Portrait From The Show In National City

 

Here I am with the piece "El Puente Del Corazón"

Singularity at Vulture Peak

This Similar Triangles Poem titled "Singularity at Vulture Peak"is a refinement from an earlier piece and is much more direct with what I want to express.  -Kaz

One vernacular translation for this mathematical expression is, "Enigma is to a flower dream as the truth is to the experience of a flower."

One may want to Google "Vulture Peak" to see what many say is the first transmission Zen from the Buddha.

Karl Kempton - Meditation Formula

Here is something recent from Karl Kempton.

10,000 Dharmas Return to the ...

For those who are not familiar with the Chinese character - it is "Buddha's mind"

Anything divided by itself is one.

Added October 22, 2019 - Please See: CLICK-THIS 

Sunset Sutra

Much of my recent work is inspired by my studies and practice of Korean Zen. Living in the present moment takes practice and the sunset is a perfect tool to notice the power of the present moment - for if not living in the moment you will miss the sunset. The most spectacular sunset that I have ever seen was from the window of an airplane. This photographic image was shot during that sunset. The mathematical poem is in the form of what I call an ‘orthogonal space’ poem - which is always in the form of a = bc (or its syntactical equivalent e.g. b = a/c or c = a/b ). One may notice that the sunset is not as important when the time approaches zero and the phenomena of Dharma approaches infinity. One aesthetic process that excites me most comes from pondering how math functions within the mind and its particular relationship to the spectrum of all mental phenomena. I see math illuminating the logical structure of the mind and poetic metaphor being a wind blowing through that structure.

Addition Online Collection

My Polyaesthetic work which includes the "Orthogonal Space Poem": "The Monastic Path" was included in the online collection titled "Addition"

The Fog

Here is a Polyaesthetic piece titled "The Fog" and within this piece you will notice a Proportional Poem. The original photo was shot at Biro Ahm (Small Temple)that sits on top of a mountain within the Tongdosa Monastery complex in South Korea.

Don't Think About This

Here is a proportional poem titled "Don't Think About This"

Buddhist Mathematics by Karl Kempton

Here is a new version of an older piece by Karl Kempton

Venerate Your Experience

Here is a new twist on one of my older proportional poems based on the the statement form is to emptiness as emptiness is to form. This is an example of solving the equation for "1"

Bathing Ghosts

Here is a Proportional Poem titled "Salvation". This was inspired by my recent visit to the Korean Zen Temple Songgwangsa

The image above is a detail from the image below

Venerate Your Experience – Not This

Today’s Blog entry is a bit different due to most of my polyaesthetic pieces are printed at 24” X 36” maximum size and this one is 108” X 108”. Generally I print a lambda Duratran to be displayed in an easily manageable Light-box however today’s piece one will require one huge box.
The first image shows the piece in full. There is nothing wrong with your monitor the piece is totally white light with the exception of a piece of imperceptible text that if properly displayed would be 1 inch high and 2.5 inches long. The second image visibly shows the text which lies at the center of the field.
“Venerate Your Experience – Not This” is the title of this poem. The poem is a similar triangles poem that has been transposed into a different identity … Why don’t you see if you can put it back into the similar triangles poem form as well transposing it into other synonymous syntactical forms.

Basho (Specific Condition)

After some more (noisy mind) thoughts about not thinking; I feel the poem from the last blog entry should be considered as a relationship stated in a general condition (without direct value or value in a positive or negative sense) furthermore, I think the poem would be easier read in the specific condition. So I have a new version in the specific condition. (see above)

The mathematical structure remains the same as the last poem and can be seen on the last blog entry.

The Poem is derived as such:

Starting with the ideas that the Splash is to the Waveless Old Pond as Frog is to No Self and as Noisey mind is to clear Mind. Which is set up mathematically as:

Splash/Waveless Old Pond = Frog/No Self = Noisy Mind/Clear Mind

and arbitrarily choosing to use flavor five from the expanded similar triangles poem examples we can see that the next line can be set up as g/h = a-d/b-e

Which translates as:
Splash / Waveless Old Pond = (Frog - Noisy Mind)/( No Self- Clear Mind)

The variables are as such:

Frog =a

No Self =b

Noisy Mind=d

Clear Mind= e

Splash=g

Waveless Old Pond=h

An aesthetic decision to solve for a and using the third example from flavor five yields: a= g(b-e)/h + d

Therefore:
Frog = (Splash(No Self – Clear Mind)/ Waveless Old Pond) + Noisy Mind

공의 옉 설 The Empty Paradox

Here is the Korean version of “The Empty Paradox” "공의 옉 설"

The Empty Paradox

Here is a new piece titled "The Empty Paradox"
C= Compassion and W= Wisdom
The Chinese character is 'Buddha's mind'
So we have C multiplied times W equals the limit of (1/x) as 'x' approaches Buddha's mind.

The equation is the familiar function of x equal to 1/x which yields a hyperbolic curve when graphed and results an asymptote when x = 0. Compassion multiplied by Wisdom is equal to 1 over X as the limit of X approaches Buddha’s mind. Buddhist philosophy tells us that Buddha’s mind is emptiness yet the philosophy also tells us that emptiness is different than nothingness or zero. In fact it is quite paradoxical for we are told that emptiness is very much something. This piece also uses visual imagery for poetic expression with Buddhist symbolism of flexibility and eternity represented by bamboo and pine trees respectively.

On The Dangers of Spiritual Art

Karl Kempton sent me the piece (shown above). It, as well as other works of his spawned the following essay.

I feel that one of the most dangerous areas of contemporary art comes when the artist makes him/herself a target by embracing spiritual concerns. Our society enjoys pointing fingers at the inadequacies of institutionalized religion (there are many) and ignoring the archetypical ideas of the spirit that have brought us the wonderful icons of the past. These spiritual metaphors have manifested themselves throughout history in many forms always relating to the culture of the artist. Many of the ideas of religions are obsolete and don’t function well in societies as diverse and ever-changing as ours. The artistic challenge of spirit is an extremely difficult task especially when trying to use historically loaded iconography of current dominant religions. I think many of the artistic phobias associated with the spirit are due to our experience of so many ‘so-called’ spiritual artists, who have created cliché kitsch or dogmatic concepts that accent the hypocritical ideas of the church or yet have forged an audaciously different direction aligning themselves with likes of aliens from other planets. Also to note, there seems to be a direct conflict between science and the spirit, which is anxiously evident when scientific minds address spiritual matters. I believe the problem is based in the illusiveness of Truth in both arenas. There are many that think that Truth is defined by science using the language of mathematics. Others believe Truth is beyond logic and only evoked through the metaphoric language of a spiritual ritual. Then there is my personally distasteful category of those who think that Truth is defined by their particular religion or should I say defined by their particular church. Focusing on the later idea we see that human nature tends to have many conflicts and from a historical perspective, one of the most destructive is the religious “us versus them conflict.” I see churches tending to promote this kind of behavior due to its doctrine being fed through so many egos. On the same line of thinking, the testosterone of the self righteous seems to have made its way into religion and spiritual matters to set up so many of the conflicts that we humans engage in. Many have died and continue to die in spiritual wars created by the religious intolerant.

The fact that the conflicts exist, illustrate how illusive Truth is. It seems to me that science is no better when it comes to Truth. The eminent scientist David Boehm points out that science does not find Truth, its purpose is to correlate experience. Also in this vein, we can see that there are those who provide great arguments against the platonic nature of mathematics pointing out numerous problems with using mathematics as a true model for reality. I see the bottom line being that the terra firma of veracity is constantly shifting; therefore, we must accept this fact and move on. The eastern mystics use the metaphor, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”.

I believe it is the function of special artists to assimilate as much information as possible from the diverse cross-planet cultural ideas not limited to including the concepts of science so that they can re-contextualize, synthesize and synergize their metaphors to be acute and pertinent to the global culture today. They must fully embody the ideas of love and tolerance as if the ideas were new so as to debride the cliché skins attached to them. As impossible this task seems, it is the challenge of those artists to reconnect the loose strands of past archetypical works and re-contextualize them to breathe new life in today’s world. Their job is not to run from the spiritual confusion that permeates the ever-changing cultures on this globe by hiding in some self-conceived scientific illusion of truth without spirit. That is not to say that science cannot be the new religion … it can. However, the spiritual scientist must connect the magical and irrational mind to scientific metaphors so that our spiritual understanding can be flexible as science metamorphoses. The past mytho-spiritual ideas were always based in the science of the times. It takes courage to navigate through the mental minefield of past ‘truths’ finding new veracity that resonates in ones psyche as they express it and expose themselves to the ridicule of being an irrational kook.

I believe the special artist/poets should focus their efforts to make metaphors current to our historical and sociological condition. The purpose of a metaphor is to bridge the infinite to the concrete. Many people feel that past mytho-spiritual/religious metaphors are absolute in the notion that they permanently point to the infinite. Personally speaking, I see the veracity of metaphors being temporal with their cultural relevance having different half-lives. What can confuse matters is that the half-life in some metaphors have existed for such a long time that they seem absolute. There is an argument that the Bastian elemental ideas and Jungian archetypes are absolute. Even if this is true, the metaphors employing those elemental ideas always need recontextualizing to be relevant to the current cultural thought. The frustrating aspect for the artist is having so little control over the fertility of the inspiration process. I wish I could say that artists had full control over the source and production of their metaphors. However, it seems to me that their strength, viability and temporality are a function of graciousness, imparted from the muses. I believe it is though the struggle and success with life that these special artists acquire the molecular building blocks of a vocabulary that becomes the means of their expressions. These ideas logically coagulate around an infinite idea provided to them by the unknown.

From Ethnic To Creedal

This poem is in the form of a similar triangles poem.