nondual perception – Page 2

tracing the contours of bewilderment

Posted on July 10, 2014May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Jena Argenta brings her exquisite papercutting to the artisans’ gallery, and contributes an equally exquisite, deeply thoughtful essay about her work.

In papercutting and in drawing,
I can’t capture the Mystery of a crane or a lily.
I can only trace the contours of my bewilderment.

Walking the Dark (detail), black newsprint unmounted, full size 9″x16″

Frederick Franck and my mother were early teachers in how to see and how to love. And if one makes a practice of falling in love, everywhere, with everything, it pushes the reach of one’s arms. Far becomes near. There is no “other” in the margins. Suffering is not on the peripheries. Like beauty, it is palpable and immediate. Drawing can leave you feeling broken and small with God on your skin. It can change your life. And yes, Jordan Wolfson, it can change the world.

My papercutting, while part prayer, is just a fancy way to get back to that line. To illuminate it by leaving it out. It turns the experience of life drawing and its loving inside out. I want to share eyes with you. And to take my time. I want to dig my heels in like a heavy rooted oak in the city’s technetronic center and hold ground and show you how beautiful light is when it’s mediated by shadow.

– Jena Argenta

Read the full article, with more examples of Jena’s work, here.

artisans

artisans’ gallery

who sees the tree?

Posted on January 20, 2014May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Piet Mondrian: The Red Tree (Evening), 1908 - 10, Oil on Canvas

Piet Mondrian: The Red Tree (Evening) 1908 – 1910

– – –

Look outside at the sleeping tree there. Who sees the tree?

… Does a body do the seeing or does awareness, consciousness, life see it? What sees the tree? Consciousness? – or a body-centered custodian of consciousness?

Where is the tree? Fifty-seven feet removed from a body-oriented ego-container of awareness, a judge who likes or dislikes what he sees? – or is the tree within awareness? Is the seeing of the tree the activity of a separate-from-the-thing-I-see recipient-of-life, a so-many-year-old male or female pump filled organism who looks out through bloodshot eyes and answers to the name of Bill? – or could it be that it is Deity being the “seeing”?

Indeed, isn’t it just possible that Isness, Reality, God, is the seer “seeing” and being the seen? Could it just be that “seeing” itself is the identity “we” are?

Could we be Life itself rather than the recipient of it? Indeed we can! We are!

– William Samuel, The Awareness of Self-Discovery

In order to understand the true meaning of Abstract Art,
we have to conceive of ourselves as a reflex (reflection) of reality.
This means we have to see ourselves as a mirror in which reality reflects itself.
– Piet Mondrian

Image source: www.pietmondrian.info

I’ve lost track of which is which

Posted on December 26, 2013May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Nina Papiorek: Namibia Zebras iii

Zebras: July 22

When I look at this photograph of zebras, when I feel love for them, I become them: I enter their stripes, feel their taut flesh, their muscled bodies, the flanks, the legs, the soft nostrils.

I cannot hold myself apart from them long enough to experience it as love of other. When I love one of these zebras, I am reveling in my own delineated skin, my four points of contact with the earth, the tail of long hair soft at the backs of my behind legs.

Who made this animal? And why? Why on earth – why in a whole universe – such whimsy? What got into somebody’s head, to mark me thus?

When one zebra looks at another, it is not amazed at what it sees. Probably the looker little supposes that it looks much the stripy same as the other fellow. But even if it knew about its own appearance, this knowledge would not impress the zebra.

I can feel the other zebra’s head resting in the middle of my back, where its undermouth sinks into the curve of my spine. Its weight is deeply satisfying. And I can feel the weight of my own chin sunk heavily into the other zebra’s welcoming back, and holding the weight of my striped head (though I do not know that it is striped). I can smell the other, and the other can smell me. I’ve lost track of which is which.

Don’t try to figure it out. It isn’t important. Nor is it worth any effort at all to tell where zebra stops and human starts.

– Jan Frazier
When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening

[I have no way of knowing what picture Jan was looking at when she wrote this piece; the image here is by photographer Nina Papiorek]

light becomes what it touches

Posted on November 14, 2013May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Claude Monet: November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926

La Cathedrale de Rouen, le portail, soleil matinal; harmonie bleue (1892-1893)

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

– Lisel Mueller

Londres, le Parlement, Trouee de Soleil dans le Brouillard, 1904

Claude Monet at the artisans’ gallery

artisans

Blake’s eternal delight

Posted on October 23, 2013December 11, 2017 by miriam louisa simons

When the “old” version of the awakened eye website was being transferred to this site, many shorter pages were edited out. It seemed they would be better shared as posts. This is the first – a collection of quotes from William Blake, along with some examples of his artwork.

[Blake] held that the way to truth and higher consciousness was through the contemplation of art. He proposed that by immersing oneself in art, a person could experience it not just as an aesthetic but more akin to the meditative exercise a mystic performs in preparation for achieving a higher state of spiritual enlightenment.

– Leonard Shlain in Art & Physics

[For Blake] every act of the imagination, every union of existence and perception, is a time-space complex … in which time and space as we know them disappear.

– Northrop Frye in Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake

The eye altering, alters all.

– William Blake

To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

As a man is, so he sees.
As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.

First thought is best in art.

He who binds to himself a joy
does the winged life destroy;
but he who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity’s sunrise.

William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy C, 1790 (Morgan Library and Museum): electronic edition

Every man who is not an artist
is a traitor to his own nature…

Find more images and in-depth information here: siteslab at UNC

UPDATE – See Eric Nicholson’s fine article about William Blake’s vision of The Book of Job at The Culturium – highly recommended.

Drawings of William Blake (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) – Edited by Geoffrey Keynes