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It's not hard to believe in reincarnation. I feel like I've had several lifetimes in this life. Those are somewhere in memory.
My grandmother used to tell me that as you sat in Quaker silence you were to go inside to greet the light. That expression stuck with me.
The vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open. The fact that we have this vision with the eyes closed is very interesting. And the idea that it's possible to actually work in a way, on the outside, to remind one of how we see on the inside, is something that became more interesting to me as an artist.
We sit in the cave with our backs to reality, looking at the reflection of reality on the cave wall. As an analogy to how we perceive, and the imperfections of perception, I think this is very interesting.
There are some very interesting experiments that were done several years ago. They show that light is aware that we are looking.
We're not apart from nature. In fact, that's one of our greatest conceits, to even think that we're somehow apart from nature.
We generate light at night in the cities to offset our fear of each other, but lighting the night sky cuts off access to the universe. And the territory we inhabit is a visual territory. There are certainly aural aspects to it, I'll grant that, but if you cut off access to the universe, you don't live in it. It's a psychological change to do that, to light the sky and cut off access to the stars.
As you fly, you do see space that is determined not so much by physical confines, but by atmospheric and light phenomena within the space.
I think for instance of the Hopis and some of the Southwest Indians, who live on the mesas. They are essentially "sky people," as the Zuni call themselves. Sky city at Acama. And also the Hopis live in that situation. They actually live in the sky. Certainly the Tibetans felt they were living in the sky. They really felt that.
One of the most interesting times I had occurred when I was training. I came down over Pyramid lake near Tahoe, and it was an absolutely still morning. I could see the reflection of the sky in the lake. I rolled upside down, and it looked perfect upside down. I rolled right side up, and it looked just the same. Of course, you can feel gravity, but when you do a barrel roll, you take that gravity into the roll. So you have to remember whether you're right side up, or right side down in relation to the real world. There is this beauty of the reflection.
I would like to have the physicality of my light at least remind you of this other way of seeing. That's as best I can do. It's terrible hubris to say this is a religious art. But it is something that does reminds us of that way we are when we are thinking of things beyond us.
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