A Synthesis of Matter and Mind (version 14)

I just completed this new piece for my Micro-Chimerism series. This is the fourteenth version of this particular design. There isn’t any significance to that number that I consciously intended. It’s just that it took quite a few stages of metamorphosis to get to this satisfying version.

It reminds me of a painting on a cave wall, or like a design a Native American might paint on an animal’s hide. When I was drawing the design, I thought of how Buddhism teaches what is called the Eightfold Path. The paths Buddhism describes are supposed to lead to enlightenment.

Some of the square shapes surrounding the main ring in the design remind me of hammers. And the four circles on the outside of the main ring remind me of gears. This piece leads me in my associations into an abstraction of work and labor in society. Everything works like clockwork, and everyone is like a gear, and the hammer-like structures could symbolize the manual labor for which all modern cultures are founded on.

The philosopher Spinoza wrote about reason, and how to develop one’s reasoning abilities. He likened this process to starting real simple and basic, and advised one to build one’s reasoning from the most basic blocks of understanding into more complex structures.

Hammers and gears were developed from a more basic form of society and work, but they still are foundations that got humanity as a whole to where it’s at now.

This image has some associations with the idea of a big bang, and how scientists theorize how our known universe was born. I’m not sure if I totally agree with that simplistic understanding of our universe, but it still is a simple foundation from which more complex understandings can develop.