"I tend to think of art as a covenant relationship between spirit, the art, and the viewer."

Joel Metzger is the founder of the Online Noetic Network (ONN), which offers free email articles on living consciously.

The Online Noetic Network can be visited at wisdomtalk.org (site will open in new window).

This interview was the first in a series with artists, created in association with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), for the Noetic Arts Program (NAP).  Artist Alex Grey portrays the nervous, vascular, skeletal, and other bodily systems with a disarming, anatomically exact realism. He then passes to spiritual/energetic systems with images such as "Universal Mind Lattice," envisioning the sacred and esoteric symbolism of the body and the forces that define its living field of energy - Joel

ONN Joel: Please start by telling me a little bit about your work.

Alex Grey: Well, my work is primarily examining the nature of consciousness, and it uses various mediums to explore that question…Art, as we know from the prehistoric cave art, is tens of thousands of years old. It's one of the most ancient reminders that humans existed, so it seems to be an innate and an important aspect of the human story as it has evolved. One can look at the history of art and read the evolution of consciousness. That was one of the points that I made in writing the book The Mission of Art, where I looked at the immersion of the human mind in its natural surroundings in very early cultures…

If your subject is consciousness in your artwork, however, you've got a lot of problems because not only is it difficult to define consciousness, but then we are challenged to visualize something that's invisible and has no inherent form. Yet consciousness is the basis from which everything emerges -- our understanding of reality, of ourselves, and of our world. It becomes an interesting puzzle to try and come up with art works that have something intelligent to say about the span of being…

We can't just think our way into this. We have to have actual experiences of transpersonal reality in order to make any kind of convincing spiritual or transpersonal art. And so although it's not part of the curriculum in art schools, I think work on our own souls and our own spiritual practice has to be a component of the art-making process. We need to sensitize and refine our own spiritual sensibility, have mystical experiences, and go on a spiritual journey in order to encounter the states of being that will then translate into authentic works of spiritual art.

ONN Joel: So, the point of our spiritual development is to progress spiritually, not to paint art. The work of the artist is to bring the viewer into his or her experience -- to portray the experience the artist is having.

Alex Grey: Yes, exactly. I tend to think of art as a covenant relationship between spirit, the art, and the viewer. And so the artist-- if he or she gets lucky and has some kind of inspiring spiritual experience -- has a responsibility to translate and transmit it as closely as possible so as to evoke a similar experience in the viewer. They want to translate their experience clearly enough so that if the viewers can trust the work they are able to let go of their own ego identity and merge with the inspiring moment that the artist was able to capture. At that point, they will stand in the same relationship to the transcendental that was the initial gift given to the artist. So the artist becomes a transparent medium through which a person is able to reconnect with his or her own deeper nature.

ONN Joel: Your training and your beginnings were with representational and anatomical art. How did you come to go beyond that into spiritual physical art?

Alex Grey: It sort of started out with a mystical experience that I could not understand in any reasonable way. My wife and I were sort of intrepid psychonauts. I guess it was about twenty-five years ago. We did a lot of psychedelic exploration and had some experiences that completely changed our orientation toward making art by calling into question all we'd thought was real. These experiences then became the basis on which we proceeded to live our lives. We both had an experience of what we refer to as "the universal mind lattice." 

We would wear blindfolds and lie in bed after taking strong hits of LSD and sort of dissolve into wherever we were going. We wound up in this lattice realm. It seemed that our identity and our body had become a torroidal fountain of light that was interconnected with an omni-directional and infinite number of similar fountains of light. It felt more real than sitting here talking. It had a sense of bedrock reality, and the energy that was flowing through all these different toruses, these cells, was love energy. It was intense and ecstatic. There was a sense of participating in a network of love energy -- of becoming -- all beings and all things. It seemed that this was the true reality, that we are all interconnected on some very fundamental, primordial level, and that this interconnectedness is the body of spirit that we participate in. We're an important node in that network...

ONN Joel: While you're talking, questions are popping into my head, but I don't want to interrupt you because you're saying such good things. What I'm hearing, though, is you feel in communion with the whole span of sacred artistry through the ages.

Alex Grey: I think that that's been, as I would call it, the mission of art, for people to enter into a communion with the their own spiritual understanding of their relationship with their environment and with each other. I think that the magical and mythic archetypes were sort of visionary encounters -- they were ways for people to try to make sense of the reality that surrounded them. In the Paleolithic art we have the animals that were relied on for sustenance, and the early people had a kind of a magical relationship with them.

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