Posts Tagged 'freedom'

288. The stuff of life

FullSizeRender 3

I painted it mostly with my face very close to the paper. This is how I love to make art. From close up I feel that I am in the space of the painting. This is where I’d like to always be. Every area of color is like a place, a version of mood that I can choose to walk into. Then come the spaces among shapes and lines, where you can smell freedom. You can enter these and see how it feels. Colors overlap to create new colors. How does it feel to be in a place of a mixture? How do the clear paints feel near mixed ones? Do you want to run away from places like this, or enter? And there are the placers where the pink guiding lines that I made before putting in the colors show through the layers and cause the surface to feel like leather.

FullSizeRender 4

When I look at it from so close everything feels alive and happening right now in front of my eyes. I make myself a little world and get lost in it, just as we all do with our lives.

I started, as always with the drawing. I chose to describe the way I felt. What is my experience of this moment? This is the question that I ask before I start. Who do I ask? I ask the deeper parts of myself.

Nowadays I take some medications to reduce the pain. It does not reduce all of it. But I get longer periods without pain and this enables me to do things. There are side effects. One of them is that the strength of all nerve signals is reduced along with the signals of the pain. It makes it harder to meditate. The effects of being alive come as if they had to pass through a blanket before I sensed them. I learned to become aware of weaker signals.

(I also get tired from thinking. I had to stop at this point because my mind found it hard to continue.) In the afternoons the effect of the nightly medications dissolves and I become clear again.

What can I say about this picture?

Let’s imagine that it was not me who painted this. I tell this to myself, so I can shake off habitual fears about exposure.

I feel, in the shapes of the colors, this same tiredness and inner deafness that I feel in the mornings. Every shape is like a blanket. Or maybe the shapes are like the heavily filtered signals, when I finally get them.

Yes, this is the view.

If you looked at the drawing before I added the painted shapes, you would see suffering and despair. Then a deeper state ensues, just because I was keenly aware of my experience, and I start the colored shapes from a standpoint from where I feel the movements of energy that bring about the outer layer of experience that I described as suffering. At this moment I sailed away from fears and the outermost details of my life. Going on deeper, if I did, I’d come to silence. For me, while doing this layer I already feel the silence. So these energies, as you probably know, come from thoughts, beliefs and expectations that originate at this point from my very long and deep subconscious. Becoming aware of this layer, just being aware from the place of silence, is enough for dissolving these thoughts that create the movements of energy, which eventually bring about what we perceive as suffering.

From this perspective, making art like this is healing. And even though I stopped officially to show in the blog how I heal myself with this way of making art and reading it, the truth is that I have continued all the time. The flow in art-making leads you deeper, to the place from which being aware heals.

And this is helpful indeed psychologically and spiritually at the same time. The more clear of thoughts that mask the truth I am, the more free of suffering I become, from the psychological perspective, and the more free I become, at the same time, of whatever habitual thoughts I have that filter the knowing of my freedom. Freedom is always in me (and everyone). You can never take it away. Some call this freedom love, because, being free, you can’t but love everything.

So this is what we have: despair on the surface and heavily masked signals from inside and outside. What is not shown are the peace, play, curiosity and even joy that are the essence of seeing from a deeper place. You have to guess them from seeing the details of creating a mood with movements of energies that come from thoughts. This is the stuff of life.

285. The dream and the life

White House Dream

4:40, early morning.

I don’t know when it started. From that point on, I had the same dream all through the night, till now.

The White House exploded and burned down.

All the people who worked there came to work in my living room.

There was place for all of them but it was crowded. They rearranged the pillows on my bed and this made it possible for them to sleep there. Trump said to a reporter that they did not need that many people, that all those who left, only made the White House work better. “We don’t need that many people, he said, it is a simple thing to run a country.”

I think this dream touches on my getting rid of a big part of what I kept before, and how having stuff that conflicts with your freedom to be who you are, is slowing you down or even preventing you from being you.

And this connects to having mental habits that don’t support your free flight.

In the last period of my sleep, most of the pains in my feet subsided and if I was careful enough I could keep it that way and get some sleep. Only one pain seemed to stubbornly menace me. It woke me up and I sat up in my bed. The people from the White House were not in my bed any more, but I still was under the spell of the dream. I felt that unpleasantness of having uncomfortable things that fill up all the space.

I tried the stronger ointment on the top of the right foot. This will take care of it, I thought. I cannot use this all the time but now it is okay.

The pain did not stop. I put the ointment again.

The pain started to subside but the parallel place in the other foot started to hurt. I treated the new pain with the stronger ointment too. Now both feet hurt. It was a hard-to-live-with pain.

Nevertheless, sitting in bed, I fell asleep and started to fall. I woke up abruptly and avoided the fall.

This pain too, in the context of this writing, has to do with thought patterns that block flying. Have you ever considered that pain is a thought? We will have to talk about it some other time.

I went to the kitchen to make some coffee.

Long ago in this continuing fight with the pain, I made up my mind that I won’t succumb to suffering. If the pain keeps me awake, I’ll do something pleasant.

On my way to the kitchen, a bit more awake, my mind started to think with some coherence.

The thoughts that came to me were about the trauma. There was that time long ago, when I felt that I was succeeding in becoming like my father. For some reason, habitual most probably, I still consider that little sweet boy to be me, even though the only thing that we truly have in common is this infinite consciousness, who has always witnessed us from inside.

I was three and a half. I climbed all the way to the top of the structure in my new kindergarten. I stood there, at the top, and knew that I had made it. Now I am like him. This kindergarten was my new place. All the kids were older than those in the kindergarten that I left. It is happening, I thought. I am becoming my father.

He was in the war in the Galilee and in that same day he was killed.

My mom was shocked and did things in strange ways. Without talking or hinting at any reason, she brought me back to the baby’s kindergarten that I just left a few days earlier. I talked with her about it many years later and I know that she wanted me to be closer to her workplace so she could come during the work-hours and see me, in case I needed her. But in those days, in a child’s way, I understood it differently: By wanting to take my father’s place and by succeeding in being like him, I killed him. He had to go. There was only a place for one. My mother knew, I thought, even though I did not tell her (I believed that people could see each other’s thoughts), and did not want me to take my father’s place. She wanted him. What a disappointment. She knew I was dangerous and putting myself at danger too. People will know what I did and will come to kill me. I had to be protected against them and prevented from any further success. This was my understanding in those distant days. And indeed I understood it also to be a punishment for following my dream, not to mention the punishment of not having a father any more.

I did not talk. I did not feel anything accept for some resistance to this predicament. I accepted my punishment as just. My subconscious was quick to learn that he had to prevent me from succeeding. I also learned to be careful not to anger Mom, as who knows what else she could suddenly do? Every time I had the feeling that I succeeded in something, my subconscious interfered and some form of blocking appeared. I did not feel these blockages, Just as I did not feel anything in the beginning. The whole air around me was making it impossible for me to be able to evolve as I wanted. The air did not let me succeed. I only felt my resistance to the air in my back and the back of the neck, as if I was pushed backward to a wall and wanted to fight my way out of this.

This is how, in my child’s mind, I paved for myself a life of struggles and some significant failures. Today I look at all this as an admirable invention of a very talented mind. But I don’t want to jump far ahead so quickly.

Everything that started to feel like success, the sky stopped. I would discover that something shocking had happened again, only too late, when the failure had already happened, and I would turn to be emotionless. Sometimes when I thought that I succeeded in something, I started to see in my imagination an angry crowd coming after me to shame and punish me violently.

Every time my mother was a little upset, and later, when my wife was in such a mood, I feared that I was about to be punished and blocked.

So when I thought about the dream that continued all through the night, I felt that it was as stubborn as this disaster-bringing-fear that blocked me so many times, and also like the pain that presented similar characteristics.

On the other hand, the insistent dream forced me to experience the discomfort that is felt when you have a blocking thought pattern that takes over the space of your mind.

So what do you do?

The first thing to know is that you cannot change the situation, as long as you remain on the same level of consciousness.

This means that you can’t win against what you understand to be a war against you or against a fear that you have. You have to let go of the whole struggle, even if it feels like losing. Lose. Let the issue rest, no matter which way it falls. It will make you freer.

We need to go to a deeper state and witness the experience from there.

This is usually enough, when you deal with all minor problems. I wrote abut it in the past. But this one here is a major one. At least from the perspective of a normal human being, like you and me (as long as we see ourselves as such).

I wrote in the past about this deeper state as a child-like consciousness. Being flowingly curious without a practical reason, loving everything, playing with the reality about us as a natural expression of who we really are, and more things like these, including of course being in a creative flow. Creative flow includes all of these characteristics together (which is the real value of art making for everyone).

This child-like state feels so much better than the state in which we suffer, that naturally, looking from this state, we choose not to suffer. Yes, suffering turns out to be a choice, when you look at it through a child-like eyes and heart. It just feels bad, and you choose not to go that way. Instead, you choose to do something that feels better. The old habit comes back later several times, but after a while it just dies from disinterest in it.

But this case is more difficult because at the time that the trauma occurred I was in a child-like state. If I get into a similar state now, I won’t be able to see the difference between my good state now and the child that I was when the trauma happened.

So we need to go even deeper than the child’s state. Only from that deeper state it will become clear that this suffering was a choice too, and the deeper state that we are in feels so much better, that we naturally make the choice not to suffer. Then again, it comes back and because we are not interested in it any more it becomes weaker and weaker, and dissolves completely eventually.

What is the state that is deeper than the child-like state?

Being absorbed in who we really are. This state is the basis, out of which the child-like state arises.

We cannot even be aware of our choices if we are in the same state in which the choices were made.

What can I say about this absorption?

When in it, you know beyond doubt that you are deeply and permanently loved. Nothing can ever change this. All your choices are supported and appreciated. All possibilities are open before you and you can choose differently than that choice that you suffer from now.

In a way it looks as if a mixture of different “I”s are involved in what I wrote.

We have the child, The “I” that I am now, and the deeper “I”, the infinite witness from within. It is perplexing, but all these become one, when you choose to live in the physical world with a deeper perspective.

271. Diving among thoughts and feelings

diving 2

Go deeper

Though you will find

Some human shapes

Go deeper

Though you will see

An orchard

Or a forest in the fall

Go deeper still

Though you may find

Flowers of the field

Go on

Pass them

Into the depths

And continue through the earth

And the whole milky way

Pass the fields of thoughts

The clouds of feelings

The pictures in your mind

And find

That you have arrived

Into yourself

That has no end

No beginning

And no name

From this

Make your body first

And know

That the world will come

For you

To play.

 

diving 3

This is a small painting. Small ones are much quicker to finish. This one took half a day. It is one continuous process, even with its inner changes, from beginning to end.

This painting was done to describe a certain meditation. There is a meditation that goes like this: with closed eyes, I see what experiences are happening now. There are bodily sensations, sounds, I feel the air on my skin, thoughts, feelings, all these happen without effort. Effects are created and noted, the subconscious responds to all of them and brings about new thoughts and feelings. Then new things happen. And I watch.

When I look at all these, I end up catching my subconscious as it responds to what appears, and I don’t follow its ideas. The energy that I could give these ideas, by following them, is not given and without this energy the ideas cannot last long. This in itself is a meditation. I can watch how the events of my experiences become smaller and how, gradually, less of them show up, until they don’t appear any more.

But this is not what I do. Instead, I feel the inner space and I dive among the events. I avoid all of them and dive.

I am interested in how the space feels, so I give the space all the energy of my curiosity.

As I continue diving, the space opens more and I go on.

This is the meditation.

I go until there are no events happening around me.

In a way it is like the other meditation, but here I can imagine being more active and adventurous.

This painting came after the drawing and writing that are in the beginning of this entry.

So you can see that just drawing something and thinking about it, can bring you deeper into that direction.

In this way, all that you do is based on what you choose, out of your interest. You don’t jump into meditation because you think that it is good for you, and once you are engaged, you start having resistances, because the entry into the meditation was not natural. It was acting on an idea that came from outside. Someone said.

I am for freedom in every step.

239. The veil

IMG_1458

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.

 

 

 

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.

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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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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