Peter Max: Peace, Love, God, and Thought

Maura and I had a wonderful twentieth anniversary day in town this year - we both have a lot going on so we decided to delay any travel until things calm down a bit. We played hooky yesterday, taking the streetcar to the River Market to wander around. Our primary destination was one of our favorite places in the city - https://rivermarketantiquemall.com. Sometimes we don’t find anything we can’t live without, but yesterday we both found several potential treasures to bring home. We both decided on something from the same cabinet. She fell in love with a couple of Russian ceramic pieces, both of them a man and a woman wearing brightly colored clothes and holding little dogs. They reminder her of pieces we’ve seen at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. She had a hard time deciding on one couple so I told her to get both; she didn’t argue. I found four little books by one of my favorite artists, Peter Max and Swami Sivananda. Published in 1970 by William Morrow & Co., Inc. They are simply beautiful books with writing by Sivananda on one side and a complimentary Max illustration on the other. Here are the covers:

I think the book called “Thought” is my favorite. Maura and I had a little happy hour in the River Market at Brown and Loe and while we were waiting on our drinks and appetizer (the Baked Pimento Cheese — OMG), we both read though a couple of the books and I found myself getting chills and tearing up a little. These books, written in 1970, feel so timely right now considering everything going on in the world and in my life. It felt like the Universe giving me a gift. Here are a couple passages and the accompanying image:

Thoughts are bricks with which character is built. Character is not born. It is formed. Man’s thoughts are the architects of his circumstances.

Whatever you think is a boomerang. If you hate another, hate will come back to you. If you love others, love will come back to you. Therefore, understand the laws of thought. Raise only thought of mercy, love and kindness from your mind and be happy always.

I’ve been a fan of Peter Max’s psychedelic art for years. I fell in love with him when I first laid eyes on some posters my dad had hanging in his office at the music store he owned, the Music Box, in NKC, MO. I would spend hours contemplating his artwork. I definitely had favorites. The posters were from a poster book he produced in 1970 both in a softbound version and a limited edition, signed hardbound edition. My dad had removed many of them and hung them in the main office of the store, among other more crass, Xerox copied, cartoons that initially confused me (were they meant to be funny?) When I went away to college, after the store had shuttered, he gave me the posters, remembering how much I liked looking at them. I, of course, plastered my dorm room with them. I think I still have some of them, but they aren’t in very good shape at this point. I would love to find a copy of the poster book in good shape! I’m not sure what spoke to me in the illustrations initially, I loved the colors, the patterns, and the otherworldliness of them. My favorite, by far, was Cosmic Window:

The piece draws you in immediately; I love the sense of looking into another world, of escape, of a mystical world, ripe for exploration.

I didn’t even know these little meditative books existed, and yet, on the day we decided to skip out on our responsibilities and spend some quality time together, there they were, just waiting to be discovered. I’ve spent the last several months reinventing myself, exploring who I think I am versus who I want to be and working on the discrepancies. I’ve been realigning the course of my life. Some days it takes more effort than others; it feels like a giant ocean tanker with a wide steering radius. Other days feel easy and perfectly aligned with the Universe like the day Maura and I had together, several wonderful things happened that just continued to make our day. A woman at Brown and Loe came inside from the patio and just had to stop to tell us that she LOVED our style in a very genuine, humorous, self effacing way. It was nice to hear and kind of adorable. After we finished our dinner, the waitress brought us a small gift — a bottle of wine to take home with words and hearts written all over it to celebrate our anniversary. One more quote from Sivananda and occupying Max image, from the book “Love”:

There is no virtue higher than love; there is no treasure higher than love; there is no knowledge higher than love; there is no religion higher than love; there is no truth higher than love. My dear child of love, tread the path of love. This is your highest duty. You have taken this body to achieve love, which alone is the goal of life.

I know these aren’t new ideas, but we could really use them right now. There’s something meaningful about finding these books and holding them right now. T They are beautiful reminders from an artist who shaped how I see the world — words written fifty years ago that feel written specifically for right now. Maybe that’s what the Universe does when you’re paying attention.

Universal Quantum Consciousness

The Pixelated Universe

What if consciousness didn’t originate with human awareness? What if it was always out there, in the Universe, and our evolution allowed us to receive it, to connect with it? Consciousness happens at the nexus of human awareness and the Universe.

I don’t know that this is true, but I find it to be a fascinating and beautiful idea and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

Recently, I had a quick chat with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. After catching up on life, we started talking about this topic, which just happened to coincide with some of my recent thoughts. We’ve talked about deep ideas before, we both enjoy exploring ideas that might be considered a bit “out there” He knew I was open to it and love to talk about things like this but him bringing it up, when I had been doing my own exploration into these ideas felt meaningful and somehow fated to be — the Universe pushing us to explore further. The idea that our consciousness, our ideas and thoughts about ourselves are both bigger AND smaller than us is interesting to contemplate. I was a Philosophy major, and for good reason — I love to explore interesting ideas like this. The theory is that consciousness comes from outside from an external quantum field and our brains have evolved in such a way that we can recognize it and interact with it. We assume that it’s our own, that it comes from within our own minds. In reality, it’s both, existence comes from the external field and our brain’s interaction with it, and our interpretation of it.

I’ve always been a deep thinker (some might say over thinker). I like following the threads of topics that interest me and this one has come up in several different contexts lately, most recently when catching up with a good friend. I haven’t had the capacity to do this kind of mental exploration for a while; I was too busy managing systems and people (which I also enjoy) and solving more immediate problems. I enjoy having the luxury of sitting with ideas and questions that don’t necessarily have answers, that fascinate me for exactly that reason, they are unanswerable. I appreciate having the time and mental energy to sit with deeper, unsettled, sometimes unsettling questions again.

I do believe there’s an efficiency and elegance to our evolution, all of life’s evolution. As weird and messy as it can be in the short term, over the eons it somehow finds the best, most efficient way to exist in the world. Our brains are powerful information processors — a four pound lump of meat, astonishingly energy efficient, better than any computer we’ve built. Maybe that efficiency isn’t just clever biology. Maybe we’re not generating consciousness so much as tuning into it.

After the conversation yesterday, I brought up the topic with AI to help me process my thoughts on it a little further and it came up with a great quote towards the end of the conversation:

“We are talking about the nature of thought because, in a very real way, the universe is using both of us right now to try and understand itself.”

I don’t know if that’s true — it’s a grand anthropomorphism — but it’s a beautiful idea, and and the conversation with my friend felt like evidence of it. I’ve missed having the time and energy for this kind of thinking, exploration, and discovery. I’m learning to trust the Universe again, and to allow things to unfold as they will.