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224.What really happens when we do not pay attention?

Published February 14, 2016 energy , Inner light , Intuition , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , The world of thoughts 4 Comments
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P1000221

In the foreground there is a gate and above it is the agitated activity of the lines that look like branches of a tree. When we come to the blue lines in the upper part, the character of the lines changes and becomes more like the movements of playing, wondering and inventing. See that?

The gate is closed, and some parts of it are broken, its color is light and there is no fence or a wall that the gate can open or close. It is only an idea that we cannot go in. In truth we can.

If we go in, we find strange, mysterious shapes that play together. They are trying to frighten us, maybe, but chuckle at the same time.

Both in the front parts and in the back parts, as we go up, we find more openness, more freedom and a suggestion of an infinite space.

In the front we have the more shallow aspects of life, the drama, the nervousness, the ideas of restriction. In the deeper part we find playfulness, joy and an interface with the endless.

Who is the protagonist in the picture?

Who invents the stories the dramas and the restrictions?

Who enjoys the game of the shapes inside?

223.Many words about something that is really simple.

Published February 7, 2016 energy , evolving , Intuition , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Spiritual , The world of thoughts 3 Comments
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P1000218

When I started this blog, one of the first things I wrote, was about the question: What is art good for? Today it became clear to me in a different way, with the morning writing. Art is a way to experience fully what is usually covered and obscured by our filters.

Why is it important to experience anything directly and without obscuration? Because this is what we are here for. When we do what we are here for, we become happy and our unhappiness ends. If you want, you can turn what I just said upside down. Then it will be: Experiencing directly is what makes us happy, and because it does, we may say that it is why we are here.

I’m going to describe this slowly, step by step.

When we become more and more aware, and our awareness becomes subtler, we start to be able to experience our thoughts as if they are something material, passing in space, and we can experience our imaginings as something that you can touch and feel. This is when we start to see what is going on with us. Before this we don’t know experientially how life works.

Here is an example. In the quiet of this space (inside of which we see the thoughts), which is really who we are, and you can call it consciousness and awareness and anything, inside of this an imagination movie appears. It is very fast and almost unnoticeable. The imagination movie is a wordless thought. Because we are in a deep state, we are aware to that degree of delicacy that we can detect what it is about. Let’s say it is about turning our head sideways and looking out through the open window. We can see all of this in the movie of our imagination that happens very fast. We can know how it feels too. And immediately with it, we turn our physical head and look out through the open window. The imagination was a creating moment. The turning of the physical head was the manifestation. (The world outside that I saw through the window was another part of the manifestation. Both my body-mind and the sight outside must be there for an experience to happen.)

You can say that when the imagined action happened, we have already experienced what it was and maybe we do not need to experience it physically? We have already had the experience. This is true, but not for most of the people. Being here in a physical form gives us the possibility to experience it in a different way. This time it has become denser and can be experienced as a physical experience.

And here comes the second part, for which we are here. With our body we experience looking out through the open window and seeing something there that we understand as happening outside of us. The way this experience makes us feel is seen by our inner self, that infinite space that we are. In this space a stir occurs and its waves go far to be shared with all that we are. This is very pleasant. If we experience ourselves as this space, we enjoy this tremendously. It is thrilling and beautiful. We love this. We don’t need anything else. And then we become ready for the next created adventure that will be returned to us so beautifully.

So there was a circle of action here. From our infinite self arose the creation of a physical experience. The physical experience in its turn gave our infinite self some excitement and pleasure. I as a human being, I am in the middle between my infinite self and the created world. I am here to enable this circle. I am the physical body who receives the physical event and gives it back to my infinite self.

Before we develop this sensitivity to the tiniest movements of energy, so that we can detect all of the above, we miss the direct experience. The act of looking out through the window and the experience of seeing something, immediately provokes many subconscious beliefs. These respond quickly, quicker than our conscious thinking. They tell us what we see and what it is connected to and many more stories, and the experience becomes blurred or totally covered. So we miss the direct experience.

Being able to experience directly brings happiness. This subtle response in the infinite space of our consciousness is happiness and playfulness and curiosity and caring. Not experiencing directly, we will always feel that something is lacking and we cannot make this feeling go.

But we have a compensation for what we miss. It is the arts. The arts are capable of going deep into the more subtle-sensitivity state, where the direct experience has been felt, and they can bring this experience out for us, to where we can experience it consciously, through a metaphor or a simile. It is not the thing itself but good enough so that we can experience the tiniest variations of movement of energy in a magnified way, usually. And this is the role of art in our life. We make art out of the longing to feel the real, un-obscured experience. It is like a guiding sign that points us toward the direct experience. Art shows us the way to happiness. When we walk toward happiness with the help of art, We already feel that we live meaningfully and we have deep satisfaction.

Does the satisfaction last? For a while it does, and then we feel the urge to make another work of art.

To say it in a very simple way: We make art so that we can be happy. We are happy when we experience deeply.

You see? we don’t need that much to be happy. Try it out.

222. Who won’t twitch their feet when they are tickled?

Published February 2, 2016 energy , evolving , Inner light , Intuition , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth 1 Comment
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P1000217

Thoughts/things

Maybe it is strange, but these days nothing is more pleasant to me than sitting quietly somewhere and watching the interface with the quiet space that is always there, seeing how a few moving things in my mind calm down, feeling the body relaxing and staying there.

A person passes in the street on his bicycle and I feel this somewhere in my energy field, as if it happens there. I feel a stirring of a little, very pleasant excitement and then it goes away. I see it as if it is a thought.

The quiet space is alive. If I tune in to it, I know, thoughts like the one that is a person on a bicycle, are moving in it. There are stirrings like this in different depths. They all belong to something infinite that lives its inner life in this way, creating interest and feeling it.

I suddenly understand babies, twitching their feet when they get excited. They experience the stir in the infinite space when their wordless thoughts move. They feel as if it is a tickle. And who won’t twitch their feet when they are tickled?

 

221. The explosion

Published January 18, 2016 energy , evolving , healing , Intuition , letting go , making art , MAking it possible , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Spiritual , The world of thoughts , Truth Leave a Comment
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P1000215

One of us complained about a headache. It was the evening talk on a retreat. We all sat around our master. And it was way into the night. When he finished talking this friend raised his hand and complained.

Your headache is just a wandering thought, the master said.

I don’t remember what was spoken after that because this sentence hit me strongly. I would not be able to explain it, but I knew that this was true.

I also had a headache. I was exhausted from the intense concentration that I used in my meditation all through the day.

Soon after the conversation ended we meditated again. The sentence repeated itself in my head. It is true, I thought. The way my body feels is a wandering thought. And just like with every other wandering thought, I can let it go.

Then there was an explosion in my neck. The head was blown away. The throat remained torn to scraps. I saw this clearly as I was floating in the air behind myself. I was very peaceful and in wonder. There was no time.

Now I understand some of it. The pain is a result of a thought. This is clear. Everything that we experience is a result of thoughts that we believe. The experience is not always exactly as we anticipate, but it always matches our vibrational state.

My teacher and many other teachers never explained this. They prefer to leave things mysterious. Or they do not want to give us the knowledge to change our reality. They want us to transcend it.

When I started the blog I knew that the pain and the malfunctioning of the body came from thoughts. I knew that if I released the beliefs that created the malfunctioning, the fundamental belief that creates the body in its healthy state would take back the controls and the body would heal. This is the direction that I took and there is the evidence for it in the blog. But I am still with the malfunction and the pain. Many times lately I felt desperate, tired of the struggle. I wanted to give up. But I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to rest. If it would lead to the death of the body than let it be so.

My essence, the truth of who I am, cannot be harmed.

I think part of my struggle is because I do not want to lose the fight with the powers that, as I imagined, wanted to block me from developing. This struggle belongs to a non-existent figure. I can let it go now. I wrote about this kind of struggle and I can write again in another entry. The interest in finding the way to heal myself should, as I truly believe and as I teach my clients, come from curiosity, playfulness, love, peace and joy. Coming from these energies that are the natural energy of all of us, it cannot be a struggle. It can only be a joy. There should not be a difference between the true expression of who I am and healing. In other words this means that in order to heal we need to be in the energy of the truth of who we are.

So I allowed myself to enter with my boat into the river of who I am, throw the oars away and let the stream take me.

All that I wrote after the end of the healing descriptions (after #58) was about living in the downstream direction.

When the pain is great I loose sight of this sometimes and the old I appears. Maybe I can allow the pain to kill me, bend me down and break me apart? Maybe I can let the head explode and disappear. I can live without a head.

219. The mirror spoke

Published November 3, 2015 evolving , Intuition , letting go , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , The world of thoughts , Truth Leave a Comment
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Conflicted about direction

Which way to go?

Did a drawing this morning. This morning was a slow one. I woke up at four, drank tea with milk and stayed in bed, sitting with the backing of the couch’s pillow, and the meditation cushion supporting my head. I listened to Rupert Spira talking for a few minutes about how, after awakening, the allure of material, things, disappears. Then it was close to seven and I did everything of the mornings and ate. And here, at this table, I laid my head on my hands and rested again. It is amazing to me how tired I can be, that even after a good night sleep, which I did not have for so many years, I can be so tired still.

Now I have the new watercolor drawing in front of me and I think: Let’s see what is in it.

I can see density, as if it describes stones or packages that somehow got connected to each other in groups. Now we have a few clumps. The way the clumps relate to each other as a group of clumps, as a composition, gives a feeling of an effort. What is the effort? Maybe it is to stay together, while every one of them wants to go somewhere else. This is where the tension comes from.

There is one unfinished piece and it gives the effect of something that was left undone, unfinished. And maybe this effect creates another one, of something that happened in a haste. This whole group of clumps detached itself, or even better, tore itself away from something bigger and found itself free, but conflicted about where to go now. Now that they have freedom, what do they want to do with it?

And before, when I looked at the drawing and did not yet let the words come and tell me this story, the drawing looked like a stranger. How did it come here? What does it have to do with me?

And here we are now. The mirror spoke at last.

212. Spots of light on the flow of life

Published May 29, 2015 energy , Inner light , Intuition , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth Leave a Comment
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movement infused with feeling good

Spots of light on the flow of life

These are nerves, and the flow of life. The dots are the mysterious spots of light on the flow of life.

If you take those lights away, the nerves will only follow their usual routines for habitual actions. But when you put the spots of happiness in, the nerves and the flow of life become happy too.

This is how the reading came to me.

This view is not scientific for sure. But it comes from being in a meditative state. It is dream-like and feels good. The process that I go through has brought me to a good state.

When we feel good, more unhappy habits float to the surface. They can’t survive in a happy environment. It is a chance to take care of them. This is why we go up and down.

206. So close to the truth

Published February 28, 2015 energy , evolving , healing , making art , MAking it possible , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , The world of thoughts , Truth 2 Comments
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Everything that I used to see as concrete is turning into states of moving energy.

More and more subtle

More and more subtle

I haven’t written for the blog for quite a long time.

The reason is that I am changing and for a while I lost the clear feeling of direction. I would wake up every morning and ask: Where am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? I’m still doing it.

When I started this blog I was interested in reading my subconscious. I wanted to find everything that stood in the way of the free flow of joy and I wanted to release its hold on the subconscious.

More specifically I wanted to find the thought patterns that created the damage to the nerves of my feet, as you could read in the “about” page.

I thought I had found everything. But the pain is still with me and I know that I am still missing something. Actually I know what I am missing. I need to be in such a sate in which agreeing to suffer is impossible. A state in which word stories are seen through and known to be the illusion that creates illusions.

Some things worked wonderfully. I found some programs in the subconscious that were surprising to me. Again and again I had confirmations to the validity and value of this method that I came up with. I learned to trust it more and more. I explained how the method works a number of times in the blog, and I have written about it more in my book Opening Intuitive Flow Through Artwork. And I wrote about it in different discussion forums. Working so intensely on myself, by using this method, has made me a better therapist. I had a supervision group of art therapists and they learned to use this method too. I did workshops and taught others how to use it. I presented it in conferences and in lectures.

When I decided to stop the public demonstration of the work on the pain, I continued to do the work. I knew that there would be many repetitions as this always happens, and I did not want to describe these in the blog.

But writing the entries to this blog became something that I liked a lot, and I decided to change the purpose of the process that I showed in the blog to seeing how far such work can take me.

I had many glimpses of peace and joy and you could read about them as they happened. After a while my whole perspective has changed. I lost interest in my subconscious blocks. They lost their charm for me. When they come I just release them. The ropes that I saw on my path, and thought that they were snakes, as the Buddhist story tells, turned back into ropes. I still find it interesting to help my clients read their subconscious and release whatever stops them from being free and joyful. But for myself, I am not attracted to these any more.

In time I came to live with another kind of energy. I found myself in awe as I came to be in the presence of infinite peaceful space. It became easier and easier to get there, and my main focus started to be the investigation of this space. Just being there makes you happy without any perceivable reason. I realize that this is what I have to do. I have to be in this presence again and again, as it fixes everything that needs fixing. My clients changed too and nowadays most of them go through experiences that are like mine. They discover their inner voice and inner guidance. They find joy and playfulness when the fears and worries leave them.

Doing this blog, as it follows my adventure of going into myself is still one of the most exciting things for me to do, and you are moving with me to wherever my front line is. I appreciate you very much for being with me on this trip, like old friends.

Some changes have already taken place naturally and I am going on. Please feel comfortable to communicate, if you are moved to do so. Good to have you. Thank you.

205. How can I feel better now?

Published January 22, 2015 energy , evolving , healing , Inner light , Intuition , making art , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth Leave a Comment
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You are those vibes

You are those vibes

You are swimming in the universe. You ask: How can I feel better now? You sense how the question changes everything in the universe. You gulp it in and swallow the universe completely. You feel how it becomes you. Now you are those vibes. Lick your lips. It was good.

Now, when you start feeling the itch, ask again: How can I feel better now?

204.Everything is of the same importance

Published January 7, 2015 makingart , meditation , perception , Physical and non physical , Reading art , Spiritual , The world of thoughts , Truth Leave a Comment
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Lost in infinity

Lost in infinity

This is about looking up, while meditating or imagining. It is a good idea, and a strange thing too, as in an infinite field, where there cannot be any place that is different from another, there is no middle, no side, no up and no down.

So looking up belongs to the relative world. Some time ago I was advised by inner guidance to look to the sides, when I dive into imaginary spaces, instead of looking straight forwards. It was a smart advice. I discovered a whole now experience. And maybe this is the beginning training of me in getting used to infinity. There is indeed so much more in it, and the way we focus in infinity is totally different. We do not hold a narrow view. We have the view of all.

And when I looked up at first in meditation, I discovered again a new world. And this is what I started to depict here.

Of course, it is: bringing the relative perspective into the infinite reality.

In my imagination it looked different at first. It looked like a scene into which you could penetrate deeper and deeper, passing bodies of something on the way, going beyond them, passing other bodies, and so on. Here I have some form in the middle, as if it is a three dimensional form. You may get the feeling that it is a kind of a giant. You are looking from the level of the knees and far ahead there is the head. Then it may even look as if this head is looking down at you. As much as I wanted to lose my earthly perspective, it came through. I could not get rid of it. In a way it endears this perspective to me. Like a child that you, impatiently, want to convince to do something that is more comfortable for you to deal with, but the child stubbornly wants to go at that thing from his perspective. At first you get annoyed, but you end up listening. If he insists so strongly, you think, let me listen carefully, because there is something in it for him, and it is important for him so much that he opposes me. Let me see what it is.

So who is the child in this case?

It is the earthly perspective. The way we experience and interpret the world around us. There is always a point in a specific place in the space that I know, from which the view is taken. There is also the issue of bigger and smaller, and the world will compel you to pay attention to these differences, as they have something to do with your safety. If the giant is your friend, then he’d rather be big and strong. But if he is of an unknown orientation…

When you look at the individual spots, some of them seem to be closer to you, and some are farther. This is due to the color and the surrounding colors. If you look at the area of what would be the chest, the dark blue area seems to be an opening into an unknown depth. The purple seems to come toward us. And the green is deep but not so deep as the dark blue. These differences break the solidity of the form, and I wanted this effect to be in the art, to confuse the usual way of relating to forms and background. I wanted you to know that what you are looking at is not what you thought it was.

The white parts can be seen as objects painted in white, as we do sometimes in our reality, but also as areas that were not touched by the power of the colors. They have not been swayed off balance to be close or far, warm or cold, friendly or hostile. So they remained points of reference, like the test groups in scientific experiments that let you know how things will behave without the influence of the foreign element that you introduce.

So you now start to have the feeling of what this painting is about. It is about being uncertain as for where things are, of the integrity of forms, of background and foreground. You are still with a few of the perceptual habits of an earthling, but your trust in your reality starts to falter.

And it is fascinating indeed. The fascination will take you through the unfamiliar. And it will take you to where everything has the same importance. What comes to mind in this context is the music of Schoenberg indeed. The invention of the twelve-tone music did the same service to music that this artwork does to visual perception. In the traditional structure of a scale there are more important tones and less important ones. The home tone is the most important, and it creates the adventure. We go far from it and feel uncomfortable. We come back and relax. This is the relative world. We, humans gave the importance to some of the places, because this was our perception of reality. Places have relative importance and everything else has relative importance as well. In Schoenberg’s music this relativity is lost. You are placed in an unformed space musically, where it is hard to know where you want to be. You can struggle and try to reach something that will resemble the familiar home, but you can’t really find it. So you get used to having no home. And when your worry subsides, you start to play. You try to put things in different orders. And you know that the orders that you create are temporary and not substantial. But they give you pleasure and activate your curiosity to go on trying other combinations.

So now, do you have a better sense of this artwork?

201. The vividness of the present moment

Published October 12, 2014 evolving , healing , Inner light , Intuition , making art , meditation , Reading art , Spiritual , Truth Leave a Comment
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Radiating

Radiating

This time I’m not going to write about this painting and the other one down the page. I added them here to decorate. Maybe they are connected?

These words came to me:

As long as you send out, you do not receive.

The elaboration is below.

I am doing short meditations during the day, of relaxing all the focuses. I look inside and find where I am focused and let it go. When I first came to a state without focusing, it felt a little frightening, because as it turns out all or most of our habitual focusing is about wanting to be safe. We are afraid all the time and watch out for whatever might happen. This is why, when I relaxed the focuses, I felt the fear from which they came.

After some time of doing this, I suddenly felt the vividness of the present moment, in a way I have never felt before. I felt how much it is alive. I can’t describe this in words but it is wonderful. So now I understand what it means to be in the moment.

It means first to let go of the fears and trust that you are okay without being on guard. And when the experience of the vividness comes, you know experientially that you are much more than okay. You are in wonderland.

Connect it to your intuitive flow method, says my inner guide.

So I do.

Being in the now happens on its own when you follow only your sense of beauty while making art. It is much easier to be in the moment through artmaking, than to do it mentally. When we do this, we also feel that it is okay to be without our fear focus. Instead we go to our interest, curiosity and love. This is a good way to let go of the fears. You can’t act out of curiosity and out of fear at the same time. If you act out of curiosity, you are not afraid.

And as we go on following the sense of beauty, we stay in this state of experiencing the vividness of the moment for the duration of the artmaking.

When we read the art, we do this while being-in-the-now for a second time, and experience the vividness of our artwork. This is experiencing how it felt to be present a few minutes ago. But the experience of this happens in the present, because it is based on looking at the art now.

Another issue that arises is the idea of “the present.” This idea belongs to the way of understanding that thinks that there is time, there are past, present and future. But what is meant by saying “to be in the present” is not to be in the middle of that line of time. It is about being in a different, deeper state, in which the understanding that there is time does not happen. When we look at it at first we think that this is a strange way of understanding, and that we need to shut off some important capacities in order to imagine that such a state, in which we do not know about time can exist. Eventually this strange state, we come to realize, is the truth of how things are. And the thinking process that we developed as humans, and that has the idea of time in it, is one ingredient of the state of affairs and not the basis of everything else.

Now I think that it is a very good idea to read the art, to find the fears or any other unhappy feelings, and paint them.

As we paint them, we release them. And I have written about this a lot.

In this way there is a complete practice: Draw what is going on inside of you now. Be guided by your sense of beauty only. Read the art, also from the state of awareness and flow, as I teach in many other places, including the book “Opening Intuitive Flow Through Artwork.” Find fears and draw them to release them.

End with a new drawing of “what is happening now” so that you can see that you have changed. When you know that you have changed, the change stays.

Floating landscape

Floating landscape

Curiosity, as it turns out, is openness to receive. It is a burning desire to receive experiences from the universe. Being open like this and receiving experiences is abundance. This is what abundance boils down to. We want to be rich so that we can be unafraid and open up to experience the present moment. We don’t know that this is what we want but it is so. Experiencing the present moment with all its richness and depth is happiness. We do not have to wait until we are rich or until something that we believe will make us experience joy will happen. We just have to release our fears and open up now.

The fear and the caution are defensive activity aimed at what we perceive as outward. It is a pushing away activity. As long as there is this pushing away, there cannot be a receiving.

The trust in the truth of now starts when we discover experientially that the truth has to do with love, with acceptance, with fun, with fulfillment. When we discover this, our attitude starts to change from fear to a desire to have more of the truth. So if you want to help people change their attitude toward the truth, you have to bring them to experience the love, the fun and the acceptance that are in the truth of the moment.

By making art from your sense of beauty, you yourself become the accepting and the curious entity. You experience being awareness in action. You don’t make art from the feeling of wanting to push things away, but from the openness that wants to experience.

So the question now is: How do you bring people to realize that what they do in the artmaking, as they work from their sense of beauty, is the expression of the truth. And how can you bring them to the knowledge that they can become that entity that acts out of the sense of beauty all the time? How can you bring people to relax their judging, and let themselves be this eager and accepting curiosity?

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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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