Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Egoism and LSD

(a midterm)

There are people who see the world the way they want to.

There are people who see the world the way it is.

And there's the artist.

My Brother, Hunter, aka: Atlas, is a serious artistic photographer. He has recently acquired one of these Blogs and will be posting soon if you wish to check him out.

Hunter focuses on existentialism and takes it to a completely different mental plane. He is the kind of person who has delved so far into his mind that sometimes he has trouble getting out. The result is an explosion of artistic creativity.

Lengthening Sensual Development


The above photograph with a smiling girl and paint splattered around her as if to come out of her ears is one of this artistic photographs, entitled: LSD, or Lengthening Sensual Development.

She's smiling as if she has reached a new high. The splatter paint looks as if her brains may have just exploded out her ears. But, she enjoys it.

But believe it or not, my brother's photograph makes no direct reference to Acid, except that LSD is a drug that expands your mind. This girl is on no drug other than herself. The brain has the ability to take you incredible places if you want it to do so. Some have tried to harness this ability through meditation, and those people are on the right track.

But, anyone can sit on a mat and hum for eight hours. The key to this act is sheer willpower and a resistance toward society. When your mind is grounded in the accepted reality of society, it becomes difficult to see the world from any other perspective. Once you are able to find this resistance. The result is an explosion.

An explosion that looks very similar to butterfly wings. Unique, colorful, and with the ability to fly, whereas before this metamorphosis you simply walked with everyone else.

Part of this resistance is the ability to go into the self and take apart the mind from the inside out. Organized religions, support groups, activist groups, schools, and even family can all act as a deterrent to this process. You must become the blank slate, and then create.

What you do at that point... is up to you.

Egoist, Jared Foust


Another work that comes along the same line was created by a close friend of mine, Jared Foust, aka: DaiKamanohashi, who recently discovered the difference between Egotist and Egoist.

Quoth the Oxford English Dictionary.
USAGE The words egoism and egotism are frequently confused, as though interchangeable, but there are distinctions worth noting. Both words derive from Latin : ego (‘I’), the first-person singular pronoun. Egotism, the more commonly used term, denotes an excessive sense of self-importance, too-frequent use of the word 'I,' and general arrogance and boastfulness. Egoism, a more subtle term, is perhaps best left to ethicists, for whom it denotes a view or theory of moral behavior in which self-interest is the root of moral conduct. An egoist, then, might devote considerable attention to introspection, but could be modest about it, whereas an egotist would have an exaggerated sense of the importance of his or her self-analysis, and would have to tell everyone.

He showed it to me along with the work of art he created, and I had an explosion of understanding of his piece and instantly fell in love with it. A word to describe intense introspection and self-evaluation existed. Nothing could describe the moment but the word 'cool'.

The three of us all have different paths to attaining the individuality which allows for great introspection. I've used eastern philosophies like Taoism and western religions such as Paganism, Hunter tackles Existentialism, and Jared simply embraces who he is and doesn't let a soul in the world tell him otherwise.

But even with these different paths, the goal is the same. Reach into the mind and pull out that world in which we truly belong. Art ensues as we try to invite that world into reality, and allow those in reality to gain a glimpse of who we are.

So there's the artist, who sees the world as he created it.

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