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269. On becoming a philosopher

The scream, the understanding and infinity

I just wanted to paint or draw the pain again.

In the past I used to draw the pain many times. The pain was not almost constant, as it is now. It would come every now and then and it would be quite devastating. I found then that I could draw it, the way and shape it was felt in the body, and after becoming stronger at first, the pain would start to get smaller and smaller until it would disappear. This would take some five or six drawings, which I made quite quickly in a little pad that I always had with me.

I thought I had the cat’s pajama. This gave me a way to protect myself from the pain and a way to feel capable and not out of control. But it also helped in establishing the pain. Because I did not want the pain and at least part of the activity of drawing was for the purpose of winning against it. When you think this way many times, you repeat the belief that the pain is bad for you and dangerous and needs to be fought against. This establishes the pain, in your mind, as dangerous and needing to be fought against.

I understood this and stopped this practice. But I also knew that there was a lot of good in making art about the pain. The good is, or at least some of it is in this: In order to draw you actually change your attitude from fear to curiosity. Curiosity is a characteristic of the true you, and it is of a higher vibration than fear. This makes you into a place, in which fear’s lower vibrations cannot stay. So it was beneficial in the emotional realm. And it taught me to automatically change my attitude every time the emotional reaction to the pain arose, from fear to curiosity. And you can add the sense of beauty that easily added itself to the drawing and brought a lot more good vibrations.

I am sure there is more good things to be found in this activity, so I decided to paint my pain again and find out. I wanted to let the painting bring in the thoughts and not the other way around.

All that is done with lines is a description of the pain. I took the liberty to twist appearances, as this helped to express the pain. You can see that it radiates strongly to all directions.

Sometimes when I want to give the feet energy with my hands, good, healing energy, the left hand jumps away. As if the strength of the pain’s energy frightens the left hand away.

After the lines, came the color areas, and this was done with a more relaxed state of mind. There is one line of orange round shapes going from a big shape at the bottom to a small one at the top. This is one story line. And there is a blue line of three rounded shapes going from right to left and crossing the orange story. And there is also a line of same-size round, smaller shapes, as if it is a bit farther, going diagonally through the whole picture.

To me, as I’m looking at the painting now, the orange and the blue describe an inner conflict. Two ideas in my being don’t agree with each other. And it is not shown as a juicy harsh conflict, but as an idea. One thought goes in this direction, another goes in a different direction and they disagree. Maybe it is even possible to see that there is no need for a resolution of this conflict. The two ideas can stay intact. We can get used to having contradictory ideas within us, because we all have plenty of them. Solutions, in any case, are never in the same layer of the conflicts. We have to go deeper.

The yellow line of smaller round shapes feels to me as the experience of a deeper layer of myself, where connection to infinity is felt.

How strange. In one painting you have the screaming of the pain, a more peaceful view of an underlying conflict, and a sense of infinity.

I was not interested in this case in the disappearance of the pain, but in seeing the bigger picture. I have changed.

When I told my Friend Stuart, many years ago, that I was about to separate for my wife, he told me a story. A student came to the Rabi and asked weather marrying was a good idea for him. The Rabi said it was. If you both fit each other, then you are a lucky man, he said. And if you don’t, then you will become a philosopher.

I feel as if I am married to the pain, we don’t fit, and I am becoming a philosopher.

In the end it may turn out that it was good for me…

How?

By forcing me into the deeper view.

251. This too will be

Published December 22, 2016 dream , evolving , healing , identification , Infinite space , Intuition , letting go , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth Leave a Comment
Tags: alive, collapse, dream, face, finger, laughter, love, reality, space, touch, vibes

You can probably tell

From my vibes

I see the reality in my dream

Collapsing

And there is something interesting

About the space that opens

Maybe you can see that too

It feels alive

Maybe more alive than it usually was

It almost has a face

And you can feel it

You can almost touch it

With your finger

Will it laugh when you do?

It may laugh

And you will recognize yourself in it

Even though

It is me

And if all that will be left

After everything else had gone

Are these three little birds on a line

This too will be

An expression of love.

249. Who?

Published December 8, 2016 evolving , healing , identification , Infinite space , Inner light , Intuition , letting go , making art , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth 1 Comment
Tags: anywhere, direction, holding on, joy, nobody, nothing, who

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Which direction do you grow?

To where the joy will take me.

What do you hold on to?

Nothing.

And who is looking at you?

I alone look at me.

There is nobody else

Anywhere.

243. (re)Discovering

Published October 10, 2016 evolving , healing , identification , Infinite space , Intuition , letting go , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth 1 Comment
Tags: change, curious, depth, Discovering, eternity, finding, life on earth, rediscovering, satisfaction, trip, what you love, who you are

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Discovering who you are is the main issue of life on earth.

You can find yourself in many ways and in many places and things. Actually, in every thing.

The best way is through doing what you love to do and taking this way as a trip to the depth of who you are.

You will change along the way, and maybe what you love doing more than anything else will change too. You have to always choose to do what you most love at the moment.

You will start finding yourself in small steps or maybe big. And every time you find yourself, you will feel satisfied. Finding yourself is the source of satisfaction. I want to say the only source, but I’m not sure yet. All this knowledge comes to me as a surprise, and at the same time as something that I have known before.

After the satisfaction periods you will start being curious again, and you will again use doing what you most love at that time to move on towards the depths of yourself.

All of the trip happens between you and eternity, which is you too.

239. The veil

Published July 31, 2016 evolving , healing , identification , Intuition , letting go , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , The world of thoughts Leave a Comment
Tags: beauty, creativity, essence, freedom, human beings, joy, personality, personality traits, psychology, superficial

I looked at painting 7/3/16/A.

I started to read it again. Yesterday I read it psychologically (which you didn’t see), and the reading shifted to a bigger view of all psychology, as I’ve been doing lately. Obviously I am in a stage, in which I notice more and more the superficiality of the psychological realm altogether. I understand my meditation teacher’s belittling attitude towards everything psychological. I was, at the time he was doing this, studying psychology as part of becoming an art therapist.

For most people the psychological view widens and deepens their understanding of the human being. It was so for me too. How amazed and thankful I was when I realized that I could read all this hidden treasure in people’s art. And I played in this field for quite a while, enjoying my ability to easily see what is hiding there, and my resultant ability to help people see their own subconscious activity and release its powerful control over them.

Then, very quickly I saw that if you release a lot, you will experience how it is to live with less inhibiting ideas blocking you from being free. The psychological relief became a path of spiritual growth. I tasted the joy that becomes unleashed. I lived the love that streams freely unburdened.

And at some point it became clear to me that those psychological features, the killers of joy and freedom, are the building blocks of the personality. Just a small dip in the non-physical aspect of life makes it totally transparent that this character, this personality, is just a bunch of habits. You look from a deeper place and see the inflexibility of these personality traits as they inevitably cause people to bump into each other quite blindly, respond to each other uncontrollably and create all the unpleasant situations that we know.

Then you realize that what is left in you once these psychological features are let go of, is so much better than these.

What can be better than love?

What is wrong with joy that does not depend on circumstances, but is your inherent essence?

The whole psychological realm starts to look like a veil or a filter that you can look through. At first the view is dim and then it starts brightening. The veil looses all its previous power. Your personal veil becomes just one of the infinite number of empty energetic shapes, that you create in your imagined thought-world. And because you love the characteristics of your essence so much more than the personality’s character, your world starts to reflect back to you what you already experience, the beauty, the creativity, the joy and love. These are what the world is becoming for you.

237. A city that is a flower

Published June 19, 2016 evolving , healing , identification , Infinite space , Intuition , letting go , making art , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual 19 Comments
Tags: beautiful, beauty, breathless, Calvino, experience, fight, infinite, intuition, joy

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Like Italo Calvino, who wrote about cities that never were, I too write. It is about our reality.

Sometimes a living thing appears and it is a miracle that it stands at all.

It stands for a very short time indeed, when there is no wind of course, without too many sets of eyes to look at it, and only a few hearts to flutter breathlessly.

Sound familiar? Maybe not?

Don’t fight, people. There is no real victory. Let your claims fall to empty space.

The city council (in the city that is a flower) is in a meeting. For now there are no results.

The grey cloud examines the degree of truth in what the piece of sky expressed.

The castle is simply pointing up while the ochre looks down with penetrating eyes. The green agrees to disagree.

But there is nobody to listen anyway. The city is too delicate for this. The city is a flower. The city is created by a mind that’s only joy.

Don’t fight, people.

Accept defeat on the level of the argument, because you cannot win.

Hug your doubts about what is possible

And dive into the deeper space

That is right here.

236.The energy is left with no job

Published June 10, 2016 energy , evolving , healing , Infinite space , Inner light , Intuition , letting go , making art , MAking it possible , meditation , Reading art , Spiritual , The world of thoughts 1 Comment
Tags: beauty, beliefs, body, change, colors, curiosity, drawing, energy, fear, heart, infinite, joy, light, love, meditation, pain, playfulness, release, stories, story, suffering, thoughts

All the colors stand around me, in bottles, tubes and pencils. They are looking quietly at what I do. What will I say? They are my audience now.

I love them. They can do infinite things. They do not really look. I know. It is the whole who looks. The infinite listening-with-the-heart. The heart-of-listening. His name is I.

When the light of seeing is bright and strong, everything that is non-transparent burns into non-existence. Its energy is left with no job. It gives itself back to be used for creation.

The name of the creator is I too.

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It seems the light in the middle of the painting (the yellow and orange) is marred. It has been hit on the head.

Darkness (on the left) makes a threat. But the little child-who-flies is not afraid. He flies into the darkness to repair his past. He will find his love that he rejected in those old times. It is like the soul-retrieval that shamans do.

The goodness and the freedom-filled-joy, which is the lost part of him, will be found where it went to hide when it was not permitted to act in the world. It will be invited back and respected, loved, accepted, joined.

Again the lines tell the stories. The color shapes tell the emotions. The composition says that all is blessed, with all its tiniest details.

The white always looks with endless love and curiosity, with awe, with pride and marvel.

There is confusion there too, on the right, projecting a yes-no feeling.

Everything is okay.

The big yellow mother would like to say: Be careful!

But she knows that daring requires love and trust, and not carefulness. So she does not say a word. She admires her child.

#####

Yesterday in the morning I sat on the window seat and meditated. With all the lack of sleep that I collected, because of the pain, I fell asleep. I lost my balance and fell. I opened my eyes in the middle of the fall and saw the world turning around. But I was still asleep when my forehead hit the floor.

Then I woke up.

I felt fear and this conjured up memories from an event in my childhood, that now I saw more fully than before. Doors that were closed before, opened.

Fear cannot come if there is no story behind it. Falling cannot happen without a belief or a few beliefs that invite it. I know this is strange for some.

After some time I did this painting.

235. Take the inner world out

Published June 7, 2016 evolving , healing , identification , Intuition , letting go , making art , perception , Reading art , Spiritual Leave a Comment
Tags: beautiful, beauty, change, colors, drawing, experience, fear, free, joy, play, playfulness, release, story, thoughts, words

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There are the lines and there are the color shapes. They seem to describe the same thing but they have very different perspectives.

Sometimes, in other paintings, the lines and the shapes do not necessarily describe the shame thing. If we compare this to music, then those paintings are like counterpoint. The lines have a tune and the color shapes have a different tune. But when they are placed on top of each other, the music makes sense. The music becomes richer by the working together of different tunes.

This painting is more like a tune with chords. The chords accompany the tune that the lines make.

If we look at the lines, trying to see the character of the tune, in my opinion, it is hesitant, even afraid somewhat. It tries to describe something but we cannot identify what it is. In a way it is like what toddlers do sometimes, when they pretend to be writing words and sentences but they don’t yet know how to write. So the lines only looks as if they are describing shapes. There is humor in that.

Now if we look at the color shapes, they don’t seem to be worried at all. They seem to be happy. They come together to share an activity and while playing together they keep their independence and individual identities. They seem to be playful and enjoying the game that they play.

If we describe the music here, it may be something like this: on the background of freely moving pleasant chords, the tune is hesitant. Its parts hold on to each other as if they are afraid to fall apart. There is no sense of freedom in the tune. It seems to be working hard, trying to fulfill some duty or necessity. It is a bit ridiculous in its efforts to describe everything in detail while it is impossible to decipher what it describes.

The chords in this piece of music are strange. They are a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant feelings.

I actually like that kind of music.

But if this were the description of a person, what would you want to tell him?

Maybe it will be, to let go of some of the seriousness with which it takes the story line, and give some attention to the deeper layer of himself, where the playfulness, freedom and maybe even the beauty of life’s experiences can be felt. This layer is so close…

But the story won’t stop. And we are here for the story, aren’t we?

So maybe it is possible to take some of the character of the inner layers of who we are and bring it with us outside, when we create the lines of our stories. Maybe we will then make lines that are a bit freer and happier than before?

234. Segovia and the quiet spot

Published May 17, 2016 evolving , healing , identification , Infinite space , Inner light , Intuition , letting go , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth 2 Comments
Tags: beauty, body, change, curiosity, drawing, experience, fear, free, infinite, intuition, joy, love, play, playfulness, stories, story, suffering, thoughts

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Mooji showed up in front of me, when I was going through videos to enjoy but I moved on every time. Now I stopped and let him speak. He is like an old friend that I love deeply. So my heart opens. What will he say now?

In everything that he says and in the way he moves, I feel that-infinite-space attending, just like my own one right now. I realize that I came to like the taste of this state. It starts to be familiar.

And he says that when a troublesome event comes up and we have a shock, a fear, or we are being shockingly and fearfully agitated, the thing to do is to find the quiet spot that is always there too, and go into this, stay in this.

And this is what this reminds me of:

When both of Segovia’s parents died and he was left alone in his world, he was some six years old, or maybe less. He was very sad, and I am crying for this sadness now because I feel some of it. Somehow there was someone there who knew what to do. He or she put Segovia (little Andre) on the train with all his belongings and sent him to his grandfather in another city.

Grandpa took him from the station and brought him home. For Segovia this was a strange person who he did not know. Grandpa sat Segovia on a chair and sat himself on another chair facing Segovia and in his hands he had his guitar. Segovia did not play guitar yet.

Grandpa made a chord.

Segovia cried.

Grandpa made another cord.

Segovia cried more.

And so they went. Grandpa played chords and Segovia cried, until Segovia smiled.

This was his introduction to his grandpa. And this is what brought the guitar to his life. And it was also his introduction to that different love that comes with insight and cannot be broken.

You see? Whatever life brought, whatever emotional response he had, he went to this direct-no-story effect of the sounds and this became his quiet spot. Maybe at first he did not even perceive the sweetness of the chord. Eventually he fell in love with it.

Maybe you do not immediately feel the huge, deeply joyful, childishly curious, absolutely peaceful character of the inner peace. But with many visits it becomes inevitable that the taste will come through. And there will be a sweet love that has just awakened in your heart, that will take you there again and again and it will be your home, the only place where there is no contradiction whatsoever between you and the place. And with no contradiction, you are the place and the place is you. And so it goes for everything.

(As for the story about Segovia, I hope it is close enough to the truth. I heard it on public radio long ago. The details may have been somewhat different but the core is true.)

233. How the “I” moves to a wider view

Published May 14, 2016 energy , evolving , healing , identification , Infinite space , Intuition , letting go , making art , MAking it possible , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , The world of thoughts , Truth 3 Comments
Tags: beauty, beliefs, body, change, colors, curiosity, dance, drawing, energy, experience, flow, free, heal, heart, infinite, joy, love, meditation, pain, play, playfulness, real, reality, release, sadness, space, stories, story, subconscious, suffering, thinking, thoughts, words

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Being tired and in pain I became sad. Pain is a simple thing but living with it creates additional problems. Now all of them weighed on me. I thought: I can’t go on like this any more. I did not even paint yesterday and today.

My friend from Germany called. We started to talk and the phone line went dead.

I pulled a new piece of paper onto the table, dipped the brush into the water and into the first paint that my eyes saw in the watercolor box. It was olive green. This is how I choose the first color.

And then there was the drawing. No time. No pain. Brush, water, paint and the composition, the story with no words. The energy of the truth. Everything is good.

The olive green lines and the white of the paper are the best of friends. It is a holy connection. The lines, strikingly, appearing out of the white. The white does not have inside and outside. It is everywhere. It is all-there-is-everywhere. Even the word everywhere does not fit here. Is the green line real? And my eyes that see it: are they real? And my heart that has just become so full and so delighted, what about it?

(The other colors came later.)

Now in a different way:

Pain is part of the illusion of life, together with the body, with time, with good and bad.

The true self cannot have pain. Its essence is joy. Its essence is love and playing and being curious. The true self cannot be affected by the illusion.

For the “I” in the illusion pain is real and hard.

The good thing is that everything is connected. All I need to do is to change the way I focus and switch my identity to the true I.

Instead of focusing on the pain and automatically trying to escape it, to fight it, to prevent it, to change it, Instead of these, I find my curiosity and make the olive green lines. I find my playfulness and play with everything that shows itself. I look for the beauty in everything and find it easily. I look for my joy and it is right there. I am joyful. I look for my love and indeed what else do I have? This is how I start to identify with the true self.

And as I do this, I find that I have forgotten the pain. I don’t even feel it. Or if I do, it is not significant. I am in peace. The vibrations of the pain, the waves that streamed through the legs calm down. My hands that clutched one foot fall down, relaxed. The body rests. The energy of creation flows flawlessly everywhere it has to go. The body heals. The specific thinking processes that hold on to the body and its suffering become weaker. I am not so dependent on the body and the world around it. I witness them and I am free. In my mind I am already walking down to town, where the galleries are. I am going to see an exhibition. Right foot, left foot and I dance.

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