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VISIONARY REVUE
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The Visionary Revue
is pleased to present
this illustrated essay by
Daniel Mirante
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editor of
Lila.info
The Journal Of Cosmic Play
Explorations into Shamanism
and the Transpersonal Vision
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DEEP ECOLOGY
Daniel Mirante
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This is a creation of God
this is a deep cleansing
Eagle Spirit !
Peace, love and harmony
to all living Beings !
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FALL 2007
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Amongst the many sacred plants of Gaia there is a tea, a 'Great Medicine', whose discovery lies with the jaguar. There is an old story of a master hunter, Uaica, closely identified with the jaguar, who was said to have discovered a bark potion useful in shamanism. The early human groups in the Amazonian forests observed how the jaguar chewed the leaves and stems of a vine, to increase its hunting skills, and would lead to it entering into ecstasy on the forest floor.
It was found that as well as being an excellent tonic for the digestive and nervous system, the tea of this vine also enabled a certain sensitivity to the nature of other plants and susceptibility to trance. Another plant, originally used for dysentery, composed of the glossy leaves of a plant related to coffee, was combined at some point and a miraculous magical potion was created.
When decoctions of these two plants are taken together, a complex biochemical reaction provokes the organism into a process orientated toward reconnection and wholeness.
Ayahuasca is a psycho-integrator, that is, a tea that stimulates mental and emotional processes to force the organism towards an integrative holistic growth state... the stimulation of the mind, emotions, soul and spirit toward integrative development, helping elicit a process of holistic restructuring of the elements of the psyche by amplifying usually repressed aspects of being, and reconnecting the often dissociated psyche with the body and its memories and emotions and subtle energetic (pranic) flows. This process of growing toward inner and outer integrity is the true meaning of the word 'health', the state of wholeness or holiness.
Like a vital messenger molecule within the body of Gaia, Ayahuasca has extended beyond its bioregion and is performing its ancient work of transformation within the disconnected, mediated and institutionalised matrix of Western civilisation.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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During the turn of the millennium I was fortunate enough to consumate my longstanding interest in Ayahuasca, through a ceremony held by a Peruvian 'vegetalista', a shaman specialised in plant medicine, oracion of sacred songs, and 'limpia', cleansing ritual.
In the darkness of the ceremony, supported and guided by the 'icaros', melodies whistled and chanted by Don Francesco Montes Shuna, I experienced the flight of the soul from the body, into realms where I was awed and humbled by personifications of wrathful wisdom and infinite tenderness.
After drinking more vine medicine around 2003, I began to paint. Not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time, and in a completely different 'mind' than I ever had done before. I had no preconceived idea of what I wanted to paint. The nearest comparison is when I had compulsively drawn hundereds of labyrinths when I was 5 years old.
I remember being surprised as I painted, at how organised, totemic forms began to emerge, along with unusual colour combinations that contained something of the energy of the realms I had experienced. Moreover, it soon became apparent that there were prophetic signs within the painting, indicating the deeper meanings of the forces and patterns playing out through the surface appearance of my world.
One such painting that came through in this period predicted a courtship with my beloved, sanctified by the Eagle Spirit. My paintings constitute something of my love song for woman. Other paintings seem to hold an almost autonomous energy. As I have sometimes worked on paintings over the course of a year, different energies and currents seem to take turns occupying the image. Visionary painting is somewhat analogous to channelling. At times I have had to make bold and discisive interventions to 'exorcise' unwanted energies from a canvas.
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EAGLE SHAKTI
Daniel Mirante
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FALL 2007
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THE HERALDRY OF THE SUN
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Art and Ayahuasca are both teachers that can reveal that whilst we live on the surface of things, there are yet deep layerings and extensions to our everyday selves. Each being is like a ten-thousand armed, multi-faced, multi-faceted deity, such as those depicted in Indian temple statues and Tibetan thanka cloths. We extend outward across the fields of nature, manipulating and weaving energies in a myriad of realms. The great visionary art of such painters as Ernst Fuchs, HR Giger, Maura Holden, Oleg Korolev and many more, emphasise this hyperdimensional aspect to human being.
Ancient shamanic cosmologies talk of an underworld and sky or celestial realms, and the middle earth - our own world occuping a middle ground in the infinite gradations of consciousness - the 'rainbow bridge' - betwix the alpha and omega, the centre and circumference of creation.
The heraldry of the sun, the celestial realms, includes the kings and queens of animal life, those that exist at the top of their respective foodchains, such as eagles and lions. Mountains and giant trees, titanic waterfalls, crystals, thrones, wheels, chariots, glittering armour and elaborate royal attire, bridal chambers and sublime dances, shining light, elaborate gardens, temples, musical instruments, all pertain to the heavenly or solar, where all has been perfected, where no trace of dross may enter and where infinite tenderness reigns.
The pristine 'inner sanctum' is made inviolatable by a mandala of warrior entities, guardians, knights... "heavens wall", rivers of forgetting or barriers of flame... which usually require a transmutation of ones being in order to pass through, a purification, a shedding of ones ego.
Here, in these realms of the primal sun, all elements coexist as an ur-substance which stands before the division and fragmentation of qualities. It is at once ice and fire, crystal and stone, holographic, and luminous with the sanctity of the 'first born' state, fresh and bejewelled in the dawn of creation. The ideal forms, the paradisial gardens full of sacred trees, fragrant blooms, sparkling birds and fountains of the waters of life are all there, as are temple-cities, that are themselves made of the primordial energetic stuff of knowledge, prayer and information.
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THE TRUE VINE
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Mohammed the Prophet said here everyone is 33 years old, their absolute prime and in their ideal form. It is here we throw off our crutches, and there are no misunderstandings. Everyone communes in a higher form and the soul is in rapture, perpetually bathed in Godness. All these realms pertain to the transpersonal self, the 'centre that is free'.
"This world of imagination is the world of eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of every thing which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature. All things are comprehended in their eternal forms in the divine body of the savior, the true vine of eternity, the human imagination"
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- William Blake
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VISIONARY REVUE
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Navigating the rainbow bridge, the ladder of imagination that angels and demons ascend and descend, I have delved into the deepest, most compacted and stagnated realms of my ancestral family karma, exorcised viral miasma, and opened up the glued-together spiral passages of my heart to realise that there is nothing to hide. These deep healing journeys have transformed my relationship to fellow humans, and helped me realise the gifts inherent in my sacred wounds, my highly focussed and yet simultaniously chaotic and fractal attention. I have been supported in this often difficult healing quest through refuge in the fortress of art, where so many deep wisdoms and understanding about the transformation of the species mind are held and portrayed.
There are many realms, many worlds. Rather than providing answers, Ayahuasca respects the great mysteries of life, and makes them more fertile. No final answers or conclusions snap into view. There are always fresh vistas. If anything, wisdom is shown to be responsive and dynamic, not a collection of static pieces of knowledge. There is a time for everything, and no single rule for anything. Only the fearful mind seeks premature confines, and in a ''hermetic'' box life dies.
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GAIAN SHAMANIC ART
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The vine-drinking Tukano peoples of the Amazon describe how two complementary generative forces enjoin to create all forms of organic growth. There are the creative and enlivening rays (bogá) from the Sun above empowering the generative forces from below (dári) within budding and sprouting plant forms, the biological fecundity and fertility of Gaia. These circuits of energy regulate the reproductive and productive cycles in the forest, river, garden and village, as well as in animals and people. (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1996).
This, to me, is a profound metaphor for the creation of art. Inspiration is like the blazing, radiating, unformed and frequency-like force of life itself. It takes the feminine principle, the 'dari', the creatrix, to absorb and regulate and pattern this light into the matrix of generative forms.
In Tukano cosmology the paye, the shaman illuminate, healer-visionary, exists as an agent of integration between the solar and the earthy, conscious and the unconscious, the natural and the cultural, the masculine and feminine, to re-fertilise the dense realms of matter with life-giving vibrancy, energy and information, thus maintaining the strength and potency of the people and the ecological web.
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FALL 2007
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"O Thou our Provider! Send down Thine aid, that each one gathered here may become a lighted candle, an enlightened flame, each a centre of attraction, each a summoner to Thy heavenly realms, till at last we make this nether-world the mirror image of Thy Paradise."
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Abdu’l-Bahá
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PANGAIAN WILDS
Daniel Mirante
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In terms we can recognise, this work is manifest through psychosomatic healing, knowledge, and the generation of art, stories and music. In this function, the artist shaman provides an invaluable service to his people.
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NOVA HORIZONTE
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Art is prayer and psychotherapy. I often feel I tread a wilderness, that my soul is on a vast pilgrimage upon an infinite terrain. The perennial values of goodness, truth and beauty are my orientation, so that I do not remain a vagabond spirit.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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In the visionary realm, where one is blown beyond ones 'holding patterns' into the 'free life state', one needs to find ones prayer, to find ones connection to God. I have often had to hold in this frail vessel tremendous forces in need of transmutation, such as titanic entities, unascended spirits and collective karma. I feel that such challenges are in the nature of the bodhisattva vows and aligning with the lower angelic batallions. Such ideas can sound fanciful until one is faced with experiential encounters with archetypes.
On one journey I encountered a cosmic bodhisattva who bestowed me with a 'shamanic weapon':
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I become the creator of worlds, a spiral galaxy, dancing between freedom and constraint, creating infinite sets of creation, unfurling my fiery arms, worlds within worlds, ecologies within ecologies, historical processes, societies. In the spiral of creation, I phase-lock onto a certain reality, a world, a forest crystallises around me. I walk forth into the mystery of my own creation.
Within a sacred grove in an enchanted wood,
A flower fair, a light comes down
A knight wreathed in flame descends
Wielding a sword sharp and bright and spoke:
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"IF THIS WORLD WERE
TEN-THOUSAND TIMES
MORE CLOUDED,
CORRUPT, HATEFUL
AND CAUGHT IN DELUSION,
IF THIS WORLD WERE
BEYOND REDEMPTION,
BEYOND HOPE
I WOULD STILL HEAL IT."
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FALL 2007
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And the earth trembling warrior gave his sword to me
and I on my knees, awed by his power could only say "Who are you ?"
And a wise and kind mirth echoed through the play of being |
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"I AM YOU
ONE DAY YOU WILL KNOW
YOURSELF TO BE ME
BECAUSE YOU ARE ALREADY ME
BECAUSE YOU AND I ARE ONE
YOU AND THIS LIGHT OF WISDOM ARE ONE
YOU AND THESE TRUTHS ARE ONE
YOU AND I ARE NOT SEPARATE
REMEMBER ME
FOR LOVE IS SHINING
AND THE SILVER SWORD
WILL CUT THE CORDS
AND SET YOU FREE."
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I understand, the sword is not a weapon but a tool of love that cuts the fetters of duality and delusion. |
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- Journal Entry, May 2006
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THE LILA
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The capacities for non-reactivity, witnessing, non-judgement and 'finding ones prayer' that the vision-quest demands one to develop, are modalities transferable to the craft of creating art. Sometimes painting can be challenging, ego-grinding work, demanding patience, faith and concentration. I know many people who don't paint, the reason being because it hurts to be faced with ones limits and the results of hard effort can sometimes be dissapointing. This is the important aspect of discipline in art. It is not all freedom and visionary mind, but also the rigor of applying oneself and focussing that creates the special medicine of painting.
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VISIONARY REVUE
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Maintaining a clear mind, fertilising the moment, without rushing to some foregone conclusion or being pulled away by the mind to and fro, are beneficial conditions to trust and maintain, both in the highly amplified visionary state, and in art as well as day-to-day life. Instead of our thoughts thinking us into being, I find much health and solace in emptiness and placidity - inner humility. Letting the mind rest. When there is the receptive state, there is a permiability to transpersonal energies.
As I have worked past gross delusions, paranoias, shames, and repetitive, obsessional cycles that once pervaded my mind, I encounter levels of calmness, positivity, subtlety (what Buddhists call 'emptiness' - like the emptiness of a sun-drenched sky) and freedom, and what I sometimes experience as the infinite tenderness of the spirit.
This kind of contemplation cannot be 'depicted' in art because it is absent of form. However, the energy can be evoked or re-presented through symbol, through colour, through rhythm and melody, metaphor and narrative. Particular themes and sensibilities, such as the balance of the complimentary pairs (eg sexuality), and correspondences and patterns that rejoin the so-called 'inner' and 'outer' worlds, seem suited to evoking the mystery of existence. Symbols are not merely representations of some unfathomable 'external reality' - but an outgrowth, a creative elaboration and completion of the Lila, the boundless field of creation:
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“In the pattern of the human being exists the plan for creation: To create, play, evolve, and to explore the infinite varieties and manifestations of love. The spirit is at play, energy is eternal delight, both matter, life and mind are expressions of the cosmic logos. This world is the expression of the divine logos that the primordial man and woman create through each other. At play in the fields of creation, characterised by differences and boundaries, Shiva and Shakti play in creativity and love. Shiva and Shakti is man and woman, liberated and in love, who have set each other free. This universe is an overflow of this love, an expression of the exuberance of this love. Enjoined in spirit, we exist complete, the whole of creation."
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Journal entry, June 2005
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Sexual energy is one of the most interesting facets of being human, and also one of the most unintegrated facets, both in daily life and spiritual paths. I feel Ayahuasca, as a psychological purgative, helped my process of 'cleaning out' issues of power, guilt and desire concerning the opposite sex, and this has had an empowering and aligning effect upon my art.
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FALL 2007
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RECEPTIVITY
Daniel Mirante
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Sexuality, attraction and desire, can be full of the celebration of spirit, despite whatever outward manifestation it can take. I appreciate women deeply, as the flowers of Gaia, the fruit of humanity. I feel comfortable acknowledging their massive inspiring effect upon me. I feel like a warrior sent on a sacred adventure by the Goddess.
Through clarifying consciousness, journeying through dharma-fields, and creating culture from these assemblage points, we bring the waters of life back with us from sacred realms. Through unblocking the fertility circuit, unblocking tense, fear based control mechanisms, the pranic creative energies through which we are most aligned to spirit can flow and be expressed, as a gift to and from the source.
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Daniel Mirante,
Febuary 2007,
Koh Lipe, Thailand.
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*
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FALL 2007
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DANIEL MIRANTE
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Born in the United Kingdom. Has been wandering the wilderness of the mundus imaginalis for 28 years.
Began www.lila.info, cooperative visionary art and medicine culture website in 2000 ad.
3 years ago was gifted from the Creatrix a hummingbird brush to depict songs of Gaian intricacy and celestial crystal Logos
In 2005 received help in the mische (mixed) technique of oil glazes and egg tempera with Brigid Marlin.
Became a collaborating member of the Elfintome arts collective (www.elfintome.com).
In July 2006 exhibited works at the Visionary Art Alliance event in London, then at BOOM Festival, Portugal.
Daniel is currently gaining much guidance and inspiration from rainforest traditions, the Kaballah, and the perennial narrative running through all world wisdom traditions.
The adventure continues....
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Visit
Lila.info
The Journal Of Cosmic Play
Explorations into Shamanism
and the Transpersonal Vision
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