By Jon Rappoport

“Logic is a mirror of how the physical world operates.  It is a vital tool.  Imagination is the capacity to make new and different worlds, an unlimited number of them, which can operate on no particular basis at all.”  (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Here is an interesting statement from Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985), about his painting.  Rudhyar was a world-famous astrologer, and also a philosopher, painter, and composer.

“It does not seem important to me that people seeing my paintings should know what I felt, why and how I produced them. The essential thing is the viewers’ response — what the paintings do to them, what arises in them as a result of their seeing the paintings, of their relationship with the painting. It is, I believe, a matter of relationship: ‘something’ in the painting meets ‘something’ in the spectator; what is important is the character and quality of this meeting.”

“…These youths are also often greatly impressed by my paintings, yet at the same time they are puzzled by them. I am repeatedly asked what the paintings mean, how the evident symbols in them are to be understood…”
“When facing my paintings, a person’s reaction is often that I must have used such geometrical or biologically suggestive symbols deliberately, knowing exactly why I used them. People frequently are shocked when I tell them that I did not have precise intentions and did not think of traditional meanings. Then they often want to speak of ‘the Unconscious’ — my personal unconscious or the ‘collective Unconscious’…”

“They are even more puzzled if I tell them that they should forget the traditional system of knowledge and simply try to experience the drawing and allow it to speak to them and communicate a ‘mystery’ which perhaps transcends or has meaning besides the traditional knowledge.”

“Nearly twenty years ago while in Paris, I attended meetings and lectures at a well-publicized Congrés du symbolisme in the elegant and ultramodern UNESCO Building. At the close of the sessions I vividly realized that the lecturers always spoke of symbols in the past, referring almost exclusively to ancient cultural epochs and traditions. A very intelligent woman I had met who was enthusiastic about all that had taken place asked about my reaction to the Congress. I expressed my deep interest in the proceedings, but added that I felt the talks had been almost entirely, about the past. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, ‘But the past is all we know. We do not know the future!’ To which I replied, ‘Of course we do not know the future, but we are creating it!’ The lady gave me a strange look; she could not grasp the meaning of what I had said, and our conversation ended very soon.”

If you say the voyage of imagination is spiritual, people immediately want to know which spiritual system you are talking about, or which principles.  They want art and creation to be an expression of that which is already understood.

But art is not a descriptive sign hanging on the entrance to the cosmos.

Every piece of art is its own cosmos.

It needs no myth structure or origin-story or cultural precedent.

Art is the great exception to every rule of the universe.

If this isn’t magic, nothing is.

Source: Answers in art « Outside the Reality Machine