Essays

Yoga

The study began as minor cellular rumblings in my consciousness concerning my sensations of religiousness, as a lapsed Catholic, the notion of an almost blind belief to a church, had always been fundamental to the questions of mental and spiritual well being, and worldly searching. Searching for satisfactions, for intelligence, for accreditation and validation, for wealth, for love, for some " thing ", for the fulfillment of desires, that would create and reinforce who I am as a being walking around on this planet. From birth this method of catholic belief had proposed much and answered very little. The adherence to hierarchy and history creates a void in the present that could be otherwise, so much effort is expended in the actions of belief, yet life is always a battlefield of conscious and unconscious intent, a process of invention in the present. The dogmas of catholic religiousness, postulated that personal belief was ultimately subject to the deliberations of an organization in Rome, run by old men who wear funny hats, wear expensive red gowns, and take years to make decisions of worldly import. History exposes the pathetic, perverse, and paranoid side to human history, yet we are forever called upon to have allegiances, moral and physical, to the methodology and intent of leaders, organizations and power mongers, killing and controlling in the name of gods, all searching for their place in history. Allegiances that dull the will, personal invention and joy stops, and enslavement begins.

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" The Tree of Life " 5 feet by 3 feet, authors are Edward Bowen, Yogi Ananda Troja & Merylle Mahabir. 1992 - 93.
Price, $TT 30,000
54.61 Kb

In my work this invention is the fundamental or primary, to expose perhaps new configurations of intent, new forms that must emerge, pulled out from a well of mindspace that is also present in this time and space, a wellspace that is continually being defined and informed.

To read the " spiritual " texts repeatedly and sink deeper into these codes of relavances, opening out fresher questions and understandings, peering past veils, scraping away the expected, a sacrifice of conscious mind that found an immediate parallel in the work at the desk with the drawings in progress. The drawings became a kind of anchorwire, as if to stop still in a space and refocus the mental journey into" some thing " practical, material, some " thing " immediate and primary to my everyday existence. The drawings are an attempt, as is the rest of my work to create localized individual experiences, which are like personal visual prayers, offerings back into the worlds of intelligences, meanings and forms.

The Gita examines human concepts and behavior, it describes a method of an opening consciousness and an expanding universe, the smallness and largeness of thought, the physics of action, prescribed and otherwise, more questions precipitating answers in time and space, the mechanics of creaturely balancing on a spinning globe, and the inevitability of human action.

It is difficult to be intelligent about what is a searching, not for answers as such, but just because it is a kind of privilege that I believe in, a God given right as it were, to want to find out about the worlds, the universe begs questions to us running around here in gravity. Stories in antiquity always resurfacing in our consciousness, the influences of personal and public historicity, tradition, dogma, myth, mystery and magick, active and animated, oftentimes sublimated in the affairs of our everyday realities. I often wonder that in our time, we in this world must be in a similar state of confusion to the time of the mythical Tower of Babel, one cosmic intelligence, one humanness, many fragmentations, ways and illusions of that unavoidable " truth ", as yet to be defined, or in constant definitive action, to live is to be in action. In a sense, or rather in the actions of thought, we define the spaces inside of ourselves, as well as in the immediacy of our external and active condition. For me, the practice of art - making is a methodology through which the individual may create or form a bridge between these two realms of action, an art piece of work becomes a statement of identity in time and space, the individual in a constant method of realization.

Yoga is a path of unfolding action, creation, preservation, and destruction, Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, representative of all action in nature and the cosmos. To be in the body is to be in the action of nature, the equation presupposes cosmic relativity, and yet more action.