Catawampus

(Image : Soul card 126, SG, 2009)

…I love words!

Just found a shiny new one, that I never read before in my long, long journey as a reader : catawampus.

D’ you know what it means ?

Well it means… askew, awry, positioned diagonally.

It´s quite a useful little word, as in : We took a short cut and walked catawampus accross the field.

…Did you ever hear that ?

The Imaginal

(Image : Dare to be who you were really meant to be, altered greeting card, SG, ‘ 07)

Art as a spiritual Path.

In the modern world Art and the spiritual Path have usually been considered as rather different domains. Not so for me. And not so for the Ancients.

Art – which is the work of the Lady Imagination – and Spirituality, which has everything to do with the Lady Intuition, come from the same Court : the court of the Sun King, the real Self.

The so-called Otherworld, in my definition, is the world of Lady Imagination, not a “parallel world”, not a different dimension.The Druid “Otherworld” is the world of the imaginal. Not a different dimension. Do you understand the vast consequences of this realization? The word “imaginal” comes from “imago”, an “imago” in psychoanalytic terms means an inner image that we have formed in early childhood (of a loved one, usually a parent) and that remains unchanged throughout our life. See? We carry “images” around, shelved in our brain(s), and these images, most of the time, determine our destiny. And that, my dearest friends, is the important point : they *determine* our destiny.

Wouldn´t it be interesting if we could actually *manifest* these “images”, actualize them, and even change them if they are not what we need them to be? This is quite possible. This is the function of –A-R-T, as I see it. Get all those “imagos” onto paper, and see who you really are! Or, more precisely, what the Matrix has done with the Original You…Then, change it! Because, you are the Creator, and you can define the images that you carry around.

Working with the energy of creativity (which is a very real divine attribute) places these two forces, Lady Imagination and Lady Intuition, in their rightful place on each side of the Sun King, the Self, in the inner Court of the Soul. And since we have even lost the inkling that we are really part of this Court, (or maybe nobody ever told us), the brillance, the sheer wonders that these two Ladies bring to the world show us the Royal Path to the center of who and what we really are : a spiritual Being of untold and undiscovered magnitude.

There are indeed historical (and many hysterical!) reasons of why we have lost the Path, why we have all been thrown off our spiritual heritage, and these reasons can and should be studied. The future of our race and of the whole planet may depend on it. There is no other way if we want to prevent utter destruction : we have to actualize our inner images.

Soul cards

(Image : The Winter Queen, soul card 121, SG, 2009)

So, what are soul cards?

I have started my collage work years and years ago, long before it was “invented” in California by a lady called Seena Frost. An artist friend of mine showed me how to cut stuff in old magazines to create stunning collage work (her own being abstract). As my drawing was not up to the kind of images that I got in my mind, the technique really worked for me. I can decide on perspective, and create architecture, layers and depths. Through the years I evolved my own style and my own themes.

When I started my Psychosynthesis Diploma Course in the year 2000, I realized that I could actually document my inner processes, so the collage work soon became an expression of all the phases of my PS process. Now they are an extension of my inner Journey. 

Anything can start a collage card, an inner impulse, a colour, something somebody says, an image in a magazine, sometimes just an emotion, or a state of mind. Through time I have elaborated my own “vocabulary”, so I  immediately know what the card means when I look at it. It is a sort of stenography of the soul. 

When I show the cards I let the viewers elaborate on their own meanings, and am glad to see that my cards evoke lots of interesting ideas. It rather works like an unconventional Tarot deck (of 121 cards!). Nowadays I mostly use them to illustrate this blog, which allows me to show things that words cannot communicate.

All the images you see in this blog are simple scissors-and-glue work. I don´t do Photoshop. And of course, I don´t sell them, though I did, at one time, create book covers with them for a friend of mine who is a publisher.

The Otherworld

 

 (Image : Road to Damascus, collage on paper, SG ’04)

Who cares if the Otherworld and the gods are “real”, or not ?

To me they are real. As a walker-between-the-worlds, an artist, half of my brain (and half of my time!) is “over there”, through the magic Gates, walking the Land of the Imaginal, which is not just fantasy. The images are real, they are inside my brain, and I can, if I want and need to, have a creative dialogue between these parts of who-I-am.

Or did you think that your Matrix identity was the “real” one ?

Give yourself the chance to discover what your hidden mind is up to!

When all is said and done, at the moment of your passing, will it have mattered if the wonderful encounters with archetypes, gnomes, the Queen of Faerie or Merlin himself that you possibly had, were politically correct? Is the Matrix real ? Hahaha.  Adam, my young friend,has a saying written on a piece of cardboard which says “Do not believe everything that you think”. Lol.

Are you so restricted in your perceptions that you think that only the physical is “real”?

Even so, I think that there is a huge difference between “path-finding” in your own neurons, and some of them are quite quirky, particularly the quantic ones, ya-hoo!!,  - and “imagining” things.

When you just imagine (which is quite OK too), well, you have a certain control over the images, you build them up, you actually create them in mind-matter (in sanscrit, chit, yup), you create what you want or what you need, and basically the images obey their master, your alpha mind (for example).

But there is another way of working with images, a much more mysterious way, which I prefer. The images emerge in your mind which simply acts as a mirror, and they have their own development, their own quirky quarky path. Very different.

In that mysterious world, Merlin really exists and he can even talk to you…That is what I call the “Otherworld”, a mysterious place inside my own brain, which has its own rules, motivations, and purpose, aside from my Matrix ID.

The process is the same as in art, an idea “is born”, somewhere deep inside, and the good artist follows this idea, to see where it is leading. All the art is in the letting go of preconceptions. The good artist is a master at “letting go”!…

And that is how I sometimes follow the gods and the various interesting characters that come and visit me. Can´t mistake the joy, the exhilaration, the enthusiasm, the uplift, in one word…the buzz. The bliss. We do not invent the gods, they come …or they ignore us.

 

 

Faces of the Goddess

 

(Images : Faces of the Goddess, Heart of the Cailleach, The Morrigan, and The Lady Niwalen (Spring), collage on paper, SG, 2008)

The Goddess is like a mountain, and She goes on and on…

Altered Art and Psychosynthesis

(Image : “Mystic”, Altered Calender, Shakti G.,08)

Conversation with the Wizard…

First part : About Art and Psychosynthesis…

Since when do you paint/make art?
Shakti : I´ve always been doodling and painting, but really “making art” in a continuous and consistent way, well, only since I started my Psychosynthesis Diploma course in the year 2000. I soon realized that there are things that I cannot say in words, not even in poems, because I´m a very visual person. So I started working with collage. Since I can´t really draw, it was easier to rip images out of magazines, and associate them in ways that were significant to me. That´s how I started to do “spiritual” collage, collage that would not only be esthetically pleasing, but also contained meaning, “messages from the soul”. Which is how I use collage now : creating “soul cards”. An image is a synthesis of meanings, a dance of meanings, or, as a friend told me recently: it´s visual poetry. 

What is Altered Art? Where and how do you find your material?
Shakti :Altered art is just what it says, you take something, a box, a book, a postcard, anything really, and you alter it. You do your art on it, over it, as it were. I find my material anywhere, everywhere, sometimes out of the wastepaper basket! Cereal boxes (for Artist Trading Cards), magazines (for collage), sandwich paper (for transfers), the plastic nets around the fruit you buy in the supermarket, just about anything!…I´m absolutely sure that “altered art” has been created by a female artist somewhere who did not have the money for canvases! (Laughter). And she found out that it was SO fun to scribble OVER other people´s work, there is a kind of rebellious irreverence to it that attracts a lot of artists!…Female artists, I mean, since we women have such a wonderful streak of rebelliousness! (Laughter). 

What inspires you and how do you keep motivated? 
Shakti : Well, usually it´s a mood, a certain light of the day, an energy that surfaces, inspiration is very mysterious, it´s the ways of “Awen”…I don´t have to “keep” motivated, it´s the very ebb and flow of my life, it comes and goes, and dances, and totally overwhelms me at times. As if there is always water beneath my ship… 

How did you discover Psychosynthesis? 
Shakti : Of all things, in the Internet!

 

What kind of contribution does PS make in the modern world? 
Shakti : PS explains a possible, a sustainable, structure of the human mind and a philosophy of life in a symbolic shorthand (the Egg diagram) that is very useful when you feel overwhelmed by the reigning philosophical chaos. It somehow contains all the most important steps humanity has taken to explain its own existence. Rosicrucianism, Kabbala, Hinduism, Western esoterism - Assagioli was really very eclectic. His inspiration was multidimensional, and that is what gives PS its wonderful flavour, its holistic colour. 

Is there any personal contribution that you make to PS? 
Shakti : Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. PS is not only “Assagioli´s teachings”. PS is absolutely experience-based. When we talk about the Egg diagram, there are points that Assagioli hasn´t really included because he died before they really developped. Body and Energy work is one of them, so I added my own contribution to his diagram, and it works perfectly for me and for my clients. Psychosynthesis is not the Bible; we can add to it, perfect the model through our own experience. Assagioli did not write PS on stone! As a psychosynthesist you do respect Assagioli, certainly, and/but you add your own hard-won experience to his findings. To add to the diagram you really have to get involved with it in the first place, though. As in everything, knowledge is the very edge on which creativity is manifesting…

 

How do you teach PS?
Shakti : In the flesh? (Laughter)