Alex Grey et al. - Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Marshall Frankel Foundation and Liz and BeckyFrankel for their generous support of the Sacred Mirrors book project. MarshallFrankel, a Chicago businessman and well-known art collector, expressed a greatinterest in the Sacred Mirrors during his life, and it was a pleasure to have beenhis friend. I greatly cherish the friendship of his daughters.

Thanks to publisher Ehud Sperling and the Inner Traditions staff for believingin and actualizing the Sacred Mirrors book project. Leslie Colket and WendyTilghman have edited the text with great skill and insight. Susan Davidson andFrank Olinsky provided invaluable design work. Thanks also to art directorEstella Arias for cover consultation and press approval.

Great appreciation is due my friend Ken Wilber, for giving us his insightfulperspective on the spiritual in art and for selflessly providing his essay in theshadow of a time of personal grief, after the death of his beloved and extraordinarywife, Treya.

Special thanks go to Carlo McCormick, who is always deluged with requestsfor essays and written work. He took on the difficult task of researching all ofmy past work in depth and has given me with his essay the immense satisfactionof being understood.

Thanks to the assistance of my late grandmother, Carrie Stewart, who believedin my work, I was able to begin the project of creating a book about theSacred Mirrors. Thanks also to my parents and to Allyson's family for theircontinual emotional and moral support, and for remaining the healthy sourceof our experience of parenthood. Thanks to our daughter, Zena, for her puresmile and inspirational joy. She gives us back much more than we could evergive to her.

There is no one I must thank more than my greatest and most intrepid friend,my wife, Allyson, who has been inspiring and helpful throughout the SacredMirrors project. We sculpted and cast the frames together, a labor of love anda most grueling task. She has edited my written words and advised me in almostevery aspect of my work. I consider her a great artist and feel privileged tocollaborate with her. This book is dedicated to Allyson.

PREFACE

On June 3, 1976, we simultaneously shared the same psychedelic vision: anexperience of the "Universal Mind Lattice." Our shared consciousness, nolonger identified with or limited by our physical bodies, was moving at tremendousspeed through an inner universe of fantastic chains of imagery, infinitelymultiplying in parallel mirrors. At a superorgasmic pitch of speed andbliss, we became individual fountains and drains of Light, interlocked with aninfinite omnidirectional network of fountains and drains composed of andcirculating a brilliant iridescent love energy. We were the Light, and the Lightwas God.

It seemed as if the "real" material world was an illusory veil, now withdrawn,and the energetic scaffolding of causation and creation, the Ultimate Reality,eternal and infinite, was laid bare before and through us. All polarities wereincorporated and transcended without conflictpast and future, microscopicand cosmic, male and female, self and other. Yet there was no extinguishmentof awareness. Indeed, we each felt this state to be our purified essence. "I" wasone particular point in the vast network, aware of "my" unique relationshipwith all points in the field. An infinite Void seemed to provide the ground fromwhich this lattice of light emerged. We both realized our vital connection withall beings and things in the Universe, with God. We felt that death was not tobe feared because the Light was our spiritual core and we would eventuallyreturn to the profoundly transcendent bliss of this lattice realm.

Sensing that we shared the same transpersonal realm at the same time, wedidn't confirm it until we had both returned from the experience. It was oneof the most puzzling and extraordinary events in our lives. Afterwards, wedescribed the lattice and drew pictures that depicted for each other the samespace. The visible and invisible universe became our family. We were no longerseparate, but part of a mysterious web of energy that connected body, mind,and spirit. We were so convinced that the space was real, we felt that otherpeople must have experienced it too. Alex found numerous accounts of it inpsychedelic visions, near death experiences, clairvoyant images of HeavenWorlds, and descriptions from traditional mystical literature.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow has stated that there is a biological need fortranscendence in human beings, and that the transcendent experience has ahealing force. After the experience of the Universal Mind Lattice, we decidedthat a vision of sacred interconnectedness was the most important subject ofart. This book is a result of that decision.

Over the years, Alex has exhibited and presented his work to a wide audience;invariably people tell him that certain paintings remind them of transcendentexperiences they have had. Like those who have sent Alex letters requestingcopies of his paintings, these are "our people." We have a spiritual bond withthem. This book is for them, and for those who discover their lives to be atransformative path, who recognize a spiritual framework behind and interlacingthe veil of the material world.

Allyson and Alex Grey

BODY, MIND, SPIRIT, 1985
oil on linen, each panel 12 x 12 in.

IN THE EYE OF THE ARTIST:

Art and the Perennial Philosophy

Ken Wilber

According to the perennial philosophythe common mystical core of theworlds great spiritual traditionsmen and women possess at least three differentmodes of knowing: the eye of flesh, which discloses the material, concrete,and sensual world; the eye of mind, which discloses the symbolic, conceptual,and linguistic world; and the eye of contemplation, which discloses the spiritual,transcendental, and transpersonal world. These are not three different worlds,but three different aspects of our one world, disclosed by different modes ofknowing and perceiving.

Moreover, these three modes of knowing, these three "eyes," are not simplygiven to a person all at once. Rather, they unfold in a developmental sequencefrom the lower to the higher. In the first two years of a babys life, sensorimotorintelligencethe eye of fleshdevelops and evolves to disclose a material worldof "object permanence," of solid surfaces and colors and objects, as well as the sensorimotor bodys own feelings and emerging impulses. In the followingdecade or two, the eye of mind will increasingly emerge and develop, disclosingin its turn the world of ideas, symbols, concepts, images, values, meanings, andintentions. If development continues beyond the mind via meditative disciplinesor, in some instances, psychedelically induced mystical experiencethen theeye of contemplation opens and discloses the world of soul and spirit, of subtleenergies and insights, of radical intuition and transcendental illumination.

The eye of flesh tends to disclose a prepersonal, preverbal, preconceptualworld, a world of matter and bodies. The eye of mind tends to disclose apersonal, verbal, and conceptual world, a world of ego and mind. And the eyeof contemplation tends to disclose a transpersonal, transverbal, trans-egoicworld, a world of luminous soul and spirit. The first realm made visible to theeyes of perception is composed of