Revelation Song: Rising through the Energy of Transformation

“Revelation Song” is an image from Deborah Goudreault’s soon to be launched Collection of perceptive sculpture entitled “When Gods Descend”. Email deborah@lightmindimages.com to join in the inspiring preview of her latest Collection and learn more about the heart and mind behind the work.

No work of art emerges in a vacuum.  I create amid the immaterial forces and unfamiliar forms of more subtle dimensions and spaces in nature, but even that which is intuited with my physical senses withdrawn is not untouched by the circumstances manifesting around us. Even in my silent and reclusive hours of artistic practice and a life seemingly apart, my heart remains inseparably connected to all humanity and the Earth, and my work dedicated to breaking the barriers of how we have defined nature and the self, and to preparing minds to experience a more universally networked reality beyond the limits of the physical eyes’ perception. Never have I valued life more than in these last few months or felt more vulnerable and willing to humbly work to transform any preconceptions which have limited my own potential, or my capacity to support the ascent of others. It is a time when more is asked of all of us, and when so many voices are being raised and many more are learning to listen, I felt I must consider my latest collection and specifically “Revelation Song” in relation to our rapidly evolving present. This is something I ordinarily never do, allowing my work to reflect its infinite source rather than any finite material condition or time. But I can see in my soon to be released collection how deeply I carry the growing cries of humanity within myself, as well as our shared desire to advance beyond injustice, conflict and suffering into the fullness of our human totality and potential. I can see how it drives my work, and that my way of answering is to focus the Light in works that are catalysts of unifying perception and distributing agents for the great outpouring of energy and aspiration that is now elevating our experience of who we are, our relationships with one another and the nature of Earth.

The relevance of true art has never just been about the work itself, but what could be learned about the creative process and energy and intelligence which it embodies. My practice as an Artist is one of surrendering my attachment to familiar forms and conditioned preconceptions, and constantly refining a faculty of inner perception that overrides physical sensory input and allows for more unlimited observation. It is unplanned and my only intention is to translate as much of the subtle multidimensional network of nature I am given to grasp. I do not project an experience from imagination or from what I see with the physical eye, but what I sense within as purely, unbiased and unconditioned as I can. Never was the connection between this practice, its works of art, and humanity more pertinent. In a way, we are all being asked now to learn such a practice, not necessarily to create art, but to create a new phase of human advancement. We are being called to develop a greater capacity to see beyond our surface forms and events, and allow a new awareness and reality to manifest, free of the conditioned limits we allowed to dominate our minds, feelings, and actions.

Many different beliefs, strategies and actions are being brought forward as we consider what comes next and how we evolve beyond the unacceptable and unsustainable patterns of the past. I believe that if we come together with greater understanding of the power of our diversity, a common love and respect for humanity, and a commitment to universally establishing just and harmonizing human relations, we will find support in one another that gives strength to our minds, our hands and our will to open within us the potential to become avatars of a new synthesis of being; projections of new self-awareness and intelligence, and creators of new forms and ideas in which every last shadow of disharmony and injustice finally resolves in Light. I offer these thoughts on the context and essence of Revelation Song with deep and unyielding compassion as we grow to meet the challenges and possibilities of an age of transformation toward racial equity and a reality where every individual is valued, free and supported in realizing their unlimited human potential and unique contribution to our collective human advancement. – Deborah Goudreault

Rising through the Energy of Transformation

(Written during the first week of US police reform and racial justice demonstrations, before they became widely supported globally)

As America simultaneously faces a life-threatening pandemic and a critical phase in racial equity transformation, we are challenged on every level to refine our thoughts, feelings and actions in relation to the universal truths seeded in our country’s founding principles, and to all participate with vigilant commitment in the shared purpose of making them a collectively felt reality. Beyond the lines of demonstrators and the borders of our nation, judgements and criticisms of our history and ideological tenets fly from every corner of the world, with some using this time of hardship to establish and solidify a new hierarchy of global dominance.  But what we are facing at this time is not the challenge of one nation or one people, or the opportunity to achieve power through more polarizing, self-driven objectives. Globally, conditions are forcing us to see beyond the blindness of our external, materially conditioned focus and to accept what humanity has refused to acknowledge and tried to outrun; that ours is a reality of inseparable collective relationship and responsibility which surpasses every boundary we have falsely held to divide us or used to strengthen our individual positions at the expense of others. On the surface, we may see this as a disruptive period of darkness, but it is actually a period of concentrated and deeply revealing Light from which selfish motives, injustice and ignorance can no longer hide, and greater racial equity and a new human identity emerge. The fact that this lesson comes so close to home in the US will ultimately speed the shift in our awareness and transformation, and rather than weak and flailing in divisive chaos, make of us a nation of more valuable global allies in human advancement. Why? Because here amid the battle against an invisible virus and before the socially networked eyes of the world, every human desire which causes us to act as if we are exclusively separate, and every act of violence to secure dominance deemed justifiable based on the fearful belief that to survive it is either me or you, or us or them, is now being magnified and burnt as fuel in the fire of greater awareness.

The racial equity challenge of this time is a deeply rooted and recurring one of oppression versus freedom, and each time it surfaces in a new generation we are given an opportunity to face it with greater sensitivity and more universal and permanent resolve. Of course, most attest to the belief that we all have an equal right to be treated humanely and realize our full human potential, and that selectively upholding these rights should not be tolerated in any nation, especially one whose beginning was shaped by fighting for the rights and freedoms of a democracy. But, why is it so difficult to align that belief with behavior? Why has upholding it as a symbol and goal of our democracy been easy, but realizing it as a collectively shared experience taken us much longer? Why have we not succeeded in making Earth a place of elevating and harmonizing actions of universally beneficial intention and effect? That is why we are here; why the Earth was created as a place to realize this human potential not as a place of conflict and disease to plunder and destroy. How do we close the gap between thought and action, how do we strengthen our will to serve ideas of universal intelligence and collective benefit rather than the conditioned fears and feelings patterned by the past?  How do we move minds to recognize that realizing our highest level of human excellence and potential within the self is not a right or a choice we have the power to limit or withhold from others? How do we unblind our ability to see that this is not just a nice idea or value we use to shroud more ego-centric intentions, but an equally shared human purpose and duty that exceeds all others, and the extent to which we have created a society which supports its global fulfillment is the true measure of our advancement? Of course, we continue to advance technologically, and its powers have broken down many barriers to collective awareness, but while our outer technologies may be lauded as a measure of intellectual advancement, the truth carried in the pain and suffering mass demonstrators are opposing is that it is clearly not the equivalent of human advancement.  There is a new frontier of shared endeavor before us; that of unavoidably and intentionally evolving the self. Some are overwhelmed and discouraged by what seem insurmountable past limits and conflict, but we must not lose ourselves in that inertia. We must keep up, understanding that the higher the idea and ideal, the more it challenges us to refine our nature and transform our accepted preconceptions to attain it.  And the more our actions support a shift in awareness, the more our conditioned minds will also naturally fight to maintain the status quo against change, even when an idea like racial equity is in harmony with the momentum of evolution. This inner battle will gradually subside as past patterned blocks are dissolved in higher thoughts, feelings, and actions, but consistent commitment is required, as is consciously filtering and surrounding ourselves with influences and practices that help free our minds from limiting preconceptions and support our positive transformation. With focused awareness and commitment to lessen the gap between belief and behavior, many are beginning valuable work now through the agencies of intellect and education to transform our awareness and actions into those which advance racial equity and elevate the structure, leadership and partnerships in our institutions and personal networks.   It is work that will yield essential tangible progress but working conventionally with the conditioned mind to change the conditioned mind is still an approach limited in its effect.

True freedom is much more than physical freedom, freedom of expression, or even the freedom to live without fearing for our safety and security. What is within us will always manifest in our outer experience, and when we fight against another ideology, to oppress and dominate another race, gender or nation, what we are really fighting against is the powerlessness of a self we have limited with an exclusively finite identity that separates us from our universally networked human totality. It is an identity that makes us slaves of our physical bodies and material needs; and where we are not slaves of the material, we are enslaved by the preconceptions of a conditioned mind. We sense, mostly unconsciously, that there is something more to being human. We search for it in religion and in science; a greater totality and infinite nature. We feed ourselves when we are physically hungry, but this invisible hunger to realize an identity that is more than our surface dimensions we either deny or are unaware of how to fulfill it. Feeling bound to the material, we focus on expanding our material power and accumulated wealth, but still that alone does not expand our awareness of who we are and our true human potential. When we live only a part of our totality as separate finite beings, we are left bound to the physical as our reality. We are angry at our duality, cruel to our own bodies and minds, and when we attempt to overcome our physical limits, and gain the power and authority we feel disconnected from and rightly ours, it is often through actions which limit and oppress others. The inner individual self becomes the outer collective experience, so it is the greatest, universally shared human burden and the underlying cause of all our conflict and grief to be the slave of the conditioned mind, because in that we are the slaves of the false, the limited, and whatever surface appearances we are conditioned to recognize with the physical senses.  The mind is designed to be an instrument of the self, not the master which drags us around by our conditioned thoughts and desires.  To achieve the harmonized vision of humanity we are seeking, this is the root oppression we must also endeavor to change within while we are rightly opposing the racial inequity and other unjust effects of it. When we dedicate ourselves to the freedom that comes from knowing who we are behind the veil of the material mind and surface appearances, then we are truly free. When we each have the freedom and resources to access all dimensions of the self, to nurture the ability to observe our mind’s activity and ascend to a place of authority over it, and to identify the self as part of a greater, infinitely potentiated, universally networked totality, then our individual and collective experience will permanently rise by all standards to a new level of balanced excellence. To speak for this freedom and inspire its attainment is an essential part of my creative work in images and word and is especially concentrated in Revelation Song and the related images in my soon to be released collection: “When Gods Descend”.  The most beneficial “non-optical ally-ship” we can establish is with the universally networked nature of our own human totality, and a greater understanding of the innate interfacing system through which entanglement operates in humanity, otherwise temporary victories will quickly dissolve or continue back and forth in a duality bound box of competing powers, shifting dominance, and justified injustice. If we continue to approach our human conflicts solely as surface issues of race, ideological division or the weakness of one group or enemy, our progress will have little permanent effect and we will have missed this opportunity to evolve our individual and collective human potential. The illusion of “chosen” or self-made superiority, human trafficking, drug trafficking, efforts to monopolize or limit access to education and resources, and destructive acts of dominance, sexual aggression and abuse are only some of the ongoing expressions of enslavement in global human culture. And what we have tried to hide; all the unevolved desires that oppress and dominate as if they were the only way to attain and protect our individual power, now stand stripped of their armor and weapons of illusion on the shore of a rising river of reform. It is time to transcend the self that we appear to be, and discover we are not the enemy of the other, rather each born on this planet as individual partners given the power and collective responsibility of climbing our mightiest human summits and excelling together.

I have found in my experience as an Artist and meditator that while we may appear separate and finite on the surface, and our physical senses keep us focused on surface qualities and familiar forms, the answers and potential we seek lie beneath the surface, in evolving an inner perception of the subtle dimensions of Nature and the self and realizing a tangible connection to our true nature as universally networked beings. It is as Martin Luther King Jr. described decades ago, that “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.  I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.”  It has taken time for our collective minds to grasp and understand this idea as an inescapable universal law, not just spiritual philosophy or beautiful rhetoric, but now conditions give us no choice, and we are charged with answering the question of how to access and navigate the subtle reality of that network. How do we transform the battleground of competitive duality which is the blood of America and much of global culture? How do we remove the ignorance of perceived separateness and nurture discernment which leads to the realized unity and non-dual wisdom other approaches have failed to effect? Criminal sentencing, conceptual un-learning, and group demonstrations have proven limits in transforming the causal roots of our feelings and actions, unless with their message we are also given the tools for tuning into and re-tuning the self. Social media blitzes and every company and political figure quickly converting their marketing and election campaigns to racial equity awareness campaigns is still self-serving re-positioning if it is not followed up with harmonizing actions of integrity, and long-term commitment.  It is not progress to raise awareness of racism as a strategy for personal economic or political gain. We cannot just change the outer dialogue of old ideas, replace it with new ones and expect fundamental behavior to shift. Some may become more emotionally attached to the new ideas, but this also makes them vulnerable to being inflamed and manipulated by those whose agenda is not as pure. For others, connecting with a “righteous” cause may just be another way of feeding the unnatural exaggeration of the ego and lead to more polarizing instability rather than the reharmonization we seek. In order to build a more sustainable and universally just social order as the new collective reality, it is the subtle inner dialogue of the individual which needs to be elevated; the self-purification that Dr. King described as one of the critical steps in a non-violent campaign for human progress. Yes, there is power in one’s voice and the freedom to express it, but the effects of that message are only as powerful and impacting as the energy and intelligence it projects. Power exists and operates optimally as an undivided whole, and the more we grow in understanding of how we operate as a universally networked human totality, the more our thoughts, feelings and actions will become projections of more unlimited power and potentiality. Demonstrations have forced some long-awaited positive action, but we have not reached the limits of our human evolution or our human progress! To be more, requires a vision of a sky of ever widening potentiality not just above us, but within us and all nature. This is the challenge and purpose of my work; to help free an awareness of nature and the nature of the self as more than the limits, biases and preconceptions of our current identities. Rather than focusing our hope on returning to an idealized pre-pandemic reality, it serves to inspire each of us to intentionally commit to our continued evolution, to exploring the unknown dimensions of the self, and to discovering our dormant more unlimited capacities to heal, revitalize, and elevate ourselves, our relationship to each other, and the nature of Earth. We have been a society obsessed with fashion and made icons of its designers, but now we must become equally obsessed with elevating our own individual awareness and creativity as co-designers of the most important fashion project in human history; redesigning the garment of our individual and collective destiny.

Revelation Song as both a Work of Art and Human Advancement

There is much work to be done yet in educating ourselves about injustice, racism and oppression, our conscious and unconscious role in perpetuating these conditions, and how all humanity will benefit in overcoming them. Through a visual experience of unfamiliar form, Revelation Song challenges minds to open beyond our known dimensions and conditioned limits, and to explore who we are across the boundaries of the physical, in the subtle, unknown inner agencies of the self where untapped energies wait to unlock more unbiased and unbound cognition, feelings, and actions. Based on my own decades of exploration and re-contextualizing of the unfamiliar sounds of Sanskrit mantras as a current of  energetic force, Revelation Song also carries the idea of sound as an inner technology of transformation for penetrating unopened spaces in the heart, shattering the naïve logic of the mind, and clearing a path within for the intentional “purification” and evolution of the self.

Suppose the quality of our minds and the threshold of our awareness vary according to our sound sensitivity, which is separate from musical sensitivity, and the sounds we engage daily. Suppose we have within us a system of constituting forces that are ceaselessly vibrating and producing subtle sounds which reflect the frequency of our thoughts and feelings, and that this system is also sound sensitive and minds can be refined to operate at a much higher level through the creative power of specific vocally or mentally chanted sounds called mantras. Suppose Mantras are a language of subtle energy keys, unlike our conversational language of meanings that are too often imprisoned in cages of bias and convention, and misunderstood. Suppose Mantras are like thunderbolts which break down the walls of our material world prison and unlock access to more infinitely evolving potential. Suppose through accurate mantra recitation that transcends religious connotations, the subtle energy dimension of the self  becomes active for the removal of discordant qualities, obstructions and resistances to expanding our experience of the self and concentrates energy in the area of the heart in such a way that our view of an exclusively separate and divergent self is transformed into a more universally convergent awareness. Now you come close to the deeper meaning of Revelation Song.  Where we overlook the role of Sound as an agency of human advancement and allow the potential of mantras to remain dormant and unknown, our own human potential will also remain dormant and unknowable. If we can see mantras as separate from their ancient or religious origins and with some humility accept we may not know everything about the subtle aspect or effects of Sound, they may serve us now in a way ordinary words cannot as instruments of unity, weapons of non-duality, and a path of freedom on which we may intentionally purify, transform and transcend the finite physical elements and limits we have mistakenly identified as our human totality. It is my experience and the experience of other subjective researchers that these specialized seed sounds and atomized frequencies stimulate openings in the subtle energy interfacing organs of the self, bringing the physical and subtle dimensions of the self into closer alignment. Said another way, they help align the fields of thought, feeling and action so we may evolve the self within a network of more unlimited energy and intelligence. Because of this effect, mantras have much to contribute as a subject of research and potent practice for opening the interface between idea and behavior and filling the gap between thought and action that we understand must be connected in successfully transforming race equity and elevating all human experience beyond its past limits. Every one of my images has an associated mantra that is both written on the back of the work and chanted during and after its printing so that the image is more than a visual experience. It is an impression of creative mind as well as the more unlimited, unifying cosmic Intelligence the mantra carries and connects us to.

The Takeaway

There is a darkness in all ignorance, and those content with knowing only what is within the borders of materially established laws are bound to even deeper darkness. Revelation Song beckons us to go further; to find the courage to confront the austerities of our pandemic pressed solitude as a refuge of undiscovered Light, and to listen there with something more than our flesh ears, and to see with more than our outer eyes. It invites us to become the receivers and transmitters of a luminous dimension of Sound not meant to pacify the physical, please the familiar, or stimulate the intellect.  A Sound that does not give our passionate impulses and conditioned minds a place to live out their desired excitement but flows instead through the subtle body of the self as modulations in a symphony of cosmic Energy and Intelligence.  Revelation Song is not the equivalent of an experience born from a succession of notes hammering upon our physical senses but a relation between moments of silence where the purest akasha, the nuclear essence of sound, resounds and unbinds our minds in an intimately reordered and elevated frequency of being, waking us to the infinitely evolving universally networked nature and potential of the self.  Such Sound may at first be dissonant, (like some people’s  first experience of the unfamiliar images in my work)  but it is not their unfamiliar acoustic effect that is challenging, rather something long repressed in the depth of our being that is stirred; something veiled and unacknowledged in an externally focused life that can no longer be ignored. Resonating in the form of Revelation Song is the message, “Do not turn away, it is this buried Light that waits in the unknown, and in what we hear when we listen with our hearts, that will carry us through the challenges of this period.” With each practiced touch of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, a mantra can take us beyond our perceived limits where each of us become notes in the revelation song of humanity.  A song that penetrates and transforms the mind and inspires us to shed our conditioning and become more aware not just of an injustice or cause, but of the greater totality of the self.  A song which invokes in us the will to evolve humanity’s power to resolve diversity in a unity that answers the silenced cry of long avoided Consciousness. A cry rising up now from within that says we are of one universally networked existence, and no physical or economic barriers can separate us from the truth that all life is eventually and inescapably felt within the self.  It is a Consciousness even the most unyielding egos, pervasive delusions, aggressions and fears cannot evade. Cell phone, social and news media images, conventional photographs and video of surface figures, forms and events continue to bombard our minds and further condition how we view the self and humanity in this period of transformation, but change will never be more than a temporary superficial one if we do not begin to know the self as more than the identity conditioned by external experiences and what we see from the outside. Revelation Song and all of my works are created to enter the field of our externally focused, visually dominant experience; that sea of repetitive familiar surface forms and reflections and deliver a more unconditioned and uncontrived expression of nature, an unfamiliar form with some universal essence and presence that stirs and wakes us to question who we really are. What is important is not that you recognize the figure in Revelation Song, but that in it you feel challenged to connect with something beyond the known that frees you to begin to see yourself as more than the surface form and capacities you know.  We can not change the color of our skin or the nation in which we are born, but we can change what we know of the self, the limits we have accepted as our identity, and the mind we project in our actions, and we can work together to insure all humanity the opportunity to pursue those changes and realize their highest self. Revelation Song says, “Let us be more than race and religion, more than thinkers, and makers, consumers, and seekers of beauty.  Let us be seers of the whole Light; that fire, that sun, that ocean which burns and carries us across all the material limits and conditioned biases and preconceptions of the mind. Let us nurture a greater human totality that instead of suffering feels the infinite potentiality of gods descending where innately networked cosmic Energy and Intelligence spread their roots wider within us.”  Revelation Song is a timeless work and will no doubt inspire constructive future thoughts, feelings, and actions that even I cannot fathom, but the essential revelation it translates for us now is that whatever we learn through the self; in our experience of serving others, conscious meditative practices, nonviolent actions against injustice, or sounds we engage to purify and refine the mind, we will not have to learn through continued disaster, disease and suffering, for the causal root of all those phenomena we consider born of  separate external causes and conditions, begins within the self.

© Copyright 2020 Deborah A Goudreault. All Rights Reserved.