Saturday, June 23, 2012

LANDSCAPE And The NUDE in the NEPSIS FOUNDATION





by Rev. Steve Frost PhD
93


-4









165[94]

 This painting is the seventh in a series of male nudes at first overtly sexual in the practice of sex magic (See Painting/Partition #119 [48]— the most powerful and dangerous of magics. Working through issues of sexual identity, one comes to a NEW INNOCENCE, with sexuality a discreet mystery—even abstinent, certainly chaste. When Adam and Eve are found hiding from God in the Garden of Eden, God replies to Adam’s complaint about being naked with the above query, “Who told you you were naked?” Before the Resurrection and after the creation of Adam and Eve, this question might be the most important moment described in the Bible. How do we lose our innocence, i.e. our natural relationship with the divine spirit… and everything else?  Clothing- which I prefer for most people in most situations- is the result of the Fall.  The point here is that in an increasingly urbanized world, one's mindset becomes more and more alienated from our natural origins, certainly from the excellence, refreshment and challenges of wilderness.  This presentation emphasizes a particular experience with 'landscape,' i.e. nature, and the 'nude.'  Most people's experience of nature is more and more confined to the human body and urban design. The separation (divorce?) is at least traumatic in its effect on human culture and psyche.  This is simply a different facet of ecological and 'new age' challenges.  

***
"...Steve has painstakingly taken the pulse of our modern times and has tried to mediate between the rational and the irrational [intuitive, ed.], the theoretical and the artistic. And this he has done from a perspective which stands middle way between the two.  ...in this sense I consider it a pioneer’s work–  ...He has accommodated as much as he could, and yet he has not yielded the main thrust of this work. ...I consider this as a victory for him and Academia."  

R. Panikkar 

(Gifford Lecturer- 1989, with three doctorates in science and cultures, twelve languages, pertius at Vatican II, UNESCO, et al- from his official 'response' to Frost's Nepsis project)
***


Landscape and the Nude 
The Nepsis Foundation's foundation is a particular 'Lightfulness-' Shadowless Light of the Gospel, Clear Light Buddhist Realizations, Visionary Consciousness extant since the early, Animist/Shamanistic Epiphany- in relationship with nature- as the Spiritual core of Creation.  


See University of California Nepsis Foundation's 

 ART CATALOG

 Art Numbers: 1 through 109
Art numbers in brackets are from the 2010 UCB Promulgation, without brackets are from the 2013 Nepsis Inventory- currently at #. www.nepsis.com
Visual Arts






Even the most ‘abstract’ or ‘non-representational’ painting may have content and context that are important to its meaning- witnesses in an ongoing response to otherwise ineffable inner experience.  This is not separate from either world history or the vast and variable parameters of the moment. It colors, animates and provides a rich cache of meaning.  Is, in fact, vital to aesthetic experience.
The Frost paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures of the Nepsis Foundation are strongly annotated compared to the captions of most contemporary artworks.  Often an artwork or series has its own story or myth worth knowing.  This because of the uniquely influential role they played in the Nepsis evolution and themes- 'On-the-Road' pilgrimages, Study: Theology, Religion and Aesthetics- Initiation and Practice.

***
Physiology and Geography-  From "Memo to a Bishop"  

 Holy Week, 1997 
To: The Bishop 
Re: Physiology—not just sex--Cosmology, and Ecclesiology—not just the Roman Church. 

Over the past few weeks a number of issues that I have been deeply concerned about for 
many years have become clear in a poignant way. This of course is not unusual for artists 
or writers. Rather, it is the ongoing experience. But, this complex of issues I think might 
be important to share with you. 

Let's start with the seemingly more benign of these issues--perhaps, I've already broached 
this with you? But it is an open door to many important anthropological findings 
supportive of the religious insight that I have pursued. When Cardinal Bellarmine 
contested with Galileo about cosmology, they were both right according to their own 
areas of concern. Galileo was right because, as it was later proved, the earth does go 
around the sun physically. The Church was also right in that it maintained the older, even 
primordial, understanding that the perceiver is at the center of the perceived. And given 
that the cult of the individual that now holds sway, had not yet developed, persons 
regarded themselves as part of a group, psychologically and politically tied to terra firma 
or some part of it. Or, what they could perceive of it! (What could be perceived had not 
yet been determined to be round. In fact, Master Galileo’s heirs have recently determined 
the universe to be flat!) 

No one knows the boundaries of the physical universe, nor its ultimate character or what 
it seems to be expanding into--God, perhaps! Absolute nothing, paradoxically, the 
nothing that is the origin of everything. At least psychologically, it is still true that the 
perceiver is the center of the perceived. This, of course, does not excuse any dirty politics 
of the Renaissance in which members of the Church, including Galileo, might have been 
involved. Cosmology is the issue here, as it is in what follows... 
"Memo to a Bishop"  1997 

(The Earth is flat?  Obviously the earth is a globe.   But for an understanding of an interior experience of evocative symbols, something more personal, and immediate is required.  Interior landscapes, so important to this artist for so many years of focus on visionary consciousness/pilgrimage- interior and exterior- tend to be flat.  It's local.   -And Generally, while I am not enthusiastic about 'Fantasy' literature  such as Lord of the Rings, those maps in the front of many Fantasy novels tend  towards flat.  Few thought 'global' until the Scientific Revolution within the Church's Ecumene.)







#[99]
GENIUS LOCI:  Spirit of place. "If you turn around you will see them."  

From Chapter Five of LETTER TO A BISHOP (Nepsis Foundation Cycle I)
One such was on our way to India.  We had a lay-over in Rome, so we went to Assisi to pay our respects to the great saint.  To do so we found a meadow in a canyon above the ancient town. There, my companion and I made a vigil over night- a night of sitting and walking meditations.  We’d been fasting but had water and some cherries we bought in a road side stand as we explored for the place to make our vigil.  It was a moon lit night and sometime after mid-night, a voice in my mind said,
“If you turn around you will see them.”
I turned and only saw the moon-lit meadow.  Then, to the left on the bank of a stream, in a sycamore tree, on a specific branch, one could see a kind of alteration is space, like heat waves rising from a summer pavement on a sunny afternoon.  Unquestionably, it was a ‘presence’ we both witnessed.  We offered it some cherries.
When morning came, we hiked out.  Spent some time in the famous old town and noticed an inordinate number of cast iron dragons around town.  Playfully at first, we identified this icon with the psyche of nature as we identified our experience the night before.  But I am also a catholic priest.  And for us, it is the Holy Spirit that animates the world.  None-the-less, we always talk about the Dragon of Assisi in a completely positive way.
On the morning that Catherine and I left Assisi, we walked down to the train station on the plain below that hill-top town. Once down, we turned to see the town encircled by a dragon-like cloud of roiling dark reds, golds and umber coils. Though the full account of this improtant realization/experience of an all night vigil above Assisi and the sacred encounter had there is told elsewhere, it was the first conscious encounter with what I would come to identify as the Dragon Lord- -
The Holy Spirit of Creation.
__________________________________________

From Chapter 7 of LETTER TO A BISHOP: "We also seek completion"

I hitch hiked across the country after attending an ordination in Tucson, Arizona of some school-mates. I flew from N.Y. to London. Crossing the Atlantic, I had a terrible migraine. (I kept thinking of Puck from “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” attending the flight.)
I started hitch hiking on arrival at 7:00 A.M. and arrived at Stonehenge by evening twilight. It was the night after the solstice, after Midsummer’s Night. I camped that night at some Celtic burial mounds down from the “Stones” so that lithic monument was arrayed across the horizon above me in that night when it never really got dark. I didn’t sleep much. I did not bring a sleeping bag, only a small knap sack with a change of clothing and mostly ritual implements otherwise.
I got up early and walked towards the highway. As I walked away from the mounds towards the “Stones,” a clear communication came to me. 
“We also seek (need) completion.”
Bishop, for a Christian, the completion is the Omega represented by the Christ. That is but one vocabulary in which to describe the ineffable.The point is that the “powers” represented there below Stonehenge are part of creation and thus the proper subject for my priestly, pastoral, salvific concern.
In the south, I started hitch-hiking. The first car to come along picked me up. The driver had just left the Tibetan Buddhist Center in Scotland where he was a student and was headed to his home in the south…
I walked around Landsend in Cornwall, just to see it, then took a ship from Plymouth to France. By the end of my first day, I was walking through a small village out in the country of central France. Belloch, I believe is the name of the town. I walked through that village and a couple of miles further. I had a strong sense that there was a place for me to stay further up the road. I walked a little further. On a hill to my left, behind some berry vines and trees, was an abandoned farm house. There was a water well with a hand pump, fruit trees and a place out of the weather. I stayed there. I made an offering of some almond cookies to the local spirit and animals. I was fasting. It was a pleasant place. Night came on. I tried to sleep. Too cold. I meditated and did certain breathing exercises taught by the Tibetans to produce yogic warmth. That worked for a while, but the concentration that it requires was harder than the cold. Then something came for the offering. I was terrified. A terrible storm hit. The lightening seemed to be hitting so close all around. I had a vision of the Great Old Man. Then I fell asleep. I dreamt of the Great Old Man. He made me levitate in the dream. Then he directed me to fly to a huge burnt out old tree. How could I have known at the time that this would be the clue to the solution for the problem of the entire quest. Take Note.
Morning came. Awful night. It took days to remember all of it. I am, after this, not quite as strong as before. It was as if I got older somehow…

-"The Integration of Knowledge:"  Being includes everything- Matter, Psyche and Spirit.  Nepsis, here, indicates methods to explore both the content and the interrelationships of such basic elements.

 The brilliance of the Scientific Method and Critical Thinking is its exploration of matter and its mechanics- a rational, fact-based approach to issues.  It does not supply origin or meaning- though it can comment on the interaction of 'matter' and the 'ineffable.'   The challenge remains an accurate evaluation of the animate interaction between the two.

-Pilgrimage: Spirit/Body/Mind/Land.  Methods of development understanding and integration.

 -Radical urbanization has shifted and truncated the experience of traditional religions for most, since these are based on or simply accept without comment the hegemony of Nature.
***
-Landscape and the Nude:  
Early studies for what came to dominate my aesthetic interests:




















ROOTS & Other Early Drawings/paintings




Intimations of a Muladhara










Canyon Poems:




I.



Out in the Country North of L.A., 1949 ff





We started in a 15' trailer, out in the country north of L.A., 1949-



under a giant wild cherry tree



with Jimson Weed threatening fierce geisha beauty through earthbound gourd vines spread on the hot

sand



but I learned my first five years bare foot in the gravel and stickers, wild fragrance summer and spring-



what not to step on....  What to avoid- what to jump down the hill.  I knew not to fall into the yuccas- just a knack I guess.  To avoid Rattlesnakes and Black Widows like the Holy Terrors they are…  couldn’t.



There were 5 of us.  My older brothers slept outside in an Army Surplus bunk bed.



It doubled as a playpen for me by enclosing the bottom bunk in chicken wire.



Coyotes couldn't drag me off, like they did the free range chickens and turkeys.



There was a redwood water tank about 5 feet tall and ten feet in diameter filled to black, green and shards of sky.



It smelled of wet verdant ecology in that brittle, spare, sage, sand and chaparral place, where we almost ‘made it’...  Nothing grew in the refreshment of that upright pond, ‘cause of the tannins in the redwood- I know now.  Ecologies are so complicated!



Dad played ball- and chain for our sake.  Mother wore those full summer dresses,

and was too beautiful.



Her heart almost like that place, and she walked her own way..



Sunsets pure and clean before smog, an heroic stage for our small dramas...



I was with her when she died 50 years later in a similar place.  The others all gone before-


Now that I’ve sucked in the wind that whipped our iris garden down

year after year...

Steve Frost- May, 2011
(DOB 5.25.'49)



Its hard to explain about frogs, where
it was usually dry, judge grey
gravel dry
sage green weeds, blond and grey tumble, salmon weeds

but for seldom big Nino years[1] when
two inches of clear water would sit Zen
above the little rocks, sand and
thousands of frogs
years hidden 
appeared, in the big cottonwood hole singing all night seems
below a turn in the road -they had to spread out 
cars had to smash ‘em
one car had to miss and aim for the pool
in the hole
But a cottonwood caught it for the longest time.
***
Its hard to explain about Georgia.[2] how
that last year was
when the veil between worlds was so thin
It was payment in full, ‘a blast of pure white light 
glancing from a spread of black raven's wing’
it was better than any-thing, how
on the plane back from that oasis in Egypt
seeping its vast aquifer
in deep cold oracular pools, how
if the plane crashed on its way back, then it would have been ok 
with me- and her
-maybe not the rest... stern to bow
*
But now John, ur right, there's still to do
I'll follow the streams I always have, to their source. You will too.
You can give charity if you receive it, Steve
for the love of God, Bill!


September 3, 2013
California


[1] I was a child as well as it being a wet El Nino year.
[2] Georgia was my mother who came to live with me when I was Newman Chaplain at SSU in N. California.  After 5 year there, I got sick, retired, she at 80, and I took care of each other for another 5 years.  The ‘last year’ mentioned in the poem was 2005.  John, Steve and 
Bill are priest friends in S. California.


______________________________________________________




Kick the Hornet’s Nest



Run, jump, slide down hill

No danger to die or kill

Slide beneath branches

Jump the brush of tiny ranches

Run wild wind and down to fill


A spread of time



Between womb



and tomb.





A child



Off course that day,



Didn’t kick the paper nest nor



Even see it in time




Off the line of sight as



It was



Nearly naked



I was.





Joy of being that young



Free of economies



And elections





I was free to knock that nest off its branch.  Didn’t look



Didn’t know they were there 



If they cook



Or care.





Nor did they care for me



Until I was gone


Not so far

14 miles to that old doctor.

Old red truck, Model T

Stings,

Red Sings of lumps

Bumps

The size of half dollars

Dozens of stings on my little body still

Ripe with baby fat.


Fight a big sting

But then was well.


Nice to be young

No heaven or hell

That people dream

Then try to sell…


Old now

Rocking

fall

And smile

Asleep.
10.28.’10
CALIFORNIA





(Love Poem 1, '07)

Pasture, fields

We were green incisions

breaking rocky sand after huge, hill slipping rains

Then the blue hills on long stalks, and golden orange sweeping to a climbing sky
sweet horse-breath tough muzzles
long hair, pulling lips and yanking teeth, naked and bareback we rode over cliffs into a peaceful ocean…

Wolf purple and Indians brush the slopes with salt skin sweat enough to lubricate a long soccer run across high school into
College, friends forms shapes

Color that keeps to itself to inspire only in love

Love that leaves and comes back and leaves again

So, there is only God- but God doesn’t want ‘only God’ or why us?





(Love Poem #6. '07)  

All I see is those long stalks and feel the sticky sap that seeps and weeps when we picked their great blue bells—
much more variegated in its person than a name can tell.  

 Now it’s a knife of a thousand revelations that I was a lucky kid in our hiding place and willing to pay the wind for its bite and the long walk up those rocky hills to know its love, 

Once I lay on its side writhing that migraine out, so that old school bus driver got out on his way home and climbed up to take care of me, though I was a quarter mile off the road and up the side of our hill that dad built on—all gone now.  More of what I learned to do as they were brawny and bold with those big flags of stone-- More of light glinting across my ball, the eye to my soul, and sent now to save or kill.

***


More College Works
-18.  [5.21a] Nightstream,
Intaglio Print 24” x 15.5” 1972






 5b
Bridge to Who
Mono-print, 1972


Drawing from live models in school-  i.e. Drawing from life, still life, and nature is required by traditional art training.







5l
Migraine Of Thought
Pastel on Handmade Paper I, 1973


From the study of life drawing (nude models), nature  and still lives we learned composition of recognizable objects and abstract composition to be of equal significance.


5k
Psyche of Nature/Dragon Rises/Inner Landscape





13-15 Two Become One
Mono Print 1974




 [13.4] Late Winter Landscape
Oil Pastel on Paper 1974

***

Independent Work- After College




9 [7]





152 [18]


'No one's funeral, for there is no one to bury" T.S. Elliot, Four Quartets
Oil on Canvas 40” x 30” 1991





"Rorate Caeli II"
Oil on Canvas 40″ x 30″ 1991.




23
Crucifix with Antlers
Oil on Panel 5.5' x 3' 1977-1987
...Shamanistic themes involving earth powers and metaphysical energies in relationship with the Passion of Christ, expressed here with ancient symbols for the divine hunt--antlers, and the crucifix, display an underlying unity in a variety of spiritual traditions and experience. In this work, the practical influence of shamanistic elements is beginning to be apparent. Abrahamic and Asian religions live off their inheritance from the Animist/Shamanistic intuition.

***





[44] Dark Lady
(See #37, Mother/Son)
Mixed Media 12' x 5' 1988



131 [50] Fence
***





121 [67] DESERT/SEA
88
Mandala: India V
Nature is the first Mandala, the human person is the second.
Oil on Canvas 5' x 5' 1990
Paintings #84-87 were painted upon my return from India in1990. I had journeyed to India to study Tibetan Buddhism (1980): in particular, Tibetan Mandalas, (1990). Paintings #88 and #94 continue the influence of this study and practice. (Painting #30, 1980, reflects an early interest in this complex of themes.) The Mandala in Tantric Yoga, like the Christian Icon and its theologies, is the Great Art of Divine/Mundane union, the Symbolon. This practice and product requires the reconfiguration of intellect, emotion, imagination and physicality of the practitioner for re-creation of the whole human person in its 'true' or 'divine' image. In other words, this attempts full, true 'conversion.' That is the intention for both the practitioner and for the world. Thus, an actual mandala or madalesque (truly iconic) art carries that same intention: the ‘salvation’ or ‘realization’ of individual and world by seeking and telling—being—this truth. This is the touchstone for the whole of NEPSIS.
1991--THIS IS ABOUT WHERE #s14-22 WOULD FIT CHRONOLOGICALLY. WE ARE STILL VERY MUCH IN THE MIDST OF ‘INITIATION.’ THOUGH, #s 93-99 JUST PRECEDE AN IMPORTANT TRANSITION INTO ITS FINAL STAGE. SEE CYCLE III IN NEPSIS FOUNDATION: THE ORACLE OF XIBALBA.

[93]
Mural of the Resurrection/Ascension/ Parusia
St. Joseph Church, Santa Ana, California. (Mural unfinished.)
Acrylic on Concrete 40' x 29' 1985-6
An icon of ritual intent, consecrated at the 1995 Easter Vigil for that church with spiritual root in Cuernavaca drawings (and Mexico City earthquake!) that lead to this image.


[94]
“Who Told You You Were Naked?”
Theopoeisis
A New Innocence
Oil on Canvas 12' x 8' 1996-99

 BEFORE

 When Adam and Eve are found hiding from God in the Garden of Eden, God replies to Adam’s complaint about being naked with the above query. "Who told you you were naked?" Before the Resurrection and after the creation of Adam and Eve, this question might be the most important moment described in the Bible. How do we lose our innocence, i.e. our natural relationship with the divine spirit… and everything else? This painting in combination with #93, #43, (and #84-88), comment upon the ‘answer’ to the problem of the Fall in Genesis--The Christos, or our christic identity—or as Panikkar would have it, a "New Innocence." The old innocence is lost. It cannot be reclaimed by modernity. But there is the possibility of a "new" state that comes from the influence all the "wisdom traditions" of the past and the altruistic intentions of our own secular age. In relationship to the "New Innocence" is the ancient Church teaching about Theopoeisis, the Rhythm of God, or the movement of the divine spirit in creation. This refers to an early, predominant teaching, or spiritual method, in the Church concerning how such original innocence is rediscovered in one’s life. To live life according to the Rhythm of God, is to discover one’s true identity, and holiness as the completion of nature.
The "horns of light", yellow shapes around the central figure are a reference to mandala themes. See #84-88, or dissertation appendix.
This painting is the seventh in a series of male nudes at first overtly sexual in the practice of sex magic—the most powerful and dangerous of magics. Working through issues of sexual identity, one comes to a NEW INNOCENCE, with sexuality a discreet mystery—even abstinent, certainly chaste. See also: #s 48, 49. 71, 93, 93c, 158…

AFTER: A New Innocence Found, The Seeker Opens to the World- 2009
______________________________

 2011- 
At a violent moment, mural canvas is torn in three.
___________________________________________



101

Where the River Meets the Sea (I).
Colored and Graphite Pencil on Paper 40" x 22" 2000



105.  Rainbird in Long Grass 


(Aka:  'Muladhara' or 'Root Chakra' -source of creative invention,
just above one's perineum according to mystical physiology, 
from 'primal pounding stone' to electronic composition, 'pantheon of deity' to 'divine love'- ART.  
See also:  THAUMATURGE.) 












176 [107]

***


Dancing the Freeway 2012

Finding Sacred Places- Genius Loci.  Places of the Primordial Mother, et allia... Resolution of Issues, and so on...  Here is a description of the canyon where the author was raised from birth that leads to pilgrimage.
_________________________________


We stood in our hill top garden waving to the West
but down to the yellow school bus
as it carried my brothers away- waved
toward the canyon road
carrying its public commerce for so long through this kindly canyon



pungent again with natural fragrance

chaparral and sage-

Star thistle, maybe?



That’s if one is on foot.



Our canyon was

Once the principle California road north for a Stage Coach Line,



(We knew the family up the canyon who had homesteaded 

here 

back then- were the stage stopped.



When ‘long ago’
(Made me receptive to a memory)
to be a way station for that coach, horses running 
our wild Way
as it spread through California into this New Age.

Now it’s only certain times of the year that the fragrance is so strong from leaf and branch that we can still smell it in, 
in our fast cars- windows wide open.

TINY FLOWERS
YELLOW SPRING CARPETS
THAT COVE

with

Olfactory intoxication

Just to trespass against absentee landlords

And a few steps into their domain
-a life long memory-
heavy, to the ground-sweet, as some blue skies
huge in their nearly feudal influence

Command my values...

Dancing the freeway... on the way home after pilgrimage
pounds down.  Light on my feet and finger light
waving the joy
unburdened by any other value
but that moment recovered and shared
with any passersby at 70 mph

past the hiker

by the blue glory
vine-ing its way up any strong
enough
brilliant wide-open blue

All gone, but for those ‘long agos’ held
With in.

One has a seemingly unrelated dream and then an idea comes that resolves so many issues before unresolved.   One goes out 

on the road, on the land to
meet the invisible, the unknowable-  subsequently unrelated blessing flows. 

'In ambulando solvitur'

  -and so on.
[1]


Steve Frost
Wyoming, 01.29.'12


[1] John McAndrew-  quoted the Latin to me ‘movement solves (problems)’  Pilgrimage, walking, doing something... Indeed!



***

FURTHER NOTES ON CREATION

Stephen Frost
Chama Canyon, New Mexico, 01.’11





1.  Be

     L
     i
     v
     e

     i n g

2.  Am, spark, spel

Grandmother Spider spoke to Changing Woman- Chama come to tell.  Holy Mary- Mother of God- arrived and spoke the spell 
they conceived.

Thus it was, great plains touching, 

3.  A Great Bang

4.  A beautiful woman silent sang 

radiant glory- Immaculate

light, comfort and sweet consolations.


5. Clear Light casts no shadow.


6.  Raised a mountain

7.  Grew the Tree

8.  Scrabbled in the dirt and gravel

9.  Ate the fennel growing along European highways--fasted, traveled, prayed.

10. Drew the fountain forth from Mountains of Fire--Pyrenees-- Sum of healing and salvation or from Himalayan caves

11. Pray for us, now and the hour come

12.  Poof!  Wake from the dream softly, respectfully

13.  Who can tell 'all that is and all that seems'


what to do?

Stephen Frost
Chama Canyon, New Mexico, 01.’11

___________________________________


NOTES:

1. To Be= More than existence, rather, all that is.   Live=life + ing = Being in process, Being + Consciousness, the Divine Spark animates matter.  Belief is necessary for the "integration of knowledge."  I.e., union of this material world and the Divine world- that the two belong together.

2.  Am (Who Am).  Spark in the sense of the Divine Sparks refers to the Hasidic theory of Divine Sparks and Person/Creation.  Spel = Word of Intention.

    Three female divinities from Pueblo, Navajo and Bo-Po (Tibetan) world views. Holy Mary joins the group, chosen, holy and thus divine- 'of the divine' if you prefer.  Who can speak of such Mysteries with finality but that it indicates a union of mundane and sacred states.  Time is of course brought to its fullness and disappears.  So, who or what comes first or highest is moot.  Though it is interesting to contemplate that the word "God" is a mere symbol for this same Mystery.  One might playfully suggest that Divinity itself derives from the Feminine as in the THEOTOKOS, Mother of God.  Though it’s safer, and maybe truer to say that all things proceed from and return to Divine Mystery. 

February, 2006.  After an unplanned drive from the Pacific Ocean to NE Arizona, I find myself, as I approach Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly, to be in tears of mourning for the deaths of my mother and brother the previous fall.  I’d had a worrisome dream Christmas morning about my mother in the afterlife.  I’d made little offerings at this place in the past because Grandmother Spider, a creator deity, is reputed to live there.  I’m a Roman Catholic Priest, but I’m still reverent of the old insights and symbols as well. Many visits in the past wherein nothing happened…  This time Grandmother Spider took over my consciousness, and indicated I should look up the right hand canyon (Canyon de Chelly splits just there at Spider Rock).  I did so.  And there, benevolent Changing Woman, a Navajo deity, appeared standing behind my mother.  My mother was protected (saved) and holding a box with golden light inside.  She was well.  See below for Bernadette.

3.  The grandeur and expanse of Spirit (and these Ladies) is referenced here by a "plains" image and jumps to the theory of "Branes" touching and thus evoking the moment of creation, the Great Bang in Astrophysics.   

There is a ‘singularity’ about all real religious experience due to the ultimate nature of the experience.

4.  Holy Bernadette 'scrabbled' in the dirt and chewed weeds before she dug out the Sacred Spring which became the Lourdes phenomenon.  Clearly this resembles a shamanistic trance and ecstatic frenzy.  As the first vision was of the feminine divine--a Beautiful Woman,”  for some the Great Goddess- Became a Roman Catholic vision afterwards. Some will be scandalized. What's the problem, except when the human heart needs to feel superior or unique or worse to despise others and vilify that which is not one's own. The Holy cannot be owned.  Every person is unique.  And the Immaculate Conception is also a beautiful doctrine.   Is not a world-hating denial.  Is affirmation of the union of Matter and Spirit, i.e., salvation.   However, a distinction can be made between archetypes and supposedly historical humans… though only in a temporal vale. 

5.  The answer to everything:  Or, the "Six Yogas of Naropa's"  Clear Light Realization might be considered along side Christian 'Light That Casts No Shadow'-i.e. the Light of the Lamb- the ineffable light of Holiness/Grace/Divine Energy.  Visionary Consciousness, root of images and ideas.  

6.  The Holy Mountain.  See Nepsis Foundation painting #14.  +Egyptian Creation story in which God (Ra in this case) raises a mound (later results in Pyramids of Giza)” up out of the pre-creation morass- (Waters in Genesis);.  Other sacred mountains: Sumeru, Kailash, Zion, Sinai...

7.  Tree of Life.  Central axis.  Axis Pole around which reality turns.  One's perception is always the center of the perceived universe.  Many such references in history of religions.   Even the most esoteric martial arts such as Pau Qua contain whispers of such a memory...  

8./9.   Bernadette again.  The point being a universal excitement about the holy, the ineffable atemporal in it's ecstatic embrace. As well, once on a pilgrimage from California to a monastery in Greece, during which fasting was an important element, I was so hungry that I ate anise stalks growing along the road on which I was hitch-hiking.   References ‘method’ in the Spiritual life- practice that evokes the spiritual encounter. 

10.  Pyrenees-- radiating divine energies, emoting sacred springs.  Fire and water- such elements here refer the Divine.  Home of my teacher, Raimundo Panikkar. ... In Sarnath, India I was once cured of a terrible migraine by smoke from a burning bit of holy cloth from clothes a Buddhist hermit who lived in a cave in the Himalayas...

11.  Even in those years of deepest exile, (OKC), the concluding lines of the Hail Mary, rose spontaneously to my lips as I fell asleep each night, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the moment of our deaths" and encouraged me in isolation. Here 'hour come' seems a broader reference than 'death' and hints at a moments of truth in addition to death. 

12.   Indicates shifting states on consciousness.  Secular consciousness, confined as it is, shifts uncomfortably in its chair in the face of prayer and many religious traditions. Waking from the state(s) of consciousness necessary to understand or experience the vast spectrum of meaning, i.e Spiritual traditions, in our past- waking to the day to day banality of consumer societies, I use the word 'poof.'  This is to indicate the disappearance of these states, but also to suggest an inadequate homage to certain kinds of homo-erotic personalities that have been vehicles of the sacred in the past instead of the 'abominations' mentioned in the Old Testament.   Poofters are necessary...

13.  From the other end of my investigation, see SKYLIGHTS, 7 Poems, near the beginning of my religious query in 1975- '77- the 7th poem: 

Oh, Pluck the string, 
Climate of my dreams, 
sound your timbrel, 
that I may sing 
of Elevations and river dreams 
of all that is and all, all that seems. 

Steve Frost
Venice Beach, CA. 1977



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