CAROLYN: My painting and drawing, being visual, are pre-lingual. Poetry and prose, being verbal, are more restricted in their word-clothes. I enjoy both translations, the freedom of the nonverbal in painting, and the architecture of words. They are in constant dialogue, a harmonious chord ascending my song.
DJB: In your three books, there seems to be an evolution of consciousness that is being expressed: a progression from states of psychological difficulty and struggle to ecstatic mystic revelations. How would you describe this archetypal journey from darkness to light?
CAROLYN: I would say the darkness is there before the "witness of oneself' is developed. It's in the capacity to reflect, that one illuminates one's experience and thus can move into the light. The light is one's own star in orbit amongst the galactic systems in constant electrical interplay. The dialogue, the information, the secret messages come from being deeply in reception of these infinite channels. It is a lying back in the embracing arms of infinity, having all in expecting nothing. My books are the charting of this voyage of experiences, the currents in the wake of navigation. Presently I am editing and completing my first prose book titled The 6th Dimension: Architecture for a Ecstasy. It represents the recordings of my own particular vessel as it rides the waves of existence, a vessel united in verse with the universal.
RMN: Many of your paintings reveal mythic combinations of humans and animals. Does this arise from your own experience of inter-species communication?
CAROLYN: Yes, we have an aviary here with thirty-six lovebirds, parakeets, and cockatiels. We're living with owls, hawks, peregrine falcons, chipmunks, squirrels, mice and many other unique creatures. The creatures and I are in daily dialogue. I make a special whistle sound when I paint which I also use to communicate with the birds. They seem to tune in to the resonance.
RMN: Are they usually friendly?
CAROLYN: Yes, unless put on the defensive, which we avoid. In Nature one can see into the ancient wisdom, the order that governs our greater existence, our interactions with one another.
DJB: So you feel that you can talk to Nature sometimes, or that Nature talks to you?
CAROLYN: Yes, I do commune with Nature. It may be necessary for others to also experience a less literal, more poetic language for this to happen. Incidentally, we've discovered that lovebirds aren't necessarily monogamous and that falcons can carry grudges.
DJB: Free-love birds?
CAROLYN: Well, their behavior exposes our misconceptions about their monogamy. The creatures' instincts are the same as ours, except that we are far more complex and lethal. Even though our birds have all their needs met in the aviary, they are still programmed in a survival code, and will fight if territory or sex is involved.
DJB: How has your location influenced your artwork?
CAROLYN: We are living 500 feet above the sea, with a 360-degree view. This serves to keep a lid off our heads. The beauty is a never-ending, changing spectacle. We receive the winds from every direction, which can be quite a challenge to live with. The wildly divergent energies, forces of the "dragon's crown" where we live, are all translated into my art through the instrument of myself in concert with it all.
DJB: How has being in Big Sur in particular influenced your work?
CAROLYN: It's a unique place to be. It has accelerated my internal journey, and simultaneously my art, to be in a place where I can create the space and time to let all that's possible happen. It's an enigmatic and challenging environment. It's been essential for me to be in the constant inspiration of nature, where I can be in a position to live my own natural rhythms, and define my own nature. Previously, I didn't have the time to do so. Here, I'm able to create a world where I can live in my imagination as much of the time as possible.
This wilderness is a place that allows me to be in a receptive and vulnerable state of being. Because I'm not dealing with the daily traffic of a city, I'm not having to use the defense mechanisms that dull my sensibilities. My sensitivities and sensibilities can have the freedom to play, experiment, and just be. Big Sur is a mirror for a beautiful state of mind, hence the real importance of keeping it unpolluted can't be stressed too much, since we have so few places left that can mirror the human soul. Of course, one's internal environment always creates one's perception of the external environment, wherever one is, and can eventually reshape the external.
DJB: So you're saying that there's a reflection or a synchronistic parallel between your own inner experience and the environment here?
CAROLYN: Yes, I'm attempting to live in a conscious process with my experience, weaving this integration into my artwork. Of course I'm also dealing with many business issues, social issues and other demands while I live here. So, I'm not able to be totally in meditation. But in dealing with the world, I can see how other people are relating to the universe. There are enormously divergent climates, conflicting psychological warfares, and assumed prejudices that take different cruel forms of human expression. This does not make for a healthier world, and drags our evolutionary force downward like gravity, instead of evolving us into an ideal future.
DJB: What's dragging the evolutionary force downward?
CAROLYN: I see us as the clothed forces of nature in our vast geometric diversity. Our greatest limitation is our closed minds, our limited perceptions. This causes us to live from survival fears, and prevents us from realizing that we have everything that we need, here on this glorious planet. If all people were to cultivate themselves, the way they think, we could grow out of this survival mentality. But human beings have been raped of their self-rights, and have allowed this to happen. For some reason they've given up their original birthrights.
DJB: Why do you think they've done this?
CAROLYN: There's a temptation to hand over self-responsibility, first to familial hierarchies, then to the influences of educational and governmental "authorities." On the other hand, we are tools in the hands of nature, and the world uses us according to our strengths and susceptibilities. The jungle needs its mechanics to go on, just as the intergalactic intelligence needs its imagination.
DJB: So what do you think we can do to help wake people up? Or maybe you're saying we shouldn't, because if we're all part of a larger super-organism, and some people play the role of liver or stomach cells, maybe they don't need to wake up-but then again you said before that they're hindering or pulling back on the evolutionary process. So what do you think people can do?
CAROLYN: Ideally, all people would develop a self-referencing point to comprehend themselves and their universe well enough to guide their own vessel with awareness. Otherwise all you have is sleeping, dazed nuts and bolts, endless repetitions of people in reproduction. A certain amount of this is obviously an ingredient of evolution, but at this point in history we can see that a total regeneration of inner, thus outer values is necessary for all of our survival. The exploitation, the murderous lies of our leaders, must be recognized, and the individual must reclaim their rights to harmony. Everything that's going on outside is also within us. It's up to us to navigate our forces, unify to a greater harmony. The collective is only as great as its every individual.
DJB: The idea being that the more people that do it, the easier it is for other people to do it. It creates a stronger field, and then there's more of a resonance?
CAROLYN: Yes, for instance, once an athletic record is broken, then it's psychologically easier for others to do the same. The resonance is in the expanded consciousness.
DJB: And you think part of the problem is that the bureaucratic systems discourage people from living their highest integrity?
CAROLYN: The word integrity has been lost to a dysfunctional fragmentation. The comprehensive whole has become disconnected, schizoid. There is no prominent ethical reality in our society to serve as a model for a healthy way of being. I consider it truly pathetic that the leaders chosen by the people are the most aggressive, vicious and deceitful of the population. This shows we are on a bare survival, f
ear level and choose the most murderous dogs to defend us. The people have to think differently and demand a voice that gives them their basic rights to a healthy existence. They must not agree to having their hard-earned money used for defense instead of progress.
As Einstein said, the problem is the way we think. I think everyone has been constricted by a non-culture that is dollar-crazed, where the churches have been replaced by the banks. People are enslaved by their fears, by the stress that they're under financially. You know, I'd like to see everybody in America all stand up together demanding to have a voice, right on their tax form; as to how their money is spent. The most humiliating thing the government does is to levy a tax so hard on the people that they have to work everyday under stress, and then their money is used to build systems that kill them.
So, here you have an example of what I was speaking of earlier. If you take the individuals' rights away, you make them completely dependent on you. Once people submit to having their birthright, their individual rights, taken away, they've sacrificed themselves to a system that swallows their integrity. That's the end of them, because they've lost their capacity to grow as individuals beyond that social survival level of existence, and that's not where anyone's ever going to find fulfillment. Out of the relentless need for exterior power and exploitation can only come the damaging imbalance of needs and greeds.
DJB: Do you foresee a major change coming along soon?
CAROLYN: Well, I think that generally everything happens very gradually, just like Nature. But Nature also can do some very extreme things that are the opposite of gradual. An asteroid or comet could crash into Earth, for example, and there would be instant evolution, in a direction that we may not recognize!
DJB: Without warning there are earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and genetic mutations. Things happen all of a sudden sometimes.
CAROLYN: I think that the earth is, as we are, a transforming entity. We are planets unto ourselves, the same as the earth.
DJB: Planets are really people?
CAROLYN: Planets are really people. They have transformations, they go through illnesses, and everything just like we do, on every level. Right now this planet is in a health crisis, and it will do whatever it has to in order to move to the next stage. So I think that there will an increase in natural and peculiar physical disasters, including increased volcanism, or at any moment we could be hit by asteroids from outer space.
DJB: Wow. You really think that something like that could happen?
CAROLYN: Well, anything is possible with Nature. Its design in undesign goes beyond our localized conceptions.
DJB: In the way that we're like cells in a larger body, planets are also like cells in a larger body, and our planet is sending out SOS signals?
CAROLYN: Yes, every atom in every universe is in response from another alchemical stage of transformation. We are part of an expanding intergalactic system and what the interplay of ail this will mean is very complex and speculative. I see it as in our molecular biology, where different enzyme combinations have a uniquely specified part to play.
DJB: Have you had any experiences that you thought to be communications with beings from another planet or not of this world?
CAROLYN: Well, I feel as if I'm in touch with what I call the "ancestral resonance." This would be a poetic translation for receiving information from everything that's ever happened. Within one's every breath lives every beginning.
DJB: It sounds like what Philip K. Dick called Valis--the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, or what the Hindus called the Akashic Records, or Alyha Vijnyana, where all the information in the universe is stored.
CAROLYN: Yes, if you listen to the sounds of the tides of the oceanic pulse, you hear the music of all that's ever been. Everything that's ever been has a sound, and the sound is still reverberating from its origin. Of course the eternal symphony is forever expanding with each new cellular note of sound. I have a poem about this idea called "The Lost Language of Unheard Sound."
DJB: The way that each sound is connected to its whole ancestral past, and carries within it the whole history, and maybe even the future...
CAROLYN: Yes, it can be the exquisite music I heard in deep meditation that inspired my poem. It is the lost language of unheard sound because it's lost in the infinite until we open our ears and deepen our silence to hear and receive it.
DJB: Have you ever thought that you are translating music into visual forms?
CAROLYN: Yes, the fluid media I use allows the musical colors and rhythms to form a circulation of patterns and forms through me. The fusion of the varied colors and chemicals creates a form of its own, paralleling the synthesis of musical textures.
As the example of the dolphin's ultrasonic communication teaches us, you can remake the form if you have its sound. So, out of the currents and colors of the music I paint to comes the form through my translation. The sound I make is dolphin-like and tunes me in mantra-like to the unknown, carrying back images like a dolphin's sonar.
DJB: You've refrained from imposing a kind of internal structure onto the natural flow?
CAROLYN: It's more like I become the empty canvas, empty mind, and in becoming one with the atomic energies that be, these energies, this consciousness, uses my nervous system for its translation. Rather like an Aeolian harp being brought to sound by the winds.
DJB: It seems like a musical instrument, your body or nervous system?
CAROLYN: True, an instrument that lets itself be played by nature, but it isn't that I'm not guiding. I'm very much in charge of what I'm doing. But I'm also completely not in charge. It's like all the opposites are happening--because that's the only way you can get perfect balance, meaning the balancing of opposites. I wear ballet slippers when I paint. At an early age I was a prima ballerina, so I was always involved with balance.
As in our living, we must be the navigator of our energies, the balancers of the flow of atomic information. As a conductor I stand above my paintings and work as the skies and winds as a torch of current. I dance and leap about quite unconsciously, letting us form each other, the work and I, as one. Thus, in the inherent order of my particular integration, consciousness, the gossamer order, underlies the freedom of chaos.
DJB: Because you are unique, your works have their unusual originality.
CAROLYN: Thank you. Originality has its origin in its freedom and the only way true liberation is possible, is through inherent order. So I am spinning and weaving my thoughts constantly into my art, into order. The bliss of inventing keeps me in tune.
DJB: Yes, being a musical instrument is a beautiful metaphor for the process of creative expression.
CAROLYN: Also, it is a unique circulation, a poetic metabolism. I've noticed the imagination has beautiful sounds when in tune; it hums. The metabolic intensity of creating is hypnotic, like an unfurling chant, chord in accord.
I once experienced my body as being a nanotechnological factory in which I heard the buzzing and repairing of my system. Atomic elves regenerating all my parts.
DJB: So your work expresses, through poetic metaphor, atomic life?
CAROLYN: Yes, the language of poetic symbolism is multifaceted, offering a kaleidoscopic view of life that is ever moving in possible perception. It is connected to a deep comprehension of the question of reality, not limited in the linear, or one-reality concepts. You can see from this overview the theater of our existence, its pageantry of absurdity. There is the cosmic eye with all its clarity and humor. In my drawings, I have a character called "the Witness of the More." This is the self-referencing director who sifts out the superfluous in the editing room of one's consciousness.
There are some of us who live in the imagination, in the crown of the Universal consciousness. There are others essential to the industry, the mechanical. Unfortunately most people have become enslaved by the rusty mechanics of our times, the stale and massively rebroadcast thoughts, and operate as robotized ants.
DJB: Slaves?
CAROLYN: Yes, liberation requires people to wake up, see the illness of their planet, of themselves, their leaders, and rise to a higher more conscious integration. Through abrasion there is refinement. So the brave, the bold, the adventurers will put themselves out there, and invent these possibilities for higher existence. Like being a diamond or crystal through their strength of vision, their capacity to see through life, they illuminate the genes of life's potential, the ideals of themselves. Since this planet is in a crisis stage, it will call on its healthiest instruments to bring it to its next stage of evolution. Of course this is all happening in integration with an ever-expanding intergalactic system.
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… Page 26