By Rebecca Lerner

Natvar Bhavsar’s paintings are stuck to the walls of New Brunswick’s Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum only in the most technical of senses; they somehow manage to transcend their earthly confines and surround the viewer.

One does not merely look at a Bhavsar work, one is transported by it.

It is as if the artist has bottled up the night sky, dusted it in powder pigment and cast it out in great dreamlike bursts. The result is a textured canvas that pulses with dimension: grainy up close, smooth and wispy from afar.

“What I have done is to enter the world of color,” Bhavsar said. “When I paint, I enter the realm of experience, which gives me that feeling the word “nirvana’ may have been invented for.”

Bhavsar, an abstract expressionist, is the most successful Indian artist in the American art world today. Ninety-five percent of his fans — those who can afford the $15,000 to $800,000 pricetags on his work — are of Western descent.

The titles of his paintings, chosen for their melodic effect, are Sanskrit words referring to natural phenomena, such as comets and rain. Their colors, impossibly rich hues of crimson, indigo and gold, evoke the essence of their inspiration.

“What I have done is to bring you to be with it and try to experience it as an aura of a sort,” Bhavsar said.

Bhavsar was born in the 1930s into a wealthy and highly educated Guajarati family. His father was the village headmaster and encouraged him, at age 7, to teach Untouchables how to read and write. He became an excellent student and achieved prominence as an artist in India by age 19, working primarily in the Cubist vein until his move halfway across the world in 1962.

In New York City Bhavsar was deeply influenced by the open-ended spirituality surrounding abstract painting. He found himself at the center of the avant-garde world; he was spending time with such prominent artists as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Bhavsar was the first artist to have a gallery show in what was to become SoHo, at the Max Hutchinson gallery.

Now age 73, with nearly 900 completed works, Bhavsar has no plans to retire.

“A thousand years,” he said, “would not be enough to fulfill this incredible hunger for exploration.”

“Natvar Bhavsar: The Dimensions of Color,” is on display at the Zimmerli Art Museum through July 22. It is the first part of a three-year program called the South Asian Regional Initiative, or SARI.

“Raccoons eat pretty much anything that’s available to them in their home range,” Sanchez said. “They’re good at taking opportunities for sources for food or water. What to us doesn’t look like a resource, to a raccoon or coyote [can be] a pretty good foraging opportunity — things like bird baths, swimming pools or ponds, a bird feeder or a kitty dish outside the back porch, or garbage.”

I’d hope the other human survivors were cooperative, because community offers a tremendous resource for a forager. If you have three other people in your doomsday tribe, you could get four times as much as food in the same amount of time, and cover four times the territory.

Even wild animals that are notorious loners will band together in difficult circumstances. “It’s unusual for raptorial birds to work together, but in very arid hot food-scarce areas like the Sonoran desert, Harris hawks will hunt like a pack and share food,” Sanchez said.

I speak from experience. When I lived off wild plants for a week in late May 2009, I got weak and lightheaded fast because I was using lots of energy but not getting enough calories from what I could find. It was a seasonal cusp — there were plenty of greens but nothing with any real caloric density. But when I did this again in November, I sailed through without any trouble because I had a whole pantry filled with the foods of the summer and fall. I had chestnut flour, dried sumac berries, dried stinging nettle, wild mushrooms and more.

Some primitive food preservation methods include drying, mashing berries into a paste and baking them, and roasting and crushing tree nuts into flour. This is another area where it’s extremely helpful to have a community to rely on. It can take days to transform a few gallons of acorns into flour even with a dozen people helping.

My first wild food week adventure also taught me the importance of learning the indigenous diet. No matter where you live, it’s likely to be very different from what you’re accustomed to. I had made the mistake of assuming that the only difference between my conventional diet and a wildone here in the Pacific Northwest would be the foods themselves — for instance, chickweed instead of lettuce and stinging nettles in place of spinach — but in fact the structure and proportions are totally different, and there’s a reason for that. Just like nonhuman animals, real-life hunter-gatherers have vastly different diets that depend entirely on what’s available. In some places, these may include foods you’ve never thought of, like the inner bark of trees and starchy roots from under-water plants. And in cold regions, the diets may be heavily meat-based; in hot climates, they may be made up mostly of plants and fish.

A shaman is a powerful guru who acts as an intermediary between these other dimensions and our reality in order to heal others from emotional and physical maladies. This is done through trancing, chanting, drumming, working with energy, consulting guides on “the other side” and even engaging in psychic combat through meditative travels.

Shamanic practices and related mysticism are found in indigenous cultures worldwide, from Asia to Africa, from North America to the Andes, but also in the roots of the world’s major religions, including Judaism and Buddhism.

Anthropologists from the West who have gone to study cultures with shamans have returned to report life-altering experiences. This was the case most famously for Carlos Castaneda, who documented it in “The Teachings of Don Juan.” This also is what happened to Michael Harner, who wrote “The Way of the Shaman.”

It happened to me when I met Jodee Chizever last spring.

I was extremely curious to see for myself what shamanism was like and whether it could help me overcome the emotional wounds I was suffering from. Still, as intrigued as I was, I was also skeptical.

Shamanism seemed spiritual, and religion never appealed to me. I have long been an atheist because of the Problem of Evil. I’m also opposed to blind faith. I’ll believe it when I see it, feel it or hear it, and no sooner.

What opened my mind to shamanism in the first place was a weird psychic experience. I had just graduated from college with a degree in philosophy and anthropology when I went to Red Bank with a good friend and sat down in front of a lady with a crystal ball. Just for fun. But the woman looked at me and point-blank said, “You’re a journalist.” All bets were off; the universe was weirder than I thought.

Chizever, too, was not what I expected. She’s a friendly blond woman who has her master’s degree in public administration and used to work for city government and non-profits, which is just not quite how one envisions a shaman. But Chizever learned her skills through years of study with a Peruvian medicine woman, American Indian healers and Kabbalistic rabbis.

The most surprising thing of all was to see for myself the reality of her work. I had come to her with some heavy issues overwhelming my heart. I left feeling relaxed and blissed out. I continue to work with her whenever I feel the need to, or when I am curious to learn from her.

Monday, for instance, Chizever and I sat across from one another, meditating. She sent a surge of energy blasting through my body. I formed it into a ball of light, breathed it into my lungs and set it on a path. It went barreling from my stomach to the tip of my head, then shot fast down my spine. The sensation is difficult to describe in words, but it was intense. It froze a huge grin on my face and left me feeling springy and light. Images of blues, pinks and greens swirled in my mind’s eye. And this was all before I felt a quartz geode pulse like a heartbeat in my palm.

Calling this “alternative therapy” wouldn’t do it justice. It’s dimension-eclipsing.