ALL TEXT COPYRIGHT © 2006 LAWRENCE SHEAFF
Absolute Image Book—Lawrence Sheaff
A SIX-PAGE Summary OF the Book
Behind every sunrise, every flower, every beautiful face, is the poetry of geometry. The form of a galaxy, the shape of a cloud, the curve of a hill, are the music of mathematics, the song of symmetry. These are all, in the end, just modes of intelligence, the qualities of consciousness that reside within us and structure both our inner and outer reality. We resonate with them because we are made of them. Their nature is bliss.
Absolute Image: The Structure of Consciousness in Visual Form is the title given to my continuing series of paintings presented in this book. These paintings are handcrafted in acrylic on canvas 36 by 36 inches. They emerged in their present form early in 1995 and were first exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, at the Friends of the V&A Gallery, in 1997.
What is the Absolute Image series? How did the paintings begin? What was the initial impetus behind the creation of this series and what were they seeking to express? The Absolute Image series represents an individual painter’s quest for the Absolute in visual form. Such a quest is not new. Many prominent painters in the twentieth century made the search for absolute values within their medium of expression a central mission.
The advent in recent decades, however, of a new and complete science of consciousness inspired me to look again at this concept. The quest for Absolute Image became my personal response, therefore, to the emergence in our age of new knowledge concerning the ultimate structure of human awareness.
This complete science of consciousness is contained in the Vedic wisdom of India, the world’s most ancient body of knowledge. It has been reformulated in its completeness for our scientific age by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as Maharishi Vedic Science and Technology. ‘Veda’, or ‘Vedic’, pertains to pure knowledge, the total knowledge of Natural Law.
'The total knowledge of Natural Law' refers to the knowledge of all the laws of Nature together that create and maintain our ever-expanding galactic universe in perfect order. The complete science of consciousness is therefore the total knowledge of Natural Law because consciousness is now understood to be the ultimate reality of everything.
‘The theory of everything’, the complete knowledge of the structure of reality, has finally been glimpsed by modern science. This brings modern science to an end. Its purpose has been fulfilled. Yet in the realm of modern science itself, this complete knowledge of Natural Law remains theoretical only. Modern science offers no practical means of applying it to life.
However, it has been amply demonstrated by hundreds of research studies that Maharishi Vedic Science can harness and mobilize the Totality of Natural Law through its simple, natural, Vedic technologies of consciousness for the direct practical benefit of human life everywhere. Thus, the purely objective reality of modern science becomes perfectly integrated with our inner subjective reality. Through this, the ‘Age of Science’ steps onto the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.
The importance of this complete science of consciousness for all fields of human endeavor is immeasurable. The full integration of it into the visual arts promises to finally establish a truly stable foundation for the discipline. The nature of this science and its relationship to the visual arts will therefore be one of the central themes of this book.
In this new millennium, an age of instant global communication, we find ourselves exposed to the innumerable facets of aesthetic expression across a multicultural world. Yet beyond our more recent trends of Modernism and post-Modernism there lies the promise of another level of art waiting to unfold—an art whose range of vision comprehends the Totality of Natural Law, a level of art whose subtlety and power could perhaps be unprecedented in the whole history of civilization.
Where does this level of art begin? It begins within. It begins in that innermost reality of all of us, the reality of our own inner awareness, the reality of consciousness itself. Herein lies the significance of this new and complete science of consciousness contained in Maharishi Vedic Science and Technology.
In the context of our Western traditions of knowledge, this science is unprecedented. It has established on a firm scientific basis that consciousness itself is the one ultimate reality of all existence. Moreover, the simple, natural Vedic technologies of consciousness, now revived in their purest form in Maharishi Vedic Science, allow the individual direct access to that unbounded field of creativity within—pure consciousnes, the Absolute—for a life lived spontaneously in harmony with the Totality of Natural Law.
It was my own experience resulting from the practice of these Vedic technologies of consciousness that inspired the creation of the ongoing Absolute Image series of paintings. These Vedic technologies of consciousness are the Transcendental Meditation program and its advanced techniques, which include the TM-Sidhi program and Yogic Flying.
Furthermore, the principles established by Maharishi Vedic Science—together with the latest findings of modern science—provide a consistent framework for re-evaluating the domain of easel painting at the deepest reality of its inner structure.
Absolute Image is the examination of the nature of consciousness within the medium of the visual arts. It seeks to unfold the truly cosmic nature of easel painting and its arena by relating it to the cosmic nature of human consciousness itself. It reviews the scope of the visual arts in relation to the fullest value of human creative potential—the state of Enlightenment in Unity Consciousness.
The Absolute Image series of paintings arose spontaneously from my desire— maintained over many years—to integrate the complete knowledge of consciousness into the formal values of my discipline.
It is important to make clear, however, that the wholeness of the paintings came first. That is to say, the intellectual analysis of them in relation to the structure of consciousness has always been an after event. In the process of painting itself, I am only innocently recording—as accurately as I can in the concrete form of paint and canvas—the abstract wholeness of the image as it has arisen within my awareness.
All art serves an evolutionary purpose. All artistic expression, whatever its content or style, is a process of expansion. In exploring absolute values in the discipline of painting, Absolute Image is not setting itself off from other approaches to visual expression.
On the contrary, by establishing one extreme end of our visual aesthetic reality—what might be called the place where all painting begins—the fullest realization of Absolute Image would merely confirm the presence of cosmic values in all facets of the visual arts.
The unifying theme throughout this book, therefore, is that consciousness is the Absolute; consciousness is the Unified Field of Natural Law as identified by modern quantum physics. It is the home of all the laws of Nature, the origin of all energy, intelligence, creativity, and organizing power in the universe. It is a state of perfect order. Its structure is a perfect symmetry. It is the perfectly balanced integration of all complementary and opposing values from point to infinity, from infinite silence to infinite dynamism.
Its state of perfect balance makes it an unbounded ocean of peace. Yet it is not a flat peace. It is a lively peace, a blissful peace. The inner experience of that unified level of existence, pure consciousness, the most silent level of human awareness, reveals itself as a lively field of pure bliss.
The simple, natural, Vedic technologis of consciousness give the direct subjective experience of this reality in the simplest, most settled state of human awareness at the source of thought. This is the inner subjective experience of Nature's own perfectly balanced wholeness—the Unified Field of Natural Law as identified objectively by modern science.
Another premise of this book is that when this complete science of consciousness, the total knowledge of Natural Law, is fully integrated into the life of the practicing artist and the visual arts as a whole, entirely new and more holistic levels of expression will begin to unfold.
The individual is cosmic, human creativity is identical with cosmic creativity, man is made in the image of God—these realities, embedded in all the world’s most ancient traditions of knowledge, will now begin to determine more and more the approach to all modes of human expression.
Having briefly described the knowledge base that underlies the Absolute Image series, we can now begin to explore the nature of the paintings themselves. In most painting, the visual content of a work is used to express either significant beauties of feeling and/or some new and expanding intellectual or spiritual concept. To do this, color/forms are organized in terms of figurative or illustrative values with literary or narrative connotations; or they are organized in terms of symbol, metaphor, analogy, or allegory—and/or sequential diagram.
All such devices have to do with ‘becoming’. Absolute Image has to do with ‘Being’, not ‘becoming’. Absolute Image uses its visual content to arrest the pure dignity of the easel-painting arena itself in terms of its own absolute existence. It uses its visual content to make tangible the arena’s own self-sufficient, abstract, cosmic value of wholeness. Absolute Image does this, not in terms of symbol or metaphor and the like, but in terms of freeing its color/forms of all such localizing, or limiting, devices and syntactic superimpositions.
In figurative or representational painting, for example, the image has to refer to some other reality outside itself to validate its content. This robs the image of its self-sufficient autonomy in absolute terms. To do justice to the title ‘Absolute Image’ the visual content itself of the image has to be made self-sufficient in absolute terms. The complex diversity of color/forms within Absolute Image, therefore, cannot represent something else. Its pigmented color/forms cannot be manipulated to ‘become’ some other thing.
The primary content of Absolute Image are the five fundamental geometries, point-line-circle-triangle-square. These totally self-existing, self-sufficient, self-referral forms bestow upon Absolute Image its absolute level of autonomy. While remaining what they themselves are, these primordial color/forms are ordered in terms of a four-fold symmetry. (By four-fold symmetry I mean a square image that mirrors itself on its horizontal, vertical, and therefore also diagonal axes.)
The point, the line, the circle, the equilateral triangle, and the square represent the ultimate, primordial values of all structure. They are all self-sufficient, self-referral, irreducible, perfect values of symmetry in relation to our visual aesthetic reality. Because of this they resonate most intimately with—and therefore evoke more directly than any other visual forms—the self sufficient, self-referral, perfect symmetry of the Totality of Natural Law itself, pure consciousness, the Absolute.
Point-line-circle-triangle-square, therefore, hold within themselves the essence of all order, peace, and bliss in terms of our visual aesthetic reality. (In relation to the easel-painting domain, in Vedic terminology I think of point/line as Purusha/Prakriti, and circle-triangle-square as Rishi-Devata-Chhandas respectively.)
Being the basis of all other forms in the universe, point-line-circle-triangle-square, when orchestrated together as an aesthetic wholeness in terms of four-fold symmetry, should in principle present the perfect fullness, the perfect symmetry, of Total Natural Law in its irreducible visual form.
Along with this aesthetic fullness moreover, Absolute Image proposes that the formal value of four-fold symmetry itself is nothing other than the infinitely silent, infinitely dynamic, perfect symmetry of the Totality of Natural Law in its ultimate, two-dimensional visual form.
In four-fold symmetry, ‘over here’ is made to be the same as ‘over there’. This sameness everywhere in the formal structure of the image gives it the value of infinite silence. Superimposed on this infinite silence is the incessant visual interplay given to the forms among themselves. This manifests within the image the sensation of a balanced coexistence between infinite dynamism and infinite silence.
Beyond this stands the most challenging demand of all that can be made of Absolute Image. Nevertheless, that demand is a natural one and needs to be fulfilled. The demand is that its whole content—both its internal forms and the ground upon which they sit—should be rendered transcendental. Absolute Image appears to fulfill this demand by its incorporation of two principles demonstrated in the last series of paintings by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944).
The first of Mondrian’s principles is the dissolving of form through repetition. He established that the repetition of identical lines in principle negates their existence. The second of his principles is that the material reality of the ground itself is dissolved through the interweaving or braiding of lines upon its surface. With both these factors operating within Absolute Image, the negation together of ground and form in principle renders its whole content transcendental.
Even in terms of its material reality, Absolute Image operates in a domain free of both time and motion. It is free of time because it offers the totality of its content instantaneously as a simultaneity. The entirety of its material content in principle is available in a single instant—is available forever in the immediate present. It is free of motion because not only is its own content fixed and motionless in itself, but also in principle the viewer is not required to move in order to fully comprehend its totality in terms of outer sensory perception.
Absolute Image offers, therefore, its great variety of opposing structures and functions as an eternal continuum—as a constantly present simultaneity in relation to our visual aesthetic reality. This tangible display as a-togetherness-in-continuum of the opposing cosmic functions of expansion with contraction, point with infinity, infinite silence with infinite dynamism etc., is unique to the universe of the two-dimensional visual image.
The fullest realization of Absolute Image in principle, therefore, would give us the direct outer sensory experience in a localized form of the operations of the Totality of Natural Law whose own cosmic level of functioning is an eternal simultaneity. Through this, Absolute Image can sound an echo of that cosmic value of wholeness—the Totality itself—and its all-nourishing presence deep within the awareness of everyone.
Thus, Absolute Image aspires to be the Totality itself in visual form—not a symbol, not a metaphor, but to be that transcendent Totality: to be the self-sufficient, self-referral, self-effulgent structure of the pure reality itself.
Through a poetry of form in terms of visual aesthetics, Absolute Image aspires to be the fullness, to be the perfect symmetry of the Totality of Natural Law, pure consciousness—the peace and bliss of the inner Self of everyone and everything—in its ultimate, most concentrated, or irreducible, two-dimensional visual manifestation.
In conclusion, Absolute Image seeks to make ‘the stuff of matter’ show itself for what it really is—‘the stuff of consciousness’. Absolute Image wants to make this a direct outer sensory experience within the traditional parameters that define the easel-painting domain.
The fullest realization of such an image should therefore arrest the infinite silence and infinite dynamism of the universal continuum in terms of the medium’s own innate structure, which in itself presents a static, unchanging continuum. Together with this sense of eternal continuum, by articulating the entire range of Natural Law from point to infinity in relation to our visual aesthetic reality, Absolute Image at the same time aspires to create a sensation in the viewer of Nature’s infinite wholeness, of Nature’s infinite order, of Nature’s infinite precision, of Nature’s infinite detail.
Absolute Image wants to make comprehensible the incomprehensible. It wants to take the incomprehensible vastness of the unbounded cosmic ocean of wholeness itself, which on its own level stands far beyond our ordinary modes of perception, and make that cosmic wholeness a direct outer sensory experience.
Through an aesthetic expression on an intimate human scale, Absolute Image seeks a resonance with that Totality of Natural Law. Achieving this takes the individual level of human creativity long-celebrated in the Western traditions of art, and places it on the threshold of the cosmic level of creativity eternally enshrined in the wisdom of the Veda. By aligning individual creativity with Nature’s cosmic creativity, Absolute Image aspires to sound an echo within the viewer of that same eternal cosmic value of wholeness—the all-pervading pure peace and pure bliss that is the very essence of both our inner and outer reality.
Thus, the book Absolute Image explores all the major facets of the structure of consciousness as defined by Maharishi Vedic Science and relates them directly to the laws that govern the easel-painting domain. The ongoing Absolute Image series of paintings, therefore, presents a research project into the discipline of painting. It is an individual painter’s exploration of the fundamentals of his craft and its formal material constraints in the light of the complete knowledge of consciousness. The goal has been to transform those material constraints into an unbounded, universal expression that uncovers both the fullest cosmic potential of the artist and the fullest cosmic potential itself of the easel-painting arena.
What is the practical utility of creating a resonance between the pure abstraction of the Absolute itself and the concrete material values of the easel-painting domain? The complete articulation of such an image and its own irreducible structure of fullness should finally establish the foundation or ‘ground state’ of our visual aesthetic reality.
This deepest reality of the visual arts—when established in principle and practice through the complete knowledge and experience of consciousness—will re-animate the cosmic dynamics present within all modes of visual artistic expression. It will not only empower the artist, but also elevate the relevance of the visual arts as a whole and permanently secure for them a stable foundation—a foundation that can support their ever-continuing and meaningful expansion for the enrichment of society as a whole. ENDS.
