tom riedlinger

reincarnation

Started drawing this image using colored pencils at the peak of an LSD session in 1975. Took about 100 hours to finish it afterward. Later published anonymously in Stanislav Grof's BEYOND THE BRAIN. It has multiple meanings for me on various levels. The roots reaching down and away from the world of light represent, I believe, a deep-seated abandonment fear that's entangled, deeper still, with fear of death. The casket containing a skeletal corpse is embedded in earth that resembles a cosmos, thereby pointing toward transcendence of the conflict in transpersonal realms of the human unconscious.

	convolution
	Began drawing this image with graphite pencil in 1974 when during an LSD session I remembered a line from Samuel Butler's book EREWHON: "What is a man's eye but a machine for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through?"