ANIMATICA

Precepts, Insights and Principles of the Animatic Art Movement.
 

We are One.

Our understanding is that the perception of separation from other individuals, the community and the creation that most adult human beings experience, is an ego-generated illusion. This illusion of separateness, achieved by the ego's ability to create abstractions, symbols and systems to control reality, is a necessary precursor to sentience.

To experience consciousness, to be aware that we are aware, we must first achieve separation from the creation. The egos ability to create this artificial separation has resulted in Cosmos (our name for the Universal Unity or the One) becoming aware of itself on this planet.

To have consciousness occur, and to have the ability to experience even a little of the magnificence and grandeur of Cosmos, is a blessing beyond compare. However, there is a danger in ego-based sentience, that the self conscious individual thus created may lose or have severely impaired their connection to the One. The result of this loss of connection, in it's most extreme form, creates a psychopath. An individual who no longer feels any connection is capable of committing all manner of atrocities upon their community and their environment.

Children, before their ego begins to develop, are totally connected to the creation. They are One. We were all children once. Connection to the One is not a novel experience for any of us. However, it is one which all six billion individuals on this planet lose the ability to experience, to varying degrees, as we develop into adults.

To retain the separateness of individuality, at the same time as maintaining awareness of connection to the One, is the most important developmental task facing us as adults.  
 

An Individual is to Humanity like a Mushroom is to the Mycelium Root.

Imagine a field of mushrooms; each looking just like an individual. If mushrooms were conscious of themselves they might also imagine that they were stand alone units. However, if you dig down to the roots of the individual mushroom you will find that it is connected, by its root, to all other mushrooms in the field. In fact they are one entity. So too for us, the entity called humanity.

The perception of this is not as easily proven as we have no manifest mycelium root to reveal our connection. However, all six billion individuals on this planet are connected, aware of it or not, by blood and by soul, to each other. Our collective being is the awareness of Animatism.  
 

The Universe is one Entity: aware, conscious, creative and concerned.

We are not separate from each other, the community or the cosmos. We are one, multifaceted and evolving entity which Animatism refers to as the "creative spiritual force." The sentience we experience as individuals offers proof of the sentience of the cosmos as a whole. The unenlightened ego-self and its obsessive attempts to manipulate and control the environment, the community and the creation and the resulting death, destruction and despair, are the ignorance which our "collective spiritual self" attempts to enlighten through the inspired and visionary communications and manifestations which we call art.  
 

Artists are Messengers.

The messages animatic artists bring originate from this creative spiritual force.

We receive these messages through a process called inspiration, the in-flowing of the creative spirit. Our task is to prepare ourselves to experience these communications. Our responsibility is to manifest these spiritual messages into a tangible artwork, painting, sculpture, dance, song, etc; as clearly and truthfully as we are able, and then to offer these important and inspired communications to our community.  
 

Biological Oneness.

We live in an age of science where spiritual understandings and metaphors are not easily accepted, and so a biological addendum, a proof of our Oneness.

The biological proof of this Animatic perception is fundamentally simple to test, by your own reason and understanding of biological function. Simply follow your cell divisions back to the source of your inception.

In the beginning you were one cell in your mother's womb, her cell. Your father's sperm cell arrived, offered up DNA sharing and, the cell divisions that became you began. So, the cells that make up your physical being right now are the further divisions of your mother's cells. You are the continuation of your mother's cell divisions.

Now, follow the cell divisions back even further and you will arrive at your mother's inception in her mother's womb. Your mother's physical being is a continuation of the divisions of her mother's cells.

Back and back, generation after generation, we can trace the cell divisions. Eventually we will arrive at the primal mother, the first human female. All humans on this planet can trace their individual lineage back to this primal mother. We are her children and, in a profound way, we are her cells continuing to divide. We are her. Like a huge and expanding cellular mandala, reaching through eons of time and space, our being extends its matrix of unity and Collective Consciousness.

The human entity began as a mass of one. We were one point of sentient awareness in Cosmos. Now, millions of years later, still a mass of one, we have grown to six billion points of sentient awareness.

We are a biological and spiritual unity of being and consciousness. Our individual experiences are part of the shared resource of Humanity.

We understand that the people in our community, the people in our country and the people in our world, are as much who we are as our own body is. This awareness and its ramification's are the message of Animatism.

We are One.

R.L. Johnson 1999