A Birth Dream Frees The World Soul With Visionary Art

Birth Dream by Johfra

A full exhibition of Johfra's monumental career of works can be found on Visionary Revue, a publication by Laurence Caruana devoted to the history and future of Visionary Art. The most well-known Visionary Artist in America is Alex Grey. His artworks spurred on my fascination with this new wellspring of artistic creativity. A break from surrealism, visionary artists utilize all triggers available to the human body and soul, toward transcendent & transpersonal spiritual unity. The Birth Dream ignites the power of noetic states to trigger the breath of novelty into the mind of the seer. Completed in 1945, this painting marked the very beginning of Johfra's career. He is today known as the principle pioneer of painting techniques that today are the impetus for creative gatherings of all kinds, celebrating the breadth of wonder that the Visionary World Soul inspires in and through us all.  

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I hid in triumphant bedrooms of young fear and coarse humor, watching my love’s eager tongue, to lick night’s end with a tearful silent dimming of conscience and the earth’s bounteous tune of motion, she stopped and looked at the drug-stung gang of princely wealth. 

The Mahant Offers Child Birth Medicine to Elokeshi by Unknown

They passed around a newly synthesized batch of 2C-I, a wrongly attributed artificial form of mescaline, and into the innocent palm of my blue-pill eating love. She sang in the company of the greedy minds that drank Smiles in a worshipful torrent of a sleep-lust rush, yet I knocked the beady teardrop-shaped tablets from her hand and mind in an instant of tough self-worth. 

A Portrait of Frankie Howerd by StuartHampton

I drew her character near, and as dawn waded in the shore-sent horizon, I pointed outward, to an island off the lakebed shore, where the upstairs cottage-lights roamed out onto the moonlit waters, faintly giving way to the sun’s scintillating swarm of heat and meaning. We walked, silent as the ether out onto shore, and for the first time, I saw her swim. 

Shore Landscape by Fanny Churberg

I witnessed her smooth body glean the uncanny movements of a dolphin’s glowing visage as her inward celebration of life met with my dusty ruminations on the natural way, the right road home, without minding the needful eyes of that ghastly rush that now lay strewn over the colonial walls of a midsummer cottage, alone in the wilderness of one natural hallucination. 

Painting of Sohni Mahiwal by Unknown

The samsaric fish swam with the mermaid intelligence of true human pride, and I saw her, she knew as I, that the metaphysical dome of the potent seed can dry out the natural host of our musing otherness already freed by the practice of our unique and artful sanity. 

_________

"with true knowledge of her leaving,

the door closes behind you twice,

            without word,

            in absolute Love,

a vacuous throat

                        shaped by the corridors walked

and now stared through

            sitting in the awesome lesson of the moment’s own home,

                        a dream over 10 years,

                           that this cave is positioned to open towards a passage,

                                                one’s only point of departure

            and perceptual environment is no more or less than passage,

                                                whether through the mixed celebration

of alcohol and music

in Iquitos jungle vibrancy

on the neon drug night

of America’s wandering life"

excerpt from "Blakean Consciousness on a Rainy Day"

Kieran of Ireland and the Sainthood of Dream History

Detail of a stained glass window depicting Saint Kieran
(St. Brendan's Church, Ireland - Photography by Andreas F. Borchert)

"Kieran of Saighir was the first saint born in Ireland...Before she conceived Kieran in her womb his mother had a dream: as it were a star that fell into her mouth; which dream she related to the magicians and to the knowledgeable ones of the time, and they said to her: “thou wilt bear a son whose fame and whose virtues shall to the world’s latter end be great [i.e. notorious].” Afterwards that holy son Kieran was born..." Life of S. Kieran of Saighir. at Celtic Literature Collective

Strangely familiar to the origin stories for Buddha, I first read about this aspect of Irish history in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology. Reflecting, I see similarities to Mexico's Virgin de Guadalupe, who was seen in a vision (see also my post: The Imperial Ethereality of the Christian Cross), to incite the mask of christian history over the indigenous face. I wonder, was the story more brutal, covered up by fables of dream and superstition, to align with dominant perspectives on native irrationality.

See related posts: The Mother of Buddha Had A Dream & To Dream Is To Conceive An Other

______

In the penthouse suite version of my tiny apartment, I cavort around the fine art, baby grand piano, clear glass tables and impeccable wood floors with my mother. She is youthful and gay, enjoying the space with matchless ardor. As I look into her face, I begin to call out for my wife. “Where is she?” I ask pleadingly. Strangely, the stars shine clearly outside, entering our dimly lit space through the window. We are high above the smog and pollution, high above the human world of earthly obligation.

Cupid and Psyche in the natural bower by Hugh Douglas Hamilton

As I step down, to visit my grandparents in their New York home, I wait, fixed in place within the center of a foyer condensed by the continuous movement of relatives up and down the stairs. The air is heavy. I embrace each family member longingly, and with a strength characteristic of my waking need. Our grandfather is dying.

Interior by William Gerard Barry

Later that night, my wife and I decide to cross a high river. Our kayaks soon tip in the rushing torrent, flooded with murky water. We swim earnestly to the edge, where my wife quits on me as I gather strength enough to submerge in a second-hand craft to retrieve one of our vessels caught in the shoreline brush. Sitting in a sinking vessel, with only a dilapidated, half-worn paddle, a family of ducks begins attacking with an incessant hunger for my pruned, sore fingers.  

_______

Where am I falling?
Who do I call?
I have fallen, I am getting small.

- excerpt from "I Have Fallen"

To Dream Is To Conceive An Other

"I had a dream also before you were conceived which was quite interesting, there was a being there standing in the corner, it was a male, and said to me in the dream, said, 'please will you give me a place in your body.'" - Mother of Tulku, from the film by Gesar Mukpo

I have a friend whose named their first son a Tibetan name after she reportedly had seen the child himself appear in full bodily form prior to conception, asking if he could be born through her. Is he a Tulku? What does this say about the mother? Do you have any similar experiences, first-hand or otherwise? 

As a reclusive student of Buddhism, who became delightfully initiated into Green Tara devotions with a Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tsetan at a chance meeting, and in that series of meditational initiations befriended a forest hermit who's been a lifelong supporter of my work ever since, I will add my opinion on tulkuhood (please see my Green Tara Post for more). 

In my reading and meditation, I see Buddhism as an enlightened practice of seeing, in the way that Joseph Campbell saw myth as creative perception, and the way that Terrence McKenna saw shamanistic hallucination as an archaic mode of seeing through the phenomenal nature of human subjectivity.

In other words, I see tulkuhood as a universal expression of a natural phenomenon that is experienced every day, in every moment, by every one always. That easily said, without having redacted with much scholarship on the matter, I can humbly reflect on the notion that a Tulku is simply the ancient wisdom of indiscriminate practice, which resides in all social and personal forms, within all sentient beings. 

_______

We met in bars, malls, cafes, and sidewalk parks. The entire time, it was as though we met in the privacy of his home, even more, in the secrecy of his mind. He had let me into his imagination of himself. The way he was so sweet, surreal. Figments of smiles and laughter lit up our shared space as from a shared brain. He spoke with a borrowed voice.

The duplex works well for me, a single man on one side, my best friend and his family on the other. One day, they show me their leaking roof, a madhouse of water and anxiety. Unable to help, we attend a nearby gathering, an awe-inspiring array of human diversity, as an earmarked page in an unassuming book. A busker presents his CD release. On a new accordion, he plays the delight of all, while my best friend retreats back into our house, ready to subsume the difficulties of an entrenched domestic struggle. I continue on through the peopled havoc, stirring blindly with blissful listening and warm-hearted aspirations, to embrace the heart of our local culture and be drawn into its imperfect cultivation.

This is the last day, he said. No visitation, no indrawn temptation, not a flicker of need. What happened? I decided to see for myself, the state of this new loving presence, his shape-shifting personality beckoned me, although I had not seen another side, I knew his face does change.

Entering his house, no one welcomes me. Walking up the austere mahogany stairway, the banister is buffed and shining with inestimable taste. The doorway to a study is slightly open. A deep, unwavering silence overtakes my curiosity, I am driven through with the pain of loss, a reality I had known all along, though served so politely, mind-to-mind by the loving acquaintance. He sits at a high leather chair, bearded as not before with elder white beard, square-faced and unmoving. His countenance, exposed in the antiquated sepia light, is only recognizable as an acrid tinge of sentiment and memory, subtly issuing as from within, between our speechless minds. The instant is nigh, as he looks at me, stone-faced, an unseen floodgate opens from his untamed eyes. Then it fades and I leave, pained with eternal mystery of who.

_______

Age

"To dream of age, portends failures in any kind of undertaking." (iDream)

When I read the dream above, I immediately think of McKenna's statement, "you become unrecognizable to yourself" 

_______

donating beautiful soundless hearts
through world music motion

our one universal language emotion
& the commonly evolved ground broken through violent social awareness

meant to survive generations
with the traumatic blessing of the great earthly groan

from
MA, virgin, temptress,

my Kuan Yin

- excerpt from "I drank in the stupor"

On another poetic note: check out my latest publication, a very buddhistic haiku posted today on Marco Polo Arts Mag