Unique Gifts

How do our unique perspectives of the world color our relationship with beauty, creativity, and transcendence? Join Alex Grey, Diane Musho Hamilton, and Dr. Marc Gafni for a cutting-edge dialogue on Creativity and Unique Self.

Alex Grey has become one of our most iconic and immediately-recognizable artists, and somewhat of a poster-boy for a genuinely integral approach to art, life, and spirituality.  Many of his prolific works have been featured and reproduced all over the world, ranging from magazine covers, party flyers, and blotter acid to high-profile album covers for Tool, David Byrne, the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, and Michael Hedge.

In this discussion, Alex shares his own personal path to Unique Self, describing how his creative process is directly informed by an intimate realization of radical and unqualifiable emptiness, combined with his unique and irreducible perspective of the world.  Alex talks about how his passion to create springs from an almost Bodhisattva-like yearning to serve, and how this devotion to service is one of the defining characteristics in the emergence of Unique Self.

Only by cultivating a path for ourselves that honors the paradoxical simultaneity of emptiness and perspective can we discover the real potential of our artistic gifts.  In Alex’s case, this path has allowed him to fully and fluently express a deeply personal vision of the universal””illuminating a spiritual anatomy that is common to all of us, but uniquely recognized and rendered through Alex’s distinct perspective.

Whether you are an artist trying to carve out your own creative path, or just a casual admirer of beauty in its many effulgent forms, you will not want to miss this intimate and insightful discussion!

Alex Grey, a renowned visionary and spiritual artist and author of The Mission of Art. In the foreword to The Mission of Art, Ken Wilber stated: “Alex Grey might be the most significant artist alive. One of his most well known works is the Sacred Mirrors series of 21 life-sized paintings, taking the viewer on a journey through body, mind, and spirit. The Sacred Mirrors present the physical and subtle anatomy of an individual in the context of cosmic, biological and technological evolution. After painting the Sacred Mirrors, he applied this multidimensional perspective to such archetypal human experiences as praying, meditation, dying, kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth and nursing.

Diane Musho Hamilton combines decades of work in in conflict resolution with depth of experience in sitting meditation. She often says that “mediate” and “meditate”, share the same purpose: to bring what is divided or in dispute into harmony. In mediation, one brings disputing parties to agreement. In meditation, one brings body, speech, and mind into coherence with the environment. With extraordinary warmth, depth and insight, she encourages us to work with our differences, while discovering our fundamental unity. Diane is the author of Everything is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution, (2013, Shambhala Publications), The Zen of You and Me: A Guide to Getting Along with Just About Anyone (March 2017, Shambhala Publications), and soon to be released, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart, in-press with Gabriel Wilson and Kimberly Loh (May, 2020, Shambhala Publications.)