Stuart Davis is transcending. Think of him as an astral butterfly freshly hatching from a cocoon of inner journey and yearning to pollinate humankind with a musical vision of spirit and love.

Fresh off the release of his new album, “Bright Apocalypse,” the new Stuart is an exposed man, a more naked Stuart Davis.

Literally.

He even chose to pose nude for his current press photos in a traditional heroic style that juxtaposes yoga meditation.

“The one of me standing upright with one knee bent and arms straight out,is a yoga pose,” Davis says. “I do yoga from time to time, and have always wanted to do a series of nudes which were all the different yoga poses. I still may do that, actually.

“The one of me in a half lotus, bent over with my hands folded above my head is just a pose I made up, which is used at the end of each meditation session I do,” he says. “It’s a position of submission, intended to put the head beneath the heart, signifying surrender.”

Surrendering is a major risk Davis has taken in making “Bright Apocalypse,” his seventh studio album. As founder of his own record label, Post Apocalyptic Records, Davis has surrendered himself to his fans, who fully fund the label through investments. The end result is an album that turns out to be an immense accomplishment for Davis.

“I think it’s by far the best CD I’ve recorded, because it includes the most,” he says. “The scope, the range of this material is much more expansive than any of the previous records, and I feel like the album succeeds in sustaining a survey of mystical death without it being boring or preachy or one dimensional. There are a lot of layers to these songs, and I think they can have a very long life, since the themes in this album are the same ones that have fueled humanity for many thousands of years.

“What happens when we die? What is God?” Davis ponders.

Questioning existence is a big factor in the changes undergone by Davis. A large portion of his transformation results from looking inward.

“The biggest thing is that I had to change as a person,” he says. “Before I could write this album, I had to do some inner exploring for a few years and start getting acquainted with some more remote dimensions. In other words, my waking awareness is just one type of awareness, just one frequency on a very wide radio band, and I’ve been trying to learn how to tune in some other frequencies.”

On “Bright Apocalypse,” Davis draws from many different elements and influences, including authors Ken Wilber and Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, as well some religious ideas.

“‘Bright Apocalypse’ is about exploring interiors,” Davis says. The album draws from the mystical traditions of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism and Hinduism, “but isn’t associated with any one in particular,” he says.

However, Davis is quick to defend what the album is not.

“It’s not a new age album, or a Christian rock album, or an album about religion,” he explains. “It’s a collection of songs about experiencing God directly by going inward.”

In essence, the record is the latest brick in Stuart Davis’ wall of themes built on issues like sex, self-help and death. While his latest venture concerns God, Davis says his next album won’t be moving forward. Instead, the artist plans to pull a George Lucas on his fan base by releasing the prequel to “Bright Apocalypse.”

“Originally it was going to be a double album, but I couldn’t get it organized in time to make it happen, so I released ‘Bright Apocalypse’ as one album, and it was really supposed to be disc No. 2 of the set,” he says. “So, I may release disc No. 1 next.”

He goes on to reveal some of the more intimate details of what the unfinished album holds.

“It deals with a lot of the gruesome elements involved in becoming intimate with the Divine,” Davis explains. “I feel like that’s something that’s missing in spiritual music — it tends to just equate ‘spiritual’ with ‘comforting,’ and I think that’s a major omission.”

Although Davis strives to use his music to communicate his cryptically inspiring thoughts, he doesn’t want the idea of being labeled a musician to constrict his sense of being.

“Music is something I do, but it’s not what I am,” he says. “I wouldn’t really want to associate my true ‘self’ with anything impermanent, including being a human. It’s easy to confuse experiences with identities. Things come and go, but ‘I’ am not those things. I have lots of little identities which are really experiences: my job, my sex, race, age, income, species — but they’re all impermanent.

“I would say my true self is really the Self. Godhead, Spirit, Allah, One, et cetera, whatever you want to call it, that is behind/inside all of that,” he continues. “Experiences come and go, but there is something that doesn’t come and go, and that’s where I try to put my identity. The operative word there is ‘try.'”

One label he can’t shake is that of being the forefather of the post-apocalyptic punk-folk genre he is both the creator and a student of. As spokesman for the post-apocalyptic movement, one that couldn’t have started at a better point in history, he has but one hope for humankind.

“I hope humanity will become bored with its self-mutilating fascination and put some focus on exploring its interiors,” he says.

“In my experience, growth is a messy, gruesome affair that can scare the shit out of you,” Davis adds. “Real spiritual transformation involves all sorts of death — the deaths of our smaller identities — and it ain’t all white light and harp music. I want to use my music to tell about that part of spirituality, a part that I feel gets bypassed or sidestepped most of the time.”