The Black Pearl: The Magical Synchronicities Surrounding a Mysterious Painting
Awakening to the authentic self
It was the strangest painting experience I can remember. The art class in the second semester of my junior year of high school focused on painting, and that day the art teacher had put out some cheap watercolor pan sets for the students to play with, the kind kindergartners typically use. I had tried watercolor in the past and found it frustrating when I felt I couldn’t control it with the wet-into-wet technique, which uses a lot of water, and somewhat boring when I could control it using less water.
But something was different this time. I didn’t start with any ideas about what to paint and I didn’t think about technique. I loaded the brush with purple and began with a big splash of it on the left side of the paper. I then added pools of dark blues and greens. Sharper shapes soon appeared to peel and spin off in lime, orange, and fuchsia.
I watched it all happen as if in a daydream with detached curiosity. At some point, the painting suggested a reorientation so I turned the paper vertical and built the abstraction upwards with a lighter blue. At the top, a sphere formed in deep blue-green, with iridescent swirls of pale pink and yellow. It looked like a dark pearl emerging from a colorful vortex.
When I see that painting today I still can’t figure out how I did various parts of it. There’s a dimensional quality of the splashes that somehow created depth without any deliberate intent or action on my part. I’ve tried to paint things like it all these years later and failed. Maybe it was, ironically, the cheap, student-grade materials that produced these effects.
But I’m also pretty sure that at the moment I had been in an alpha brain wave state, which is like light meditation below the beta brain wave (alert, problem-solving) state we’ve been led to believe is the only appropriate way to function in the world. During this painting experience my ever-anxious ego-mind stepped down and some other aspect of consciousness took over so that I could paint with freedom and ease I’d never experienced before.
People see all kinds of things in this image: a woman dancing, someone meditating, a seated child. Do you see the wizard? Someone pointed it out to me. I didn’t consciously paint it but it’s there. Tilt your head to the right and you’ll see his face just below the pearl. A blue wizard, with the traditional hat pointing off to the right, a glowing eye, nose, beard. Looks like Merlin, who has appeared to clairvoyants dressed in blue and even as a blue being. Suggests to me that artists — and people in general — in a state of surrender are conduits for extradimensional information.
In my early twenties, the painting hung on the wall in my Washington, DC, condo while I lived a life of shoulds, working respectable jobs dealing with rigid opinions (politics) or sensible facts and numbers (policy administration) in drab office buildings. And eventually, the bright but cheap, non-lightfast paint faded, and my painting became a ghost of its former self.
I threw it away — in perfect metaphor of self-abandonment.
In my late thirties, after realizing that I had no desire to make use of the master’s degree in urban planning I’d just earned, I rummaged through a box of forgotten things and found a sleeve of old Ektachrome slides of artwork I had made in high school. And there was a slide of the pearl painting. I had it digitized and prints made of the image. Untitled up until that point, I named it Resuscitation. And revived my life as a watercolor artist.
Soon after making that decision in 2013, I traveled to the Amazonian jungles of Peru for a month-long healing retreat with the traditional psychedelic/medicinal brew, ayahuasca. I was guided there intuitively because, as I would later understand, healing is an important phase of awakening. As I described to the retreat’s owner this painting I had rediscovered, he said, “It sounds like a depiction of spiritual growth.”
And then another pearl of wonder: In February 2014 I received photos of myself as a very young child painting outside on an easel. What’s striking is the similarity between the painting in the photos and the one I did at age 16, even though I don’t ever remember seeing these photos before, so they couldn’t have influenced my later artwork. It’s the same circular shape atop a pile of abstraction. The paintings even share the structure coming off the lower right of the sphere, like a sepal (one of those little leaves surrounding a flower bud). Remember this pearl and flower imagery because it becomes relevant later.
A couple months later, as I was lying in bed in the brain wave state between waking and sleep known as theta, I distinctly felt some gentle force push my head to the left and I heard a crystal-clear voice in my mind say, the black pearl is inside you.
I know what dreams feel like. This was definitely not a dream. By that point, I had grown very aware of and interested in the intersection of spirituality and science and I knew that the brain was not just a generator of consciousness but also a receiver, much like a radio. The notion propagated by the dominant materialist-scientific paradigm that those hearing voices are just delusional victims of faulty brain chemistry ignores what many aboriginal and shamanic cultures have understood for thousands of years: that the human brain is a doorway to other dimensions.
I wasn’t scared and I knew I wasn’t going crazy, and indeed I was excited because it meant that my psychic abilities — which every human has the capacity for — were gearing up. But I wasn’t interested in actual pearls in my waking life, so this message intrigued me. Who sent it, and what did it mean?
Later that morning I googled all things black pearl and, after loads of dead-end references to Pirates of the Caribbean, found two that seemed applicable. First was the book, The Black Pearl: Spiritual Illumination in Sufism and East Asian Philosophies, by Henry Bayman. In the postscript to the book he writes:
The “Black Pearl” or “Dark Pearl” (xuan zhu) is a symbol for the mysterious Way (Path). As the Turkish Sufi poet Harabi says, “[Only] the Wise understand this shadowy secret.” The mellow, hazy reflections from the surface give the appearance of seeing “as through a glass, darkly.” The perfection of its spherical shape reminds us of another perfection: that of God. (“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”)
The second reference was in a blog post by spiritual teacher Sabrina Reber, where she discusses the black dot that people often see in the mind’s eye during meditation practice. She doesn’t call it “black pearl,” but alternately “black dot” and “blue pearl.” Still, seems like too much of a coincidence to ignore:
The black dot or blue pearl is the original seed of consciousness that was inserted by your higher soul into your physical being and will lay [sic] dormant until the lower self decides from its own free will to ascend in consciousness so it can know itself better.
Within months of meditating regularly, I noticed a round black dot appearing in my closed-eye vision during my practice, and also when I naturally slipped into an alpha brain wave state when just staring off into space (something I was scolded for as a child but that I now realize was the soul’s way of saying, it’s time to meditate — a natural, necessary state for well-being practiced in eastern spiritual traditions for thousands of years, but that the western world is barely starting to recognize as beneficial).
The pearls on my path continued.
In the fall of 2018, my partner and I spent two weeks in Tonga swimming with humpback whales. At a celebration dinner, our boat captain’s wife sat next to me and showed me the jewelry she had for sale. The pendants were beautifully carved mabe (MAH-bay) pearls, which are cultivated pearls that form like blisters on the interior sides of the shell. A piece of the surrounding shell that contains the pearl is often included in the jewelry and may be elaborately carved.
She described the huge amount of effort that went into cultivating and extracting the pearls, and how Tongan families would share the mollusks’ meat — a real delicacy — after the pearls were harvested. She also told me about the Tongan master carver who worked on these pearls in an interesting way: Instead of deciding on a design ahead of time, he would hold each uncut pearl in his hands and intuit the design that was already waiting within it, which he viewed as his job to uncover.
I remember reading about how Michelangelo worked in a similar way, and I loved the idea of the artist considering the material a conscious collaborator. It reminded me of how my watercolor painting seemed to paint itself through me.
I chose a pendant with some traditional Tongan carving ringing a pearl. Only later did I see in it what might be a stylized view of my painting’s subject from above, with the pearl surrounded by abstraction.
In November of 2018, Teal Swan — one of the most influential spiritual teachers in my awakening process — wrote a blog post that, as usual, resonated with me, since her teachings focus on recognizing and healing the trauma most of us carry as a result of dysfunctional families and stifling societal norms. But the metaphorical imagery she used, which I’ve bolded below, really captured my attention as it seemed to explain my painting in such a satisfying way:
When we come into the world the people around us do not look at us like gifts to nurture so we can unfold so they can see the unique pearl within us. The people around us look at us as if we are a raw substance to mold into what they think is best for us and for them. They tell us that certain things are acceptable and if we are those things, we will be loved and safe. They tell us that certain things are unacceptable and if we are those things, we will be rejected and unsafe.
Anything that remotely resembles something that will meet with disapproval is then something that we feel vulnerable about. And we begin a process of splitting ourselves. We put forward only the things about us that make us loved and safe in the world. The rest, we keep hidden. It is as if we will not let certain lotus petals open and therefore keep the pearl hidden so as to fit into the world and feel safe.
You can only build a life from what is real. Unless you know and admit to what you really think, really feel, really want, really need and actually do, you are working with illusion and you are going nowhere. It is like building a castle on thin air. It will crumble . . . .
Authenticity is the highest state of being that one can achieve. In the years to come, authenticity will become the replacement for enlightenment as the true goal of spiritual practice and more than that, the true goal of life itself. And as such, our society will be an expression of our collective human essence instead of the very thing that molds it, corrupts it, keeps it hidden and shuts it up.
My perspective on my painting continues to evolve. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the paradoxes of pearls. There’s a captivating, desirable perfection to them. But perfectly round pearls are rare if they exist at all; it’s an illusion of perfection that we usually see. And we couldn’t enjoy pearls if it weren’t for the unpleasant experiences of the creatures that formed them.
What we’re actually seeing in a pearl is a sort of alchemy: it’s trauma, integrated and transformed. The allegories suggesting that pearls represent the hidden perfection within us — our “true” natures, the spark of God-consciousness — serve us in a more holistic way if we acknowledge that the perfection we seek results from a process not of disowning and rejecting, but of accepting and integrating every seemingly imperfect, unwanted, painful thing that has occurred in the container of our experience. Without such an embrace of the unwanted, the pearl wouldn’t even exist.
If this story has a soundtrack, it’s “Less than a Pearl” by Enya. The translated lyrics suggest they are sung by being still in a state of incarnational amnesia but starting to wonder about their planet’s place in the cosmos and who else might be out there. It’s early yet; they don’t recognize the pearl they are:
Long journey to knowledge
Now sings the way
of what was
The world moves
As it is, out of night, the written end of night,
And, as it is, out of night a small world-shape.
Our words we send beyond the moon
Our words and the shape of world-time
Out of the world to find an answer In the journey of the lost word.
. . .
Less than a pearl in a sea of stars
And alone in the shadows our island is unfound
Our endeavours leave the way of the world
Yet our dreams have hope
As it is, nothing written is a lost word
And, as it is, our words may journey to no-one
We call out into the distance . . .
Still lost in shadow but emerging from a scripted night, yearning for off-planet contact? These are symptoms of spiritual awakening. It’s not just lyrics to a song; it’s happening en masse right now on planet Earth as we near the completion of this dark stage of a major cosmic cycle. And those beings in the song are no more alone in the cosmos than we are.
Of course, nothing is lonelier than alienation from the authentic self. That’s why those undergoing a spiritual awakening like me start to wonder not only about what else is out there, but who they really are inside. And that, I think, was the purpose of my painting as it resurfaced again and again in my life: to remind me of who I really am.
If you’re interested, prints of Resuscitation are available for purchase here.
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