James K-M: Paintings

Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can’t make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It’s all THIS!” He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. “And not only that but we both understand that I couldn’t have time to explain why I know and you know God exists.
- On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac, 2007, Viking, New York, pg. 221

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Flaubert said that a work of art should be as straightforward as a cow, that is to say, the artist must act as if he is so stupid that he doesn’t understand the challenge of beauty.
~ The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle, (quote from Paul Goesch, 1920), edited and translated by Iain Boyd Whyte, the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, pg. 114

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Man should maintain a constant, nonstop dialogue with his Creator. And for that kind of dialogue you don’t need even to be verbal, let alone grammatical.
- Who Was Marshall McLuhan?, Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1994, Comprehensivist Publications, Toronto, pg. 141

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Theologians may quarrel with what must appear a murky disregard of the distinctions between mystic, metaphysical, spiritual, religious, Gnostic, transcendence, immanence. These slippery words point to experiences beyond language.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 269

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The uniting of the opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.
- 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck, 2006, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, pg. 346

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In the unresolved, our unfolding continues in our imaginations and therefore in our souls, grappling up from bare-bone facts.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 250

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(Harold Innis) changed his procedure from working with a “point of view” to that of the generating of insights by the method of “interface,” as it is named in chemistry. “Interface” refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of “symbolism” (Greek “symballein” – to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse. In writing, the tendency is to isolate an aspect of some matter and to direct steady attention upon that aspect. In dialogue there is an equally natural interplay of multiple aspects of any matter. This interplay of aspects can generate insights or discovery. By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction. An insight is a contact with the life of forms.
- From Media and Cultural Change, Marshall McLuhan’s introduction to the 1964 edition of The Bias of Communication by Harold Innis

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One of the best-known variants of the axis mundi is the caduceus, formed by two snakes wrapped around an axis. Since the most ancient times, one finds this symbol connected to the art of healing, from India to the Mediterranean. The Taoists of China represent the caduceus with the yin-yang, which symbolizes the coiling of two serpentine and complimentary forms into a single androgynous vital principle.*
- The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby, 1998, Tarcher/Penguin, New York, pg. 95

*Regarding the caduceus, Chevalier and Gheerbrandt (1982) write “The serpent has a doubly symbolic aspect: one is beneficial, the other evil, of which the caduceus represents, as it were, the antagonism and equilibrium; this equilibrium and polarity are above all those of the cosmic currents, which are figured more generally by the double spiral”; in Buddhist esotericism, for example, “the caduceus’s staff corresponds to the axis of the world and the serpents of the Kundalini,” the cosmic energy inside every being (pp.153-155). … According to Bayard (1987), the two serpents of the caduceus, the yin-yang of the T`ai Chi, and the swastika of the Hindus all symbolize “a cosmic force, with opposed directions of rotation” (pg. 134)

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Gifted artists who push their explorations to the extreme have a way of bumping up against God at some point or other. This happened to the innovative jazz saxophonist John Coltrane in 1957. Addicted to heroin and alcohol, booted out of the Miles Davis band for reporting to work stoned too often, Coltrane had what he later called a ‘spiritual awakening.’ He kicked his addictions and in 1965, released the album A Love Supreme, a four part jazz suite in which he tried to give musical expression to the vision he’d experienced eight years earlier.
- Review by Edward O’Connor of A Love Supreme by Kent Nussey, in The Globe and Mail Book Review, August 9, 2003

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[Untitled]
There is only one way to save yourself: sacrifice your reputation.
I met a man the other day claiming to be an aviator; I’ve since learned that he was an elevator attendant.
Littérature 2nd series, no. 10 (Paris, 1 May 1923), p. 13.
- Francis Picabia is an Idiot in Anti-Dada, 1921-1924, Francis Picabia, from I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, MIT Press, 2007, pg. 302

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What is beautiful? Until now we have built as if the earth were doomed to die tomorrow – the ice-death. An anti-spirit has gnawed every child of God right down to the skeleton of abstract style.
~ The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle, (quote from Hermann Finsterlin, 1920), edited and translated by Iain Boyd Whyte, the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, pg. 85

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Beauty, like loving, sometimes seems a kind of crisis. It brings us to the crossroads and thresholds of the perpetual choosing. Immediacy thus impels us.
The recognition of beauty is part of the soul’s flow.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 215

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Goldy says, “I have drawn Mommy Bear in reverse. I forgot when I was drawing her that if it is to be printed directly from my drawing, it requires an original mirror-image master. But I am going to leave her that way because it’s well to remind everyone at the outset that we can only get from here to there by a series of errors – errors forwardly to the right, then a correcting forwardly error to the left, each time reducing error but never eliminating it. This is what generates waves; this is what generates the experience life.”
- TETRASCROLL, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale, by Buckminster Fuller, St. Martin’s Press, 1975, pg. 4

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Wilde’s (1854-1900) last days were grim. An ear infection, believed to be the result of syphilis, grew worse and worse; an operation failed to clear it up, and Wilde seems to have died from meningitis. He was understandably preoccupied with death during his final period, and he wrote to Frank Harris, “The Morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc bed there.” (Richard) Ellman notes that Wilde really did visit the Paris morgue.
Some weeks after his ear operation, he got up and went with some difficulty to a café, where he drank absinthe before walking slowly back, and rallied enough to produce his famous statement (for a woman named Claire de Pratz) that, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
- The Book of Absinthe, A Cultural History, by Phil Baker, Grove Press, New York, 2001, pg. 32

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I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content…I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does…You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film.
- Stanley Kubrick on his film 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Up until his death from a brain tumor in April 2000, (Terrence) McKenna was the leading prophet and proselytizer, the nonstop pontificator, for the contemporary psychedelic movement. … Inspired by psychedelic visions, McKenna studied accelerating novelty and the I Ching and predicted an as-of-yet unimaginable summation in the year 2012. He later found that the Mayan calendar prophesies the end of the present historical era and the beginning of a new cycle in 2012, at the moment when our sun comes into momentary alignment with the galactic center. McKenna theorized that the linear structure of time could be a temporary illusion, and that time might actually be a wave form, fractal, or spiral. He used the “King Wen” sequence of the I Ching to plot time as a wave form representing increasing complexity or the “ingression of novelty’ into human consciousness. He speculated that in the last years leading up to the crest and collapse of this wave, we might see a speeded-up replay of all of human history as cartoon farce. By this logic, the destruction of the World Trade Center might be in “resonance” with the Tower of Babel, while the global military campaign of the United States might resonate with the rapid expansion and collapse of the Roman Empire or the Crusades. He proposed that the current simultaneous processes of technological advance and global destruction might be something like a chrysalis stage, in which humanity was incubating technology, awaiting a dimensional shift, or preparing the way for an evolution of consciousness.
- Breaking Open the Head, a Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck, 2002, Broadway Books, New York, pg. 231-232

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Literate man, once having accepted an analytic technology of fragmentation, is not nearly so accessible to cosmic patterns as tribal man. He prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. He becomes less inclined to accept his body as a model of the universe, or to see his house – or any other of the media of communication, for that matter – as a ritual extension of his body. Once men have adopted the visual dynamic of the phonetic alphabet, they begin to lose the tribal man’s obsession with cosmic order and ritual as recurrent in the physical organs and their social extension. Indifference to the cosmic, however, fosters intense concentration on minute segments and specialist tasks, which is the unique strength of Western man. For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
- Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan, The MIT Press, (1964) 1994, pg. 124

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As scientist Sheldon H. Geller explains, “scientific research cannot prove anything…it disproves error.” By contrast, the perceptive artist learns how to repeat and magnify his errors in order to create his own distinctive style for sharing new truth.
- ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment, Barrington Nevitt, 1985, pg. 77

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“Abstract art is the ultimate democracy,” Melamid proclaims to a crowd of critics at a press preview. “That’s what it’s about. It’s taking painting from the academy to the people. Certainly my IQ is higher than an elephant’s, but how much of my IQ do I use when I paint? It’s not like Jackson Pollock was a mathematician or something, so maybe it’s not so crazy to see that elephants and humans can compete in this arena. That’s not to take away from Pollock’s achievement, but not all human activities need to be at the highest possible levels of intelligence to be valid.”
- Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid at the Venice Biennale, 1999, quoted in When Elephants Paint, 2000, pg. 94

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Our thinking tends to circle around established conventions whose basis is forgotten or obscure. Nietzsche proposed that the attainment of knowledge requires a ‘solid, granite foundation of ignorance’ for its unfolding: ‘the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but – as its refinement!’
- 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck, 2006, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, pg. 3

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The Messiah alone stands at the crossroads where the old values are no longer binding, and he alone must tread the weary path through the world of evil which is the mark of his mission. His actions are not examples to be followed; on the contrary, it is of their nature to give offense. … The true acts of Redemption are at the same time those which cause the greatest scandal.
- Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem, 1946, Schocken Books, New York, pg. 314

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The stereotype of the bohemians as jolly fornicators, roisterers and barflies is superficial because it completely ignores the significance of Excess. If Bohemia was a journey as well as a destination, it was a journey in the dark to a land of danger as well as pleasure. It promised a path along the edge of a precipice, and it was impossible to know in advance whether that path led to revelation or madness, triumph or oblivion. The point of Excess was ultimately not self-gratification, but self-discovery, or sometimes self-destruction, as Baudelaire expressed it, ‘a taste for the infinite.’ The deadly sin of Bohemia was not Lust or Gluttony, but Hubris – the pride of Daedalus, who courted death by daring to fly.
- Bohemians, The Glamorous Outcasts, Elizabeth Wilson, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2000, pg. 195

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Walk through the door marked ‘Bohemian’ and whatever is beyond makes the same set of unequivocal statements:
> I do not value what money can buy.
> If I choose decorations and colours, it is for their beauty, not because they flatter my social status.
> My environment reflects the life I’ve led, the places I’ve visited and the people I’ve loved.
> I’m not afraid of being thought tasteless, because I make my own taste.
- Among the Bohemians, Experiments in Living, Virginia Nicholson, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY, 2002, pg. 103

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… Infinity terrifies us, Pascal said. So we prefer homes, structures, institutions, security, ceremonies that explain, anything that contains. Limitation becomes equated with duty. And limitation could be exalted over the extraterritorial abyss, where everything crosses and mingles.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 105

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If all those leaps of attention, flexings of eye muscles, fluctuations of the psyche, if all the effort it takes for a man just to hold himself upright within the flow of traffic on a busy street could be measured, he thought – as he toyed with calculating the incalculable – the grand total would surely dwarf the energy needed by Atlas to hold up the world, and one could then estimate the enormous undertaking it is nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all. At the moment, the man without qualities was just such a person.
- The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1880-1942), 1995, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, pg. 7 (first published in German in 1952 and 1978.)

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In all the cities of the world, it is the same. The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and backbreaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.
- Notes et Contre Notes, Eugene Ionesco, pg. 129

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There are messages whose codes seem sometimes to be without a key, streaming away from our grasp. Yet through these apparently haphazard infusions, we apprehend the mystery thrall. It is this pulse that moves us ever deeper into those interpenetrating moments where intimations of new mythologies begin.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 178-9

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The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external) things become more and more automatic, and we observe that our vital attention fastens more and more on internal things. The life of the truly modern man is neither purely materialist nor purely emotional. It manifests itself rather as a more autonomous life of the human mind becoming conscious of itself. Modern man – although a unity of body, mind, and soul – exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract. It is the same with art. Art will become the product of another duality in man: the product of a cultivated externality and of an inwardness deepened and more conscious. As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.
- Natural Reality and Abstract Reality, Piet Mondrian, 1919

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I am convinced that every powerful artist (read: astral power man) can be a Cubist one moment, an Expressionist a minute later, and an Impressionist within the hour – and a Dadaist and so on. There is no one who would want to, or even could, do justice to everything that fills his universal soul so expansively within the limits of any one scheme (regardless of whether it -ists or -ismses).
~ The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle, (quote from Wenzel Hablik, July 28, 1920), edited and translated by Iain Boyd Whyte, the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, pg. 129

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The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist’s problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist deconstruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, not the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery – of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.
- The Ideographic Picture, Barnett Newman, New York, Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1947. Reprinted in Theories of Modern Art, Herschell B. Chipp, University of California Press, 1968, pg. 550

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What would a calling of first principles mean, even if this must be left unspoken, a trace to be intuited?
I suggest this: … to chart ourselves back into the enwombing outlines of the source that encompasses–and compasses–our minds and souls.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 226

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Kabbalah has constantly changed the forms in which it expresses a single all-embracing conception of reality; the intention is that no picture of existence shall become a fixed image that might be considered the ultimate. Alas, orthodoxy has never understood this principle and often takes authority from redundant formulations.
~ Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge, Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985, pg. 11

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Plotinus, whose Neoplatonic system deeply influenced the mystical trends in the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, remarked: “Numbers exist before the objects described by them. The variety of sense objects merely recalls to the soul the notion of number.”
~ The Mystery of Numbers, Annemarie Schimmel, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pg. 16

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We, human beings, (are) loved by all the unknown swarms and manifold phalanxes of sentient entities beyond the realm of the sensible, for our own creative efforts, no matter how mass-produced, ill-conceived, or half-formed they may be. We are loved for our creativity, which is a kind of infinite potential.
- Breaking Open the Head, a Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck, 2002, Broadway Books, New York, pg. 294

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I’m not making value judgements. This would seem to many people a very good thing, and it may well be a good thing. I’m simply specifying the pattern or the form that occurs when you have instant speed of electric information. You cannot have a monopoly of knowledge such as most learned people had a few years ago; you cannot have it under electric conditions. This applies to all professional life as well as to private life.
Ivan Illich has a book called Deschooling Society, in which he argues that, since we now live in a world where the information and the answers are all outside the school room, let us close the schools. Why spend the child’s time inside the school giving him answers that already exist outside? It’s a good question, but his suggestion to close the schools is somewhat unnecessary because instead of putting the answers inside the school, it is now possible to put the questions inside.
- From the chapter Living at the Speed of Light, Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Me, Lectures and Essays, 2003, pg 238

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A just society would be one that acknowledges that mind, or noûs, exists primarily in the person. Society, culture, language, race, history, political institutions, religions, must not dominate. It is the pneuma, the fire that should be allowed to rise, falling upwards, towards its source.
The stoics thought pneuma was “the vital breath.” It was “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” Dylan Thomas wrote in his poem of the same name. Pneuma, both fire and breath, is what creates the deep well in personhood.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 53

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There is a language of forms and symbols. When one does not know this the visions to him make no meaning, and there cannot be made a standard of this language. Yet spiritual vision is not necessarily symbolical, sometimes it is as clear as it manifests on the surface.
- The Message In Our Time: the life and teaching of the Sufi Master Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan, Pir Vilayat Inayat-Khan, 1978, Harper and Row, San Francisco, pg. 214

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Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed crosslegged and looked straight at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events; Neal apologized but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine; bringing up illustrations.
- On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac, 2007, Viking. Pg. 150

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Sometimes the higher self comes upon us, and we speak of justice, or of love, truly. We may feel first principles, and then speak of a Universal Charter that addresses opportunity, the right to participate, the right to develop a personality, a common origin, the dynamism of energies that enlighten but don’t impose. Then the higher self leaves, and we are left wrecked, or receptive, perhaps confused, perhaps wiser–nevertheless remembering–and we go on, day by day, doing what we must, one side of ourselves waiting for the opening to come again.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 262

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“Now man that alto man last night had IT–he held it once he found–I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.” I wanted to know what “IT” meant. “Ah well” laughed Neal “now you’re asking me im-pon-de-rables – -ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, he lines up his ideas, people yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he GETS IT–everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT—” Neal could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.
- On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac, 2007, Viking. Pg. 304

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Protect yourself better
protect yourself wanderer
with the road that is walking too.
~ The Sonnets to Orpheus, Appendix (Fragments), Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1985, pg. 155

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As the Dalai Lama told us, the goal is clarity. The noise coming out of the sense organs has to be quieted, including the powerful sexual impulses. In the puritanical religions, this is done through suppression, denial, hatred of the body. As D.H. Lawrence defined it memorably, religion is bad sex. The daring of Buddhist tantra is to work with the energy, rather than suppressing, denying, or opposing it.
- The Jew in the Lotus, Roger Kamenetz, 1995, Harper Collins, New York, pg. 204

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This then is the constituent beyond the soul, which forms later out of the fabric of light, since metaphysically sound is prior to light.
The Sound, or Divine Music of the Abstract, projected from itself Light; and this Light, responsive and yet expressive, broke again into the rays that form Arwah, the spiritual heaven of souls. And the souls, each responsive and yet in itself expressive, bringing forth and partaking of the various attributes of the Abstract, grouping them together in manifold forms and variations, created this world, Sifat, the expression of the Absolute.
- The Message In Our Time: the life and teaching of the Sufi Master Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan, Pir Vilayat Inayat-Khan, 1978, Harper and Row, San Francisco, pg. 198

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Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
- Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

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A wound is also a signature of the opening.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 259

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Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating: “Now you just dig them in front…They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there…and all the time they’ll get there anyway you see. But they need to worry, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, a false really false expression of concern and even dignity and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that TOO worries them NO End.
- On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac, 2007, Viking, pg. 306-7

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For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the “natural” program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness. Everybody becomes a voluntary participant in creating diversity without loss of identity. Man is the content of the environment he creates, whether of “hardware” or “software,” whether of consciousness or unconsciousness. There is therefore no technical alternative to “humanism,” even though for many this would include the divine grace of the superhuman.
- Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, pg. 293

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The significance of play … is by no means defined or exhausted by calling it ‘not earnest,’ or ‘not serious.’ Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.
- Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga, Beacon Press, 1971

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Murshidship and mureedship is a journeying of two persons, one who knows the path, the other a stranger taken through the mist by the Murshid until they arrive at a stage where neither Murshid is a Murshid nor mureed is a mureed, though the happy memory of the journey through the path remains in the consciousness of the grateful mureed.
For the mystical teacher is not the player of the instrument; he is the tuner. When he has tuned it, he gives into the hands of the Player whose instrument it is to play.
- The Message In Our Time: the life and teaching of the Sufi Master Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan, Pir Vilayat Inayat-Khan, 1978, Harper and Row, San Francisco, pg. 380

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The next step on the path is often to become aware that the person instructing one is not on his own, but part of a link in an ancient chain of teaching. Many academic scholars of Kabbalah find this phenomenon disconcerting, because there is little or no literal evidence of the inner workings and organization of the living tradition; but this is exactly what is meant by an oral line.
~ Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge, Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985, pg. 20

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The cult of art-as-art centers around art as a magic, art as a second, or double, or super nature, around art’s immolations and unearthlinesses, around art’s timelessness, uselessness, and meaninglessness.
- [The Cult of Art], undated in Art As Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, the University of California Press, 1991, pg. 186

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Royalty is an inappropriate geometry for our restlessness, for the struggling and questioning subjectivity that is the heart of enlarging mind, in our planetary and cosmic affair.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 198

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Art has but two dimensions: height and width; the third dimension is movement — life — represented by the evolution of art: it is the arm of the cameraman shooting the film in the cinema. This evolution is the only thing that should interest us.
- Francis Picabia is an Idiot in Anti-Dada, 1921-1924, Francis Picabia, from I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, MIT Press, 2007, pg. 280

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Below Daat the Flash passes to the Pillar of Mercy (Expansion) and back to the Pillar of Severity (Contraction), and a pair of Sefirot are defined which govern the level of emotion as distinct from supernal intellect. The Atribute of active or inner emotion is Hesed, Mercy; that of passive or outer emotion is Gevurah, Justice. Both Sefirot have other Hebrew names and other translated equivalents, but all are inadequate to explain the Attributes; those used here merely approximate to the active and passive Divine principles involved. In ourselves these qualities appear in complementary tendencies towards love, tolerance and generosity on the one hand (Hesed) and discipline, rigour and discrimination on the other (Gevurah). At this, the emotional level, the operation of opposing Sefirotic principles, and the dangers of going too far in one direction or the other, become part of everyday experience: Justice and Mercy underlie every human transaction, from a summit conference to the choice of a birthday present.
~ Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge, Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985, pgs. 6-7

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My personal program, which you will long since have inferred from my works, is not to seek the new form in the enanthema and exanthema of primitive basic forms, in the alien-bodied eruptions of primary expressions of form, nor in the mass-attraction of the gigantically monumental, nor in the fascinating monotony of formal parellelism, but in the mutated and complex development of the great bodies themselves, in the isolated whole, in the fixation of organic movement, which obeys only the most basic and primitive laws of expression. Such structures and formations are unlimited and recognizable, as they are born only of the most purest and most intensive intuition.
~ The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle, (quote from Hermann Finsterlin, 1920), edited and translated by Iain Boyd Whyte, the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, pg. 47

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A small temple in a garden is consecrated to the Noumenon beyond phenomena.
~Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship Publishers, Los Angeles, 1972, pg. 79

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Churches are okay if you got to belong to something to feel safe, but artists don’t need that … they’re part of the universal energy in their creating. Look — existance is. We’re part of all like everything else, we’re on our own, goddamit!
~ Jackson Pollock in 1952 quoted in An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, Roger Lipsey, Shambhala Publications, Boston, Massachussets, 1988, pg. 306

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Art is innate in the artist, like an instinct that seizes and makes a tool out of the human being. The thing in the final analysis that wills something in him is not he, the personal man, but the aim of the art.
~ Carl Jung

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All mystery is hidden in name. The knowledge of everything rests on first knowing its name, and knowledge is not complete which is devoid of name. Mystery depends upon knowledge — we cannot master a thing of which we have no knowledge. All blessings and benefits derived from earth or heaven are gained by mastery, which depends upon knowledge, knowledge depending upon name. A person without the knowledge of the name of a thing is ignorant, and the one who is ignorant is powerless, for one has no hold over any thing of which one has no knowledge.
~ The Mysticism of Sound, Inayat Khan, A Mystic Ocean Book/Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, B.C., 2004 (1923), pg. 38

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My guru determined by various calculations that the last Kali Yuga or Iron Age, of the Ascending Arc, started about A.D. 500. The Iron Age, 1200 years in duration, is a span of materialism; it ended about A.D. 1700. That year ushered in Dwapara Yuga, a 2400-year period of electrical and atomic-energy developments: the age of telegraphy, radio, airplanes, and other space-annihilators.
The 3600-year period of Treta Yuga will start in A.D. 4100; the age will be marked by common knowledge of telepathic communications and other time-annihilators. During the 4800 years of Satya Yuga, final age in an Ascending Arc, the intelligence of man will be highly developed; he will work in harmony with the divine plan.
A Descending Arc of 12,000 years, starting with a Descending Golden Age of 4800 years, then begins for the world (in A.D. 12,500); man gradually sinks into ignorance. These cycles are the eternal rounds of maya, the contrasts and relativities of the phenomenal universe. Men, one by one, escape from creation’s prison of duality as they awaken to consciousness of their inseverable divine unity with the Creator.
~ Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship Publishers, Los Angeles, California, 1975 (1946), pgs. 193-4

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In creativity, outer and inner reality will always be organized together by the same indivisible process. The artist, too, has to face chaos in his work before unconscious scanning brings about the integration of his work as well as of his own personality. My point will be that unconscious scanning makes use of undifferentiated modes of vision that to normal awareness would seem chaotic. Hence comes the impression that the primary process merely produces chaotic phantasy material that has to be ordered and shaped by the ego’s secondary processes. On the contrary, the primary process is a precision instrument for creative scanning that is far superior to discursive reason and logic.
~ The Hidden Order of Art, Anton Ehrenzweig, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971, pg. 5

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Things taken together are wholes and not wholes, something is being brought together and brought apart, which is in tune and out of tune; out of all things there comes a unity, and out of a unity all things.
~ Heraclitus quoted in Kirk, G.S. – Raven, J.E. – Schofield, M.: The Presocratic Philosophers, A Critical History with a selection of texts, Cambridge University Press, 1995, second edition

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The New, my friends, is not a matter of
letting machines force out our handiwork.
Don’t be confused by change; soon those who have
praised the “New” will realize their mistake.
~ The Sonnets to Orpheus, Appendix (II), Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1985, pg. 135

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Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle just now I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental .… Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. There must be no art as content of some other set of skills or interest .… I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs. They made of the world a perception Lab .… The mode of great Art. The environment as ultimate artefact.
~ Letter from Marshall McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, October 4, 1964

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… interconnections are established everywhere, and where a darkness remains, it is the kind of darkness that requires not clarification but surrender.
~ To Clara, Rilke, April 23, 1923

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The pilgrim at the end of the day returns to himself and finds this–his face–is what has been emerging all along.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 230

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Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.
~ e.e. cummings

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What is being negotiated is the relationship between fiction and truth, where truth is understood by Kerouac to mean, “the way consciousness really digs everything that happens.”
~ Fast This Time, by Howard Cunnell, in the introduction to On the Road: the Original Scroll, Jack Kerouac, 2007, Viking, pg. 5

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This was the trick, [Allen Ginsberg] now figured, to distill visionary experience into a poem and convey it, through a kind of supernatural mental transmission, to the reader. Poetry might set off similar explosions in people’s heads. Take away the “sawdust of reason” and the poem becomes a machine whereby the juxtaposition of real and unreal images, the telescoping of time, combines with the suggestion of magical emotions to release the fleeting “archangel of soul.”
~ A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, Deborah Baker, the Penguin Group, New York, N.Y., 2008, pg. 36

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The sound of a cat lapping milk is heard over a loudspeaker all across Zurich.
~ Clairvoyant: the imagined life of Lucia Joyce, Alison Leslie Gold, Hyperion, New York, N.Y., 1992, pg.21

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Human Beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
~ Tom Robbins

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The Greek word Symbolon means the halves of a broken piece of pottery. One part of the physical object rests in the physical world, the other part in the invisible. Symbolic moments are those events when we are conscious that life has taken on powerful metaphoric vibrations. Life feels heightened. We sense that we are being struck open, in our hearts, or drawn upwards, away from the cracked world. Every meeting of the vertical and horizontal planes is a layering of realms, in the ritual crux. These are the experiences that seem to move us beyond matter, into a spiritual realm.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 162-3

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There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
~ The Blue Octavio Notebooks, Franz Kafka, 1918

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Your spirit and the fire contained within you are drawn by this nature upward. But they comply with the world’s designs and submit to being mingled here below.

Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?
~ Marcus Aurelius

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… Identity, a task, not a given. At the columned entrances of the Mysteries at Eleusis, the initiate found that the descent, the journey, the quest, and the ascent, must take all of the time in this life, and whatever there was to come.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 104

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The Pythagoreans went so far as to divide everything in the universe into two categories: the odd numbers belong to the right side. which is associated with the limited, the masculine, the resting, the straight, with light and goodness, and, in terms of geometry, with the square, while the even numbers belong to the sphere of the infinite, the unlimited (as they are infinitely divisible), the manifold, the left side, the female, the moving, the crooked, darkness, evil, and, in geometrical terms, the rectangle.
~ The Mystery of Numbers, Annemarie Schimmel, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pg. 13

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EDELSHTEIN: Chaim, teach me to be a drunk!
VOROVSKY: First you need to be crazy.
EDELSHTEIN: Teach me to go crazy!
VOROVSKY: First you need to fail.
EDELSHTEIN: I’ve failed, I’m schooled in failure, I’m a master of failure!
VOROVSKY: Go back and study some more.
Envy, or, Yiddish in America, from Collected Stories, Cynthia Ozick, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, pg. 50

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Some visionaries will themselves into receptivity to vertical information. Open the borders, open the senses. Let the other side infiltrate, sideswipe, dislocate, permeate, influence, assist, amaze. Admit it like music. But can one handle the infusions of Spirit? Will it utterly destroy the old foundations? One may invite visionary experience, and then regret it. Can one absorb the flow of imagination, spiritual knowledge without being wounded? Receptivity takes courage. One must strive to find calm. It takes a long time to learn how to rise up and absorb the sun.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 123

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This hieroglyphic nature of images can be confusing for observers. The cruxes of the literal plane (the horizon of physical experiences) and the symbolic plane (the whirlwind of possible meanings) defy the nihilism of consumerism, the parodic self-references of pop culture, academic deconstructions which attempt to keep interpretation only on the social and political level, and the homilies of preachers who (at all costs) want to preserve their definition of community.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 166

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Yet for an image to become iconic, no longer a mere sense impression–for it to become a representation of depth–it must enter into the intricate matrix of projection and identification, memory and desire. It has to possess tracks of the past; it has to catch the elusive present, and carry some prophetic inklings of the shape of things to come.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 182

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We live again with apparitions, and they are speaking. The apparitions and images are back, rebellious mists, deriding the emphasis we put on the merely material. Every day, and night, our senses are being massaged, and aroused. We know the signs of this by our perpetual dissatisfaction, and our easy enchantments.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 253

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