Archive for the 'perception' Category



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.

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

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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.

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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?

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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

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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

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.

218. The knowledge that does not fit in the shape.

Inner sound

Hearing the sound

The knowledge that does not fit in the shape

Requires a mouth that is shut for now

The joy of expanding

Like children in a school break

Running out to the yard

Is like an eye that is open to the ocean

The face that will not be intact any more

Collapses because of an ear that hears the eternal sound

A hair that flies in the wind is left

From the static posture that breaks open.

216. The story point of view and the energy point of view

The influence of the wind.

The left and the right.

There is some discrepancy between the right side and the left side of the picture. The left is loose and hardly organized. It looks like something that is falling apart. The right is better organized, but it is losing some of its order by the pressure and movement that come from the left.

The right is filled with interesting things that try hard to hold on to their shapes. The left looks as if it used to have shapes too, but with the movement, no good form is left in it.

What does it mean?

From the point of view of the story of life, this painting may depict a traumatic and frightening event.

From energy point of view it is just the process of change. In the end of it, maybe there will appear new forms that will be better adjusted for swift movement? And it is also possible that after this movement the forms will disappear all together and there will only be a peaceful sea of energy, in which some things appear and disappear.

The forms are the story.

The sea is the ground of all.

So what do they think about the wind?

From the story point of view it is what brings a disaster.

From energy point of view it is how freedom manifests.


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

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