About the self-evident

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The Path of the Left Hand: Art, Alchemy, and Awakening

Exploration of Creativity, Integration, and Meaning

About the Self-Evident or "Our Stone and the Creator of the World Share a Common Name" (from Rosarium Philosophorum) Everything is simpler than it seems. We don't have to go anywhere, search for anything, or wish for anything to gain access to the self-evident, because it is within us. We only need a path to get there. It is simple and obviously difficult to recognize the self-evident in the state of being-so. Transferred to images, these are the first four Tarot cards (0, 1, 2, 3), where the horizontal and self-evident state of being-so has not yet been touched by vertical consciousness. When the development of the spirit began to take the natural path through "the head" to shape the awareness of the self-evident, the being-so, the spirit, instead of closing a natural circle, fell out of orbit and began to develop linearly, to become autonomous and to distance itself. Like a rocket, it rushes at great speed in its dangerous escalation and has forgotten the whole, the self-evident. We now stand at a point in our evolution where we are waiting for integration, for the self-evident, natural completion of the closure of the form; we are waiting for the self-evident, and the self-evident does not happen. We hardly know what it is about! The metaphysical questions of who we are and what the meaning of life is arise again. It seems that humanity has forgotten where it stands and where the path leads. We urgently need to be reminded what the self-evident is and where to find it. If the sentence is true that it is good as it is, then the disease of our time and our world is a good sign. We react to draw attention to the disturbed balance. The messiahs of our time and spirit of the age, each in their own way, feel that the self-evident circle (form) must be closed in order to say goodbye to the old millennium and to be reborn again. When I began painting and drawing with my left hand and closed eyes a few years ago, I did not know that this was the beginning of closing a circle that did not announce perfection but completeness. I did not know that this dark side guards the secret of secrets (secretum altissimus), the "path of the left hand," as the Indian Tantrics call it. I did not know that when I integrated my two right elements, fire and air, with two left elements, earth and water, through this pairing (coniunctio Solis et Lunae), the fifth element, the quinta essentia, would appear (lapis philosophorum). Painting with the left hand opened the way to my self. It is the path to the Holy Wedding, the marriage with myself; it is the path to integration. How forbidden this was in the 16th century is shown to us by the alchemists' text in the "arcanum artis" in the following words: "Note well: in the art of our magisterium nothing of the philosophers has been hidden, except the secret of the art, which must not be revealed to anyone; for if this were done, he (the traitor) would be cursed, would draw God's wrath upon himself, and die of apoplexy. Therefore, all error in the art consists in not taking the appropriate starting material. Therefore, we want to make use of venerable Nature, because from her and through her and in her our art is born and in nothing else. And so our magisterium is the work of Nature and not of the craftsman." The critical touch of the left hand points to "sinistres," illegitimate, morganatic, emotionally driven impulses, precisely to the fatal admixture of incest and its "perverse" fascination. This dilemma sheds new light on the secret of the art: it is the serious danger of heresy. If we take the fear of divine punishment in case of betrayal as what it seems to mean, then it must be a matter presumably dangerous to the salvation of the soul, a typical "peril of the soul." The veneration of Nature, an ancient legacy, stood in more or less secret opposition to the ecclesiastical worldview and directed heart and mind somewhat onto a path of the left hand. The reason I write so extensively about painting with the left hand is that it finds the channel or the path. It opens by itself, it is there by itself, where images paint themselves and poems write themselves, where they tell about themselves self-evidently, where everything becomes a flow of intuition and where the state of integrated consciousness and unconsciousness as a whole naturally produces joy, love, health, happiness, peace of soul, calm, and success. For recognizing the self-evident or the divine, perceiving the path plays a major role. When we paint with the left hand, we are easily led back to our origin, to our own sources, to our own being-so, to the prima massa, to recognize the chaotic darkness, to include it, so that "lumen quod superat omnia lumina" is born. As Democritus said: Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature overcomes Nature, Nature rules Nature. In painting with the left hand, I unite the opposing nature within me, I marry my soul within me (unio mystica), and through regular painting I approach the divine, the self-evident within me. Painting, I ascend the steps of a higher order of the natural, the self-evident BEING-SO. Rosarium Philosophorum: "in habentibus symbolum facilis est transitus." (For those who possess the symbol, the transition is easy.)

Papermaking in the Service of Becoming Human

The post-war period lasted longer in Slavonia, in the eastern part of Croatia, than in other regions. In the small town on the Sava River lives my bosom friend Marlena, an interpreter for German and owner of an art gallery. She sells and exhibits my paintings, publishes books, and leads art-interested women on study trips to the most famous art exhibitions in Europe. She had long harbored an old unfulfilled wish, and I knew it: how much she would love to learn papermaking. The ancient art was unknown far and wide there, so this wish remained only a dream. At Christmas, my friend Milena in Istria called me and shared that the city of Munich had invited Korean paper artists to teach papermaking in the large white tents on the Theresienwiese. In the workshops, they would teach papermaking. So I packed my bags, distributed the flower pots to friends, left some kilos of dry food for the cats, and set off over the snowy and icy roads in the Alps to Germany, where I had lived and exhibited for decades before. In the summer, I traveled with the newly acquired knowledge of papermaking, with wooden frames, kaolin, and some other ingredients to my birth town, where a group of women awaited me; women filled with will to live, spiritual renewal, and hope. Papermaking was meant to strengthen all of that for them. For months, a whole year, recycling, papermaking, creating took place. During the summer holidays, the warmest month of August was chosen, Marlena decided, together with the women, to create the largest paper image in the world and thus enter the Guinness Book of Records. The organization and logistical framework of ten women created the conditions for this unprecedented undertaking. The scaffolding was secured in the main square, and 600 hundred kilos of pulp (paper mass) were divided over several days for an image that had to be 80x60 meters, the largest in the world. But the summer weather changed mercilessly. The August rains began, the paper was covered and carefully stored and watched over day and night, strengthened with paste, torn and glued again, soaked and dried again. TV teams accompanied the stages of the work and reported the results in TV broadcasts. And just like the medieval alchemists in their labs, where instead of gold only the philosopher's stone was created, so it happened in this small war-traumatized town that a new quality of life emerged from papermaking: vitality, a sense of community, and interest in creative work. For several years, the paper was made in the courtyard of the art gallery until a whole room was filled, and the experienced teachers could offer their art to schoolchildren in the schools. Afterwards, numerous exhibitions of paper art objects and paintings followed throughout the country. Once, the gigantic paper image hung on the facade of the old school in the city center, and everyone could see the heroic creation, the image of Slavonia with golden wheat fields, red poppies, and the sunlit sky over the Pannonian Plain.