My body can be found afloat among the houses, tables, pencils, thoughts Emerging from the ground of all
I move between my feelings and my pen As if I fly From dream to dream
Myself has turned to air.
I let everything go. My attention goes to where it usually is, which is everything that has to do with seeing. Seeing seems to be the strongest attraction and if you try to feel where you are, when you close your eyes, most probably you’ll find that your attention is somewhere where it feels that seeing happens: Somewhere inside of your head in the front part. The place where thinking happens is maybe also as strong. But this is only a habit. You can move yourself to another place. Or you can shift your inner listening to another mode. You can settle yourself into an energetic attention. This is what I did here. I found myself just attending to the field of awareness.
In the beginning it looks empty. Then you feel that it is alive. Then you start knowing that it is eternal, and you may start knowing more things. In this specific case I started seeing colors. The painting was some expression of that. The reason for seeing colors may have been my expecting this to happen or even just wanting. And when you find your body, your thoughts and emotions or your experiences, in this context, Then this is what the poem describes. The sense of beauty is inherent in this state.
Your experiences will be unique to you, if you try this. Don’t take this writing as a guidance. My teacher of meditation would say: “Let go of imagining altogether. See what is there already.” What is there is awareness that you can experience. And beyond this there is nothing. That nothing you can’t experience. You just experience that there is nothing. And this nothing is you.
A rock and a shadow Stand on the flexible green And a cloud comes To cover them
It turns out The shadows have been going on From far in the past And into the future
Unfinished life forms have only to ascend As the blue haze is hinting To come to a place Of peace
The life forms Will decide
Or does it only Seem so?
The rock and the shadow seem to be me and my shadow thoughts. The flexible green is the village where I grew up. Much of the shadows start early in life. The cloud is the way our subconscious thoughts are unknown to us, until we learn how to hear them.
We know this, don’t we? The shadow thoughts are those that prevent the energy of our infinite self from being expressed by us in the life that we live.
Life forms are me and you and others. We constantly change, so we can be seen as unfinished, until we discover one day that we are like dreams. We always represent our state of mind of the moment.
I would like to add something to the previous entry.
In the composition there are two spots that have some uniqueness, some characteristics that are different from everything else in the picture. These are: the area that looks somewhat like a head with dots inside and the area that represents the pain. Here they are:
These two spots relate to each other in their colors, textures and the feeling of having interruptions in them. I could call it spottiness. Please look at them in the big picture, in the previous entry. In the head, the spots look like a decoration. In the pain area the feeling is of a bleeding in a weak system.
Because these two spots are the only different places in the painting, they become important, and the relationship between them becomes important too. They become the subject of the art. Usually the subject of a picture is the strongest and biggest element. and here the subject is almost negligible. The two big movements in this painting, this of the lines and that of the color shapes appear to be the strongest and biggest elements. Maybe it will be more correct to say now that the subject of the art is the contradiction between the strong and big elements and the smaller but disturbing elements.
This correctly represents the situation I am in. There is the big movement of opening and connecting more and more to the infinite part of us, and there is the disturbance of the pain.
The pain is related to thoughts that are at the same time beautiful and separated. Thoughts, beliefs and expectations bring about the experiences that we end up having. Some of the thoughts, the red ones, are connected to the pain by color. If I could let go of these thoughts, maybe this will stop the creation of the pain? And what stands in the way of letting them go? It is the fact that they are considered by me to be beautiful.
Usually we would think that thoughts that create pain must be ugly, shameful, and having other such characteristics. But many of the thoughts that bring us agony are actually being loved by us. This is why we do not want to let them go. Is this true? These thoughts are usually chosen in a very young age, in traumatic circumstances. The child, let’s say the really lovely three years old child, encounters danger. Out of love, and out of wanting to make the situation better, he courageously decides on the spot to act in a way that for him will be the best solution. He feels that it will be a sacrifice. He will have to let go of something that is enthusiastically loved by him. But he is determined to do good, and save the moment. It is beautiful. He is a hero. But this choice of his leads to blocking his connection to his flowing happiness and this creates all kinds of suffering, including, in time, physical suffering.
Thoughts go right Feelings aim left White is all around Red is where it hurts
And if this makes you want to ask Let the questions go Sink instead To where the questions come from.
I’ll go line by line in the end. But first I’ll say this: The poem is how I read the art. At first it is just finding content, quite intuitively. As this inner seeing goes on, a deepening of the awareness happens on its own. A deeper view becomes available and it expresses itself in the end of the poem.
This is a general characteristic of art making. When making art, any form of art, we tune in to deeper layers of who we are. You can call it a meditative effect. The noise of the outer layer of our life calms down. More subtle energies start to be noticed.
This happens too in the drawing and in the addition of background colors. The drawing already is a process of increasing awareness. So when the background colors’ time comes, I am already in a deeper state than the way I started, and the background colors are added with greater understanding and compassion. (Note: I do the background after I do the line-work.)
The whole event, the drawing, painting, reading and interpreting, is about introducing awareness to what is going on in the mind at the time of making the art and reading it.
Now line by line (almost): I took the drawing to be the thoughts. They created in the picture a bridge like shape that feels as if it goes to the right. The background color shapes seem to be aiming at the left and I took them as feelings or the energetic movements under the thoughts. There seems to be a contradiction here. Why would the thoughts and feelings go in opposing directions? This question is not being answered. But note that the color shapes were added when already in a deeper state than in the beginning. White all around is the feeling of the infinite awareness that is everywhere. The pain is in my feet. In almost all of my artworks there is some expression of the pain. And here, in the end of the poem, comes the advise from the deeper and wiser state. Go to an even deeper awareness. Answers that come from shallow layers of us will not encompass the whole picture. They will be partial, and more questions will have to be asked and answered. Better to sink deeper into the infinity that is us, and allow something more fundamental to emerge. And better yet: No matter how deep the answers come from, It is awareness that notices them.
In the beginning there was a face With jugged lines As if hacked From a Redwood tree
Then the forehead From which the stories came cleared up And you could see the endless sky
And you could see the forest As it hugged the flowing waters Carving their path in the earth From ice to sea
Then a woman of light With a cane Stood up to tell her pain To the hollow pine of history
And as her light ascended in the air One little cloud Came to rest On the mountaintop.
——————————————————————————————————————–
I saw myself for what I am and therefore the woman was seen for what she is. She is my mother, and this seeing releases her from the character that she played in our dream life. I can laugh now. History is indeed empty.
I have not been here for a while, as you know. But I continued to work on myself. “Working on myself” is only a way of talking. I did not work. I watched myself, my inner workings, in the most pleasant way that I know of. It is a pleasant way for me of course. Other people surely have their different most pleasant ways. And for some, my way may be most pleasant too. As I wrote before, this is my main way to keep being aware of my inner life, but I also do other things, like meditating and learning from other people and from non physical guides. If your way is different, you can learn the deeper principles of this work, see if they feel right to you and apply it to your way, if you feel inspired.
What is my way? I draw and paint intuitively, and I read my art, to know what is going on in my mind.
There is a part of the inner conversation that is easy to know. What we consciously think, we can know. But we usually are not aware of the conversations between our experiences of our world and our subconscious. The subconscious has a much faster language than our spoken language. It responds to everything that we encounter so fast that there is already a response from the subconscious, before we even start noticing that something happens. And so much happens that we don’t catch. These mostly missed thoughts are important because they indicate what we create and what we experience in our life.
If we want to know what is going on in our minds, and what will determine our experiences, we need to be in a deeper state. What does it mean? It means relating to what happens in our minds not from a content point of view, but from an energetic point of view.
I’ll give an example: Let’s say I argue with my friend. He gets angry and insults me. From a content point of view I feel hurt and endangered, and I want to protect myself. From an energy point of view the feeling of being insulted is a movement and contractions of energy, created in the body by two contrasting energies. One is the energy that is generated from the thought that I am weak and in danger. The other, contrasting energy is the energy of my higher self, or the energy that creates me and watches me always. This energy is impossible to describe in words, but in some short way it is described as love. The two energies mix with each other and create disharmony. This is what I experience, if I relate to what happened energetically. This disharmonious mixture is unpleasant. It is the essence of suffering.
Now comes a strange thing. It has to do with this energy that we call the higher self or who we are or any other name. This energy or this consciousness can do things that we people don’t think are possible. So I’ll describe. But please know that it is really impossible for me to describe.
Imagine that you are an infinite consciousness that has no shape or any boundary. You are like a transparent clay too. You can shape yourself into any shape. You can think in many ways. you can experience everything that you shape yourself into. You can make yourself into many beings that all have these same capabilities. And you experience all of them all the time, with all their thoughts and actions and experiences when they encounter their worlds. Well, this is you. Roughly. But this reality is mostly hidden from us. We focus on thoughts, things and feelings, and we miss this underlying part of who we are. Reading my art enables me to see my patterns of creation and to free myself of unwanted automatic reactions that obscure my freedom.
So this infinite mind is the part that starts experiencing the mixture of energies that does not feel good to us. Some of this mixture is the flow of my infinite consciousness itself, unhindered. The other part of the mixture is itself too, but made to be less free. This is us as people. And it is like a huge body of streaming water that encounters a little disturbance in the flow. The disturbance is smoothed out and it disappears into the general flow.
This is what we can call a healing event. This is also the only possible healing of thoughts, emotions and even bodies. It happens in all kinds of modalities and therapies, when the therapy is “working”, and in most cases the therapists themselves don’t know that this is what happens.
This was a simplified description, done by someone who still does not know much. Take it as a description of a view, given by a mostly blind person. Don’t trust me blindly. Walk your own path with your inner eyes wide open.
Things that I drew many times before, appear again in this drawing.
The drawing is dense with shapes, especially on the right half. This drawing asks for colors that will help define the shapes, the background and the background of the background. The first background is the environment. The second is eternity.
What are these things doing together? They are flowing. They come into being and they move on, leaving their place in our awareness for other things to come, with the flow of our thoughts.
When you look at details, you may find that even shapes that seem to block the flow move, together with everything else.
All the things that I love move. They are not now what they were before. Mainly, everything shows to me how everything changes. Like watching a parade, I watch my life passing by. There will always be something to watch. My thoughts will make everything more and more beautiful. The sky will turn into the infinite heart. My home will recline on the back of my cat and both will float as clouds over the land, spotted with things I have not come to know yet. The village of my youth will undulate with little waves, while a simple bug will fly away from the big pine of my youth to its own new perceptions.
Then, when you think of it, only thoughts and perceptions change.
To end, since the drawing begged for colors, I gave them to it.
I thought just now of calling it: birds falling from the sky.
As in many times before, many shapes that I drew, not knowing what I was doing, ended up looking like strange animals. I did not think of any birds and no people were planned. But now there is a man in the left lower corner, doing something and maybe using a second head to look at the biggest falling bird. Maybe it is falling right on him? On the right there is a bra hanging from a tree branch. It seems there is some ground at the bottom. It is not drawn. But several things stand on it. This is why, for me, it feels that an earth must be there. At the top there is a big bird feeding a young, smaller bird, while in flight, as airplanes sometimes do. maybe there is a cat down on the earth, with some unknown creature standing on its back. So what is behind what I draw here? I somewhat like this drawing. I did not add paint to it, to preserve it as it is, in the most alive state, before the power of the colors reduces its strength. Being raw, you can feel the fascination with the shimmering of everything. This is how I see things nowadays. It is not a perfect drawing. The hanging bra and one little bird, alone in the air, at the top left, break the diagonal flow of everything else. The little bird moves at least. But the bra is defying every tendency in the drawing, by hanging vertically, as if nothing is happening around it.
This is not a happy drawing, though the deep curiosity is here, and curiosity is a happy state. So it is a mixed mood.
I love birds, I love rocks (there are two at the lower right corner), I love cats, I love people, I love the sky. There is nothing in the drawing that I do not love.
Maybe the issue of the drawing is the inconsistencies?
Maybe it is the big event of the central big bird falling and the chaos that it creates?
Of course there are always details in life that continue their natural way of behaving, as if nothing happened, as in all cases when some disaster occurs.
This is it! I have caught the essence of the drawing for me.
How do I know?
When I wrote this it felt right.
So:
Disaster happened.
and nature goes on as if everything is okay.
The sky continues to be wonderful.
Painfully, the recognition is being forced on you: the big disastrous event is only in your eyes. Big as it is, it comes and goes without leaving a mark in infinity.
There is joy everywhere.
The universe with no borders is flowing gracefully and lovingly forever.
Everything happens and nothing happens.
It is like all the little waves that you bump into when swimming in the lake. How many of them will you remember when you are already out of the water, lying on your back on a big towel and watching birds in the blue sky?
