The Mission of Art
September 22, 2024
Ethan Maurice
By: Alex Grey Intro: The Mission of Art is a philosophical text about what art is about.
Written by Alex Grey, a mystic visionary artist, it makes a monumental case that throughout history, the arc of art is actually a record, and means, of the evolution of consciousness.
After the astounding psychedelic experience of an “infinite ‘web of life’ in which I was one node of life intrinsically woven into infinite others,” as I wrote in a notebook later that day, Alex’s artwork became a remarkable means of describing that ineffable experience to others (see Net of Being , Rainbow Eye Ripple , and Order ). The Mission of Art puts into words the philosophy and perspective underlying those transcendent works of art.
One need not be an artist to resonate and perhaps even be transformed by a piece of art and one need not be an artist to resonate and perhaps even be transformed by this book.
Some of my highest flying perspectives, intuitions, and aims were both altered and affirmed.
We all organize and interpret life according to a unique psychological filter or lens, our worldview. This psychological context, the way we hold the realities of life, including who we think we are, mostly goes unnoticed. Our minds and body use it somewhat automatically. In order to notice our own worldview, we have to think about the way we think; we have to rise above our habitual thought patterns and notice that they are habits. We have to question who we think we are. This happens only when our worldview is sufficiently challenged, when new visions collide with and unsettle our existing vision of life. If the challenge is great enough, our worldview and sense of self will dissolve and either regress, break down, or transform to a higher and deeper vision.
Alex Grey
Although human greed, hatred, and ignorance have led us to the current crisis of our overpopulated and polluted world, the question is, can enough individuals personally awaken to a reverence for life, as Schweitzer called it, and then, through their creative actions and interventions, redirect the tendency of society away from self-destruction.
Alex Grey
The poet is a light and winged and holy thing and there is not invention in him until he’s been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.
Socrates
Individual will is aligned with divine will, attaining a spiritual overview and unity with the cosmos.
Alex Grey
The conceptual mind constructs a coded world of meaning by assigning names to things and then comparing them. The everyday functioning of civilizations is completely dependent on the powers of the conceptual mind and its coded world. The downside is that by creating a world of isolated distinct objects, the conceptual mind creates a trap of limits and opposites, distinguishing our isolated self from everything else. The ego is the construction of this intellectual self-distinction. The conceptual mind creates a seductively logical prison of words that only spiritual insight can cure by transcending.
Alex Grey
Timeless spirit is the ultimate context or reference point that the flesh-and-bone human refers to for meaning. Contact with spiritual ground provides the true basis for meaning in our lives. We experience an altered, or in this case “altared,” state of consciousness, a contact with infinite love, infinite bliss, and infinite awareness. The meaning of the physical world is realized to be a beautiful dream symbol requiring our lucid participation, a shadow play cast by the transcendental sun.
Alex Grey
Idealist visionary art reveals hidden spiritual truths. Fantastic and surreal art depend upon no ground of ultimate truth, no reference to God. All is dream from which there is no awakening, except to the realization that we are all dreaming. Idealist and mystical art evoke a positive altruistic force and a basis for appreciating the divine dream show we call reality.
Alex Grey
The mystical experience imparts a sense of unity within oneself and potentially with the whole of existence. With unity comes a sense that ordinary time and space have been transcended. replaced by a feeling of infinitely and eternity. The experience is ineffable, beyond concepts, beyond words. The mental chatterbox shuts up and allows the ultimate and true nature of reality to be revealed, which seems more real than the phenomenal world experienced in ordinary states of consciousness. When we waken from a dream, we enter the “realness” of our waking state and notice the unreal nature of the dream. In the mystical state we awaken to a higher reality and notice the dreamlike or superficial character of our normal waking state.
Alex Grey
In a dream, two friends and I were climbing on the radiant, mountainous face of a God. The head was made of glowing golden crystal rock. As we perilously ascended this huge Godhead, my friend who was a writer stopped and rested at the mouth, my friend who was a musician climbed into the ear, and I struggled to the eye. At our separate stations, we could no longer see each other, but we were united by the same illuminated Godhead, having placed ourselves at the spiritual sensory gates that governed our art.
Alex Grey
To see, in the ideal sense, is to contemplate the causal spiritual realm beyond physical appearances.
Alex Grey
At the very moment when at sunset we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought: “Reverence for Life.” The iron door had yielded: The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in that life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Thus, to me, ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principal of morality, namely that good consists of maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or hinder life is evil… Reverence for life dictates the same sort of behavior as the ethical principle of love. But reverence for life contains within itself the rationale of the commandment to love and calls for compassion for all creature life. Reverence for life means being seized by unfathomable, forward moving will that is inherent in all Being.
Albert Schweitzer
Imaginal travel, from the furthest realms of outer space to the tiniest subatomic realms, can only leave one in a state of eye-bugging awe at the magnitude of our universe and our minds.
Alex Grey
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