Frost PhD Appendix 4
CONCLUSION
The human body and the body of creation engage to produce the mandala’s intention. “Completion” (or return to “Completion”). The aesthetic experience of that is fairly elitist, since few would go to the trouble to conjure it. So in evaluating art objects, perhaps we could look at the painted, 3-D, or sand mandalas as ‘mind-altering’ substances, from the art world rather than the plant world, meant to: 1) aid one’s journey of transformed conciousness; 2) catalyze growth and holiness as fetish, power objects; 3) to provide in a ritual context for the divine encounter with self, or “Self.”
The Mandala, the Cruxifix as a symbol or the Sacraments for pre-Reformation Christians, represents the distilled codification of a vast “wisdom” gleaned from eons of cultural and esoteric redaction, to produce substances (art objects), and processes (rituals, religions), that engage the divine to the greatest degree possible.
The Tibetan mandala as an object represents a vast ritual that evokes and guides the forces and states characteristic to this interacting complex of individual and world to ultimate realization of the “real”. The sentient product of that interactive complex and how the art object functions within that complex is my interest.
Tucci provides this view;
- …it has been difficult to overcome the impression that Tibetan painters have little originality and are so subservient to the rules of iconography that they are hardly able to give individual forms to their own fancy. They follow a certain number of fixed patterns but are hardly able to display any creative power. All this is true to a certain extent, but it cannot be denied, as Grousset justly remarks, that Tibetan painting is imbued with a spirit of serene simplicity and a devout and naive grace which not infrequently suggest a natural affinity with the Italian primitive. In fact, the vision unfolding before the artist’s wondering eyes are the same, and we are always confronted with the same choirs of saints and the same meditative ecstasy. Of course, it is true that the loftiness and grace of Italians is not equaled, on the whole, by Tibetan painters and many schools follow the hieratic models of Indian miniatures so closely that they degenerate into a sort of expressionless and lifeless Byzantine manner. I am also ready to admit that even with the best artist, the weight of iconographic tradition is dominant to such an extent that the figures occupying the centre of a picture are as flat and motionless as if they were copied from a bloodless model. It is, however, the manner with which Tibetans treat colour that should engage our attention, and the value of their work lies in the skill and wisdom with which they grade their shades and place them near one another, conferring onto the whole the iridesence of a rainbow. The merit of this painting is entirely in its artlessness and in the mastery of colour; nor should we overlook the simplicity of its religious inspiration which bestows on every picture the character of a divine evocation.(ed) Tibetan painting reproduces the Tibetan soul like a mirror in which we can discern what this people have learnt from India, China, or Central Asia and what they have created on their own initiative. When we look at one after another of these specimens we can see reflected in the images they present, the culture and the spiritual history of a people who lived for ages and are still living under the domination of religion. Thus, this painting is an unfolding panoramic vision of the Tibetan soul, its religious life, and its history.For this reason the meaning of these images cannot be grasped fully unless we visualize them in their own enviroment.…the resolution of iconic representation into aniconic awareness… [is the salient issue here.] (Tibetan Painted Scrolls, Vol.1, pg. IX)
A gestalt of appreciation is necessary for the mandala to be effectively understood. The cultural, aesthetic, moral, virtual, and actual values must act at once to open the doors of life, health, appreciation.
A mandalic symphony of signs produces a Symbol. Because of its peculiar composition of act and intention (art and yoga), this evokes a direct experience of some absolute value to human perceptive capacity.*
From my story Nepsis:
- Bishop, let me speak for a moment about art. This might not be so interesting to you. But, this is pertinent to the conclusions of this story fast approaching. That conclusion definitely will be of interest because it requires a response from you.Perhaps what distinguishes some ‘modernist’ from ‘traditional’ thinking is that the “moderns” disgarded entirely their own (occidental) mystical systems that were the basis for a universal definition of the world and human personality, largely Jewish and Christian in the West. This, in part, opened the door to discover in a new way what it meant to be a human being in the face of the commercially sucessful, technological wonders, commercial expansions and martial horrors of the 20th century. That had some drawbacks, like the suicides and mysterious deaths of many of these explorers. But it was a brave venture.Some have expressed this traditionalist/modernist distinction in terms of how we communicate. Traditional culture with all its definite taboos, rituals, cosmologies; used symbols with specific references. A picture of Christ or the Buddha refered to something everybody understood within a “structure of assumptions”.**
Modernist thinking abandoned such comforts for “metaphor without reference.” In this, I believe that they hoped for greater authenticity and honesty in our response to the challenge of experience and assumed the possibility of freedom from personal bias or cultural “structures of assumptions” about life and the world.
Once when queried about the Aristotelian notion of Art being a reflection of Nature, Jackson Pollack replied, “I am Nature.” (Landau. pgs, 161,179,242.) Thus one’s life and art becomes the direct experience of absolute as well as personal Being without artificial intermediatory agents. This is the antithesis to ecclesiastical or philosophical mediation such as Scholastic Catholicism, wherein “agent intellect” sifts and interprets everything conceptually. Though the Modernist’s interest in direct experience might be more empathetic with various mystical schools of divine union and realization, even those of the Church.***
Modernism, sailing full spinnaker at the turn of the century, culminated in Abstract Expressionism of the New York School and Existentialism in the ’50s.
One of the alternative trends has been a reexploration of ancient symbolic systems. Hence, my interest in the Tibetan mandala, Byzantine icons, Shamanistic and monastic sacramental practices.
I was first heavily influenced by the power and insights of Modernist art and the altruistic concerns so fervent in the Sixties. Then I began religious studies and practice.
My art now is an aspect of a larger conjuring and practice to effect a larger goal. (The manipulation of symbolic and non-symbolic perception is the modern warrior’s craft.) I hope that this story displays some of the potential in this understanding. That goal is nothing less than full, absolute ‘realization’, “Deification”, (Third Century Church Dogma), for myself and everything else. Here. Now. I use any ‘means’ available in this world and the ‘other one’ to accomplish my goal because we are at such a desperate moment that I believe requires a radical creativity. Not only is the culture and the enviroment torn, but the very fabric of our physical brain is at odds with itself. Art against Religion. Religion against Science. Right Brain against Left Brain. The traditional, more… “natural”, mindset is pushed and stressed; indeed enslaved, to produce technological wonders that amaze and destroy. All too fast. All too greedy. Compulsively greedy.
To moderate this imbalance, I have tried to call up all the “agents” operative within the world’s “personality” to effect a turn away from the lemming’s cliff. In working this ‘magic,’ some of the paintings and sculptures from 1987 to 1989 (immediate post-Yemen, “Nepsis,” Part III) reflect the venomous, cathartic, eruption of death and destruction characteristic of the personal and universal evolutionary cycles that this story of the warrior’s path has tried to unveil and effect. The creative work that followed returned to an earlier approach of primary colors and spiritual curiosity.
Bishop, re: Cosmology: No Cosmology, no concensus of understanding about who we are or what the universe is. In the last 500 years have moved more and more to concentrate on the physical phenomena of existence and less on the context of experience; the spiritual, the ontological. This relegates medieval cosmologies, such as those that produced the Tibetan Mandala, however sophisticated psychologically and culturally, to the parlors of the occult, rejected by the “hard” sciences in search of verifiable information. The issue of overall relationships between various aspects of “reality,” the religious issue, are left to one’s personal bias.
No cosmology, no mandala!
We lose our profound identity and thus are tempted to self-destruction. For Example.
Problem: Without a concensus cosmology, i.e. is the universe a sacred body or an object of commercial developement/exploitation; we, as a body, don’t know how to behave appropriately. The result is, with the advent of great technological power, a world in danger of nuclear or enviromental suicide.
Approach to Problem:
This is a Spiritual problem: … without such understanding, human identity is reduced to commercial value as producer or consumer.
But Human Perception is the creator of cosmologies as well as commercial technology.
Investigate the spiritual qualities of this creative agent through religious traditions and practice; Shamanism, Tantra, Christianity, Chinese Internal Arts, among others, to find solution in the evolution of human self-identification.
Art, poetry, prose fiction are used as vehicle to unveil some non-discursive aspects of these disciplines and to help effect the resolution.
In other words, re-awaken right brain function in such a way that will focus attention on the mandalic configuration of Being.
Thus “Nepsis” is an attempt at structuring a contemporary cosmology for a specific purpose and concludes with a mandalic reference.
From Nepsis the concluding P.S. in the letter to the Bishop:
Stephen is at the same location in the same Southwest desert as before, with the crystal skull reliquery at his side
Stephen with great steel sword across the altar, the mesa in front.
Stephen with medicine shield, and battle shield mandala of 12 directions.
(I am in the center of the great mandala shield, now three dimensional and all around me, a galaxy, a universe.)
The steel staff from Yemen rests at his side.
Stephen, Artificer
Dances the dance of swords
sends the webs of
binding
(Having spun the webs of cottonwoods [Los Alamos]
I now play the webs of the Spell.) And
binds the insane Destruction
And binds the Criminal, injects the venom
to heal.
Dances the Dance of Swords and intreats the God of War.
Is the God of War. (Schizophenic capacity/ of one to become Legion is a sick misappropriation of the multiple unity/ in absolute personality /infinitely /singular in its trinitarian /variety.)
Stephen Artificer
[silence]
spins the webs of healing.
Artificer
tends the fire of creation;
the 5 creatures and 12 directions,
dragons of water and fire, earth and ether, (300 million dieties)
tends the weapons, the warrior
guards the People
Sends the Spell of Being
treading twilight,
Artificer watches for dawn, Warrior
Bishop.
(Stephen in “Nepsis” is a reference to Joyce’s character, the artist, artificer, expanded to warrior, shaman and savior Christ man.)
- Bishop, let me speak for a moment about art. This might not be so interesting to you. But, this is pertinent to the conclusions of this story fast approaching. That conclusion definitely will be of interest because it requires a response from you.Perhaps what distinguishes some ‘modernist’ from ‘traditional’ thinking is that the “moderns” disgarded entirely their own (occidental) mystical systems that were the basis for a universal definition of the world and human personality, largely Jewish and Christian in the West. This, in part, opened the door to discover in a new way what it meant to be a human being in the face of the commercially sucessful, technological wonders, commercial expansions and martial horrors of the 20th century. That had some drawbacks, like the suicides and mysterious deaths of many of these explorers. But it was a brave venture.Some have expressed this traditionalist/modernist distinction in terms of how we communicate. Traditional culture with all its definite taboos, rituals, cosmologies; used symbols with specific references. A picture of Christ or the Buddha refered to something everybody understood within a “structure of assumptions”.**
In the Tibetan mandala, the elements of a culturally produced art form and a culture’s religion join in singular purpose to produce a total realization of clarity, perfect dynamic stability, composition and content of religious, aesthetic, and cultural values combined in a form that carries the heart of Vajrayana Buddhism.
As Arguellas notes (p. 15) about the mandala in general:
- The healing, meditative integrative purpose of the Mandala has its beginning and its root in Man’s attempt at self-orientation. Man is the center of his own relative time space locus from which he receives a cosmic consecration. Whatever is in front, behind, to the left, and the right of him become the four cardinal directions; Whatever is above and below become the heavens and the earth; what was yesterday and will be tomorrow becomes time past and time future and the center is always the individual, the bearer of the awareness of the eternal now. Feeling the impulse toward wholeness, man applies it to all that he does. It motivates his thoughts, permeates his activities, and resides in all that he constructs. In his dwellings, as in those of most the “primitives” pre-industrial world, there is a place, an altar, a fire, a stone that is the center, not only of the house or dwelling, but also of the entire cosmos. This is no inherent contradiction, for we are dealing with what is essentially a sacred principle, or a sacred state of consciousness in which all beings and all things are realized equally as emanations as One Divine Whole. Sacred consciousness, of which the mandala is a structural model, conforms to the Hermetic stratement, “god is an intelligent sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”…as he approaches its center, the disciple approaches the ‘center of the world.’ In fact, as soon as he has entered the mandala, he is in a sacred space, outside of time; the gods have already ‘descended’… A series of meditations, for which the disciple has been prepared in advance help him to find the gods in his own heart. In a vision, he sees them all emerge and spring from his heart; they fill cosmic space, then are reabsorbed in him. In other words, he ‘realizes’ the eternal process of the periodic creation and destruction of the worlds; and this allows him to enter into the rhythms of the cosmic great time and to understand its emptiness. He shatters the plane of samsara and enters a transcendent plane…”(Eliade)
With or without such New Age bias or an Older Age bias as the Tibetans presume or my creative Catholic assumptions (bias), the mandala remains a powerful agent descriptive of human perception of itself in the world.