In every moment, like when there is an attack of pain that is hard to suffer Ask myself: Where is the “I”? And these days I already see, every time I look, many of my “I”’s in many levels.
It is even possible to choose a direction and look for all the levels of I in that direction. This adds interest.
So now that I see many levels, I can ask: From which level of I do I want to act now? Which level do I want to be for this moment? Which level do I want to choose an action from?
Then this is what I do. And the next question is: What action do I want to choose?
And the deeper I go I find that I am more satisfied already and I do not want to do anything really, because I have everything. I am good. I am done.
And the more outward I go, the more I feel that action is required right now, to fix what is not satisfying yet.
So, instead of fixing the un-fixable I go deeper and find that there is nothing to fix. This is what I do when the pain attacks.
Now comes a Zen question: If there is nothing to fix, and everything is good already what shall I do anyway?
This is an infinite question. and I think the answer may be: to play to be curious to be loving to express love to help to make art to express the truth for everybody and for nobody.
This is the thing. This is why it is so difficult to answer a Zen question. Because you can answer on or from many levels.
This is what they call Skillful Means. To know what level to answer from. (They say so , usually, to explain how come they contradict themselves frequently.)
And what is the better level? To answer from the same level that the question came from? From one level up? Two?
There is no good answer. Maybe to strengthen what is already possible for the one who asks at the moment of asking?
And does not everybody have the same connection as I do to all the levels of I?
Actually, the thing to do is to surrender to intuition.
This is the most surprising and the most beautiful.
I invent as I go. The next line always suggests itself. It means that I am in a conversation and allowing the infinite-field draw through me. It always responds to my mood or feeling in the time. And if I allow a description of some energy, an expression of a feeling or any inner experience, come through as well, the energy of the feeling is released at the same time that it comes to be seen on the paper. It is released because it is being seen from the perspective of the flow, which is a higher energy. Higher energy dissolves lower energy.
Then, still in the process, relieved from what I felt before, a new, better feeling arises and is also expressed in its turn. And so on.
At some point I feel good about the way the drawing is now, and this is the sign to stop. It feels complete.
This feeling of completeness is miraculous. Where does it come from? I ask my inner guide and he says: This is your gift.
Do I understand this? Not really. I consider this not-knowing a gift too.
…
I can leave the drawing as it is.
And I can start playing with colors and additional textures or whatever feels good.
I wait for the lines that are done in watercolor to dry out. Then a thought comes to me, to photograph every step, so when I share this text with you, you will have in front of you what was in front of me when I wrote about each of the steps of making the painting. But I get so engrossed in the process that I do not want to stop, and I end up finishing the whole painting, without taking any photograph in the process. So you will have to imagine the steps that I wrote about, when the painting was in progress, while looking at the finished painting.
Now, with the finished drawing in front of me, I already feel so much better than before. Yes, just making these few lines made me feel so much better. All along the way, through the doing of the drawing, I released whatever emotions came up and became freer. Infinity matched my new feeling and brought new ideas for lines or effects that felt better than before.
…
I did the first color area, the dark green. The people at Prismacolor (I used Prismacolor pencils to color) call it Olive Green, but it is not olive green at all. It is more like what is called in other places Forest Green. It has a sense of depth and aliveness. I feel happy about how the drawing jumps above it. The softness of the green and what feels like a positive environment makes the brown of the drawing a bit scary and as it has bad intentions.
Also, suddenly there is a feeling of depth. The green calls you to sink deeper into it and the brown line is jumping closer to us.
…
I had a feeling of what would come after this green spot. I saw in the imagination many colors. I saw a procession of them in the same kind of spots, developing into some jolly dance.
But now, that I see what is appearing, as I am working on the next color area, the ochre, another game suggests itself to me. I feel excitement about what I’ll do. Look at this: another improvement in the level of joy.
…
The second color, the reddish ochre, is in. It feels as if it is under the green, but if you ignore the area where this new color touches the green and look only at how it interacts with the brown lines, it feels to be closer to us than the green. It is under the lines just because I drew it as such. But it is jumping out a little and in other circumstances could be felt to be closer than the brown lines.
I look at what I have now and I feel it is almost enough, but not yet.
The color areas have some stability to them that makes the lines seem more active than before.
Does it feel good now? Yes, it does. But still I feel there is need for more.
…
There is strong pain in my left foot. The foot is hot. This is unpleasant and my automatic thoughts about it take my mood down a bit.
On the other hand, even though I can do something to reduce this pain, the interest in what is happening in the painting keeps me involved in the process.
…
I get tired suddenly and decide to stop and continue the next day.
…
I look at the picture in progress in the next day. The red added a stone like body that is suddenly turning down. The ochre and the green made an effort to go up and this red goes down. It is not a stone really, and the green and ochre aren’t that heavy. They float. They all are light and it is just a meandering of energy, depicted in this way.
Making the red go down is actually following what the drawing does. The following of the drawing is not like making a copy of its movement but a variation that is at play with it. Again, the colors add a sense of depth, a concrete depth. The white background that the drawing played on can represent the infinite space, the boundlessness. The colors come a little closer to the way we experience our reality (This shape is close to me and that one is a bit farther away).
Adding the colors and then more effects is like composing music. You have the leading voice in the drawing. If we do not add anything after this, we have an a-capella performance. Adding the color spots and other things is like adding harmony and maybe a base line and drums. This is the way it is for me. The added color shapes can go along, can highlight the drawing and can contradict it. This creates the composition, and the composition is the most important aspect of the way the whole piece feels. When you play music, it is because you love to hear it. And it is the same here. Everything is done in the painting because I love to experience the way it comes out on the paper.
…
Now I have just done the light, dust-in-the-desert like, cloud under the lines in the left region.
As I was finishing I felt a bit of an alarm. Maybe this is not the best color here? I saw it there before I made it. I always have this soft, trusting, question in me before I make the next step. What will come now? Aug., what do you think? Aug. is August Moon, my inner guide. He is always present for me so lovingly. And he paints with me. We are one, you can say. So I invite him to participate in all that I do here as a human being on this earth.
Usually, as soon as I ask, I see the next step in my imagination and I do it. When I say that I see it, it is still not final. It keeps changing as long as I make it. Ikeep changing throughout the process, and these changes are expressed all the time. This gives a wonderful feeling of wellbeing, of playing joyfully. You can say that it is a way to walk along with awareness. Awareness itself only looks and knows. But I like to express, so I invent ways to make effects in the art that express what awareness sees.
…
At this point I look at the painting again and I start seeing possibilities for a few steps ahead. But when the blue is done, all the other possible additions become unnecessary.
…
I needed to have blue there. It was something I felt very strongly in my body. So now I feel relieved. It is a good feeling, like: Everything is okay now.
But is it? Let me look again.
The addition of the colors has made the painting more dramatic. Especially the addition of the blue has a strong effect. Now the lines are like wind and the way it blows, and the color areas are like a thunder as it moves through the landscape.
The fact that the area with colors is in the middle and is surrounded by white makes the scene harsh. It is almost shocking. Such a drama is happening in the middle, that everything else in the world has become white. The central happening has sucked all the energy from the world.
And me? I feel excited. What a game! Look at what I made!
…
I could stop here. It is like a minimal statement. The string instruments, as I imagine the lines to be, have a meandering tune. They mix with each other to travel along a short musical sentence, from right to left. They go up, they go down like in a wave, they swell again and this is the whole sentence. And in the background you hear the thunder of other instruments rolling, making a big show, but it is a short and colorful one. It all happened quickly and now it has ended. You still tremble with the sound waves.
…
Something deep in me wants more. The picture is not totally true yet. Something is missing. To be satisfied I need to add something else. And I add the screens in several places.
Yes, this is better now. Something deeper wanted to be expressed. August moon is smiling now and this means that I am in a very good state.
The last addition of the screens softens the harshness of the event. It says that this was a little occurrence in infinity. There was a concentration, some contrast, some rumbling of a passing energy, and now it is dispersing and about to disappear into the infinite peace.
…
Time to sign
I can add or align my signature with the edge of the picture. But then it will be like saying that I add my power to the tendency to confine, to frame and limit the view. So instead I decide to be close to the movement and to align myself with the infinite ebb and flow in the ocean of energy. Not to feel protected by holding on to a defined place. Not to say that my power comes from having a point of view. Instead, I am everything. Everything happens within me, is made of me and disappears in me.
…
This turned out to have been a meditation about the nature of our reality. It lead me from expressing feelings as they were detected by the awareness, which is the background to all of our excitements, going along with the experiences of how the feelings kept changing from involvement to detachment and from the narrow view of: Oh, what is happening to me, to awe.
It is a healing trip, like a pilgrimage that sends you walking in the mud step after step to disentanglement and to the bigger view of the truth that opens up.
It is based on listening to one’s heart and doing what comes from there.
This is one possibility of becoming free. There are innumerable ways and this one is my favorite.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.)
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.
intuitiveflow 