Talking with Michael Green
By Mary Davis, Editor

What words do I use here? I struggle to find the words to describe artwork that is so visceral, so radiant, so lyrical that it touches my heart, and makes me want to move away from the computer to sing and dance and weep in joyous devotion to that which is most sacred! Those of us who attend Mythic Journeys 2006 will have this inspiration for several days because Michael Green is the artist who is shaping the “Experience Design” for this Mythic Journeys Conference and Performance Festival.

It is even more difficult to find the words to describe the artist himself. I met Michael Green first when our Mythic Journeys leadership group spent an afternoon in discussion with him, starting with his reading from The I Ching, The Book of Changes , which he had consulted before he left Pennsylvania for Atlanta. His reading was Number 48: Ching/ The Well , which in Wilhelm’s translation begins, “Wood is below, water above. The wood goes down into the earth to bring up water…the well from which water is drawn conveys the further idea of an inexhaustible dispensing of nourishment…” Before the afternoon is over, we see and touch the beautiful cedar box Michael carved to hold treasures like the sensuous wooden holders for the raptor wing feathers of ceremonial fans and the vellum with exquisite drawings and script. He was trying to sort out what his presence at “the gathering,” Mythic Journeys, would be, and we were getting to know him. Then the following day, Michael and I met at my favorite coffee shop for an in- depth interview and conversation, which I hope to convey to you here.

While Michael is a critically acclaimed artist, he is also a craftsman, a sculptor, a builder of earthshrines and installations, writer, television art director, and musician (The Illumination Band). He creates his work as an intuitive response to the spiritual, and he views art as a process of getting aligned with the Great Mystery.

Born in New York City in 1943, he says his inability to master a foreign language in high school was a factor in his attending New York University, which had no art department, and may therefore have been a good thing. He says that art has no canon now in contrast to dynastic China, Florence in the 1500’s and Paris in the 1920’s, except possibly the ability to generate “buzz.” But more about art later.

Michael Green’s life included film school and study at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. In his twenties, he hitchhiked around both the Amazon Basin and the United States. He continued his studies which included the gospel of Ramakrishna and in the 1960’s he became a monk. He thought of himself as a saddhu, a celibate renunciate. People invited him here and there, and he eventually lived for a time in a tipi on a mountain outside Woodstock, N.Y. A Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War, he also worked on light shows with Timothy Leary.

His Teacher, Bawa

Michael eventually found his way to Pennsylvania to study with the Sufi master Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Among the aspects of his life affected by his studies with Bawa, who told him that he was almost a jnani and that he looked like a bridegroom , was the instruction by Bawa to become a householder. Michael says now, “There are certain lessons only a wife can teach.” His wife is also an artist and his son is a member of The Illumination Band. They live in the countryside in the Philadelphia area near Bawa’s burial site, The Mazar, where Michael has created what might be called an earthwork or a sacred environment.

In his dedication of A New Illuminated Rumi, One Song to Bawa, Michael includes a visual image of Bawa, and he writes, “For Bawa, who was truth made visible, who shared his love secrets. Who taught us Separate from yourself that which separates you from others.” Visual images of Bawa may also be seen on pages 83 and 85 of The Illuminated Rumi which Coleman Barks and Michael Green created in collaboration. Coleman and Michael met as they both studied with Bawa, and they have also collaborated on another of Michael’s (and Coleman’s) books, The Illuminated Prayer: The Five-Times Prayer of the Sufis .

One of my questions to Michael was how his contact with Bawa was made. He says, “As soon as you saw him, you knew .” In Woodstock, Michael had met Jonathan Granoff, who was an aide to Senator Alan Cranston and now heads the Global Security Institute. He says, “Jonathan and I knew we had dirt on the back of our necks which we couldn’t see. We needed the perfect mirror, and we agreed to let one another know when we found one, one of what some might call ‘the nobody home-ers.’” They found Bawa in a Philadelphia row house after hearing a student from Ceylon describe him.

According to the stories, Bawa had been found sitting in a tree outside a village in Sri Lanka in the early 1940’s. He spoke both Sanskrit and Arabic, as well as other languages including Tamil and English. His name, Muhaiyaddeen , means restorer of the true light, of the “deen,” of the path. No one knew how he arrived at that tree, but people sensed that he had been around a very long time. He had a sense of humor, and Michael tells the story about Bawa’s making a low level joke about Ganesha’s blowing his nose, and then looking up and asking, “Green Michael, do you have any problem with this?” Michael responded that at the very least, since Ganesha is held in reverence by millions of people, it is strange to treat him like this. Bawa looked at Michael and said, “He who first sang the Vedas can make fun of Ganesha.” Michael says you could feel the truth of this, that Bawa had been here a very, very, very long time, long enough to have been a first singer of the Vedas. Bawa, he says, was like Shiva, “He would go after whatever it was you were crystallizing your identity around, and be a flamethrower.”

Michael says that in our world, in our culture, we don’t usually think of sitting at someone’s feet to learn, but he felt truly human when he was at the feet of Bawa. Much of the teaching was directly with the individual. One of the reasons Michael stayed with Bawa as a student was that he could have living, intimate, immediate interaction with him. Bawa would burst into spontaneous song, was aware of invisible beings, and “accomplished a huge amount of work in invisible realms.”

Bawa considered Michael “Artsmaster,” although Michael says this was no big deal. Bawa also considered art as “a shiva/shakti thing, one of the sixty-four sexual arts, keeping a circuit open.” Bawa made clear in his teachings that we’re entering “the destruction,” that 43 signs had been given to him, 41 of which had already happened by 1985, when Bawa left, after being routinely ill off and on for three or four years. Michael says that a “nasib” is a contract with every soul for a certain number of years (to live on this plane). Bawa had experienced a number of extensions of his contract and “you could feel that he was stretched thin.” He feels that in reality, Bawa is now inside him, and he said, “He is my wisdom, my soul, which in a miraculous way has taken form.”

Rumi, Art, and the Creative Process

We continued to discuss in an interwoven way, Michael’s art and his creative process, as well as his teacher, life itself, society, the sacred, our work at Mythic Journeys, and more, including healing or stopping the potential “destruction.”

He says that if he, Michael Green, has a public face, it’s because of his work with Rumi. He sees Rumi as a voice for change. He loves the combination of word and image, saying that the art of illumination is like “a well executed comic book, with lots of illustration, hopefully balancing the right brain (predominantly images) and the left brain (predominantly words) and addressing the whole creature.” He finds a kind of ceremonial magic in the image: the image conveys a different kind of thing than the concept, ie: the color red conveys red better than r-e-d. “At the far end of the spectrum, images can convey a non-verbal kind of understanding about mystical events, and best of all, are the two (images and words) together.”

Michael adds that visual images also make you read the books more slowly, and that if you go through Rumi’s poems quickly, you are not getting them. “Rumi really wants to stop you in your tracks!” Once Michael gets the initial metaphor, he works from that, and he says it does not have to be Persian-esque, because he wants to bring Rumi forward as a world figure.

He brings art, science, and religion together in his work, combining images like the photo of a tungsten atom with fractals and the image of a mosque, working digitally. He has spent much time studying sacred art, and he says the more elegant the system, the more the form of art is looked upon as a road map, like a Tibetan thanka. The use of an original gives him a clear sense, a way to fit elements together, and he says that if he is sensitive to it, he finds a way to bring together what belongs together. He also says, “a dangerous thing, appropriating,” implying to me that he takes great care in the elements he combines.

We discuss imagining the Paleolithic tribesman or woman picking up a burnt stick, drawing an image of a human figure on the wall of a cave, and the shock, the magical power, when the person really sees the image. Michael says that art seems to have often been reserved for what is most important, for the shamanic, to make the veils thinner (between the worlds or dimensions); that for probably 90% of our human time on earth, art has been special, magical, mysterious, with canons. As he says, a Hopi blanket tells a story. He notes that an anthropologist working in Bali at the turn of the century was told by the translator that the language had no word for “artist” because life is art .

“Traditional culture is not just a stage set, it is a profoundly different mind set,” and then he draws for me our culture’s linear view of time with Alpha at the beginning of a straight line and Omega at the end, and after that, he draws traditional time as a circle that is continuous, that is more like a dance, more dreamlike. While I know this intellectually, as Michael draws, it sinks in, and I catch a glimpse of what it would be like to really experience time in a profoundly different way, a traditional circle of time, and I am moved.

Michael sees the profane and the sacred as figure and ground. He is working now on a chant that says, “Reality is a rendering of neurology.” We discuss the “whatever it is” nature of the realities we perceive and that it appears that traditional people are anchored in a different parallel dimension.

When I ask him more about his own creative process, he says that for him two aspects are important. First is the “forbidden aspect,” through some sort of spiritual practice, you clear your mind, so that the first thing that rushes in to fill the space is a muse (“Woof!”), the experience, the bright idea, the insight. The other aspect for him is that working digitally, there is a fluid play and you feel warmer or colder and you know when it’s right, and then he quotes Duke Ellington, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Society, the “Destruction,” the “Afterculture,” and Myth

Throughout our conversation, we have discussed the difficulties we all face in today’s world, difficulties on a personal level (like money, capacity, responsibility) and on a societal level. Michael speaks of the part of mythic imagination that is learning to be impeccable in the real world (or in the unreal world), that an impeccable warrior handles whatever situation he (or she) is in, appropriately, whatever the rules are. He cites as an example, the story from Castaneda when Don Juan says, “Meet me in the park in Mexico City.” Carlos did not really expect him to be there, but when Carlos arrives, there is Don Juan and he’s on time and wearing a three piece suit!

On the issues we face in our collective society, Michael’s questions include, “What went wrong? Where and when? Is there a fatal flaw that can’t be fixed? Is there an ‘Andromeda Strain’ virus in our culture, let loose long ago, reaching some sort of Wagnerian kettle-drum climax now? If only we could put the genie back (the atomic bomb). Where is this going? Is our culture on a runaway train? Here we are again, just like with the Vietnam War. What is the role of ‘progress?’ Are we in a chaotic, violent breakdown of civilization, like a black hole in space?” He continued that at one of the recent meetings he attended, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that “our kingdom is in peril.” As he says, it is not that people are “bad,” but that the dialogue has gotten so distorted and that we need to get back into “proper balance.” And he said that Bawa taught that we are entering ‘the destruction.”

I ask Michael what he thinks we can do to turn things around and if Bawa had suggestions to stop or transform “the destruction?” He has thought about this a great deal. He discusses a complete surrender into absolute unknowing and the rebirth of an ancient sanity, perhaps in a great spontaneous gathering like the Khumba Mela. He has written a book about this which is not yet published and which he may choose not to publish, not to make concrete. “Anytime you put something out there, it takes form,” he says, “so it is important to keep it fuzzy, to keep the gauze scrim.”

When you visit Michael’s website www.MichaelGreenArts.com you will see his image of what he terms the River of Sanity. There he says, ”This River of Sanity is nourishing a new and vital culture committed not only to personal transformation but to a planetary ethic that cherishes Earth as a living entity and understands all consciousness as a continuous field.”

He continues, “To explore the dimension of MYTH, mythologies are stories that nourish the soul. Generally set in the past, authentic mythologies must also live in the present.” Painting a vivid word picture as he sketches a visual image, he says, “Dancing on the event horizon, trying to imagine a future mythology, surrendering to the unknown! The event horizon is at the black hole where the sat-guru sits as the bridge, one foot inside space/time, and one foot beyond space/time and at the other end, the white hole, is the goddess emerging.”

On Bawa’s teachings on stopping or transforming the “destruction,” Michael says that curiously Bawa downplayed this, going on to explain that insan kamil is Arabic for a true, primeval, enlightened human being, and that sixteen people who are true humans profoundly seeing through the dream-like nature of reality and with the compassion to make adjustments to the dream… perhaps??? “In a dream, do you stop the tyrannosaurus or do you become the Dreamer?”

We spoke about the importance of soul and heart, the importance of imagining a shift in consciousness and how it would manifest on the everyday, mundane level of life. Becoming natural people again, effecting major change and becoming a “traditional culture,” recovering heart quality and mythical thinking (a sacred world view) are aspects of the “North American Afterculture” which Michael envisions and refers to as “future anthropology.” “I think the most important myth of our time right now is the one all of us (the people who come to myth and who come to this Mythic Journeys gathering) are engaged in. It is the ‘hero with a thousand faces’ going forth to save the City, going forth to save the Country.”

He quotes his wife’s insights into mythology. She says that mythology traditionally was a grand tale that people told themselves in order to anchor their identity and their purpose in a great, seizing, turbulent universe. Then, as the age of science came in, and indeed, the mythology of science became the new mythology, the word “myth” became synonymous with falsehood. Then in modern times, Jung and Hillman and others have restored myth to an honored place, but they brought it back in a much more inward, individual path, the psychological dimension.

Michael says that, with his vision of the “Afterculture,” he is hearkening back to the primeval use of myth as a great narrative for people and individuals who are undertaking to save the kingdom, “And so, I’m bringing in a slightly different focus, it’s contextualizing…”

On his website, he explains more of his vision of the Afterculture, “America is now giving birth to a mythology of the future. It’s half formed, but already deeply embedded in our collective consciousness – it’s the Road Warrior vision of an After- the- Collapse, where things get wild. It’s clearly an intuition of the huge changes that are bearing down on us, but it may be ill-informed. A breakdown of the old order does not necessarily mean a collapse into violence and anarchy. That River of Sanity culture has deep roots, it waits, it bides its time, and it brings with it a new, organic kind of community. What might we become, freed from the crushing weight of the old order? If we could embrace in our hearts and live out in our lives a sacred and sustainable path? Sometimes the quest for understanding something begins by naming it: so let us call it the Afterculture.”

Quoting Michael again, “We are witness today to the emergence of an ancient spiritual vitality into modern affairs. Call it the River of Sanity , an underground current which has run through all history, nourishing visionaries in every tradition. It comes from the deepest wellsprings of our humanity, and it moves us into harmony with the natural world and ourselves. It does not contradict scientific thought, but the river offers a profoundly wider way of engaging reality. It is caught, rather than taught. My work is to illuminate this emergence in the style or media most appropriate to the moment.”

He sees this gathering, Mythic Journeys, as a perfect expression of a new kind of culture, “a gathering of the lost tribe, trying to identify each other and a plan of action, and the most difficult thing is that it’s not simply an outer task, but for the task to succeed, we each have to become a different kind of person.”

Amen, Brother Michael!!!

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