In the Upanishadic materialization of Spirit, media of increasing density precipitate the forms, landscapes and sensible objects which humans apprehend as the symbolic embodiments of conscious being. Within etheric space the fields of electromagnetic and gravitational attraction and repulsion create the conditions for the appearance of atomic fire, saurya agni, the element that brings into first visibility the forms of things. This plasmatic element, radiant and liquid, modulates itself into substantial textures and densities, which then cool and congeal or vaporize into the gaseous, liquid and solid shapes of the world we know. In the Upanishadic view of creation, the self-born (swayambhu) Purusha emerges out of the unmanifest waters with its subjective properties of sense-experience and projects from these the universe of sense objects. Within this universe are then produced the creatures, the last of which is the human. The properties of sense, figured as the gods, then enter the human being, declaring him to be truly well fashioned. This is the Upanishadic assertion that the human being is made in the image of God or, in other words, that from within the creation, the human has the potential of experiencing reality in the experience of the Creator. The subtilization of human senses may peel away the objects of sense and reveal in them their formative elements and processes. This is an aspect of art as yoga, shilpa-yoga, union of creation and creator, subject and object, primordial elements of sense and sense object. Refining a process of this nature, Arvind Akki has been able to contact and manifest a radiant and plasmatic earth with its landscapes of liquid fire and its spirit forms of aspiration and floating or descending shakti. From flat gentle suspended washes of light through fields of colored sparks and fluid dunes to glassy molten rocks, forms of flight and powerful etheric storms, Arvinds eye strips the inconscient materiality of the familiar earth and reveals another materiality which pulsates and glows beneath waiting its hour of manifestation an earth at once of the primordial pre-human past of the gods and of the beckoning post-human future. His art is an invitation to this deepening of sight, the illuminated perception of the primal concentration of consciousness kindling the fire of tapas, tapo-agni, formative of sense and world and the symbols of the Beyond.
