A FURTHER STUDY OF IGNORANCE: POST-SELF AESTHETICS
My academic research in analytical philosophy began in 2010 as an undergraduate at Birkbeck, where I majored in Political Philosophy, and continued into MPhil research at the University of Glasgow, exploring parallels between Buddhism and neuroscience. The density of academic writing, and its limited accessibility to non-specialists, troubled me and led me to seek other ways of conducting and communicating philosophical inquiry. During this period, I presented at the Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference in Helsinki (2015) and the Royal College of Psychiatrists Congress in Edinburgh (2017).
From there I turned to poetry, particularly the Modernists Yeats, Cage, Pound, and Stein, and to theatre, engaging with Dada, the Theatre of the Absurd, Post-Dramatic, and Devised practices. My written dissertation proposed a new reading of W.B. Yeats’ play The Herne’s Egg (1937) through the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Rider–Waite deck). My performance work inverted Freud’s psychoanalysis, revealing the synthetic limits of analytical logic. Both projects were awarded distinctions.
At Sheffield, I came to understand that action and performance are critical to grasping and communicating the nature of consciousness, freedom, suffering, and death. This aligned with Eastern and esoteric traditions in which inhabiting conceptual or animate states, extended in tantric and Vajrayana Buddhist meditation and yoga, becomes a form of transformation. For me, performance links directly to human metamorphosis and intensifies through creative practice. Convinced that research must be practice-led, I undertook the pioneering MA Writing at the Royal College of Art in 2020, followed by the Graduate Diploma (Distinction) and their MA Contemporary Art Practice. Alongside, I have continued an independent research trajectory spanning forty years in astrology, meditation, and hermetic philosophy.
These pathways now converge in my MFA Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (2025–27), which I chose over a PhD to prioritise the calibration of my visual, performative, and philosophical practices, with sculpture as the leading thread.
Today, my research moves through sculpture as a site and portal where philosophy, performance, and matter converge. In my current project Luminance and Levitation, I am developing acoustic chambers, porcelain curves, and multi-player Helmholtz resonators as instruments of shared resonance. These works are not static objects but living, vibrational fields in which breath, voice, and material luminosity are inseparable. By grounding aesthetics in resonance rather than representation, I propose a practice that reframes art as post-self inquiry: a collective harmonic rising beyond individual subjectivity into shared experience. In this way, my work seeks to liberate art from fixed form, moving toward a philosophy of aliveness, resonance, and transformation.
From there I turned to poetry, particularly the Modernists Yeats, Cage, Pound, and Stein, and to theatre, engaging with Dada, the Theatre of the Absurd, Post-Dramatic, and Devised practices. My written dissertation proposed a new reading of W.B. Yeats’ play The Herne’s Egg (1937) through the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Rider–Waite deck). My performance work inverted Freud’s psychoanalysis, revealing the synthetic limits of analytical logic. Both projects were awarded distinctions.
At Sheffield, I came to understand that action and performance are critical to grasping and communicating the nature of consciousness, freedom, suffering, and death. This aligned with Eastern and esoteric traditions in which inhabiting conceptual or animate states, extended in tantric and Vajrayana Buddhist meditation and yoga, becomes a form of transformation. For me, performance links directly to human metamorphosis and intensifies through creative practice. Convinced that research must be practice-led, I undertook the pioneering MA Writing at the Royal College of Art in 2020, followed by the Graduate Diploma (Distinction) and their MA Contemporary Art Practice. Alongside, I have continued an independent research trajectory spanning forty years in astrology, meditation, and hermetic philosophy.
These pathways now converge in my MFA Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (2025–27), which I chose over a PhD to prioritise the calibration of my visual, performative, and philosophical practices, with sculpture as the leading thread.
Today, my research moves through sculpture as a site and portal where philosophy, performance, and matter converge. In my current project Luminance and Levitation, I am developing acoustic chambers, porcelain curves, and multi-player Helmholtz resonators as instruments of shared resonance. These works are not static objects but living, vibrational fields in which breath, voice, and material luminosity are inseparable. By grounding aesthetics in resonance rather than representation, I propose a practice that reframes art as post-self inquiry: a collective harmonic rising beyond individual subjectivity into shared experience. In this way, my work seeks to liberate art from fixed form, moving toward a philosophy of aliveness, resonance, and transformation.
- Research Manifesto for a Post-Self Aesthetic
- This research leads with exploring Helmholtz Resonance as sound not only produced, but is contained, amplified, and transformed by vessels (porcelain, alabaster, marble) with fleece suggesting bodies of containment and release.
- My practice explores creating Multi-Player Instruments (hard paste porcelain) to consider art as distributed resonance, not authored by one but born of a chorus. The opening of chambers to multiple breath sources embodies the non-self principle.
2. Harmonics as Cosmology
- Deep study of Helmholtz & Partch: Harmonics provide me with understanding of structural laws of vibration, equally mathematical and sensorial. They parallel astrology and theosophy, where planetary aspects are harmonic intervals in consciousness.
- My four decades as an astrologer and mystic practices, also drawing upon my own astrological chart, expands this focus of self undone in sound, imagination, and collective performance.
- I also turn to the Theosophic Tradition of Harmonics as bridges between matter and spirit; sound as a ladder of ascent and not music about transcendence, but music that enacts it.
3. Post-Self Aesthetics
- From Ignorance to Illumination: Drawing on Buddhist concepts, ignorance is not absence but potentiality, a field before form. Post-self aesthetics situates art not as representation of self but as its dissolution into resonance.
- Luminance and Levitation: This strand calibrates energy: what rises, what lightens, what floats. Aesthetics here is a vertical axis as kundalini rising, and post-self-enlightenment as sonic levitation.
4. Ritual & Prehistory
- I explore Standing Stones, Cairns, Megaliths: Evidence (and speculation) as encoded resonant chambers and proto-Helmholtz structures where chant amplified theta-wave states.
- My practice expands Mantra & Lament as my vocal practice (Lament for Gaia, MA works) sits in this lineage: sound that is both mourning and invocation, harnessing harmonics to shift states of consciousness.
5. Aesthetics of Material
- Porcelain & Parian are luminescent, brittle, resonant, porcelain especially embodies fragility and clarity, like sound itself.
- Incorporating Fleece & Felt as soft absorbers, shaping resonance into “orchestras of sacred harmonics.”
- I use Rust & Muslin as surfaces that bleed, entomb, and record entropy, reminders of time and mortality.
6. Philosophical Anchors
- Leading this project is Helmholtz's science of sound.
- I'm also catching up with Harry Partch and his harmonics as radical alternative musical cosmology.
- My aim is to shape a discourse that engages directly with Johnny Golding’s Radical Matter, the greatest living philosopher today.
- My legacy research into Buddhist Aesthetics as ignorance and enlightenment will be revisited and expanded.
- One of my methodologies is the use of prediction tools such as Astrology, investigating harmonics as cosmic principles of dynamic emergence.
7. Toward a Canon of Post-Self Aesthetics
- My research aims towards proposing a new aesthetic field:
- Not self-expression, but self-undoing.
- Not static form, but dynamic resonance.
- Not object, but portal.
- Not permanence, but luminous and sonic elevation.
Conclusion: I seek a canon of art where breath, resonance, and matter converge into a living, harmonic field. as a practice that is at once archaeological (megaliths, rituals), cosmological (harmonics, astrology), philosophical (aesthetics of ignorance), and radically contemporary (AI dialogue, post-self performance).
Science of Consciousness 2023 - QR CODE PDF (safe to download)
| tsc_2023_paper-_how_can_we_use_bi-handed_drawing_breath_and_sound_to_investigate_cyclical_spiral_energy_.pdf |
Research
Science of Consciousness Conference, Sicily, Italy, 2023
HOW CAN WE USE BREATH, SOUND, AND BI-HANDED DRAWING TO INVESTIGATE CYCLICAL SPIRAL ENERGY?
This research borrows and aligns the concept of Lyotard’s libidinal band with breath directed bipedal uprightness and aspects of cosmic breath-directed spiral verticality in disk galaxies (Ghosh et al 2022a) and proposes the examples of breath-directed bi-handed drawing and bi-directional writing as observable stabilised spiral spatio-temporal happenings, referred to here as acts of soma-neuro-emergence. Drawing upon recently published research that makes such contemporary speculations possible and correlations in ancient Eastern metaphysics, in particular early Buddhist teachings (EBT) on impermanence and the inter-spiritual concept of kundalini spiral energy1 and Zen this research approaches existence and being as continuously cosmologically emergent. The research further concentrates on the ‘bending’ nature of the spiral as enabling the essential ‘folding’ move in the Möbius strip /libidinal band deployed by Lyotard and Johnny Golding. In contrast to bipedal uprightness the research also links my Breath Induced Vivid Dreaming [BIVD] (Wilson: 2005, 2016) method that posits dreaming, hypnagogia, hypnopompic visualization as horizontal circadian paradigms. Golding's Radical Matter Research Lab's are a vital catalyst in the development of these ideas and propositions.
This research borrows and aligns the concept of Lyotard’s libidinal band with breath directed bipedal uprightness and aspects of cosmic breath-directed spiral verticality in disk galaxies (Ghosh et al 2022a) and proposes the examples of breath-directed bi-handed drawing and bi-directional writing as observable stabilised spiral spatio-temporal happenings, referred to here as acts of soma-neuro-emergence. Drawing upon recently published research that makes such contemporary speculations possible and correlations in ancient Eastern metaphysics, in particular early Buddhist teachings (EBT) on impermanence and the inter-spiritual concept of kundalini spiral energy1 and Zen this research approaches existence and being as continuously cosmologically emergent. The research further concentrates on the ‘bending’ nature of the spiral as enabling the essential ‘folding’ move in the Möbius strip /libidinal band deployed by Lyotard and Johnny Golding. In contrast to bipedal uprightness the research also links my Breath Induced Vivid Dreaming [BIVD] (Wilson: 2005, 2016) method that posits dreaming, hypnagogia, hypnopompic visualization as horizontal circadian paradigms. Golding's Radical Matter Research Lab's are a vital catalyst in the development of these ideas and propositions.
Here is the accompanying pdf paper.
| tsc_2023_paper-_how_can_we_use_bi-handed_drawing_breath_and_sound_to_investigate_cyclical_spiral_energy_.pdf |
Towards a Science of Consciousness, Helsinki, Finland 2015
Tibet (2001)
Throughout these past 40 years I have create art as paintings and sculptures. In early 2000s I traveled to Tibet and led a drawing and sculpture to Tibetan Nomad children, travelling to the rooftop of the planet. The children though never having drawn or experienced free imagination led expression, created a profound body of work that was exhibited at Spitalfield's Gallery, London with many pieces auctioned at a fundraising event at The Savoy London. The funds contributed to building nomad tent schools and the training of midwifes in remote Tibet. Observing the power of immediacy in creativity through these children led to expanding my own creative practice as moving meditation and expressive performance. A practice that quickly re-activated the bi-handed drawing method I taught myself as a child in the 1970s while watching television in the family house front room. From 2000 to 2010 my painting concentrated on the AIDS crisis and the impact of on children in poverty around the world, paintings included those of children living in the sewers of St Petersburg, Russia, and child victims of the Chernobyl Disaster. With children of my own to raise and full academic studies as well as my astrology practice in the UK and America, I closed my studio and concentrated creatively on poetry and writing.
The photographs here were all taken by nomad children of Tibet using disposable film cameras purchased at Boots chemist.
The photographs here were all taken by nomad children of Tibet using disposable film cameras purchased at Boots chemist.
