jeff hogue/ bluelab art org

Finish what you've started here
You make your move
just once a year
In the city
in the town
Your happy home
is never found
Second hand
was never planned
The birth was over,
the baby banned
She fled the place
at such a pace
She never even saw your face
So go with me
Inside
Believe
You have so much to give

Switch the light off,
have a go
Force the only one you know
To leave this place
without a trace
A pity
I had seen your face
Where do you think
I will find
This party girl
who was so kind?
Raven hair
and skin so fair
Sadness
never visits there
So go with me
Inside
Believe
You have so much to give

the Delgados
Make Your Move

We didn't sleep too late.
There was a fire in the yard.
All of the tress were in light.
They had no faces to show.
I saw a sign in the sky:
Seven swans,
seven swans,
seven swans.
I heard a voice in my mind:
I will try, I will try, I will try. I will try, I will try, I will try.
We saw the dragon move down.
My father burned into coal.
My mother saw it from far.
She took her purse to the bed.
I saw a sign in the sky:
Seven horns, seven horns, seven horns.
I heard a voice in my mind:
I am Lord, I am Lord, I am Lord.
He said: I am Lord, I am Lord, I am Lord.
He said: I am Lord, I am Lord, I am Lord.
He will take you.
If you run,
He will chase you.
He will take you.
If you run,
He will chase you
'cause He is the Lord.
'Cause He is the Lord...
Seven swans, seven swans, seven swans, seven swans, seven swans...

Sufjan Stevens Seven Swans

“The question is no longer how did we get here, and why? But, where can we possibly go, and how? We live in a society that has drastically narrowed our sensitivity to moral and spiritual issues; the problem we face is how to deal with a belief structure that has blocked both psychological and spiritual development. If there is a new agenda, a new vision now emerging within our society, how might one help put it into practice?”
Suzi Gablik

...bluelab is being developed upon the issue first posed by Einstein, "a problem cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness in which it was created.” It has become evident to many that in order to meet the problems we face as a species we must embrace a radical revision of our beliefs and our behaviors.

bluelab functions upon the strong presumption that artists likely figure significantly into the revisioning of a new world—and the invention of ways to communicate our discoveries. As we all learn more and more about our essential interconnectedness it also becomes increasingly evident that artists can’t function in a social vacuum. The label of “artist” is a problematic one and only used as a signifier of persons with specific media skills and training who are fluent in creative processes and who have some professional link to art. We are working to deconstruct as much as possible the binary--"us vs. them" mentality that still pervades the high art world. It seems to us that consistent with new paradigmatic shifts taking placethroughout all fields--there is a need to reconsider our accepted definitions of "artist" and "audience" all together. bluelab is constructed to offer pathways into higher levels of inclusivity. It is only through true inclusion that we can hope to make work that is deeply inviting and that offers an atmosphere of true love and trust and safety to all.

In terms of the way bluelab will in fact function, we are working to develop a sound and effective approach to community building which relies heavily upon time tested processes that are well understood and are seeking the help of people who are expert in these processes. On practical levels, the sharing and cross fertilization of specific areas of expertise allows for rich and complex works which through communal process are fused unselfconsiously and intuitively making of an organic whole.

Why all the talk of “community”?It is our firm belief that by building works in a heightened communal space we will in fact be building works potent with transformational energies. Jung talked about the distinctions between “liminal”or
transformative space and “liminoid”, or works that are simply entertaining. With a hard look at where we are at as a species and planet—it seems like simple math that we must link art making to the real task at hand—that of saving the earth.

Jesus pushes it back to the edge. Can you even see the image of Christ in the least of the brothers and sisters? He uses that as his only description of the final judgement. Nothing about commandments, nothing about church attendance, nothing about papal infallibility: simply a matter of our ability to see. Can we see Christ in the people, the nobodies who can't play our game of success? They smell. They're a nuisance. They're on welfare. They are a drain on our tax money. If we can, then we are really seeing.

He pushes it even further than that. He says we have to love and recognize the divine image even in our enemies. He teaches what they thought a religious leader could never demand of his followers: love of the enemy. Logically that makes no sense. Soulfully it makes absolute sense, because in terms of the soul, it really is all or nothing. Either we see the divine image in all created things or we don't see it at all. Once we see it, we're trapped. We see it once and the circle keeps moving out. If we still try to exclude some: sick people, blacks, people on welfare, gays (or whomever we've decided to hate), we're not there. We don't understand. If the world is a temple, then our enemies are sacred, too. The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. ...

Everything becomes enchanting...

Richard Rohr Everything Belongs

“[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

Is it possible to create new spiritual structures for collaborative art making and to implement such toward community building with a depth of conviction, courage and inspiration that might move participants beyond self-interest toward truly new possibilities? Is it possible that with rigorous and focused processes artists could joyously make work engaging meaningfully with the specter of our global challenges while together exploring the uncharted territory of their souls? Can community building processes readily pour into art making wherein something meaningful and healing might evolve? Is it possible that these discoveries might be transmitted to the public at large through various new media shedding fresh light upon human potentials? Is it possible that all of this could dovetail with the efforts of important organizations such as The Global Justice Movement, Environmental Defense and Amnesty International toward a healthier and happier planet?

We say hopefully, yes.

What if artists were offered stipends, room and board allowing them to come together and 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 issues in depth leading to transformational theater, installation, film and music? What if these artists were guided by experts through a structured community building process prior to beginning to create their projects? What if artists were given opportunity to work with and interact with some of the leaders of our time in the fields of art, science, and philosophy? What if these artists were given all the production equipment and technical assistance they might need to produce global quality shows? What if supporters and friends of our organization were given intimate amphitheater access to segments of our artists’ processes as well as early rehearsals, scheduled meals, activities and fellowship? What if the productions could be built and performed with some eventually touring the US and the world?

bluelab has been founded and created out of a perceived need to reconsider art making and professional collaborative art practice proceeding boldly from visionary prerogatives. We don’t find fault with the many artists who will not be drawn to what we are doing—for spiritual practice and its interface with collaborative art making are not for everyone.

In light of our present global endgame scenario it seems frivolous at best to argue over rhetorical issues. bluelab is intended for the “Great Work”--that of joining leaders of many fields worldwide who are engaged in the work of saving the earth. We believe that perhaps the only way to meet our present challenges is to deeply transform ourselves which implies the support of a real community and structured spiritual practice to be determined by each member for her or himself.

When serious professional artists are willing to embrace the rigors of authentic spiritual practice, the work of community building and heightened artistic collaboration will undoubtedly fall quickly into place.

The abundance of quotes from Sufi teachers have been included simply because they are part of my daily practice and do not infer a direct link between bluelab and Sufism. In point of fact, any serious spiritual practitioner must see that there can be no schism between the teachings of true Sufism and any sincere humanitarian interest. In the interest of those who may fear some sort of covert Islamic link, Sufism as it’s practiced and defined by and large in the West is Universalist in its orientation and in fact many Sufi’s roots are Christian and Jewish.

"Emptiness feels empty not because there is nothing present, but because whatever it is we're doing has no egotistic interference. The subtle arteries have no ego plaque in them, nothing to resist the smooth flow of the soul. Without our getting in the way, the life of the soul is rich and full, though unpredictable. But it isn't easy to trust strong desire and the life that keeps pouring into us. We always think we know better what should be and how it should all turn out. That is why the death principle --avoiding, worrying, being moralistic--is so popular." Thomas Moore The Soul's Religion

All through Erikson’s work is the implication that the creative adult (the generative adult) is precisely the person who can infuse his life with play;…the great cultural synthesizers—the religious, political and cultural geniuses such as Luther, Freud and Gandhi—were supreme in their playfulness, especially in their work. Their great words of synthesis were personal attempts to restore the active mastery of their egos in the context of the tensions and dichotomies of their personal and public historical situations. All great historical syntheses are as much play as they are work. They are work because they are indeed attentive to the real contradictions and tensions that most people of a given historical period both sense and suffer. They are a result of play because the creative genius does not simply conform to, adjust to, and accommodate to these tensions. Instead, he bends and reshapes these tensions until they submit to a new synthesis which not only enlivens and activates him but which also enlivens and activates a whole people and an entire era.

“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, [Islamic in our affirmation of self-sacrifice,] [Hindu in our affirmation of the multiplicity of God's expression], 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!”

“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., A Different Drum

"In the very first chapter Thomas (Berry) lays before us 'The Great Work.' In each historical epoch, he says, people are given a “Great Work” to do—in one age, the settling of new lands, in another the building of great cathedrals, the creation of artistic, philosophical, religious or scientific works, or the shaping of political structures and ideas. The Great Works of prior periods are seen in such things as the movement of the first people out of Africa in the Paleolithic Period; the creation of language, rituals and social structures in hunter-gatherer communities; the establishment of agriculture communities in the Neolithic Period; the development of the great classical civilizations; and, in the modern period, advances in technology, urban civilization, new
ideals of government and human rights, the modern business enterprise and globalism.

Our Great Work is not something we choose, Thomas says. It is something we find ourselves thrown into by virtue only of being born in a certain time and place. The task may seem
overwhelming, one coming in response to some huge historical difficulty, but, he observes, just as we are given our historical task by some power beyond ourselves, we must also believe we are given the abilities to fulfill this task.
The Great Work into which we and our children are born, Thomas says, comes in response to
the devastation of the planet caused by human activity. We are facing a breakdown in the life
systems that can only be understood by comparison with events that marked the great transitions in the geo-biological eras of Earth’s history, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species when the Mesozoic Era ended and our present Cenozoic Era began. Our task is to move from our modern industrial civilization with its devastating impact to that of benign presence. It is an arduous and overwhelming task, one exceeding in its complexity that ever offered to humans, for it is not simply one of adjustment to disturbance of human life patterns, as, for example, that occasioned by the Great Depression or the recent World Wars, but one of dealing with the disruption and termination of the geo-biological system that has governed the functioning of the planet in the 67 million year reign of the Cenozoic Era in the history of the planet Earth."

Ten Sufi Thoughts

from The Way of Illumination by Hazrat Inayat Khan

There are ten principal Sufi thoughts which comprise all the important subjects with which the inner life of man is concerned:
1) There is one God, the Eternal, the Only Being; none else exists save God.
2) There is one Master, the Guiding Spirit of all souls, who constantly leads all followers towards the light.
3) There is one Holy Book, the sacred manuscript of nature, which truly enlightens all readers.
4) There is one Religion, the unswerving progress in the right direction towards the ideal, which fulfils the life's purpose of every soul.
5) There is one Law, the law of Reciprocity, which can be observed by a selfless conscience together with a sense of awakened justice.
6) There is one human Brotherhood, the Brotherhood and Sisterhood which unites the children of earth indiscriminately in the Fatherhood (/Motherhood) of God.
7) There is one Moral Principle, the love which springs forth from self-denial, and blooms in deeds of beneficence.
8) There is one Object of Praise, the beauty which uplifts the heart of its worshipper through all aspects from the seen to the unseen.
9) There is one Truth, the true knowledge of our being within and without which is the essence of all wisdom.
10) There is one Path, the annihilation of the false ego in the real, which raises the mortal to immortality and in which resides all perfection.

The following are shared objectives for bluelab and were first articulated as such by Hazrat Inayat Khan who is credited as the first to bring Sufism to the West--in the early 20th century.

The objectives of the Sufi path:

1) To realize and spread the knowledge of unity, the religion of love and wisdom, so that the bias of faiths and beliefs may of itself fall away, the human heart may overflow with love, and all hatred caused by distinctions and differences may be rooted out.

2) To discover the light and power latent in man, the secret of all religion, the power of mysticism, and the essence of philosophy, without interfering with customs or belief.

3) To help to bring the world's two opposite poles, East and West, closer together by the interchange of thought and ideals that the Universal Brotherhood may form of itself and man may see with man beyond the narrow national and racial boundaries.

Monday, October 23, 2006

From The King Within Accessing the King in the Male Psyche Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

THE POSTMODERN RETURN OF THE KING

We are now moving in a postmodern era, (written in '92) one which is recovering a sense of hidden, divine, and in psychological language, archetypal heights and depths. Rationalism and modernity are collapsing under their own irrational weight. And that collapse has prepared the way for the return of the King.

The first serious crack in rationalism's facade appeared after Einstein published his Theory of Relativity. Though this theory is the better part of a century old, modernity lingers on because the world of subatomic physics is so intellectually challenging popularizers are still having difficulty explaining the meaning of the work Einstein and his colleagues have left us. The atom bomb, of course, is one direct application of the work-rationalism's apocalyptic achievement is based upon discoveries that undercut the certainties of rationalism.

Among the most disconcerting discoveries was that our apparently solid world is mostly made of empty space. Atoms can be described as akin to mini solar systems, in which subatomic particles are relatively just as small and far apart from one another as are the planets of our solar system. Furthermore, the major subatomic components, the electron, proton, and neutron, can be broken down into even smaller components, which can themselves be broken down, and so on in an apparently endless regression.

These particles exhibit extremely bizarre characteristics. They seem to be able to travel backward in time. They seem capable of localizing in two places at once, without ever having divided. These tiniest of particles may not even be particles. They also behave as if they are waves of radiant energy. They appear to spontaneously arise from and subside into a mysterious, underlying energy grid, an invisible matrix which may permeate what we have considered to be the void of empty space. Subatomic particles seem to be transient, granular concentrations of this underlying energy field. This makes the void fairly dance with energy, whatever energy may be. Many have noted how the new physicists have had to resort to the allusive, spiritual language of mystics to explain their concepts.

Physicists working with astronomers are inventing a new "mystical" cosmology. These new theories are fundamentally challenging to modernity's assumptions about the nature of reality. According to the prevalent Big Bang theory, this immense universe was once packed into a tiny point smaller than an atom's nucleus." Within this unimaginable density the four major energic forces that drive and shape our universe were combined in one single undifferentiated force.
Max Planck worked calculations back to chart the universe's course to within 10--43 of a second after the Big Bang. Before this time, he proposed what we now designate as the Planck Era in which time and space as we know them did not exist. Recent theorists have enjoyed speculating about the Planck Era. They imagine a kind of foam that throws up bubbles, most of which fall back into the Planck Era. Those that escape explode into universes, each of which generates its own unique space-time. Our universe is one such expanding bubble. Each bubble contains in miniature the inherent structures of the universe it will become. Astronomers have now collected sufficient data to map galaxy distributions-and they have found that galaxies are distributed in vast strings and clumps. This is in accord with the uneven quality physicists believe to have been implicit in our tiny Planck Era bubble.

As if these discoveries weren't enough to confound the rationalist Ego, biologists have begun to explore the unseen dimension from which biological forms and processes derive. Just as there is an implicit grid along which mineral crystals form in explicit detail, biological phenomena seem to arise as explications of a mysterious implicate order. Adolf Portmann postulates hidden "operators," or structural forms, explaining: "Formation and new formation in the realm of living organisms are not a production of order out of a disordered chaos, they are the production of order out of an already given, ordered structure. " Portmann has spoken of an invisible "abyss of mystery" in which these structural forms are implicit, an "immense, unknown realm of the mysterious. Once again we find a scientist speaking like a mystic, and even like a depth psychologist. Jung noticed striking resemblances to ideas of modern science turning up in the dream productions of his analysands. What is an archetype if not a notion of implicate order, of just the type postulated by physicists, biologists, and astronomers? Jung's "abyss of mystery" within the psyche, the illimitable collective unconscious, is an invisible structure giving transient form in the "material" world to various complexes and urges. There seems to be emerging a unitary, postmodern worldview, in which the mystical traditions, psychology, and the physical sciences all serve to elucidate aspects of the same underlying reality. That
underlying reality reveals the presence of the landscape of the King within the human psyche.

Perhaps we can parallel the two fundamental dimensions of scientific reality, the implicate and the explicate, with the sacred and profane dimensions of the sacred king's world. The ancient idea of divine order in mythic time and space seems to agree with ideas of implicate structures, strings, granular space, and invisible operators. This may be an aspect of the divine order we have referred to as Ma'at, Dharma, Tao, and Torah. There is also the shared notion that in the "sacred" time and space of the Planck Era, all things existed in undifferentiated unity. This is strikingly parallel to the pleroma of the Gnostics, the Buddhist nirvana, the Hindu unmanifest Brahman, the Christian paradise, the Jungian collective Self.
Jungian analyst Jolande Jacobi has noted that many prominent scientists, including Planck, Hartmann, Uexhill, Eddington, and Jeans, have come up against an impassable barrier between what empirical knowledge can discover and what metaphysics alone can grasp. We call this Left Brain barrier the "wall of paradise," after the ancient theologian Nicholas of Cusa. On our side of the wall primordial unity manifests in pairs of opposites. On the other side everything exists in com
plete harmony.

In the Planck Era, the four forces of nature were joined into two, and the two into one. Taoists say that the appearance of "two" signaled the inception of the created world. Before two is the Tao, unknowable in its pure essence. In Babylonian mythology the universe began when Marduk slew Tiamat and divided her into two. The Egyptian universe began when the primordial hill arose from the cosmic ocean, creating two dimensions of reality.
And just as creation myths hold that sacred energy erupted into the profane at a single point, then radiated outward, so the Big Bang theory argues the universe began within an infinitesimally small point. After an unimaginable explosion, radiant energy spread in every direction. Our sphere of space-time is still expanding. We can find a direct parallel to this in the Jewish tradition, which tells us, "The Most Holy One created the world like an embryo. As the embryo grows from the navel, so God began to create the world by the navel and from there it spread out in all directions."

The emerging postmodern worldview is in a way a remythologization-of the universe. The teachings of the great spiritual traditions no longer seem so farfetched. From the theory of the archetypes to the "operators" of biological forms, it is once again reasonable to speak of an invisible order trying to incarnate in the lives of individual humans. Of course, physics, astronomy, and biology do not speak the anthropomorphic language of the myths of the King. But they do point to a creative ordering which moves the potential into the actual.

Creative ordering through an incarnational process is the central characteristic of the archetypal King. The King is returning in the postmodern world.