Ganesh and Forest Elephants

A vision of a Generativity Continuum

I meditate for about 5 minutes a day on most days. It’s first thing in the morning and I’ve got my coffee and toddler Hawk is playing, reading, talking to his stuffies, building legos, nursing, and doing a million other things right next to me at the same time. I’ve been meditating for very many years and I can drop into my practice fast and sink in.

Tuesday morning I decided to do a Ganesh mantra. This isn’t super unusual. I do this about once a week nowadays. You see, several years ago I had an experience of having a total cessation and then a white light vision. A cessation is when your consciousness blips out. It feels like restarting your computer in the 90s where you could visibly see the screen contract before your eyes as it rebooted, but instead of just your mind rebooting, it’s somehow a total body refresh button. They do not happen often in meditation and you never forget it if you happen to experience it.

Now, after the split-second blip, I rebooted into a full white light vision, which is unusual and unheard of for me. My visions always include lots of imagery and content so to see just white light was really astounding. The white light was present and conscious but there was something so awe-inspiring and almost shocking about it, I couldn’t draw anything more out of it while it was happening. I just experienced and was in awe. Fast forward to my class I teach at The Alembic once a month called Alligator Lizards. I am really remiss in not doing a complete post about what and how we do in that class, but I’ll sum it up to say that I teach my students a variety of techniques that come in contact and come into dialogue with unconscious material, whether it is an entheogenic vision, a meditative experience, a dream or anything else along those lines. It’s powerful business. Visionary art helps to reify someone’s experience and can also open portals for people’s own visionary encounters by looking at the art. But it’s a whole other thing to treat that peak experience material as its own generative source of being and build a relationship with it as it’s still alive and continually evolving.

Because that white light experience was so arresting several years ago, I have been working with it in my class for over a year, dialoguing in a variety of art and writing techniques that continue to produce the most incredible insights and wisdom. One of the first times I decided to call up and ask that experience to play, I was working with the Surrealist technique of Decalcomania. This wonderful technique basically creates random splotches of paint on a surface by pressing two pieces of paper or a variety of other surfaces together. Then, you look at the splotches and see what you see.

What emerged from my splotches was unmistakably an elephant with a unicorn emerging from his third eye - It was Ganesh and I was shocked. I tried to see other things, I tried to turn the circle around and find other images. But no. Every way I looked at it, there was the elephant shape staring back at me. Other than painting a Ganesh on my bedroom wall in high school along with some psychedelic rock poster-inspired imagery, I haven’t really worked with or vibed with this diety before. But there he was, plain as day, coming into life in my decalcomania. The white light sentience was Ganesh in nature and therefore the archetype I was dealing with was Jupiterian: overflowing abundance, joyousness, and the ability to remove obstacles that are in one’s path.

Since this was too striking to ignore, I have begun developing a relationship with this deity in various ways, including trying to understand elephants archetypally. What is an elephant’s Platonic form? What does an elephant mean as a symbol? Several months ago, my family watched the most incredible National Geographic documentary series on elephants and one of the episodes was about the elusive Forest Elephant. Forest Elephants are a separate elephant species from African elephants and have evolved to be smaller with beautiful golden yellow eyes. They are incredibly beautiful and almost spooky looking and they have utterly captured my imagination.

Because they have lived in this forest for so many generations, their very footsteps have shaped the forest and the forest is the way it is because the elephants are there. Let me say that again because this simple, elegant, and beautiful fact can’t be overstated. As the elephants move through the forest, they carve paths, trample plants, fertilize the earth, and essentially garden the forest around them. This has struck me as some incredibly beautiful essence of existing in the world and it is something I think about many times a week.

I was sitting and doing my Ganesh mantra on Tuesday. The mantra I say is “Om Gum Ganapataye Namaha” which is a salutation to Ganesh as the remover of obstacles in my path. I often visualize while I do mantra and I picture myself in the elephant’s point of view as they move through space, knocking down a tree or walking through tall grass. Tuesday, I saw the Forest Elephants moving through the forest much like from the perspective of the video above. Like lightning, I understood that while removing obstacles can be knocking over an entire tree (metaphorically or literally), it can also mean simply moving through space and allowing your very movement to create the garden, a space of flourishing, around you. This realization brought tears to my eyes and my heart burst open into a million pieces. The prayer came to me as follows:

Help me create the garden around me as I walk the path my ancestors have laid down before me.

And I continue to forge the path and ensure generativity for my future generations to follow in my footsteps

It is the continuance of generativity and flourishing.

I saw it all as a multidimensional understanding all at once. Just as the Forest Elephants garden the forest for generations, literally creating an environment of mutual flourishing and fecundity that relies on a different sense of time than the one we think in usually, we also are walking a path that was forged by our ancestors by their choices and actions. We can consciously step into the path of flourishing and generativity and intentionally lay the groundwork for whoever comes after us whether in our own family or in our chosen community to flourish as well.

But my words create a linearity that isn’t quite correct. Just like the drone footage that allows us to look from a bird’s (or God’s) eye view, zoom out for just a moment. The life of the elephants and their impact on the paths and plants and water is one timeline but the life of a tree is much longer. The current elephant’s grandmother probably shaped the tree that they are passing today and the path that they walk was formed generations earlier. and the seedling that they trample today allows its neighbor to live and thrive and it won’t be a tree for about 70 years, which is when the baby elephant in the group will be the aging matriarch taking her last footsteps. This interconnected network of generative exchange functions more on a quantum entanglement timeline rather than our perceived linear one and this is how we too function not only with the environment around us but with our family and community that we exist within.

The continuance of generativity and flourishing doesn’t just happen. It’s something we have to consciously participate in and be in right relation with. It’s an orientation toward and simply an intention to be a part of that allows us to step into this beautiful river of lush creativity. Let the Forest Elephants inhabit your mind. What kind of garden can you grow around you by just being YOU in the world?

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In other news, I’ve become utterly obsessed with this song. I can’t get it out of my head and I listen to it at least once a day. Hilariously, Arthur Brown wrote “Fire” in 1968, which among other astrological stuff, was a year of a Jupiter Uranus conjunction. This asterism only occurs every 14 years and we just had a Jupiter Uranus conjunction last week which is when I began listening to it because this song came up in conversation randomly. Just a funny cosmic coincidence.

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Mark your calendars if you are local for the opening of the next art exhibition at The Alembic on May 18th. I will have a very special Alligator Lizards earlier that day from 1-3 focusing on the artworks on display and the opening will be from 6-8pm with an artist talk at 7pm. The world feature the Visionary Muse Collective and the show is called Visions of the New Earth. I’ll do a deep dive on everything next week so stay tuned!