IMELDA ALMQVIST ART: JOURNEYS TO INNER WORLDS, OTHER WORLDS AND AROUND THE WORLD IN PAINTINGS

!Kung Bushmen, Kalahari Desert, Milky Way, the Backbone of the Night, entropy, the Laws of Thermodynamics, Brian Swimme, 'The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos', Wendy Doniger, 'The Implied Spider', Bhagavad Purana, Isaac Newton, Mathematical Equations, Classical Physics, Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity, General Theory of Relativity, Spacetime, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Physics, Probabilities, Speed of Light, Speed Limit of the Cosmos, Time Asymmetry, Extra Dimensions, Baby Universe, Multiverse, Universe As Hologram, Erwin Schrodinger, Theory of Everything, Superstring Theory, Particles, Parallel Worlds, Hindu Philosophy of the Vedanta, John David Ebert, The Twilight of the Clockwork God, Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, Child of the Sun, Cosmological meaning of Sacrifice, The Tides of the Human Mind, Celebrating the Mysteries of the Universe, Creation, Ancestor Spirits, Divine Heritance: The Law, Spirit Ancestors, Creation Epoch, The Dreaming, The Dreamtime, The Dawn of the Universe, Alcheringa, Creator Serpent, All Mother, Spirit Beings, Milky Way Galaxy, The Milky Manta Ray, Names for  the Milky Way:The Straw Thief's Way (Armenian), 'The Way The Dog Ran Away' (from a Cherokee myth), Silver River (Chinese), 'The Way Of Birds' (Estonian), 'The Winter Way (Faroese), 'The Deer Jump' (Georgian), 'The Road of the Warriors' (from a Hungarian myth), River of Heaven (Japanese), 'The Road to Santiago' (Spanish), Winter Street (Swedish), 'The Way of the White Elephant' (Thai), The Fort of Gwydion (Welsh), The Night Sky, As Above So Below, Hermetic Texts, Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet, Miracles of the One Thing, Macrocosmos and Microcosmos, Fractals, Reindeer Moss, Inner Landscapes, Mental Landscapes, David Bohm, The Universe as a Hologram, The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot

 THE BACKBONE OF NIGHT   (size?)   £245

The !Kung Bushman of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana have an explanation for the Milky Way, which at their latitude is often overhead. They call it 'the backbone of night' as if the sky were some great beast inside which we live// They believe that the Milky Way holds up the night; that if it were not for the Milky Way, fragments of darkness would come crashing down at our feet'

COSMOS

The Native Indian people of South America teach that

'To become human one must make room in oneself for the immensities of the universe'

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 'The total energy content of the universe is constant and the total entropy is continually increasing'

(The two great laws of thermodynamics)

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'On this continuum between the personal and the abstract, myth vibrates in the middle; of all things made of words, myths span the widest range of human concerns, human paradoxes'

Wendy Doniger in The Implied Spider

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'The imagination must be given not wings, but weights'

Francis Bacon

THE GREAT COSMIC LOTUS DREAM   (80 x 100 cm)   £650

Both Carl Sagan and Erwin Schrodinger have pointed out that Hinduism is the only one of the great world faiths dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religiion in which the timescales correspond to those of modern cosmology.  There is the deep notion that that the universe is but the dream of a god, who after a 1000 Brahma years dissolves himself into dreamless sleep and the universe dissolves with him until the cycle starts all over again... the dream... The great cosmic lotus dream! Meanwhile elsewhere there are an infinite number of other universes, each with its own god dreaming...  These ideas are tempered by another idea: maybe men aren't the dreams of gods, maybe the gods are the dream of men...

  Recently (January 2009) I have written a page on MATHEMATICS and completely rewritten the CREATION STORIES page. These two subjects will dance and embrace on this webpage, about the Cosmos and Cosmology.

I am following my intuition in writing this page. I am not a cosmologist, just as I am not a mathematician. I am a painter who has been reading as much as possible about  infinity, cosmology and mythology. I have allowed a sense of excitement and visions of connections to guide me in attempting a webpage on a subject that is and remains, in many ways, beyond human comprehension.

In his book 'The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos', famous cosmologist Brian Swimme says that 'the opportunity of our time is to integrate science's understanding of the universe with more ancient intuitions concerning the meaning and destiny of the human.

KRISNA I  

 In her book the 'Implied Spider' Wendy Doniger tells a Hindu tale from the Bhagavad Purana (a 10th century text in Sanskrit). It is about a little boy who is really the god Krishna incarnate and his mortal mother. Krishna had been playing outside and eaten dirt. Yashoda (his mother) scolds him. Krishna opens his mouth and Yashoda sees the whole universe in his mouth, from the sky and the stars to their little village and herself. It is a moment of total confusion. She thinks she is deluded, yet it is also the moment she realises that her son is God. She then cuddles him and forgets instantly about this big revelation. If we are to live our everyday human lives we can't focus on great dizzying cosmological questions for more than a fleeting moment.

KRISHNA II   (2 monoprints, A4, £150)

 The story about Krishna makes a point that is true for all of us: all of us can look up at the night sky and see the galaxies then look through a microscope and see something very similar. Both these things exist at the edges of human observation: planets too far away to see and particles too tiny to be observed without magnification create very similar images.

SOLAR SYSTEM OR PARTICLE PHYSICS?   (monoprint, A4)   £85

 Saul Bellow does a much better job of making this precise point in Henderson the Rain King:

'Being in point of size precisely halfway between the sun and the atoms, living among astronomical conceptions, with every thumb and fingerprint a mystery we should get used to living with huge numbers'

In the 17th century Isaac Newton studied falling apples and the orbit of the moon. He then expressed in a handful of powerful mathematical equations everything known about the motion of of earth and in the heavens. This body of work formed the basis for what is now known as Classical Physics (i.e. the kind of physics you learn in secondary school!) For Newton time and space were a classical stage on which the events of the universe unfolded. The concepts 'space' and 'time' indicated where and when events took place, no more.

THE MOON  IS A SHOE   (size?)   £125

The !Kabbo San people of Botswana believe that a mythical beast called the Mantis, when inconvenienced by darkness, took off one of his shoes and threw it into the sky, ordering it to become the moon.

"The moon painfully goes away, he painfully returns home. He goes to become another moon, which is whole. He lives while he had seemed to die. Therefore he becomes a new moon. He puts on a stomach, he becomes large. He goes along at night. He feels that he is a shoe, therefore he walks in the night"   (slightly abbreviated, from Specimens of Bushman Folklore, a delightful volume published by Forgotten Books).

In the 20th century Albert Einstein formulated his theories of relativity and completely changed our thinking about space and time. To him space and time were the raw material underlying everyday reality. He invented the concept "Spacetime". By the 1930 physicists were forced to introduce a whole new set of concepts called quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics describes a reality of probabilities: a reality where things hover in a hazy state of being partly one way and partly another way. Things become definite only when observation forces them to 'relinquish those quantum possibilities' and settle on a specific outcome. In other words: long range quantum connections between particles can bypass spatial seperation. Two objects can be at opposing ends of the universe, but they will behave as if they are two halves of one single entity. (Bear in mind here that the 'speed limit of our cosmos' is the speed of light, and that this phenomenon of 'acting like two halves of the same coin' even applies to particles millions of  light years apart!)

THE ULTIMATE SHAPE-SHIFTER: THE ELECTRON!   (D 30cm)   £95

 Another  interesting point is that the known and accepted laws of physics show no 'time asymmetry' (i.e. they do not show that time must run forward, in one direction only). According to the laws of physics time could (theoretically!) run backwards - but this is completely at odds with our everyday reality (where people die and stay dead and scrambled eggs don't unscramble themselves...)

Scientists are still looking for a 'Theory of Everything' (which remains elusive so far). A leading contender right now in the 21st century is so called Superstring Theory. This theory redefines the question: what are the smallest constituents of matter? For decades the answer was 'particles' but Superstring Theory suggests that these particles are composed of small filaments of energy shaped like string. Those strings can vibrate in different patterns (like a string on a violin) and thus produce the different properties particles possess.

One mind boggling feature of Superstring Theory is that it requires nine spatial dimensions as well as one time dimension to work - and compare that to the three spatial dimensions + time we are aware off. This immediately raises the question: how much of reality do we actually perceive? It also throws up the issue of (hypothetic!)  travel to other dimensions. Not to mention the question: where are these dimensions hiding, from our point of view? One answer is that they might be so tiny and folded up inside existing dimensions that our equipment can't spot them. As for very large dimensions: there might be other worlds nearby in the extra dimensions, of which we have been utterly unaware up to now. Only time will tell if these theories are correct or not.... We live in a truly exciting era!

FOSSILS OF IDEAS THAT CAME TO NOTHING  (A4)  £85

Not only do we live in exciting times in a mysterious universe, there is theoretical evidence that our universe is part of a larger universe. That universes may suddenly inflate and give birth to a 'baby universe'. If this is true, Big Bangs happen all the time and we live in a 'sea of universes'. A better name for this might be a 'multiverse'.

BIRTH OF A BABY BOY OR A BABY UNIVERSE?!  £95

Theoretical evidence is mounting to support the existence of a, so called, 'MULTIVERSE', in which entire universes continually sprout or "bud" off other universes. If true, it would unify two of the great religious mythologies, Genesis and Nirvana. Genesis would take place continually within the fabric of timeless Nirvana...  (Source: Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku)

And here I am going to make 'the great leap' to mythology. The great quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger supposed the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta to be essentially equivalent to the phenomenological insights of modern physics. He wrote a beautiful little book 'My View Of The World' where this great man, a scientist and Nobel Prize winner, summarises his philosophical views on the nature of the world and our reality. In essence he believes that there is only one single consciousness of which we are all different aspects. He admitted that this view is mystical and metaphysical. I have great admiration for a scientist who had the courage to publicise such beliefs. He even mentions his guardian angel in the foreword!

 John David Ebert (in his book 'The Twilight of the Clockwork God' ) makes the very interesting point that 'science is never as "objective" as its priesthood would have us believe, since it too is a production of the human imagination and subject to the same archetypal contours as myth'.  

 I will quote the famous cosmologist Brian Swimme here: '... the opportunity of our time is to integrate science's understanding of the universe with more ancient intuitions concerning the meaning and destiny of the human' and 'Cosmology, though it is consonant with science, is not science. Cosmology is a wisdom tradition drawing upon not just science, but religion and art and philosophy. Its principal aim is not the gathering of facts and theories but the transformation of the human'.

Coming at this from a different background, Karen Armstrong (in her book 'A Short History of Myth') says that like science and technology, mythology is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensily within it'.

Another beautiful quote from the same author is that 'Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of the great silence.'

CHILD OF THE SUN   (SOLD)

In the case of the Sun, we have a new understanding of the cosmological meaning of sacrifice. The Sun is, with each second, giving itself over to become energy that we, with every meal, partake of. We so rarely reflect on this basic truth from biology, and yet its spiritual significance is surpreme.// And every child of ours needs to learn the simple truth: she is the energy of the Sun. And we adults should organise things so her face shines with the same radiant joy'. 

Brian Swimme in 'The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos'

This painting has been dedicated to Anne Sinclaire 

 Many pages of this website feature paintings inspired by the sacred teachings of aboriginal peoples from all over the world. Brian Swimme says: 'It is not because we have no answers to the question 'What does it mean to be human in this universe?' It is rather because we have so many different answers that we need to stop and wonder about the universe in order to sort out our right and fruitful relationships'. I agree totally!

THE TIDES OF THE HUMAN MIND   (mixed media, A4)  £85

Why is it that so many aboriginal peoples have done just that and devised ways of living that were and indeed are (!) sustainable spiritually and environmentally while we contemporary humans lost our ability to celebrate the mysteries of the universe quite some time ago. We sit in classrooms and study science and other subjects... And as Brian Swimme points out: we also sit in front of the tv and absorb a lot of messages that are designed to make us unhappy with what with have, keen to acquire and consume things... Our own children recently discovered the 'shopping channel' on tv and it really freaked me out!

All cultures have myths or religious beliefs about Creation. In Australia it is believed that Ancestor Spirits formed, named and breathed life and language into all that exists in the known Universe. This is the touchstone of all Aboriginal culture and religious practice. This divine inheritance is known as the Law. It is continuously being re-enacted in ceremonial activities. Aboriginal people recognise that they have a spark of their Spirit Ancestors within them and that they thus have an unbroken link to the Creation Epoch, known in English as 'The Dreamtime' or 'The Dreaming'. The dawn of today is essentially the Dawn of the Universe.

ALCHERINGA: DREAMTIME   (SOLD)

Creator Serpent, Mother Of All Being

  It can't be emphasized enough that the Dreamtime is not something that happened in the past. All time exists in the present moment. There is no 'thing' that is 'nothing'. Everything has its place in the divine order, from dung beetle or poisonous snake to human being. The Spirit Beings did not only make everything, but they also gave plants and animals their names and distinctive markings. They created the sacred teachings of the Dreaming: hunting, fire making, dancing, ceremonies, language etc. After the Dreamtime ancestors completed their tasks they returned once more to a state of slumber. They can change their shape and some disappeared back into the earth while others became distinct features of the landscape (sacred mountains, waterholes, markings on rocks and so forth). The fact that they are hidden from view does not mean that they are no longer alive, conscious and  powerful! In Aboriginal spiritual tradition the force of the Spirit Ancestor resides at their resting place and this spiritual power can be tapped through ritual by those who understand how to use this power. These are sacred sites and have profound significance for Aboriginal people.

Now leaping back to the Cosmos. In Carl Sagan's book 'Cosmos' I recently read about the the !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana looking upon the Milky Way as the 'Backbone of the Night' (see the painting at the very top of this page).

Cosmologist Brian Swimme has suggested that we can think of the Milky Way Galaxy as a gigantic manta ray. This is a fish with a flattened body, a slight bulge at the center and two great wings for propelling itself through the oceans. His main reason for coming up with this visualisation is because the Milky Way is not 'sitting on anything'. It is gliding effortlessly through the dark universe just as a manty ray glides through our oceans.

THE MILKY MANTA RAY   (size?)   £145

This painting is dedicated to Brian Swimme

I found this so fascinating (and started painting furiously!) so I decided to run a google search on the names for the Milky Way in different languages. I found much of interest! Here is some of the 'pure poetry' I discovered:

 The Straw Thief's Way (Armenian), 'The Way The Dog Ran Away' (from a Cherokee myth), Silver River (Chinese), 'The Way Of Birds' (Estonian), 'The Winter Way (Faroese), 'The Deer Jump' (Georgian), 'The Road of the Warriors' (from a Hungarian myth), River of Heaven (Japanese), 'The Road to Santiago' (Spanish), Winter Street (Swedish), 'The Way of the White Elephant' (Thai), The Fort of Gwydion (Welsh). (The information can be found on Wikipedia).

 These names speak of an ancient relationship between our Ancestors and the night sky above us.

 There is an ancient phrase 'As Above, So Below'. These words come from Hermetic texts. Hermes Trismegistus was the first to explain this concept (in the 'Emeral Tablet'): That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the Miracles of the One Thing".

In accordance with the various levels of reality: physical, mental, and spiritual, this relates that what happens on any level happens on every other. This is however more often used in the sense of the macrocosm and the microcosm. The microcosm is oneself, and the macrocosm is the universe. The macrocosm is as the microcosm, and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one (usually the microcosm) you can understand the other. I have mentioned this idea here because it ties in with the macrocosmos of our universe and the microcosmos of particle physics.

 On the MATHEMATICS page I mentioned fractals. Fractals are a phenomenon that illustrate the phenomenon of 'as above so below': the shape of a leaf's pores echoes the shape of a leaf, the 'veins' in a leaf echo the shape of a tree's branches... and so forth.

Just today I was reading a book about the seasonal journeys and migrations of animals and I stumbled across the curious fact that caribou in the arctic graze on about 62 varieties of lichen. The type most commonly consumed is Cladonia Rangiferina or reindeer moss. This 5 cm hight white/grey/green plant forms a miniature forest on the woodland floor. Coincidentally its leathery palmate branches are shaped just like the antlers of the caribou!  To my 'artist's mind' that is real life magic!

THE TREE IN THE LEAF   (mixed media)   £85

In our society we lost touch with our 'Dreamtime' a long time ago and we are deeply impoverished by this state of affairs. One of my reasons for writing this webpage is to launch a plea for all of us to examine our relationship with ourselves, Mother Earth and our myths and legends so we can once again receive the 'spiritual nutrition of the dreamtime' and marvel at the miracles of the cosmos we inhabit and are part of.

This is how Karen Armstrong puts it:

A myth was an event that  which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological sense of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us get beyond the chaotic flux or random events, and glimpse the core of reality.

  A NEW ATTITUDE TAKING SHAPE   (monoprint, A4)   £85

 Wendy Doniger makes the same point in a different way:

'One such inversion is precisely the ability of "the field of mythical thought" to translate a microscopic image into a telescopic image, to move us from the infinitely small to the infinitely large. The myths suggest that if your microscope is powerful enough it turns into a telescope, that things really deep down and really far away become one another'.

 As an artist I find this concept very intriguing. I have revisited my file of monoprints because I realised that they touch upon all the themes on this page. They were created completely intuitively,  yet the landscape that emerges is that of the telescope and the miscroscope. And the dividing line between an inner landscape or mental landscape and what surrounds us fades: we are quite literally what we believe, the creators of our own reality.

 Here I will just mention one more great idea I came across only recently: The Universe of a Hologram. Earlier on this page I mentioned that experiments in particle physics have shown that subatomic particles can instantaneously communicate with each other, regardless of the distance seperating them. It does not matter at all whether they are 10cm or 10 billion miles apart.

The famous physicist David Bohm believed that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm: the Universe as a Hologram! To understand his point, let's look at what a hologram is. A hologram is a three dimensional photograph made with the help of a laser. And not only is the notion of a three dimensional world contained in a flat two dimensional picture quite amazing. If we have a hologram of something and cut it in half, (or then divide it again and again), we will always have a smaller but intact version of the original image! In other words: every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole!

Bohm therefore suggests that subatomic particles can remain in contact with each other, regardless of the distance seperating them, not because they are sending a mysterious signal back and forth, but because their seperateness is an illusion. He thinks that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but actually extensions of the same fundamental something. (Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe explains this theory).

Now this is mindboggling! Here science truly meets Mythology and even Shamanism...

 (Brian Swimme says that)... in the ancient world shamans and magicians introduced young people to the universe. These were individuals highly skilled in shaping human consciousness and they possessed great wisdom. Our society in particular needs people who can take on that role.

(Please also see the SHAMANISM page and SEEING page!)

REACHING FOR THE STARS   (monoprint, A4)   £85

 The beginning and the end is a primordial encounter with the great abyss of beauty that we call the universe. Not to enter such moments of awe, not to wonder over such majesty, not to live each day - at least for a moment or two! - floating inside a colossal and intimate mystery, is to live a life that is deprived. Even more it is to live a life that is vulnerable to fundamental distortions.

Brian Swimme

 Imelda Almqvist, (Last updated in August 2010)

ISTHMUS   (size?)  £195

'Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to'

CS Lewis

THE IMPLIED SPIDER

A painting from the MATHEMATICS SERIES

 'Myths form a bridge between the terrifying abyss of cosmological ignorance and our comfortable familiarity with our own recurrent, if tormenting, human problems...'

Wendy Doniger in 'The Implied Spider'

Bibliography

Cosmos, Carl Sagan,  Abacus 1995, ISBN 0-349-10703-3

My View Of The World, Erwin Schrodinger, 1964, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-09048-3

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Brian Swimme, Orbis Books 1996, ISBN 1-57075-281-8

The Universe Is A Green Dragon, a cosmic creation story, Brian Swimme 1994, Bear & Company, Inc.  ISBN 0-939680-14-9

The Fabric Of The Universe, SPACE. TIME. AND THE TEXTURE OF REALITY. Brian Greene, Penguin Books 2004, ISBN 978-0-14-101111-0

Parallel Worlds, Michio Kaku, Penguin Books 2006, ISBN 978-0-14-101463-0

THE IMPLIED SPIDER, Politics and Theology in Myth, Wendy Doniger 1998, Columbia University Press,  ISBN  0-231-11170-3

Twilight of the Clockwork God, Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age, by John David Ebert, 1999, Council Oak Books,  ISBN  1-57178-079-3

 A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong, 2005, Canongate Books Ltd, ISBN  9-781841-957036

 INCREDIBLE JOURNEYS, Featuring The World's Greatest Animal Travellers, by Nigel Marven, BBC books 1997  ISBN  0 563 38736 X

Worlds In Collision,  I. Velikovsky, Abacus 1974, (first published in 1950),  ISBN 0-349-13571-1

 The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot, 1996, HarperCollins, ISBN 0 586 09171 8

Specimens of Bushmen Folklore, WHI Bleek & LC Lloyd, 2007 (first published in 1911), Forgotten Books,  ISBN 978-1-60506-006-4   www.forgottenbooks.org

!Kung Bushmen, Kalahari Desert, Milky Way, the Backbone of the Night, entropy, the Laws of Thermodynamics, Brian Swimme, 'The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos', Wendy Doniger, 'The Implied Spider', Bhagavad Purana, Isaac Newton, Mathematical Equations, Classical Physics, Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity, General Theory of Relativity, Spacetime, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Physics, Probabilities, Speed of Light, Speed Limit of the Cosmos, Time Asymmetry, Extra Dimensions, Baby Universe, Multiverse, Universe As Hologram, Erwin Schrodinger, Theory of Everything, Superstring Theory, Particles, Parallel Worlds, Hindu Philosophy of the Vedanta, John David Ebert, The Twilight of the Clockwork God, Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, Child of the Sun, Cosmological meaning of Sacrifice, The Tides of the Human Mind, Celebrating the Mysteries of the Universe, Creation, Ancestor Spirits, Divine Heritance: The Law, Spirit Ancestors, Creation Epoch, The Dreaming, The Dreamtime, The Dawn of the Universe, Alcheringa, Creator Serpent, All Mother, Spirit Beings, Milky Way Galaxy, The Milky Manta Ray, Names for  the Milky Way:The Straw Thief's Way (Armenian), 'The Way The Dog Ran Away' (from a Cherokee myth), Silver River (Chinese), 'The Way Of Birds' (Estonian), 'The Winter Way (Faroese), 'The Deer Jump' (Georgian), 'The Road of the Warriors' (from a Hungarian myth), River of Heaven (Japanese), 'The Road to Santiago' (Spanish), Winter Street (Swedish), 'The Way of the White Elephant' (Thai), The Fort of Gwydion (Welsh), The Night Sky, As Above So Below, Hermetic Texts, Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet, Miracles of the One Thing, Macrocosmos and Microcosmos, Fractals, Reindeer Moss, Inner Landscapes, Mental Landscapes, David Bohm, The Universe as a Hologram

 IMELDA ALMQVIST ART: JOURNEYS TO INNER WORLDS, OTHER WORLDS AND AROUND THE WORLD IN PAINTINGS