The only obstacle to surrender is self-asserting ego
ahaṇkāra-nivṛttānāṁ keśavo nahi dūragaḥ
ahaṇkāra-yutānāṁ hi madhye parvvata-rāśayaḥ
“The Supreme Lord Keśava remains in the company of persons who are free from a mundane conception of life; but there appears to be a great mountain range between the self-asserting egotists and the Lord.”
This image is a the beginning of a series of self portraits created in photoshop.
For an artist with a spiritual objective overcoming the ego is a true dilemma. The vaiṣṇava has a personal conception of the Supreme Being who is having a personal relationship with each individual soul. This is Divine and eternal, so in the light of such a relationship the idea of the cessation of ego in raw divine energy, as the goals of yoga or zen, and utilised in the process of Abstract Expressionism is unsatisfying. An egoless state is not a mindless moment where nameless nature overcomes the artist as an instrument creating “perfection”.At my current state of artistic growth I am examining approaches to this. The first step is to create work that is based on the fabric of divine sound encased within ślokas of the Śrī Sāraswat Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, and in these works I am using the magical alchemy of image making to create my image as a subject representing the conditioned soul. By the manipulation of photoshop an original portrait photo has been transformed into a new image becoming the character of a narrative surrounding this dialogue.Through this narrative description and distillation of the false ego is being discussed, to the pure ego state in the eyes of vaiṣṇava – I am the servant of the servant of the servant of those dearmost to the supreme being – dās-anu-das ad infinitum
More artwork from the series Search for the Golden Vyuha
