to any form of communication.

Information processing is the foundation of all technology. Thus, Hermes is the informing myth of a technological approach to sacred psychology and spirituality. Hermes' domain includes gnosticism, alchemy, magick, and depth psychology. Like programming, they are all hermeneutic endeavors, involving the process of interpretation. Jung noticed that, "Every interpretation necessarily remains an "as-if." The ultimate core of meaning may be circumscribed, but not described." He refers to the "as-if" reality as the closest we can come to direct knowledge. For example, our God-image in the psyche is our closest (and only) experience of Divinity, however unique it may be. We perceive it directly, but it is a specific interpretation of the unknowable archetype.

VIRTUAL BODIES OF LIGHT:

A major tenet of Qabala and occult philosophy concerns the nature of the astral body. The Jews call it the Tselem. This starry body is composed of scintillating etheric energy. It is perceived in imagination as being composed of light that takes on various fine forms. The analogy with electrical energy and light in cyberspace is obvious, if not literal.

To work on the astral level, the magician identifies with this virtual double of the physical body. In imagination, one perceives with the eyes of the body of light while maintaining its perspective and orientation. The light body has the ability of separating itself from the constraints of the flesh and blood body, without limitations of a mortal frame.

The astral body contains the fully functioning consciousness of the aspirant. Its existence is alleged to persist after physical death, as reported by those with near-death-experiences.

Magically, or psychically, the astral body is built in the imagination through the process of breath control, or pranayama. The VR program supercedes the trained imaginative faculty. It opens the experience to those who are not of contemplative nature, those unwilling or unable to spend years training the mind and visualization capacity. It makes the dialogic realm open to all in limited form. It establishes a new medium for the traditional I-Thou dialogue.

The virtual astral body could be employed for the practice of pathworking. Magick, itself, is the practice of practical Qabala, and its most practical exploits are the imaginal consciousness journeys known as pathworking. As a magical practice, pathworking differs from ceremonial invocation by imaginally transporting the aspirant to the location of an archetypal Form, rather than calling the Form into the circle or oneself. The experience includes a "there-and-back-again" experience of a very specially conditioned terrain. The exposure to symbols keys processes in the mind which influence the process of transformation.

The paths of The Tree of Life are metaphorical "in-roads" through the imagination. Each is marked by typical landmarks, milestones, and signposts. Each contain their ordeals, challenges, and intrinsic rewards. Pathworking offers a way of "finding" or "locating" archetypes in imaginal space. In imagination, we do it simply by wishing ourselves there, actively interacting. In VR, it requires some programming, but the initial intent is the same whether creating your own program or authoring a master program for others.

Each successive pathworking increases the area of perceptible inner space. One can enter the experience as a passive spectator, or as an active participant. The emotional impact of the experience is real. Imagine when these experiences become re-processed in your dream life! In VR, other humans could play the parts of entities encountered, or the journey may be undertaken as a common adventure. All pathworkings return the traveller to the point of origin, which is usually some symbolic form of door to the netherworld.

Another magical exercise, rising on the planes, is conducted while in the Body of Light. In this process, one imagines oneself moving further and further up through the hierarchy of planes described in the Qabala. You can get a sense for it if you can imagine an ever-widening perspective moving from sub-atomic to cosmic. For example, imagine you are a sub-atomic particle, an atom, a molecule, an organism, an animal, a human, the biosphere, the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, ad infinitum. All of this type of imagery is readily programmable and universal in meaning.

Crystalline Tree of Life

Resonance, Iona Miller. Resonance as a nomadic concept in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari still throws light and shades to our understanding of the problematical relationship between philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis and arts on the one hand, and the spectacle or the specular on the other. What kind of a concept is resonance? Can it be theorised or should it simply be left untheorised? What are its implications for the concept of a concept? What are the conditions of its distribution in the work of Deleuze and Guattari? If philosophy can deviate the thought from the rule of the specular, as was attempted by the Situationists, “resonance” – as it appears basically in The Logic of Sense – is perhaps already offering a non-relational relationship between various pairs or binaries which, especially in recent history and in the history of philosophy have fettered thought to a sedentary regression. If the spectacle cannot be maintained as such unless under certain philosophical, historical, cultural and geographical conditions, what would be the role of resonance in opening up new paths towards deterritorialisations particularly under the light of an elusive concept of “resonance” on a plane of continuous flight?

Sample Photo 2

from Blue Elf Magick suite

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Astral Being

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Nuclear Mysticism, Homage to Dali

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Brief Description

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Qabalah Sphere

DIGITAL CYMATICS

INTRODUCTION

I have been a “Qabalististic artist” for over 35 years. That is to say, Qabalah is the primary thread that weaves through all my graphic and written work one way or another. The history of Hermetic philosophy in Visionary Art is very rich, an often unconscious esoteric current that pervades Western art from the Renaissance forward. Similar symbolic imagery always permeated Eastern art under different philosophies.

Even Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Titian, Ficino, Blake, Tchelechew, Grey, and others owe a debt to the Hermetic revolution and philosophical syncretism. The Renaissance was about developing a stereoscopic perspective, and the task of today’s visionary Digerati is to take that vision hyperdimensional. As ever, it is all about recontextualization and multisensory evocation of psychobiological states.

Great art has impact; it stops us in our tracks with aesthetic arrest, then leaves an aesthetic afterglow. It concentrates transformative insights in skillful, original forms. For the visionary, art becomes a literal description of extreme mindbody states. Mission is committed vision. With a perceptual acuity tuned to discovery, the artist beckons the viewer further, to share her vision, albeit, in silence.

On Summer Solstice 2005, I got a spontaneous influx of creative energy. I presumed it would end there, but it has kept right on going. Of course, that is not to say that I am ever blocked, as I simply don’t know what that feeling is. I’m not bragging though, because the flip side of my characteristically fluid or fluent process is that I must serve it when the prolific Angel is upon me. I could only ignore it at my peril. Ah, but then what the heck? Dylan said we all gotta serve somebody.

The summer influx came in the form of a wide variety of what I could characterize as Ionic Vortices, psychic quadratic equations, holographic interference patterns, electromagnetic quadratic monopoles of highly saturated brilliance, even visions of the morphing quaternions (hypercomplex numbers) of the Zero-Point virtual field. It really doesn’t matter what domain they are viewed from, as the patterns repeat at all levels in nature and our nature in an infinite fractal reiteration.

In cymatics, a vibrational field ALWAYS acts holistically. These mandalas formed essentially the same way, varying their frequency and amplitude of color and form, as well as symbolic content. Surely, the onlooker will have his or her own point of view and interpretation of the rather abstract medium. It might be as simple as a sort of universal stirring of the pot, so to speak. In any event, if I had actually tried to depict field forces, I don’t think I could have come up with a better idea: but this one was a spontaneous eruption, an emergence at the creative edge of chaos, where if you just get out of the way, things flow forth, effortlessly.

Jung has linked mandalas to the imaginal net of the Self archetype, and implied that they often emerge when a person is in need of healing, of holistically feeling that deepest connection to the source of being and imagination, of imposing order on disorder. Do I need healing? Who among us doesn't? Who can't benefit by taking a moment to connect with sensuous Beauty, technological, archetypal and spiritual? What higher goal could we have for our artistic intentionality? Its unique beauty is its radiance, its spirit, beyond reason and words.

The symmetry of mandalas somehow creates a neurological calm within us. We see through it to another world outside our mundane existence. As we contemplate The Center we identify with that Cosmic Axis at an existential level, and it recalibrates the psyche. We don’t know “how”. THAT is the penetrating Mystery, the marriage of the soul with the divine. All we can do is rest within it.

Mandalas are as old as the first circles scrapped on sand and stone by our ancient ancestors. Perhaps the oldest mandala was the rotating, circular bowl of the heavens. But what can be expressed through morphs of this form, both visually and symbolically is virtually infinite. Mandalas can be so symbolically dense, that from a distance all we perceive is an undifferentiated vortex. But this vortex holds the seeds of our potential spirituality.

The Tree of Life is a glyph entirely composed of circles, lines and color but it conveys and orders an encyclopedia of symbolic associations. Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas likewise symbolically represent the creation and reabsorption of the entire universe. Mandalas, like the horoscope or wheel of I Ching hexagrams or Tarot deck, have been used as divinatory devices. They are aids to inner recollection, aids for connecting with the divine. Solar systems and galaxies are mandalas, and so is the atom.

Now, the mandala enters the era of SCIENCE-ART (the fusion of art and physics), where it continues expressing that which is unseen in the inner realms except by the dark-adapted or Third Eye. First we had the molecules, then atoms, then the undetermined waveforms of subatomic particles, and now virtual fields of the pulsating vacuum fluctuation and their pure potential, sometimes called the scalar field.

Computers have been generating mechanical mandalas practically since their inception. But these soulless forms don’t have the depth of a “considered” piece. Mandalas themselves are mnemotechnical systems or devices. In this case, the computer doesn’t make my mandala, nor does it make source, content or morphing choices. It doesn’t make the creative choices where to start or when to end. The artist creates the qualitative field within which synchronistic events manifest and from which uncontrived art emerges.

I use the computer to create it, the same as I used to employ the brush. If it helps me shortcut the process, good, as fluency comes from keeping up with mental processes in execution. The secret, as ever, is the source material, the palette, the Light. These mandalas are Rorschachs for the third eye. If you are lucky, perhaps one will “capture” you.

FOUR IN ONE

Jung described wholeness as a quaternio. Some electromagnetic field interaction is described as quaternions. These mandala fields aren’t accurately called quaternions, but I call my mandalas QuaternIONAs. The four contains a powerful retrograde connection to the One. It is a mythopoetic unified field theory. As quaternions are related to matrices, so these mandalas are related to the old alchemical formula of Maria Prophetessa: the Four in One.

“Out of the One comes Two, out of the Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as the Fourth.”

Marie-Louise von Franz wrote of this formula extensively in her classic, Number and Time. She was one of the original Jungians with a definite eye for the interface of psyche and matter or that elusive instant where the center of Nothing, (which is everywhere, always, forever), becomes Something. It is the vacuum fluctuation of the Imagination, where the amorphous unconscious becomes an eidetic image, alive in the mind’s eye.

The mandala, a quaternary thought-model, is a creative means of holding the tension of psychological opposites, discrete but conjoined, including those of potential and actual. One is openness; two is plurality; three is engagement, and four is integrability. Jung corresponded this four-fold process with integration of the psychological functions of Intuition, Thinking, Feeling, and Sensation.

THE SELF & THE MANDALA

A geometrical God-image, the mandala is the psychic counterpart of the alchemical unus mundus, one world where soul and spirit are not divorced from the body. The body is the unconscious, the memory and repository and expression of our essential nature, our Self.

According to Jung, his archetype of the Self, or the metaphysical Higher Self, is an archetype of wholeness, the entire contents of the psychophysical field. Synchronistic phenomena are its parapsychological equivalent. It manifests symbolically in the inherently hypnotic form of the mandala, which draws us inward like a black hole.

I contend, according to both Qabalah and the holographic concept of reality, this implies it is the personification or embodiment of the entire Universe, for we are a microcosm of that. Mandalas depict the magic circles that coordinate or explore the meaning of cosmic order. The man-dala is the symbol of man as the intercessor between micro- and macrocosm. Finding its secret center means finding illumination. It is a cosmic portal, and a psychotronic device.

This is why we see through these primal forms when we look inside ourselves, as visionary artists, mystics, or depth psychologists. The Self is the ultimate muse, the source of all inspiration. Its abstract representation is the highly coherent Cosmic Mandala form, order which is infinitely rich in meaning.

We resort to art when we cannot articulate our vision with concepts alone, when our reach exceeds our grasp. The oneness of existence transcends our conscious comprehension, insisting on a comprehensive symbol. In a moment of synchronicity, it is the vehicle of transcendence.

When we have gone out and been overwhelmed by ten thousand outer things, we can make them one through the image of the One Mind. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling the scattered aspects of ourselves and the spiritual forces of life together and coordinating that with the universal circle. But we can’t identify with undifferentiated nothingness, so we have to give it qualities. And the most primal of these are color, line, and volume with motion - symbolized force.

This centering meditation can realize itself through art, uniting heaven and earth - vision and substance. Granted, in the digital era, that substance is more ephemeral - the pulsating EM stuff of the temple of living light. But then, doesn’t that reflect Nature’s Way even better? The animated mandala as pure frequencies carries this further than the static print or wall art, since nature is never still. It is a unified field of dynamically unfolding rhythmical sequences, a fractally reiterating manifold of the imagination, transpersonal energies beyond temporal flux.

THE SELF & CREATIVITY

Creativity expresses itself through a specific act. Originally, in primal shamanic cultures, there was no separation between art and the sacred -all art was sacred, and it still is, if we hold that attitude of reverence toward its source in Spirit. Similarly, before our addiction to so-called scientific objectivity, physics was not separate from philosophy, but known as Natural Philosophy.

In the quantum era, physics has returned to a philosophy, since there is no consensus but only theories about the nature of ultimate reality and matter (strings, holographic, multiverse, transactional, etc.). SCIENCE-ART is a form of mythopoeisis, a sacred psychology that delves deep enough to creatively see their unification.

To be creative means to invent, to originate, to perceive old patterns in new relationships, or rearrange old patterns in new ways. This is the hallmark function of the real self. Ironically, it is the recycling of consciousness, eternally morphing force and form. Our individual capacity for expressing this varies. There are forms of personal creativity that have nothing to do with artistic expression.

Through the function of our emerging self we can make original, unique, creative rearrangements of our own inner psychological patterns. Every artist knows what these are, because they form the basis of our recurrent, even autobiographical themes - our neuroses, proclivities and obsessions. We tend to revisit them often, morphing our relationship with eternal forms, over and over again. They are expressed outwardly as originality and style.

It is style - a consolidated perspective - that separates the great artist from the mediocre. Art we make for our Self rings far more authentic than art contrived for consumption in the popular marketplace. The artist who is true to his or her Self best exemplifies the zeitgeist of the times.

Art also requires a devotion to the vision, a willingness to stick to the image as presented in the unconscious, to follow where it leads. The practice of therapy has the same kind of creative requirement. Often it involves effort and struggle and the willingness to endure anxiety. Some people are just unwilling to make the necessary effort or to endure the unavoidable anxiety. They forego creative fulfillment as a result. They consume, rather than have a love affair with images.

The self is our unfixed aspects that transcend and encompass ego. Qualities of the self are qualities of creative spirit: 1). Spontaneity and aliveness of affect (passion); 2). Self-entitlement (pleasure at environmental support); 3). Self-motivation, Self-activation, assertion and support ; 4). Acknowledgement of self-activation and maintenance of self-esteem (adaptive coping); 5). Self soothing of painful affects or emotions; 6). Continuity of self; 7). Commitment and perseverance toward goals; 8). Creativity to transmute old patterns; 9). Capacity to express Intimacy.

Tales of artists’ struggles with their own creativity are legendary. In this process, however, psychological scars can be transformed into genius. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, transformed by genius. The inner muse, genius, or Self is what Plato called our Daemon. Under inspiration we are ridden by this Daemon, and bent to do its will, rather than creating solely from the ego, employing craft and technique.

Thus, genius is not something we are, but something we occasionally are lucky to have or enjoy, manifesting transpersonal energy through us. To the extent that our theme expresses common developmental conflicts it will touch more people, who identify with or yearn for that existential position. Like therapy, art can be a proxy vehicle for discharging feelings and discovering a-ha solutions. Great art can alter our worldview, at least for a time of magical aesthetic transport. Space and time become suspended, superceded.

The fully developed real self - our genius - has access to its creativity for it is indissolubly connected to Source, the wellspring of creativity. But we can be artistically creative even without full development of the self - though it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Self-esteem is established and reinforced by self-activation in our art. Creativity is the vehicle of a quest to establish a real Self.

We are ARTificers - doers and makers. Art is a verb, not a noun - process, not merely product. It is an end in itself; the imaginal or visionary telos. The real self provides an internal visual grammar and repertoire. It is finite and fixed, but varied and flexible enough to blend the need for real self-expression with the external roles required by adaptation. Part of the joy of the creative process is the pleasure of increasing mastery, a biophysical gestalt.

Visionary art is a process of Self-Actualization. Artists individuate in expressing their original statement that also speaks to the collective consciousness. I am sure as time goes on, these mandalas will morph again, and I will continue to fuse my own images with them.