Guru Corner

Disclaimer: Teachers highlighted in the guru corner are not being recommended or promoted for spiritual guidance. They are merely individuals who exemplify certain spiritual qualities that are placed here for us to observe and use in whatever fashion works best for us

" Born in Figueras, Spain, in 1907, Salvador Dali had his first drawing lesson at the age of ten. During his younger days his primary interest was in Impressionism. As a student in Madrid, Dali went on to experiment with a variety of styles, including Dadaism and Cubism, but by 1929 he had become a leading figure in the Surrealist movement and remained so during the next ten years. Dali, with his trademark handlebar mustache and flamboyant manner, brought a flair for showmanship to his approach to modern art. His most famous paintings are typically dreamlike landscapes filled with bizarre, puzzling objects. He referred to these productions as 'hand-painted dream photographs' and they have otherwise been described as "a handmade color photography of concrete irrationality" (Weyers, p.19). Dali died at the age of eighty-five. He is one of the twentieth century's most popular and most unusual artists.


The Persistence of Memory, 1931


Salvador Dali got the idea for this painting after an evening meal when he found himself staring intently at the remains of runny camembert cheese. He projected this image using drooping forms of clocks as well as the 'soft self-portrait' melting on rocks underneath it, and added them to the barren landscape. In contrast to these elements of softness and perishability are the gaunt rocks and strange blocks to be found in the painting. All that is man-made or human has been conquered by time, including the artist's own self, while the cliffs in the background (the landscape of Cap de Creus) covered with bright light, display a permanence where the true 'persistence of memory' lies. In this painting with its haunting, dreamlike reality, linear time as measured by mechanical clocks is not important, as all things human are transitory. When compared with the eternity of the landscape, technical measurement of time has no value or importance. The live ants crawling on the solid clock have been said to suggest our inevitable death. We are all conquered by time. "The 'soft watch' acts as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of mankind, our inevitable decay and our subsequent obsession with the nature of time set against us" (Bradbury, p.70)." Excerpt from Look Before You Think: How To Appreciate A Painting.

When Salvaldor Dali made his melting watches famous, he actually tuned into the flexibility of time, not the rigidity of time as this excerpt suggests. It's interesting to me that when dealing with our inner senses, often our logical mind becomes lost in its own wanderings, unable to constrict a multidimensional aspect to linear reality. Just as Salvador Dali tied into these concepts through his dreams, we will begin exploring the nature of our perception of times in areas where our belief systems are more relaxed, like in altered states or dreams.
Beyond The Dream

Many people experience a different sense of time in their dreams. I have personally experienced dreams that averaged month timeframes only to awaken the next morning after one night's sleep. I have had time stop in a dream. I have had time speeded up. I have heard other people tell of being able to "rewind" their dreams and have them play backwards like the tape in a VCR machine. Time is extremely flexible in altered states.

One of the aspects of this Shift in consciousness which we are experiencing is a renewed understanding of our time element in our creations. As multidimesional beings, time is not linear. Time is merely experienced linearly in this one focus. However, through altered states, one can access not only past focuses of your own being but jump ahead to view a future you as well!

Simultaenous time will eventually become a reality to us and not merely a concept. Currently, it would be impossible for us to understand simultaneous time. The idea that there are many focuses of our essence throughout not just this time dimension, but alternate time dimensions in the form of probable and alternate focuses, is highly confusing to a linear mind.

In such a multidimensional mind, meeting a total stranger can be like meeting a long lost soul mate. If one has access to the multidimensional universe, one can see the past and future associations one has with a particular essence that has chosen to remanifest at a particular time and reunite with you again for the choice of experience. In one way, this is a beautiful and grande design. In another, it can be confusing if only one of these people holds that remembrance of Self.

As we begin to pay attention to time, we begin to understand that we create it. Time is not independent of consciousness. Time is an element of our consciosuness. Just as we create our objective imagery, we also create the element of time within our lives. This is a very difficult concept to understand and maybe we don't have to. Maybe all we have to do is pay attention and experience the difference in time when our perception shifts.

As my own experience suggests, time is interwoven in all of our creative imagery. It is the glue that holds our reality together. Without time, we would not have physical creation. We would be in other areas of consciousness exploring other things. So, we can see understanding time as just another element of understanding Self in all our multidimensional glory.

View and order some of Dali's paintings at the store below:

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