Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey

"Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it." Ernest Holmes There seems to be a couple schools of thought; one is that this body is simply a mound of flesh. It may or may not have a soul or a spirit. It is mechanical, it is predictable, it is prone to all kinds of disease and suffering and its eventual downfall is always death and the other is that this body is an extension of the Spirit. That we are not a body with a spirit as much as we are Spirit with a body; that every cell, every atom, every strand of our being is being made and remade in the Image and Likeness of Light; that the whole universe is pouring into us and through us in each and every moment, that life is eternal. After we lay down one body, we quickly receive another and another and another.... I tend to believe the latter. I got into metaphysics/philosophy/spirituality whatever you want to call it quite young...my early 20s. I had what many called a "mental breakdown" it was, in fact, a Spiritual breakthrough. It was like all of the sudden I realized that my identity...the identity that I knew as "John" was completely made up and I was the one that made it up consequently I had made everything up! How completely liberating! How completely terrifying! But after I was released from the hospital, I knew in the depths of my soul that I could not return to the world as the same person, because I wasn't the same person. I was resurrected, I was re-born and not in a Benny Hinn/Jimmy Swaggart kind of way. I had truly been baptized with the Holy Spirit...the Whole of Spirit...the Celestial Fire that is within every thing and every one just as every thing and every one is within it. It's just that most of us, if not all of us, fall prey to appearances. In other words, we get used to things. We start seeing the world as flat even though intellectually we may know it's round, emotionally we feel as though there is a hole in our soul and we are suffocating from the world.... Before we go any further with this review...STOP...and simply breathe slowly in.....and breathe slowly out....just breathe in White Light let it cleanse your mind, your spirit, your body...and breathe it all out...breathe in...and out...just try to regain ground, try to get centered, try to open yourself to Life...to Light...to Love... This is what Alex Grey did in his paintings. He did something with his art that I had only read about in metaphysical books. It's easy to write about metaphysical experiences; it is easy to say that the body is an extension of the Great Creative Power that permeates the universe; it is easy to write that we are not the body but the soul...but how do you envision this...how do you picture this in your mind? How do you allow this information to gain entrace to your heart, your emotional nature? Well, Alex Gray has done this in this incredible book, The Sacred Mirrors. These "Glimpses Into Higher Thought" are breathtaking...if you merely see them as

Alex Grey is quite probably the greatest artist alive today.With that said, back to the book at hand. Sacred Mirrors is probably the book most people who want to get an idea of Grey's art should buy first. I find it slightly more accessible than Transfigurations, and it does not demand any knowledge of Grey's previous work. For those unfamiliar with his work, he paints almost all of the systems of the body in a transparent fashion, layered on top of each other. In his paintings you will see bones, nerves, blood vessels, chakras, and auras all at once. It can be overwhelming, but careful study of the paintings can make you see ordinary processes like kissing in a whole new way. And if you keep looking deeply at his paintings, things will keep revealing themselves. He also paints deities, from Avalokiteshvara to Jesus, with loving detail. This is definitely a great coffee-table book (and so much more!) for anyone interested in how transcendental theories of energy would manifest themselves visually. Grey's book also makes delightful entertainment for any kind of trip. Overall a sound buy for almost anyone who gets that feeling, sometimes, that there may be things going on in our physical reality that we just can't percieve. Grey can see them, and he has shared them with us.