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, age five, and we can see it’s a time when the child is filled up with magical thinking and here we have a power animal on the shoulder of the skeleton and a happy gravestone, a little coffin.
Five years later, at age 10, I did another depiction of death 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 the skeleton, but now from a more rational perspective and I was naming all the bones and everything — more disciplined in 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. Then I did some performances, 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 the ad-slot on the subway and rode underneath it. 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 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 you hadn’t noticed, and I prayed to a god I did not believe existed to show me a sign that there is 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 spiralic 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 re-birth canal, and I could see that grey 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 Grey.
Now, the hostess of the party, 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, Alison and I have 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 had to understand it. I spent 5 years studying there and preparing bodies for dissection, and doing some dissections, 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 the performance that Alison and I did, Sarah Laurence actually, she was in white grease paint, I was in black grease paint, 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 and became grey.
This is called The Beast and I was dressed in a 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 10 foot wide painting. It 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 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 art is kind of like shock therapy to activate us and wake us up to it.
This piece is called Prayer Wheel and Alison and I were in gold grease paint and tethered to a skeleton and carrying a baby-doll and we did 60 rotations around the Prayer Wheel chanting the Om Mani Padme Hum.
Living Cross: Alison and I were laying motionless and surrounded in the 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 5,500 apples as I did 100 prostrations at the foot of the Goddess. It was at Lincoln Center outdoors and after the performance we boxed up the apples and gave them to a shelter for homeless families.
This piece was Heart Net and it was at the American Visionary Art Museum. There is 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 10000 prayers were hanging on the web there.
It was really a beautiful outpouring from the community and a new vision of the world.
Alison and Zena and I participated in a — or created an event called World Spirit where we collaborated with musicians and other performers, and really the attempt was to create an experience of unity and healing, and there were about 1000 people there in the Bay Area to experience that.
Now, the same motivation went into creating the series called The Sacred Mirrors. And The Sacred Mirrors started with a performance called Life Energy and Alison and I met with a group of people, and we were doing exercises to get in touch with our life energy, and I made two charts for this performance: one was the nervous system, and the other was a kind of subtle energy map. And Alison 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 is Alison and I 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, and 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 chakras, the auras, and all floating in a kind of pranic psycho-energetic 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 Alison and I had back on June 3, 1976. We had 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 a body of God. It seemed like this was what was really real behind the veil of the material world. It was all made of love. The light was love and it connected us all.
The Divine Archetypes: Buddha, Christ, Sophia, they are sacred mirrors of our future enlightenment. After the Universal Mind Lattice experience, Alison 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 7 different 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 is 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 alignment with the heavens and wants to share our revelations.
This is Gaia who’s 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 Earth held as 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’s 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 channels the creative force into the artefact, and this artefact then becomes a battery, ready to zap a viewer into a new way of seeing the world.
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.
Oversoul: planetary consciousness becomes cosmic consciousness, through human consciousness.
One: when we gaze into the eyes of the beloved, we are 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 Godself, one node. Now, we are each one node of an infinitely interconnected self, a networked self. Now, an image can become part of the culture and the rock band Tool used this image of The Net of Being on their Grammy Award winning album 10 000 Days, and they also used it in their stage sets, and the image became a kind of icon of interconnectedness between music and art. Here is our daughter Zena wearing a Net of Being dress. And you can see Net of Being tattoos all over the world.
Now, Ken Wilber’s integral map of the 4 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 in the upper right quadrant, we have the individual making the artefact. On the third quadrant, on 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 artefact.
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 Alison 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 5 years it was a nexus for visionary culture in Manhattan. In 2009, we moved up to the Hudson Valley to build the temple and this is an experiment in art and spirit and community. We’ve been collaborating with various visionary artists. There is 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 Entheon. Entheon means a place to discover the God within. It will be a sanctuary of visionary art at CoSM. Visionary art matters because the visionary mystical experience is the most direct contact 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 eye witness. Creativity is our spiritual path at CoSM. At Entheon, we want to be a consciousness evolutionary accelerator for spiritual friends to experience their unity, and with the human family, and with the impearled life web. It’s being 3D-modeled, and it is going to be 3D-printed, a new way of making ornamental sculptural architecture. The multi faces 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. 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.
