Notes from an Emerging Culture

Harmony and Evolution
Thursday 13 October, 7.30pm
Ian Skelly in conversation with Chris Parish
Booking link: click here

Ian Skelly, well-known BBC presenter and Chair of the Temenos Academy, will be joining EnlightenNext UK Managing Director Chris Parish in a conversation inspired by Skelly’s work with the Prince of Wales on their newly published book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. The book makes an impassioned plea for renewing man’s bond with Nature as a means to correct the many imbalances which lie at the heart of our contemporary ecological and societal problems. Proposing nothing less than a shift in consciousness to restore balance, beauty and sustainability to the world, the book provides a sound philosophical guide to achieving a harmonious and more humane future. Continue reading →

If you, like me have stared deeply into our current global, ecological, economic, moral ethical and spiritual predicaments you might have realised the age of the separate individual has to pass! These challenges are the circumstance that will and should ideally contribute to a deep reformation of the human soul.

Many of us in some aspects may be plugging away to personally succeeded on the familial, material, spiritual or cultural levels trying to make some impact, but the fact is most of us are largely alone in these endeavours.
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Andrew Cohen delivered his eagerly awaited talk Monday night on Spiritual Self Confidence. He commenced the evening by unexpectedly announcing that, instead of spending the necessary two hours explaining the broad principles of his teachings, he had decided to limit himself to an hour so he could take questions and answers. Cohen explained he was going to ‘discipline’ himself to achieve this.
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The personal development industry in response to the uncertainties of our age promises us much to bolster our confidence. A casual at glance adult education brochures for example at reveals courses offering us gains in confidence as leaders, as speakers, in our emotional intelligence, confidence to manifest the life we want, the business we want, the partner we want.
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On New Years Eve, the EnlightenNext Centre pulsated with joy, lightness of being and the supreme beauty of enlightened awareness as we partied with both meaning and purpose. All celebrants experienced a sublime mix of edifying timeless discussion, mind suspending mentalism and kosmic performance art accompanied by gourmet cocktails and excellent vegetarian fare. Thus a group of 200 adventurous souls spent an evening ecstatically ushering in 2011 for perhaps the first of many similar festive occasions.

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A well-established feature of the EnlightenNext UK Centre programme has been a regular Tuesday evening event focusing on discussion and meditation. Not being a regular attendee on this day due to pressure of my studies, I thought I would put aside some precious time last night and delve into something even more valuable:  meditation and evolution. Continue reading →

St John’s in Edinburgh, the well respected liberal bastion of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, played host to an enthralling dialogue between Bishop Brian Smith and evolutionary visionary Andrew Cohen last week. The immense subtlety, understanding, and philosophical depth of the perspicacious Bishop facilitated an engaging and hugely informative dialogue with Andrew, who took on the toughest of questions and successfully placed them into the context of an evolutionary cosmological worldview. Continue reading →

Richard Long

Artist of the Landscape

Sculpture and Landscape Art have always held a powerful attraction for me. Andy Goldsworthy was the first eco-sculptor I came across and his sculptures and the pictures of his installations enabled me to experience the ephemeral beauty of art created in situ with natural materials, not created for any particular beholder or market simply for the beauty of the piece itself.

Richard Long was if not the original, one of the first contemporary artists to make marks on the landscape and present this as art. His recent exhibition ‘Heaven and Earth’ at Tate Britain covered the whole panorama of his work over close to fifty years. This show was a phenomenal experience, an elemental tribute to the man his mission and prodigious dedication to his work.

In its totality, as well as in its particulars the exhibition allowed the visitors to sink deeply into the consciousness of an artist whose art is totally integrated into the meteorological, cosmological and planetary rhythms of the natural landscape. My overwhelming impression in experiencing the exhibition was not of Richard Long the person, but more of him as an emblematic archetype of human motion crossing the planets terrain, evoking hundreds thousands years of trekking, migration and movement across the surface of the earth. Long, outstanding in his art because of his total immersion in nature, conveys the primal urges that drive humanity in the timeless quest to explore the landscape of the living planet.

The central motifs or cohesive themes that ties all Longs’ pieces together are his walks, which are mostly solitary quests, walking in straight lines, or exceptional distances daily, framed or envisioned by a simple mathematical or poetic blueprints.

As well as installations of stone, rock, wood or within divergent landscapes Long creates textworks that relate to walks he has undertaken. These are to me, some of his most powerful offerings, a three line textwork to encapsulate a 366 mile 8 day walk a walk to a Lunar Eclipse or a textwork outlining a walk of 173 miles in seven and a half tides. Not given to excess verbiage, Longs textworks are items of sparse simplicity, the tip of the tsunami of his endeavours. Some works purely describe occasional sounds heard on a 700 mile walk or sights seen on Dartmoor, remarkable for their lack of commentary and absence of emotiveness, these austere recordings of elemental nature strip away surface experience to reveal our inner timeless primordial instincts.

The exhibition was deceptive, as the exhibits could been viewed simplistically as just objects on display, isolated from one another and so consequently the show might have had limited impact on the observer. A magnificent mural painted on the Tate’s walls for the exhibition, one with gold coloured clay paint, applied in swirling interwoven shapes across a twenty feet span, which were displayed together with textworks inscribed on the walls and installations of stone of irregular shapes and sizes weights and appearance, arranged and organized into coherent oval circular or oblong shapes. However walking through the hall with intention and deliberation, absorbing and imbibing the art as organically as the artist may have created it, revealed the immensity of Long artisitc vision and the impersonal expression of his soul as a force of nature itself.

This exhibition fully portrayed the ability of art to connect to transcendent spirit and as such is light years ahead of the supercilious products of the celebrity obsessed art establishment.