PAX CULTURA Today: what would Nicholas Roerich think?

Nicholas Roerich’s paintings nurtured the relationship between meditative mind and creative expression early on in Light Mind Images Founder and visionary Artist Deborah Goudreault’s life, and the imprint they made continues to kindle flames of courage and certainty as she follows an unwavering path of evolving awareness. Without intentionally tracing Roerich’s steps, she was guided along a similar trajectory, gradually expanding both her meditative discipline and perception of the subtle dimensions of Nature and the self.  

Below are excerpts from letters to Gvido Trepsa, Museum Director at the Roerich Museum, New York, NY. sent recently as the second wave of the pandemic began to surface, and forest fires, political chaos and echoes of violent conflict and economic uncertainty continued to overshadow us. Here Goudreault remains focused not on surface events, but the role of art and her own evolving practice and medium as an instrument of transformation, sharing her thoughts with thanks to Trepsa “not just for managing an historic archive of Roerich’s paintings and writings, but for protecting a stream of pure and ever vibrant Light in the legacy of someone who endeavored to know himself and all humanity as rays of endlessly evolving Consciousness and attainment.”  This she said, we all needed to be reminded of today.

The Roerich Bridge

“After 4 years living and studying life sciences, philosophy and theology on the campus of a Benedictine monastery, and subsequent graduate studies at Columbia University in New York, my journey would turn, like Roerich’s, to the Southwest, and fateful meetings with a Hopi medicine man and an Apache painter who further strengthened my connection to Nature. There I also met my first spiritual Teacher who was an adept in the Western distilled works of Blavatsky and Bailey but left me with many unanswered questions. In Arizona I also began a long friendship with a Tibetan Lama who was the English translator for the Dalai Lama on his early visits to the US.  Shortly after leaving Arizona and returning to my native New England, I was invited to Himachal Pradesh and the lesser Himalayas. From postcard images of Roerich’s Himalayan paintings, pinned to the wall above my desk, I would travel to meet the spirit of those mountains that had called to me as long as I could remember, never imagining that Roerich’s own Urusvati Institute would be so close by.  I lived humbly in the small mountain community of a remote Teacher and a space that vibrated with such a frequency of energy that to breathe the air was to ascend without ever needing to meditate. Like seeds of sun, every form radiated with a purifying but un-consuming fire whose integrative force very tangibly penetrated one’s ordinarily perceived duality and the boundary between individual form and universal connectedness. Once felt, it was Roerich’s effort to translate this essential fire-Light, beyond the surface forms of mountains and classic symbology that I appreciated. I too wanted to remain in those austere but consciousness accelerating heights of divine peace forever, but felt my work was in America.  

Back in the US, I continued my study of the relationship between physical and subtle systems in Nature and the self, and while also cultivating a refined sensitivity to sound, unexpectedly opened a unique spatial awareness and intensified connection to Light. With this transition, my life became one equally devoted to art.  In art I could express what science was yet unable to explain; the overlooked energies and dimensions I perceived from within that could not yet be measured by research tools. I sacrificed much of my outer life to live deeply immersed in Nature, and to further refine my inner perception and understanding of the subtle dimensions and centers of life beyond the scrim of surface forms.  Increasingly, I devoted myself to evolving a transpersonal art that tangibly translated the infinite Presence, Energy and Intelligence universally networked and operating in the interface between the material and the immaterial in Nature. Building on the vision and legacy of Nicolas Roerich, I continue to practice art as an instrument of transformation that frees viewers from the limited boundaries of surface forms, and am committed to the idea that when we challenge what we know about outer nature, what we know about the self is also given new space to expand.”
 

PAX CULTURA Today: What Would Roerich Think?
 

“After etheric mountain-scapes, most people associate Roerich with Pax Cultura and his enlightened initiative to preserve and protect the world’s institutions of art and science and the most significant art and monuments of historic culture.  If he were here today, he would certainly see that the call to preserve the cultural past has changed with time, and that we are living  in a period where the  protection of cultural heritage is violently challenged when art or symbols conflict with reigning or competing ideologies, or represent imperfect ideas and values that promote ignorance and division and memorialize those who bore them. He would also see that the high purpose he held for art in unifying humanity and supporting human advancement remains overshadowed in an art industry that has evolved as a market driven system of asset acquisition and management and another source of entertainment and diversion, with little understanding of the role and responsibility of art in the progress of human evolution. He would see some trying to contribute by creating and representing art focused on raising awareness of the consequences of social and environmental imbalance, and the devastating effects of unjust, disharmonizing and destructive human actions.  But like a growing number of people, I think he would recognize that delivering a story of surface conditions and effects, even with enough new information or shock value to get people’s attention is not enough.  

In the socially distant solitude of pandemic culture, with masses spending more time on social media, zooming and watching the news, we may at times be poorly or partially informed, but we are certainly not blind to the problems and conflicts shared by humanity, and hardly need more impressions to remind us.  We are however blind to the greater totality in which we exist and the inner network that connects us to each other, all Nature, and a more unlimited cosmic energy and intelligence. If he were here, I think Roerich would see that even more important than protecting the art of the past and present is protecting and purifying the purpose of art and creativity itself in a way that answers the cries of humanity and Earth, rather than just echoing or magnifying them.  He would understand the critical significance of furthering art that pierces through surface forms and effects and offers bridges into the unknown, subtle dimensions of Nature and the self. He would call for an art that demonstrates our capacity to evolve our perception, expand our awareness and potential, and reform our intentions beyond the conditioned limits of the past or present.  
 
The imbalance Roerich predicted with the rapid rate of material advancement, and the power felt in our increasing technological victories over time and space, without the coincident inner evolution of our human identity and awareness has come to pass with complex consequences. Although humanity has become more “Light”, with significantly expanded creative possibilities on a material level, our intentions and feelings remain patterned by a finite, separate human identity and physical sensory conditioned reality. As a result, the conscious individual and collective responsibility that should have evolved with material advancement has remained locked behind walls of duality, competition, fear and conflict, and our egos’ blind embrace of new material power and potential has been unleashed in art, science and every field of human endeavor without understanding or concern for its disharmonizing or destructive implications. Roerich foresaw all this from his high mountain vantage and now it is our task to see with even greater clarity and perspective. It is our responsibility now to inspire artists, art distributors, collectors, and all humanity to do the individual work required to support the conscious development and integrity of art and dedicate the use of our creative power in every filed of endeavor to liberating our minds in an experience of more boundless knowledge, and unlocking our capacity to harmonize, heal and evolve the shared experience of humanity and Earth.
 
What aspiration can grow where we continue to drown our minds, bodies and spirit in projections of aggression, duality, and social conflict, or portraits of our perceived limits and entertaining diversions for temporarily escaping them? No matter how deeply felt our frustration and rage at this time, and our desire to project those feelings in art, it only reinforces and spreads it like the virus we are now trying to vanquish.  Likewise, no matter how materially advanced our technological innovation, how megalithic or powerfully evocative the imagined illusions we create in art, or how real our virtual realities become, we cannot escape the real fire of transformation and evolution rising in Nature and the Self.  We cannot escape the inner development we must undertake and navigate to expand our individual human identity to one of greater totality, universal connectedness and unlimited Energy and Intelligence. And in a world now shaken to realign itself and expand the perception of its nature and potential, art and science must also reform themselves as the pillars of that progress toward a more wholly harmonized and sustainable humanity and Earth.  

There is no more powerful vehicle than the atomized mind’s transfer of creative thought into manifest form. What level of energy and intelligence is projected and strengthened in that process, however, depends on one’s awareness, discernment, and will to refine our intentions and elevate the effects of what we create. Roerich understood from the richness of his own inner experience that learning to paint or studying the intellectual disciplines of a scientist were not enough, and that integral to advancing transformational art and science is an inner commitment of both artist and scientist to evolve beyond the conditioned limits of the self and expand the perception of which his or her work is a projection. If Roerich was here, I think an amended Pax Cultura would reaffirm it is the shared work of art and science to dissolve illusions, not perpetuate or magnify them, and to free minds from their conditioned limits and  misperception in the networked Light of a greater and more potentiated knowledge, beauty and totality of being. In his absence, it is left to us to become the “careful keepers of the realm of Light”; to discover how the center of all Energy and Intelligence is networked within the self and all existence, and that our best hour is not one remembered, or lost in virtual experience, but the one we have the unlimited capacity to create and is yet to come. I am ever inspired by Roerich’s images and ideas as I continue my own practice of art and evolving the self to make way for new waves of Light and hope these words will have some meaning and encouragement for you in your role as Roerich Museum Director and guardian of the expressed energy of his life. With Grateful Regards in Service and Light, Deborah Goudreault”
 

© Copyright 2020 Deborah A Goudreault. All Rights Reserved.