Like Love, Art ties together all the great sacred traditions because they all used creative expression, or we wouldn't know about them.
— Alex Grey
I want my art to help people reimagine God.
A relationship succeeds when obstacles are met with communication and resolution. A relationship flourishes when we take the beloved as our teacher. Shared goals create a transformative, interwoven path.
A fully engaged imagination is essential to the spiritual practice of the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana School, whose artistic tradition is in service of consciousness transformation.
Love is God's secret name.
Festival culture is all about evolving consciousness and generating a sense of unity, hope, and possibility.
For some people, maybe my artwork just seems like fantasy or something. However, if you have had any kind of a mystical or cosmic experience, I guess, then people seem to recognize the territory.
My father was a professional artist all his life who encouraged my path as an artist.
I use a lot of different words for God - infinite intelligence, primordial, perfection or universal creativity. All of these, to me, are God. And 'God' is a word, I think, that some people feel uncomfortable with, so they can use another word, you know? It's the great mystery.
I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness.
I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect.
What makes Burning Man special is the location: a 9-mile circle of gypsum, an ancient dried ocean bed. The ground is like a flat crust with no plants or insects, a perfect outdoor gallery for monumental interactive sculpture and architecture.
The inner artist is not the voice of reason. The inner artist can have wild and impossible ideas... The inner artist is not the voice of comfort.
It has been an honor to paint on stage and have my art grace the albums and stage sets of renowned musicians.
Religion comes from the word 're' or again and 'ligare' meaning to bind or tie back. The purpose of religion is to unite the self with God or the creative force. Music, sacred spaces, and meaningful icons are the way we conjoin our minds with the transcendental.
I put the cult in culture.
The more religions are fixated on having a dogmatic sense of truth, the more likely they are to blow each other up. So being open to God as a creative principle could provide for a new kind of dialogue between the faiths, which I think is crucial at this time.
God's inexplicable. God is beyond the everything. And yet we can't cease to blather about it.
Spiritual teachers and artists that have opened the eye of wisdom for the world, and visionary community builders, have influenced my work.
The creative principle is less about dogma and more about opening ourselves to the evolution of consciousness.
It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.
It is the prayer of my innermost being to realize my supreme identity in the liberated play of consciousness, the Vast Expanse. Now is the moment, Here is the place of Liberation.
Art is the skin of the soul.
I think sound and vision are all vibratory emanations... it's the way the soul flowers: art and music.
The visionary imagination is the source of art and religion.
I grew up Methodist and went to church until my parents gave up on religion when I was nine.
Burning Man is a crowning achievement of freedom in festival culture.
When you see the face of God, or when you have an overwhelming, ecstatic, blissful, visionary experience; there is no doubt about it. It isn't like, 'Did it happen?' It's unforgettable. And you are a changed person in some way.
The web of life, love, suffering and death unites all beings.
My art has always been in response to visions. Rather than confine my subject to representations of the outer worlds, I include portrayals of the multi-dimensional imaginal realms that pull us toward consciousness evolution.
I became really interested in the study of consciousness.
To bare our souls is all we ask, to give all we have to life and the beings surrounding us. Here the nature spirits are intense and we appreciate them, make offerings to them - these nature spirits who call us here - sealing our fate with each other, celebrating our love.
In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.
