Art as religion

I often ponder on the deepest underlying roots connecting all religion and all spiritual explorations.  Put another way, I experiment with the concept of all religions containing one universal spark at their core that all apostles of every faith share on common.  To put words to this flickering flame is as hard as trying to catch it in your hand.  I see it as a THING.  It is something that is found on any number of journeys.  Once it is held, the holder feels connected to something greater than one's self.  Be it Islam or Wicca, be connecting to God in heaven or experiencing the greatest connection to the magic of the all mother, that moment of mixing the self with the almighty is somehow universal.  

While definitions may differ, I believe not in what I have described as a result of this search, but instead believe in what I have felt on this search.  This abundant feeling is sacred, but it is not a purely religious feeling.  I have felt this same way about certain movies, certain books, certain games even.  The experience lifts me up and connects me to something higher than myself.  Examples.  Cloud Atlas connected me to this endless journey across the ages as souls cross and recross the same problems again and again until they transcend them.  Prince of Persia connected me to a brave soul who conquers time itself to weave a narrative and growth arc that truly transcends time.  

Every story is a vessel that takes us to a different dimension.  It is the dimension where the collective imagination of all beings is given form.  By drinking of these stories and experiences, I become them; I live what they live and learn what they have learned.  I become more than myself and when I experience a story that connects me so complete to another and that feeling is identical to its sister flame that I find at the root of all religions I have studied.  

Dear reader, I would like to extrapolate this one step further.  Might I be so bold as to say that all art, all ACTION may lead us to this grand connecting force.  I do not mean to say that all of us are on this anti-entropic path, but I find most of humanity seeks this single feeling-- a flame that flickers through adversity and warms us to the truth that we are not alone.  

Meditate is an adverb

Many people these times see meditation as an act.  One sits down and consciously breathes into a state of deep, healing relaxation and it will improve their lives.  They are meditating, yes, but they are yet unaware that this state of being is akin to any adverb describing a person.

I see meditation as a state of perfect being.  One is perfectly in the moment.  One is so at one with the tidal twists and turns of fate that all is calm even while tumbling through that most torrential current.  This is easy to do when doing nothing but meditating, but it is also easy to do this during any and every action possible in this universe.  Buddhist monks have this DOWN.  Everything from mopping the floor to drinking tea is perfected while the monk is simply present, at one with the perfection of his or her presence.  This IS meditation.  Many ascetics simply wish to live their lives in this state-- and anyone who has meditated truly has likely envied a reality where they are so constantly present.

Therefore, I say why not!  Meditation is an adverb.  I do not meditate, I meditatively DO.  I do not simply drink water, I bless this water as I drink and it in turn blesses me with the perfection I have helped it attain.  I do not simply draw art for work, I connect to the highest dimensions and call down in perfect clarity these transdimensional moments onto paper.

And you can too.

Without the speaker, nothing is said.  Without the reader, nothing is gained.  If I am to accept that we are one, dear reader, I must accept that there is no distinction between the reader and the writer.  This is your creation as well as mine.  Together, remembering our roots, we are greater than both of us.  

Avatar state

I had a dream recently that was awesome.  This dream started off more like a meditation.  I found myself in a calm, blanketing canvas of mystically deep waters.  I gained a moment of lucidity and invited a friend.  Adara showed up and I asked her to teach me how to firebend a la the show Avatar.  I proceeded to lose lucidity at this point, but what I partook in was the bending equivalent of a philosophical jam session.  

I'll continue in first person now to get deeper into that moment.

Adara showed me first: "it feels like this."  Her thumb on my head shares with me a moment from her past.  The fire that ignites in my hand feels like pure creation.  It is like holding an entire army of Celtic fiddlers all pouring their souls into an astonishing piece about life's perfection.  It is like coming up with an idea that will change the world.  It is like being pregnant with the universe.  My heart overflows into movement and every flicker of action is creative and full of pure life force.  Wherever I move, the burning passion of life in its prime wreathes me as I go.  I swathe fractals in flame limited only by the life in the infinite being of all existing within my heart.  I believe in my strength when I firebend because in doing so, I am life itself-- my breath is steady and my fire can warm, soothe, dazzle, or protect all the beauty this universe has to offer.

"It feels totally different from my native element, water."  I raise my palm in yang to show her.  To bend water, one's mind must be at the bottom of the ocean; dark, but constantly moving, the source of all nourishment, yet so easily tugged around by the moon and by man.  I become infinitely humble as to never be broken.  A double helix of water rises as my arm paints upwards.  Now arisen, I slide humbly and exhale out.  Water humbly follows with all the strength of the tide.  This tidal force envelops all that my communicating and healing waters touch, wholly and completely.  I am in perfect communion with the one truth that all things share.  I believe in my strength when I waterbend because my depths are unfathomable-- I can contain within me any anger thrown at me and unleash a calming deluge in response, exactly proportionate to the situation.

"Now, Adara.  Where in water and fire, one communes with a force of the universe beyond them, air is entirely and completely different.  Air is purely movements of the self."  With a movement of my hand across my body as I lower my presence, a vacuum opens and the wind pours in to fill the void created by my movement.  Slowly, at first, but as my gestures become more bold, mighty oaks may fall to the movements of my soul.  With air in mind, there is action and reaction, movement and the fury of the storm that follows.  I must be careful, but I have nothing to fear, for my gentle hand touches all.  I believe in my strength when I Airbend because I know do not have to change anyone-- I need but change myself, the world will align by causality.

"As with fire and then water, it is wind and then earth."  Earth bending feels surprisingly weak of power in my physical form.  It is an allegiance and a bond with the earth that respects the fragility of me, but when fully realized, my strength is infinite because it is the entire earth moving to aid me.  Each pebble believes in me so much that I need but point and the earth itself flocks to experience what I believe is there.  I am a YouTube celebrity.  I am but a piece of clay on this earth, yet others believe in me.  I need but move my arms up defensively and this world bends its entire might to shelter me from harm, for I am important.  I believe in my strength when I Earthbend, but only because I know that I am but a pebble with a voice to inspire.

"To envision the avatar state, I must inform you of what it is like without."  When I waterbend, my entire being was water.  My focus is so heavily on the connection and the unfathomable depths that my mind cannot experience the exact opposite of the infinite high of conducting a symphony of fire at the same time!  To do both at once is surely impossible.  To bend more than one element at once is to feel multiple experiences at once.  It is to experience multiple lives, all lives even, and pull out of that sea the movements that rewrite fate itself.  To fly away backwards on a cloud while flinging boulders, one has to be both completely focused on moving the self while needing those movements to inspire the earth itself to leap to action.  To slam my fist into the ground and encase my target in electrified water, I must fill the unfillable depths of my soul with the intensity of the fire I hold in my heart.  Each combination is unique and each feels more like I am looking at myself from the void of time than it does feeling and moving and acting like each element individually.  All four elements at once, like the caging of Vaatu, is a feeling of such intense unification, I have a hard time describing it.  In bending all four at once, I become the world I bend.  It is no longer me bending my surroundings, it is my surroundings bending to make way for my will on this earth.

...

Ok, I hope you enjoy.  I feel like an ABSOLUTE nerd at this point and feel like I should go hide in a corner forever.  kthxbai

Papoose

http://papoosedoorbelle.blogspot.com/

This website is a beautiful place.  It is filled to the brim with nothing but the sparkling stuff that makes kids beg you for just one more story.  And now I'm part of it.  Go check it out!  Remember, even clicking on the link gives wonderful people like myself, Papoose, and Ken a view.  Those views add up into more viewing and those viewings add up into more viewings.  The internet is a democracy of clicks.  Here is to clicking wisely with the future in mind <3  

Gaming evolved

Whether you play games or not, the idea of fighting games is pretty simple.  You have a life bar, your enemy has a life bar, may the best gamer win.

The game I linked below is a team based game where 5 players join together to lead an army on three fronts into the enemy base.  I am linking it because for so long, gaming has been about the individual.  The times are changing and games like this give each character a part to play in a being greater than each of them individually.  Watch the bottom of the screen.  The red and the blue bars are the combined life total of the visible members of the respectively colored teams.  Full circle.  This is still a fighting game to test skill and train quick thinking, but the mechanics have evolved beyond the capacities of a single player.  Lucian, featured here, is but the arm of the team.  He rocks socks, but in truth is nothing without the other four.

I want to see games like Starcraft and Civilizations and Eve incorporate functionality with multiple players given control over one body.  It'd be like Pacific Rim, the pilots having to become one in order to move a body massive enough to take on the task at hand.  It is an exponentiation of battle for one, but it is also a new dimension of connection and synergy that reaches out beyond language.  When I played that game, I played with crazy people from Brazil, loud people from Korea, funny people from Spain, and quiet people from Canada.  No matter who or how they were, the goal was the same and achieving that goal meant cooperating.  It meant seeing things as bigger than yourself.  Sometimes it meant sacrificing your life to protect someone.  Sometimes it meant knowing that someone was sacrificing themselves for you.  Sometimes it meant taking a leap of faith into a fight you thought you will lose because your teammates believe it was possible.  There is a language of pings and body language that transcends country and helps five become one.  

Games can teach that.  Convention tells us otherwise because we cannot imagine anything greater for the medium.  If we can simply imagine something greater, we can create it.  If we can simply conceive a better world in our minds, we can transform our world to match it.  That is our power.  That is our responsibility.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5ME-TLmyQA

Here's another vid for the road.  More focused on the specifics behind team play.  I highly recommend it.

http://youtu.be/IdA_yq1i0S0

Veiled

Welcome to Veiled, my first YouTube project.  I have had pipe dreams of turning this old dream into a comic, but I am not a high enough caliber artist to dedicate myself to that work for the years it would take to go panel by panel.  I also find myself fond enough of writing to desire to write my own books on these, but I am not a high enough caliber writer to fashion an entire book.  

Why not do both?  I have an imagination, surely I cannot believe that an artist must be limited to one medium or the other.  Veiled will be done in a visual novel style with a voice over of my episodes with some flash of my artwork to aid the narrative.  Each episode will be YouTube length and will be able to be watched for the most part in any order even though order will of course add to the experience.  

Veiled is about the nameless protagonist who is trapped by the current God in a single moment in the present.  She is trapped so that she may learn enough to succeed the current one.  This god is a troll dad and has set up an experience she is familiar with: earning achievements.  Each achievement is some important lesson she gleans from the moment.  There will be some filler episodes like an achievement for walking 500 miles complete with her getting upset about getting the song stuck in her head.  Also: God is depicted as a chipped coffee mug with "best dad" printed on it.  Because ... Well that's how it was in the dream it came from.

I drew it on the back of some notes for a job I was doing on my clipboard with a knife-sharpened pencil.  The work is entirely my own save for the ... Whoever that is behind her.  That was drawn on there by someone else, but I like it.  If you look close, the sun's lens flare eclipses the best dad mug as well as the title.  Her skirt (which is not what she normally wears, this is a publicity piece) has some super intricate designs on it that might be hard to see (nevermind, I inked it).  She is floating on a cloud overlooking vast plains and mountains framing the sunset.  When I photoshop this, the "angel" will be practically a watermark, and the color pallete will be somewhere between dark souls two and the earthy pastelles of a hippy wardrobe.

Enjoy and wish me luck.  I'll be attempting to get my YouTube career up and running with this and a few other shows I'll tell you about later.  

I have to level with you, dear reader.  I am a geyser of creative energy right now.  It is absolutely insane.  Between all this YouTube stuff AND the Red Alert earlier, I have work that needs doing.  The lion in my heart is charging forward with unstoppable tenacity and I am holding on for my life, may chance to see these things in my soul to be given life on our plane.  

Clutter

I have been doing some side work helping people with their computers.  I was working with this lady on her windows 8 work computer and she said something that made me think: "my start screen is so cluttered with stuff, I just ignore most of it."

I showed her how to get rid of things and together we made a start screen that was aesthetically pleasing, conveniently had everything she needed, and even had some luxury news panels.  Everything had a purpose.  She really enjoys her start screen now and can use it for its designed purpose, but her words stuck with me enough that I find myself here once again.

Human brains are exceedingly good at pattern recognition and filtering out complexity.  When overwhelmed, our defense is turning excess stimuli into white noise so that we may direct focus resources to solving a more pertinent issue.  This woman recognized the start screen as some computer function, but the details were fuzzy and the computer had so much stuff installed on it for work that the menu was too much information to process.  After trimming it down and putting focus on making it hers, she had no problem starting to truly see the start screen instead of filtering it out subconsciously.  We do this all the time.  From dozens of Facebook adds to skimming newspaper text, the details we choose not to see are simplifications of our world made ironically to help us see it better.  

Her words made me ask myself, "what else are we filtering out?"  Are we filtering out everyone else's feelings?  Their actions?  Their intentions?  Are we filtering out our conscience?  Our logic?  Are we filtering out colors and sights?  Are we filtering out BEAUTY so that we can focus on not walking into a pole?  Should we?  

Start menus are not complex-- not on the scale of the complexity of the entirety of our audio-visual spectrum, but the concept is the same.  If we don't really know what we are looking at, we will filter it out.  In many ways, I find myself like the lady I helped.  In simplifying and learning about my world, I no longer filter it out.  I SEE it and am astonished and fulfilled by it.  How silly I have been.  It was right here this whole time.

Red Alert

Remember how I said I was working on something big?  It's getting bigger.  It has a name now.  It has a face now.  It has its dharma now.  All it needs is its shell sculpted out of earth and the mysterious spark of "life" and it will be free on this world.