In 1998 I asked Gage Taylor to write something for the Art America website. Websites were still new for artists at that time. I am sharing this highly intimate interview once again as many issues are relevant now.
Ten years before we met I was living and working in Germany, attached to Engineering and Programs with the USAF. Every wall of my modest apartment was covered in posters and cards done by Gage Taylor. I told a friend, “If I can’t paint like Gage Taylor, I don’t want to paint at all.” A decade later, I became his student in Northern California.
Gage was a true visionary; a meditator with a profound connection to nature. A writer and musician as well as a painter, he attracted brilliant minds and shiny people. He gave others a wide berth to be their authentic selves. He could remember every word a person shared with him decades after meeting them. He was a person who listened on a deeper level. This is why I wanted him to do an interview with me.
Gage Taylor died of cancer nine months before the attack on The World Trade Center. He had just finished his unpublished novel, Pillars of Fire.
In the following interview, this 21st century visionary shares her astonishing insights on living multidimensionally, ascension through kundalini yoga, Tibetan Dream Yoga, and the evolution of humanity.
“When Uriél Danā first asked me if I would write something about her for her website, my first thought was; which part of her? There’s the internationally recognized painter, the sculptor, the award-winning poet, the writer, the mystic, the holy woman, and the visionary. There is also the outrageously funny, sensuous, astute business woman that can parallel park a car anywhere on the first shot.”
– Gage Taylor –
Uriel Dana walked into my life in 1983. She was the first and only student in the gallery and museum management program at College of Marin to curate an exhibit and lecture series. The show was “Crystal Energy”, and it was about the healing power of sound, color, light, and crystals from the metaphysical, Native American, and Scientific points of view. It was a ground-breaking event that influenced many people and businesses. It also established Uriél Dana as an artist of noteworthy skill. Her work carried its own weight hanging side by side many established San Francisco Bay Area painters. Shortly after that exhibit, I accepted her as my apprentice, and within a year her paintings were of a skill level to command prices that took the rest of us years to achieve.
Since that time, she has been my apprentice, my painting partner, my lover, my wife, and now my ex-wife. Through all of those roles, she has remained my best friend and spiritual teacher.
When Uriél Danā first asked me if I would write something about her for her website, my first thought was; which part of her? There’s the internationally recognized painter, the sculptor, the award-winning poet, the writer, the mystic, the holy woman, and the visionary. There is also the outrageously funny, sensuous, astute business woman that can parallel park a car anywhere on the first shot.
I decided to take my cue from one of her tools, the Tarot. Uri’s soul card is the High Priestess, but her personality card is Lust. The High Priestess not only governs dreams, but represents a person who is highly telepathic, independent, wise, and in harmony and balance within themselves.
The Lust personality is one of passion, heightened perceptions, multi-dimensional creativity, and creator of successful outcomes to all challenges. It is also the card of the Tantric. Uriel Dana is a woman destined to help people blend their spiritual and physical natures through her discourses, poems, and paintings.
“Magical things do happen around her. I’ve seen scrunched up balls of money blow across the street in the middle of nowhere when she needed some, and I’ve seen her pull nearly $400 in wet cash out of the sand on a deserted beach.”
Ironically, someone once described Uri to me as a cross between the original Mrs. Emma Peel and David Copperfield. That was a perceptive observation… magical things do happen around her. Over the years I’ve seen her energy affect people, animals, and plants. I’ve even seen yellow jackets move their nests for her.
Uri and I once walked into a bakery where a big commotion going on. A bird had flown inside and there were workers with towels running about and customers standing aside. As we walked in, everyone in the room stopped and looked at Uri for some reason. It was like her presence made everyone stop and take a breath. Uri just looked at the bird and it flew down to a window sill. She walked over, picked it up, then carried it to the door to release it, petting it like a cat!
At first, everyone just stood there with their mouths hanging open but then people started to look at each other and smile, acknowledging they had witnessed something special.
We sat down with our coffee at a window seat. I swear that same bird flew down, perched outside our window, and said something to her telepathically. She nodded her head, and it flew away. Uri refers to this kind of communication as the “twilight language” of the Dakinis’ (feminine nature spirits).
“The most unexpected people, including priests and psychiatrists, have sought her council. A member of European royalty seeking information on St. Germain was brought to her.”
Uri also has a profound effect on people. The most unexpected people, including priests and psychiatrists, have sought her council. A member of European royalty seeking information on St. Germain was brought to her. A local Sikh, now an acquaintance of ours, would get “spooked” every time they would run into each other. He thought she was putting a spell on him because he would feel unusually good for days after encountering her! I have one last extraordinary story to share.
One morning when we were having coffee in downtown Sausalito, Uri excused herself to sit quietly by the waterfront. I noticed, as she closed her eyes and stilled herself, that a group of German tourists began to line up on a bench behind her. Each one closed their eyes and entered a meditative posture for the entire time she meditated. Without ever noticing Uri, they became her spiritual chorus.
These are just a few of the things I have witnessed since I’ve known her. She rarely mentions these events unless it is to demonstrate how we all are capable of achieving the same results on our spiritual path.
Uri has the ability to see the sacred in all without moral judgment, to blend the spiritual with the sexual in life and in all of her art forms. I cannot begin to explain how she does this, so I decided to ask her to share those secrets herself in the following interview.
Q: Uri, how would you explain the magic that happens around you?
A: That’s a big question. I’ve been doing self-modified dream yoga work for 25 years. If you combine soul travel with lucid dreaming, you get the gist of what I do. I move in and out of other dimensions in my sleep as easily as most people drive their cars from state to state. I just travel in the dream states.
To answer your question, for me, everything is a dream, maya (illusion)… a hologram, if you will. When we know this truth in our deepest being, there are tools we can learn to help us stay awake in our dreams, and to recognize the dream while we’re awake.
The magic you speak of comes when I don’t like the way the dream is heading, so I change the ending. I just happen to be awake.
Q: I think you’re going to have to explain, “other dimensions” a little more.
A: There are many realities that exist simultaneously, but in different wavelengths. Many people can remember when there were only a few television channels – CBS, NBC, ABC – and maybe an educational channel. Some people perceive our world with similar limited vision. This does not mean that the other 496 stations you can pick up with the right equipment, like a satellite dish, do not exist.
Our past, future and present all exist simultaneously, but in different wavelengths. What we perceive as this life only feels that way because we are tuned into this wavelength.
Our egos can go into panic when they first hear this because they fear they’ll no longer be the center of our universe. that they’ll be diminished somehow. The funny thing is, to those other dimensional aspects of ourselves, we’re just a character in a dream, just as they are to us.
Q: When did you begin to incorporate this multidimensional vision of reality into your life?
A: To answer that, I’d have to go back to when my dream work began. I had to learn to control my dreams because my dreams were controlling me. For 15 years I had a severe sleeping “disorder” called parasomnia, or what is commonly called night terrors.
Night terrors are very different from nightmares. During normal REM sleep, our bodies are actually paralyzed, but with night terrors, dreamers can sleepwalk and can harm themselves or others. I was a horrendous sleep walker and would walk blocks away from home in the dead of winter! The other thing about parasomnia is that if you wake the sleeper, you can actually cause brain damage.
I can tell you that metaphysically, what is happening, is that the sleeper has begun to shift dimensions as they’ve relaxed into the higher brain functions. The sleeper can’t be awakened because to them they’re not asleep… they’re in another dimension!
Even if I did not come to this understanding from my own experience, how else can you explain why some blind people dream with vision? Or what about how common it is for twins to have the same dream, on the same night, at the same time, but from their individual perspectives? In fact, there’s even a Tantric Buddhist technique for couples to share dreams.
Q: Is the ability to perceive multidimensionally only for people who have some type of dream skills?
A: No, but it helps to have some understanding of how our personal energy systems function, like Kundalini yoga. One of the reasons I’m sharing my work is because our universe is currently moving from 3rd to 4th dimensional consciousness. In a 4th dimensional reality, our thoughts manifest themselves instantly without the lag time we currently experience. Any psychological damage or issues we haven’t confronted are suddenly in our face.
We’re seeing great polarities of light and dark in behavior right now. People are saying to themselves, what’s going on here? I think it’s the hardest on people who do not have a spiritual anchor. In fact, I don’t believe it even matters what that spiritual anchor is, just as long as your soul has a resonance with it. All beliefs hold a piece of the puzzle, and our souls are drawn to what we need to remember. To put it another way, just because you don’t remember the dream doesn’t mean you didn’t have one.
Q: Is there anything special people can do to start remembering more of their dreams?
A: One technique I use is an ancient Tibetan Dream Yoga exercise that activates our dream states through stimulation of the brain stem. You visualize an illuminated blue sphere floating in front of your 3rd eye, and then with your mind, tell the sphere you wish to remember your dreams when you awaken. You then take the sphere and swallow it until it rests in the back of the throat. It’s very effective. Blue is the color of the throat chakra, incidentally. For myself, I meditate prior to going to sleep, and I keep my bedroom a sacred place of ritual; no tv’s or electronics. I also sleep with my head toward magnetic north to align my electro-magnetic energy fields with the earth’s unified fields. I do this because the electromagnetic rhythm of our brains is synchronized with the Earth’s.
Also, I rarely drink alcohol as it greatly interferes with REM sleep, and it makes it impossible to soul travel. I guess it all sounds a bit over the top, but then… so am I.
Q: You said earlier that you experienced multidimensionality when you suffered from night terrors. Could you be more specific?
A: When I was in “an episode”, I would be reacting on a physical level to what was happening in the dream… in my case fear, terror, & horror. Sounds like a law firm! (Laughs).
Anyway, I had some counseling in dream management and spent many years learning to fight dream demons, or what I call “dreamons”. While having a nightmare, I was trained to stop, turn around and face whatever was chasing me. With night terrors this does not work.
My night terrors began in 1959 during one of the invasions of Lhasa by the Chinese when many monks were brutally murdered. In my dream, I was one of those monks in the middle of a massacre. I would be completely out of my mind with terror… but when you’re 5 years old, how do you explain why? This “dream” image reoccurred for many years until each monk’s face became etched into my mind. Somewhere along the line, I resolved to be the caretaker of their memory, and that helped me transmute the dream pattern.
Q: So what are nightmares, then?
A: Nightmares are unresolved spiritual issues our souls need to complete with, or prepare for on the mental level. Generally, they’re fear- based issues that need to rise to the surface in order to be seen. If your nightmares come near morning, then you have something to worry about! Premonition dreams nearly always come just before we wake up.
That reminds me that for years I had a recurring pre-waking nightmare of a flying Ganesha trying to pick me up like a predator bird. (Ganesha is the Hindu elephant-headed God that removes obstacles and blesses written works). He’s a totally benevolent God, but in my nightmare I knew somehow that if he caught me, it would be the end of my life as I knew it. This dream turned out to be a premonition of a near-death experience I would have many years later.
Q: What did an elephant-headed Hindu God have to do with a near death experience?
A: You know, in ancient Egypt the word “dead” meant, “not here, present elsewhere”. This describes exactly what happened to me. I experienced another lifetime in India down to the most minute detail when I flatlined from anesthesia during a surgery. I just want to ad that it’s important to know that figures in dreams will take whatever form your consciousness feels safe with. They can look like a dead parent, an angel, Jesus, Allah, or an archetypal movie star. It’s all just energy communicating in a way that has meaning to us personally.
When I flatlined, I saw a time and place when indigenous peoples lived side by side with some of the non-terrestrials that seeded this planet with their own DNA. These beings came and went regularly through interdimensional vortices. They communicated inter-dimensionally. I saw India, but not India. I saw what the eye could not see. A doorway to a parallel world and the life I was living in that world.
When I came home from the hospital, I had the first of my four “Shiva” dreams. Shiva is known as “Lord of Dreams”. I am not Hindu, the way. These were life changing dreams.
Q: In what way did the Shiva dreams affect you?
A: Imagine yourself exploding into a billion atoms and coming back together re-assembled with two fists full of pearls. Each pearl contains an important insight, but you don’t exactly know what to do with them. Those four Shiva dreams became a string for me to bead those pearls into a mala… or necklace, that would tie everything together. Like I said, they were life-changing for me, but may not be anyone else’s truth, and that’s OK, too.
Someone I really respect once asked for my spiritual hit on something. I answered with the qualifier, “I’m just an artist”. He said, “Yeah, right.” His reply made me realize that each of us has an answer for someone, somewhere… that all of us have something unique to give. My life experiences allow me to perceive the world differently. Because of how these visions were revealed to me, I share them.
Q: Especially in light of the dream I remember you having the night before your NDE. Would you mind sharing that here?
A: I dreamt I was being taken to the 13th Dalai Lama in his private rooms. When our eyes met, I began to morph into a young boy, but he held up his hand to stop the process. I then began to turn into the woman I am now, and he began to morph into the 14th Dalai Lama, his holiness Tenzin Gyatso. He gave me a white lotus, and I knew everything was going to be OK. A friend I shared this with said, “I wonder what he dreamt that night!”
Q: Let’s talk about Shiva. You said you had a clear impression you were talking to a real entity, not a symbolic being… so does he really have four arms?
A: No. Most portrayals of holy beings, in writing or in art, is metaphorical. The Shiva in my dreams was telekinetic. As he’s used his hands, he was also capable of moving objects with his mind. This metaphor is why he was portrayed in art by the indigenous people as having four arms. According to the being from my dream, our psychic abilities become exceptionally enhanced when all four areas of our brain are completely activated. This is referring to our reptilian, neo-mammalian, limbic, and the etheric 4th brain. (He said he had an additional 4 etheric levels to his brain.)
I used to wonder when I saw sculptures of deities with three heads why their fourth head was always said to be “understood”. It finally occurred to me that it was an allegory for the spiritual consciousness we achieve when all four parts of our brain are activated.
Another thing that really struck me about the Shiva in these four dreams was he was half-male and half-female, and clearly not human. He did not have snakes around his neck as portrayed in art, but he did wear a heavy amulet of two snakes making a caduceus, complete with winged sphere. The sphere was a moonstone, which is considered to govern dreams. I have to admit that I was totally obnoxious to him in the first dream.
One technique I have for remembering important dreams is to get confrontational with whoever or whatever I’m dealing with. I kept treating Shiva like a dreamon, and he kept looking at me like I clearly needed to get a grip. There I was making myself big like a cat with its fur all bristled out, and he says, “I’m here to help you remember.” I think I said something like, “and who the hell are you?” Great start eh?… (Laughs).
Q: What happened then?
A: He told me who and what he was, where he was from and what was being asked of me. I asked questions, he answered, and I asked more questions. All four dreams were like that. He talked of Meru, and how each major star system had emissaries there to bring their world’s highest spiritual truths to this world when it was ready. He said that virtually every major religion and esoteric belief system on Earth could be traced to the Central Asian perimeters of Meru.
This Shiva said he was originally from the Sirius Star System; that he represented the Royal Order of Melchizedek, Metatron, and the Archangel Michael… the holy trinity of his trident. He said his trident was energetically connected to the world axis and allowed him to perceive truth on three levels of reality; physical, spiritual, and psychic and in many dimensions.
He spoke of our world shifting into 4th dimensional consciousness, why and how we need to activate our new DNA, terrestrial kundalini, and the ganas’s, or dwarf avatars.
Q: Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’ve got to know… what are dwarf avatars?
A: Dwarf avatars represent resonance holders for this universe. They are beings that act as a pitch pipe for the rest of us. They are meant to be felt, not heard, so to speak.
Dwarf avatars are not the same as regular avatars, commonly known as bodhisattvas. Those are beings with full Christ or Buddha consciousness that serve spirit in physical form.
In my dream, Shiva said that Mother Meera was a dwarf avatar and wasn’t meant to be brought into the mainstream. Now, just for the record, let me say right here that I mean no harm or disrespect for Mother Meera. It seemed very important for Shiva to bring clarity to this issue because of some damage that had been done. Andrew Harvey was harmed when he brought her out into the world because that energy then became distorted by her personality bias. Shiva said a full avatar would not condemn anyone spiritually for their sexual preferences; in fact, bi-sexuality is our true spiritual state. I believe what he was referring to was our own androgyny.
Q: Wow, is that why Shiva is portrayed in art as half-male, half-female?
A: Yes, because his male and female natures are in balance within himself… but he also has both male and female organs. Well, I didn’t ask him to show me, it was just “understood”. This is the tricky thing with trendy distortions of ancient practice. It’s what I refer to as, “tantra-Lite..”
Tantra is a yoga, and whenever you see the word yoga, you’re talking about an energy system. Most Tantras are not sexual in nature but full of complex magical formulae. Sexual Magic came out of those texts. Kundalini energy is feminine in nature but functions by uniting the male and female polarities within us. To put it another way, Kundalini energy functions very androgynously. By the way, when that synergistic energy becomes activated, even when unintentional, a “straight” person may find themselves dealing with awakening bi-sexuality, whether they act on it or not. This can create fear disguised as homophobia.
Q: Why is it important now for more people to concern themselves with understanding kundalini energy?
A: Because it literally holds the key to mankind’s evolution as well as our survival as a species. According to my four dreams, the non-terrestrial races that seeded this planet did so by mating with the indigenous people.
I’ve since learned that tales of Gods mating with terrestrial females show up in scriptures and mythologies everywhere. There’s a bit in Genesis where t”he sons of God saw the daughters of men and took wives of all that they chose,” and who could forget the Hindu epics talking about Krishna’s love marathon with 900,000 gopis (cow herding Earth girls)?
The offspring of these races are what will be called the 5th race… half-human, half-other. Believe it or not, that’s us. We are about to make a huge evolutionary jump in consciousness, and a lot of people are not going to understand what the hell is happening to them. Very few of us use both hemispheres of our third, or neo-mammalian brain, much less know how to access our Limbic system!
Q: So, when we hear about left-brained people, or right-brained people, are we actually talking about third brain activity?
A: Yes. A person using the left brain hemisphere looks at a puzzle made of blue squares, yellow circles, and red triangles, and proceeds to put the squares in the square shape holes, the circles in the round holes, etc. It enables our mind to function objectively.
A right brained person would look at those same blocks, dig out a soldering iron, and in an hour would have built a free standing sculpture with those same blocks melted into tertiary colors of green and orange. The right hemisphere functions subjectively and is the home of our imagination and intuition, whereas the left brain is the part of us that balances the checkbook. When these two parts of ourselves are synergistically interactive with our heart, we begin to access the limbic system, and through the limbic system, our etheric 4th brain.
Our own evolution is why we must sustain our artists, our musicians, our spiritual leaders. This is where we will find the gatekeepers to our higher consciousness. As our society continues to eliminate these skills from it’s educational programs, we may discover that, by killing the arts, we are killing our own evolution. Our brains need these skills to develop the way they were meant to be. The brain access that allows an artist to create also gives non-artists creative solutions to problems.
Q: What does the limbic system do for us that its necessary for our evolution?
A: The limbic system activates our frontal lobes and is the gateway to the neocortex… our higher functioning 4th brain. The limbic system or paleomammalian part of our brain allows us to access our psychic abilities and experience multidimensional interaction. The limbic system allows us to tap into universal awareness, and to read our own imprints in the akasha. When these first three areas of our brain become synergistically energized, our etheric fourth brain, in conjunction with our secondary chakra system, will activate our new DNA. According to the Shiva messenger in my dream, three hybrid viruses will be spread through the human food chain in beef. Nothing pharmacological will have an effect. Our new DNA will be 12 strands, like our starseed ancestors, not two. This is what will ultimately save us from these viruses.
Q: To tie this all back together, you are saying here that we can activate our new DNA through sexual activity?
A: Well, not just any sexual activity. Here’s a hint … if a guy thinks the initials PC stand for personal computer or politically correct, head back to the personals. I’m talking thousand petal lotus orgasms here, but yes, we are capable of activating our new DNA through sex. We must first be able to consciously access our limbic system, however, as the feedback between the heart chakra and the limbic system is instant. This activates our secondary chakra system via the left side of our heart… as in Buddha being born from his mother’s rib. To ascend, we must go through our heart chakra, and to go through the heart chakra, we must be in our bodies. Even if you are a very spiritual person, you are a spiritual being in a physical form. We must learn to re-connect our spiritual and physical natures.
Q: What about people who are uptight about their sexual nature for personal religious reasons?
A: Sexual energy is an extremely powerful tool for our spiritual growth and empowerment. Convince people it’s wrong or harmful to their spirituality, and you’ve robbed them of enormous spiritual power. This is exactly what some religions have done intentionally at certain times in history.
Repressed sexual energy often becomes distorted into anger or hateful behavior, like abuse or homophobia. Whenever I’ve observed someone who tries to force their homophobia on others, I always find myself thinking, “He-doth-protest-too-much”.
Celibacy is appropriate if it is an individual spiritual choice and not forced on us by someone else’s agenda. For many millennia, celibacy was necessary to keep the vortices to the higher dimensions open. Those who chose to maintain that resonance for humanity did so out of love and wisdom and deserve great respect. It’s important to realize, however, that these people were not repressing sexual energy, they were transmuting it into another form. This requires many years of training in kundalini energy.
Q: The shringara rasa series you painted reflect women that are empowered by their spiritual-sexual nature, and yet you do not give in to what the media deems the ideal woman’s body. Why?
A: Because we are perfect in our imperfections.. I caught about 2 minutes of the last … I think it was the Miss Universe pageant, and was shocked to hear the hosts saying that something like 83% of the contestants had breast implants!
Women aren’t built like little boys with perfect domes 3” apart on their chest. Every one of us has a unique shape with scars that tell of our battles with weight, our health, or children we have carried. Sooner or later our breasts stop making eye contact when our lover enters the room. I think women have more hang-ups about their bodies than they do about their sexuality.
Men can be self-conscious too… especially if they are judging the size of their lingam by some guy wearing a prosthesis in a porno movie. To get past this, we need to become the woman or man we would want to date. We need to treat ourselves the way we would want to be treated, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. The only person that is responsible for our personal happiness is ourself. When body, mind, and spirit are in alignment, we are in integrity, and with integrity comes self esteem. This is a pre-requisite for a great relationship because we are unable to love anyone more than we are able to love ourselves.
Q: One last question that I know people are curious about. Why do you wear a bindu?
A: It is to remind me of the work I need to do as a soul. It’s like a string tied around your finger to remember something. The bindu is a sign of expanded consciousness. Around the end of 1997, Sai Baba, the Indian avatar, began occasionally showing up in my dreams. I had done so much body shifting, I honestly thought he was Richard Simmons! Around that time, several people, some of whom I’d visited in their dreams, began giving me gifts, independent of one another, of things to put on my third eye. These included sacred oils made with ground moonstone, as well as vibhuti, a sacred ash made manifest by Sai Baba, and brought from India to a Melchizedek Priest. I was then given a wrapped package of Bindi. It was the last thing in the world I would have thought about wearing or expected as a gift from this person, but I could feel what it was through the package. I put one on, and it felt right so I just kept wearing one daily from the package.
A funny thing started to happen… people I didn’t know started recognizing me from their dreams… now there’s some amazing stories! I started to get the feeling this would be how people would know me. Then one night I dreamt I was in a friend’s kitchen in Berkeley, and they were cooking something up on the stove. An old Indian holy woman was mixing something in a bowl at a work island in the middle of the room. She looked up at me and said, “Where’s your Bindu?” I said, sort of sheepishly pointing off in the distance, “Well, my body’s asleep so I took it off!” She said, “We know how to take care of that.” She took out an object that was a cross between a branding iron and hot wax seal and branded my third eye! She said, “now you’ll never be without .”
This told me I will not wear one forever. Dreams of premonition or that have some bearing on our futures always have 3 round objects in them. This dream had a frying pan, a bowl, and the branding iron. The walls were also purple, of great spiritual significance in a dream, so I’ve been honoring the old woman ever since. After all, it’s all a dream anyway…
© 1998-2001 Gage Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
All images and text remain the property of the artist and may not be used without her written permission.
Featured Image: Photo of Uriél Dana and the late Gage Taylor (d. 2000), 1996, Sausalito
Uriél Danā has been a Professional Artist, Curator & Arts Writer since 1983 in addition to being an invitational Arts Ambassador for the US State Department. She became a Master of Tibetan Dream Yoga from age 9 to overcome a sleeping disorder under the training of a Mongolian monk on the North side of Chicago. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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