Unicorn Consciousness

Books take longer than paintings

Nov 29, 2023

Welcome new free and paid subscribers! So thankful you are along for this ride and so much gratitude for your support. I’ll be sharing some subscriber updates this month and an exciting offering come the new year for paid subscribers. Stay tuned! I’m excited to dive into this week’s post which I hope you will enjoy. On with the show….

Things are not often as they first appear. There is always a surface impression, something that impacts you immediately and so often we take that as is and turn away. What does it take to keep looking? Perhaps that second look will reveal something new and catch your interest a bit longer.

I’ll start with the surface. There’s a Starbucks logo surrounded by unicorns and then some My Little Ponies and some 80’s movie references you feel seem familiar from childhood. This is true. It is these things. It is also so much more.

Like a true mandala, I’ll start in the center and work my way out. The Starbucks logo is zoomed out to reveal the actual Starbucks logo from the original Seattle coffee shop. I like it much better than the anesthetized version we see on our coffee cups on the regular. My Starbuck has her tongue out and a bindi on her forehead. She is making the familiar facial expression of the Hindu Goddess Kali, the Great Mother and the Great Destroyer. She is both the Creator and the Goddess of Death, controlling what comes into this world and what goes out of it.

Starbuck Kali is giving birth to the new cultural consciousness and is my way of saying that we need to stop dumbing down sexuality, dumbing down creation, dumbing down and numbing out death and true, poignant experience. This is equally as important as joy. Because you cannot have pure joy without pure depth. They work in tandem. And until we deal with our baggage, it’s only going to keep haunting us and biting us in the butt and we will never truly move forward.

Through liquid unicorns and the history of this magical creature, the mandala continues to unfold from the Elasmotherium at the very bottom, Ctesias’ description of the unicorn, the Medieval Christ-like unicorn, G1 My Little Ponies and The Last Unicorn. Princess Luna and Princess Celestia from the most current iteration of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic oversee this process at the top of the mandala. The Princesses are sisters who had a tumultuous relationship (as Light and Darkness usually do) but managed to work out their problems by truly communicating their feelings to one another. Now they work together, Celestia tending to the kingdom and their subjects during the day and Luna tending to them during the night in the dream realm. This relationship between the Sun and the Moon, Light and Darkness is what makes the world go ‘round. It is how we dive deeper into our Self and explore the facets of our diamond-like nature. Placing them at the top of this mandala is making sure that the revolution is not stagnant. What began with Starbuck Kali at the center, giving birth to the unicorn consciousness culminates with the two Princesses, Sun and Moon, where the Sun brings it into the world and the Moon takes it back into the darkness where it can be reborn again through the center.

Is your interest peaked? This is just the tip of the iceberg.

You see, this is actually a book I am writing. The book itself is inspired by alchemical treatises that focus on the purification of lead into gold but does the entire process in unicorn allegory. The “gold” here is Unicorn Consciousness, which is radical individualism coupled with radical community ethics: ie. we all can be unicorns and work together. Our individuality is not threatened by being in a group, but in fact, builds us up as we build each other up.

The book takes each one of the characters from the painting and turns them into a theme for a chapter. For example, Chapter 1: Kali. “We Begin in the middle of the mandala and we begin with Death. In order for life to exist, death must nourish it.” The first chapter deals with a variety of topics such as Swami Vivekananda’s poem, Kali, the Mother, the parable of the wheat and Eleusis, Melusine (whom the actual Starbuck logo is named after) and apophatic writing. You know, light stuff. Another example is Chapter 3: Stirrings from the Deep, Negredo. This chapter references the unicorn skulls at the bottom of the painting and talks about what is a myth and is a unicorn a visceral memory of the Elasmotheriums that once roamed the earth with early people. I also dive deep into the description of the unicorn by Ctesias in the 3rd century BC. Again, light stuff. But in between is actual fodder for, dare I say it, a mystical experience. Why? Because like books of old, this text is meant to be read esoterically. There is one book that you are reading and one book that you are experiencing as a metaphor for much grander and deeper themes. Just like the painting, it is what you see on the surface and it is also so much more.

I’ve had to put a halt to writing since having my little one but I am excited to have some writing time on the horizon in the coming months. I’ll be very stoked to share excerpts and tidbits with you all as I create this work.

When I first had the vision for the book, I knew I needed to complete the painting first because alas, paintings take much less time than books do, even if my paintings take a lot of time. And I essentially have the outline of the book right there always ready to contemplate. How and why I am a unicorn expert and why I was destined to write such a text will be it’s own post one of these days.

Pop Shamanism by Krisztina Lazar

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