Sage under tree/Sage in the heavens

I painted these water colors in the summer of 1970, shortly before I became a devotee. There were more in the series, but I have only these two left. They were not thought out, but the product of an inner impulse, depicting the voyage of a seeker towards heaven. The sage riding a hammer-carrying horse into the sky. No idea what it meant, but the feeling of excitement, that I was headed into a glorious, colorful realm, was overpowering.

The immediately previous picture in the series was one of the sage walking on a path along a mountain value towards a fairy castle. In this last one, he is looking down at the mountains. I think the horse represents grace.

The color has unfortunately almost completely faded, and at different speeds, too.

The majority of seeds in nature die as seeds, and in human life, all natural men, all the timid, all the stupid and all the evil, remain in the starlit cavern of the fallen mind, hibernating in the dormant winter night of time. They are embryos of life only, infertile seeds, and die within the seed world. The possibility of life within them remains in its embryonic form of abstract ideas, shadows and dreams. Some of the dreams are troubled visions of the real world of awakened consciousness; others are the nightmares of paralyzing horror which all minds in a stupor of inertia are prey to. Here and there a seed puts out a tentative shoot into the real world, and when it does, it escapes from the darkness of burial into the light of immortality.

Such a seed, however, would only have begun its development, for the vegetable life is not the most highly organized form of life, because it is still bound to nature. The animal symbolizes a higher stage of development by breaking its navel string, and this earth-bound freedom of movement is represented in our present physical level.

The bird is not a higher form of imagination than we are, but its ability to fly symbolizes one, and men usually assign wings to to what they visualize as superior forms of human existence. In this symbolism, the corresponding image of nature would be neither the seed bed of the plant nor the suckling mother of the mammal, but the egg, which has been used as a symbol of the physical universe from the most ancient times.

Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947). 347-348.