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

hmmm 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 transcendental 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 aged 5 and we can see it's a time when the child is filled with magical thinking and here we have a power animal on the shoulder of the skeleton a happy gravestone a little coffin 5 years later at age 10 I did a another depiction of death but here in a more archetypal 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 old bones and everything more discipline and skill now at age 20 I had a dream where I saw my hair half shaved like this and so I decided to enact a performance ritual where I'd keep my hair half shaved for half a year and I did some performances that I was a billboard painter at the time and I placed this self-portrait in a dead Board and then I did a self portrait put it in an ad slot on the subway and rode underneath it was called private subway now I handed out leaflets with my face on it and invited people to call me for dinner or throw it down and step on my face and kind of a polarity situation now after six months I did a piece called brain sack and this was how I ended the six months so I ate a plate of spaghetti and then I cut my hair onto the plate I placed the brain onto the hair took the universal antidote syrup of ipecac and vomited the spaghetti up onto the brain I put it all in a sack and that was brain sack I was severely depressed if if you hadn't noticed and I prayed to a god I did not believe existed to show me a sign that there's a reason to go on living and within 24 hours I was invited to a party where I was given LSD for the first time and I closed my eyes and I was in a pearlescent spir aaalac 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 the hostess of the party who 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 Allyson and I've been 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 answered I got a job in a morgue to study the anatomy 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 they're preparing bodies for dissection and doing some dissection and it was kind of an underworld experience really in retrospect I look back and it really helped to orient me 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 greasepaint I was in black greasepaint and meditating on a skeleton there at the conclusion of the performance we stepped outside of the circle of duality and sensuously merged our pigments became grey this is called the beast and I was dressed in military uniform and as people came into the room I stamped their hands with the number of the beast I was acknowledging what I felt to be the evil of the military-industrial complex and acknowledging my complicity with a death machine as part of the installation there was a nuclear crucifixion painting about a ten-foot-wide painting and felt like the same ignorant sand 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 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 shocked therapy to activate us and and wake us up to it this piece called prayer wheel and Alison and I were in gold greasepaint and tethered to a skeleton and carrying a baby doll and we did 60 rotations around the prayer wheel chanting the Omani paid me home 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 Alison nursed our daughter Zena in the heart of a goddess made of 5500 apples as I did a hundred prostrations at the foot of the goddess it was at Lincoln Center out of doors and after the performance we boxed up the apples and gave them to his shelter for homeless families but this piece was Hartnett 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 was really a beautiful outpouring from the community and a new vision of the world Alison and Xena and I participated in a or created an event called world spirit where we collaborated with musicians and and other performers and really 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 met with a group of people and were doing exercises to get in touch with our life energy and I made two charts for this performance one was a nervous system and the other was a kind of subtle energy map and Allison noticed 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 that was the birth of the sacred mirrors she also named the sacred mirrors so you can see that there we have the framed finished example there and here's Alison knife doing the frames in our basement back in 1985 and we sculpted them and cast them 21 of them in our basement it provides a philosophical framework for the biological and technological evolution of humanity and ascending toward God consciousness when you experience the sacred mirrors you get in touch with 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 your various sympathies and prejudices I suppose an attempt to relate to the other person as a sacred mirror and then it gets into the subtle energetic realm and this is the psychic energy system where we have the x-ray Anatomy fused with the acupuncture meridians and points the chakra as the RS and all floating in a kind of pranic psychoenergetic soup there and this spiritual energy system shows the progressive dissolving of the physical identity into the light body universal mind lattice this is an attempt to portray an experience that Allison and I had back on June 3rd 1976 where he'd taken a massive dose of LSD and entered into an 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 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're 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 all wisdom traditions and here we see in the halo the expressions the prayers of seven different world wisdom traditions kissing shows the infinite bonds of love that unites 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 and feels in a line 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 as sacred in our minds we pray we pray for the healing of the life web Thea log the union of human and divine consciousness weaving the fabric of space and time in which the self and its surroundings are embedded the artists 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 consciousness going on when we look back through our history you know the painter channel's the creative force into the artifact and this artifact then becomes a battery - 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 from my past this magic mythic rational integral and transcendental reflections on the same subject / soul 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 ayahuasca experience and it was a vista of interconnected godheads each one of them a node of an anthropocosmic node of awareness and this is the god self one node you know where each one node of an infinitely interconnected self a network itself now an image can become part of the culture and the rockband tool use this image of the net of being on their Grammy award-winning album ten thousand 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 Xena wearing a net of being dress and you can see net of being 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 the upper right quadrant we have the individual making the artifact in the third quadrant and the lower right we have the systems of integration of that artwork into the world and then in the 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 based on a vision that Allison and I had back in 1985 and it finally came to fruition in 2004 we opened our doors in New York City in Chelsea and for five years it was a nexus for a 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 spirit and community we've been collaborating with various visionary artists there's a groundswell of visionary artists all over the world and our collaborations together are really something to celebrate now this is our current project and it's called an Theon an Theon means a place to discover the God within it will be a sanctuary of visionary Art at Kazem 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 on this mystic state now the best currently available technology for sharing the mystic visionary experience is a well crafted artistic rendering by an eyewitness creativity is our spiritual path at Kazem and an Theon we want to be a justise evolutionary accelerator for spiritual friends to experience their unity and with the human family and with the imperiled life web it's being 3d modeled and it's going to be 3d printed a new way of making ornamental sculptural architecture the multi phases of God 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 birthed 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

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,329,029

Rating: 4.9249434 out of 5

Keywords: tedx, ted x, ted talk, tedx talks, ted, tedx talk, ted talks

Id: 0_YJToyOp_4

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/dixienormous691]

Thanks! Gonna give this a listen at work

[u/SeanFloyd]

He is an artistic genius and I enjoyed his TED talk. I tried to get into his Joe Rogan podcasts and it wasn't particularly enjoyable to me.

[u/prollybored]

This was great, thank you for sharing.

[u/cdavis9789]

Also, please forgive the audience.