Posts Tagged 'thoughts'

321. A bidirectional bridge

Thoughts go right
Feelings aim left
White is all around
Red is where it hurts

And if this makes you want to ask
Let the questions go
Sink instead
To where the questions come from.

I’ll go line by line in the end. But first I’ll say this:
The poem is how I read the art. At first it is just finding content, quite intuitively. As this inner seeing goes on, a deepening of the awareness happens on its own. A deeper view becomes available and it expresses itself in the end of the poem.

This is a general characteristic of art making. When making art, any form of art, we tune in to deeper layers of who we are. You can call it a meditative effect. The noise of the outer layer of our life calms down. More subtle energies start to be noticed.

This happens too in the drawing and in the addition of background colors. The drawing already is a process of increasing awareness. So when the background colors’ time comes, I am already in a deeper state than the way I started, and the background colors are added with greater understanding and compassion. (Note: I do the background after I do the line-work.)

The whole event, the drawing, painting, reading and interpreting, is about introducing awareness to what is going on in the mind at the time of making the art and reading it.

Now line by line (almost):
I took the drawing to be the thoughts. They created in the picture a bridge like shape that feels as if it goes to the right.
The background color shapes seem to be aiming at the left and I took them as feelings or the energetic movements under the thoughts.
There seems to be a contradiction here. Why would the thoughts and feelings go in opposing directions? This question is not being answered. But note that the color shapes were added when already in a deeper state than in the beginning.
White all around is the feeling of the infinite awareness that is everywhere.
The pain is in my feet. In almost all of my artworks there is some expression of the pain.
And here, in the end of the poem, comes the advise from the deeper and wiser state. Go to an even deeper awareness. Answers that come from shallow layers of us will not encompass the whole picture. They will be partial, and more questions will have to be asked and answered. Better to sink deeper into the infinity that is us, and allow something more fundamental to emerge.
And better yet: No matter how deep the answers come from, It is awareness that notices them.

314. Two me

I cry
For how I suffer
For how I let my youthful thoughts
effect my stay

My feet are burning
But
Being infinite
I split myself to two

The deeper
wiser me
Takes the crying me
In hands

Look around, I say
See how energy makes the trees
Do you see
How sensitive it is

And happy
As
It
Flows?

You too are energy
And all you see around
Is you
Including me

Do you see
How much
you love
yourself?

287. Only light

New

There is

no shadow under the bed

in my new room

No shadow

beneath

the table.

Only light.

282. A new beginning, or: What has happened to Giora?

I am sitting in the big guestroom and the wall of the other side of our street looks at me as I look at it. Here:

IMG_1940

This ‘other side’, as everything else, is created by thoughts, and thoughts are independent entities, capable of self-reflection, which makes it possible for them to rethink who and what they are and what they are doing here in my experience. When I do self-reflection my experience of everything in my life changes.

Do you want an example?

Wherever you are, ask yourself: Let’s see what can I love now? And see what happens to everything around you.

So things are only a kind of a mirror, reflecting me. And ‘me’ is a constantly changing thing, based on what I think. Basically I am free to change myself, as I wish for different experiences. The only thing that makes me seem like a stable being is the big, mostly ancient collection of previous choices of how to think about things. These old thoughts think themselves so quickly when I am not aware of them that they take over my life. They make it seem that they are my choices now of what I want to be.

I am breaking the stream of thoughts. It is time for some quiet, to let all the thoughts of the previous paragraphs get digested. Maybe I’ll stop this entry here, and you, please make sure to take some digestive enzymes.

You may be thinking: What has happened to Giora? There may be a resistance to accepting my thoughts. Good for you. Don’t accept them. Take them as my opinion. You really don’t have to accept anything. It is just my fun to write them. I am not even trying to convince. I am a thought. I can only convince myself to be a different thought.

But you wouldn’t be reading this if you did not have some invitation to these thoughts in you… I am part of your world, and I am responding to your wish to have different experiences.

Before we close I want to make sure I say this: Being a thought is only a partial state. It is a limited view. The complete me is everything, with no boundaries. You too.

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.

266. Just reading

Craving roots

There are many ways to read art. This is one of them: Just start writing and see where it takes you.

You can also say: Start to describe what you see. From there you start to be guided by your interests, associations, and yes, the universe supports you, based on your inclination at the time. We are always supported.

The painting is from June 5th and I wrote this on June 6th. Other things came in the way and I did them, but now I want to share this.

The first thing that came to my mind was that it came out alive. It means that the power that was used in order to create it is still in it. And what is the power? It is a thought, expressed in space and time.

When you look at it, your energy field responds to the experience by arranging itself into an energy structure. To you it feels like a feeling that you may have a name for. Then your thought processes become engaged and a new adventure starts in your story of your life. It may be big or small. Maybe you immediately turn away, smile, have a cup of tea and look at birds in the sky?

Here is what I wrote:

It feels like this: a number of shapes in different colors bump into each other in the middle (These are the colored shapes). The feeling is of an argument or at least a disagreement (Purple, orange, brown and blue). But it does not come to fighting.

There are three shapes who are out of the group. They haven’t come into touching relations, like the four others. So maybe they hesitate to join? Maybe the yellow on the left and the pink on upper left were kicked out of this society or could not join in as there was not even the slightest invitation extended to them. Or, maybe they stopped before they came too close, so that they can take a good look at what is happening.  Maybe they want to check it out before they join? And the cloud, the third of the outsiders, is the one who cares the least. He seems to have more power than all the rest. He has his own behavior and his own field of reference, which is the weather system in the area and the world. As such he is much less a participant in the meeting. But because of him, the perspective of other, bigger systems, is added to every part of this picture.

Then there is the earth with an orange border. But this element is cut abruptly on the left, without too much drama.

This tear-off breaks the impression of a stable earth. This earth can shrink to nothing. Don’t rely on me, it says. Look somewhere else for your stability.

Now the purple and the brown seem to connect with the earth, in spite of it being ephemeral. The orange and the blue seem to be okay with just floating in the air. Or maybe they are not so okay with it, and this is why they come to mix with the earthlings.

So here is a kind of a summary. There is a little drama here. Like in a country, or any society. People collaborate without agreeing with each other. There are some small areas of overlapping and you can say, some form of compromise and collaboration. The others are in differing degrees of separation, deciding not to get involved. But they are close anyway. They are human too and they don’t want to give up on their belonging to this group.

These are the energy bodies, operating by the hidden assumptions that bring about what seems to appear in reality, which is the drawing in green lines.

The green lines describe little separate forms that together create the pattern of what appear in this world of time and space.

So when you wander in this world and see all these forms around you, know that they come from a deeper, usually unseen, layer of energy bodies, coming into being from thoughts and ideas.

All comes from thoughts.

As in a known Zen story, in which some students, looking at a flag that moved in the wind, argued about what truly moved. Is it the flag? Is it the wind? And the master said: Nothing moves, except for your thoughts.

And how could I forget the red part of the lines, in a little area in the right? There was some drama in the reality of the picture.

This red part is indeed a part of the reality that I created with my thoughts. But I gave it the red color to say that according to my beliefs this is a violation of some sort.

Now imagine that you are an art therapist and this is the first artwork that your new client made. Do you see how much can be learned from just the first painting?

And if every one of us has a such a collection of thoughts with him at every moment, can you see what the fabric of our humanity is made of? If we want to have any measure of freedom, we must come out of this state, in which we are controlled by our assumptions, and look at it from a deeper perspective.

238. A story about idealism and reality

I was born in Israel and my parents were idealistic pioneers. They built Israel from nothing, with all the others there of course. They wanted social justice, a place to live and grow their food, a place where they could have a country and a piece of land and they wanted their children to be born in a country with a house and a field. I drank idealism with my mother’s milk. (This was long ago. Now it is a bit more complicated there.)

I was an artist from young age. I went to study graphic design. In Graphic Design you make art that is used immediately. Then I was an illustrator. As an illustrator you illustrate children’s books, for children to grow up with good stories, with knowledge and love of the world about them, with a good taste in art, as it makes for a better life. And you illustrate for adults so that they will think in a different way and they will laugh…

Then I got involved with Buddhist meditation, and the idea was to know what I am, so that I’ll live my true life.

And indeed, once you start to know something you start teaching. What can be more important than helping others know what they are, so that their lives will be good, and truthful? And that they will be good people, help each other and create a wonderful world for all of us, and our offspring…

Then I went to study art therapy, so I would be able to help people get rid of what held them back from being what they were. To show them how to become free of inhibiting ideas and thrive, so that they can live happily and lovingly etc.

And I did all these. I was idealistic and practical.

Then I started to know that every one of us has his own world, created by his own consciousness. We do not live in the same world. Our worlds meet with each other and it looks as if it is one world, but it is not so.

You can’t create a meaningful change in any part of the reality that is around you in your world. If you want this reality to change, you have to change yourself. The new thoughts and beliefs that you will have will bring to you everything that fits this new state of mind. So I cannot change or help change the people who come to do therapy with me. In one view, they are part of my outside world. I have to change myself, and as a result another version of that person will appear in my world, which will be a match to the way I have become. From another view, the patient is in another world, where he is the only one who can make changes in his world, by changing himself.

I always thought that we all lived in the same world. That there was one person in front of me, who suffered, and I helped him release the suffering and live a better life. But no.

And I thought that making art was a good thing for other people, to widen and deepen their experience, to give them the experience of beauty that will help them live a more beautiful life, with love, with collaboration, with understanding…

Now I felt there was no sense in doing anything. I always had a purpose for doing things and I missed it.

It felt like depression.

P1000273

Then I decided to ask August Moon about it.

August Moon is my inner guide. I have been connected with him for a while. He always answers. He is always there.

I asked and made a drawing, as I like to get the answers through the art. Sometimes I know through words, but if it is a big thing, I make art and read the answer in it. I just like it this way.

P1000277

And as soon as I started making the art, I knew the answer. The lines in the drawing spoke to me with the energy that is in them:

The reason to do anything, to do all that you want to do, is not that there is a need for it. You are not doing it for any idealistic purpose. You do it because it is your nature to be interested in doing things. It is your nature to love. It is your nature to be curious, playful, peaceful, capable and creative. This nature is what you are and it is expressed by what you do. So you do, just because you are a natural expresser of yourself.

So, you see? There is no outside reason for me to be happy. I am happiness.

And how can this be depressed?

 

236.The energy is left with no job

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.

P1000269

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is okay.

 

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

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

#####

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

Then I woke up.

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

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

 

After some time I did this painting.

 

235. Take the inner world out

P1000265

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I actually like that kind of music.

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

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

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

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

234. Segovia and the quiet spot

P1000260

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.)


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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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