Cosmic creativity -- how art evolves consciousness: Alex Grey at TEDxMaui 2013

H how art evolves Consciousness this painting Body Mind Spirit shows the trajectory of the evolution of human consciousness through the physical to the mental to the trans and dental the subject of mortality whether our Consciousness survives bodily death is a question that haunts us all this is the first drawing that I did of a skeleton age five and we can see it's a time when the child's filled with magical thinking and here we have a power animal on the shoulder of the skeleton happy gravestone a little coffin 5 years later at age 10 I did

a another depiction of death uh but here in a more archetypal and mythological kind of portrayal of the Grim Reaper at age 17 I was in art school and I was still drawing the same subject of a skeleton but now from a more rational perspective and I was naming all bones and everything more discipline and skill now age 20 I had a dream where I saw my uh hair half shaved like this and so I decided to uh enact a performance ritual where I'd keep my hair half shaved for half a year and I did

some uh performances that I was a billboard painter at the time and I uh place this self-portrait in a dead board and uh then I did a self-portrait put it in an ad slot on the subway and rode underneath it was called private Subway uh now I handed out leaflets with my face on it and invited people to um call me for dinner or throw it down and step on my face and kind of a polarity situation uh now after 6 months uh I did a piece called brain sack and this was how I ended

the uh uh six months so I ate a plate of spaghetti and then I cut my hair onto the plate uh I placed the brain onto the hair took the universal antidote syrup of epicac and vomited the spaghetti up onto the brain I put it all in a sack and that was brain sack um I was severely depressed if if you hadn't noticed and I prayed to a God I did not believe existed uh to show me a sign that there's a reason to go on living and within 24 hours I was invited to a

party uh where I was given LSD for the first time and I closed my eyes and I was in a pearlescent spiric tunnel I was in the dark and going toward the light and the light was God every conflict and polarity was resolved in this spiritual rebirth canal and I could see that gray brought the Opposites together and so I decided that would be my mission as an artist to bring the Opposites together and I changed my name to gray now uh the hostess of the party uh who uh an acquaintance I barely knew in

art school had also taken the LSD and by the next day she was the love of my life and so Allison and I I've been uh together married for Studio mates for 38 years within 24 hours of my prayer I had seen the light and met Divine Love In the Flesh my prayer had been [Applause] answered I got a job in a morg uh to study the anatomy uh I wanted to make art about Consciousness and the body is the box that Consciousness comes in so I knew I'd have to understand it I spent five

years studying there and preparing bodies for dissection and doing some dissection and it was kind of an underworld experience really uh in retrospect I look back and uh it really helped to Ori me uh to appreciating the preciousness of body and soul meditations on mortality was a performance that Alice and I did Sarah Lawrence actually she was in white grease paint I was in Black grease paint and uh meditating on a skeleton there at the conclusion of the performance we stepped outside of the circle of Duality and sensuously merged our pigment ments and became Gray

This is called the beast and I was dressed in military uh uniform and as people came into the room I stamped their hands with the number of the Beast um I was acknowledging what I felt to be the evil of the military industrial complex and acknowledging my complicity uh with a death machine as part of the installation there was a nuclear crucifixion painting about a 10-ft wide uh painting and felt like the same ignorance and brutality that would murder a saint would be responsible for the kind of global self-destruction Wasteland Mr and Mrs X were

on their way to dinner when they were surprised by a nuclear blast they arrived at a dinner table able in hell to Feast on money so that's what we did we ate the money and drank the blood and vomited it up onto the table some Arts kind of like shock therapy to activate us and and wake us up to it this piece called prayer wheel and Alison and I were in Gold grease paint and Tethered to a a skeleton and carrying a baby doll and uh we did 60 rotations around the prayer wheel chanting the

ommani p meong uh a living cross Alison and I were laying motionless and surrounded in a cross of apples and roses and staring up at the angel of death Allison uh nursed our daughter Zena in the heart of a goddess made of 5500 apples as I did 100 prostrations at the foot of the Goddess it was at Lincoln Center out of doors and uh after the performance we boxed up the apples and gave them to a shelter for homeless families this piece was heartnet and it was at the American Visionary Art Museum there's a world

map on the back and it was up for a year and we invited visitors to the museum to write a prayer for the Earth and about 10,000 prayers were hanging on the web there it was really a a beautiful outpouring from the community and a new vision of uh the world Allison and Zena and I participated in a uh or created a an event called World Spirit where we collaborated with uh musicians and and other performers and um really uh the attempt was to create an experience of unity and healing and there were about a

thousand people there in the Bay Area to experience that now the same motivation went into creating this series called The Sacred mirrors and the sacred mirrors started with a performance called Life Energy and Allison and I um met with a group of people and were um doing exercises to get in touch with our life energy and I made two charts for this uh performance one was a nervous system and the other was a kind of uh subtle energy map and uh Allison noticed uh how people were really enjoying this experience there in the gallery so

she suggested that I do an entire series based on this idea and uh that was the birth of the Sacred mirrors uh she also named The Sacred mirrors so uh you can see that there we have the framed uh finished example there and uh here's Allison and I doing the frames in our basement back in 1985 and we sculpted them and cast them 21 of them in our basement uh it provides a philosophical framework for the biological and technological evolution of humanity and ascending toward God Consciousness when you um experience the sacred mirrors you get

in touch with uh each one of these paintings and kind of meditate on it and feel the system inside so you feel the inner systems and then you contemplate um your various sympathies and prejudices I suppose an attempt to uh relate to the other person as a sacred mirror and then it gets into the subtle energetic uh realm and this is the psychic energy system where we have um the X-ray Anatomy fused with the acupuncture meridians and points the chakras the auras and all floating in a kind of pronic psychoenergetic soup there and uh this

spiritual Energy System shows the progressive dissolve ing of the um physical identity into the light body Universal Mind lattice this is an attempt to portray an experience that Allison and I had back on june3rd 1976 where he' taken a massive dose of LSD and entered into an uh infinite Vista of toroidal fountains and drains of light and it seemed like every being in the universe was one of these balls of light kind of like a a cell in the body of God it seemed like this was what was really real behind the veil of the

material world was all made of love the light was love and it connected us all the Divine archetypes Buddha Christ Sophia they sacred mirrors of our future Enlightenment after the Universal Mind lattice experience Allison and I just wanted to make art about sacred interconnectedness so here we have praying painting and it points to the light in the core of uh all wisdom traditions and here we see in the Halo uh the Expressions the prayers of seven different uh World wisdom Traditions kissing shows the infinite bonds of Love That unite us beyond the impermanence of the

flesh the Holy Family points to a hopeful future where there's a planetary civilization one world one people yes this is the holy Child grown up and it's really any one of us that carries World spirit in our hearts you feels in alignment with the heavens and wants to share our Revelations this is Gaia it was based on a vision that I had the day our daughter was born our world is in Peril and we have a decision Evolution or self-destruction planetary prayers with the with the Earth held us sacred in our minds we pray we

pray for the healing of the life web theologue the union of human and divine Consciousness weaving the fabric of space and time in which the self and its surroundings are embedded the artist Hand holds a spiritual tool of evolutionary vision and every creative act empowers every other creative act we can look at the magic Mythic rational integral and transcendental thrust of art history and see the entire Arc of The evolutionary uh Consciousness going on when we look back uh through our history you know the painter channels the creative Force into the artifact and this artifact

then becomes a battery to uh ready to zap a viewer into a new way of seeing the world and returning to the subject of mortality here we have the painting dying where an ectoplasmic wisp of the soul is leaving the body and going toward the white light and you can see now uh from my past this magic Mythic rational integral and transcendental Reflections on the same subject overs planetary Consciousness becomes Cosmic Consciousness through human consciousness one when we gaze into the eyes of the Beloved we're staring into a sacred mirror and we recognize our Oneness

the net of being was based on an iasa experience and uh it was a Vista of interconnected godheads each one of them a a node of uh an anthropocosmic node of uh of awareness and this is the god self um one node you know we're each one node of an infinitely interconnected self a networked self now an image can become part of the culture and uh the rock band tool used this image of the net of being on uh their Grammy award-winning album 10,000 days and they also used it in their stage sets and the

the image became a kind of icon of the interconnectedness between music and art there's our daughter Zena wearing a n ofbeing dress and you can see n ofbe tattoos all over the world now this Ken Wilbur's integral map of the four quadrants can help us understand how art evolves Consciousness in the upper left quadrant we have the origin of Art in the inner world of the artist or the individual and uh the upper right quadrant we have the uh individual making the artifact on the third quadrant in the lower right we have the systems of

integration of that artwork into to the world and then in the uh fourth quadrant in the lower left we have the inner world of the collective and that's our culture the Zeitgeist it's the interpretation of that artifact so once we understand things in a new way it creates a new world and then a person will have a vision within that new world and the grand round of art continues painting is our ministry and we go all over the world to festivals the festival culture wages peace in the world by creating a temporary zone of planetary

civilization based on Art music and love the chapel of sacred mirrors was uh based on a vision that Allison and I had back in 1985 and it finally came to uh fruition in 2004 we opened um our doors in New York City in Chelsea and uh for 5 years it was a Nexus for Visionary culture in Manhattan in 2009 we moved up to the Hudson Valley to build a temple and this is an experiment in art and um uh spirit and Community we've been collaborating with various Visionary artists there there's a a ground swell of

visionary artists all over the world and uh our collaborations together are really uh something to celebrate now this is our current project and it's called antheon antheon means a a place to discover the God within it'll be a sanctuary of visionary art at km Visionary art matters because the Visionary mystical experience is the most direct contact that we have with the Divine and all sacred art and religious Traditions are founded uh on this Mystic State now the best currently available technology for sharing the Mystic Visionary experience is a well well crafted artistic rendering by an

eyewitness creativity is our spiritual path at cm and anthon we want to be a Consciousness evolutionary accelerator for Spiritual friends to experience their unity and uh with the Human family and with the imperal life web it's being 3D modeled and it's going to be 3D printed a new way of making ornamental uh sculptural architecture the multi uh faces of God uh each have a world religion in their forehead so this is the many and the one this is the steeple head pointing us toward the one Cosmic creativity art is an echo of the creative force

that birth the galaxies and creativity is the way that the cosmos evolves and communicates with itself the great uplifting of humanity Beyond its self-destruction is the Redemptive mission of Art thank you w