Just before a concert during my senior year in high school several of us were having a discussion on some point of philosophy. As we were taking our seats on the stage a trumpet player leaned over and asked, "Can I be your first disciple?" It was said in jest but my immediate mental response was to remember a line from the bible, "It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble. Luke 17:2 It horrified me.
Later, in college, a crowd gathered on a whole floor of one of the dorms to pray for deliverance from me, the Anti-Christ. In a later semester a dear friend of mine who was studying to become a minister announced that he was dropping out and going back home to be a dairy farmer. He said the things I said and the questions I asked had brought him to the place of realizing that he was not ready to be a minister. There were too many things he could not answer and was no longer sure of within himself.
My grief and fear were overwhelming. Had I led one of His children astray? Or had God, through me, set someone back upon their true path? The fear has always been hard set on me. I have always been a seeker with too many questions of my own to be a teacher. So I do not often speak of my personal beliefs or try to "correct" the beliefs of others.
Over the years I have been called, labeled or diagnosed as mystic, the anti-christ, schizophrenic, teacher, troublemaker, hippie, beat and as one psychiatrist told me, "You are simply a very stupid young man." Labels are very abstract and tend to be self conclusive - therefore limiting and non-contextual. All of the above labels are probably true at various perspectives.
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
Anais Nin
I think that statement is very true and ever since I read it so long ago it has been a very governing belief in my own self examinations and my dealings with other people. In fact it is a principle behind these writings, looking at how I see the images and events in my life to discover who I am and what made me this way.
Sometimes the words of other people, like the quote from Nin, strike us as profoundly true by crystallizing the often nebulous and vaporous thoughts already in our mind. Sometimes it takes years for us to build an experiential language to even understand what is being said. ("All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given." Matthew 19:11) I was brought up completely immersed in religion and the Bible so all things began from that perspective.
The quote from Nin resonated with "For as he thinks in his heart, so is he." Proverbs 23:7 This theme of interior qualities turned out to dominate in a great amount of explorations. Everything builds on and feeds from and to everything else. That is why a person sweeps the floor the same way they make love, drive a car or eat a bowl of soup.
It was a principle behind my learning the techniques of glazing when I got into oil paints. I also experimented with painting pictures in rough, thin acrylics as an under painting for oils knowing the underlying colors would subtly shine through and the shapes would, however subconsciously, effect my brush strokes.
It was especially profound when I began studying the poems and writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He used the word "inscape" to refer to the intrinsic and individually significant qualities that determined the truth of a form. He invented the word "instress" to refer to the energy of intent that illuminates this inscape to the beholder.
This was a concern of the beats, to keep pure the integrity of the word. Abstract painters did away with the lines of traditional forms to deal with the inscapes of pure color and geometry. The surrealists tried to blast away all the baggage of meaning from images and show how inscapes could feed new perspectives from the energy of new associations, the relationships of instress.