The Divine Light of God
I am about to impart to you an experience that I had
at an early age that I decided long ago I would never
share with anyone again. My reasons for deciding to
share it now are simple enough and misanthropic in nature.
Im just no longer concerned with misinterpretation.
I am no longer concerned with unjust accusation and
dealing with pretentious bigots and their superiority
complexes. Every time I shared this experience with
another human being (dogs love hearing about it, as
do ferrets) I was accused of being a mystic, accused
of lying, being a Christian, and surprisingly enough,
accused of being a bigot with a superiority complex.
This experience defined my adolescence and I decide now also, that since I am on the verge of 26 years and about to begin what society sees as my adult life, I should publicly express the culmination of this experience and thusly exorcise it.
For some years when I was in my teens my mind was a disaster. As all of my philosophical and theological ideals and idols fell one by one and without grace and under the fury of a lack of conviction, crumbled upon the hard black earth, So too did my grip of reality. There are of course two symbiotic realities for every person, that is objective reality and the perceived reality which is like a map of the universe in ones mind and composed of the ideas that the mind has created using objective input as its source of inspiration. For me the map was quickly becoming useless as new and reckless input was being registered. My entire psychic structure was beginning to crumble.
During this experience I decided for reasons that I will neglect to mention here, to move away from my family and to move out on my own. I was 18 years old. I moved into a boarding house: a little shack in Pompton Plains filled to the brim with alcoholics, drug addicts, rapists, and schizophrenics. I felt dejected. My love had moved a state away to go to college and I remained behind to try and get my diploma in night school. I saw no friends while there, my life consisted of getting up for work in a large and dark factory where I was generally left alone with my thoughts, coming home and getting changed, and then leaving for school where any brilliant mind of course retreats in repugnance of its surroundings and crawls within itself, once again alone with its thoughts. I spent my nights alone in my room, hungry, in the dark and alone with my thoughts, but for the sound of my neighbor brutalizing his ex wife, whom he lived with, against her will.
I lived in this condition for 9 months. I had almost no food. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches and Ramon noodles, all I could afford. At 6 foot 3 inches I dropped from a scrawny 185 pounds to a mere 145. I became physically fragile and would throw my back out of line with any heavy lifting. Headaches and nightmares plagued me.
Despite all of this I did not retreat to drugs or alcohol (which I wouldnt have been able to afford anyway, to be honest) which is key to this experience of deprivation What good is any experience if youre not there to experience it?). Whenever I closed my eyes I perceived with my minds eye a Wheel of Fire. It was not a visual object so much as a psychic projection of an idea. My mind was turning in on itself. Every thought I had was being systematically seized in infancy by its opposing twin and murdered, like the dragon that waits between the legs of the woman to devour her child. I could do nothing, think nothing, create nothing. My mind was being destroyed and every day when I awoke from my ever less complex and more abstract nightmares my mind was filled with less and less thought. I was decaying from the inside out , and then
The tower collapsed. The structure had been destroyed and there was nothing left to support the Temple. It crumbled, without apology, and gracelessly hit the earth, shattering in silence.
In the Tarot, I later discovered, the Tower is supposed to be destroyed by the mouth. A word destroys the tower, but that of course signifies decisive action, and it was not so with me. In the dream that I had that night I saw an eye, and it was surrounded by fire (no doubt inspired by my love of JRR Tolkein) and it hung in the sky like a second moon above a skyscraper. The building crumbled into dust, and a single phrase was muttered over the din of silence: Let no one stone stand upon another.
I later discovered as well a myth among mystics that if one is to repeat the name of Shiva as a mantra in meditation, she will awake, open her eye, and destroy the world perhaps I did have a will to destruction.
I awoke in peace. Something I had not felt for 4 long years. I was surrounded by light. Not physical light, a light in my mind. It had replaced the wheel of fire. This light was so bright, the purest white I had ever seen, but pale and silvery at the same time. In fact it was so bright because it was so pale pure is the only word to accurately describe it. There was no pain to look directly into it. With this light came the understanding of everything in the universe. All at once upon waking I understood that everything in the universe had its own place, that nature worked for the perfection of itself, and that humans as the only creatures through which nature had achieved a conscious awareness of herself, were destined to be stewards of that process, so ultimately nature works for the perfection of the human race as well. I understood the fly as of paramount importance in the scheme of the universe, and I understood the Atom bomb as the quintessential beginning and end of all. I knew that the divine marriage that is broken in the Atom bomb had also been broken in my mind. And my mind now saw not only singular thoughts and their opposite twins, but the essence of the marriage of the two, the Third Side. The entire universe was open to me, and nothing was beyond my understanding with but simple and relaxed concentration.
The effects of this process have been long lasting, the gifts that it bestowed upon me. But of course the peace could not last. The divine peace left in a matter of months, and I understand this to be because my mind of course began again to build up its complexities in the absence of love. In a year I was all at once human again, another process that occurred in a single moment. But thats another story. This blog is about the Divine Light.
That thing that religion currently defines as God, I have declared over and over, to be the simple relationship between the two irreconcilable original thoughts, namely that of something and nothing, 1 and 0, which is binary, and shows me the brilliance of our species and makes me understand that A.I. is in fact within our reach. But a mind cannot be created; it of course has to be evolved. We already have the key and just need to utilize it properly.
But I digress. I have decided that in everything I could do and all of the possibilities that are open to me, to be an artist, because that is what I was borne to be. And more accurately in craft, a painter.
The divine light is expressed in geometric proportions that are perfect, namely those of Phi. It is also seen in luminescent painting of superior craftsmanship, like the works of Dali; namely, for example, The Christ of St. John of the Cross, and also in the work that I am beginning to produce (if Dali wanted to paint like Vermeer de Delft and achieved instead of painting only like Dali, I am justified, I think, in wanting to paint like Dali and then one day perhaps I will paint like Christoph).
You can see how this work seems to emit its own light better in person. When I was fortunate enough to go and see the Dali retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art I at the first and foremost recognized the God Man as I was walking up the long marble stairs to the Romanesque building almost covered by a banner adorned by his infamous face and name. I wept for a moment, turning my face from the crowd climbing the staircase, praying to my most secret self to be remembered in the same fashion.
Then I entered and eventually came to the first handful of pieces on display; the first that I remember being Impressions of Africa. My first thought was I didnt know that Dali painted on glass.. But of course it wasnt glass. His work in person looks like glass painting lit from behind they seem to emit their own light! I was startled to say the least. I went to the exhibit being a greater fan of Francis Bacon, but overwhelmed by Dalis capability for eye aching detail and to give texture to surfaces (see the large horse in his Battle of Tetuan). I went to discover in person if he was in fact human and to try and discern how these marvels were achieved. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
I have to suppose in retrospect that we are so used to seeing bad painting that this simple achievement seems amazing. Painting with terrible use of color, that is issued directly onto the canvas from the tube with little or no intervention, as I have already proclaimed, as a monkey throws shit at tourists. Dali, on the other hand, was a master craftsman that word is important, craftsman! How many great artists are also great craftsmen?
I studied his work in depth, standing for far too long and lingering on each piece, on every detail. I almost had to rush at the end to make it through the exhibition before the museum closed for the day. But I began to understand some of how he did what he did. Aside from the facts that are obvious for making superior pictures, as OBJECTS of superior quality, like making certain that the surface is flat and uniform, there was a simple technique that he used, contrast. Colors contrast brilliantly, but more important to Dali (as you can glean from reading his 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship) was lights and darks. Wherever there is a shade, it is immediately followed by a highlight, and wherever there is a highlight it is immediately followed by shade. The product of this method, carried out from the broadest sense of overall composition to the most minute details, is to sense that the canvas emits its own light. And in a way it does, it is the Divine Light, the Light of the essence of God. Wherever there are opposites in marriage, there is light, life, and evolution. And the product of such unions is the essence of divinity.
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