jeff hogue/ bluelab art org

Triage

“My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

“If one wishes to change the world, one must first become that change.”

Mohandas Gandhi

“We are living in precarious times. There is a tremendous spiritual hunger that pervades the Western world. Some of this hunger arises from the innate longing inherent in all human beings. Some is born out of an unnamed, existential emptiness. Some is the result of living in a world in which our planet is facing the possibility of its own extinction. And still more hunger comes from wounds to the human heart and mind caused by living in a Western civilization that is alienated from love and connection on all levels; that by-and-large lacks a solid and withstanding spiritual foundation; that did not teach us how to access the wellspring of knowledge and love within us, and to live accordingly.

My passion is to assist people to learn to make sound spiritual choices in whatever path they proceed along; to make distinctions between spiritual terms, teachers, practices; to inspire the possibility of moving beyond limited conceptions of ourselves; and to communicate perennial truths in a manner that is applicable to, and easily understood by, the Western world.

The possibility for re-enlivening a spiritual culture in the West that is authentic, sane, potent, grounded, and full of passion for Love and Truth, rests in the hands of the few who dare to accept the full responsibility of this task. Those who do are called to study, practice, be vigilant and courageous, and to express lives of uncommon integrity in these demanding times. “

Mariana Caplan, PhD.

Preface

This is a preliminary document—a work in progress. I welcome your input, your ideas and constructive criticism. I am not attached to too much here. I am dedicated to making a sincere run at getting this organization off the ground, but if it is to work it will be through the concerted efforts of many people. If you want to edit the work in earnest, let me know and I will email it to you or give it to you on disc. Remember, this is only a beginning. If this is to be a collaborative process, this document seems the logical point to begin. Because this writing is still in its developmental stages I have elected to use a lot of quotes of influential writers to offer a clearer idea of the matrix of quality teachings and teachers that exists in contemporary spiritual culture. I hope that in contributing you will feel encouraged to add any and all that you deem worthwhile.

tri·age (träzh)
n.

1. A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated.
2. A system used to allocate a scarce commodity, such as food, only to those capable of deriving the greatest benefit from it.
3. A process in which things are ranked in terms of importance or priority:

What if?

What if artists were offered stipends, room and board allowing them to work intensively and without distraction for substantial blocks of time on film, music and real time performance collaborations? What if artists and thinkers could explore important topics with highly regarded teachers leading to personal breakthrough? What if these artists were guided by experts through structured community building processes prior to beginning their projects? What if artists were given opportunity to work with and interact with some of the important leaders in the fields of art, science, and philosophy of our time? What if these artists were given all the production equipment and technical assistance they might need to produce national/international quality shows? What if supporters and friends of our organization were given intimate amphitheater access to many segments of our artists’ processes as well as early rehearsals and could join them and visiting artists and thinkers for meals, activities and fellowship?

Mission

triage is a contemplative community intent upon the creation of transformative experimental art and will organize itself around the collaborative productions of films, performances, web, and site-specific installations. We will work to promote art making in functional relationship to spiritual practice, community, and integrative collaborations with professionals and thinkers from other fields. Our goal is to create, maintain, and promote a culture of civility though a community devoted to collaborative art.

Executive Summary

triage is a newly forming non profit corporation providing a venue and radical new approach to making communally created new media art. triage will seek involvement on the part of many leading artists, performers, and musicians (which from this point will all be called simply, “artists”) along with highly regarded spiritual leaders along with leaders of the arts and related fields. Our intention is to be up and running by fall 2006 with performances and public events beginning in the winter/spring of 2006.

The function of triage is to participate in the world wide effort shared by leaders of various fields toward saving the world. At triage we believe a cosmological fusion of art, science, and philosophy is important while perhaps even more fundamental to our approach is the establishing of a true community or mystical body. Within the context of the broad triage community our vision is to create production cells of highly skilled and gifted interdisciplinary artists and thinkers assisting them wherever possible in making profoundly original works of art in all media.

“Unless there is a speedy and radical shift in human consciousness, to bring about a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ and the return of the sacred to the center of our personal and collective life, the human enterprise on Planet Earth most probably will come to a catastrophic end. The paranormal events that we have been discussing may be wake-up calls coming from the regions of the Holy Spirit, or what Kenneth Ring calls ‘Mind at Large,’ to overcome our morbid entanglement with materialism in all its forms and manifestations and help us become aware of our Divine origins and our destiny as beings in the process of deification. Once that understanding, now buried down in the recesses of our individual and collective subconscious, comes to the surface, then we will feel, think, and behave in ways that will render us custodians of Creation and not its mindless destroyers.”

“Conventional scientists, …sooner or later will have to recognize that what is happening today is not regression to prerational states of superstition but a quantum leap into super-rational states of awareness. It is not the reversal of the Enlightenment, as they are worried, but its fulfillment through the development of a new science that will incorporate the spiritual at the center of its preoccupation.”

Kyriacos C. Markides PhD, Riding with the Lion

“When we approach anything, any activity at all, in the spirit of play—that is, fully, joyfully, and primarily for its own sake—we are likely to achieve not only the greatest happiness but also the best results, the most enduring success.”

George Leonard The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei

"Leadership is seeing hope in any adversity."

Brent Filson

“Any spirituality of joy is also a spirituality of tragedy. Searches for a constantly ‘happy spirituality’ never work, for if genuine ‘feeling’ must be rooted in genuine being, the nature of our human be-ing requires acceptance of ourselves, our lives, and our world as ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or.’ It is precisely our twofold nature that spirituality embraces, and it is in embracing this spirituality that we embrace the world—reality as it is—thus discovering who we are.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that profoundly influenced the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous, William James distinguished between the ‘once-born’ (the ‘healthy minded’) and the ‘twice-born,’ (the ‘sick souls’). The once-born know no doubts. They seem, most of the time, to possess a serenity that does not even recognize that it is serenity. Self-confident and self-possessed, the healthy-minded assume that things will work out for the best, even in the short run. On the rare occasions when they experience tragedy, they do not think of it as tragedy; ‘bad luck’ is the whole of their vocabulary for frustration. Talk of ‘conversion’ thus mystifies them, for as open as they might be to changes in the world, they rarely see the need for change in themselves. Such people simply are, and they are never seduced by the temptation to ponder their be-ing. A caricaturist would picture them smiling vacuously and label them ‘Blah.’ They inhabit the more biting cartoons in The New Yorker.

Numbering himself among the ‘twice-born’ sick souls, James vividly detailed how these very different individuals are haunted by a deep sense of the risk, danger, and pervasive moral evil that runs through the world. Conscious of possessing a self that is somehow divided, these sick souls are examples par excellence of ‘the constitutional disease’ James calls Zerrissnheit (‘torn-to-pieces-hood’). From the perspective of the ‘healthy-minded,’ these ‘sick souls’

seem to have no sense of unity or coherence to their lives. They appear riddled by inner instability, torn by tension and conflict between the various elements of their lives. The ‘twice-born’ have known tragedy, failure and defeat, and they have named them such; but they also have a sense of the possibility of somehow rising above such experiences. A comic artist would nevertheless portray them anxiously insecure, identifying them with the label ’Argh!’ Sick souls also inhabit New Yorker cartoons, but they may be more familiar in the shape of Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown.

Does such openness to suffering, to the dark side of human be-ing signal some kind of denial or lack of spirituality? Are the recognition of darkness and the temptation to despair themselves failures? NO! The answer comes hurtling with all the force and wisdom of hundreds of voices echoing over thousands of years. These voices, the voices of the sages and saints, insist that it is the struggle itself that defines us.

Our many failures give meaning to our few successes, only when we peer into the abyss can we appreciate the magnificence of heights that are more than mere ‘highs.’ For to be human is, after all, to be other than ‘God.’ And so it is only in the embracing of our torn self, only in the acceptance that there is nothing ‘wrong’ with feeling ‘torn’, that one can hope for whatever healing is available and can thus become as ‘whole’ as possible. Only those who know darkness can truly appreciate light; only those who acknowledge darkness can even see the light. Our very brokenness allows us to become whole. ‘No one is as whole as he who has a broken heart,’ said Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov. ‘Wholeness,’ then, does not mean that the heart is not ‘broken,’ that the pain does not sear. To experience sadness, despair, tears, and howls of pain demonstrates not some violation or deficit of spirituality but rather the ultimate spirituality of acceptance.”

Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham,

The Spirituality of Imperfection

You Become the Dawn

Nothing to mourn, we die and die until

Until we’re born, recast as forms

So pleasing to the soul

I never miss anyone, to me they’re never gone

If that makes you uncomfortable, baby

Don’t be too long

And now you’re wondering if that song was the song you heard

When the form was just the word and the world was golden

And the only way to pray was to be cast as the dawn

Backwards in time, the rhyme within you was another child

Wanting to strive, but this time, not required

Wanting to try but not to the size of the role intended

You think it’s ended, but it begins with each choice

And now you’re wondering if that song was the song you heard

When the form was just the word and the world was golden

And the only way to praise was to be sung as the dawn

Kingdoms and criminals under the same light

As dawn shall follow night

As fall shall follow fight

Sing yourself awake, call the winds into blowing

It’s a wise child who finds this advice

First among many many lives

And now you know that the song you heard

Has called your form in from the word

And the world is golden

You’ve become the dawn

Ken Stringfellow, Soft Commands

“I wish I were living in Amsterdam. I'm serious. America has no great tradition of transcendental work, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Royce, and that's about it. Otherwise, Americans are cowboy pragmatists, which is very disheartening. And when Americans do get interested in "transpersonal concerns," it is almost always quite crazy and regressive. But I'd also like to suggest that we all remember the importance of transpersonal practice. Our practice might be meditation, or yoga, or contemplation, or vision quest, or satsang, or spiritual work, or any work done with equanimity.

But seriously, we must practice. Not many people understand that Thomas Kuhn's extremely influential notion of "paradigm" does not mean a new conceptual idea; it means a new practice, which Kuhn renamed "exemplar." And the practice, the paradigm, the exemplar of transpersonal studies is: meditation or contemplation, by whatever name.

And so, please practice! Please let that be your guide. And I believe that you will find, if your practice matures, that Spirit will reach down and bless your every word and deed, and you will be taken quite beyond yourself, and the Divine will blaze with the light of a thousand suns, and glories upon glories will be given unto you, and you will in every way be home. And then, despite all your excuses and all your objections, you will find the obligation to communicate your vision. And precisely because of that, you and I will find each other. And that will be the real return of Spirit to itself.

You and I will find each other. And in our dialogue, and our mutual recognition, and our friendship, and our respect for one another -- soon even our love for each other! -- we will embody the very Spirit of the Cosmos, and honor that vision mightily. The sublime Ralph Waldo Emerson said: ‘The common heart of all sincere conversation is worship.’ And the beautiful, beautiful Holderlin: ‘... we calmly smiled, sensed our own God amidst intimate conversation, in one song of our souls.’

Bodhisattvas are going to have to become politicians Interview with Ken Wilber by Frank Visser

“In our present situation, the effectiveness of art needs to be judged by how well it overturns the perception of the world that we have been taught which has set our whole society on a course of bioshperic destruction. Ecology (and the relational, total-field model of “ecosophy”) is a new cultural force we can no longer escape—it is the only effective challenge to the long-term priorities of the present economic order. I believe that what we will see in the next few years is a new paradigm based on the notion of participation, in which art will begin to redefine itself in terms of social relatedness and ecological healing, so that artists will gravitate toward different activities, attitudes and roles than those that operated under the aesthetics of modernism.”

Suzie Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art

“[Suzi] Gablik speaks of the previous paradigm of the Enlightenment period and what it has meant to artists: ‘Individualism, freedom and self-expression are the great modernist buzz words.’ The notion that art could serve collective cultural needs rather than a personal quest for self-expression seems almost ‘presumptuous’ in that worldview. Yet this assumption lies at the base of a paradigm shift in art, a shift ‘from objects to relationships.’ Gablik challenges her coworkers not to settle for abstract theorizing in making this paradigm shift. She personalizes and therefore grounds the transformations that must be undergone when she insists that ‘the way to prepare the ground for a new paradigm shift is to make changes in one’s own life.’ Spirituality is about praxis, she is saying, not just theory.”

Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work

“Spirit is the most creative, inspiring, and meaning-giving element in all of life, and yet it is also the most dangerous. When spirit visits us, it moves us toward action, commitment, ambition, goals, ideals, vision, and altruism. All of these feed the soul, but they also wound it. To the soul their opposites are equally important—waiting, doubting, retreating, and not going anywhere, not knowing, not seeing, and being absorbed in oneself.

When spirit is not grounded and checked by soul, it quickly moves into literal forms—converting others and becomes blindly and callously ambitious. Its powerful force may turn without conscience into violence, its altruism blackened as intrusion into the freedoms of others. Its creativity becomes unbounded productivity, and its quest for ultimacy transforms into jealous possession of truth.”

Thomas Moore Meditations

“All names and forms are the garbs and covers under which the one life is hidden.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

“As I talk to men and women sincerely trying to find meaning and an end to a confusing and sputtering life, often I hear the jargon of popular psychology and the glowing bloated terms of the new spirituality. Emotionally it is always tempting to go from one extreme to another, from the bottom to the heights, from feelings of deflation to inflation. This bounce from earthy despair to airy hope; is a particular problem in the spiritual life.

The downward way toward sprit is unflinchingly disintegrative. In an early book of mine I made much of the alchemical saying ‘Solve et coagula—dissolve and congeal.’ Apparently we need to be dissolving all the time, even as we get ourselves back together. But saying it doesn’t accomplish it. We may have to give up the words that cheer us on and discover, simply by being open to the life unfolding in front of us, the particular way of disintegrating that turns us inside out and shows us our spiritual potential. For this mystery Renaissance thinkers, so sophisticated to these matters, used Plato’s image of a Silenus, an ugly and grotesque statue that opened up to reveal the gods.

Dis-integrate means not to feel whole. The word has an interesting and, to me, unexpected origin. It comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, and eventually came to mean untouched or complete in itself. Dis-integrate is a double negative, leaving us with touched, messed with, not original. We may have two different fantasies about our spiritual condition: one is to be pure and whole as we are from the beginning: the other, common in alchemy, is to be in process, to be making soul rather than just being. Spiritual people often speak glowingly of wholeness and pursue it as an ideal. But the soul is present in disintegration as well when we have entered life generously and have been affected, having lost our original innocence and ideals.

To be spiritual is to be taken over by a mysterious, divine compulsion to manifest some aspect of life’s deepest force. We become most who we are when we allow the spirit to dismember us, unsettling our plans and understandings, remaking us from the very foundations of our existence. Nothing is more challenging, nothing less sentimental, than the invitation of spirit to become who we are and not who we think we ought to be…

We are always becoming whole, and that means we are never whole but always disintegrating as we go. We find our wholeness as we are peeled away, like an onion, with the process finished when there is nothing left to peel. Perhaps only then will we be moved to give up the idea of wholeness altogether, having disintegrated sufficiently to be touched by life, and are therefore empty.”

Thomas Moore, The Soul’s Religion

We all feel vulnerable in this contemporary world. I think in some ways artists are the most vulnerable. Artists are wide open to all that we experience and in many ways lack psychological filters that most have allowing distance from the voluminous stimuli and the more terrifying prospects around us constantly piped in by a global media complex including twenty-four hour news channels and the web. I have been working for years on these ideas—and on myself (with varying success) attempting to come to terms with a vision which is anchored in profound experience yet nevertheless seems utterly impossible much of the time. In higher moments these ideas seem quite clear and attainable. When I find myself in middle ground much of this begins to seem a bit vague, anachronistic, and other worldly. When days grow darker, these ideas seem like a world of absurdity and delusion. I’ve done a fair amount of research over the years about men and women who’ve had visions and gone on to fulfill them and for most there was a long slow period of preparation—in which much had to take place within in order to make that person capable of channeling the ideas and energies which would be necessary for its fulfillment. They say that there’s considerable danger where visionary experiences are concerned because they can lead to inflation. For a long time I felt like an outsider wherever I went.

During my school years I was fairly focused and driven but much of what actually drove me on during those years was pride and competition. I have always had difficulty creating effective structure for myself and following it and therefore all but puddled out upon completing school. I didn’t have the confidence in myself or my ideas at that time to form strong supportive relationships to get my needs met and to further my ideas. I had been whimsical in school—arrogant and foolhardy in maxing out loans and blowing lots of money on materials—many of which were never used and left here and there along the way. I had been awakened yet also deeply wounded by my peak experiences over the years and it would be a long time before my soul would able to balance its interests against the urgency of my spiritual experiences.

So much seems to be at stake. Yet on many levels and over the years at many times I’ve seen that there are mysterious forces at play here—and as utopian or improbable as this whole thing seems—it or something similar can and in fact needs to be done. All resources must be gathered toward combating ignorance and injustice and to my way of thinking art is one of our greatest human assets. To turn away would be utter failure on my part. To face all this and to vulnerably and humbly approach people in powerful places seeking support is my only alternative.

To do the impossible, one must first see the invisible. Truth cannot be conceptualized, it must be sighted. To see with the eyes of the soul, one must first feel safe enough to let go of all that obscures its field of vision. triage has been conceived as a safe and encouraging place for gifted artists and thinkers to join with others of like mind in order to rise to their highest capabilities funneling the fruits of their gifts into state of the art multimedia events in the service of the community at large.

Our human dilemma will not be resolved through great ideas, but through changed hearts. Artists are often big hearted leaders. By guiding and supporting them into transformative breakthrough they will naturally go on to inform, transform and heal those around them. Generosity is not a distant ideal to be attained, but our very essence as human beings –as souls.

Great artists and creative thinkers are great souls. Herein is hope for our troubled world.

triage is intended to become an art driven transformational center for a world culture on the verge. We at triage are aware that there are no simple solutions to the systemic difficulties we all face. We call forth and celebrate a strange and translogical freedom to hold as true the notion that as artists willing to become empty of self-concern, the phenomenon known as “time” is on our side. All resources shall be called into our assistance for our intentions are truly altruistic. We have glimpsed triage beyond the envelope of space and time and know its existence to be real.

We have begun building it.

We propose that through the interface of ancient, contemporary and future wisdom held in the space of the sacred silent now we will construct collaborative new media works of art emerging from deep and authentic community. We assert that works pouring from our collaborations will yield unprecedented potentials in terms of the inspiration and activation of grassroots western culture toward spiritual renewal.

triage will be seeking support and funding from visionary contributors to provide stipends and consultation for collaborating interdisciplinary artists and thinkers. triage will be bringing in a variety of exciting guest artists and thinkers who are leaders in their respective fields and our friends and supporters will have access to some of the liveliest and most life affirming research and dialogue available anywhere today. Supporters and friends will have access to many of our key creative process moments along with raw early rehearsals. This will give us the energy of a live audience to reflect back to us the ideas and energies we’re working with while providing our benefactors with access to some ecstatic shared and personal experiences.

triage is formed upon a foundation based upon “perennial values” and we honor the essential non-hierarchical nature of reality and will provide an atmosphere largely free of pretense and political strife. We recognize that all human beings have gifts to share and that communities flourish in diversity. triage offers a model of radical inclusion in which all who sincerely want to be a part of our community will be welcomed. As our individual hearts grow we discover the power of dynamic tension which is to say the power of loving inclusion of divergent human leanings and tendencies which if held in compassionate balance can give amazing depth, potency and vibrancy to co-created works of art.

Those with eyes wide open are aware of the urgency of our global situation and are intent upon doing all possible to address it by working to heal ourselves and our world. We look forward to many wonderful formative evenings with guests, participants and supporters with a number of warm and casual events planned in order to provide clarification, comfort and encouragement to all who visit us. In the grand scheme of things we are not responsible for results—we’re responsible for our intentions and actions. When this truth is fully understood it offers great freedom. By assisting one another in focusing and shaping our intentions and learning to work with one another, miraculous events will become more and more a part of our working experience. What once might have seemed unlikely will seem easy, what once seemed impossible will seem probable. When artists see the abundance of assistance that is available to us on the part of higher forces, we will become more and more confident in our interfaced abilities to positively impact the world around us.

triage plans to rapidly ramp up organization and construction toward a number of projects even as “artist / transformers” are standing by in Kansas City sharpening their skills and awaiting funding and organizational opportunities to allow them to pour their formidable gifts into our transformative new media works. Most prospective participants have art degrees from leading nationally honored schools and many years under their belts in the development of specific skills and craft/s that they will be bringing to our triage work.

Art has always been inextricably linked to philosophical, theological, and scientific questions. Kierkegaard pointed out that “truth is only revealed if you go at it with an insane intensity -- take no prisoners! “-- and I like many others belong to that tradition. I align myself with those who lead the way in searching for solutions to the problems we face as beloved relatives on this gorgeous and troubled little planet. My primary interest is in doing my part to fully change myself knowing that whatever I might be able to do for the world will be contingent upon what happens within me—within the context of my daily practice. Each day I say some prayers and perform some rituals including journaling and meditation and try to let go of the controls and to slip into the moment where life is unfolding. Poe said, “The most obvious is the most difficult to fathom.” I‘ve found that the gift of contemplation can only be awarded us through our willing efforts in meditation. Meditation is our effort to surrender through various techniques involving mind, breath, and concentration. Contemplation happens by grace as God begins to do for us what we could never do by ourselves. Contemplation is the labyrinth through which we pass to rediscovery of the eyes of the child within. Only the child’s eyes can see the obvious. Only the awakened soul can fathom such mysteries as grace and rebirth.

The child within can see beyond the banal appearances of everyday life into the exalted and exotic world which lies right in front of us. It is the archetypal divine child who is the creative one. Play, display, passion, compassion, and creation are all aspects of the same archetypal lover or child within. Religious iconography has come up in my art work over and over from early on. At times I’ve been consciously destructive wanting to confront and eradicate the distortions I see within my personal shadow and in religious institutionalism. I give myself permission to enter these dark and often frightening spaces with the knowledge that I can approach them as personally and temporarily as I choose. When such things are reeled in and become simple personal processes it seems as though a great deal of the power is released from them. If I make discoveries that are useful to others it’s only because in truth we are all of one mind. If one has unitive experiences one can see that while our potentials are vast because we are connected to the One, our conceptual worlds are conversely relatively small. In praise of the One we can also relinquish self concern to Her. That which is actually true cannot be stained or destroyed—only the vestiges of its shadow forms can be altered. Human distortions created through misunderstanding of archetypal realities have wreaked much havoc throughout our civilization’s history.

My burning interest is to create collaborations between thoughtful creative people who can draw upon vast storehouses of creative healing potential within the balancing and containing context of communal relationship. I believe that art is moving away from modernism and all its compartmentalized assertions into something that is not currently fully understood yet simultaneously familiar. Suffice it to say that art and all viable intellectual pursuits must be thoughtfully linked to efforts toward embracing the crisis at hand—that of saving the earth. Great minds and spirits such as Mathew Fox have said that our problems must be embraced holistically. To understand the whole of art we must entertain questions of physics and philosophy. My dream is to create opportunities for people well versed in these forms to come together to teach each other and to find new models that give expression to their integration.

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso.

“Some renaissance theologians worked hard at reconciling paganism with Judaism and Christianity. We have yet to achieve this détente that is essential to the life of the soul. Fragments of our hearts and minds are located in the garden of Gethsemane and in the garden of Epicurus, on the zodiac of the Apostles and on the zodiac of the animals, in the wine of Dionysus and in the wine of the Eucharist, in the psalms of David and in the hymns of Homer.

It is not a matter of belonging to a religion or professing one’s faith, it is a matter of orientation in life and participation in its mysteries. We can all be pagan in our affirmation of all of life. Christian in our affirmation of communal love, Jewish in our affirmation of the sacredness of family, Buddhist in our affirmation of emptiness, and Taoist in our affirmation of paradox.

The new monk wears invisible robes. Thomas Merton travels across the globe, and in the home of Eastern monks, dies. Isn’t this a myth for our time and about the resurrection of the monastic spirit!”

Thomas Moore, Meditations

Conflagration 2005

a brief introduction to (some of) the central concepts of triage

1. art as individual and communal meditation holds great potential for personal and collective transformation.
2. art when linked to science and philosophy provides a panorama of transdisciplinary potentials toward personal, inter-personal, and trans-personal discovery, healing and growth.
3. Rather than focusing upon answers to generally unanswerable questions, we feel that communally built public art might offer deeper entrance into our shared central questions. Questions held in proper atmosphere give rise to inspired consciousness and deep reverence. These spaces are the essence of authentic veneration in terms of aesthetic experience and awe in terms of the numinous or sublime. When such fundamental mysteries are held in patient reverence they might serve to change us. Questions that when transmitted through highly developed works of art might evoke change in the community at large.
4. The spirituality of triage is not a monolithic spirituality of superior attainment, but one of love’s decent into purified childlike awareness—into our shared core of contemplative innocence. triage offers a spirituality of imperfection wherein contradictions and paradoxes are integrated resulting in the emergence of a new set of transcendent unifying principles and capacities.
5. art needs (at least in part) to be socially engaged. Seeing the plethora of challenges we all face in our present world situation, art holds practical potentials in the creation of works that impact our culture in functionally positive and healing ways.
6. art is deeply and eternally linked to mysticism…to the direct experience of divine love.
7. triage seeks to make work that is conceived, developed, and completed/performed/transmitted through spiritual community. This is high idealism but is the stuff of considerable research and practical experience in terms of community building, collective art making, non-profit development, etc.
8. triage will focus on making works that are interdisciplinary in their formation but designed and built with the intention of accessibility and inclusivity with our public. We want to make work in an organization that grows naturally with the completion of each successful project and that will provide a venue and equipment for new media as well as the experimental use of traditional media.
9. triage calls for the assistance of community leaders in all fields as well as benefactors sympathetic to the cause of the arts and social justice. As we develop budgetary abilities we intend to bring in leaders in a number of fields to teach, guide and assist us, to provide inspiration in the form of shows and talks, critiques, workshops, etc. The beauty of such a model is that in terms of our broader support community, we need not exclude “non-artists” from our gatherings. Anyone with enough vision and awareness to want to be involved is qualified. The “us vs. them” modernist mentality that still pervades the art world is a worn out and elitist model. If one groks the gravity of our current political climate and is aware of what may be a narrow window of opportunity to make work of this nature, one realizes that anyone who wants to be involved and is willing to work cooperatively is qualified. triage will be much stronger and more effective if professionals from a number of fields are involved—at least on advisory levels.

If all good people were clever,

And all clever people were good,

The world would be nicer than ever

We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow, ‘tis seldom or never

That the two hit it off as they should;

For the good are so harsh to the clever,

And the clever so rude to the good.

Elizabeth Wordsworth

“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we are not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.“

R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

The above speech by Nelson Mandela (Inauguration 1994) was originally written by Marianne Williamson

“Vulnerability, then, is not only the ability to risk being wounded but is most often made manifest by revealing our woundedness: our brokenness, our crippledness, our weaknesses, our failures and inadequacies. I do not think that Jesus walked vulnerably among the outcasts and crippled of the world purely as a sacrificial act. To the contrary, I suspect he did so because he preferred their company. It is only among the overtly imperfect that we can find community and only among the overtly imperfect nations of the world that we can find peace. Our imperfections are among the few things we human beings have in common….Indeed, only honest people can play a healing role in the world.”

M.Scott Peck, M.D., The Different Drum

“It is the elusive law of spirit: you can’t safely go high unless you also visit the depths. Without attention and cultivation, deep thoughts and emotions remain raw and wild. Spiritual people often ignore them, thinking them irrelevant. Yet no one is more plagued by freewheeling bigotries, sexual confusion, and aggression than the religious or spiritual zealot. The underworld of the saint echoes Dante’s inferno and Sade’s cellars.

Spiritual people may be anxious to avoid shame, the emotional realization that we are of earth and have a close and mysterious relationship to the animals. Shame is not guilt for having done something wrong; it is the sensation of not being the light and airy person we might aspire to. Shame connects us to our earthy nature, and though it is not entirely a comfortable feeling, it can initiate us into much needed depth. Shame corrects the hubris of the spiritual ascent.”

Thomas Moore, The Soul’s Religion

ten triage convictions

We propose that:

1. The world as we know it can be saved through radical change (metanoia) brought about (at least in part) through a new (cosmological) integration of art, science and philosophy.
2. Visionary Artists and Thinkers are ideally suited to initiate this change.
3. By transforming artists through shared spiritual process they will be primed to initiate transformation in the world at large.
4. Spiritual Community is the ideal support vehicle for such a change.
5. Emptied of selfish ambition and concern through a shared and structured spiritual process, gifted visionary artists and thinkers become transceivers for benign higher forces of understanding, forgiveness and love transmitting higher realities through their refined crafts.
6. triage does not have to be “maximally profitable” to be sustainable and through this sort of clarity we can focus our energies and efforts upon authentic discovery without pandering to the public or unscrupulous benefactors.
7. Through balance and communal integration, the personal self is naturally decentralized making a spiritual task that would otherwise seem impossible appear less daunting and in highest moments already achieved.
8. By making key connections throughout the extensive art community in Kansas City, triage can organize itself sufficiently to garner significant corporate support (without selling out) allowing for projects of significant production scale and widening span of influence.
9. triage doesn’t offer a new ideological bag of tricks but rather heightened love and kindness synthesized freely from all true religions and discovered through meditation and contemplation— expressed artfully and brilliantly leading to the inspiration of the public around us to (along with us) move to deeper spaces within and to ask deeper and more penetrating questions. The solution is to be found more in our questions than our answers.
10. We will model this breakthrough of childlike openness and love in all our processes and we will work to be at peace with the diversity within the unity of all.

a basic overview of the communal approach to triage

1. Gather

2. Encounter

3. Surrender

4. Acceptance

5. Transformation

6. Celebration

7. Consecration

8. Production

9. Performance

1. Gather

It is important on all levels to gain involvement and commitment from at least a sampling of Kansas City’s finest artists and thinkers. As has been stated elsewhere, I believe that many of the finest artists in KC are destined to be involved in triage. triage is not interested in usurping the other important art related organizations in the city and rather sees itself as a friend to all existing endeavors. triage will probably work best if there’s a steady turnover among performers keeping us refreshed and forever young and learning.

2. Encounter

The initial projects will be harder than subsequent ones in terms of these early phases of the process. Artists and creative thinkers are often very private individuals and because most of us are still under the influence of modernist belief systems we find a certain amount of vainglory in isolationism. Again, triage seeks only to change the way artists see themselves in the context of this work and its necessary processes and experiential thresholds. If artists participate in a show they may need to return to the desert or the isolation and privacy of their previous studio lifestyles for a period of time in order to assimilate and make sense of what they experienced and discovered in their time with triage. Some may never want to try something like triage again. I suspect that most however will want to be involved as much as possible with future projects and may create similar organizations and efforts on their own.

The encounter process is my term for what M. Scott Peck has termed, “chaos.” This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of authentic group process. The encounter phase is the stage of the process wherein as kind and gentle a way as possible, individuals become fully aware of who each one is in the context of the group and our shared intentions. This is where biases and beliefs and disagreements are laid out on the floor in the middle of the circle in plain view of everyone. This encounter phase is the point in the process where people give up the need to pretend and to posture and find out and assert who they are and what they think and feel. This is the beginning of a really courageous process of deep and meaningful honesty and self-disclosure and leads to the experience of the collision that we all feel when we try to bring our ideas and thoughts and beliefs (attachments) to others who may or may not fully agree with us (who have there own).

Some personalities thrive in this sort of conflict while others naturally recede and prefer silent observation to vocal participation. It seems important that everyone has at least some time in the limelight and that those who tend to want to speak too often learn to be quiet and to bracket their urges to express and hear someone else’s thoughts and feelings while the more stoic need to push against their natural urge to retreat and to let themselves be heard.

At times very volatile issues emerge and everyone is thunderstruck by the chaos and the confusion of the moment. The aggressive want to take over, the squeamish look for the door, and everyone throughout the spectrum of experience finds themselves wondering what they’ve gotten involved in and whether this thing is real or worth the hassle. For those who’ve been through a number of these experiences it can actually be an encouraging signpost. When one has been through the nooks and crannies of community processes enough times, one finds a level of equanimity and detachment by which to simply let things happen. When dealing with human beings in the context of building a true community one is dealing in the realm of mysterious phenomena and subtlety too complex to ever really control. One learns that rather than controlling, one must simply trust. As each person gathers positive experience through the process, each individual begins to build experiential knowledge that the process can be trusted—that we can each trust our personal experience as well.

3. Surrender

This is one of the most difficult and perhaps rewarding phases of the process. Surrender is perhaps the essence of all authentic spirituality. In this context we are speaking of the individual and collective struggle to let go of control and to experience the silence or emptiness of relinquished control. In dealing with a group of true artists and highly creative thinkers we’re talking about a coming together of some very strong personalities. It has been my discovery that even so, the more sensitive, intelligent and creative a person, the easier it is to tune into the conversation of the moment and to simply be with others. The more each member can surrender to deeper levels of silence, the more powerful the group becomes. Some mystics such as St. Theresa of Avila make a distinction between meditation and contemplation. In terms of the collective process, this is the point in the journey wherein people begin to sense some larger force beginning to show its will. This is the point in which awe becomes known—the point in which things seem to become easier—where inspiration begins to replace effortful struggle.

A simple analogy might be that of growing corn. If we as a coop wanted to grow corn together to eat and to sell in the market, the larger the field we develop, the more corn we’ll harvest to eat and to sell. Obviously there’s more work involved in clearing 100 acres than 1. This removing or emptying of belief systems and ideas we may have attached ourselves to and brought in the doors with us coming in to the community building process is the crux of the work of surrender. This is tough stuff one can be certain, but is also incredibly rewarding and freeing. As we learn that love always fills the vacuum left when anything is surrendered we welcome more and more the necessary struggles and difficulties we must walk through in order to make our beliefs real. When a group of people has suffered together and been truthful enough with one another and are clear enough about what they as a group want and don’t want for themselves, a miracle begins to grow in which each person begins to feel the extension of his or her boundaries grow. Our hearts literally grow larger and stronger—more capable of love and compassion. This surrender becomes the very process of forgiveness. We come to experience within the same equanimity of God who “rains upon the just and the unjust.” It is though this transformation that we begin to discover our capacity for unconditional love and for self-transcendence. This is the essence of enlightenment.

4. Acceptance

Just as in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of grief work, acceptance is the attainment of the miracle of Grace. In the context of community building this is the stage wherein a group of strangers has passed through some difficult thresholds together and have arrived at the shared mystical phenomenon known as “true community.” There is a palpable experience share by the group in this context. Suddenly individuals begin to experience a level of trust and warmth and safety that had heretofore seemed like only pie in the sky ideas. It is at this point that the group has become prepared for collaborative work that will go much deeper than simple creation by committee.

5. Transformation

This is a word that’s been tossed around so freely that it’s lost much of its specific meaning. A true transformation implies a qualitative change in the object in question. From a holographic standpoint, as we are changed as a group we are of course changed as individuals and vice versa. When gifted articulate artists are brought to this level of collaborative experience, there is an emergence of an entity recognized as the “Group” or “Community” that is truly something and this something is worthy of deep reverence. When the individuals comprising the community experience the power of this exalted thing each member becomes inspired by it and sees “IT” as the vehicle—not him or herself. There is a lot of relief in this as it takes a lot of the heat and pressure off the individual and allows each individual to begin to shift their perception to “it” as the sanctified vessel of which each individual is a part. As one builds experiential knowledge of this sort of thing one begins to understand new depths of ideas like “love” and “service” and one begins to know life in new and profoundly deeper dimensions. As one gathers experience along this line, one develops greater powers of perception and discernment on all fronts of one’s life. One’s sense of center deepens and becomes more and more deeply rooted offering greater and greater peace and well being.

6. Celebration

Words seem almost silly here. When we have arrived at this point in the process there won’t be too much confusion about celebration or what it’s about or why we should do it or whatever. Celebration will come naturally. In the context of making art, this is the point in which this gathering of master artists gets to really show off. In this context it’s appropriate to show off—as this is truly an archetypal impulse and is as pure and right as all pure archetypal impulses and having done the work of community building we will have the natural sense of balance and limitation to push off from and to return to in a sort of rhythm that will be as simple as breathing. The power of joy and love and inspiration will be as palpable as the wind. If we have done our work leading up to this point, this will be the point in which we really reflect upon ourselves as a community and each of us as individuals will be able to truly say that we’ve paid a price to get here and that we’ve grown perhaps more than we knew possible and that we’ve come to realizations that we’d never even dreamed of.

7.Consecration

This is the point in the process in which we as a community can reflect on all that we’ve discovered and through the shared experiential knowledge can say that what seemed impossible—perhaps ridiculous before now seems very possible—even eminent. We have found innocence and have been reborn. This doesn’t mean we’ve been made perfect—but that we’ve perhaps revisioned perfection and now understand that it is actually only us doing our being.

So enjoying our newfound awareness it is now time to dedicate ourselves to the sacred task that triage is about—participating in the Great Work—that of saving the world. This is simultaneously the stuff of cutting edge science and philosophy and the stuff of the ancients. There is nothing new under the sun…or one could say it’s all new—and this newness is the stuff of awakening…

8.Production

Our production processes will be the natural progression of the processes we’ve established through the previous stages. More will be revealed and articulated about this when the time comes. For now, suffice it to say that we will be operating on very high levels intuitively and that much of what goes on in typical ego driven production environments will not be necessary for us here. Having discovered our center—both individually and collectively we will be far more focused on loving communication and upon sharing and developing ideas that are of a higher trajectory than much of our previous work. Here we will find ourselves doing things that weeks earlier would have been inconceivable.

9.Performance

Our performances will be the icing on the cake. I don’t want to say much here. Suffice it to say that our performances will be the proof we’re seeking that triage’s productions will be authentically liminal. People will be enthralled at our shows—and changed…

Artists are generally highly individualized people and perhaps need to be in order to find and to maintain an original and personal voice in this chaotic world. Our culture is one that challenges authenticity at every turn. All sensitive and intelligent people must daily face the distractions of an onslaught of misinformation and distractive stimuli. We are all confronted with the sway of skewed materialistic values and a decaying culture fueled by fear, pride, and competition. It seems an act of moral courage to stand aside, to simply be, and to reflect on life with any real depth or conviction. We find ourselves living in a world that is unprecedented in its complexity, distraction and threat. We are running out of time to change. Many have no hope that we even can.

The image of the artist who peacefully transgresses against the often mindless traffic of pop contemporary culture is a complex one that I have long pondered. Suzie Gablik, the well known art and social critic who was herself considered a darling of central historical art figures such as Jasper Johns of the 1960’s New York scene has compellingly deconstructed the philosophical underpinnings of the “art industry” calling into question many of its foundational precepts. Along with Gablik, I too am a student and believer in the work of Carl Jung and feel that his legacy is crucial in finding and developing a workably cogent strain of meaning in reference to our contemporary world. He was for me the first true magus of our modern world who had the depth of vision, the moral conviction and intellectual sophistication to decipher and articulate many of the all but forgotten “premodern” myths and archetypal influences that had been scoured away and ignored by the intellectual elite since the earliest days of De Cartes and Newton.

While contemporary “art” and all it represents sprawls philosophically in all directions, Gablik along with others has steadfastly questioned the modernist doctrines that so many of us still find ourselves living out. At the forefront of concern for most “reconstructivists” are the pressing global challenges that must be met if we are to continue on. As a consequence of personal breakthroughs, I have been working to excavate and to organize a new philosophy that might embrace many shared key assertions while moving on to a new and more intimately detailed personal territory. I subscribe to Gablik’s insistence for the need for the “reenchantment of art.” I believe as she does that any artist who is on some level conscious and open hearted must be asking him or herself what they can do—if anything to address the shadowy and gargantuan specter at hand. If art is to have the impact that it needs to have upon our troubled contemporary culture we must develop new pathways that are both accessible and practical.

Along with Gablik, other “postmodern reconstructivists” argue against the continued thrust of individualism that reigns as the supreme and guiding value continually defining most artistic practice. This is hard to counter. After all, if it is derivative how can it be true art? Can art made communally be an attractive and inviting enterprise for highly skeptical individualistic artists? One insight that M. Scott Peck had which is mentioned in The Road Less Traveled is that he found that there are 4 discernable levels of spiritual growth. 1. Chaotic and anti-social, 2. Formal and Institutional, 3. Skeptic and Individual and 4. Mystic and communal. The thought I have in referencing this in the context of artists is that while many are highly individualistic, according to this construct, they are actually more “spiritual” than there church going families and the culture they transcended upon leaving home. My theory has always been that gifted artists hover above compartmental constructs more than non-creative people and in some ways defy a clear categorical assessment. At the same time, I have over and over discovered that given the right environment, artists are highly communal, highly generous, and easily able to channel their formidable mental and spiritual facilities—in the right environment.

This means that as unlikely and perhaps at first glance undesirable as “communalism” might seem that if it is carefully developed, it is in fact highly attractive and practical. I would propose that, as with most concepts to be held within the often seemingly contradictory framework of integrative thinking, we must find ways to enfold and to work within the dynamic psychospiritual atmosphere of seemingly antithetical concepts and values. We need a sort of intellectual sorbet here to clear the palate. This is undoubtedly difficult stuff. Most of these ideas seem stale or disproven to a lot of people—while others seem too lofty or vague. Bear with me here. Originality and singularity of personal voice can and should be honored while simultaneously holding space for new communal orientations which are more directed toward our pressing interdependent social concerns. I believe we must find the courage or perhaps purity to confront our world situation and make the effort to develop art forms accordingly. As Gablik first said, art must (and I believe will) move from its orientation from objects to relationships. If we don’t change, we face destruction.

With the advent of ever newer and further improved technologies, “new media art” and “transdisciplinary” approaches are continually evolving. Most artists would readily agree that our world is in crisis but too often throw up their hands in despair. Few can find any sufficient philosophical container by which to transform their studio practices toward workable and seemingly attainable global solutions. Consequently they continue to make work in solitude transmitting perceptions of our plight to the limited sphere of their immediate audience. Some are making politically charged work that attacks corrupt power structures and misinformation utilizing many of the same modernist modalities of our 20^th century predecessors. Some artists are content to work as primitives within the seemingly limited sphere of their influence funneling their often profound sensitivity into the world within their immediate circle and hoping that by doing so the world is slowly being transformed. Because we are in fact interconnected—all these are effectual. One pressing question is, are they working well enough—fast enough?

triage is an amalgam of ideas born of twenty-five years of research and a number of visionary experiences that have compelled me to explore what are for me potentially new perspectives resulting in an approach that has only partially been tested, but has become more and more theoretically defined. It is my hope that artists and influential members of the bustling art community in Kansas City will see enough merit in these ideas to feel inspired to get involved and to contribute to this body of work. It is not the intention of triage to create conflict with creatives who are not yet interested in exploring these possibilities concerning spiritual, transformational or communal models triage honors art made in all formats and according to all philosophical doctrine—whatever they present themselves as. In the context of philosophical multiplicity there is room for bickering over differing perceptions. It has been an unyielding ambition of mine to make work in some sort of approach that as of yet, does not fully exist.

For many years I languished in fear, self-doubt, and uncertainty. I have made a number of attempts to gather artists together and have always been humbled by the level of complexity and personal difficulty such undertakings imply. While making efforts to erect some new philosophical framework upon which to build practical ideas, I’ve had to circle back over and over to deep and persistent personal challenges which at times have clouded my judgment and undermined my effectiveness. We all seem to learn most from our mistakes, and I have had no shortage of material here. I’ve endured years of depression in trying to come to terms with the visage of an enormous gap between the scale of my ambitions and the seeming limitation of my resources and/or capabilities.

Twenty-five years ago I went through a radical and transforming process which became my personal awakening and the birth chamber for triage I seemed hell bent on self-destruction in my teens and was using every drug I could lay my hands on by the age of sixteen. I began sticking needles into my arms just months after discovering pot. There was a raging fire inside of me that I had lost touch with. Consequently I found myself celebrating my twenty-first and twenty-second birthdays living on the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately I was able to be at one of the few quality environments of this type in the world—the Menninger Clinic then located in Topeka, Kansas. It was here that I witnessed and experienced some of the miraculous potentials to be found in communal approaches. Because of the long and illustrious career of the founders, pioneering doctors, Karl and Will Menninger, for the past seventy-five years or more, the institution has been able to attract some of the most talented psychiatric professionals in the world. I was blessed to be on “Two North” which was led by an amazing section chief named, Dr. Dean Collins. Years later I found out that this man was one of the architects of the team approach for the institution. He is clearly a master community builder.

It was in the community meetings and team meetings that much of my healing seemed to take place. There is a mysterious and amazing power to be found in the context of a real community and all these years I’ve believed in its fundamental and perhaps unparalleled potentials. Words like community are often tossed around in our culture until they lose their specificity and power. Because of my vision for building art within a community I’ve been researching the concepts and definitions around related phenomena for many years now. I am convinced that a real community is a mystical body—a vessel through which transformative archetypal energies can coalesce and congeal, expand and be transferred. In this context we don’t have to possess all the answers. We simply need structures which enable us to co create with superior and always mysterious Higher Forces.

The greatest pioneer of community building and maintenance in my mind is Dr. M. Scott Peck. He devoted much of his illustrious career to the intensive study of community and went on to be the preeminent trailblazer in the field of its practical application offering workshops to thousands of people of all stripes throughout the world. I am confident of the accuracy of his mapping of community processes and believe that with some fairly simple organizational development, we could adapt these to bring highly skilled and talented artists and thinkers together to make work the likes of which the world has never seen.

It’s a hard sell though. Most artists I know are very busy. The most successful ones are hustling to make work for corporate clients and their interests and the not so commercially successful ones are holding down

two and three jobs in order to make their overhead. Even artists such as MK 12 who are rapidly making an international name for themselves and creating some breathtaking work are humping to sustain their ventures and often find themselves in contractual relationships with corporate interests they secretly loath. Only the most tenacious and driven artists are able to erect a successful studio career in our oblivious American culture. Somehow, we need to gain enough support that triage is not fastened to the maniacal production values that run rampant throughout our first world American culture. The answers that we are seeking can only come in within the context of a less willful atmosphere. The heroism of overexerted artists will not solve the problems we all face. This should be evident enough my now.

My dream is to create triage offering facilities and strategies that will make it possible for many of Kansas City’s finest artists to make work that will impact our world in positive and transforming ways. Let’s face it, if things don’t radically change, our world is likely rapidly going down the tubes. If change is to be made, it will probably be initiated by the most creative members of our culture—the artists. My vision is to locate private and corporate donors who recognize the writing on the wall and who are sophisticated and wise enough to see the efficacy of something like bluelab. I believe what Gandhi said when he stated that if one wishes to change the world; one must first become that change. This dovetails with what Einstein said when he stated that no problem can be overcome at the same level of consciousness in which it was created. So here is our problem—and my proposed solution.

We have one of the most dynamic art communities in the world right here in Kansas City. Many of the artists are graduates of the Kansas City Art Institute which is one of the finest schools around. We have some amazing galleries and art professionals, a wonderful and highly acclaimed and growing art periodical in the Review, some very fine critics and writers not the least of which is Alice Thorson who’s often quoted in the big national magazines, and a number of first tier artists—some in multiple galleries and museums. Along this line we have some amazing things going on in music and sound and several performance and theater groups that are doing work comparable to that of New York or L.A. Then we have MK 12 who are nothing short of stars in the motion graphics industry. I am humbled by the enormous contributions of people like Jim Leedy, Patrick Clancy, Mike Miller, David Hughes, Kate Hackman, Margaret Silva, John O’Brien, David Ford, Adam Jones, Bruce Hartman and Peregrine Honig along with several others who each in their own unique way have helped to make the Kansas City scene one of the most expansive in the United States.

triage does not seek to co opt all this but I do hope to borrow freely. My thought is that with a concerted effort we can gain ground rather quickly. Major corporations would likely line up to help us if we could amass a roster with some of the above mentioned names shining on it. I want to invite people in the Kansas City

Community to envision the potentials explored here. I’m not proposing replacing all the wonderful things that are already happening. I’m suggesting it might be possible to add this to the mix in a way that will simply raise the value of our community as a whole. I believe triage offers a win-win situation. With sufficient corporate support we could build work of such power and quality that it would force the public hand for sustainability.

The Convergence

My job is not to perform the myriad of technical and artistic crafts and sheer magic that must be achieved if

triage is to have the effect upon the world that I hope for. There are a number of first class artists on our prospective roster who’ve toiled, sacrificed and slaved for years and years to perfect their gifts and related skill sets. My job is to hold this vision firmly and diligently in my heart, to locate and to convince the powers that be to provide the necessary funding, to lay out the over view of our “school” and philosophy and to enroll and inspire the appropriate artists bringing order, fertility and blessing to the project. I do not plan to do most of the teaching and lecturing involved but will work to bring in a number of reputable teachers with vast experience in their respective fields. By allowing a number of teachers from a number of backgrounds we will encourage a broader and more diverse foundation for the informing and development of our community and will discourage the tendency for sedentary political influences which set us up for all kinds of distractions and dilution.

Those of you who are called to triage have been going through deep interior processes—consciously or

unconsciously your whole lives. Most have felt the vague pull toward something like this on various levels for many years. Many have been blessed with an insatiable curiosity for life and its mysteries. Most of you have had deeply personal mystical experiences as long as you can remember and many have perhaps considered some form of ministry or philosophy as a vocation. Most of you have sensed in the depths of your being that you’ve been called to do something new—perhaps something uncanny yet these sorts of ideas seem strangely natural, familiar and unegotistical. You have known on some primary level “who you are’ for as long as you can remember and have generally found it easy to trust this very personal natural space.

Devotion to the creative process for you has always felt limited or compromised by rote academic, religious or philosophical rhetoric. Your natural inclination toward art does not constrict or limit you and though it calls for sacrifice of ego or false self which can be difficult—most of you have had comparatively little struggle with this sort of thing—as you entered this life as bodhisattvas beyond much of this typical human struggle. Letting go could be defined as the release of the illusion of separation that opens one to the vastness of the Mystery of our lives. Though the process of “depth spirituality” or mysticism is daunting and at times painful, it is more often extremely gratifying and joyous. The highs experienced through focused sacrificial spiritual practice are unparalleled. The false self is of course in opposition to this process which it knows to mean its demise and will resist it with its last breath. Because of the resourcefulness and cunning of the false self, structured spiritual direction has been found to be next to essential although as I’ve watched many of you over the years, you seem to get along without much external direction at all.

Gifted artists and thinkers throughout history have held a highly skeptical regard for “authority” and have taught themselves to trust their inner guidance—often in the face of great personal risk. The idea of a spiritual guide may be met with considerable reservation. This should not be too great a burden however. A true and skillful spiritual director is more of a supporter and skillful listener than a directive supervisor and is slow to criticism and quick to love and nurturance. In the outlining of bluelab, I believe that each person involved will need to address such issues in their own way. For those who acquire a guide, the guide will be according to your choosing. We only suggest that you select one and use wisdom and discretion in the process. We will have on staff a few such people—all with impeccable credentials who are well known within a network of well regarded teachers and leaders.

: “A friend is needed; travel not the road alone,
Take not thy own way through this desert!
Whoso travels this road alone
Only does so by aid of the might of holy men.”

Jalaluddin Rumi

“The Sufi teacher never wants his pupil to be come an occultist or a great psychic or a man with great power. This does not mean that he will not become powerful, but the responsibility of the teacher is to develop the personality of the mureed (student), that it may reflect God, that it may show God's qualities; and when that is done then the responsibility of the teacher is over....”

“... What Christ taught was, "Make your personality as it ought to be, that you may no more be the slave of the nature which you have brought with you, nor of the character which you have made in your life; but that you may show in your life the divine personality, that you may fulfill on this earth the purpose for which you have come."
Philosophy, Psychology and Mysticism, Hazrat Inayat Khan

When one finds and learns to trust the sacred silence or the empty stillness within (which most real artists are already fairly adept at), one has found true liberation. When this state has become integral to one’s being, one has become unbreakable. There is exhilaration in knowing this and one begins to see life not as a short term set of challenges and obstacles, but as a vast and benign process of love—the service to others, service to the whole…to the One. To be in the flow of Creation is the greatest experience known.

It takes time to adjust to this level of consciousness and being but is in fact our most natural and effortless state and the pathways to this point have been clearly charted by countless mystics and saints of all traditions throughout recorded human history. At the point in the process when individuals arrive at this place they realize their fundamental interconnectivity and the basic mystery that is our existence in God and become far less concerned about their “personal” self and its priorities and more intent upon service to those around them and the greater good.

“I am the vine and you are the branches.” From this sphere of orientation one is potentially open to all, connected to all, sees all, experiences all, and channels all. Through the achievement of silence one is whole. When one is whole, one is fully prepared to function as a channel of the Sublime without too much fear of adulteration or distortion. Deleterious personal influences have been sublimated, integrated, and thereby neutralized. One can proceed with confidence that their impulses—though perhaps strange by the world’s standards, are divine—and therefore ultimately healing and integrative for all. It can be said that there is a fine line between courage and recklessness, but one of the beautiful things about a functioning community is that we are all held in check by our need for and our love for one another. For me, there is great joy and encouragement in this.

“Unless you become as little children you will not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

This is a call to the “superbabies.” I have chosen this odd name because it seems to embody their image and identity so fittingly. There is an irony here that can’t be ignored. Reinhold Niebor said that where there is power there can be no love and many have said over the years that the whole concept of a “super race” is of course problematic and often signals racism. In the case of triage, “superbabies” is used somewhat playfully although on another level, the superbabies are perhaps chosen ones who’ve been given the grace and awareness to rediscover our shared core human innocence and to demonstrate the responsible wielding of power. Only time will tell. One of the concepts that I’ve long been intrigued by is that of the complex relationship between the individual and community in the context of performance, display, and notability. Fame has been the downfall of many an artist. Our hope is that through certain practices and structures anonymous service will become more attractive than vanity and pride.

Imagination has been defined as the suspension of disbelief and perhaps one must have considerable imagination to believe any of this. If one can believe this you might see that superbabies are gifted and highly independent artists and thinkers who were born to lead and who are being assembled to participate in the Great Work in these last days of our present epoch. Superbabies have exceptional facilities of charisma, vision, knowledge, intelligence, invention and talent. I believe that many have already converged in Kansas City and are occupying and supporting themselves in a number of ways—some through their primary creative talents. All are great souls who’ve sacrificed their lives in times past for the Cause and therefore belong to God and live under His/Her covering and are here now to participate in the Effect. Their allegiance is unquestionable. They came into this lifetime pure of heart and consequently have from childhood intuitively seen beyond the mainstream trappings of cultural illusion, dualism and the various and sundry institutions of religious and ideological fundamentalism.

triage is the structure framed and articulated as the organizational vessel through which our Work will unfold. My function is to gather everyone together: the superbabies, the teachers, the facilitators, the guiding elders, and the supporters and to assist and to initiate the preliminary foundational processes leading to the formation of a true community of great artists and through them to the transformative productions to follow. Some might call such a structure problematic or arcane. Some might call it benign despotism. I have contemplated upon issues concerning spiritual and political power and its abuse for decades, and because I’m clear that I am in fact an imperfect servant of a higher order of things, am prepared to serve/lead with compassion, tenderness and humility. We will also have elders, advisors, and teachers to assist, guide and encourage us, and when the need arises to set and reinforce boundaries. Because of the gravity and extent of this mission, I am deeply humbled and welcome input and direction from those I deem mature and trustworthy as guides.

One of the safeguards of the communal system envisioned is that of a sharing of responsibility that brings the community together regularly for warm and informal gatherings to discuss openly and explicitly any and all issues that are a concern to each of us and to our organization as a whole. Again, a community is a gathering of leaders. We will focus upon modes of interaction and processes that empower each of us and make each of us feel loved and valued. As we do, our natural tendency will be to release self-concern and to give more and more of ourselves to the community—and ultimately to the world.

Dynamic discussion of controversial issues can be a foundational safeguard against formation of psychosocial shadow material as well as the tendency toward pie in the sky utopianism or self-congratulatory crystallization. I believe in the self-correcting and counterbalancing capabilities of true community—which again is to say, a divinely organized and guided mystical body of awakening souls. I believe that God gave me my shortcomings so that I would not be too effective a tyrant or iconoclast. Human beings are prone to character flaws and failure—but even these can be used for God’s purposes. Through our weakness and brokenness we are paradoxically whole. Only those who are intimate with spiritual processes and who have endured their own personal dark night can fully understand the sublime economy of divine ways. God uses everything we have for Her purposes. (I intentionally flip back and forth in referring to God as him or her—because God is of course both while always more than both of these)

While on this topic, it should be noted that many of my friends are not at all comfortable with concepts and labels along these lines. I have come to believe that in some cases my close friends have a resonant experience of life that is completely compatible with my own—yet find discussions around religious issues to be disconcerting if not distasteful. I am hopeful that in time they’ll have patience with such difficult matters. I feel that words are always a problem when dealing with topics that are so often beyond words, but the rub is that as human beings making efforts to connect with one another and to meaningfully explore such important ideas, we are forced to grapple with the often unsavory or painstaking issues of languaging the nebulous if not ineffable.

If one keeps in mind that our effectiveness is as a community and that communication is primary to being a community, one learns to more delicately embrace the issues of speaking about that which always tends to defy being spoken about. I believe that Love is with us and is far more gracious and tender and present and involved than most of us dare imagine. Why? Because of my personal experiences—not because I read it somewhere. Having said that, Love is also completely transcendent of all such concerns, but for our purposes what does that really matter? triage is not intended as an ideological structure—and in fact, is primarily designed to help each of us strip away much of that sort of thing. There will be those involved who are perhaps devoutly religious, but for our purposes, one need only be willing to consider (as in AA) that we as a community are more powerful and effective and therefore more important than we as individuals. For those who might scoff, I would say that if you become involved and committed to the ideas and the practices which we will be employing, it won’t be long before you too will have experiential knowledge of community, and once you’ve tasted it, I assure you that you’ll crave more. We are here to locate and use all our resources to make work that has a chance to transform us as we make it, while ultimately transforming the world around us as we transmit it. What could be more rewarding for real artists than the deep satisfaction that we are making a difference—even if the difference is not yet readily measurable.

I am intent upon the construction and maintenance of a lateralized and consensual power system and will work with everyone including our advisors and elders to develop and provide processes for the community

that are wholesome and comfortable for all involved. I realize that everyone who commits to bluelab does so with awareness of our own human frailties and paradoxical brokenness and that the primary function of bluelab is only fulfilled as we operate and create work as a true community. This means that all that are accepted and committed to triage are to be regarded as leaders of their own right and that the teachers and elders will work concertedly to support each member with great compassion and skill so that each participant will be encouraged to their highest level of creative and collaborative functionality.

When seen through the distorting lens of the unrefined human ego, these ideas may seem complex and esoteric. When one has found the silence of wholeness beyond the chatter and distraction of the false self, they appear extremely simple and natural. To be transformers of contemporary world culture we must first be transformed ourselves. Upon some degree of transformation of our members as a group, we will see clearly as a group, feel clearly as a group, and function concertedly as a fully empowered community.

The mystical path to union with God is the greatest and most rewarding adventure known to humankind. By relocating our individual consciousness in “heaven” we will then know clearly and intuitively how to construct and transmit our work to the world.

“The rules of communication are best taught and only learned through the practice of community-making. Fundamentally, the rules of communication are the rules of community-making, and the rules of community-making are the rules for peacemaking.”

The Different Drum M.Scott Peck M.D.

History

“The future must enter into you a long time before it happens.”

Unknown

As a curious child raised by well-intentioned but dysfunctional fundamentalist parents I grew up with a deep sense of confusion resulting in childhood depression, shame and isolation. I had the crazy making early childhood influences of a rageaholic father and a doting and often syrupy mother. I knew at an early age that something was amiss in their world view—though I could find no one to substantiate my hunches. This produced a deep sense of loneliness and self-doubt. I knew by the time I was four that I wanted to be a missionary but on the other hand I just couldn’t get my mind around the idea that there is a God who only loves Christians—Church of Christ Christians to be precise—and that all my neighborhood and school friends were going to hell. By early adolescence I often laid in bed peering into the abyss trying to come to grips with the horrors of everlasting hell. I became more and more isolated inside. I felt like an imposter in almost all situations—whether in the van on the way to a tennis tournament, addressing a class during a philosophical discussion or sitting on the edge of a bed waiting for a snaggle-toothed junkie to shoot me up with smack or speed. I was deeply alone.

In high school I was selected to interview the venerated philosopher and writer, Eric Hoffer on stage in front of the student body. I snuck home and rushed down several bong hits trying to manage my unbearable anxiety. As result of the many drugs I was using I contracted hepatitis my senior year even while making straight A’s (o.k. they were easy classes) and collapsed and lost first round as a seeded competitor in the state tennis tournament. Weeks later after being out of school and circumventing finals because of my good standing I took forty dollars worth of mescaline for the cap and gown ceremony, relapsed, and was sick most of that summer.

The first years of college I bounced from drug to drug, school to school and eventually treatment center to treatment center. I was numb with uncertainty. I landed in jail facing serious felony charges in 1979 and after having the grace to be represented by some of the most influential attorneys in Oklahoma who were able to get deferred probation in lieu of prison, violated my probation and ended up in the emergency admissions unit of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

There I was blessed to be under the care of Dr. Becquer Benalcazr. I knew from our first moments together that “Dr. B.” was an exceptional psychiatrist. Despite being a multi-lingual surgeon turned leading psychoanalyst, Benalcazr seemed well versed in altered levels of consciousness and non-mainstream modalities. The first time I looked into his huge dark Columbian Indian eyes I recognized the presence of a master and as he gazed into me with a rare depth and unselfconsciousness he told me, “I don’t know if we can help you here or not” and sent a tremor from the base of my spine up into my scalp. I certainly hoped he could.

I brought all my defenses to bear but was steadily overwhelmed by this man’s (along with several other outstanding therapists there) charm, charisma, playfulness and occasional deadly gravity. As the treators chipped away at my walls for months and months eventually I had a sort of sudden and profound exorcistic release and seemingly effortlessly began to learn to trust and to slow down and to move through my denial and pain and into the silence. I had always been terrified of my own inner poverty and had created a myriad of escapes. The fear of my own nothingness which I had probably exacerbated through extensive drug use and a chaotic youth had led me to this helpless point in my life. I fancied myself an artistic genius that would never live to see 30. I had certainly met my match here.

Fortunately, Menninger’s had as much in common with a college as a hospital and I was allowed to (under the guidance of art and music therapists) study music, to make paintings with professional quality materials, and to spend a lot of my extra time in a quiet and unencumbered environment. They say that in centuries gone by that troubled kids were sent to monasteries to grow up. In many ways Menninger’s was that sort of environment.

It was in the “community meetings” that I first experienced the miracle of true community. The doctors, nurses, activity

therapists, psychologists, social workers, and technicians were from all over the world. To work at Menninger’s was considered an honor and so these were people who came to work each day with real passion. Several of the staff displayed qualities that I have come to recognize as ecstatic, illumined, and even genius. I sat in rooms equally divided between some of the finest professionals in their fields and some of the most profoundly disturbed and tortured patients I’d ever encountered. Many of the young adults on our unit were childhood schizophrenics and had been in and out of institutions most of their lives. A few of us were fairly normal at first glance and some were quite gifted. So it was in these meetings of an hour or more with all of us sitting on chairs and couches and the floor filling a large meeting room that I witnessed so many things that have continued to have such a marked influence upon me.

I was for a time terrified of these meetings but I think I was so cut off from my own fear that initially I only recognized my desire to challenge and impress and taunt others. I had a huge ego and this was the first place I’d been where I felt that I was surrounded by worthy adversaries. These gatherings were largely unstructured. Anyone in the community was welcome to start the meetings and anyone—staff or patient was encouraged to speak up and to say what they felt about whatever the topic presented itself as. I gradually recognized that I was able to settle into this beautiful and subtle atmosphere of love, tolerance, and kindness that healed me deeply. There was something sublime about this unlikely mixture of human beings that opened me to a much deeper dimension of inter-personal possibility. The treators displayed such grace and poise and thoughtfulness even as they occasionally showed their own brokenness and weakness. Stereotypes and idiosyncrasies melted away revealing these amazingly vivid and tangible individual

human beings. In the air one could often sense a palpable lightness and joy—even in the face of utter darkness.

Most of all when thinking of community, I remember the beloved section chief, Dr. Dean Collins. In the two years that I lived there as a long-term patient I never caught even a glimpse of disingenuity in that man. He was a tower of depth and awareness and fecundity. He was conversely accessibly squishy and Buddha like. He was soft-spoken but always rosy complected and potent. Occasionally there was chaos such as when once a fellow patient committed suicide on the unit. During the emergency community meeting the following day I noticed Dr. Collins sitting sage like and fully engaged, yet completely transcendent and compassionate. There were others times when I would be sitting alone in the cafeteria eating lunch or dinner and Dr. Collins would politely ask if he could join me. I never ever saw staff—especially doctors sitting with patients. He loved us as only a true saint could. My egotistical antics never seemed to faze him and I always felt warmly received by him in whatever the circumstances. It was his commitment to truth and his absolute integrity and clarity that sat the tone for the quality of our community. Years later in a video interview for a school project entitled, “The Return of the Soul”, he humbly disclosed to me that one of his proudest achievements had been his leadership in the development of the “team model” for the institution. He is one of the finest men I have ever known.

I eventually had what I have come to understand as several unitive experiences. Somehow, Grace blessed me with the willingness and capacity to release myself to this unknown and numinous presence I was coming to perceive. It was during this initial period of ecstatic consciousness that I first glimpsed some of the possibilities that I have come to call “bluelab.” The odyssey which began with a long and seemingly effortless drift into lost contemplative days and evenings was punctuated by an explosive light experience followed by 2 long and breathtaking weeks of ecstatic experience. This was to become the defining period of my life. I felt that I was reborn and that suddenly my mind and perceptions were as clear as a child’s. The scales had fallen away and everything looked completely new. Sunlight flitted on the wind ruffled leaves of trees in the Kansas June in a way that seemed electric and rife with meaning. When I looked upon people around me, my heart was crushed by the weight of their pain and my compassion and love for them. I melted at the sheer innocence and fragility of human beings and with the sense of tragedy that seemed to counter their exquisite beauty. As I stood consciously in eternal awareness all was infused with unfathomable love. I knew as never before that all things of this physical world would ultimately pass away. Each moment was so filled with beauty and magic I had to return to my breath and to prayers to stay with it all. The edge of terror is the edge of ecstasy and the edge of death is the edge of creation and for a time I hovered there without effort. As though seeing a wall of thunderclouds overhead I looked up to see the eternal stream of mans intellectual and spiritual knowledge drift over me as I looked back to the dark horizon of the beginning of time. I sobbed with joy and anguish more than once.

One night I was dreaming that I was floating around in a whirlpool of light when suddenly I woke up next to my roommate Sam’s bed with my knees to the floor. He was sitting up looking at me pale with terror as he said, “Jeff, Jeff are you alright, are you alright? I don’t know if I was awake or dreaming but I looked up and saw you floating around in the air in this whirlpool of light!” I heard myself immediately say, “It’s the Holy Spirit.” I felt completely calm and composed and simply returned to my bed and to sleep.

One afternoon I looked up at the sky and it seemed a rare luminous blue like a sort of translucent turquoise or lapis. I was frozen for several moments in awe. This was the experience that led many years later to naming this organization “Blue Glass.” In searching for a name, I was reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and ran across the concept

called, “Rigpa.” I won’t get into all the subtle meanings of this word, but the idea of it is symbolized by the “Sky of the True Mind” as opposed to the “clouds of human ignorance and confusion.”

I somehow knew that the walls of belief systems that I’d been blocked by had collapsed like those of Jericho. I stood in radical amazement before the whole drama of creation feeling like a child suddenly delivered into the sunlight from the dark and hopeless toil of a third world factory. Somehow I knew that I wanted to share this sense of liberation that I’d been blessed with.

In one vision, I saw a stage. It looked like the stage was perhaps 10 feet tall and on the front of it I saw a 3-leaf clover pattern formed out of light. The experience filled me with a tremendous sense of responsibility and it seemed that I was witnessing something outside the envelope of space and time fully developed and real. On the stage I saw a group of performers of which I was one. I felt completely overwhelmed with the experience and was left with a quaking sense of inadequacy in terms of the scale and magnitude of the spectacle in contrast to my own sense of brokenness and uncertainty. I felt I was being shown my future. I anguished as I seemed to stand in a vortex between different dimensions, at once joyous and elated and honored while simultaneously ripped apart by my overwhelming sense of the scale and mystery and shock of a whole new level of consciousness of which I’d never dreamed.

In 1893 I was offered a paraprofessional counseling job at Community Addictive Treatment Center 120 Day program in Topeka. I’d been out of treatment for about a year and had been doing Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the treatment center as a volunteer when one of the directors invited me to be on a television show which was done live in a Topeka station in concert with a national program to be aired that night called “Chemical People.” Things went well enough that the Assistant Director hired me to come to work in the treatment center. The program was created to assist men coming our of prisons in the region with a history of drug problems to reintegrate into life outside of prison without returning to drugs and alcohol. There were a number of miraculous experiences there but two come to mind. There was a client in the population name Phil M. who reminded me of Al Pacino and who’d made it fairly clear to me at times that he would like to take me out. My job was to drive a van with usually 16 guys to a garage owned by the treatment center where I worked with the guys ½ day 3 days a week and all day for 2 detailing cars. I was alone with 16 guys many of whom had been behind bars for several years and Phil was no exception. He was a fairly short but very tough looking little Hispanic man in his early thirties. One day for some reason he began with his stares toward me and I instinctively invited him upstairs with me to the office. As we went up the stairs and rounded the corner to the area where my large vintage desk sat I reached over to grab an extra wooden chair to drag it over closer to my desk and when I did and as he sat down I looked into his eyes and it was as though a flood of love and compassion poured down upon us both. We both broke down and cried for several minutes as I hugged him. From that day forward Phil changed—somewhat profoundly. The man who had once lurked around the treatment center and scowled at the treators and fellow clients became one of the community leaders.

One afternoon a consultant was standing watching intently as the men were working on two cars side by side—one being his. He was a quiet and subtle highly disciplined man who’d always intimidated me to an extent. He was poker faced and rarely disclosed opinions. This particular day he seemed even more intent than usual. Finally after several long silent minutes standing side by side watching the men work intensively on the 2 cars he suddenly asked, “What have you been doing with these guys?” Of course my immediate assumption was that something might be terribly wrong—something perhaps obvious to a scientist like him and invisible to me. I reluctantly replied, “I’m not sure…”

He said, “I’ve been bringing my car in almost once a month for nine years to watch these guys work and to study their behaviors in this context. I’ve never seen them work like this… ever.” Whatever I was doing I was doing out of instinct. Perhaps a lot of the credit should go to the extraordinary physicians and professionals who’d worked so patiently and lovingly with me at Menninger’s. All I knew was that something had opened in my heart through my experiences in Menninger’s and treating those guys with love and respect was effortless. I found that I could see into each one of them and treated each one as an individual worthy of respect and encouragement.

Over the years I became acquainted with the work of Mathew Fox who along with a few others seems to be on the front edge of many of the concepts I have found to be related to my own discoveries. It was Fox who first introduced me to the idea of the cosmological wholeness that can and must be established through the fusion of the previously disparate fields of art, science, and philosophy. As I began to work out the ideas leading to bluelab I started with the central concept of a collaborative artistic community working closely with visiting artists, thinkers, scientists, and spiritual teachers. In time, I began to flesh out physical and logistical ideas in the form of a non-profit corporation, which would hold such a vision in the space of a resplendent rural atmosphere. The ideas were huge and clearly far beyond my immediate reach.

In 1984 I was offered a job through a friend in Colorado Springs and moved out there to get away from the binding feeling I had from the medication I was taking. I struggled with the risk, appropriateness and wisdom of getting off the meds so I sought out a secondary professional opinion and visited with a doctor in Topeka who wasn’t affiliated with Menninger’s. I met with Dr. Jeff Nichols who was a holistic obstetrician and after giving him a 20-minute version of my story he agreed that I should get off all medication—but that “it wouldn’t be without considerable risk.” I found myself living in Manitou Springs Colorado above the city in a beautiful little cottage beneath Pike’s Peak. I was attending A.A. Meetings every day of the week for support and spending free time playing keyboards, painting and writing poetry. I had left Topeka in search of professionals who might help me overcome my need for mood-stabilizing meds and was directed immediately to a psychiatrist who shared my views. He linked me to Kathy Jorstad who practiced shiatsu massage and bioenergetics and with her help I seemed at make a seamless transition away from Lithium chemotherapy.

My roommate Ed Engels introduced me to a wonderful and affluent couple in Bolder, Colorado and we stayed with them one weekend. I was browsing their library when I first glimpsed the book, Christian Mysticism, by William

McNamara, a Carmelite Priest and Theologian. The book seemed to leap off the shelf into my hands and upon opening it I became transfixed. It was the first book I’d ever run across that seemed to speak the language of my experiences—the strange language of my heart. He redefined the “three vows” in a way that impacted me so deeply that I practically memorized them. “The poor man takes God so seriously that he cannot possibly trifle over anything else. The chaste man has such reverence for other human beings that he cannot possibly take advantage of them for selfish desires. The obedient man listens to God. Obedire, the Greek root of obedience means literally, ‘to listen.’ ”

Months later I decided I wanted to meet one of these strange Catholic monks who knew something about mysticism. I opened up the phone book and called the first number that caught my eye. The man who answered the call was a monk/ priest named Fr. Barns. Later I came to realize that he was not only a true mystic, but was the abbot of a monastery, a scholar and teacher of mysticism and that he almost never answered the phone there.

In 1885 I began the familiar emotional rise and became increasingly restless and on a lark feeling led by the Holy Spirit moved back to Bartlesville to live with my parents and to look into going into the ministry. I spent my days painting the exterior of their house and many of my nights traveling to various church revivals and services in the area. I believed that I was called to the ministry and began to hear of a prophesy about “a man from Bartlesville.” I really wasn’t sure what specifically the prophesy was, but I had a gut feeling it was about me. I began to move into the familiar but always difficult interior territory I’d come to recognize as “mystical.” I had begun praying in tongues, fasting, and obsessively studying the bible. During this time I had encounters with some of the best-known men and women in the charismatic Christian world. While I found many of these men and women fascinating, I couldn’t shake the concerns I had about their theology. I also began to see more and more clearly, a dark side to all of the power and prestige these people enjoyed. I can tell you that regardless of their error, these were people who carried enormous mojo. My concern was that I might get sucked into something that was incredibly distorted and destructive. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but I could recognize the narcissism. These people lived like kings. The tailored clothing, the gold watches, the German cars and private airplanes were a mere backdrop to the enormous power they wielded over their followers. I sensed that I was being drawn into something dangerous and wrong.

One weekend I drove to Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa, to Rhema Bible College and to Kenneth Hagen’s annual Camp meeting. I was planning to drive on from there to Ardmore to my paternal grandparents for a family visit so planned to leave early. I was flying very high and that night with a large crowd of pastors and teachers from all over the charismatic world the evening was electric. Hagen commented that something unusual was happening and at times seemed overwhelmed by what he was experiencing. I was sitting toward the back watching the whole thing as though from a glass enclosed booth with complete emotional detachment. I remember seeing what reminded me of blue green ocean waves move from above me down forward to the front of the large auditorium. Eventually I got up well before the end of the service as it was getting late and I had a three plus hour drive in front of me. I remember walking out the back doors of the church and around the corner of the large brick building heading for my car in one of the parking lots. As I came around I walked by Gloria Copeland and John and Dodie Osteen were standing looking silently and wide eyed at me as I walked by. I was high in the spirit and far beyond the ego or the urge for polite exchanges. I walked on about 50 feet or so and suddenly saw Kenneth Copeland getting into a late model silver blue Towncar. As he sat down behind the steering wheel something halted me and I found myself standing entranced just in front of his car looking at him. Suddenly, it was as though he became a cartoon character. His eyes seemed to pop out of his head and his hair seemed to stand up on end like a Warhol wig. He was clearly overcome with some sort of truly extraordinary terror. I was completely unmoved by any of this and simply stood there noticing in addition to the above description his blue green aura. I was at peace. I turned and walked toward my car as he through the car into reverse, backed up and put the car into drive moving in the direction of his wife and the Osteens.

My energies steadily rose that summer and I became more and more ecstatic. I was having visions and was fighting to keep my sanity. I kept going over the rumors regarding “the man from Bartlesville” and I was of course filled with dread that it was about me. I wasn’t sure what made me more frightened—that I was insane, or that this rumor was about me. I finally went to ask one of the authorities, the “apostle” son-in-law of Kenneth Hagen, Dr. Buddy Harrison. I encountered him one night in the back halls of his large church headquarters in North Tulsa, “Faith Christian Fellowship.” I had heard that around 1400 pastors reported to him and considered him to be their spiritual director. I boldly walked up to him and looking into his eyes, I asked him if he was familiar with the “prophesy about Bartlesville.” He looked at me very intently and said, “Of course, everyone’s

familiar with the prophesy about Bartlesville.” I said, “I am from Bartlesville.” I looked down at his alligator loafers and then up into his eyes and suddenly I saw that he had the eyes and tongue of a serpent. We exchanged a few more words then I excused myself and walked into the sanctuary and sat down. Several minutes later the worship leaders proceeded out onto the stage. Harrison walked up to the microphone first and announced, “Tonight is a special night. The Sprit of the Lord has spoken, and a seed has been planted… and we pray that this seed has been planted upon good ground and give glory to the Father.”

There I had it. I’d wanted off the fence and gotten the shove I’d asked for. The following days were more difficult and psychedelic than any acid trip I’d ever taken—a lot more. Several days later, having endured weeks of ecstatic consciousness without any human support group whatsoever and in fact hiding all this from unassuming parents, I checked into the City of Faith Hospital in Tulsa. I needed refuge from the storm. I thought I could waltz into the emergency room and persuade the attending physician to give me a prescription for Lithium. They graciously invited me to stay with them a few days upstairs. I was happy to, frankly.

The following Sunday I walked across the parking lot of the hospital on the edge of Oral Roberts University Campus to the Mabee Center where Billy Joe Daugherty was leading church services. I walked in to the basketball arena where they were holding services back then and sat down about 15 rows up in the center. Minutes later, Daugherty looked up at me for what seemed like an eternity and as our eyes locked he gave me one of the most intensely angry stares I have perhaps ever experienced. I decided to flee Oklahoma and all the people and religious confusion I had surrounded myself with and ended up in Austin Texas. I’d heard that Austin was a great place to live and was happy to be far from everything I had come to know. I needed a fresh start and Texas seemed a great place for it.

I dove into recovery meetings, found work, and got heavily involved in twelve step service. I began doing Narcotics Anonymous meetings in jails, prisons, hospitals, and treatment centers and got involved with their hospitals and institutions committee. I was visiting Charter Lane Hospital one night a week for their meetings. On one occasion I looked across the room and spotted Tommy Shannon, the bass player for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. I greeted him after the meeting taking care not to let on that I recognized him and welcomed him. The following week I attended the meeting again and afterward Tommy asked me if he could speak with me. He haltingly eventually asked me to “sponsor” him. I felt a flood of emotion fill me and happily agreed.

A couple of months later Kumi, his wife urged me to fly out and join them on the road. She was worried he might relapse. Suddenly I found myself in Nashville with them. The morning I arrived at Opryland, the convention complex and concert hall Roy Acuff built to succeed the Grand Ol’ Opry I walked into Tommy’s room and in walked Stevie Ray. He was not of this world. He was decked out just like he was ready to walk out on stage and was playing with a cheap little balsa glider throwing it into the air with the tail set to cause it to immediately loop upside-down and over his head and back between his legs. This was my first encounter with the man widely considered the greatest living guitar player in the world. I worked to keep my ego in check. Without any warning I suddenly found myself privy to a world few people ever witness. Tommy and Stevie were like brothers. When on the road, they always got rooms that joined one another’s and when there were no wives or girlfriends in tow, they always left the adjoining door open. Being around Stevie was always electric whether he was on stage or not. Tommy, being the gentle stoic sage was his pillar. Traveling south one night after a show in Atlanta and heading to Florida for their next gig, I found myself sitting in the front lounge of the tour bus watching Tommy, Stevie, and Chris “Whipper” Layton playing some silly kids game facing one another in a circle. We were listening to Patsy Cline on the stereo and I was catapulted into some sort of altered state. Years later I thought how strange it was that the first moment I met Stevie he was playing with a glider and then there was the experience that night we were listening to Patsy and then he was killed in an air crash the way she was. Life is so strange…

I had been invited to do a portrait of Karl Menninger by the clinical director of the clinic when I was still a patient which was never completed and then invited to do the cover illustration for the book Menninger The Family and the Clinic by Lawrence Friedman. It never seemed that strange at the time that an imminent historian should invite a former patient to create the cover illustration for a book on the history of the clinic he’d been a resident of for over two years. It was during my stay as a member of the “patient council” that I first met Dr. Karl. I remember being amazed by the sight of this gnarled and elderly and stately man as he became utterly animated leading the five or six of us at the table all over the place with his conversation leaping from one point to the next. I was struck by how youthful this man’s energy was in contrast to how aged his exterior. Years later, in 1988 I made an appointment to visit Dr. Karl in his office to present to him my finished image which was to be the cover for Friedman’s upcoming book. Dr. Karl and I had a long and probably convoluted conversation in his large and stately office in the former Neiswanger Building on the West Campus. Filled with artifacts and rare objects and art from all over the world along with thousands of books, his office seemed haloed ground. Dr. Karl was by now ninety-five years old but still came to his office everyday. In his expensive gray suit and his large turquoise ring which he wore on the middle finger of his right hand he was a physical anomaly. With his hearing loss our conversation was strained so I moved around behind his behemoth semicircular desk and found myself sitting inches away from him when he invited me to join him for lunch. He didn’t bother to notify his secretary who eventually entered the office carrying a cafeteria style tray with a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast.

Dr. Karl offered me a piece of toast on a paper napkin, then a piece of bacon, then some scrambled eggs. I found myself eating this with my fingers. The whole thing was utterly sublime to me. Six years after leaving as an inpatient from this world class mental hospital I find myself having a private lunch with its legendary founder, the man many historians have referred to as the “father of American Psychiatry” eating scrambled eggs with my fingers. Time seemed to disappear as we sat together and truth is I don’t remember what we talked about. Eventually, as it became time to leave, Dr. Karl rose from his desk and went over to a bookshelf and pulled one of his paperbacks, The Crime of Punishment and scrawled something inside. As we were leaving his secretary entered the office. She was a small elderly woman. She looked at me as though she’d seen a ghost and said, “I’ve been working for Dr. Menninger for forty-five years and this is the longest he’s ever had anyone in his office…ever.” Later I looked to see what if anything Dr. Karl had written to me along with his autograph and he had inscribed, “Sail Away! Karl Menninger, MD 8.8.1988” Years later it struck me as I reflected on this and realized that it was the same cryptic remark that one of the Oak Ridge Boys had made along with his signature on a set design sketch which was framed and given to me by a friend named Bob Cherry who’d invited me to a closed set filming of a CBS Country Christmas” shot outside of Tulsa on a closed set on a farm in 1979.

When Stevie died in August of 1990 I drove from San Antonio up to Dallas for his funeral. I was filled with a strange mixture of shock, disbelief, and honor to be admitted beyond the roped off crowds to the small chapel at Laurel Land in North Dallas for his service. It’s the only funeral I’ve ever attended with security and a guest list and immediately upon walking in I recognized “that little ol’ band from Texas”, ZZ Top sitting in the back left. The pews in this small humble chapel where empty on the left half with the exception of the bearded ones from Houston so I walked down a few rows in front of them and sat down. Kumi turned around from the front of the crowd on the right and beckoned me down to sit with them. There was no room on the row with the band members and their wives so I sat directly in front of them on the front row next to Bill Carter who wrote, Willie the Wimp. I turned around to greet Tommy who was sitting there gray with shock and fought back the impulse to break down and cry. Among the whispers I realized that Mac Rebennack or “Dr. John” was somewhere in the back playing the cheesy little chapel organ with flair only he could provide. After a sermon by a local minister, they led Stevie Wonder up to the front. He stood about 6 or 7 feet in front of me and sang The Lord’s Prayer without accompaniment. I broke down and sobbed like a baby. The surprise of the moment combined with power of this legendary star unadorned either in dress or sound in his openly broken and humble state stunned me piercing the bubble of shock I was frozen in. I think the whole crowd lost it although I’ll perhaps never know. I certainly did.

The chapel was only seventy-five feet or so from the grave and the burial service. I wondered out with the chapel occupants to find myself standing among some of the rock gods of my youth. I had been so consumed internally upon arriving at the chapel earlier I hadn’t looked around at all to recognize all the musical stars that were present. I can tell you that the atmosphere was one of the most rarefied of all my experience. I was in an altered state as I mingled around the edge of the burial tent feeling a bit out of my depth as I realized I was standing inches from Jackson Brown. He looked just like he had twenty-five years earlier. As I passed by Bonnie Raitt it seemed that she was surrounded in some sort of white light and she burst into tongues or something as Tommy introduced her to me. I’ll never understand that one. It was so weird to be on that side of the crowd patrician—to be “on stage” with all these stars I’d grown up with. At one point I found myself holding hands for a prayer with them. I looked around to see these people that twenty years earlier I’d stood in a huge crowd and looked up to a large outdoor stage to see.

In 1988 upon a recommendation from Tommy, I began meeting with a therapist named Dr. Charles Fitzimmons in Austin. He was an unusually intelligent and complex elderly man who lived in a redwood house filled with Himalayan cats with a large Zen garden in the backyard complete with a kabuki. After meeting with him for several weeks, I noticed a ring he was wearing. It looked at a glance like a class ring but somehow it evoked my curiosity. I inquired about it to find out that it was awarded him for an aviation world record. Upon further inquiry I found out that he held many aviation world records—13 I think—more than any man alive. This struck me. All my childhood I’d dreamed of being a pilot. It was an obsession throughout my life. For some reason over the years I had been drawn over and over to pilots as significant figures in my recovery. Several of my sponsors over the years in twelve-step programs had been pilots in various wars. After seeing him for several months he announced to me that his teacher and mentor was Dick Price, the co-founder of Esalen. He looked me in the eye and out of the blue told me that Dick was a mystic and that before he was killed in a mountain slide while meditating during a hike he had told Fitzimmons that “the messiah would come from Bartlesville!” The thing I’d run from in Oklahoma had reared its head again in Austin.

Living in San Antonio I got involved with the Unity Church there and became a confidant of the minister, Sunny Stone. The San Antonio Unity Church was a sponsor to a well-known Russian intellectual celebrity and activist turned Unity Minister named Mikhael Zykov. I was asked to become his secretary in the US and through him also met his daughter, Sasha. One afternoon I was driving to visit the Guadalupe River Ranch in Borne outside San Antonio with Sasha, (reportedly the first official female minister recognized in Russia in hundreds of years) listening to tapes of the former research physician turned spiritual teacher, Richard Moss. When we arrived there, I was stunned to find him having dinner with a friend in the River Ranch’s lovely dining hall. I introduced myself to him and told him of the synchronicity and he hugged me and told me that we were “kindred spirits.”

It was during this period of time that I decided to go back to Art school and was accepted to the San Antonio Art Institute in the fall of 1989. It was a young school with a steep uphill climb ahead to receive the national accreditation it needed in order to become a viable BFA program recognized by other serious schools and industry powers. We had some very fine instructors and several major artists and critics were brought in for shows and visits. Those who were working to put the school together were attempting to transform a 50 plus year old community arts school into a nationally respected fine art school. We had fabulous facilities with a number of studios and galleries designed by Charles Moore. During my sophomore year Bill Fitzsimmons the sculpture instructor took a sabbatical and invited the great James Surls to visit the school and to take over his classes for a couple weeks. Surls wasn’t interested in teaching us to drive nails or wield but in doing some collaborative experiments. This was a great experience for me for Surls was a man of rare intensity and depth who was fearless and wide open to anything. We worked as a group for weeks to outline ideas together. I came up with the idea of setting the performance up as a mandala with the stage rotating around the crowd in the four directions beginning with east and ending with north. We got to drive to Splendora north of Houston to his studio to stage and perform the piece we’d collaborated to write called, Beyond Time. The studio was breathtaking. It must have been fifteen thousand square feet! It was built out of redwood and had a kitchen, a full bathroom, and a clean room for his 8 foot wood block prints. I was blown away by this mans energy and ambition. Most of all he had the presence and demeanor of a real mystic. I’d rarely met anyone with his vibe. About twelve of us performed the piece for Surls and the townspeople and friends he’d invited. When the piece was completed he made a b-line to me and hugged me enthusiastically saying it was the best thing he’d ever seen! This was a huge compliment coming from a man who was a personal friend of the Bluemen and who ran the experimental theater in Houston for years.

In the spring of 1992 I wrote a piece called I Wanna Be A Hero, Sermons of a Post-Quantum, Neo-Charismatic Man in the Face of a New Cablevision Free Epoch. The text was a dark 5 part poem that was loosely autobiographical and apocalyptic. I wrote the music for the piece which was sort of Mahler meets Pink Floyd with some of the brass of Wagner. I had met a striking actor through social circles in San Antonio named Ryan Bonne who’d reportedly gone to school and done stage work in New York who I asked to perform the piece as I played the keyboards from the side of the stage area. I was fortunate to have Joe Houston edit the piece and help me put the finishing touches on it. Joe had come to the art institute on a full scholarship and had shown at PPOW in New York for ten years before even going to school! He had the demeanor of a Zen master and was extremely helpful in grounding me and slowing me down to address as many details as possible to in order to make a polished production out of the piece. Our show was the first event in the beautiful and pristine main school gallery space. By the “methodology of the marvelous” the images projected onto the wall forming the backdrop for the stage area formed an almost perfectly symmetrical triptych. We used a number of grainy photo copy stand images taken from cropped images shot mostly in the late 19^th century often duplicated and reversed forming interesting non-objective forms while also revealing various narrative figurative scenes. It was terrifying for me to perform the piece on a number of levels. I wasn’t at all confident of my keyboard skills but more than that I had written a piece that delved into my personal shadow and all the mystical questions I’d been swimming around in for a decade or more. The school librarian, a well educated woman who seemed decidedly Ivy League with strange silver blue wolf like eyes told me after the performance that she’d recently seen the Tibetan Lamas perform and that she’d had the same experience at my show. This was a very affirming compliment. I think more than anything else I was trying to penetrate the numinous space that I’d become familiar with through my mystical experiences and her feedback affirmed that I had been successful.

In 1993 I visited The Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson Vermont. Here I met Jonathon Gregg and his wife Louise Von Weise who founded this wonderful and successful artist community where every year aspiring and emerging artists come from all over the U.S. and abroad to develop their work and to have fellowship with established and often famous New York artists. It was here that I witnessed first hand some of the possibilities I craved to create. I also met and spent a good deal of time with Jane Dickson, a well-known New York artist. She seemed to take a real interest in me and often spent large amounts of time standing around talking with me in my studio space, which was located in the back of an old white frame church building. She told me I reminded her of her famous friend, Kiki Smith which of course I took as a sizeable compliment. She also told me that I was a good painter, but she believed I had come into this life to do something else—something new.

During my last year at the Kansas City Art Institute I created a video, titled, The Return of the Soul in which I did interviews with a number of spiritual leaders in Kansas City. It was through a school instructor, Patty Cato that I met Nuria Sabato. Nuria had gone to India a number of times and on her most recent trip had been in the presence of the “Lady Turquoise Dacini” the oracle to His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. During this auspicious afternoon she was overcome by an overwhelming experience and began to fall completely apart. This was apparently a bit awkward because Nuria was already a recognized Sufi leader and was the tour director for a number of others who were there with her. She was so seized upon by the experience that she was completely incapacitated for weeks and had to be attended by some of His Holiness’ personal physicians. The doctors were very encouraging and told her that as painful as her symptoms might be that she had been very blessed by this and that she had gone through a very high and powerful initiation. She could not eat for the first week during the process and could barely take in any water, she blistered all over her body and there were scales of dead skin noticeable behind her ears when I met her many months later. Nuria had created an organization that was assisting Tibetan refuges and had become good friends with a number of very high lamas and rimpoches. Some months later I was honored to meet and have breakfast with Norbu Rimpoche, the brother of the Dalai Lama who is considered a national treasure in the US and a leading scholar of Tibetan Studies at the University of Indiana.

Later, through Nuria, I also met Khamtral Rimpoche who was a great scholar, physician, and leading artist in Tibetan culture. When I met with him in private, I asked him about my light experience in 1981 and he unhesitatingly responded telling me that the light was “Yeshua.” This was a surprise to me to hear a Tibetan Buddhist master tell me that I had seen Jesus and also because I had always assumed that the light was the Holy Spirit. I had always believed that people saw the Holy Spirit in such experiences, and part of the confusion was that the light experience came about when I was looking into a mirror. Upon looking at myself in a mirror in my room, my attention was suddenly drawn into the pupil of my right eye when suddenly my reflection disappeared and a light exploded before me. I saw my life pass before me and in the sequences from childhood and adolescence I vividly saw these scenes as though I had time traveled back to those moments and was witnessing them from outside my then appearance. Part of what struck me was that I saw a luminous cloud like form all around me in each scene. I intuited that it was the Holy Spirit. More recently I have come to believe that it was my soul.

Over the years I studied with Nuria, then with Connie Rahimah Sweeney, PhD who has now been my teacher for the last several years. Under her, I was ordained as a cherag or minister by Murshid Khabir Kitz, the leader of the Cherags in the Sufi Ruhaniat International lineage which I am a member of. I have been blessed to have wonderful and mature guides theses last several years and have found Rahimah to be the absolute embodiment of compassion and patience with me. I praise God for her.

The basic idea of the Blue Glass Farm (as I then was calling it) has been to create a large-scale retreat center on farmable land in a mild climate, probably somewhere along the West Coast (although I have always been open to creating it in wherever.)

Here I have envisioned a group of buildings and cottages where artists, scientists, philosophers, and spiritual teachers could meet for prescribed projects culminating in large-scale public works. Borrowing freely from personal experiences at places such as VSC, the Guadalupe River Ranch, and various retreat centers and monasteries, I formulated an outline for a venue providing for concentrated community building, shared professional forum, spiritual work and ritual, and art making. The ideas congealed around the presumed needs of creative “cell groups” that might each be made of around ten people of various disciplinary backgrounds. These individuals would intentionally represent a thorough cross section of talents and skills. The plan calls for a creative nucleus of writers, directors, composers, painters, sculptors, musicians and performance artists who have an established professional history, honed skills, and a deep interest in making socially engaged works of art.

My plan outlines a model for various artists “cells”—say 5 or 6 to be joined by scientists and thinkers who are similarly interested in personal spiritual practice and social transformation. This group would be selected and brought together for a period of say 1 or 2 weeks for intensive work and play. They might begin their process by sharing their portfolios and ideas followed by community building work combined with various games and exercises. It has always made sense to me that these men and women would be led by spiritual teachers who are adept at community building and the creation of sacred space. My hypothesis is that with a quiet, comfortable, and safe environment, gifted and engaged people would be supported to make collaborations that would manifest in the form of films, theater productions, installations, etc. The initial projects could be held in any number of affordable settings such as retreat centers or monasteries.

In trying to flesh out a sustainable business enterprise, I began to think in terms of having a large scale farm setting

where artists and spiritual students in all levels of development could pay to come and to make work in their own personal studio space, experiment with others in making collaborations paralleled in form and process to the primary productions, provide heavy lifting and assistance to the guest artists and creatives, and gain from their presence in terms of lectures, teaching workshops, critiques, fellowships, internships, and so on.

For people who want to focus primarily on their spiritual practice the spiritual teachers could also use the space to conduct their own workshops in tandem with their work as consultants to the primary creative cells. Ultimately, the farm could be a haven for any number of people who might not consider themselves to be particularly artistic, but who value the spiritual direction and social implications of the enterprise and who might simply want to come and play and work in the garden, eat good food, and rest for a few days maybe taking in a lecture or slide presentation or performance. All these paths of service would provide for economic sustainability.

Eventually I began to realize that such a place might cost tens of millions of dollars and since I really didn’t know anything to speak of about building a corporation of any scale, I balked. The ideas also seemed a bit too far fetched for those I presented them to so I began to try to trim back the plans and in the next several months began to think in terms of what I might be able to do with an initially zero budge which was gradually built over time scaling up with each successful project completion. I created The Blue Glass Projects as a first tier structure where artists and thinkers could begin to make work, to spend time together, and to begin building experimental community.

In the fall of 2002, I sat out to meet local artists, musicians, poets, and young wiz kids who were interested in making collaborative work that might have social impact. We began meeting in each other’s apartments and houses and in coffee houses in Kansas City and talking about how to organize ourselves. I first began talking with Jennifer Coombes and through her met Cody and Heather Brewer and the four of us began getting together and talking about creating “blueglassprojects.” Mikal Shapiro began to work closely with me in development of a business plan and her sister, Trace (a graduate of Sarah Lawrence and Stanford) offered to guide us all through a community building process she’d been taught. Heather Brewer and Jennifer Coombes were interested in creating a web-based gallery to promote emerging artists, Cody Brewer who worked in the financial industry offered to help as our acting treasurer. Monica Ross a painter and mixed media artist and her boyfriend Jeff Helkenberg offered their loft space as our first real working studio. Joel Kraft, Mikal Shapiro, Jason Beason and others brought their musical talent to the table. Mark Saviano brought a passion for filmmaking and performance. Derek Moore and Jeff Helkenberg brought a boatload of ideas for integrating activism, mathematics, and physics into the mix. Christie Bradley and others offered their experience as writer/poet/ spoken word performers. Suddenly, there were 15 to 20 artists meeting and talking and partying and drawing and playing music and dreaming about the future. We had some fabulous times.

Our first slated official project was called “Both/And” which I got from something M. Scott Peck said in one of his books. “Mystical thinking is moving from either/or thinking to both/and.” This concept seemed to also embrace the experience of each of us working on a drawing together and how we struggled to understand how to be both individuals and a community. We had all sorts of trouble as one can imagine when trying to make a meaningful and authentic collaboration working with little or no budget with a group of individualistic and often anarchist young people. My friends Will Leatham and Tom Wayne who own Prospero’s Books offered to let us have our first show in their store which we scheduled for March 21^st, the first day of Spring, and the first 39^th Street Art Walk Friday Night for the 2003 year.

We made several paintings, drawings, and mobiles and tried to put together an elaborate performance, but were unable to bring many of our ideas to full fruition due to our lack of time, money, and experience. The highlights for me were our stop action digitally videoed painting filmed by Mark Saviano and painted on by all of us, our Zen like mock protest against our own show which we staged the night of the opening in front of the venue, and the joy we all felt with the realization that we had endured a rigorous and painful process and had stuck it out through squabbles and annoyances and all imaginable grievances. In the end, some members seemed disillusioned, some were burned out and turned off by the perhaps unrealistic time constraints we innocently placed on ourselves and many were far less than satisfied with my antics in trying to lead us. I found myself to be overcome by the whole experience and realized that I had a lot to learn about community building, collaboration, and group leadership. Most of us still consider each other to be friends, and some of us perhaps precious friends, but only a few have been interested in launching into a second endeavor. This is probably for the best however, as one of the things I think I learned is that the creative team—at least for initial projects needs to be fairly small.

Mikal Shapiro went on to create the Gypsee employing many of the same ideas we’d developed for blueglassprojects and has had 6 shows to date. In the most recent show I co-organized with her (“Flower” at the Boley Bldg. downtown KC sponsored by the Urban Culture Project) and I counted at least 8 participants out of the total of around 30 in the show who’d previously been involved with blueglassprojects. Heather and Cody Brewer who’d been founding members moved to West Virginia and then to Bent Mountain, Virginia where they have been involved in a similar collective made up of some of the finest Kansas City Art Institute graduates of the last several years called Stick to Your Guns.

Mission

triage is a nonsectarian contemplative community intent upon the creation of experimental art and will organize itself around the interdisciplinary productions of films, performances, web, and site-specific installations. Our approach will be one that focuses on art making toward an aesthetic of interconnectedness and social justice. We will work to promote art making in functional relationship to spiritual practice, community, and integrative collaborations with professionals and thinkers from other fields.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Carl Jung

The Problem

Many people throughout the world see a covert and malign force loosed upon the world commonly known as “globalism.” While proponents of globalism represent themselves as stewards of the interests of common mankind, it becomes self-evident after some study and observation that their actual purposes and motivations are anything but those of our common interest. Seeing the destruction of natural resources, corporate exploitation of 3^rd world cultures, the outsourcing of 1^st world jobs resulting in increasingly polarized economies, and political corruption and abuse of power on the highest levels, we face a systemic and aggressively destructive set of challenges the likes of which the

world has never known.

Witnessing the scale, mysterious sophistication and the ruthlessness of recent domestic terrorist events has caused some artists to cower in creative paralysis. Some, having experienced devastating personal visions of nuclear annihilation have simply stopped making work all together. Many have adopted principles of anarchism to define their resistance. Still others continue to pursue their studio practices turning a blind eye to it all with the traditionally popular view that art and all it represents is separate and somehow detached from common pedestrian concerns. We believe that in light of evidence of our potentially catastrophic near future, the philosophy of “art for art’s sake” is unwholistic and irresponsible and therefore in need of revision.

The perception of many creative people the world over is that we are in a state of unprecedented crisis the scale of which seems complex to the point of insurmountability and therefore completely overwhelming. It is with this condition of “overwhelm” in mind that we have sought to develop and to define alternative art making methods and processes to those that are typically known. Artists are perhaps the most sensitive and therefore vulnerable members of any culture. By creating ways for artists to maximize their God given sensitivity while remaining supple and balanced and reasonably comfortable it would seem that their gifts could be optimized. Einstein once said that a problem can never be solved at the level of consciousness in which the problem was created. This is a glimpse into a holographic social approach to art making in that we can through a structured community learn to internalize the “problem” and the “solution” learning that all that we perceive around us is based upon who and what we are. They say that earth is heaven for the saint and hell for the fallen.

Perhaps through the support and power found in community we will be able to muster the fusion of human and divine will to potentiate a substantive shift in the consciousness of a decisive portion of mankind. Campbell once said that the world is a wasteland—and always has been and that culture always unfolds from the top down. The concept of “triage” is that our focus will be built upon a shared commitment to uncover and discover our own demons with the assumption being that as we do, we will see a shift take place upon the landscape around us. As we weave our discoveries into new media collaborations and transmit these to those with the ears to hear and the eyes to see it’s possible, that we could touch a decisive number of hearts to incite a meaningful shift in our global culture—or at the very least, to do our part as we work with many others of like mind.

This is not the stuff of head in the clouds utopianism—this is a call to some of our most creative and intelligent members of society to develop ways to work together toward a true and meaningful heroism—not simply a romantic self-aggrandizing one—but one grounded in the humble and courageous pursuit of human resources we can muster.

The Solution

triage is a structure that provides for the spiritual transformation of artists individually and ultimately collectively so that we might have the capacity to meet, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct “the problem” converting an impossible panorama of catastrophe into one of renewal. A number of art theorists agree that the modernist model of the “artist as the lone iconoclast” has outlived its timeliness. If art is to be made that meaningfully embraces the gravity of our present world situation, its creators must reconsider their beliefs, values, and modus operandi. The rigors of such a task in the face of our shared human frailty poses that our only effective solution lies in the strength and power to be found in some sort of communal approach. Isolated approaches may have effect, but a compressed and shared effort could provide greater efficacy while also providing a covering for all involved.

“Autopoietic structures are instructive in several ways. The illuminate an important paradox: Each structure has a unique identity, a clear boundary, yet it is merged with its environment. At any point in its evolution, the structure is noticeable as a separate event, yet its history is tied to the history of the larger environment and to other autopoietic structures.”

From a mystical viewpoint, the treasured individual voice need not be dissolved into a communal caldron. Triage asserts that we can celebrate individual voices within the chorus of a communal production in ways that are nourishing to individuals while simultaneously presenting the unified and layered force of

Along with these issues are the central logistical issues of making work in new media and its cost. Through sharing equipment and facilities in a structured approach triage will provide resources for art works that would otherwise be unfeasible.

As the Tibetan Buddhists have for centuries had the term “Rigpa,” which is known to them as the “sky of the true mind,” so we have the concept of pure sky blue as the color indicative of that which watches over us—of our one sky the world over—of our harmonic relationship to one another. Unity or harmony could be said to be the essence of any successful spiritual community. If a “true community is [in fact] a mystical body,” then one could say its color could be signified as blue. There are many sacred colors—each with its own place, meaning and value. We needed a name to hold out as our signifier or logo and so we originally arrived at “bluelab.” The idea of bluelab has been one that has been explored for some years now and only recently has been changed to “triage”. When one thinks of new media one might also think of blue i.e., the blue screen of a monitor that’s on and primed for service, of the special effects blue screen which is heavily used in creating convincing 3d illusions in film, and simultaneously one can think of the fifth or “throat chakra” * and it’s commonly thought of color blue that is associated with creativity and expression. We thought of calling the “place” a “lab” not because we want to create an antiseptic and guarded environment, but one that encourages experimentation and discovery. In the supportive atmosphere of community, individual artists can each find and learn to maintain the delicate and fluid balance between detachment and exertion, between camaraderie and solitude, communication, silence and reception, and between the “self” and the “Other”.

The value of a community as an alternate creative vehicle cannot be overestimated. As human beings we are fundamentally interdependent and therefore social animals. In a time marked by international conflict, artists need intimacy with friends and family more than ever. As a fledgling community of artists, triage’s focus is best served in preliminary processes that give us opportunity to get close to one another and to form deep and respectful bonds. There is a period of chaos that must be traversed if a gathering of highly individual and intelligent artists are to eventually trust one another with sufficient depth to encourage meaningfully sensitive collaborations. Only after some preparation can a group of real artists come together and sit silently in a room with one another with a level of trust and respect to bring about real inspiration. The experience of silence initially feels like emptiness which is much like death for most of us who live in a culture that routinely saturates us with information and stimulation. Most artists with any degree of success have learned to create a safe place for themselves and their work, but usually these places are very private and secluded. The objective of bluelab is to create an environment that is real and natural while also so pristine and sacred that it fosters a sense of safety and security. There are of course certain principles that participants will have to agree upon in order to develop such an environment, but once people begin to savor the joy and the power of effective community, they will be highly motivated to keep themselves in check and to yield to the will of the group. Safeguards will be in place to preempt abuse of power of organizational leaders in the form of elders and guides who will on some level function as consultants and who by nature of limited time on site will have greater watchdog sensitivity and clarity. Bylaws will empower our elders to take corrective action in whatever form they deem necessary so as to protect us from our own shadow material.

When sufficient preparation has been achieved we will naturally move inward toward silence. It is the empty vessel that is prepared to be filled. Silence and introversion are intrinsic to any deeply successful creative endeavor. Often in considering what one might conjure in ones mind when thinking of “community” one thinks of it’s polar opposite which is a “cult.” This set of issues has been the focus of many years of research and contemplation for me. Long ago I recognized my narcissism and its destructive potential. Carl Jung reportedly kept a pistol next to his bed for many years and was committed to taking his own life if he found himself succumbing to malignant narcissism. He knew the potential for unmitigated evil that comes with deep archetypal discovery and experience. My path has been one of years and years of deep and protracted underachievement—waiting for the time when I felt pure enough and strong enough to give myself over to such a lofty endeavor as birthing an organization like this.

In the model of the spirituality of imperfection, which I have come to believe the only really accurate model, I have come to see that the true spiritual leader is one who has a deep commitment to truth and therefore is deeply humble. On functional levels, Mariana Caplan in her important book, Halfway Up the Mountain, made clear that unless one has a spiritual teacher—a guide—a spiritual director, one is not truly committed to the spiritual path. I am a firm believer of this. Through the steadfast wisdom and immoveable truthfulness of my teacher I have found the clarity and the humility necessary to continue to develop these ideas. There is no arrival point. History offers scores of examples of spiritual men and women who lost their footing along the way, some with very advanced spiritual attainment, and who consequently wreaked havoc on the lives of many students and followers. It is true that the true guide and teacher is within, but anyone naïve enough to believe that they can traverse the extended austerities and obscurities of the authentic spiritual desert experience without extensive human support and guidance is to me a danger to himself and to others. Of course I’ve had to learn this first hand and so give others the space to make the same bullheaded attempts I’ve survived. Grace has allowed me many mistakes. It is true, “all things work together for good for those who love the Lord,” but when it comes right down to it, one must understand that as they grow in spiritual understanding and power, so does their shadow, or false self.

Unless we have highly skilled adepts to turn to and who are watching over us, we are all apt to all sorts of mischief which can ultimately result in tragedy. The stakes of this game are too high. I am grateful to God for my teacher. Knowing how crafty and self-deceptive I am capable of being, he gave me a spiritual master with a PhD in psychology that has been steadfast in her personal processes with her own teacher for decades. While the idea of something overly defined and organized poses real challenges to individualistic and strong willed artists. It must be said that along with the seeming confinement of such structures is the provision for much greater freedom and individuation. “A river is a river by its banks” Rollo May once said. Without real structure, human beings are very limited in the extent of their range of experience.

As logic stands you couldn't meet a man
Who's from the future
But logic broke as he appeared he spoke
About the Future
"We're not gonna make it" He explained how
the end will come - you and me were never meant
to be part of the future -
All we have is now -
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now

All we'll ever have is now

I noticed that he had a watch and hat
That looked familiar
He was me - from a dimension torn free
Of the future
"We're not gonna make it" He explained how
the end will come - You and me were never meant
to be part of the future -
All we have is now -
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now
All we'll ever have is now -

All we have is now –

The Flaming Lips All We Have is Now

“Save me, my Lord, from the earthly passions and the attachments which blind mankind.

Save me, my Lord from the temptations of power, fame and wealth, which keep humanity away from Thy glorious vision.

Save me, my Lord, from the souls who are constantly occupied in hurting and harming their fellowman and who take pleasure in the pain of another.

Save me, my Lord, from the evil eye of envy and jealousy, which falleth upon Thy bountiful gifts.

Save me, my Lord, from falling into the hands of the playful children of earth, lest they might use me in their games; they might play with me and then break me in the end, as children destroy their toys.

Save me, my Lord, from all manner of injury that cometh from the bitterness of my adversaries and from the ignorance of my loving friends. Amen”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

“This Universal Life penetrates all things. It has two aspects, a rising and a falling, an expansion and a contraction. Through the heating of expansion in Love the Higher was formed; through the cooling of contraction in
Beauty the Lower or external was formed. The waves of vibrations from these met and intermingled forming the
mind-mesh where light and darkness both are found. The Universal Light falling between the meshes of mind upon the
outer sphere gave rise to the myriad of forms which have been given names by man to distinguish them, but really the Essence is one and the same. Who understands this understands something of the Nature of Allah.”

Hazrat Samuel L. Lewis

the Omega Chamber

an interactive transformational metaspacetime environment.

A preliminary sketch for a first triage project

“The small blue haired first mate whispered into the Chief’s ear so thoughtfully, “Don’t worry captain, all’s well, it doesn’t have to make sense for it to work. It’s all part of the plan. “

The captain knew his kind assistant was right. He knew they’d moved too far out and been through too

many perplexities for the whole thing to feel clear to him in moments like this. The key was to stay out of the way and to let it be. He returned to his breath as he surveyed the sprawling instrument screens before him scanning for anomalies. He reconnected to his prayer which because of his many years of training now went on independent of his conscious effort or awareness. The huge ship slid on through the night sky as most of the passengers and crew lay nestled like newborns wrapped in lambs wool blankets symmetrically arranged in their cocoon like travel chambers. They were linked by their dreams. They all dreamed of the new world toward which they moved silently and weightlessly.”

Excerpt from The Driver screenplay for Omega Chamber

The Omega Chamber has been sketched as an immersive virtual environment with a construction model loosely based upon the basic lost wax crucible used in the creation of jewelry. In jewelry casting, one first envisions a desired object then makes a wax model of it placing the model within a container then filling the container with plaster. When the plaster is hardened, the container is placed in a kiln and the wax is burned out leaving its reverse form in the plaster surrounding it. At this point the container is placed on a centrifugal machine which consists of a spring loaded arm holding the mold container. When the pin is dropped, the force of the spring driven arm whirls the mold around at a tremendous speed gravitationally forcing the molten metal into the recesses of the mold. Voila, suddenly one has a precious metal replica of the wax model.

In a similar fashion a group of artists representing an intentional cross section of various media skills will be brought together to form a 1.community (vehicle) and upon the formation of this community will 2.gather and build ideas together to flesh out the basic concepts sketched out for Omega Chamber. The Omega Chamber is conceived as an immersive environment and will be a testing place for some of the technical and theoretical ideas regarding immersion and its transformative potentials. As a matter of philosophical clarity, triage holds that from the standpoint of value hierarchies, technical wizardry is held in service to spiritual integrity.

triage has found that there is much greater potential in seeing ourselves as creative vehicles for higher sources (humility), than seeing ourselves as the source. The capacity to think mystically requires one to learn to think in unitive or integrative terms meaning that one must learn to see and reason on levels

beyond binary either/or opposites. This move from linear cause and effect thinking to a “multiplistic” logic could be said to be the essence of the concept of the “translogical.”

As triage artists become fluent in this style of thinking and interaction it becomes much easier to simultaneously hold a range of viewpoints in regard to various issues placing respect and honor for others above one’s selfish impulse to simply drive ones personal viewpoints home. In many ways this sort of “thinking” is closely linked to “feeling” which could be characterized as “compassionate reasoning.’

triage holds that if artists are operating from their gifts, their work should come quite easily. As daunting as the idea of communal art may seem at first glance, triage proposes that for those artists with the emotional and spiritual maturity to grok the potential satisfaction it offers; the possibility of some exhilarating

experience overrides fears of the unknown. Participating in what could be seen as nothing short of a heroic endeavor in pouring ones gifts and energies into works of art with the sober intention of being transformed and simultaneously laying down ones life for the greater good holds out the possibility of personal enlightenment. What could be better?

As steep as the mountain may look from sea level, it is conquerable by cooperation and Grace.

We will assemble a group of gifted artists to build a metaspacetime chamber in which visitors can interact with and be changed by the environmental influences of the space. The objectives of the Omega Chamber are:

1. To bring together some of the finest artists in Kansas City in an experimental art building environment and to clarify and further develop many of triage theories.
2. To create the work from outset to completion through the framework of principles and strategies triage has developed focusing on authentic community as collaborative creative vehicle.
3. To create a multimedia interactive chamber that will serve as a laboratory like testing ground for many if not all the ideas that will be employed and further developed during subsequent projects.
4. To discover new ideas and strategies through the interaction and living wisdom of the specific participants involved. Discoveries will become the intellectual property of triage but of course those who want to strike out and to make similar art works are welcome to use whatever we have to offer. Because we are structured as a not for profit spiritual enterprise, we’re not concerned with hording our discoveries and in fact recognize the radical power of generosity in action.
5. To install a fully functional interactive environment that will inspire the public and plant various seeds toward our future projects.
6. To measure and document variables and to gain a critical introduction to the art community at large.
7. To offer patrons and donors concrete evidence of the efficacy of our assertions encouraging increasing levels of commitment and support.

The Omega Chamber has been conceived as a relatively low cost pilot project for triage. We will seek corporate and private support and will make efforts to gain involvement from some of finest and most innovative artists in Kansas City.

triage will be seeking a starter environment for the production phase and (if need be) a public venue for the performance phase of the project. Our first consideration is to aim toward new theoretical approaches to communal art making leading to personal and collective psychospiritual breakthroughs. To this end we need a warm and homey production environment. Too much austerity is not for us. Our courage will be tested in many other ways.

Proposed Plan

1. Create an interactive immersive environment. Create environment with sound, video, lighting, and special effects that is a transformative environment. Have floor rug constructed with each person entering barefooted. Have interactive microphones and cameras with supplemental interactive sound loops and video loops.

The labyrinth is an archetype of transformation. Its transcendent nature knows no boundaries, crossing time and cultures with ease. The labyrinth serves as a bridge from the mundane to the divine. It serves us well."

Kimberly Lowelle Saward, Ph.D.,

”In a nut-shell, Sacred Geometry is, "The use of a handful of ratios to create forms that help the seeker to resonate properly to achieve their desired spiritual goal."

Sig Lonegren

“Sacred geometry is the contemplation and utilization of the archetypal geometric patterns of Nature for the purposes of spiritual communion and healing.”

Alex Champion

"Sacred geometry is the act of studying the divine act of creation and then using that knowledge to create in the same way. By studying nature, we find that the basic building blocks of creation are geometric. Since a divine hand is responsible for originating the numbers and proportions of the manifest universe, that geometry is sacred. Studying sacred geometry leads us to truth and self-understanding. All societies use sacred geometry to construct their temples, sacred places, and art. Chartres Cathedral, for example. And its labyrinth. Numbers aren't just for counting, nor are they just symbolic. They are the actual essence of everything that exists."

Robert Ferré

Sound Video (ex. Children playing in park, blue sky, natural and colorful.)

Range from

Red 1 (middle) c denial pseudocommunity

Orange 2 d anger chaos

Yellow 3 e bargaining chaos

Green 4 f depression emptiness silence

Blue 5 g acceptance community

Indigo 6 a integration service

Violet 7 b immersion ecstasy

Loop time is 9 minutes with colors, tones, sounds, concepts and images created and presented in synch with one another.

2. The work will be fleshed out and informed by the shared experience and attached meaning and understanding developed within the context of our collaborative experience. Again, the conceptual framework is only an armature, the chicken wire of outlined thoughts and sketches and beginnings of conversations between artists. The stuff of substance will creep into the work as we interact and build and rest and exert and breath and laugh and sigh and struggle and see and share and surrender and give and receive—together—TOGETHER… etc.

The above is a simple template that could serve as a beginning point for building an immersive environment. It would look At least initially much like the ancient labyrinths which can be found in ancient churches.

Triage

“My religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

“If one wishes to change the world, one must first become that change.”

Mohandas Gandhi

“We are living in precarious times. There is a tremendous spiritual hunger that pervades the Western world. Some of this hunger arises from the innate longing inherent in all human beings. Some is born out of an unnamed, existential emptiness. Some is the result of living in a world in which our planet is facing the possibility of its own extinction. And still more hunger comes from wounds to the human heart and mind caused by living in a Western civilization that is alienated from love and connection on all levels; that by-and-large lacks a solid and withstanding spiritual foundation; that did not teach us how to access the wellspring of knowledge and love within us, and to live accordingly.

My passion is to assist people to learn to make sound spiritual choices in whatever path they proceed along; to make distinctions between spiritual terms, teachers, practices; to inspire the possibility of moving beyond limited conceptions of ourselves; and to communicate perennial truths in a manner that is applicable to, and easily understood by, the Western world.

The possibility for re-enlivening a spiritual culture in the West that is authentic, sane, potent, grounded, and full of passion for Love and Truth, rests in the hands of the few who dare to accept the full responsibility of this task. Those who do are called to study, practice, be vigilant and courageous, and to express lives of uncommon integrity in these demanding times. “

Mariana Caplan, PhD.

Preface

This is a preliminary document—a work in progress. I welcome your input, your ideas and constructive criticism. I am not attached to too much here. I am dedicated to making a sincere run at getting this organization off the ground, but if it is to work it will be through the concerted efforts of many people. If you want to edit the work in earnest, let me know and I will email it to you or give it to you on disc. Remember, this is only a beginning. If this is to be a collaborative process, this document seems the logical point to begin. Because this writing is still in its developmental stages I have elected to use a lot of quotes of influential writers to offer a clearer idea of the matrix of quality teachings and teachers that exists in contemporary spiritual culture. I hope that in contributing you will feel encouraged to add any and all that you deem worthwhile.

tri·age (träzh)
n.

1. A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated.
2. A system used to allocate a scarce commodity, such as food, only to those capable of deriving the greatest benefit from it.
3. A process in which things are ranked in terms of importance or priority:

What if?

What if artists were offered stipends, room and board allowing them to work intensively and without distraction for substantial blocks of time on film, music and real time performance collaborations? What if artists and thinkers could explore important topics with highly regarded teachers leading to personal breakthrough? What if these artists were guided by experts through structured community building processes prior to beginning their projects? What if artists were given opportunity to work with and interact with some of the important leaders in the fields of art, science, and philosophy of our time? What if these artists were given all the production equipment and technical assistance they might need to produce national/international quality shows? What if supporters and friends of our organization were given intimate amphitheater access to many segments of our artists’ processes as well as early rehearsals and could join them and visiting artists and thinkers for meals, activities and fellowship?

Mission

triage is a contemplative community intent upon the creation of transformative experimental art and will organize itself around the collaborative productions of films, performances, web, and site-specific installations. We will work to promote art making in functional relationship to spiritual practice, community, and integrative collaborations with professionals and thinkers from other fields. Our goal is to create, maintain, and promote a culture of civility though a community devoted to collaborative art.

Executive Summary

triage is a newly forming non profit corporation providing a venue and radical new approach to making communally created new media art. triage will seek involvement on the part of many leading artists, performers, and musicians (which from this point will all be called simply, “artists”) along with highly regarded spiritual leaders along with leaders of the arts and related fields. Our intention is to be up and running by fall 2006 with performances and public events beginning in the winter/spring of 2006.

The function of triage is to participate in the world wide effort shared by leaders of various fields toward saving the world. At triage we believe a cosmological fusion of art, science, and philosophy is important while perhaps even more fundamental to our approach is the establishing of a true community or mystical body. Within the context of the broad triage community our vision is to create production cells of highly skilled and gifted interdisciplinary artists and thinkers assisting them wherever possible in making profoundly original works of art in all media.

“Unless there is a speedy and radical shift in human consciousness, to bring about a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ and the return of the sacred to the center of our personal and collective life, the human enterprise on Planet Earth most probably will come to a catastrophic end. The paranormal events that we have been discussing may be wake-up calls coming from the regions of the Holy Spirit, or what Kenneth Ring calls ‘Mind at Large,’ to overcome our morbid entanglement with materialism in all its forms and manifestations and help us become aware of our Divine origins and our destiny as beings in the process of deification. Once that understanding, now buried down in the recesses of our individual and collective subconscious, comes to the surface, then we will feel, think, and behave in ways that will render us custodians of Creation and not its mindless destroyers.”

“Conventional scientists, …sooner or later will have to recognize that what is happening today is not regression to prerational states of superstition but a quantum leap into super-rational states of awareness. It is not the reversal of the Enlightenment, as they are worried, but its fulfillment through the development of a new science that will incorporate the spiritual at the center of its preoccupation.”

Kyriacos C. Markides PhD, Riding with the Lion

“When we approach anything, any activity at all, in the spirit of play—that is, fully, joyfully, and primarily for its own sake—we are likely to achieve not only the greatest happiness but also the best results, the most enduring success.”

George Leonard The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei

"Leadership is seeing hope in any adversity."

Brent Filson

“Any spirituality of joy is also a spirituality of tragedy. Searches for a constantly ‘happy spirituality’ never work, for if genuine ‘feeling’ must be rooted in genuine being, the nature of our human be-ing requires acceptance of ourselves, our lives, and our world as ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or.’ It is precisely our twofold nature that spirituality embraces, and it is in embracing this spirituality that we embrace the world—reality as it is—thus discovering who we are.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that profoundly influenced the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous, William James distinguished between the ‘once-born’ (the ‘healthy minded’) and the ‘twice-born,’ (the ‘sick souls’). The once-born know no doubts. They seem, most of the time, to possess a serenity that does not even recognize that it is serenity. Self-confident and self-possessed, the healthy-minded assume that things will work out for the best, even in the short run. On the rare occasions when they experience tragedy, they do not think of it as tragedy; ‘bad luck’ is the whole of their vocabulary for frustration. Talk of ‘conversion’ thus mystifies them, for as open as they might be to changes in the world, they rarely see the need for change in themselves. Such people simply are, and they are never seduced by the temptation to ponder their be-ing. A caricaturist would picture them smiling vacuously and label them ‘Blah.’ They inhabit the more biting cartoons in The New Yorker.

Numbering himself among the ‘twice-born’ sick souls, James vividly detailed how these very different individuals are haunted by a deep sense of the risk, danger, and pervasive moral evil that runs through the world. Conscious of possessing a self that is somehow divided, these sick souls are examples par excellence of ‘the constitutional disease’ James calls Zerrissnheit (‘torn-to-pieces-hood’). From the perspective of the ‘healthy-minded,’ these ‘sick souls’

seem to have no sense of unity or coherence to their lives. They appear riddled by inner instability, torn by tension and conflict between the various elements of their lives. The ‘twice-born’ have known tragedy, failure and defeat, and they have named them such; but they also have a sense of the possibility of somehow rising above such experiences. A comic artist would nevertheless portray them anxiously insecure, identifying them with the label ’Argh!’ Sick souls also inhabit New Yorker cartoons, but they may be more familiar in the shape of Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown.

Does such openness to suffering, to the dark side of human be-ing signal some kind of denial or lack of spirituality? Are the recognition of darkness and the temptation to despair themselves failures? NO! The answer comes hurtling with all the force and wisdom of hundreds of voices echoing over thousands of years. These voices, the voices of the sages and saints, insist that it is the struggle itself that defines us.

Our many failures give meaning to our few successes, only when we peer into the abyss can we appreciate the magnificence of heights that are more than mere ‘highs.’ For to be human is, after all, to be other than ‘God.’ And so it is only in the embracing of our torn self, only in the acceptance that there is nothing ‘wrong’ with feeling ‘torn’, that one can hope for whatever healing is available and can thus become as ‘whole’ as possible. Only those who know darkness can truly appreciate light; only those who acknowledge darkness can even see the light. Our very brokenness allows us to become whole. ‘No one is as whole as he who has a broken heart,’ said Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov. ‘Wholeness,’ then, does not mean that the heart is not ‘broken,’ that the pain does not sear. To experience sadness, despair, tears, and howls of pain demonstrates not some violation or deficit of spirituality but rather the ultimate spirituality of acceptance.”

Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham,

The Spirituality of Imperfection

You Become the Dawn

Nothing to mourn, we die and die until

Until we’re born, recast as forms

So pleasing to the soul

I never miss anyone, to me they’re never gone

If that makes you uncomfortable, baby

Don’t be too long

And now you’re wondering if that song was the song you heard

When the form was just the word and the world was golden

And the only way to pray was to be cast as the dawn

Backwards in time, the rhyme within you was another child

Wanting to strive, but this time, not required

Wanting to try but not to the size of the role intended

You think it’s ended, but it begins with each choice

And now you’re wondering if that song was the song you heard

When the form was just the word and the world was golden

And the only way to praise was to be sung as the dawn

Kingdoms and criminals under the same light

As dawn shall follow night

As fall shall follow fight

Sing yourself awake, call the winds into blowing

It’s a wise child who finds this advice

First among many many lives

And now you know that the song you heard

Has called your form in from the word

And the world is golden

You’ve become the dawn

Ken Stringfellow, Soft Commands

“I wish I were living in Amsterdam. I'm serious. America has no great tradition of transcendental work, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah Royce, and that's about it. Otherwise, Americans are cowboy pragmatists, which is very disheartening. And when Americans do get interested in "transpersonal concerns," it is almost always quite crazy and regressive. But I'd also like to suggest that we all remember the importance of transpersonal practice. Our practice might be meditation, or yoga, or contemplation, or vision quest, or satsang, or spiritual work, or any work done with equanimity.

But seriously, we must practice. Not many people understand that Thomas Kuhn's extremely influential notion of "paradigm" does not mean a new conceptual idea; it means a new practice, which Kuhn renamed "exemplar." And the practice, the paradigm, the exemplar of transpersonal studies is: meditation or contemplation, by whatever name.

And so, please practice! Please let that be your guide. And I believe that you will find, if your practice matures, that Spirit will reach down and bless your every word and deed, and you will be taken quite beyond yourself, and the Divine will blaze with the light of a thousand suns, and glories upon glories will be given unto you, and you will in every way be home. And then, despite all your excuses and all your objections, you will find the obligation to communicate your vision. And precisely because of that, you and I will find each other. And that will be the real return of Spirit to itself.

You and I will find each other. And in our dialogue, and our mutual recognition, and our friendship, and our respect for one another -- soon even our love for each other! -- we will embody the very Spirit of the Cosmos, and honor that vision mightily. The sublime Ralph Waldo Emerson said: ‘The common heart of all sincere conversation is worship.’ And the beautiful, beautiful Holderlin: ‘... we calmly smiled, sensed our own God amidst intimate conversation, in one song of our souls.’

Bodhisattvas are going to have to become politicians Interview with Ken Wilber by Frank Visser

“In our present situation, the effectiveness of art needs to be judged by how well it overturns the perception of the world that we have been taught which has set our whole society on a course of bioshperic destruction. Ecology (and the relational, total-field model of “ecosophy”) is a new cultural force we can no longer escape—it is the only effective challenge to the long-term priorities of the present economic order. I believe that what we will see in the next few years is a new paradigm based on the notion of participation, in which art will begin to redefine itself in terms of social relatedness and ecological healing, so that artists will gravitate toward different activities, attitudes and roles than those that operated under the aesthetics of modernism.”

Suzie Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art

“[Suzi] Gablik speaks of the previous paradigm of the Enlightenment period and what it has meant to artists: ‘Individualism, freedom and self-expression are the great modernist buzz words.’ The notion that art could serve collective cultural needs rather than a personal quest for self-expression seems almost ‘presumptuous’ in that worldview. Yet this assumption lies at the base of a paradigm shift in art, a shift ‘from objects to relationships.’ Gablik challenges her coworkers not to settle for abstract theorizing in making this paradigm shift. She personalizes and therefore grounds the transformations that must be undergone when she insists that ‘the way to prepare the ground for a new paradigm shift is to make changes in one’s own life.’ Spirituality is about praxis, she is saying, not just theory.”

Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work

“Spirit is the most creative, inspiring, and meaning-giving element in all of life, and yet it is also the most dangerous. When spirit visits us, it moves us toward action, commitment, ambition, goals, ideals, vision, and altruism. All of these feed the soul, but they also wound it. To the soul their opposites are equally important—waiting, doubting, retreating, and not going anywhere, not knowing, not seeing, and being absorbed in oneself.

When spirit is not grounded and checked by soul, it quickly moves into literal forms—converting others and becomes blindly and callously ambitious. Its powerful force may turn without conscience into violence, its altruism blackened as intrusion into the freedoms of others. Its creativity becomes unbounded productivity, and its quest for ultimacy transforms into jealous possession of truth.”

Thomas Moore Meditations

“All names and forms are the garbs and covers under which the one life is hidden.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

“As I talk to men and women sincerely trying to find meaning and an end to a confusing and sputtering life, often I hear the jargon of popular psychology and the glowing bloated terms of the new spirituality. Emotionally it is always tempting to go from one extreme to another, from the bottom to the heights, from feelings of deflation to inflation. This bounce from earthy despair to airy hope; is a particular problem in the spiritual life.

The downward way toward sprit is unflinchingly disintegrative. In an early book of mine I made much of the alchemical saying ‘Solve et coagula—dissolve and congeal.’ Apparently we need to be dissolving all the time, even as we get ourselves back together. But saying it doesn’t accomplish it. We may have to give up the words that cheer us on and discover, simply by being open to the life unfolding in front of us, the particular way of disintegrating that turns us inside out and shows us our spiritual potential. For this mystery Renaissance thinkers, so sophisticated to these matters, used Plato’s image of a Silenus, an ugly and grotesque statue that opened up to reveal the gods.

Dis-integrate means not to feel whole. The word has an interesting and, to me, unexpected origin. It comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, and eventually came to mean untouched or complete in itself. Dis-integrate is a double negative, leaving us with touched, messed with, not original. We may have two different fantasies about our spiritual condition: one is to be pure and whole as we are from the beginning: the other, common in alchemy, is to be in process, to be making soul rather than just being. Spiritual people often speak glowingly of wholeness and pursue it as an ideal. But the soul is present in disintegration as well when we have entered life generously and have been affected, having lost our original innocence and ideals.

To be spiritual is to be taken over by a mysterious, divine compulsion to manifest some aspect of life’s deepest force. We become most who we are when we allow the spirit to dismember us, unsettling our plans and understandings, remaking us from the very foundations of our existence. Nothing is more challenging, nothing less sentimental, than the invitation of spirit to become who we are and not who we think we ought to be…

We are always becoming whole, and that means we are never whole but always disintegrating as we go. We find our wholeness as we are peeled away, like an onion, with the process finished when there is nothing left to peel. Perhaps only then will we be moved to give up the idea of wholeness altogether, having disintegrated sufficiently to be touched by life, and are therefore empty.”

Thomas Moore, The Soul’s Religion

We all feel vulnerable in this contemporary world. I think in some ways artists are the most vulnerable. Artists are wide open to all that we experience and in many ways lack psychological filters that most have allowing distance from the voluminous stimuli and the more terrifying prospects around us constantly piped in by a global media complex including twenty-four hour news channels and the web. I have been working for years on these ideas—and on myself (with varying success) attempting to come to terms with a vision which is anchored in profound experience yet nevertheless seems utterly impossible much of the time. In higher moments these ideas seem quite clear and attainable. When I find myself in middle ground much of this begins to seem a bit vague, anachronistic, and other worldly. When days grow darker, these ideas seem like a world of absurdity and delusion. I’ve done a fair amount of research over the years about men and women who’ve had visions and gone on to fulfill them and for most there was a long slow period of preparation—in which much had to take place within in order to make that person capable of channeling the ideas and energies which would be necessary for its fulfillment. They say that there’s considerable danger where visionary experiences are concerned because they can lead to inflation. For a long time I felt like an outsider wherever I went.

During my school years I was fairly focused and driven but much of what actually drove me on during those years was pride and competition. I have always had difficulty creating effective structure for myself and following it and therefore all but puddled out upon completing school. I didn’t have the confidence in myself or my ideas at that time to form strong supportive relationships to get my needs met and to further my ideas. I had been whimsical in school—arrogant and foolhardy in maxing out loans and blowing lots of money on materials—many of which were never used and left here and there along the way. I had been awakened yet also deeply wounded by my peak experiences over the years and it would be a long time before my soul would able to balance its interests against the urgency of my spiritual experiences.

So much seems to be at stake. Yet on many levels and over the years at many times I’ve seen that there are mysterious forces at play here—and as utopian or improbable as this whole thing seems—it or something similar can and in fact needs to be done. All resources must be gathered toward combating ignorance and injustice and to my way of thinking art is one of our greatest human assets. To turn away would be utter failure on my part. To face all this and to vulnerably and humbly approach people in powerful places seeking support is my only alternative.

To do the impossible, one must first see the invisible. Truth cannot be conceptualized, it must be sighted. To see with the eyes of the soul, one must first feel safe enough to let go of all that obscures its field of vision. triage has been conceived as a safe and encouraging place for gifted artists and thinkers to join with others of like mind in order to rise to their highest capabilities funneling the fruits of their gifts into state of the art multimedia events in the service of the community at large.

Our human dilemma will not be resolved through great ideas, but through changed hearts. Artists are often big hearted leaders. By guiding and supporting them into transformative breakthrough they will naturally go on to inform, transform and heal those around them. Generosity is not a distant ideal to be attained, but our very essence as human beings –as souls.

Great artists and creative thinkers are great souls. Herein is hope for our troubled world.

triage is intended to become an art driven transformational center for a world culture on the verge. We at triage are aware that there are no simple solutions to the systemic difficulties we all face. We call forth and celebrate a strange and translogical freedom to hold as true the notion that as artists willing to become empty of self-concern, the phenomenon known as “time” is on our side. All resources shall be called into our assistance for our intentions are truly altruistic. We have glimpsed triage beyond the envelope of space and time and know its existence to be real.

We have begun building it.

We propose that through the interface of ancient, contemporary and future wisdom held in the space of the sacred silent now we will construct collaborative new media works of art emerging from deep and authentic community. We assert that works pouring from our collaborations will yield unprecedented potentials in terms of the inspiration and activation of grassroots western culture toward spiritual renewal.

triage will be seeking support and funding from visionary contributors to provide stipends and consultation for collaborating interdisciplinary artists and thinkers. triage will be bringing in a variety of exciting guest artists and thinkers who are leaders in their respective fields and our friends and supporters will have access to some of the liveliest and most life affirming research and dialogue available anywhere today. Supporters and friends will have access to many of our key creative process moments along with raw early rehearsals. This will give us the energy of a live audience to reflect back to us the ideas and energies we’re working with while providing our benefactors with access to some ecstatic shared and personal experiences.

triage is formed upon a foundation based upon “perennial values” and we honor the essential non-hierarchical nature of reality and will provide an atmosphere largely free of pretense and political strife. We recognize that all human beings have gifts to share and that communities flourish in diversity. triage offers a model of radical inclusion in which all who sincerely want to be a part of our community will be welcomed. As our individual hearts grow we discover the power of dynamic tension which is to say the power of loving inclusion of divergent human leanings and tendencies which if held in compassionate balance can give amazing depth, potency and vibrancy to co-created works of art.

Those with eyes wide open are aware of the urgency of our global situation and are intent upon doing all possible to address it by working to heal ourselves and our world. We look forward to many wonderful formative evenings with guests, participants and supporters with a number of warm and casual events planned in order to provide clarification, comfort and encouragement to all who visit us. In the grand scheme of things we are not responsible for results—we’re responsible for our intentions and actions. When this truth is fully understood it offers great freedom. By assisting one another in focusing and shaping our intentions and learning to work with one another, miraculous events will become more and more a part of our working experience. What once might have seemed unlikely will seem easy, what once seemed impossible will seem probable. When artists see the abundance of assistance that is available to us on the part of higher forces, we will become more and more confident in our interfaced abilities to positively impact the world around us.

triage plans to rapidly ramp up organization and construction toward a number of projects even as “artist / transformers” are standing by in Kansas City sharpening their skills and awaiting funding and organizational opportunities to allow them to pour their formidable gifts into our transformative new media works. Most prospective participants have art degrees from leading nationally honored schools and many years under their belts in the development of specific skills and craft/s that they will be bringing to our triage work.

Art has always been inextricably linked to philosophical, theological, and scientific questions. Kierkegaard pointed out that “truth is only revealed if you go at it with an insane intensity -- take no prisoners! “-- and I like many others belong to that tradition. I align myself with those who lead the way in searching for solutions to the problems we face as beloved relatives on this gorgeous and troubled little planet. My primary interest is in doing my part to fully change myself knowing that whatever I might be able to do for the world will be contingent upon what happens within me—within the context of my daily practice. Each day I say some prayers and perform some rituals including journaling and meditation and try to let go of the controls and to slip into the moment where life is unfolding. Poe said, “The most obvious is the most difficult to fathom.” I‘ve found that the gift of contemplation can only be awarded us through our willing efforts in meditation. Meditation is our effort to surrender through various techniques involving mind, breath, and concentration. Contemplation happens by grace as God begins to do for us what we could never do by ourselves. Contemplation is the labyrinth through which we pass to rediscovery of the eyes of the child within. Only the child’s eyes can see the obvious. Only the awakened soul can fathom such mysteries as grace and rebirth.

The child within can see beyond the banal appearances of everyday life into the exalted and exotic world which lies right in front of us. It is the archetypal divine child who is the creative one. Play, display, passion, compassion, and creation are all aspects of the same archetypal lover or child within. Religious iconography has come up in my art work over and over from early on. At times I’ve been consciously destructive wanting to confront and eradicate the distortions I see within my personal shadow and in religious institutionalism. I give myself permission to enter these dark and often frightening spaces with the knowledge that I can approach them as personally and temporarily as I choose. When such things are reeled in and become simple personal processes it seems as though a great deal of the power is released from them. If I make discoveries that are useful to others it’s only because in truth we are all of one mind. If one has unitive experiences one can see that while our potentials are vast because we are connected to the One, our conceptual worlds are conversely relatively small. In praise of the One we can also relinquish self concern to Her. That which is actually true cannot be stained or destroyed—only the vestiges of its shadow forms can be altered. Human distortions created through misunderstanding of archetypal realities have wreaked much havoc throughout our civilization’s history.

My burning interest is to create collaborations between thoughtful creative people who can draw upon vast storehouses of creative healing potential within the balancing and containing context of communal relationship. I believe that art is moving away from modernism and all its compartmentalized assertions into something that is not currently fully understood yet simultaneously familiar. Suffice it to say that art and all viable intellectual pursuits must be thoughtfully linked to efforts toward embracing the crisis at hand—that of saving the earth. Great minds and spirits such as Mathew Fox have said that our problems must be embraced holistically. To understand the whole of art we must entertain questions of physics and philosophy. My dream is to create opportunities for people well versed in these forms to come together to teach each other and to find new models that give expression to their integration.

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso.

“Some renaissance theologians worked hard at reconciling paganism with Judaism and Christianity. We have yet to achieve this détente that is essential to the life of the soul. Fragments of our hearts and minds are located in the garden of Gethsemane and in the garden of Epicurus, on the zodiac of the Apostles and on the zodiac of the animals, in the wine of Dionysus and in the wine of the Eucharist, in the psalms of David and in the hymns of Homer.

It is not a matter of belonging to a religion or professing one’s faith, it is a matter of orientation in life and participation in its mysteries. We can all be pagan in our affirmation of all of life. Christian in our affirmation of communal love, Jewish in our affirmation of the sacredness of family, Buddhist in our affirmation of emptiness, and Taoist in our affirmation of paradox.

The new monk wears invisible robes. Thomas Merton travels across the globe, and in the home of Eastern monks, dies. Isn’t this a myth for our time and about the resurrection of the monastic spirit!”

Thomas Moore, Meditations

Conflagration 2005

a brief introduction to (some of) the central concepts of triage

1. art as individual and communal meditation holds great potential for personal and collective transformation.
2. art when linked to science and philosophy provides a panorama of transdisciplinary potentials toward personal, inter-personal, and trans-personal discovery, healing and growth.
3. Rather than focusing upon answers to generally unanswerable questions, we feel that communally built public art might offer deeper entrance into our shared central questions. Questions held in proper atmosphere give rise to inspired consciousness and deep reverence. These spaces are the essence of authentic veneration in terms of aesthetic experience and awe in terms of the numinous or sublime. When such fundamental mysteries are held in patient reverence they might serve to change us. Questions that when transmitted through highly developed works of art might evoke change in the community at large.
4. The spirituality of triage is not a monolithic spirituality of superior attainment, but one of love’s decent into purified childlike awareness—into our shared core of contemplative innocence. triage offers a spirituality of imperfection wherein contradictions and paradoxes are integrated resulting in the emergence of a new set of transcendent unifying principles and capacities.
5. art needs (at least in part) to be socially engaged. Seeing the plethora of challenges we all face in our present world situation, art holds practical potentials in the creation of works that impact our culture in functionally positive and healing ways.
6. art is deeply and eternally linked to mysticism…to the direct experience of divine love.
7. triage seeks to make work that is conceived, developed, and completed/performed/transmitted through spiritual community. This is high idealism but is the stuff of considerable research and practical experience in terms of community building, collective art making, non-profit development, etc.
8. triage will focus on making works that are interdisciplinary in their formation but designed and built with the intention of accessibility and inclusivity with our public. We want to make work in an organization that grows naturally with the completion of each successful project and that will provide a venue and equipment for new media as well as the experimental use of traditional media.
9. triage calls for the assistance of community leaders in all fields as well as benefactors sympathetic to the cause of the arts and social justice. As we develop budgetary abilities we intend to bring in leaders in a number of fields to teach, guide and assist us, to provide inspiration in the form of shows and talks, critiques, workshops, etc. The beauty of such a model is that in terms of our broader support community, we need not exclude “non-artists” from our gatherings. Anyone with enough vision and awareness to want to be involved is qualified. The “us vs. them” modernist mentality that still pervades the art world is a worn out and elitist model. If one groks the gravity of our current political climate and is aware of what may be a narrow window of opportunity to make work of this nature, one realizes that anyone who wants to be involved and is willing to work cooperatively is qualified. triage will be much stronger and more effective if professionals from a number of fields are involved—at least on advisory levels.

If all good people were clever,

And all clever people were good,

The world would be nicer than ever

We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow, ‘tis seldom or never

That the two hit it off as they should;

For the good are so harsh to the clever,

And the clever so rude to the good.

Elizabeth Wordsworth

“A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we are not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.“

R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

The above speech by Nelson Mandela (Inauguration 1994) was originally written by Marianne Williamson

“Vulnerability, then, is not only the ability to risk being wounded but is most often made manifest by revealing our woundedness: our brokenness, our crippledness, our weaknesses, our failures and inadequacies. I do not think that Jesus walked vulnerably among the outcasts and crippled of the world purely as a sacrificial act. To the contrary, I suspect he did so because he preferred their company. It is only among the overtly imperfect that we can find community and only among the overtly imperfect nations of the world that we can find peace. Our imperfections are among the few things we human beings have in common….Indeed, only honest people can play a healing role in the world.”

M.Scott Peck, M.D., The Different Drum

“It is the elusive law of spirit: you can’t safely go high unless you also visit the depths. Without attention and cultivation, deep thoughts and emotions remain raw and wild. Spiritual people often ignore them, thinking them irrelevant. Yet no one is more plagued by freewheeling bigotries, sexual confusion, and aggression than the religious or spiritual zealot. The underworld of the saint echoes Dante’s inferno and Sade’s cellars.

Spiritual people may be anxious to avoid shame, the emotional realization that we are of earth and have a close and mysterious relationship to the animals. Shame is not guilt for having done something wrong; it is the sensation of not being the light and airy person we might aspire to. Shame connects us to our earthy nature, and though it is not entirely a comfortable feeling, it can initiate us into much needed depth. Shame corrects the hubris of the spiritual ascent.”

Thomas Moore, The Soul’s Religion

ten triage convictions

We propose that:

1. The world as we know it can be saved through radical change (metanoia) brought about (at least in part) through a new (cosmological) integration of art, science and philosophy.
2. Visionary Artists and Thinkers are ideally suited to initiate this change.
3. By transforming artists through shared spiritual process they will be primed to initiate transformation in the world at large.
4. Spiritual Community is the ideal support vehicle for such a change.
5. Emptied of selfish ambition and concern through a shared and structured spiritual process, gifted visionary artists and thinkers become transceivers for benign higher forces of understanding, forgiveness and love transmitting higher realities through their refined crafts.
6. triage does not have to be “maximally profitable” to be sustainable and through this sort of clarity we can focus our energies and efforts upon authentic discovery without pandering to the public or unscrupulous benefactors.
7. Through balance and communal integration, the personal self is naturally decentralized making a spiritual task that would otherwise seem impossible appear less daunting and in highest moments already achieved.
8. By making key connections throughout the extensive art community in Kansas City, triage can organize itself sufficiently to garner significant corporate support (without selling out) allowing for projects of significant production scale and widening span of influence.
9. triage doesn’t offer a new ideological bag of tricks but rather heightened love and kindness synthesized freely from all true religions and discovered through meditation and contemplation— expressed artfully and brilliantly leading to the inspiration of the public around us to (along with us) move to deeper spaces within and to ask deeper and more penetrating questions. The solution is to be found more in our questions than our answers.
10. We will model this breakthrough of childlike openness and love in all our processes and we will work to be at peace with the diversity within the unity of all.

a basic overview of the communal approach to triage

1. Gather

2. Encounter

3. Surrender

4. Acceptance

5. Transformation

6. Celebration

7. Consecration

8. Production

9. Performance

1. Gather

It is important on all levels to gain involvement and commitment from at least a sampling of Kansas City’s finest artists and thinkers. As has been stated elsewhere, I believe that many of the finest artists in KC are destined to be involved in triage. triage is not interested in usurping the other important art related organizations in the city and rather sees itself as a friend to all existing endeavors. triage will probably work best if there’s a steady turnover among performers keeping us refreshed and forever young and learning.

2. Encounter

The initial projects will be harder than subsequent ones in terms of these early phases of the process. Artists and creative thinkers are often very private individuals and because most of us are still under the influence of modernist belief systems we find a certain amount of vainglory in isolationism. Again, triage seeks only to change the way artists see themselves in the context of this work and its necessary processes and experiential thresholds. If artists participate in a show they may need to return to the desert or the isolation and privacy of their previous studio lifestyles for a period of time in order to assimilate and make sense of what they experienced and discovered in their time with triage. Some may never want to try something like triage again. I suspect that most however will want to be involved as much as possible with future projects and may create similar organizations and efforts on their own.

The encounter process is my term for what M. Scott Peck has termed, “chaos.” This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of authentic group process. The encounter phase is the stage of the process wherein as kind and gentle a way as possible, individuals become fully aware of who each one is in the context of the group and our shared intentions. This is where biases and beliefs and disagreements are laid out on the floor in the middle of the circle in plain view of everyone. This encounter phase is the point in the process where people give up the need to pretend and to posture and find out and assert who they are and what they think and feel. This is the beginning of a really courageous process of deep and meaningful honesty and self-disclosure and leads to the experience of the collision that we all feel when we try to bring our ideas and thoughts and beliefs (attachments) to others who may or may not fully agree with us (who have there own).

Some personalities thrive in this sort of conflict while others naturally recede and prefer silent observation to vocal participation. It seems important that everyone has at least some time in the limelight and that those who tend to want to speak too often learn to be quiet and to bracket their urges to express and hear someone else’s thoughts and feelings while the more stoic need to push against their natural urge to retreat and to let themselves be heard.

At times very volatile issues emerge and everyone is thunderstruck by the chaos and the confusion of the moment. The aggressive want to take over, the squeamish look for the door, and everyone throughout the spectrum of experience finds themselves wondering what they’ve gotten involved in and whether this thing is real or worth the hassle. For those who’ve been through a number of these experiences it can actually be an encouraging signpost. When one has been through the nooks and crannies of community processes enough times, one finds a level of equanimity and detachment by which to simply let things happen. When dealing with human beings in the context of building a true community one is dealing in the realm of mysterious phenomena and subtlety too complex to ever really control. One learns that rather than controlling, one must simply trust. As each person gathers positive experience through the process, each individual begins to build experiential knowledge that the process can be trusted—that we can each trust our personal experience as well.

3. Surrender

This is one of the most difficult and perhaps rewarding phases of the process. Surrender is perhaps the essence of all authentic spirituality. In this context we are speaking of the individual and collective struggle to let go of control and to experience the silence or emptiness of relinquished control. In dealing with a group of true artists and highly creative thinkers we’re talking about a coming together of some very strong personalities. It has been my discovery that even so, the more sensitive, intelligent and creative a person, the easier it is to tune into the conversation of the moment and to simply be with others. The more each member can surrender to deeper levels of silence, the more powerful the group becomes. Some mystics such as St. Theresa of Avila make a distinction between meditation and contemplation. In terms of the collective process, this is the point in the journey wherein people begin to sense some larger force beginning to show its will. This is the point in which awe becomes known—the point in which things seem to become easier—where inspiration begins to replace effortful struggle.

A simple analogy might be that of growing corn. If we as a coop wanted to grow corn together to eat and to sell in the market, the larger the field we develop, the more corn we’ll harvest to eat and to sell. Obviously there’s more work involved in clearing 100 acres than 1. This removing or emptying of belief systems and ideas we may have attached ourselves to and brought in the doors with us coming in to the community building process is the crux of the work of surrender. This is tough stuff one can be certain, but is also incredibly rewarding and freeing. As we learn that love always fills the vacuum left when anything is surrendered we welcome more and more the necessary struggles and difficulties we must walk through in order to make our beliefs real. When a group of people has suffered together and been truthful enough with one another and are clear enough about what they as a group want and don’t want for themselves, a miracle begins to grow in which each person begins to feel the extension of his or her boundaries grow. Our hearts literally grow larger and stronger—more capable of love and compassion. This surrender becomes the very process of forgiveness. We come to experience within the same equanimity of God who “rains upon the just and the unjust.” It is though this transformation that we begin to discover our capacity for unconditional love and for self-transcendence. This is the essence of enlightenment.

4. Acceptance

Just as in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of grief work, acceptance is the attainment of the miracle of Grace. In the context of community building this is the stage wherein a group of strangers has passed through some difficult thresholds together and have arrived at the shared mystical phenomenon known as “true community.” There is a palpable experience share by the group in this context. Suddenly individuals begin to experience a level of trust and warmth and safety that had heretofore seemed like only pie in the sky ideas. It is at this point that the group has become prepared for collaborative work that will go much deeper than simple creation by committee.

5. Transformation

This is a word that’s been tossed around so freely that it’s lost much of its specific meaning. A true transformation implies a qualitative change in the object in question. From a holographic standpoint, as we are changed as a group we are of course changed as individuals and vice versa. When gifted articulate artists are brought to this level of collaborative experience, there is an emergence of an entity recognized as the “Group” or “Community” that is truly something and this something is worthy of deep reverence. When the individuals comprising the community experience the power of this exalted thing each member becomes inspired by it and sees “IT” as the vehicle—not him or herself. There is a lot of relief in this as it takes a lot of the heat and pressure off the individual and allows each individual to begin to shift their perception to “it” as the sanctified vessel of which each individual is a part. As one builds experiential knowledge of this sort of thing one begins to understand new depths of ideas like “love” and “service” and one begins to know life in new and profoundly deeper dimensions. As one gathers experience along this line, one develops greater powers of perception and discernment on all fronts of one’s life. One’s sense of center deepens and becomes more and more deeply rooted offering greater and greater peace and well being.

6. Celebration

Words seem almost silly here. When we have arrived at this point in the process there won’t be too much confusion about celebration or what it’s about or why we should do it or whatever. Celebration will come naturally. In the context of making art, this is the point in which this gathering of master artists gets to really show off. In this context it’s appropriate to show off—as this is truly an archetypal impulse and is as pure and right as all pure archetypal impulses and having done the work of community building we will have the natural sense of balance and limitation to push off from and to return to in a sort of rhythm that will be as simple as breathing. The power of joy and love and inspiration will be as palpable as the wind. If we have done our work leading up to this point, this will be the point in which we really reflect upon ourselves as a community and each of us as individuals will be able to truly say that we’ve paid a price to get here and that we’ve grown perhaps more than we knew possible and that we’ve come to realizations that we’d never even dreamed of.

7.Consecration

This is the point in the process in which we as a community can reflect on all that we’ve discovered and through the shared experiential knowledge can say that what seemed impossible—perhaps ridiculous before now seems very possible—even eminent. We have found innocence and have been reborn. This doesn’t mean we’ve been made perfect—but that we’ve perhaps revisioned perfection and now understand that it is actually only us doing our being.

So enjoying our newfound awareness it is now time to dedicate ourselves to the sacred task that triage is about—participating in the Great Work—that of saving the world. This is simultaneously the stuff of cutting edge science and philosophy and the stuff of the ancients. There is nothing new under the sun…or one could say it’s all new—and this newness is the stuff of awakening…

8.Production

Our production processes will be the natural progression of the processes we’ve established through the previous stages. More will be revealed and articulated about this when the time comes. For now, suffice it to say that we will be operating on very high levels intuitively and that much of what goes on in typical ego driven production environments will not be necessary for us here. Having discovered our center—both individually and collectively we will be far more focused on loving communication and upon sharing and developing ideas that are of a higher trajectory than much of our previous work. Here we will find ourselves doing things that weeks earlier would have been inconceivable.

9.Performance

Our performances will be the icing on the cake. I don’t want to say much here. Suffice it to say that our performances will be the proof we’re seeking that triage’s productions will be authentically liminal. People will be enthralled at our shows—and changed…

Artists are generally highly individualized people and perhaps need to be in order to find and to maintain an original and personal voice in this chaotic world. Our culture is one that challenges authenticity at every turn. All sensitive and intelligent people must daily face the distractions of an onslaught of misinformation and distractive stimuli. We are all confronted with the sway of skewed materialistic values and a decaying culture fueled by fear, pride, and competition. It seems an act of moral courage to stand aside, to simply be, and to reflect on life with any real depth or conviction. We find ourselves living in a world that is unprecedented in its complexity, distraction and threat. We are running out of time to change. Many have no hope that we even can.

The image of the artist who peacefully transgresses against the often mindless traffic of pop contemporary culture is a complex one that I have long pondered. Suzie Gablik, the well known art and social critic who was herself considered a darling of central historical art figures such as Jasper Johns of the 1960’s New York scene has compellingly deconstructed the philosophical underpinnings of the “art industry” calling into question many of its foundational precepts. Along with Gablik, I too am a student and believer in the work of Carl Jung and feel that his legacy is crucial in finding and developing a workably cogent strain of meaning in reference to our contemporary world. He was for me the first true magus of our modern world who had the depth of vision, the moral conviction and intellectual sophistication to decipher and articulate many of the all but forgotten “premodern” myths and archetypal influences that had been scoured away and ignored by the intellectual elite since the earliest days of De Cartes and Newton.

While contemporary “art” and all it represents sprawls philosophically in all directions, Gablik along with others has steadfastly questioned the modernist doctrines that so many of us still find ourselves living out. At the forefront of concern for most “reconstructivists” are the pressing global challenges that must be met if we are to continue on. As a consequence of personal breakthroughs, I have been working to excavate and to organize a new philosophy that might embrace many shared key assertions while moving on to a new and more intimately detailed personal territory. I subscribe to Gablik’s insistence for the need for the “reenchantment of art.” I believe as she does that any artist who is on some level conscious and open hearted must be asking him or herself what they can do—if anything to address the shadowy and gargantuan specter at hand. If art is to have the impact that it needs to have upon our troubled contemporary culture we must develop new pathways that are both accessible and practical.

Along with Gablik, other “postmodern reconstructivists” argue against the continued thrust of individualism that reigns as the supreme and guiding value continually defining most artistic practice. This is hard to counter. After all, if it is derivative how can it be true art? Can art made communally be an attractive and inviting enterprise for highly skeptical individualistic artists? One insight that M. Scott Peck had which is mentioned in The Road Less Traveled is that he found that there are 4 discernable levels of spiritual growth. 1. Chaotic and anti-social, 2. Formal and Institutional, 3. Skeptic and Individual and 4. Mystic and communal. The thought I have in referencing this in the context of artists is that while many are highly individualistic, according to this construct, they are actually more “spiritual” than there church going families and the culture they transcended upon leaving home. My theory has always been that gifted artists hover above compartmental constructs more than non-creative people and in some ways defy a clear categorical assessment. At the same time, I have over and over discovered that given the right environment, artists are highly communal, highly generous, and easily able to channel their formidable mental and spiritual facilities—in the right environment.

This means that as unlikely and perhaps at first glance undesirable as “communalism” might seem that if it is carefully developed, it is in fact highly attractive and practical. I would propose that, as with most concepts to be held within the often seemingly contradictory framework of integrative thinking, we must find ways to enfold and to work within the dynamic psychospiritual atmosphere of seemingly antithetical concepts and values. We need a sort of intellectual sorbet here to clear the palate. This is undoubtedly difficult stuff. Most of these ideas seem stale or disproven to a lot of people—while others seem too lofty or vague. Bear with me here. Originality and singularity of personal voice can and should be honored while simultaneously holding space for new communal orientations which are more directed toward our pressing interdependent social concerns. I believe we must find the courage or perhaps purity to confront our world situation and make the effort to develop art forms accordingly. As Gablik first said, art must (and I believe will) move from its orientation from objects to relationships. If we don’t change, we face destruction.

With the advent of ever newer and further improved technologies, “new media art” and “transdisciplinary” approaches are continually evolving. Most artists would readily agree that our world is in crisis but too often throw up their hands in despair. Few can find any sufficient philosophical container by which to transform their studio practices toward workable and seemingly attainable global solutions. Consequently they continue to make work in solitude transmitting perceptions of our plight to the limited sphere of their immediate audience. Some are making politically charged work that attacks corrupt power structures and misinformation utilizing many of the same modernist modalities of our 20^th century predecessors. Some artists are content to work as primitives within the seemingly limited sphere of their influence funneling their often profound sensitivity into the world within their immediate circle and hoping that by doing so the world is slowly being transformed. Because we are in fact interconnected—all these are effectual. One pressing question is, are they working well enough—fast enough?

triage is an amalgam of ideas born of twenty-five years of research and a number of visionary experiences that have compelled me to explore what are for me potentially new perspectives resulting in an approach that has only partially been tested, but has become more and more theoretically defined. It is my hope that artists and influential members of the bustling art community in Kansas City will see enough merit in these ideas to feel inspired to get involved and to contribute to this body of work. It is not the intention of triage to create conflict with creatives who are not yet interested in exploring these possibilities concerning spiritual, transformational or communal models triage honors art made in all formats and according to all philosophical doctrine—whatever they present themselves as. In the context of philosophical multiplicity there is room for bickering over differing perceptions. It has been an unyielding ambition of mine to make work in some sort of approach that as of yet, does not fully exist.

For many years I languished in fear, self-doubt, and uncertainty. I have made a number of attempts to gather artists together and have always been humbled by the level of complexity and personal difficulty such undertakings imply. While making efforts to erect some new philosophical framework upon which to build practical ideas, I’ve had to circle back over and over to deep and persistent personal challenges which at times have clouded my judgment and undermined my effectiveness. We all seem to learn most from our mistakes, and I have had no shortage of material here. I’ve endured years of depression in trying to come to terms with the visage of an enormous gap between the scale of my ambitions and the seeming limitation of my resources and/or capabilities.

Twenty-five years ago I went through a radical and transforming process which became my personal awakening and the birth chamber for triage I seemed hell bent on self-destruction in my teens and was using every drug I could lay my hands on by the age of sixteen. I began sticking needles into my arms just months after discovering pot. There was a raging fire inside of me that I had lost touch with. Consequently I found myself celebrating my twenty-first and twenty-second birthdays living on the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately I was able to be at one of the few quality environments of this type in the world—the Menninger Clinic then located in Topeka, Kansas. It was here that I witnessed and experienced some of the miraculous potentials to be found in communal approaches. Because of the long and illustrious career of the founders, pioneering doctors, Karl and Will Menninger, for the past seventy-five years or more, the institution has been able to attract some of the most talented psychiatric professionals in the world. I was blessed to be on “Two North” which was led by an amazing section chief named, Dr. Dean Collins. Years later I found out that this man was one of the architects of the team approach for the institution. He is clearly a master community builder.

It was in the community meetings and team meetings that much of my healing seemed to take place. There is a mysterious and amazing power to be found in the context of a real community and all these years I’ve believed in its fundamental and perhaps unparalleled potentials. Words like community are often tossed around in our culture until they lose their specificity and power. Because of my vision for building art within a community I’ve been researching the concepts and definitions around related phenomena for many years now. I am convinced that a real community is a mystical body—a vessel through which transformative archetypal energies can coalesce and congeal, expand and be transferred. In this context we don’t have to possess all the answers. We simply need structures which enable us to co create with superior and always mysterious Higher Forces.

The greatest pioneer of community building and maintenance in my mind is Dr. M. Scott Peck. He devoted much of his illustrious career to the intensive study of community and went on to be the preeminent trailblazer in the field of its practical application offering workshops to thousands of people of all stripes throughout the world. I am confident of the accuracy of his mapping of community processes and believe that with some fairly simple organizational development, we could adapt these to bring highly skilled and talented artists and thinkers together to make work the likes of which the world has never seen.

It’s a hard sell though. Most artists I know are very busy. The most successful ones are hustling to make work for corporate clients and their interests and the not so commercially successful ones are holding down

two and three jobs in order to make their overhead. Even artists such as MK 12 who are rapidly making an international name for themselves and creating some breathtaking work are humping to sustain their ventures and often find themselves in contractual relationships with corporate interests they secretly loath. Only the most tenacious and driven artists are able to erect a successful studio career in our oblivious American culture. Somehow, we need to gain enough support that triage is not fastened to the maniacal production values that run rampant throughout our first world American culture. The answers that we are seeking can only come in within the context of a less willful atmosphere. The heroism of overexerted artists will not solve the problems we all face. This should be evident enough my now.

My dream is to create triage offering facilities and strategies that will make it possible for many of Kansas City’s finest artists to make work that will impact our world in positive and transforming ways. Let’s face it, if things don’t radically change, our world is likely rapidly going down the tubes. If change is to be made, it will probably be initiated by the most creative members of our culture—the artists. My vision is to locate private and corporate donors who recognize the writing on the wall and who are sophisticated and wise enough to see the efficacy of something like bluelab. I believe what Gandhi said when he stated that if one wishes to change the world; one must first become that change. This dovetails with what Einstein said when he stated that no problem can be overcome at the same level of consciousness in which it was created. So here is our problem—and my proposed solution.

We have one of the most dynamic art communities in the world right here in Kansas City. Many of the artists are graduates of the Kansas City Art Institute which is one of the finest schools around. We have some amazing galleries and art professionals, a wonderful and highly acclaimed and growing art periodical in the Review, some very fine critics and writers not the least of which is Alice Thorson who’s often quoted in the big national magazines, and a number of first tier artists—some in multiple galleries and museums. Along this line we have some amazing things going on in music and sound and several performance and theater groups that are doing work comparable to that of New York or L.A. Then we have MK 12 who are nothing short of stars in the motion graphics industry. I am humbled by the enormous contributions of people like Jim Leedy, Patrick Clancy, Mike Miller, David Hughes, Kate Hackman, Margaret Silva, John O’Brien, David Ford, Adam Jones, Bruce Hartman and Peregrine Honig along with several others who each in their own unique way have helped to make the Kansas City scene one of the most expansive in the United States.

triage does not seek to co opt all this but I do hope to borrow freely. My thought is that with a concerted effort we can gain ground rather quickly. Major corporations would likely line up to help us if we could amass a roster with some of the above mentioned names shining on it. I want to invite people in the Kansas City

Community to envision the potentials explored here. I’m not proposing replacing all the wonderful things that are already happening. I’m suggesting it might be possible to add this to the mix in a way that will simply raise the value of our community as a whole. I believe triage offers a win-win situation. With sufficient corporate support we could build work of such power and quality that it would force the public hand for sustainability.

The Convergence

My job is not to perform the myriad of technical and artistic crafts and sheer magic that must be achieved if

triage is to have the effect upon the world that I hope for. There are a number of first class artists on our prospective roster who’ve toiled, sacrificed and slaved for years and years to perfect their gifts and related skill sets. My job is to hold this vision firmly and diligently in my heart, to locate and to convince the powers that be to provide the necessary funding, to lay out the over view of our “school” and philosophy and to enroll and inspire the appropriate artists bringing order, fertility and blessing to the project. I do not plan to do most of the teaching and lecturing involved but will work to bring in a number of reputable teachers with vast experience in their respective fields. By allowing a number of teachers from a number of backgrounds we will encourage a broader and more diverse foundation for the informing and development of our community and will discourage the tendency for sedentary political influences which set us up for all kinds of distractions and dilution.

Those of you who are called to triage have been going through deep interior processes—consciously or

unconsciously your whole lives. Most have felt the vague pull toward something like this on various levels for many years. Many have been blessed with an insatiable curiosity for life and its mysteries. Most of you have had deeply personal mystical experiences as long as you can remember and many have perhaps considered some form of ministry or philosophy as a vocation. Most of you have sensed in the depths of your being that you’ve been called to do something new—perhaps something uncanny yet these sorts of ideas seem strangely natural, familiar and unegotistical. You have known on some primary level “who you are’ for as long as you can remember and have generally found it easy to trust this very personal natural space.

Devotion to the creative process for you has always felt limited or compromised by rote academic, religious or philosophical rhetoric. Your natural inclination toward art does not constrict or limit you and though it calls for sacrifice of ego or false self which can be difficult—most of you have had comparatively little struggle with this sort of thing—as you entered this life as bodhisattvas beyond much of this typical human struggle. Letting go could be defined as the release of the illusion of separation that opens one to the vastness of the Mystery of our lives. Though the process of “depth spirituality” or mysticism is daunting and at times painful, it is more often extremely gratifying and joyous. The highs experienced through focused sacrificial spiritual practice are unparalleled. The false self is of course in opposition to this process which it knows to mean its demise and will resist it with its last breath. Because of the resourcefulness and cunning of the false self, structured spiritual direction has been found to be next to essential although as I’ve watched many of you over the years, you seem to get along without much external direction at all.

Gifted artists and thinkers throughout history have held a highly skeptical regard for “authority” and have taught themselves to trust their inner guidance—often in the face of great personal risk. The idea of a spiritual guide may be met with considerable reservation. This should not be too great a burden however. A true and skillful spiritual director is more of a supporter and skillful listener than a directive supervisor and is slow to criticism and quick to love and nurturance. In the outlining of bluelab, I believe that each person involved will need to address such issues in their own way. For those who acquire a guide, the guide will be according to your choosing. We only suggest that you select one and use wisdom and discretion in the process. We will have on staff a few such people—all with impeccable credentials who are well known within a network of well regarded teachers and leaders.

: “A friend is needed; travel not the road alone,
Take not thy own way through this desert!
Whoso travels this road alone
Only does so by aid of the might of holy men.”

Jalaluddin Rumi

“The Sufi teacher never wants his pupil to be come an occultist or a great psychic or a man with great power. This does not mean that he will not become powerful, but the responsibility of the teacher is to develop the personality of the mureed (student), that it may reflect God, that it may show God's qualities; and when that is done then the responsibility of the teacher is over....”

“... What Christ taught was, "Make your personality as it ought to be, that you may no more be the slave of the nature which you have brought with you, nor of the character which you have made in your life; but that you may show in your life the divine personality, that you may fulfill on this earth the purpose for which you have come."
Philosophy, Psychology and Mysticism, Hazrat Inayat Khan

When one finds and learns to trust the sacred silence or the empty stillness within (which most real artists are already fairly adept at), one has found true liberation. When this state has become integral to one’s being, one has become unbreakable. There is exhilaration in knowing this and one begins to see life not as a short term set of challenges and obstacles, but as a vast and benign process of love—the service to others, service to the whole…to the One. To be in the flow of Creation is the greatest experience known.

It takes time to adjust to this level of consciousness and being but is in fact our most natural and effortless state and the pathways to this point have been clearly charted by countless mystics and saints of all traditions throughout recorded human history. At the point in the process when individuals arrive at this place they realize their fundamental interconnectivity and the basic mystery that is our existence in God and become far less concerned about their “personal” self and its priorities and more intent upon service to those around them and the greater good.

“I am the vine and you are the branches.” From this sphere of orientation one is potentially open to all, connected to all, sees all, experiences all, and channels all. Through the achievement of silence one is whole. When one is whole, one is fully prepared to function as a channel of the Sublime without too much fear of adulteration or distortion. Deleterious personal influences have been sublimated, integrated, and thereby neutralized. One can proceed with confidence that their impulses—though perhaps strange by the world’s standards, are divine—and therefore ultimately healing and integrative for all. It can be said that there is a fine line between courage and recklessness, but one of the beautiful things about a functioning community is that we are all held in check by our need for and our love for one another. For me, there is great joy and encouragement in this.

“Unless you become as little children you will not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

This is a call to the “superbabies.” I have chosen this odd name because it seems to embody their image and identity so fittingly. There is an irony here that can’t be ignored. Reinhold Niebor said that where there is power there can be no love and many have said over the years that the whole concept of a “super race” is of course problematic and often signals racism. In the case of triage, “superbabies” is used somewhat playfully although on another level, the superbabies are perhaps chosen ones who’ve been given the grace and awareness to rediscover our shared core human innocence and to demonstrate the responsible wielding of power. Only time will tell. One of the concepts that I’ve long been intrigued by is that of the complex relationship between the individual and community in the context of performance, display, and notability. Fame has been the downfall of many an artist. Our hope is that through certain practices and structures anonymous service will become more attractive than vanity and pride.

Imagination has been defined as the suspension of disbelief and perhaps one must have considerable imagination to believe any of this. If one can believe this you might see that superbabies are gifted and highly independent artists and thinkers who were born to lead and who are being assembled to participate in the Great Work in these last days of our present epoch. Superbabies have exceptional facilities of charisma, vision, knowledge, intelligence, invention and talent. I believe that many have already converged in Kansas City and are occupying and supporting themselves in a number of ways—some through their primary creative talents. All are great souls who’ve sacrificed their lives in times past for the Cause and therefore belong to God and live under His/Her covering and are here now to participate in the Effect. Their allegiance is unquestionable. They came into this lifetime pure of heart and consequently have from childhood intuitively seen beyond the mainstream trappings of cultural illusion, dualism and the various and sundry institutions of religious and ideological fundamentalism.

triage is the structure framed and articulated as the organizational vessel through which our Work will unfold. My function is to gather everyone together: the superbabies, the teachers, the facilitators, the guiding elders, and the supporters and to assist and to initiate the preliminary foundational processes leading to the formation of a true community of great artists and through them to the transformative productions to follow. Some might call such a structure problematic or arcane. Some might call it benign despotism. I have contemplated upon issues concerning spiritual and political power and its abuse for decades, and because I’m clear that I am in fact an imperfect servant of a higher order of things, am prepared to serve/lead with compassion, tenderness and humility. We will also have elders, advisors, and teachers to assist, guide and encourage us, and when the need arises to set and reinforce boundaries. Because of the gravity and extent of this mission, I am deeply humbled and welcome input and direction from those I deem mature and trustworthy as guides.

One of the safeguards of the communal system envisioned is that of a sharing of responsibility that brings the community together regularly for warm and informal gatherings to discuss openly and explicitly any and all issues that are a concern to each of us and to our organization as a whole. Again, a community is a gathering of leaders. We will focus upon modes of interaction and processes that empower each of us and make each of us feel loved and valued. As we do, our natural tendency will be to release self-concern and to give more and more of ourselves to the community—and ultimately to the world.

Dynamic discussion of controversial issues can be a foundational safeguard against formation of psychosocial shadow material as well as the tendency toward pie in the sky utopianism or self-congratulatory crystallization. I believe in the self-correcting and counterbalancing capabilities of true community—which again is to say, a divinely organized and guided mystical body of awakening souls. I believe that God gave me my shortcomings so that I would not be too effective a tyrant or iconoclast. Human beings are prone to character flaws and failure—but even these can be used for God’s purposes. Through our weakness and brokenness we are paradoxically whole. Only those who are intimate with spiritual processes and who have endured their own personal dark night can fully understand the sublime economy of divine ways. God uses everything we have for Her purposes. (I intentionally flip back and forth in referring to God as him or her—because God is of course both while always more than both of these)

While on this topic, it should be noted that many of my friends are not at all comfortable with concepts and labels along these lines. I have come to believe that in some cases my close friends have a resonant experience of life that is completely compatible with my own—yet find discussions around religious issues to be disconcerting if not distasteful. I am hopeful that in time they’ll have patience with such difficult matters. I feel that words are always a problem when dealing with topics that are so often beyond words, but the rub is that as human beings making efforts to connect with one another and to meaningfully explore such important ideas, we are forced to grapple with the often unsavory or painstaking issues of languaging the nebulous if not ineffable.

If one keeps in mind that our effectiveness is as a community and that communication is primary to being a community, one learns to more delicately embrace the issues of speaking about that which always tends to defy being spoken about. I believe that Love is with us and is far more gracious and tender and present and involved than most of us dare imagine. Why? Because of my personal experiences—not because I read it somewhere. Having said that, Love is also completely transcendent of all such concerns, but for our purposes what does that really matter? triage is not intended as an ideological structure—and in fact, is primarily designed to help each of us strip away much of that sort of thing. There will be those involved who are perhaps devoutly religious, but for our purposes, one need only be willing to consider (as in AA) that we as a community are more powerful and effective and therefore more important than we as individuals. For those who might scoff, I would say that if you become involved and committed to the ideas and the practices which we will be employing, it won’t be long before you too will have experiential knowledge of community, and once you’ve tasted it, I assure you that you’ll crave more. We are here to locate and use all our resources to make work that has a chance to transform us as we make it, while ultimately transforming the world around us as we transmit it. What could be more rewarding for real artists than the deep satisfaction that we are making a difference—even if the difference is not yet readily measurable.

I am intent upon the construction and maintenance of a lateralized and consensual power system and will work with everyone including our advisors and elders to develop and provide processes for the community

that are wholesome and comfortable for all involved. I realize that everyone who commits to bluelab does so with awareness of our own human frailties and paradoxical brokenness and that the primary function of bluelab is only fulfilled as we operate and create work as a true community. This means that all that are accepted and committed to triage are to be regarded as leaders of their own right and that the teachers and elders will work concertedly to support each member with great compassion and skill so that each participant will be encouraged to their highest level of creative and collaborative functionality.

When seen through the distorting lens of the unrefined human ego, these ideas may seem complex and esoteric. When one has found the silence of wholeness beyond the chatter and distraction of the false self, they appear extremely simple and natural. To be transformers of contemporary world culture we must first be transformed ourselves. Upon some degree of transformation of our members as a group, we will see clearly as a group, feel clearly as a group, and function concertedly as a fully empowered community.

The mystical path to union with God is the greatest and most rewarding adventure known to humankind. By relocating our individual consciousness in “heaven” we will then know clearly and intuitively how to construct and transmit our work to the world.

“The rules of communication are best taught and only learned through the practice of community-making. Fundamentally, the rules of communication are the rules of community-making, and the rules of community-making are the rules for peacemaking.”

The Different Drum M.Scott Peck M.D.

History

“The future must enter into you a long time before it happens.”

Unknown

As a curious child raised by well-intentioned but dysfunctional fundamentalist parents I grew up with a deep sense of confusion resulting in childhood depression, shame and isolation. I had the crazy making early childhood influences of a rageaholic father and a doting and often syrupy mother. I knew at an early age that something was amiss in their world view—though I could find no one to substantiate my hunches. This produced a deep sense of loneliness and self-doubt. I knew by the time I was four that I wanted to be a missionary but on the other hand I just couldn’t get my mind around the idea that there is a God who only loves Christians—Church of Christ Christians to be precise—and that all my neighborhood and school friends were going to hell. By early adolescence I often laid in bed peering into the abyss trying to come to grips with the horrors of everlasting hell. I became more and more isolated inside. I felt like an imposter in almost all situations—whether in the van on the way to a tennis tournament, addressing a class during a philosophical discussion or sitting on the edge of a bed waiting for a snaggle-toothed junkie to shoot me up with smack or speed. I was deeply alone.

In high school I was selected to interview the venerated philosopher and writer, Eric Hoffer on stage in front of the student body. I snuck home and rushed down several bong hits trying to manage my unbearable anxiety. As result of the many drugs I was using I contracted hepatitis my senior year even while making straight A’s (o.k. they were easy classes) and collapsed and lost first round as a seeded competitor in the state tennis tournament. Weeks later after being out of school and circumventing finals because of my good standing I took forty dollars worth of mescaline for the cap and gown ceremony, relapsed, and was sick most of that summer.

The first years of college I bounced from drug to drug, school to school and eventually treatment center to treatment center. I was numb with uncertainty. I landed in jail facing serious felony charges in 1979 and after having the grace to be represented by some of the most influential attorneys in Oklahoma who were able to get deferred probation in lieu of prison, violated my probation and ended up in the emergency admissions unit of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

There I was blessed to be under the care of Dr. Becquer Benalcazr. I knew from our first moments together that “Dr. B.” was an exceptional psychiatrist. Despite being a multi-lingual surgeon turned leading psychoanalyst, Benalcazr seemed well versed in altered levels of consciousness and non-mainstream modalities. The first time I looked into his huge dark Columbian Indian eyes I recognized the presence of a master and as he gazed into me with a rare depth and unselfconsciousness he told me, “I don’t know if we can help you here or not” and sent a tremor from the base of my spine up into my scalp. I certainly hoped he could.

I brought all my defenses to bear but was steadily overwhelmed by this man’s (along with several other outstanding therapists there) charm, charisma, playfulness and occasional deadly gravity. As the treators chipped away at my walls for months and months eventually I had a sort of sudden and profound exorcistic release and seemingly effortlessly began to learn to trust and to slow down and to move through my denial and pain and into the silence. I had always been terrified of my own inner poverty and had created a myriad of escapes. The fear of my own nothingness which I had probably exacerbated through extensive drug use and a chaotic youth had led me to this helpless point in my life. I fancied myself an artistic genius that would never live to see 30. I had certainly met my match here.

Fortunately, Menninger’s had as much in common with a college as a hospital and I was allowed to (under the guidance of art and music therapists) study music, to make paintings with professional quality materials, and to spend a lot of my extra time in a quiet and unencumbered environment. They say that in centuries gone by that troubled kids were sent to monasteries to grow up. In many ways Menninger’s was that sort of environment.

It was in the “community meetings” that I first experienced the miracle of true community. The doctors, nurses, activity

therapists, psychologists, social workers, and technicians were from all over the world. To work at Menninger’s was considered an honor and so these were people who came to work each day with real passion. Several of the staff displayed qualities that I have come to recognize as ecstatic, illumined, and even genius. I sat in rooms equally divided between some of the finest professionals in their fields and some of the most profoundly disturbed and tortured patients I’d ever encountered. Many of the young adults on our unit were childhood schizophrenics and had been in and out of institutions most of their lives. A few of us were fairly normal at first glance and some were quite gifted. So it was in these meetings of an hour or more with all of us sitting on chairs and couches and the floor filling a large meeting room that I witnessed so many things that have continued to have such a marked influence upon me.

I was for a time terrified of these meetings but I think I was so cut off from my own fear that initially I only recognized my desire to challenge and impress and taunt others. I had a huge ego and this was the first place I’d been where I felt that I was surrounded by worthy adversaries. These gatherings were largely unstructured. Anyone in the community was welcome to start the meetings and anyone—staff or patient was encouraged to speak up and to say what they felt about whatever the topic presented itself as. I gradually recognized that I was able to settle into this beautiful and subtle atmosphere of love, tolerance, and kindness that healed me deeply. There was something sublime about this unlikely mixture of human beings that opened me to a much deeper dimension of inter-personal possibility. The treators displayed such grace and poise and thoughtfulness even as they occasionally showed their own brokenness and weakness. Stereotypes and idiosyncrasies melted away revealing these amazingly vivid and tangible individual

human beings. In the air one could often sense a palpable lightness and joy—even in the face of utter darkness.

Most of all when thinking of community, I remember the beloved section chief, Dr. Dean Collins. In the two years that I lived there as a long-term patient I never caught even a glimpse of disingenuity in that man. He was a tower of depth and awareness and fecundity. He was conversely accessibly squishy and Buddha like. He was soft-spoken but always rosy complected and potent. Occasionally there was chaos such as when once a fellow patient committed suicide on the unit. During the emergency community meeting the following day I noticed Dr. Collins sitting sage like and fully engaged, yet completely transcendent and compassionate. There were others times when I would be sitting alone in the cafeteria eating lunch or dinner and Dr. Collins would politely ask if he could join me. I never ever saw staff—especially doctors sitting with patients. He loved us as only a true saint could. My egotistical antics never seemed to faze him and I always felt warmly received by him in whatever the circumstances. It was his commitment to truth and his absolute integrity and clarity that sat the tone for the quality of our community. Years later in a video interview for a school project entitled, “The Return of the Soul”, he humbly disclosed to me that one of his proudest achievements had been his leadership in the development of the “team model” for the institution. He is one of the finest men I have ever known.

I eventually had what I have come to understand as several unitive experiences. Somehow, Grace blessed me with the willingness and capacity to release myself to this unknown and numinous presence I was coming to perceive. It was during this initial period of ecstatic consciousness that I first glimpsed some of the possibilities that I have come to call “bluelab.” The odyssey which began with a long and seemingly effortless drift into lost contemplative days and evenings was punctuated by an explosive light experience followed by 2 long and breathtaking weeks of ecstatic experience. This was to become the defining period of my life. I felt that I was reborn and that suddenly my mind and perceptions were as clear as a child’s. The scales had fallen away and everything looked completely new. Sunlight flitted on the wind ruffled leaves of trees in the Kansas June in a way that seemed electric and rife with meaning. When I looked upon people around me, my heart was crushed by the weight of their pain and my compassion and love for them. I melted at the sheer innocence and fragility of human beings and with the sense of tragedy that seemed to counter their exquisite beauty. As I stood consciously in eternal awareness all was infused with unfathomable love. I knew as never before that all things of this physical world would ultimately pass away. Each moment was so filled with beauty and magic I had to return to my breath and to prayers to stay with it all. The edge of terror is the edge of ecstasy and the edge of death is the edge of creation and for a time I hovered there without effort. As though seeing a wall of thunderclouds overhead I looked up to see the eternal stream of mans intellectual and spiritual knowledge drift over me as I looked back to the dark horizon of the beginning of time. I sobbed with joy and anguish more than once.

One night I was dreaming that I was floating around in a whirlpool of light when suddenly I woke up next to my roommate Sam’s bed with my knees to the floor. He was sitting up looking at me pale with terror as he said, “Jeff, Jeff are you alright, are you alright? I don’t know if I was awake or dreaming but I looked up and saw you floating around in the air in this whirlpool of light!” I heard myself immediately say, “It’s the Holy Spirit.” I felt completely calm and composed and simply returned to my bed and to sleep.

One afternoon I looked up at the sky and it seemed a rare luminous blue like a sort of translucent turquoise or lapis. I was frozen for several moments in awe. This was the experience that led many years later to naming this organization “Blue Glass.” In searching for a name, I was reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and ran across the concept

called, “Rigpa.” I won’t get into all the subtle meanings of this word, but the idea of it is symbolized by the “Sky of the True Mind” as opposed to the “clouds of human ignorance and confusion.”

I somehow knew that the walls of belief systems that I’d been blocked by had collapsed like those of Jericho. I stood in radical amazement before the whole drama of creation feeling like a child suddenly delivered into the sunlight from the dark and hopeless toil of a third world factory. Somehow I knew that I wanted to share this sense of liberation that I’d been blessed with.

In one vision, I saw a stage. It looked like the stage was perhaps 10 feet tall and on the front of it I saw a 3-leaf clover pattern formed out of light. The experience filled me with a tremendous sense of responsibility and it seemed that I was witnessing something outside the envelope of space and time fully developed and real. On the stage I saw a group of performers of which I was one. I felt completely overwhelmed with the experience and was left with a quaking sense of inadequacy in terms of the scale and magnitude of the spectacle in contrast to my own sense of brokenness and uncertainty. I felt I was being shown my future. I anguished as I seemed to stand in a vortex between different dimensions, at once joyous and elated and honored while simultaneously ripped apart by my overwhelming sense of the scale and mystery and shock of a whole new level of consciousness of which I’d never dreamed.

In 1893 I was offered a paraprofessional counseling job at Community Addictive Treatment Center 120 Day program in Topeka. I’d been out of treatment for about a year and had been doing Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the treatment center as a volunteer when one of the directors invited me to be on a television show which was done live in a Topeka station in concert with a national program to be aired that night called “Chemical People.” Things went well enough that the Assistant Director hired me to come to work in the treatment center. The program was created to assist men coming our of prisons in the region with a history of drug problems to reintegrate into life outside of prison without returning to drugs and alcohol. There were a number of miraculous experiences there but two come to mind. There was a client in the population name Phil M. who reminded me of Al Pacino and who’d made it fairly clear to me at times that he would like to take me out. My job was to drive a van with usually 16 guys to a garage owned by the treatment center where I worked with the guys ½ day 3 days a week and all day for 2 detailing cars. I was alone with 16 guys many of whom had been behind bars for several years and Phil was no exception. He was a fairly short but very tough looking little Hispanic man in his early thirties. One day for some reason he began with his stares toward me and I instinctively invited him upstairs with me to the office. As we went up the stairs and rounded the corner to the area where my large vintage desk sat I reached over to grab an extra wooden chair to drag it over closer to my desk and when I did and as he sat down I looked into his eyes and it was as though a flood of love and compassion poured down upon us both. We both broke down and cried for several minutes as I hugged him. From that day forward Phil changed—somewhat profoundly. The man who had once lurked around the treatment center and scowled at the treators and fellow clients became one of the community leaders.

One afternoon a consultant was standing watching intently as the men were working on two cars side by side—one being his. He was a quiet and subtle highly disciplined man who’d always intimidated me to an extent. He was poker faced and rarely disclosed opinions. This particular day he seemed even more intent than usual. Finally after several long silent minutes standing side by side watching the men work intensively on the 2 cars he suddenly asked, “What have you been doing with these guys?” Of course my immediate assumption was that something might be terribly wrong—something perhaps obvious to a scientist like him and invisible to me. I reluctantly replied, “I’m not sure…”

He said, “I’ve been bringing my car in almost once a month for nine years to watch these guys work and to study their behaviors in this context. I’ve never seen them work like this… ever.” Whatever I was doing I was doing out of instinct. Perhaps a lot of the credit should go to the extraordinary physicians and professionals who’d worked so patiently and lovingly with me at Menninger’s. All I knew was that something had opened in my heart through my experiences in Menninger’s and treating those guys with love and respect was effortless. I found that I could see into each one of them and treated each one as an individual worthy of respect and encouragement.

Over the years I became acquainted with the work of Mathew Fox who along with a few others seems to be on the front edge of many of the concepts I have found to be related to my own discoveries. It was Fox who first introduced me to the idea of the cosmological wholeness that can and must be established through the fusion of the previously disparate fields of art, science, and philosophy. As I began to work out the ideas leading to bluelab I started with the central concept of a collaborative artistic community working closely with visiting artists, thinkers, scientists, and spiritual teachers. In time, I began to flesh out physical and logistical ideas in the form of a non-profit corporation, which would hold such a vision in the space of a resplendent rural atmosphere. The ideas were huge and clearly far beyond my immediate reach.

In 1984 I was offered a job through a friend in Colorado Springs and moved out there to get away from the binding feeling I had from the medication I was taking. I struggled with the risk, appropriateness and wisdom of getting off the meds so I sought out a secondary professional opinion and visited with a doctor in Topeka who wasn’t affiliated with Menninger’s. I met with Dr. Jeff Nichols who was a holistic obstetrician and after giving him a 20-minute version of my story he agreed that I should get off all medication—but that “it wouldn’t be without considerable risk.” I found myself living in Manitou Springs Colorado above the city in a beautiful little cottage beneath Pike’s Peak. I was attending A.A. Meetings every day of the week for support and spending free time playing keyboards, painting and writing poetry. I had left Topeka in search of professionals who might help me overcome my need for mood-stabilizing meds and was directed immediately to a psychiatrist who shared my views. He linked me to Kathy Jorstad who practiced shiatsu massage and bioenergetics and with her help I seemed at make a seamless transition away from Lithium chemotherapy.

My roommate Ed Engels introduced me to a wonderful and affluent couple in Bolder, Colorado and we stayed with them one weekend. I was browsing their library when I first glimpsed the book, Christian Mysticism, by William

McNamara, a Carmelite Priest and Theologian. The book seemed to leap off the shelf into my hands and upon opening it I became transfixed. It was the first book I’d ever run across that seemed to speak the language of my experiences—the strange language of my heart. He redefined the “three vows” in a way that impacted me so deeply that I practically memorized them. “The poor man takes God so seriously that he cannot possibly trifle over anything else. The chaste man has such reverence for other human beings that he cannot possibly take advantage of them for selfish desires. The obedient man listens to God. Obedire, the Greek root of obedience means literally, ‘to listen.’ ”

Months later I decided I wanted to meet one of these strange Catholic monks who knew something about mysticism. I opened up the phone book and called the first number that caught my eye. The man who answered the call was a monk/ priest named Fr. Barns. Later I came to realize that he was not only a true mystic, but was the abbot of a monastery, a scholar and teacher of mysticism and that he almost never answered the phone there.

In 1885 I began the familiar emotional rise and became increasingly restless and on a lark feeling led by the Holy Spirit moved back to Bartlesville to live with my parents and to look into going into the ministry. I spent my days painting the exterior of their house and many of my nights traveling to various church revivals and services in the area. I believed that I was called to the ministry and began to hear of a prophesy about “a man from Bartlesville.” I really wasn’t sure what specifically the prophesy was, but I had a gut feeling it was about me. I began to move into the familiar but always difficult interior territory I’d come to recognize as “mystical.” I had begun praying in tongues, fasting, and obsessively studying the bible. During this time I had encounters with some of the best-known men and women in the charismatic Christian world. While I found many of these men and women fascinating, I couldn’t shake the concerns I had about their theology. I also began to see more and more clearly, a dark side to all of the power and prestige these people enjoyed. I can tell you that regardless of their error, these were people who carried enormous mojo. My concern was that I might get sucked into something that was incredibly distorted and destructive. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but I could recognize the narcissism. These people lived like kings. The tailored clothing, the gold watches, the German cars and private airplanes were a mere backdrop to the enormous power they wielded over their followers. I sensed that I was being drawn into something dangerous and wrong.

One weekend I drove to Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa, to Rhema Bible College and to Kenneth Hagen’s annual Camp meeting. I was planning to drive on from there to Ardmore to my paternal grandparents for a family visit so planned to leave early. I was flying very high and that night with a large crowd of pastors and teachers from all over the charismatic world the evening was electric. Hagen commented that something unusual was happening and at times seemed overwhelmed by what he was experiencing. I was sitting toward the back watching the whole thing as though from a glass enclosed booth with complete emotional detachment. I remember seeing what reminded me of blue green ocean waves move from above me down forward to the front of the large auditorium. Eventually I got up well before the end of the service as it was getting late and I had a three plus hour drive in front of me. I remember walking out the back doors of the church and around the corner of the large brick building heading for my car in one of the parking lots. As I came around I walked by Gloria Copeland and John and Dodie Osteen were standing looking silently and wide eyed at me as I walked by. I was high in the spirit and far beyond the ego or the urge for polite exchanges. I walked on about 50 feet or so and suddenly saw Kenneth Copeland getting into a late model silver blue Towncar. As he sat down behind the steering wheel something halted me and I found myself standing entranced just in front of his car looking at him. Suddenly, it was as though he became a cartoon character. His eyes seemed to pop out of his head and his hair seemed to stand up on end like a Warhol wig. He was clearly overcome with some sort of truly extraordinary terror. I was completely unmoved by any of this and simply stood there noticing in addition to the above description his blue green aura. I was at peace. I turned and walked toward my car as he through the car into reverse, backed up and put the car into drive moving in the direction of his wife and the Osteens.

My energies steadily rose that summer and I became more and more ecstatic. I was having visions and was fighting to keep my sanity. I kept going over the rumors regarding “the man from Bartlesville” and I was of course filled with dread that it was about me. I wasn’t sure what made me more frightened—that I was insane, or that this rumor was about me. I finally went to ask one of the authorities, the “apostle” son-in-law of Kenneth Hagen, Dr. Buddy Harrison. I encountered him one night in the back halls of his large church headquarters in North Tulsa, “Faith Christian Fellowship.” I had heard that around 1400 pastors reported to him and considered him to be their spiritual director. I boldly walked up to him and looking into his eyes, I asked him if he was familiar with the “prophesy about Bartlesville.” He looked at me very intently and said, “Of course, everyone’s

familiar with the prophesy about Bartlesville.” I said, “I am from Bartlesville.” I looked down at his alligator loafers and then up into his eyes and suddenly I saw that he had the eyes and tongue of a serpent. We exchanged a few more words then I excused myself and walked into the sanctuary and sat down. Several minutes later the worship leaders proceeded out onto the stage. Harrison walked up to the microphone first and announced, “Tonight is a special night. The Sprit of the Lord has spoken, and a seed has been planted… and we pray that this seed has been planted upon good ground and give glory to the Father.”

There I had it. I’d wanted off the fence and gotten the shove I’d asked for. The following days were more difficult and psychedelic than any acid trip I’d ever taken—a lot more. Several days later, having endured weeks of ecstatic consciousness without any human support group whatsoever and in fact hiding all this from unassuming parents, I checked into the City of Faith Hospital in Tulsa. I needed refuge from the storm. I thought I could waltz into the emergency room and persuade the attending physician to give me a prescription for Lithium. They graciously invited me to stay with them a few days upstairs. I was happy to, frankly.

The following Sunday I walked across the parking lot of the hospital on the edge of Oral Roberts University Campus to the Mabee Center where Billy Joe Daugherty was leading church services. I walked in to the basketball arena where they were holding services back then and sat down about 15 rows up in the center. Minutes later, Daugherty looked up at me for what seemed like an eternity and as our eyes locked he gave me one of the most intensely angry stares I have perhaps ever experienced. I decided to flee Oklahoma and all the people and religious confusion I had surrounded myself with and ended up in Austin Texas. I’d heard that Austin was a great place to live and was happy to be far from everything I had come to know. I needed a fresh start and Texas seemed a great place for it.

I dove into recovery meetings, found work, and got heavily involved in twelve step service. I began doing Narcotics Anonymous meetings in jails, prisons, hospitals, and treatment centers and got involved with their hospitals and institutions committee. I was visiting Charter Lane Hospital one night a week for their meetings. On one occasion I looked across the room and spotted Tommy Shannon, the bass player for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. I greeted him after the meeting taking care not to let on that I recognized him and welcomed him. The following week I attended the meeting again and afterward Tommy asked me if he could speak with me. He haltingly eventually asked me to “sponsor” him. I felt a flood of emotion fill me and happily agreed.

A couple of months later Kumi, his wife urged me to fly out and join them on the road. She was worried he might relapse. Suddenly I found myself in Nashville with them. The morning I arrived at Opryland, the convention complex and concert hall Roy Acuff built to succeed the Grand Ol’ Opry I walked into Tommy’s room and in walked Stevie Ray. He was not of this world. He was decked out just like he was ready to walk out on stage and was playing with a cheap little balsa glider throwing it into the air with the tail set to cause it to immediately loop upside-down and over his head and back between his legs. This was my first encounter with the man widely considered the greatest living guitar player in the world. I worked to keep my ego in check. Without any warning I suddenly found myself privy to a world few people ever witness. Tommy and Stevie were like brothers. When on the road, they always got rooms that joined one another’s and when there were no wives or girlfriends in tow, they always left the adjoining door open. Being around Stevie was always electric whether he was on stage or not. Tommy, being the gentle stoic sage was his pillar. Traveling south one night after a show in Atlanta and heading to Florida for their next gig, I found myself sitting in the front lounge of the tour bus watching Tommy, Stevie, and Chris “Whipper” Layton playing some silly kids game facing one another in a circle. We were listening to Patsy Cline on the stereo and I was catapulted into some sort of altered state. Years later I thought how strange it was that the first moment I met Stevie he was playing with a glider and then there was the experience that night we were listening to Patsy and then he was killed in an air crash the way she was. Life is so strange…

I had been invited to do a portrait of Karl Menninger by the clinical director of the clinic when I was still a patient which was never completed and then invited to do the cover illustration for the book Menninger The Family and the Clinic by Lawrence Friedman. It never seemed that strange at the time that an imminent historian should invite a former patient to create the cover illustration for a book on the history of the clinic he’d been a resident of for over two years. It was during my stay as a member of the “patient council” that I first met Dr. Karl. I remember being amazed by the sight of this gnarled and elderly and stately man as he became utterly animated leading the five or six of us at the table all over the place with his conversation leaping from one point to the next. I was struck by how youthful this man’s energy was in contrast to how aged his exterior. Years later, in 1988 I made an appointment to visit Dr. Karl in his office to present to him my finished image which was to be the cover for Friedman’s upcoming book. Dr. Karl and I had a long and probably convoluted conversation in his large and stately office in the former Neiswanger Building on the West Campus. Filled with artifacts and rare objects and art from all over the world along with thousands of books, his office seemed haloed ground. Dr. Karl was by now ninety-five years old but still came to his office everyday. In his expensive gray suit and his large turquoise ring which he wore on the middle finger of his right hand he was a physical anomaly. With his hearing loss our conversation was strained so I moved around behind his behemoth semicircular desk and found myself sitting inches away from him when he invited me to join him for lunch. He didn’t bother to notify his secretary who eventually entered the office carrying a cafeteria style tray with a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast.

Dr. Karl offered me a piece of toast on a paper napkin, then a piece of bacon, then some scrambled eggs. I found myself eating this with my fingers. The whole thing was utterly sublime to me. Six years after leaving as an inpatient from this world class mental hospital I find myself having a private lunch with its legendary founder, the man many historians have referred to as the “father of American Psychiatry” eating scrambled eggs with my fingers. Time seemed to disappear as we sat together and truth is I don’t remember what we talked about. Eventually, as it became time to leave, Dr. Karl rose from his desk and went over to a bookshelf and pulled one of his paperbacks, The Crime of Punishment and scrawled something inside. As we were leaving his secretary entered the office. She was a small elderly woman. She looked at me as though she’d seen a ghost and said, “I’ve been working for Dr. Menninger for forty-five years and this is the longest he’s ever had anyone in his office…ever.” Later I looked to see what if anything Dr. Karl had written to me along with his autograph and he had inscribed, “Sail Away! Karl Menninger, MD 8.8.1988” Years later it struck me as I reflected on this and realized that it was the same cryptic remark that one of the Oak Ridge Boys had made along with his signature on a set design sketch which was framed and given to me by a friend named Bob Cherry who’d invited me to a closed set filming of a CBS Country Christmas” shot outside of Tulsa on a closed set on a farm in 1979.

When Stevie died in August of 1990 I drove from San Antonio up to Dallas for his funeral. I was filled with a strange mixture of shock, disbelief, and honor to be admitted beyond the roped off crowds to the small chapel at Laurel Land in North Dallas for his service. It’s the only funeral I’ve ever attended with security and a guest list and immediately upon walking in I recognized “that little ol’ band from Texas”, ZZ Top sitting in the back left. The pews in this small humble chapel where empty on the left half with the exception of the bearded ones from Houston so I walked down a few rows in front of them and sat down. Kumi turned around from the front of the crowd on the right and beckoned me down to sit with them. There was no room on the row with the band members and their wives so I sat directly in front of them on the front row next to Bill Carter who wrote, Willie the Wimp. I turned around to greet Tommy who was sitting there gray with shock and fought back the impulse to break down and cry. Among the whispers I realized that Mac Rebennack or “Dr. John” was somewhere in the back playing the cheesy little chapel organ with flair only he could provide. After a sermon by a local minister, they led Stevie Wonder up to the front. He stood about 6 or 7 feet in front of me and sang The Lord’s Prayer without accompaniment. I broke down and sobbed like a baby. The surprise of the moment combined with power of this legendary star unadorned either in dress or sound in his openly broken and humble state stunned me piercing the bubble of shock I was frozen in. I think the whole crowd lost it although I’ll perhaps never know. I certainly did.

The chapel was only seventy-five feet or so from the grave and the burial service. I wondered out with the chapel occupants to find myself standing among some of the rock gods of my youth. I had been so consumed internally upon arriving at the chapel earlier I hadn’t looked around at all to recognize all the musical stars that were present. I can tell you that the atmosphere was one of the most rarefied of all my experience. I was in an altered state as I mingled around the edge of the burial tent feeling a bit out of my depth as I realized I was standing inches from Jackson Brown. He looked just like he had twenty-five years earlier. As I passed by Bonnie Raitt it seemed that she was surrounded in some sort of white light and she burst into tongues or something as Tommy introduced her to me. I’ll never understand that one. It was so weird to be on that side of the crowd patrician—to be “on stage” with all these stars I’d grown up with. At one point I found myself holding hands for a prayer with them. I looked around to see these people that twenty years earlier I’d stood in a huge crowd and looked up to a large outdoor stage to see.

In 1988 upon a recommendation from Tommy, I began meeting with a therapist named Dr. Charles Fitzimmons in Austin. He was an unusually intelligent and complex elderly man who lived in a redwood house filled with Himalayan cats with a large Zen garden in the backyard complete with a kabuki. After meeting with him for several weeks, I noticed a ring he was wearing. It looked at a glance like a class ring but somehow it evoked my curiosity. I inquired about it to find out that it was awarded him for an aviation world record. Upon further inquiry I found out that he held many aviation world records—13 I think—more than any man alive. This struck me. All my childhood I’d dreamed of being a pilot. It was an obsession throughout my life. For some reason over the years I had been drawn over and over to pilots as significant figures in my recovery. Several of my sponsors over the years in twelve-step programs had been pilots in various wars. After seeing him for several months he announced to me that his teacher and mentor was Dick Price, the co-founder of Esalen. He looked me in the eye and out of the blue told me that Dick was a mystic and that before he was killed in a mountain slide while meditating during a hike he had told Fitzimmons that “the messiah would come from Bartlesville!” The thing I’d run from in Oklahoma had reared its head again in Austin.

Living in San Antonio I got involved with the Unity Church there and became a confidant of the minister, Sunny Stone. The San Antonio Unity Church was a sponsor to a well-known Russian intellectual celebrity and activist turned Unity Minister named Mikhael Zykov. I was asked to become his secretary in the US and through him also met his daughter, Sasha. One afternoon I was driving to visit the Guadalupe River Ranch in Borne outside San Antonio with Sasha, (reportedly the first official female minister recognized in Russia in hundreds of years) listening to tapes of the former research physician turned spiritual teacher, Richard Moss. When we arrived there, I was stunned to find him having dinner with a friend in the River Ranch’s lovely dining hall. I introduced myself to him and told him of the synchronicity and he hugged me and told me that we were “kindred spirits.”

It was during this period of time that I decided to go back to Art school and was accepted to the San Antonio Art Institute in the fall of 1989. It was a young school with a steep uphill climb ahead to receive the national accreditation it needed in order to become a viable BFA program recognized by other serious schools and industry powers. We had some very fine instructors and several major artists and critics were brought in for shows and visits. Those who were working to put the school together were attempting to transform a 50 plus year old community arts school into a nationally respected fine art school. We had fabulous facilities with a number of studios and galleries designed by Charles Moore. During my sophomore year Bill Fitzsimmons the sculpture instructor took a sabbatical and invited the great James Surls to visit the school and to take over his classes for a couple weeks. Surls wasn’t interested in teaching us to drive nails or wield but in doing some collaborative experiments. This was a great experience for me for Surls was a man of rare intensity and depth who was fearless and wide open to anything. We worked as a group for weeks to outline ideas together. I came up with the idea of setting the performance up as a mandala with the stage rotating around the crowd in the four directions beginning with east and ending with north. We got to drive to Splendora north of Houston to his studio to stage and perform the piece we’d collaborated to write called, Beyond Time. The studio was breathtaking. It must have been fifteen thousand square feet! It was built out of redwood and had a kitchen, a full bathroom, and a clean room for his 8 foot wood block prints. I was blown away by this mans energy and ambition. Most of all he had the presence and demeanor of a real mystic. I’d rarely met anyone with his vibe. About twelve of us performed the piece for Surls and the townspeople and friends he’d invited. When the piece was completed he made a b-line to me and hugged me enthusiastically saying it was the best thing he’d ever seen! This was a huge compliment coming from a man who was a personal friend of the Bluemen and who ran the experimental theater in Houston for years.

In the spring of 1992 I wrote a piece called I Wanna Be A Hero, Sermons of a Post-Quantum, Neo-Charismatic Man in the Face of a New Cablevision Free Epoch. The text was a dark 5 part poem that was loosely autobiographical and apocalyptic. I wrote the music for the piece which was sort of Mahler meets Pink Floyd with some of the brass of Wagner. I had met a striking actor through social circles in San Antonio named Ryan Bonne who’d reportedly gone to school and done stage work in New York who I asked to perform the piece as I played the keyboards from the side of the stage area. I was fortunate to have Joe Houston edit the piece and help me put the finishing touches on it. Joe had come to the art institute on a full scholarship and had shown at PPOW in New York for ten years before even going to school! He had the demeanor of a Zen master and was extremely helpful in grounding me and slowing me down to address as many details as possible to in order to make a polished production out of the piece. Our show was the first event in the beautiful and pristine main school gallery space. By the “methodology of the marvelous” the images projected onto the wall forming the backdrop for the stage area formed an almost perfectly symmetrical triptych. We used a number of grainy photo copy stand images taken from cropped images shot mostly in the late 19^th century often duplicated and reversed forming interesting non-objective forms while also revealing various narrative figurative scenes. It was terrifying for me to perform the piece on a number of levels. I wasn’t at all confident of my keyboard skills but more than that I had written a piece that delved into my personal shadow and all the mystical questions I’d been swimming around in for a decade or more. The school librarian, a well educated woman who seemed decidedly Ivy League with strange silver blue wolf like eyes told me after the performance that she’d recently seen the Tibetan Lamas perform and that she’d had the same experience at my show. This was a very affirming compliment. I think more than anything else I was trying to penetrate the numinous space that I’d become familiar with through my mystical experiences and her feedback affirmed that I had been successful.

In 1993 I visited The Vermont Studio Center, in Johnson Vermont. Here I met Jonathon Gregg and his wife Louise Von Weise who founded this wonderful and successful artist community where every year aspiring and emerging artists come from all over the U.S. and abroad to develop their work and to have fellowship with established and often famous New York artists. It was here that I witnessed first hand some of the possibilities I craved to create. I also met and spent a good deal of time with Jane Dickson, a well-known New York artist. She seemed to take a real interest in me and often spent large amounts of time standing around talking with me in my studio space, which was located in the back of an old white frame church building. She told me I reminded her of her famous friend, Kiki Smith which of course I took as a sizeable compliment. She also told me that I was a good painter, but she believed I had come into this life to do something else—something new.

During my last year at the Kansas City Art Institute I created a video, titled, The Return of the Soul in which I did interviews with a number of spiritual leaders in Kansas City. It was through a school instructor, Patty Cato that I met Nuria Sabato. Nuria had gone to India a number of times and on her most recent trip had been in the presence of the “Lady Turquoise Dacini” the oracle to His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. During this auspicious afternoon she was overcome by an overwhelming experience and began to fall completely apart. This was apparently a bit awkward because Nuria was already a recognized Sufi leader and was the tour director for a number of others who were there with her. She was so seized upon by the experience that she was completely incapacitated for weeks and had to be attended by some of His Holiness’ personal physicians. The doctors were very encouraging and told her that as painful as her symptoms might be that she had been very blessed by this and that she had gone through a very high and powerful initiation. She could not eat for the first week during the process and could barely take in any water, she blistered all over her body and there were scales of dead skin noticeable behind her ears when I met her many months later. Nuria had created an organization that was assisting Tibetan refuges and had become good friends with a number of very high lamas and rimpoches. Some months later I was honored to meet and have breakfast with Norbu Rimpoche, the brother of the Dalai Lama who is considered a national treasure in the US and a leading scholar of Tibetan Studies at the University of Indiana.

Later, through Nuria, I also met Khamtral Rimpoche who was a great scholar, physician, and leading artist in Tibetan culture. When I met with him in private, I asked him about my light experience in 1981 and he unhesitatingly responded telling me that the light was “Yeshua.” This was a surprise to me to hear a Tibetan Buddhist master tell me that I had seen Jesus and also because I had always assumed that the light was the Holy Spirit. I had always believed that people saw the Holy Spirit in such experiences, and part of the confusion was that the light experience came about when I was looking into a mirror. Upon looking at myself in a mirror in my room, my attention was suddenly drawn into the pupil of my right eye when suddenly my reflection disappeared and a light exploded before me. I saw my life pass before me and in the sequences from childhood and adolescence I vividly saw these scenes as though I had time traveled back to those moments and was witnessing them from outside my then appearance. Part of what struck me was that I saw a luminous cloud like form all around me in each scene. I intuited that it was the Holy Spirit. More recently I have come to believe that it was my soul.

Over the years I studied with Nuria, then with Connie Rahimah Sweeney, PhD who has now been my teacher for the last several years. Under her, I was ordained as a cherag or minister by Murshid Khabir Kitz, the leader of the Cherags in the Sufi Ruhaniat International lineage which I am a member of. I have been blessed to have wonderful and mature guides theses last several years and have found Rahimah to be the absolute embodiment of compassion and patience with me. I praise God for her.

The basic idea of the Blue Glass Farm (as I then was calling it) has been to create a large-scale retreat center on farmable land in a mild climate, probably somewhere along the West Coast (although I have always been open to creating it in wherever.)

Here I have envisioned a group of buildings and cottages where artists, scientists, philosophers, and spiritual teachers could meet for prescribed projects culminating in large-scale public works. Borrowing freely from personal experiences at places such as VSC, the Guadalupe River Ranch, and various retreat centers and monasteries, I formulated an outline for a venue providing for concentrated community building, shared professional forum, spiritual work and ritual, and art making. The ideas congealed around the presumed needs of creative “cell groups” that might each be made of around ten people of various disciplinary backgrounds. These individuals would intentionally represent a thorough cross section of talents and skills. The plan calls for a creative nucleus of writers, directors, composers, painters, sculptors, musicians and performance artists who have an established professional history, honed skills, and a deep interest in making socially engaged works of art.

My plan outlines a model for various artists “cells”—say 5 or 6 to be joined by scientists and thinkers who are similarly interested in personal spiritual practice and social transformation. This group would be selected and brought together for a period of say 1 or 2 weeks for intensive work and play. They might begin their process by sharing their portfolios and ideas followed by community building work combined with various games and exercises. It has always made sense to me that these men and women would be led by spiritual teachers who are adept at community building and the creation of sacred space. My hypothesis is that with a quiet, comfortable, and safe environment, gifted and engaged people would be supported to make collaborations that would manifest in the form of films, theater productions, installations, etc. The initial projects could be held in any number of affordable settings such as retreat centers or monasteries.

In trying to flesh out a sustainable business enterprise, I began to think in terms of having a large scale farm setting

where artists and spiritual students in all levels of development could pay to come and to make work in their own personal studio space, experiment with others in making collaborations paralleled in form and process to the primary productions, provide heavy lifting and assistance to the guest artists and creatives, and gain from their presence in terms of lectures, teaching workshops, critiques, fellowships, internships, and so on.

For people who want to focus primarily on their spiritual practice the spiritual teachers could also use the space to conduct their own workshops in tandem with their work as consultants to the primary creative cells. Ultimately, the farm could be a haven for any number of people who might not consider themselves to be particularly artistic, but who value the spiritual direction and social implications of the enterprise and who might simply want to come and play and work in the garden, eat good food, and rest for a few days maybe taking in a lecture or slide presentation or performance. All these paths of service would provide for economic sustainability.

Eventually I began to realize that such a place might cost tens of millions of dollars and since I really didn’t know anything to speak of about building a corporation of any scale, I balked. The ideas also seemed a bit too far fetched for those I presented them to so I began to try to trim back the plans and in the next several months began to think in terms of what I might be able to do with an initially zero budge which was gradually built over time scaling up with each successful project completion. I created The Blue Glass Projects as a first tier structure where artists and thinkers could begin to make work, to spend time together, and to begin building experimental community.

In the fall of 2002, I sat out to meet local artists, musicians, poets, and young wiz kids who were interested in making collaborative work that might have social impact. We began meeting in each other’s apartments and houses and in coffee houses in Kansas City and talking about how to organize ourselves. I first began talking with Jennifer Coombes and through her met Cody and Heather Brewer and the four of us began getting together and talking about creating “blueglassprojects.” Mikal Shapiro began to work closely with me in development of a business plan and her sister, Trace (a graduate of Sarah Lawrence and Stanford) offered to guide us all through a community building process she’d been taught. Heather Brewer and Jennifer Coombes were interested in creating a web-based gallery to promote emerging artists, Cody Brewer who worked in the financial industry offered to help as our acting treasurer. Monica Ross a painter and mixed media artist and her boyfriend Jeff Helkenberg offered their loft space as our first real working studio. Joel Kraft, Mikal Shapiro, Jason Beason and others brought their musical talent to the table. Mark Saviano brought a passion for filmmaking and performance. Derek Moore and Jeff Helkenberg brought a boatload of ideas for integrating activism, mathematics, and physics into the mix. Christie Bradley and others offered their experience as writer/poet/ spoken word performers. Suddenly, there were 15 to 20 artists meeting and talking and partying and drawing and playing music and dreaming about the future. We had some fabulous times.

Our first slated official project was called “Both/And” which I got from something M. Scott Peck said in one of his books. “Mystical thinking is moving from either/or thinking to both/and.” This concept seemed to also embrace the experience of each of us working on a drawing together and how we struggled to understand how to be both individuals and a community. We had all sorts of trouble as one can imagine when trying to make a meaningful and authentic collaboration working with little or no budget with a group of individualistic and often anarchist young people. My friends Will Leatham and Tom Wayne who own Prospero’s Books offered to let us have our first show in their store which we scheduled for March 21^st, the first day of Spring, and the first 39^th Street Art Walk Friday Night for the 2003 year.

We made several paintings, drawings, and mobiles and tried to put together an elaborate performance, but were unable to bring many of our ideas to full fruition due to our lack of time, money, and experience. The highlights for me were our stop action digitally videoed painting filmed by Mark Saviano and painted on by all of us, our Zen like mock protest against our own show which we staged the night of the opening in front of the venue, and the joy we all felt with the realization that we had endured a rigorous and painful process and had stuck it out through squabbles and annoyances and all imaginable grievances. In the end, some members seemed disillusioned, some were burned out and turned off by the perhaps unrealistic time constraints we innocently placed on ourselves and many were far less than satisfied with my antics in trying to lead us. I found myself to be overcome by the whole experience and realized that I had a lot to learn about community building, collaboration, and group leadership. Most of us still consider each other to be friends, and some of us perhaps precious friends, but only a few have been interested in launching into a second endeavor. This is probably for the best however, as one of the things I think I learned is that the creative team—at least for initial projects needs to be fairly small.

Mikal Shapiro went on to create the Gypsee employing many of the same ideas we’d developed for blueglassprojects and has had 6 shows to date. In the most recent show I co-organized with her (“Flower” at the Boley Bldg. downtown KC sponsored by the Urban Culture Project) and I counted at least 8 participants out of the total of around 30 in the show who’d previously been involved with blueglassprojects. Heather and Cody Brewer who’d been founding members moved to West Virginia and then to Bent Mountain, Virginia where they have been involved in a similar collective made up of some of the finest Kansas City Art Institute graduates of the last several years called Stick to Your Guns.

Mission

triage is a nonsectarian contemplative community intent upon the creation of experimental art and will organize itself around the interdisciplinary productions of films, performances, web, and site-specific installations. Our approach will be one that focuses on art making toward an aesthetic of interconnectedness and social justice. We will work to promote art making in functional relationship to spiritual practice, community, and integrative collaborations with professionals and thinkers from other fields.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Carl Jung

The Problem

Many people throughout the world see a covert and malign force loosed upon the world commonly known as “globalism.” While proponents of globalism represent themselves as stewards of the interests of common mankind, it becomes self-evident after some study and observation that their actual purposes and motivations are anything but those of our common interest. Seeing the destruction of natural resources, corporate exploitation of 3^rd world cultures, the outsourcing of 1^st world jobs resulting in increasingly polarized economies, and political corruption and abuse of power on the highest levels, we face a systemic and aggressively destructive set of challenges the likes of which the

world has never known.

Witnessing the scale, mysterious sophistication and the ruthlessness of recent domestic terrorist events has caused some artists to cower in creative paralysis. Some, having experienced devastating personal visions of nuclear annihilation have simply stopped making work all together. Many have adopted principles of anarchism to define their resistance. Still others continue to pursue their studio practices turning a blind eye to it all with the traditionally popular view that art and all it represents is separate and somehow detached from common pedestrian concerns. We believe that in light of evidence of our potentially catastrophic near future, the philosophy of “art for art’s sake” is unwholistic and irresponsible and therefore in need of revision.

The perception of many creative people the world over is that we are in a state of unprecedented crisis the scale of which seems complex to the point of insurmountability and therefore completely overwhelming. It is with this condition of “overwhelm” in mind that we have sought to develop and to define alternative art making methods and processes to those that are typically known. Artists are perhaps the most sensitive and therefore vulnerable members of any culture. By creating ways for artists to maximize their God given sensitivity while remaining supple and balanced and reasonably comfortable it would seem that their gifts could be optimized. Einstein once said that a problem can never be solved at the level of consciousness in which the problem was created. This is a glimpse into a holographic social approach to art making in that we can through a structured community learn to internalize the “problem” and the “solution” learning that all that we perceive around us is based upon who and what we are. They say that earth is heaven for the saint and hell for the fallen.

Perhaps through the support and power found in community we will be able to muster the fusion of human and divine will to potentiate a substantive shift in the consciousness of a decisive portion of mankind. Campbell once said that the world is a wasteland—and always has been and that culture always unfolds from the top down. The concept of “triage” is that our focus will be built upon a shared commitment to uncover and discover our own demons with the assumption being that as we do, we will see a shift take place upon the landscape around us. As we weave our discoveries into new media collaborations and transmit these to those with the ears to hear and the eyes to see it’s possible, that we could touch a decisive number of hearts to incite a meaningful shift in our global culture—or at the very least, to do our part as we work with many others of like mind.

This is not the stuff of head in the clouds utopianism—this is a call to some of our most creative and intelligent members of society to develop ways to work together toward a true and meaningful heroism—not simply a romantic self-aggrandizing one—but one grounded in the humble and courageous pursuit of human resources we can muster.

The Solution

triage is a structure that provides for the spiritual transformation of artists individually and ultimately collectively so that we might have the capacity to meet, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct “the problem” converting an impossible panorama of catastrophe into one of renewal. A number of art theorists agree that the modernist model of the “artist as the lone iconoclast” has outlived its timeliness. If art is to be made that meaningfully embraces the gravity of our present world situation, its creators must reconsider their beliefs, values, and modus operandi. The rigors of such a task in the face of our shared human frailty poses that our only effective solution lies in the strength and power to be found in some sort of communal approach. Isolated approaches may have effect, but a compressed and shared effort could provide greater efficacy while also providing a covering for all involved.

“Autopoietic structures are instructive in several ways. The illuminate an important paradox: Each structure has a unique identity, a clear boundary, yet it is merged with its environment. At any point in its evolution, the structure is noticeable as a separate event, yet its history is tied to the history of the larger environment and to other autopoietic structures.”

From a mystical viewpoint, the treasured individual voice need not be dissolved into a communal caldron. Triage asserts that we can celebrate individual voices within the chorus of a communal production in ways that are nourishing to individuals while simultaneously presenting the unified and layered force of

Along with these issues are the central logistical issues of making work in new media and its cost. Through sharing equipment and facilities in a structured approach triage will provide resources for art works that would otherwise be unfeasible.

As the Tibetan Buddhists have for centuries had the term “Rigpa,” which is known to them as the “sky of the true mind,” so we have the concept of pure sky blue as the color indicative of that which watches over us—of our one sky the world over—of our harmonic relationship to one another. Unity or harmony could be said to be the essence of any successful spiritual community. If a “true community is [in fact] a mystical body,” then one could say its color could be signified as blue. There are many sacred colors—each with its own place, meaning and value. We needed a name to hold out as our signifier or logo and so we originally arrived at “bluelab.” The idea of bluelab has been one that has been explored for some years now and only recently has been changed to “triage”. When one thinks of new media one might also think of blue i.e., the blue screen of a monitor that’s on and primed for service, of the special effects blue screen which is heavily used in creating convincing 3d illusions in film, and simultaneously one can think of the fifth or “throat chakra” * and it’s commonly thought of color blue that is associated with creativity and expression. We thought of calling the “place” a “lab” not because we want to create an antiseptic and guarded environment, but one that encourages experimentation and discovery. In the supportive atmosphere of community, individual artists can each find and learn to maintain the delicate and fluid balance between detachment and exertion, between camaraderie and solitude, communication, silence and reception, and between the “self” and the “Other”.

The value of a community as an alternate creative vehicle cannot be overestimated. As human beings we are fundamentally interdependent and therefore social animals. In a time marked by international conflict, artists need intimacy with friends and family more than ever. As a fledgling community of artists, triage’s focus is best served in preliminary processes that give us opportunity to get close to one another and to form deep and respectful bonds. There is a period of chaos that must be traversed if a gathering of highly individual and intelligent artists are to eventually trust one another with sufficient depth to encourage meaningfully sensitive collaborations. Only after some preparation can a group of real artists come together and sit silently in a room with one another with a level of trust and respect to bring about real inspiration. The experience of silence initially feels like emptiness which is much like death for most of us who live in a culture that routinely saturates us with information and stimulation. Most artists with any degree of success have learned to create a safe place for themselves and their work, but usually these places are very private and secluded. The objective of bluelab is to create an environment that is real and natural while also so pristine and sacred that it fosters a sense of safety and security. There are of course certain principles that participants will have to agree upon in order to develop such an environment, but once people begin to savor the joy and the power of effective community, they will be highly motivated to keep themselves in check and to yield to the will of the group. Safeguards will be in place to preempt abuse of power of organizational leaders in the form of elders and guides who will on some level function as consultants and who by nature of limited time on site will have greater watchdog sensitivity and clarity. Bylaws will empower our elders to take corrective action in whatever form they deem necessary so as to protect us from our own shadow material.

When sufficient preparation has been achieved we will naturally move inward toward silence. It is the empty vessel that is prepared to be filled. Silence and introversion are intrinsic to any deeply successful creative endeavor. Often in considering what one might conjure in ones mind when thinking of “community” one thinks of it’s polar opposite which is a “cult.” This set of issues has been the focus of many years of research and contemplation for me. Long ago I recognized my narcissism and its destructive potential. Carl Jung reportedly kept a pistol next to his bed for many years and was committed to taking his own life if he found himself succumbing to malignant narcissism. He knew the potential for unmitigated evil that comes with deep archetypal discovery and experience. My path has been one of years and years of deep and protracted underachievement—waiting for the time when I felt pure enough and strong enough to give myself over to such a lofty endeavor as birthing an organization like this.

In the model of the spirituality of imperfection, which I have come to believe the only really accurate model, I have come to see that the true spiritual leader is one who has a deep commitment to truth and therefore is deeply humble. On functional levels, Mariana Caplan in her important book, Halfway Up the Mountain, made clear that unless one has a spiritual teacher—a guide—a spiritual director, one is not truly committed to the spiritual path. I am a firm believer of this. Through the steadfast wisdom and immoveable truthfulness of my teacher I have found the clarity and the humility necessary to continue to develop these ideas. There is no arrival point. History offers scores of examples of spiritual men and women who lost their footing along the way, some with very advanced spiritual attainment, and who consequently wreaked havoc on the lives of many students and followers. It is true that the true guide and teacher is within, but anyone naïve enough to believe that they can traverse the extended austerities and obscurities of the authentic spiritual desert experience without extensive human support and guidance is to me a danger to himself and to others. Of course I’ve had to learn this first hand and so give others the space to make the same bullheaded attempts I’ve survived. Grace has allowed me many mistakes. It is true, “all things work together for good for those who love the Lord,” but when it comes right down to it, one must understand that as they grow in spiritual understanding and power, so does their shadow, or false self.

Unless we have highly skilled adepts to turn to and who are watching over us, we are all apt to all sorts of mischief which can ultimately result in tragedy. The stakes of this game are too high. I am grateful to God for my teacher. Knowing how crafty and self-deceptive I am capable of being, he gave me a spiritual master with a PhD in psychology that has been steadfast in her personal processes with her own teacher for decades. While the idea of something overly defined and organized poses real challenges to individualistic and strong willed artists. It must be said that along with the seeming confinement of such structures is the provision for much greater freedom and individuation. “A river is a river by its banks” Rollo May once said. Without real structure, human beings are very limited in the extent of their range of experience.

As logic stands you couldn't meet a man
Who's from the future
But logic broke as he appeared he spoke
About the Future
"We're not gonna make it" He explained how
the end will come - you and me were never meant
to be part of the future -
All we have is now -
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now

All we'll ever have is now

I noticed that he had a watch and hat
That looked familiar
He was me - from a dimension torn free
Of the future
"We're not gonna make it" He explained how
the end will come - You and me were never meant
to be part of the future -
All we have is now -
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now
All we'll ever have is now -

All we have is now –

The Flaming Lips All We Have is Now

“Save me, my Lord, from the earthly passions and the attachments which blind mankind.

Save me, my Lord from the temptations of power, fame and wealth, which keep humanity away from Thy glorious vision.

Save me, my Lord, from the souls who are constantly occupied in hurting and harming their fellowman and who take pleasure in the pain of another.

Save me, my Lord, from the evil eye of envy and jealousy, which falleth upon Thy bountiful gifts.

Save me, my Lord, from falling into the hands of the playful children of earth, lest they might use me in their games; they might play with me and then break me in the end, as children destroy their toys.

Save me, my Lord, from all manner of injury that cometh from the bitterness of my adversaries and from the ignorance of my loving friends. Amen”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

“This Universal Life penetrates all things. It has two aspects, a rising and a falling, an expansion and a contraction. Through the heating of expansion in Love the Higher was formed; through the cooling of contraction in
Beauty the Lower or external was formed. The waves of vibrations from these met and intermingled forming the
mind-mesh where light and darkness both are found. The Universal Light falling between the meshes of mind upon the
outer sphere gave rise to the myriad of forms which have been given names by man to distinguish them, but really the Essence is one and the same. Who understands this understands something of the Nature of Allah.”

Hazrat Samuel L. Lewis

the Omega Chamber

an interactive transformational metaspacetime environment.

A preliminary sketch for a first triage project

“The small blue haired first mate whispered into the Chief’s ear so thoughtfully, “Don’t worry captain, all’s well, it doesn’t have to make sense for it to work. It’s all part of the plan. “

The captain knew his kind assistant was right. He knew they’d moved too far out and been through too

many perplexities for the whole thing to feel clear to him in moments like this. The key was to stay out of the way and to let it be. He returned to his breath as he surveyed the sprawling instrument screens before him scanning for anomalies. He reconnected to his prayer which because of his many years of training now went on independent of his conscious effort or awareness. The huge ship slid on through the night sky as most of the passengers and crew lay nestled like newborns wrapped in lambs wool blankets symmetrically arranged in their cocoon like travel chambers. They were linked by their dreams. They all dreamed of the new world toward which they moved silently and weightlessly.”

Excerpt from The Driver screenplay for Omega Chamber

The Omega Chamber has been sketched as an immersive virtual environment with a construction model loosely based upon the basic lost wax crucible used in the creation of jewelry. In jewelry casting, one first envisions a desired object then makes a wax model of it placing the model within a container then filling the container with plaster. When the plaster is hardened, the container is placed in a kiln and the wax is burned out leaving its reverse form in the plaster surrounding it. At this point the container is placed on a centrifugal machine which consists of a spring loaded arm holding the mold container. When the pin is dropped, the force of the spring driven arm whirls the mold around at a tremendous speed gravitationally forcing the molten metal into the recesses of the mold. Voila, suddenly one has a precious metal replica of the wax model.

In a similar fashion a group of artists representing an intentional cross section of various media skills will be brought together to form a 1.community (vehicle) and upon the formation of this community will 2.gather and build ideas together to flesh out the basic concepts sketched out for Omega Chamber. The Omega Chamber is conceived as an immersive environment and will be a testing place for some of the technical and theoretical ideas regarding immersion and its transformative potentials. As a matter of philosophical clarity, triage holds that from the standpoint of value hierarchies, technical wizardry is held in service to spiritual integrity.

triage has found that there is much greater potential in seeing ourselves as creative vehicles for higher sources (humility), than seeing ourselves as the source. The capacity to think mystically requires one to learn to think in unitive or integrative terms meaning that one must learn to see and reason on levels

beyond binary either/or opposites. This move from linear cause and effect thinking to a “multiplistic” logic could be said to be the essence of the concept of the “translogical.”

As triage artists become fluent in this style of thinking and interaction it becomes much easier to simultaneously hold a range of viewpoints in regard to various issues placing respect and honor for others above one’s selfish impulse to simply drive ones personal viewpoints home. In many ways this sort of “thinking” is closely linked to “feeling” which could be characterized as “compassionate reasoning.’

triage holds that if artists are operating from their gifts, their work should come quite easily. As daunting as the idea of communal art may seem at first glance, triage proposes that for those artists with the emotional and spiritual maturity to grok the potential satisfaction it offers; the possibility of some exhilarating

experience overrides fears of the unknown. Participating in what could be seen as nothing short of a heroic endeavor in pouring ones gifts and energies into works of art with the sober intention of being transformed and simultaneously laying down ones life for the greater good holds out the possibility of personal enlightenment. What could be better?

As steep as the mountain may look from sea level, it is conquerable by cooperation and Grace.

We will assemble a group of gifted artists to build a metaspacetime chamber in which visitors can interact with and be changed by the environmental influences of the space. The objectives of the Omega Chamber are:

1. To bring together some of the finest artists in Kansas City in an experimental art building environment and to clarify and further develop many of triage theories.
2. To create the work from outset to completion through the framework of principles and strategies triage has developed focusing on authentic community as collaborative creative vehicle.
3. To create a multimedia interactive chamber that will serve as a laboratory like testing ground for many if not all the ideas that will be employed and further developed during subsequent projects.
4. To discover new ideas and strategies through the interaction and living wisdom of the specific participants involved. Discoveries will become the intellectual property of triage but of course those who want to strike out and to make similar art works are welcome to use whatever we have to offer. Because we are structured as a not for profit spiritual enterprise, we’re not concerned with hording our discoveries and in fact recognize the radical power of generosity in action.
5. To install a fully functional interactive environment that will inspire the public and plant various seeds toward our future projects.
6. To measure and document variables and to gain a critical introduction to the art community at large.
7. To offer patrons and donors concrete evidence of the efficacy of our assertions encouraging increasing levels of commitment and support.

The Omega Chamber has been conceived as a relatively low cost pilot project for triage. We will seek corporate and private support and will make efforts to gain involvement from some of finest and most innovative artists in Kansas City.

triage will be seeking a starter environment for the production phase and (if need be) a public venue for the performance phase of the project. Our first consideration is to aim toward new theoretical approaches to communal art making leading to personal and collective psychospiritual breakthroughs. To this end we need a warm and homey production environment. Too much austerity is not for us. Our courage will be tested in many other ways.

Proposed Plan

1. Create an interactive immersive environment. Create environment with sound, video, lighting, and special effects that is a transformative environment. Have floor rug constructed with each person entering barefooted. Have interactive microphones and cameras with supplemental interactive sound loops and video loops.

The labyrinth is an archetype of transformation. Its transcendent nature knows no boundaries, crossing time and cultures with ease. The labyrinth serves as a bridge from the mundane to the divine. It serves us well."

Kimberly Lowelle Saward, Ph.D.,

”In a nut-shell, Sacred Geometry is, "The use of a handful of ratios to create forms that help the seeker to resonate properly to achieve their desired spiritual goal."

Sig Lonegren

“Sacred geometry is the contemplation and utilization of the archetypal geometric patterns of Nature for the purposes of spiritual communion and healing.”

Alex Champion

"Sacred geometry is the act of studying the divine act of creation and then using that knowledge to create in the same way. By studying nature, we find that the basic building blocks of creation are geometric. Since a divine hand is responsible for originating the numbers and proportions of the manifest universe, that geometry is sacred. Studying sacred geometry leads us to truth and self-understanding. All societies use sacred geometry to construct their temples, sacred places, and art. Chartres Cathedral, for example. And its labyrinth. Numbers aren't just for counting, nor are they just symbolic. They are the actual essence of everything that exists."

Robert Ferré

Sound Video (ex. Children playing in park, blue sky, natural and colorful.)

Range from

Red 1 (middle) c denial pseudocommunity

Orange 2 d anger chaos

Yellow 3 e bargaining chaos

Green 4 f depression emptiness silence

Blue 5 g acceptance community

Indigo 6 a integration service

Violet 7 b immersion ecstasy

Loop time is 9 minutes with colors, tones, sounds, concepts and images created and presented in synch with one another.

2. The work will be fleshed out and informed by the shared experience and attached meaning and understanding developed within the context of our collaborative experience. Again, the conceptual framework is only an armature, the chicken wire of outlined thoughts and sketches and beginnings of conversations between artists. The stuff of substance will creep into the work as we interact and build and rest and exert and breath and laugh and sigh and struggle and see and share and surrender and give and receive—together—TOGETHER… etc.

The above is a simple template that could serve as a beginning point for building an immersive environment. It would look At least initially much like the ancient labyrinths which can be found in ancient churches.