Look at this image …
Now look at your self looking at this image.
Now,
Look at Who is looking
The artistic medium of Gazers - Matt Kane’s canvas, the blockchain - extends in the dimension of time, as blocks are formed one by one, irrevocably in the curious unidirectional manner that time seems to have.
A Gazer also endures through time, in both its state on the blockchain and the continuously unfolding nature of its manifestation. Like us and other things we tend to accept as being truly existent, Gazer has these static and dynamic elements that persist through time.
A Gazer invites us to contemplate the duration of this medium, time.
Unbounded, Infinite Time, or close to it.
12,000 years or so to be more exact: that’s how long Gazers are destined to keep changing.
Much the same thing as Eternity to the minds of most humans.
That’s 12,000 years of evolution
Equal to the known arc of recorded history until now
As the artist himself said on the day that Etch was unveiled: “Owning one Gazer is kind of like owning a piece of Infinity.”
A Gazer’s path ahead is certain, but unknown to the viewer. Grids of lines advance, retreat and migrate with countless fellow travellers. Different colours and patterns gradually begin to dominate the display and then recede again at different times of the day. We are comforted by the predictability of monthly changes, and excited by the uncertainty as to how those changes will appear. The Gazer’s path carries on to an unknown and seemingly endless future. No viewer can apprehend it all. Only the art itself can experience its entire being in the domain of expression.
The viewer who wishes to try to capture the whole must search in a different domain: that of the essence.
Here is a thing that, by virtue of its vast extension in the dimension of time, is in that measure greater and more enduring than ourselves. And by its dynamism, a thing that is intimately relatable. Could we think of this as a spiritual being, in both embodied and sacred meanings?
At the new moon a Gazer fosters soulful introspection. When full it aids sensual exploration. It is just as we might experience the periodic motion of the moon in the sky at some level of our animal being that we can sense and respond to, yet often barely perceive.
For one who has chosen or been called to seek the essence of a Gazer, the art exists as spiritual avatar; a mirror of true being. My Gazer for me is a doorway to an adamantine truth.
Gazer #583 gives me a mirror to my soul, a view towards the ineffable. I recognise it as having spiritual power. Somehow, gazing uncovers a special sense of being within me. Habitual thoughts and concepts fall away, and emotions of a deeply poignant quality arise. I struggle to describe them, even though they seem more real than anything else. They seem to arrive from a distant, mysterious place, but at the same time this experience of feeling is wholly personal, not obtained from somewhere but something that is experienced as a part of myself. I think of it as the heart of my being, now embodied in this vision, calling out its endless song. It is the voice of my ceaselessly perfect essence. All that is needed is the friendliness to let that voice sing on, without controlling or rejecting. That act of friendliness is the devotion that opens all doors to freedom.
To gaze is not to search. To gaze is to look steadily at one thing. A true Gazer is one who has finished searching: one who has found.
To gaze is to absorb and be absorbed, to possess and be possessed, to consume and be consumed, to be raised to the sphere of the unending, to honour the eternal, to perfectly render the eternal in the irresistible immaculate flame of innate pure awareness. And finally, to abide in the heart of that flame and see its light cast in all directions together.
For my Etch I want to curate an image that represents qualities of wholeness and reflexivity or reflectiveness - the coming together and interdependence of the viewer and the viewed. The embodied state of the true Gazer.
In memory of Sogyal Rinpoche, who showed me a sacred path.
The opening words of this article are attributed to Dudjom Rinpoche.
