~THE MIND~
 

The Mind - A prescient vision of reality. A diptych painting.
 

Stripping the top-layer of isomorphism away, we see the metaphor revealed. We can look deeper still through the now-surreal thanatopia, and in a great flood we recall all the symbols of our subliminal programming, all of the stories and visuals emblazoned in our mind through repetition, all of the icons that those we trusted worshiped ubiquitously and at whose feet we bowed in imitation. We saw the spiritual food chain, and the ethical famine that had already overtaken the world, where the neediest is king and the honest are enslaved through the use of their own reason. We see the ultimate weaponization of empathy in the morality we were taught, and what lay at the root of the persistence of these traditions.

Rather than seek themselves, in their fear they boxed us in. We were marginalized by rules which became commandments, tradition that became xenophobia, and worship that became a deathwish. We realized we believed, on some innocent level, the consequences of being ‘left out’, in a feeling that goes beyond words: The pain of shame.

How cruel then we must be to go our own way, leaving our poor families to mourn our souls and fear for our lack of repentance? How cruel are we to go willingly into the darkness of the final days, casting aside the promise of  heaven like Lucifer himself? And how arrogant we must be to pretend we could care for one another without a god.

They would say, “you can abandon the divine but it will never abandon you.” It was our fault we were unhappy. It was our fault we didn’t love our abusers or kiss the rings of holy men. Can any bargain ever be struck with those who believe it is somehow acceptable to be born sick and sinning, and then commanded under threat of eternal damnation to be well? How victimized they now are by us, who have asked that they enjoy the gardens of heaven without us and to keep each other’s own sparse company for eternity.

We saw that it was an ingenious façade, but one that only works through grooming and conditioning. We realized that those not raised in any different culture or subculture are very unlikely to see its merits from an external valuation, and therefore do not arrive without the use of external persuasion. Since our first breath of air above the surface of the waves, we have been taught to transact emotional currency, nests of symbols in our brains, like ravenous larvae, since infancy. Through hope for reaching “The Top”, we would become the user to survive our climb to glory. We would believe much more in the delusion that all resources accumulate toward us. Sanity and humanity are both forsaken in a bargain such as this. At last, we see what Pride was offering. The sweet and nefarious song that once echoed in our ears, that took away our fears. 

 

These are the final canvases that I painted during the four years with FLOW, concluding my journey with all the knowledge I gathered while searching for language that could even depict such abuse. From the renaissance painters I grew up with to the mountains of religious hagiographies that I was surrounded by in the village that I was born in, I used them all in my depiction of what I understood the "face" of society really was.