In 1976, the artist Michael Peter Cain met Itzhak Bentov, visionary cosmologist, inventor, and author of Stalking the Wild Pendulum. During a brief conversation with Cain, Itzhak shared his vision of the structure of the universe and its source in unmanifest consciousness as a torus continuously flowing both up and down as it cycles back into itself, defining at its center two conical forms, one facing up, the other down, joined at their apexes. Cain was fascinated by this image of the meeting of the inner and outer universes as an hour-glass form.

Cain’s involvement with spirals on cones was further inspired by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who used spirals to illustrate the fundamental configuration of the dynamics and structure of individual consciousness, as well the path of cosmic manifestation, from its source, which Maharishi referred to as the Unified Field of all the Laws of Nature.

WHIrL• evokes the mechanics of cosmic manifestation, inviting viewers to delight in re-enacting consciousness expressing itself as individual human awareness and as the multi-dimensional physical universe.

WHIrL• is intended as a sculptural embodiment of this continuous emergence and return from a transcendent source that engenders human sentience and the universe. 

WHIrL• echoes the operation of cosmic intelligence not by imitating Nature’s appearance but by re-creating in miniature Nature’s essential form.  

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Many years before he learned Transcendental Meditation and founded the MIU Art Department in 1974, dissatisfied with 1960s American art, Michael Peter Cain surveyed the arts of cultures worldwide throughout history. He emulated the abstract iconography of ancient Pre-Columbian architectural reliefs and Islamic infinite patterns in drawings, paintings, sculptures, architectural commissions, and environmental installations. His artworks are intended to evoke aesthetic rapture through experiences of beauty, often induced by the resonance of juxtaposed ornamental elements. Most of Cain’s artworks feature superimposed all-over patterns organized on either 2-D and 3-D grids or spirals. 

Cain’s sculpture was commissioned by Maharishi International University in 2022 through a generous gift from the Wege Foundation, which also supported major renovations to the Art Department building, now renamed the Wege Center for the Arts.