Life after Pop Art

I have vivid memories of the 1960's when the cultural scene in the United States exploded with everything and anything that was new. One could find on television an incredible array of new ideas and talent every week. There were all types of new powerful music, Colorful Pop Art and Op Art was splashed everywhere, and TV shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie, Star Trek, and The Man from Uncle made us dream new dreams and take life with a laugh. The world was being formed and reformed on a weekly basis, and this explosion of positive creativity had a very real effect - it put people in a good mood.

True creativity has a way of uplifting people because it is human imagination that reaches into the divine and allows one to soar into joy. "Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon?" were the first words of a popular song by The Fifth Dimension that anyone who was alive during those times can remember well because it was played on the airwaves like a cultural mantra. Hullabaloo was a major show on TV with an entirely new creative format that brought many humorous stars to the forefront of our culture. The 1960's American culture was a celebration of new form and a youthful idealism that infected the world and made the American Ideal the Worlds Ideal. It was a tough act to follow.

The self-examination of the 1970's and 80's brought the maturing of that forward looking generation. Looking back from the 2000's this progression was a natural step towards a more realistic understanding of our diverse society which seems very segmented and divisive today.

When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, our culture had really begun to move full circle from the unbridled experimentation of the 1960s towards the retrogressive style of the 1950's and a more stratified social and economic order. This nostalgia inspired movement found it' base in a generation that wanted to maintain what they had invented as the right kind of family values and economic rewards system. Hence Ronald Reagan was the perfect leader - Mr. Nostalgia himself, cut from the cloth of American Corporate industrial powers that governed everything from railroads to movies, by small financial elite at the helm that was focused on removing any naysayer who would d are to question the materialistic society it had produced.

The 1950's had been filled with problems and difficulties that we continue to encounter on a daily basis. Racism, hate, violence, government interference, indifference to suffering etc, were rampant also in the 1950's, and now this return to the seeming stability of that period seemed like comfort food - not really good for you, but familiar and tasty and self indulgent, reminding you of the security that came from an idyllic youth with long summer evenings without a care in the world.

Pop Art was King of surface culture. Endless Coca-Cola Bottles, Campbell's Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroe's, and Hamburgers. This was Pop culture's finest hour. It would not be until the 1970's that the dark side of processed food and processed people would start to show their ugly effect. In a way the 1960's captured the excitement of first discovery of the things that were new. The French have a phrase "When New, everything is beautiful", referring to the first encounter with a potential lover before the reality of who they really are sets in. The 1960's captured that naive newness, and like everyone who has good memories of their youth, it is remembered with a dreamy nostalgia.

Hula Hoops, Mini Skirts, Flashy Cars, Flashy Stars - all the products of a new American empire that covered an entire continent with a common culture. It was fabulous and fun, and it was hard not to marvel at its brilliance. Who could not love the Beach Boys, Pop Art, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkle - it was seductive, hip and extremely colorful.

The 80's brought a new kind of conservatism that was the coming due of some of the 1960's and 70's experiments and excess. There was a very distinct backlash against the new morality that seemed to be nothing more than self-satisfaction and irresponsibility. The youth culture needed to grow up and take care of itself. Wall Street answered back with cold cash capitalism and greed. But with the release of old values that had evaporated with the social changes of the 60's and 70's the culture became more and more inured to hedonism and materialism. The spiritual revolution was still in a sort of infancy unable to guide the greater questions into sensible answers. So in the dearth of models to live by, millions opted to hang on to the religions and values of their parents even though these values were largely responsible for the injustices that the Cultural Revolution sought to change. But at least they were familiar and known, and human nature always defaults to the familiar.

In the 1980's, life was flowing fast and fabulous in New York's unfettered Art Scene. It is the nature of artists to experiment with everything to discover new ways of doing things. By this time Rock and Roll was firmly "establishment". In fact rock and roll and its culture had become a code of life for all young American and the sensual indulgences that it embraced.

Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll was a mantra of epic proportion. Warhol was king of the New York scene - the Pope of Pop, which in America had become a capital of excess and stimulation. Today many in American society still practice the ideology of Pop Art, embrace the rule of the masses, and waltz throughout life with only surface understandings of everything from medicine and health to politics and sex. Supported by a scientific materialism which considers the only true reality to be that which can be explained by hard science, one is free to live in a free-association universe of human impulses. On the extreme other hand is a rigid neo- conservatism which see’s this excess as sinful and satanic. The neo-conservative is a world filled with fear of the unknown, rigid religion, and a basic distrust of human beings as sinful and separate from God.

Fortunately, there is another way.

Welcome to the holographic 5 dimensional universe. It is a Universe that is so infused with Divine Love that it allows each soul to have a self-determined experience that will bring it the experiences it needs to really understand itself and life. A process that can take thousands of lifetimes to gain ultimate wisdom is a process that understands that death is only a re-translation into another form and place for continued growth and experience. There is no death, only soul moving on into ever greater awareness. Divine love is the key that opens the door to greater realms of experience and increases as one continues to expand and grow into a greater expression of Divine Love.

There are no losers - everyone is moving at a personal spiritual evolutionary speed that is perfectly suited for what they need to learn.

From here one embraces life as it is, hugs a higher detached love out of every circumstance, and honors every human life no matter how degraded or despicably it may currently be expressing itself. Here lives the greater realization that every human soul is divine in origin and is trying in whatever way it can to find its way home to the source of all love and mercy.

Omni Art is about that journey that all are on. It moves past the trappings of culture, psychology, human invention and artifice to reach the land of inner learning. That inner learning over time translates into a greater outer life expression. It is spirituality without religion, dogma, or codification. It looks towards an evolving culture of love for all of life.

This path of knowing is not as simple to embrace as Pop Art, nor does it intellectualize like Modernism or Post-Modernism. However it does embrace because it is Omni - which means All, or One or Source. If one is interested in the design and function of the universe, then one will embrace Omni Art because it is concerned with that structure.

Omni Art is about expanding horizons for all. This means all cultures on earth, all humans involved in those cultures, and all individual experiences - embraced as divine and worthy of love.

Omni Art is about the source of all life which is the continuous flow of light and sound that manifests our three-dimensional universe and five dimensional cosmos.

My desire is for Omni Art to be a vehicle for expansion and awareness - to encourage individuals to recognize that they are a Divine Spark of life in an endless Divine Universe - and that they can be filled with bliss here and now and not have to wait for some far off heaven to experience it.