Transcendental Meditations - detail
2006, oil on canvas, 152 x 114cm
Notes:
Transcendental meditation is a mind/body state achieved by members of the international organisation the Natural Law Party, following the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They are a quasi-religious group drawing from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy from India, with the practice of yoga being a central concern. Yogic flying is achieved through deep transcendental meditation in the lotus position, where practitioners leap several feet in the air. The collective practice of this is believed to change the order of world events, bringing peace and love.
Transcendental Meditations is a painting of a person dressed as Yogi Bear tackling the rapids in a rubber dingy in Royal Gorge, Colorado, USA. The original low-resolution digital image comes from a website for Yogi Bear’s Royal Gorge Jellystone Park™ Camp Resort.
Yogi Bear from the Hannah Barberra cartoons is unrelated to yogis in India, except by name. He was a fond caricature of a famous American baseball commentator Yogi Berra, noted for his dry wit and aphorisms. The distinctly urbane character of Yogi Bear in the fictional Jellystone Park (play on Yellowstone) is the joke; he is anything but wild.
This leap from Yogi Bear to Transcendental Meditation suggests the New England Transcendentalists of mid-nineteenth century America. The leading voice of this group was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He preached a return to nature and an appreciation of the near, the low and the common instead of the sublime and beautiful; prioritising insight over rationality, naivety over sentimentality; abandoning a regard for the great, the remote or the romantic; eschewing an awareness of one’s place in history for direct experience. Emerson's ideas represented the American development of the ideas of European Romanticism, embodied by Goethe and Friedrich. The poet Walt Whitman was a leading exponent of this philosophical and political movement. Henry David Thoreau put Emerson's ideas into practice in the writing of Walden, where he gave a simple account of a return to nature when he went to live alone in the woods of New England for a year in 1845. This work was a big influence on Mahatma Ghandi's living experiments in South Africa in the early twentieth Century (a curious link back to India).
The painting of a man dressed as Yogi Bear, tackling the rapids of a river in Colorado, is a representation of the desire to return to nature and the inability to do so from a post-modern, post-capitalist perspective. The fact Yogi is smiling reveals a sincere intention to keep on trying to transcend the restrictions and distortions of a digitised world, indeed, with a belief that the nature of things is coming closer to the surface (of the canvas or screen).