Here is my recent NFT (non-fungible token) artwork which has just been minted which you can view at the NFT showroom on Hive blockchain:
https://nftshowroom.com/gallery/julianhorack_collages-julescape-q2-2025_strange-land-samadhi
Completed on 26 April 2025, about a month ago, during the Mars opposition Pluto alignment in the heavens, I managed to finally mint this collage now. Everything happens in its own time.
In this artwork, which I made over the course of a few days, using found magazine images, cut out with scissors and glued to an A4+ piece of paper, you can see my familiar recurring symbols which permeate most of my collages in my gallery, namely spirituality and riches. I know its a contrasting combination of opposites there, but that is where my mind dwells and these collages are all somewhat biographical, showing what is central to my life.
Having spent ten years as a celibate monk in a yoga ashram in my twenties, wearing saffron robes with a shaved head, I am steeped in this tradition. Decades later I came across Bitcoin (in 2017) and have been studying it, trading and investing almost constantly since then, almost eight years now.
Thus I might be a paradoxical yet balanced combination of feet on the earth and head in the heavens. All of which is portrayed in this NFT artwork. Although I identify as a Vedic yogi (and Bitcoin Babaji), most of my collages portray Buddhist monks simply because they are the pictures that I more readily encounter. The concept of samadhi is similar in both spiritual traditions, though perhaps more familiar to most people in the form of the Buddhist monk in saffron, as compared to the Indian yogi. Nevertheless, both perform meditation and practice celibacy, wearing saffron robes, as part of the path of transcendence and renunciation of the material world.
Since I relate to transcendence, as well as cryptocurrency trading, you will see these themes of monks as well as money in my artworks. This particular NFT is a perfect example. That's why I call it Strange land samadhi, a play on the term pure land Buddhism. And the words Strange Lands also appear in the artwork if you look closely.
When I created this collage, the planet Mars was directly in opposition to Pluto in the zodiac, in April 2025. Curiously this alignment was in the sky when I was born, as seen in my horoscope, and I believe it symbolizes, among other things, the archetype of the celibate monk, which is what I became.
Mars is the male sexual power and desire. Pluto is symbolic of superpower, like nuclear power. The monk sublimates his sexual energy (chi) in order to harness it for transcendence and to channel it up the spine to feed the brain, thus facilitating the awakening of a superpower stronger than mere Mars physical power. The superpower is the ability to transcend sex drive, to channel the Kundalini shakti and become enlightened or awakened in consciousness.
That, in itself, is also a type of wealth that some say far surpasses mundane money and riches. Thus the yogi becomes rich in mystical gifts, which some might call magic.
In this NFT you can see the meditator has already departed his body and gone into what is called samadhi or a state of liberation at death. A symptom of the yogi who has succeeded is that when the spirit soul leaves the body, that body does not decompose like normal corpses. Rather, it remains strangely preserved, and that is what you see in this image. There are real examples of this throughout the world's sacred traditions, both east and west.
In the image you can see cables leading up to the heavens on left, right and center of the yogi. These symbolize his link up with the spiritual world, so to speak. Also they symbolize the fact that we all have a male side on our right half, represented by the sun symbol on the top left of the image, and a female side on our left half, symbolized by the crescent moon in the top right section of the image.
These also allude to the left and right channels of subtle energy that rise up the central spine in the body. Here the central cables rise up to a black eagle, the totem animal symbolizing transcendence, since it's the highest flying bird species generally, able to look down on the world from the greatest heights.
We also incidentally see these symbols in Egyptian mythology, portrayed in lunar goddess Isis, solar god Osiris, and their child Horus the hawk. Perhaps its a black hawk.
Also the right and left hemispheres of the brain are our masculine and feminine halves, and they are linked or bridged by the corpus collosum. The image here depicts the awakened yogi who has mastered the art of linking up the two hemispheres within himself and thus achieving a state of wholeness.
My life journey as a monk/spiritual seeker on one hand and a cryptocurrency trader on the other, feels like the evolution of my awakening of both sides of my nature, the feminine or spiritual side (in youth) and the masculine or material side (in later years). With both active now, I like to feel I have approached a certain degree of wholeness and balance, with the two sides well connected, as seen in the symbol of the bird (traditionally mercury the androgynous archetype).
I'm repeatedly noticing some degree of synchronicity when I mint my NFTs at the showroom because my artwork echoes those of other artists who have just minted theirs, despite my having no knowledge of their work prior to minting mine. The symbols seem to be present in their works too, like the sun, moon, planets, serpent, magic.
I saw this synchronicity last time I minted my collage too. And remember that my collages were completed weeks ago, long before I actually mint them as NFT. Yet on the day they are minted, the most recent other minted NFTs show similar symbols to mine.
I presume therefore that magic is in the air, or perhaps in the collective unconscious of the artists involved who mint their NFTs here on Hive at the showroom.
I have minted only two editions of this NFT, and only one is for sale, since I like to keep one in my gallery collection. You can check it out at the showroom and purchase this fine rare scarce handmade artwork of mine for a mere 21 Hive tokens. The original paper collage is also in my possession if you wish to purchase that.
Image my own.