Archive for March, 2016

229. The blanket of words

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It looks to me at first that I have nothing to say. Then it comes to me that the balance is important. It is like a very complicated collection of so many different shapes and colors, and it all has to be in balance.

What do I mean by balance?

I mean that when you look at it you get a sense that in spite of its complexity, there is a guiding wisdom at work in it.  Some deep knowing is involved.

The impression (For me) is that all the shapes live in peace with each other and with everything that is in the picture. Every shape belongs to some group, based on sameness of color, shape, size, or other attributes, and it  may belongs to more than one group at the same time. Yet everything works together without conflicts. All the shapes and the groups do what they do within the same space. The may even overlap and mix. But they do not block each other.

There is an exercise that I used a lot in art therapy. Two people work together on the same artwork. They work in turns. Every one of them, instead of trying to support the other, makes sure of only one thing: That he or she keeps loyal to his/her own sense of beauty. When people work in this way, they come from a deeper place within themselves and they give their best contributions to the shared artwork. It is possible to live this way too.

Every individual truth (represented by one shape in the picture) is acted out with wholeness, and no individual truth is in contradiction to another inner truth.

This is possible only because the art-making is wordless. In our life as human beings there are oppositions indeed. These oppositions are only due to the stories that we tell, which are the way we interpret what happens to us. If you take the stories away from what happens, like lifting a blanket of words from something that lives a wordless life underneath, you discover a world of harmony.

So what is more real: The world of stories, or the world of experiences with no interpretation?

And which of these do you want to be in?

There is no right answer.

 

228. Imprisoned in his own choice

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In this painting there are three major systems:

  1. The lines, which are in purple, olive green and one little line is in blue.
  2. The areas of color that appear to be behind the lines.
  3. The red areas that are inside of shapes, delineated by some of the purple lines.

Many times it is enough to describe with words what you see in a picture, to know what it is about. This indeed is one of the ways to read art.

Here:

The system of lines that has its story, appears on the background of nothing. The story may be that the lines describe something, that some of them do something to other lines, that some are purple and some are in other colors, etc. The background of nothing is the white that has no features except that there are no colors and no shapes in it.

The system of colored areas appears behind the line system. The colored shapes system has its own story. It is not being told in continuous lines or shapes. Things appear mostly unconnected. But you can feel relationships. For example, you can feel that all the greens belong to each other because of having the same color. All the shapes, because of their general outline, which is softly rounded, without sharp points or angles, all of them are of the same kind. This whole system appears in the same proximity of the lines system, and therefore the two systems seem to be related to each other, as if they are parts of the same thing. How about seeing this as a person and his emotional system. (Here I went beyond just describing what I see. I added an idea that seemed to make sense to me.)

There is one shape among the colored areas that is different. It is the blue one that looks like a river or a road. It goes from close to us to another place far away that we do not see. This may be the path of life on which we float with ease or with struggles. (again, an interpretation. It can be something else too. But something that leads the eye far away, to where you cannot see the end, these can be seen.)

Now let’s take the reds, which got caught within some of the purple lines that created closed shapes. Usually in the picture, the lines go freely to wherever they go. They describe shapes, that you have a feeling are not finally determined. These shapes still can grow, shrink or move. But these areas that caught the red inside of them seem to be more final. Their muscles are stretched and tense, holding the red and preventing it from changing. This is where the happily and freely flowing human system is becoming hard and inflexible. This goes against the nature of free flow and therefore it is the place of suffering.

And all of this appears to play in an environment of no features (the white). This is not a physical portrait in a realistic environment. It is the inner experience of life, created in awareness and experienced in awareness, done and felt in the same moment. Doing and experiencing here are not separate.

And if you see that, where do you choose to place your identification? What part do you choose to be?

Here is another way to look at it:

There are two big systems that relate to each other harmoniously. There is no event  in that. Only a continuous flow. The two systems can go on and change together, every one of them in its own related way to the other. They can go on forever. But the minute the regularity is broken by an unusual behavior that occurred in a few parts, an event is created and it starts to be interesting. That’s life.

Where was the identification, when it happened?

It was in the parts that caught the red. “I must have this red in me,” said the ‘I’ who identified with these parts. Before, there was freedom there. But now the travelling ’I’ became imprisoned in his own choice.

 

127. The energies in the body and the thoughts that move them

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The intention was to paint the inside of all the shapes in the drawing, And to come out with the colors at the top of the shapes. First let me do the way that each color comes out and up a little bit from its designated area, I said to myself. These are the tricky areas. So let me do them first. But when I finished, it looked good to me just as it was. The strong contrast between the lines inside of the big areas (where the olive green lines are, where the other green lines are, where the red lines are, where the darker red areas are and where the blue lines are) and the white, gave these areas a lot of energy, and together with the way the lines curled and bent, as if they were in the middle of doing something, there was so much life inside if the shapes. I liked it and did not want to change.

So what do I get from this?

For me it feels like the energy of life inside of my body, about to explode. No. Not to explode, but to do something big, to do something loving and beautiful.

I looked at the drawing a day later and I still liked it. So it was time to sign.

****************

Everything is born out of thought.

My hand is the result of a thought. This is how it started and this is how it is being created again and again every very short time, like the way a movie is being created from some thirty pictures every second, that when shown continuously, look like something that moves naturally.

The thought that creates my hand has become a habit that is activated regularly. Based on another thought, which is the story of my life, images are chosen to create motion that will fit with the story of my life. I don’t know how all of this works, with all the details. If you want to understand it from the perspective of a human being, which is what we are of course, you will have many questions. And after they will be answered there will be so much more questions. The amount of details is beyond measure. We are dealing here with infinity, using our finite mind.

Whatever happened to my feet continues to happen so many times every minute. The minutes that have passed have gone out of my reach. Some people, who have the talent to see through the big consciousness of all of us, may visit these moments and see the process happening again. I think all of us can have (less controllable) access to past events in dreams, and in inner visions, connected to memories.

The habits of thoughts that keep creating the nerve damage and the resulting pain in my feet, started some 70 years ago. Do you think I need to visit that time in order to correct my thoughts and with the change of thought, the disease activity will stop?

But you see, the thoughts and the behavior of my energy, that creates this condition, are not those of seventy years ago. They happen right now, so many times every second. So it is enough to deal with what is here now.

There is still a lot to explore. But I’ll stop here. This is enough for one entry.

 

126. The floating ‘I’

 

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Maybe we do not see the one who sees?

It has a sense of order.

It has a sense of belonging (parts belong together), of keeping harmony. It has a sense of playfulness. Cleanliness.

Clearly it speaks about front and back. But they are very close to each other. There is no depth here, except in the white that may go to eternity.

There are no dramatic contrasts.

Immediately as you pass through the noise of the lines you are in calm-land.

And being in calm-land, you are at the gate of infinity. You can touch it.

 

And it could be that we do not see the one who sees. In the drawing we have only the layer of thoughts that stands between the one who sees and the scene that is behind the lines. So there is eternity looking through the personality (the lines), at what appears in front of the personality (the areas of color). And soon after that, eternity continues.

And you have the floating ‘I’.

If the ‘I’ identifies with the personality, he does not know anything about eternity. For him the world is made of two: Himself and the world. If the ‘I’ identifies with eternity, he sees only one, himself, as he is playing with personalities and worlds.


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The healing process

Entries 1-58 show how I use the method of Intuition Through Art to heal myself from Peripheral Neuropathy.

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