Anand Tandav

Anand Tandav

Sunday, June 9, 2013


"Heart of the Lotus", this one is from December -its about 4' x 6'.

Friday, May 20, 2011

I found the original image, sorry the image is so small.  The name of the artist and the date are unknown to me -let me know if you know!

Ananda Tandav original!

Anand Tandav

This painting was commissioned by Vijay and Shruti Sharma from Guelph Ontario (Canada) I'm making reproductions, nice ones: giclee prints on canvas and paper. The prints are on sale for $330. for canvas prints -24 x 36", same size as the original, and paper prints are about 18 x 28" and are $75. I sold out the first small edition, and I have a new batch with a dozen paper prints and 3 or 4 canvas prints I sent to Ontario to present to potential buyers there.
The painting is based on an often reproduced painting by an Indian artist, I will post an image of it if I can find it. If you want a print e-mail me!

Absurd Buses and Himalayan Nights

This short story is based on my experiences in Nepal and India. I put my friend Glenn in the lead role. Glenn also tread alot of the same paths I did in India and Nepal, though he would probably not ride on the roof of the bus, but who knows? maybe he did!
This story is dedicated to my friend Matthew Jarvis, or as one of the Dharamshala girls used to call him: "Jarvis"

Glenn smudged the glass with his fingers and peered at the bouncing jungle, “where should we be now? I don’t know, at least seven hours till Kathmandu.”
He stared into inky black as his teeth were continually rattled by the absurd bus with its vinyl upholstered plywood benches and riot of colours, now shrouded in utter night. The bus was rather full of unconscious Nepalese and Indians who bounced about like marionettes in their sleep. It really was an absurd bus –its suspension arranged to amplify rather than absorb the irregularities of the mountain road from the border to Kathmandu.
He dozed impossibly through the tumult, and was eventually stirred by the bus not shaking him about. It slowed to an utterly remote stop along the mountain road. It could have been a dream as children, mothers with babies, grandparents, great grandparents and men smoking cigarettes materialized out of wild jungle and onto the bus from God knows where on their way to God knows where. Impossibly beautiful and wild, the dark eyes of the Nepalese mountaineers were bleary with sleep, glass bangles jangled and smells of food spices, fragrant perspiration, jasmine, and hair oil made an intoxicating blend with the Himalayan night air. The cold draft sharpened the senses, and wonder and fascination wrapped the moment and slowed it. Suddenly alert, fascinated, Glenn watched the bus fill to capacity, and yet continue to fill, then stuff, then finally cram, till the remnants of the beautiful ambrosial multitude could be heard settling themselves on the roof among the luggage, presumably huddling together against what was sure to be a chill seven hours of smoking and laughing, rolled up like their cigarettes in thin wool shawls.
The little boys and girls had been carried forward with the boarding passengers, evidently unconcerned about where their mothers and grandmothers where, and settled into laps. Babies slept oblivious, slung on the hips of their mothers in the picturesque manner of the Indian subcontinent. As the bus lurched forward, the smaller children were tossed, but such was the airtight arrangement of the passengers, there was not room for anyone to fall. Not a word was spoken, perhaps some murmurs, infants croaked or sighed, and Glenn shuffled restless, feeling guilt and compassion –it must have been about four in the morning, “where were they going?” He watched a little girl standing, swaying... Nepalese were small, but he felt this girl was younger than his youngest sister, maybe two or three. The poor thing was neither asleep nor awake, swooning with fatigue, but with no room to do anything but bounce on the hips of the pungent crowd about her. His heart opened wide as he watched the pitiful scene, and impulsively he scooped the tender girl with her bird bones and her tinkling anklets and held her tight and warm to his breast, smoothing the stray hairs from her forehead in an affectionate gesture. The children on the absurd bus belonged to everyone and to no one, unless it be that they all belonged to the Parabramha, the all pervading spirit which is as real to wordless processions which mysteriously board absurd Himalayan buses as night and cold air.
Dawn followed slowly after twilight; a brilliant valley appeared beneath sheer slopes terminating in madly rushing waters, magnificent hills hemmed in the valley above keeping the journey in shade for the early morning. As the mountain road became more difficult to negotiate, bleak concrete dwellings were replaced by fantastic little stone homesteads and outbuildings whose upper stories perched on ancient timbers, grey with age. The railings and sills were wood, ornate and carved, everything appeared to be in miniature. The all pervading spirit which inhabited the soul of every passenger on the bus was also flowing, torrential like the waters among the valley floor. Glenn’s pupils dilated and the paddle ball game the plywood seat was playing with his backside became remote as the valley emerged from dusk to morning –something was starting to happen, as real and as intimate as the sun clearing the horizon high, high above them. As if with a snap, time and space became elastic as the elements from which the valley was formed became more concrete. The bones of the earth and the unfathomable depth of rock beneath their tires was as an ocean, stirring in its depths, profound and conscious, wearing a kaleidoscope of morning greens ochres and greys as a cloak. Through it flowed far below, the sound and the downward rush of the mountain river was drowning out the sound of the noisy engine and crunching tires. The beams of sunlight that pierced the mist in the pass above turned the grey mountainside gold and green, its shafts pregnant with fire, its light stirring, but flowing neither forward nor backward but rather flowing into and out of itself. The light was illuminating the valley not as a lamp throws light on the objects placed beneath its beam, but rather the light within every particle of earth water and air was stirred and awakened by the sunlight’s arrival in the valley. “Tableau”. The word floated into Glenn’s mind. His mind had been utterly still –without a single thought to stir the calm reflection of the transcendent vision on the surface of his consciousness. The reflected splendour rippled slightly. “Tableau”. Again the word slowly stirred the workings of his mind from profound and quiet meditation. He saw a picture of himself from outside, a brown cherub in fuscia and green cotton, silver bangles, a scarlet cardigan, and dusty grey feet was curled convulsively in his lap. Her heavy black braid was shedding rivulets of oily curls to frame her round face and to accent her thick curling eyelashes. There was no bus between the young Canadian with the god-child clinging to his breast and the valley. The edge of the mountain track sped past as the pair ascended the brightening valley with its whitewashed stone buildings crowned with silver grey hand-worked wood and slate roofs arranged like scales of fishes. Rhododendrons littered the mountainside in a riot of purple and pink and coral, and the mists of falling waters roared among the gorges of the valley, their plumes dancing with the columns of sunlight. Glenn watched himself as his fontanel bone dissolved, and a column of energy flowed from the base of his spine, flowing not down, but upward filling himself then flowing cool from out of the top of his head, finally returning to his body and dissolving it into a blissful tapestry of wind, water, fire, earth, and energy.

Glenn opened his eyes. A tiny woman was shaking his shoulder and grinning above him displaying her gold teeth. She wordlessly indicated to the rather ordinary looking Nepalese girl in his lap, and he lifted the sleeping child into her mother’s waiting arms. Glenn uncrooked his stiff legs and wobbled out on to the gravel where the bus had parked and surveyed it in the midday sun. It wasn’t just absurd, it was impossible. The bus was crowned with a lavender roof, it was decorated like a cake with some kind of metal that shone like chrome where all the filigrees of icing would be. Instead of candles or cherries, the bus was topped with luggage and a satisfied looking boy of about fourteen smoking, too bored to stretch his legs and chat loudly with the other boys. An absolute riot of verses or slogans festooned the rest of the bus in what was presumably Nepalese script, except where little vignettes with trompe l’oeil frames were painted with Hindu deities. Durga was resplendent with dozens of arms, each wielding a blood smeared weapon. She had her foot placed on the neck of a decapitated bull, a demon with a handlebar moustache was emerging from the massive wound brandishing a scimitar, and finding himself impaled on the Goddess’s mighty pike. Elsewhere, Shiva was mediating in his tiger skin ascetic’s robe, his pale skin the colour of moonlight to match the sliver of a young moon that adorned his matted hair, gathered in a topknot. He was surrounded by a motley crew of demons and unruly men sporting all manner of physical handicaps, the white bull Nandi kneeling in supplication before His crosslegged form. Divine life was flowing from Shiva’s fontanel, and it gathered at His feet to form the source of the river Ganges. On the side of the bus’s hood, Bal Krishna, Krishna in the form of a child, was dancing with the gopis, the milkmaids, to the tune of the flute melody of the little body, his black hair shedding rivulets of oily curls to frame his round indigo face and to accent his curling eyelashes. Atop the steps into the bus was a shrine to Lord Ganesha, The eternal Lord of innocence was cast in bronze, and smeared with red paste, hemmed in all around with electric candles, silver and scarlet tinsel, and a brass altar where rose scented incense and sandalwood burned. His elephant head with its cherubic cheeks was rosy red, fanned by his great ears and festooned with garlands of silk flowers. His four arms were brandishing weapons and sweets, and he danced upon a lotus. The amber and red lights, the tinsel medallions, the rainbow colours on the rims and bumpers should have clashed in their excess, but the impossible bus looked fantastic. As he found his seat back on the bus, Glenn saw his little friend, now awake, and he flashed her a smile. He knew she did not recognise him, but she smiled shyly.
Glenn awoke, he did not know from how long a sleep, but they must have come down the pass because the cold mount ain air had been replaced by a stifling heat. The quiet of the night journey that had accompanied the noise of the bus had been replaced by rhythmic bajhans which were blaring from tiny speakers mounted in the bus –a suitably absurd volume for the tiny speakers that squawked and hissed with distortion. The scene had changed, and a crowd of strangers had mostly replaced the villagers whom he had travelled with, including the girl, and there were some empty seats. In spite of that, men could still be heard on the roof. Babies started crying, and the heat was making the air feel still in spite of the wind the whipped through the open windows. Though his stream of thought had slowly returned, the strange sense of elasticity of time had remained and Glenn was watching himself from the point of view of a witness, as if in the third person. The bus route seemed like more like a milk truck than an express bus, stopping at every tiny hamlet and for any many woman or child who flagged it down from their tiny villages along the track. Every time the bus stopped moving to pick up or drop off more passengers, the atmosphere inside seemed to get hotter. As Glenn hopped off to help a girl and her little brothers get their luggage onto the roof, Glenn watched himself reach for a hand up himself and sat down among the laughing men and boys atop the bus. It bus lurched and swayed and bounced down the switchbacks, teetering on the brink of mighty chasms and bouncing through the hot wind. Great birds that looked like vultures floated, suspended in the silver air above them, and monkeys could be seen and heard adding to the flood of thrilling sensation that made him delirious with enthusiasm. His previously quiet mind became flooded with all manner of ideas and inspiration as melodies and poetic verses sprang spontaneously to his mind and all of his deepest longings and hopes brimmed in his intoxicated state, and still the joyride continued by the hour. He drank greedily from his water as the hot air sucked the moisture from him and tugged at his clothes and close cropped hair. The squawky bajhans echoed from the rock faces and the hum of the tires blended with the rush of the wind in his ears and the din of the men’s exuberant talk.
Glenn reflected that many more than seven hours must have passed. The cool night had forced him inside, and the scattered lights of the outskirts of Kathmandu had given way to the crazy bustle of a Kathmandu city night. All sense of discovery had been replaced by an ardent desire to correctly follow the route that he had mapped out in the Canadian consul in Delhi, and he found the room without incident. An observer in the tiny room with its window wide open to the lights, the smoke, the night smells and the bats of Kathmandu, would have seen a young Canadian man sitting before a photo of his guru, meditating in the light of a stub of candle wreathed in tendrils of incense smoke. But Glenn was still racing up to the mountain pass with an angelic child pressed to his heart. And meditating in a tiny Kathmandu hotel room. And nowhere at all. And everywhere.

letter to Mandelbrot

Here is a letter I wrote to professor Benoit Mandelbrot. The professor died a few month after I sent this, so I suppose he never read it or looked at the images. I will look over the blog and see if the images are there, if not I will add them. I guess I'll call it "Open Letter to the legacy of Benoit Mandelbrot".

Professor Mandelbrot,
I wanted to bring these paintings to your attention for various reasons, in a nutshell because I suspect you will be able to provide some key to understanding their meaning and importance.
While studying Fine Arts at University of Waterloo in 1992, a friend of mine, a PhD student in theoretical physics introduced me to the world of fractals, mostly through images, but also through discussion. That time was the genesis of a body of work in my painting process, producing paintings which I call “thoughtless organic”. Somehow seeing images of the Mandelbrot set produced a change in the way I saw and interpreted visual reality, and I wanted to paint about that.
Not being a mathematician, I cannot prove that my impressions were correct but it seemed to me that the Mandelbrot set images and their self similarity at any scale signalled something extremely important about visual reality. I felt that the beauty expressed in the set was connected to the way nature manifests beauty in complexity. It seemed to me that wherever I looked in nature, I could see a language of forms that became visible only through randomness, and that there was a subtle message everywhere taking shape whenever there was infinite complexity. Of course, I also began to see that infinite complexity was everywhere.
I noticed how the spontaneous beauty in the shifting patterns of nature is a very hard thing to paint, and I began a two pronged attack on these difficulties, on the one had through working very hard to represent exactly what my eye could see though painting and drawing, and on the other hand I began to develop other work painting imagery with no reference to phenomenal reality. It is the non representational work which I would like to present to you now, the culmination of 18 years of development.
It seems to me that you would be foremost among those who could recognise the “language of forms” if I have been able to generate it through my painting process. I realise that you are very busy, very much in demand, and I would not approach you, except that I have convinced myself that some absolutely unprecedented imagery has begun to appear in my “thoughtless organic” works. I am a painter and not a philosopher or a scientist, so I will not try to argue the importance of these paintings, rather I will allow the images to speak for themselves. Please share with me any insight you may have into the work, I need your help as I am not in a position to sanction the meaning or importance of the work myself.
In closing, I think it may be important to note that when I am painting these pictures, my mind is at rest with almost no thoughts, and no concepts or mental pictures of any kind about where the work is going. I do not know from stage to stage what shape the painting will take next, and there is some spontaneous process at work which generates the imagery without any visual reference or source material of any kind. I’m not sure it isn’t the same process that generates beauty in chaos in the natural world. There is a strange witness state in which I watch the images unfold, and though I do not know much about how I arrived at the stage where I can maintain this state, I have seen that it is the key to the process. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any insight or encouragement you may have to offer.
I am extremely grateful for you kind attention and time,

William Downey

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Her Holiness Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi pioneered a new approach to spiritual enlightenment in 1970, and Her discoveries paved the way for what would soon become an international movement of en masse (collective) awakening called Sahaja Yoga. As we approach the 40th anniversary of the advent of Sahaja Yoga, it is a time to recognize what is available to Calgarians through Sahaja Yoga meditation, and why these benefits are essential for our collective well being.

Truth is what it is; we cannot change it, or mould it in our image to suit our own purposes. Truth continues to be truth whether we seek it, or understand it, or believe in it or not. Most important of all, truth cannot be understood at the ordinary human level of awareness. We need our “Yoga” or “union” with the all pervading divine energy to be able to experience truth. This experience of being in a state of harmony with truth or reality is called by many names: self-realization, moksha, final liberation, enlightenment, nirvana, and many others.

Most people recognize that the ultimate purpose of life is not success at work, recognition in the society, or even having happy and healthy children, but rather the fulfillment of some higher purpose of human evolution. During the struggle for independence in India, millions of Indians were proudly sacrificing careers, political positions, and even the safety and security of their own families in pursuit of a higher ideal of creating a freer world for future Indians. The reason why so many were willing to sacrifice individual comfort and safety for a collective purpose was the recognition that living for our selfish ends is ultimately a path of self destruction.

It is a universal maxim that in clinging to what we love we will lose it, and in giving away what we love we may keep it for eternity. For example, if we are attached to our children, and try to hold on to them and keep them with us instead of letting them discover the world and build a life of their own, we will smother their souls, create resentment in their hearts, and lose their love –the very thing we were trying to keep. If, on the other hand, we give our children freedom to become themselves, and trust that the examples and ethical principles we have handed down to them will serve them and protect them as well as liberate them, we will have their love forever, and they will have ours to hand on to their children and their children’s children down through eternity.

The practice of meditation and the pursuit of yoga are not meant for sacrificing our lives, and giving up our comforts. God created good food, friends and families, and the comforts of a happy home for us to enjoy. Union with God does not mean turning our backs on happiness and pleasure. For thousands of years ascetics and holy men shunned the householder’s comforts in pursuit of the absolute, but the culmination of Kali Yuga, this modern age of confusion, is also the time in which human beings reach the stage in collective evolution when they can receive enlightenment as a society, without shunning the collective.

The way Sri Mataji’s Sahaja Yoga has made this possible in not a singular achievement, rather it is the most recent stage on the path of yoga that all the prophets and divine incarnations have walked upon. By awakening the primordial energy of “kundalini”, the Sahaja yogi becomes free of his human awareness through the meditation state. Just as the parent who loves his child cannot really possess that child until, through love he lets that child live free, so we cannot fulfill our worldly ambitions until we allow ourselves to give up responsibility for our lives, and surrender all our goals in a state of silence. But the wisdom and peace that this kind of detachment can provide is not possible until we can work out the experience of meditation.

When we are silent within we are released from all the pressures of our worries, our desires, our emotional fears and losses. All of our unfulfilled hopes and dreams are fulfilled because the cup of our attention is made silent and empty. In that emptiness, all of our worldly cares and sufferings drain out, and slowly that empty cup is filled with the peace of God’s love that can only be experienced in silence. In this way, through meditation we can live in connection with the source of spiritual wisdom, while still living the normal life of a householder.

How is this possible? People have understood for thousands of years that the grace of a guru is required to achieve self-realization, and even then it is only through complete dedication and perseverance that the disciple has success. The new possibility of the present age is to become our own guru through the guidance of our own kundalini within us. The goal is not to forget the gurus of the past, but rather to awaken them within us through self-realization. The new yoga is a modern yoga for modern times. Sri Mataji found a way to trigger the awakening of the kundalini collectively for ordinary people like you and I, and just as one candle can light may other candles, the yogis who through Sri Mataji’s grace have experienced kundalini awakening can awaken the kundalini of others. This is what happens at the local Calgary Sahaja Yoga classes free of charge every week. When the energy uncoils from its abode in the sacrum bone at the base of the spine, it rises through the subtle energy centers or “chakras” placed along the center of the body. The topmost chakra at the fontanel bone at the top of the head is reached, and the kundalini passes through the top of the head to connect us with the all pervading energy. That energy grants us the meditation sate, and the enlightenment of our spirit. After that, daily meditation eventually makes the peace and detachment of the meditation state a permanent part of our character, and we become an instrument of this divine love, able to pass it on to others.

New participants are always welcome, not only here in Calgary, but at our free centers in over one hundred countries all around the world.

www.freemeditation.com
www.meditationcanada.ca