What Is Consciousness-Based Art?

Consciousness-Based℠ Art is art made and understood in the light of Maharishi Vedic Science℠, which describes consciousness as the source of everything we see. It looks at three things together: the artist who makes the work, the work itself, and the person who views it. The idea is central to the work of artist Lawrence Sheaff, whose Absolute Image Series of Paintings explores it in paint. Its highest aim, in his words, is a painting “that seeks to capture the pure abstraction of the unbounded Absolute in concrete visual form.”

Where does Consciousness-Based Art come from?

The idea grows out of Maharishi Vedic Science, the system of knowledge that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi developed from the ancient Vedic tradition of India. At its practical core is the Transcendental Meditation® technique, which is practiced “sitting comfortably, with your eyes closed, for 20 minutes, twice a day” (tm.org). Lawrence calls Maharishi Vedic Science “the complete science of consciousness” (Commentary I).

Maharishi first used the phrase “structure of consciousness” in 1971. The university he founded, known for many years as Maharishi University of Management and since 2019 as Maharishi International University, asked each member of its faculty to connect their discipline “to its source in pure consciousness” (Commentary II). The university still calls this approach Consciousness-Based Education, based on the view that “all fields of knowledge are interconnected and emerge from consciousness, their own Self” (MIU).

Lawrence Sheaff took that question into painting. He became a teacher of the Transcendental Meditation technique in 1971 and spent some eighteen years directing the international design team of Maharishi’s worldwide organization. When he returned to his own painting in 1990, he says, “the original intention was to bring together the two things I cherished most, which was the knowledge of Vedic Science and the visual arts.” The Absolute Image Series began in 1995. He later completed an MA in Maharishi Vedic Science and became Research Scholar and Artist in Residence at the university.

In his book, Lawrence ties the term directly to that education. Consciousness-Based Art, he writes, “means in effect, the Consciousness-Based education provided by Maharishi Vedic Science.”

What does “consciousness” mean here?

Here consciousness means more than being awake. Maharishi Vedic Science describes an individual level of consciousness and a universal level, called pure consciousness, which it holds to be the source of everything in nature. Lawrence’s reconstruction of painting rests on two of its basic precepts: “All is nothing but consciousness” and “The individual is cosmic.”

In this science, pure consciousness is not only an idea but something experienced directly, through the Transcendental Meditation technique. Lawrence stresses that this experience “has nothing to do with faith.” That is why, in Consciousness-Based Art, the artist’s own growth of consciousness through daily practice is part of the work, alongside study and skill with materials.

The three parts: the artist, the art-object and the viewer of art

Lawrence’s book is built around three constituents of the visual arts: the artist, the art-object and the viewer of art. Consciousness-Based Art asks what each of them becomes when consciousness is taken as the starting point.

The artist

For Lawrence, the decisive factor is the artist’s state of awareness, not technique alone. “When the artist is fully awake,” he writes, “the inner Being of the artist and the inner Being of the materials spontaneously become one in the flow of the creative act.” He is clear that this is not a matter of working up a mood of unity. It is a natural state of awareness.

His own way of working follows from this: “the wholeness of the image, its form and its colour, arises spontaneously in the mind and then I paint what I see.”

The art-object

The series title names the aim. “‘Absolute’ is abstract; ‘Image’ is concrete. The title ‘Absolute Image’ refers to a painting therefore that seeks to capture the pure abstraction of the unbounded Absolute in concrete visual form.”

To do this, Lawrence works with the simplest elements that painting has. “I propose the forms themselves to be point, line, circle, triangle, square,” he writes. He calls them the five fundamental forms.

• point
• line
• circle
• triangle
• square

The viewer

The viewer matters as much as the artist. A fully realized image, Lawrence says, “should sound an echo of the complete cosmic order ever-present deep within the viewer.” He also names the kind of seeing involved: “‘Visual aesthetic reality’ is the phrase I use to denote a quality of seeing that elevates the eye far above the mundane practicality of navigating the environment.”

The sciences take the measure of it; the arts can bring it to the level of the senses.

Not a symbol, not a metaphor

Much spiritual art works through symbols, where an image stands for something beyond itself. Consciousness-Based Art, as Lawrence describes it, aims further. “A fully realised Absolute Image would not be a symbol of the Absolute. It would not be some kind of metaphor for the Absolute.” At that level, he writes, “the image, the viewer and the Absolute come face to face; they become one.”

He is just as careful about his own paintings. In the book he uses them “as a concrete reference point to help in establishing abstract principles,” and leaves the final judgment to others: “Asserting their absolute status is not my concern here. We leave the assessment of that to the reader/viewer.”

How is it different from spiritual or visionary art?

Visionary art is usually described as art that seeks to transcend the physical world, often through imagined scenes and symbols (Wikipedia). Consciousness-Based Art differs in three ways:

• It is grounded in a systematic science of consciousness and in the artist’s daily practice, not in a personal vision alone.
• It aims to present wholeness directly, rather than to point to it through symbols.
• It is not tied to one style. “Any style of visual expression and any discipline of art can rise to that level,” Lawrence says, whether figurative or abstract.

Lawrence places his own work inside the history of Western painting rather than outside it. In the book he traces a line of growing abstraction from Turner and the Impressionists, through Cézanne, to Braque and Picasso’s Cubism in 1908, “carried into even deeper levels of abstraction by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian a decade later.” He proposes that “all the artistic progressions of the twentieth century related to formal values in the arts culminate in the principle of Absolute Image.” Yet he insists that a fully realized Absolute Image “does not usurp or make redundant any other style of expression.”

What does it look like? The Absolute Image Series

The Absolute Image Series of Paintings is Lawrence’s exploration of these ideas in paint. The originals are square, most of them 36 × 36 inches, crafted by hand in acrylic on canvas, some with 24K gold leaf. As the book puts it, “there is no computer work whatsoever involved in their creation.”

A few features run through the whole series:

• The five forms. Point, line, circle, triangle and square, overlaid into a single image.
• Fourfold symmetry. Each painting mirrors itself top to bottom, left to right and across its diagonals.
• Domed-up points. Small raised points of thickly layered paint that, in Lawrence’s words, “are like jewels embedded in the paintings.”
• Intuition, not formulas. His decisions “are not pre-ordered by mathematics or geometry.”
• Names from the Vishnu-Sahasranama. Each painting is associated by the artist with one of the thousand names of Vishnu, such as Sutra 386 for No. 41, The Ultimate Abode.

A short poem at the start of the book describes the same process from the inside: “The point is the point of all beginnings, / making real the arena’s infinity / with the first kiss of colour.”

How should you look at Consciousness-Based Art?

You don’t need to know any of the theory. Lawrence says so himself: “not everyone is interested in theory. The majority of people just like to enjoy the purely aesthetic satisfaction that great works of art can deliver.”

Nor does a painting need to be decoded. In the book’s Afterword, Lawrence recalls a visitor who told him “Your paintings mean something” and expected an explanation. His answer: “she had already seen what they mean / What does a flower mean?”

The simplest approach is to give a painting time. Look at the whole image rather than hunting for its parts, and come back to it. In the tradition of easel painting that Lawrence works in, a painting is made to live with, on the wall of a home or a public building.

Where to learn more

• The book. Absolute Image: The Structure of Consciousness in Visual Form gives the full discussion behind this article, with 25 full-page plates.
• The Commentaries. Four shorter essays and an interview on the same themes, starting with Commentary I and Commentary IV.
• The 2020 interview. Bernard Bence questions Lawrence about Maharishi Vedic Science and what it means for the arts.
• The 27 Principles. 27 New Science-Based Principles that Uphold the Absolute Image Series (PDF, 2026).
• The lectures. Lawrence’s three filmed lectures on the Videos page.
• The Transcendental Meditation technique. To learn the practice at the heart of Maharishi Vedic Science, visit tm.org.

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