Origin Stories, The Empire of Stuff, and the Light of Consciousness
I've always been fascinated by origen stories. As I have navigated my way into middle-age, the questions "Where did I (we) come from?" and "How did we get here?" (as well as the subsequent Gauginist query--"Where are we going?") have, in the wake of the first major (nuclear family) passing-away the I have experienced (my mother passed at an untimely age in late 2021) grown to an occupy an even great part of my thinking, and my art practice, than ever before. As someone who has created things of some sort for their living, there is a familiar rubric that was put into overdrive the last few years, and which I feel provides a sort of monumental insight into the nature and rhythm of consciousness, among other things. It can be summed-up as the discursive-evaluative mode of consciousness, and it is a very distinct end of what I believe is a spectrum of consciousness, at which other terminus lies what might be considered the transcendent-consciousness, su...