contemplation – the awakened eye

tethering art to truth – 2017

Posted on April 24, 2017April 27, 2017 by miriam louisa simons

The Hemera Foundation has announced that applications for 2017 Tending Space Fellowships are now open at many of its partner retreat centers.

For more information see this page: fellowships for contemplative artists
and/or visit the website: hemera.org

Tending Space Fellowships are available for full-time artists with a sincere desire for the experiences of extended meditation practice to inform and influence their creative expression in the world. Up to 250 fellowships will be awarded annually on a first-come first-served basis.

Fellows will be provided with financial support to attend one meditation retreat per year at one of our partner retreat centers. (For a list of centers see the fellowships for contemplative artists page.)

Note that this year applicants will apply directly to the center holding the retreat they would like to attend. Artists who have never attended a residential meditation retreat longer than a weekend will be provided with 100% funding for the retreat of their choice. Artists who have attended at least one meditation retreat longer than a weekend will be offered 50% funding, with need-based support available beyond that. The program is open to domestic and international applicants, as well as groups of artists.

We believe that art has the capacity to genuinely help our world, to instill it with sanity, awareness, joy, and beauty. This does not mean that art has to look a certain way or achieve a standard aesthetic or tone, nor is it an endorsement of a “love and light” approach to art. It does mean that art needs to be tethered to truth, according to the logic of the process undertaken or the piece being created.

How does one cultivate this tether to truth? Our inspiration has been through slowing down, making friends with oneself through meditation and contemplation, spending the time to develop one’s craft, know one’s materials, and fine-tune the senses as tools for communication. Most of all, we are interested in supporting artists in genuinely finding their way.

– Text and graphic sourced from the Hemera Foundation website, April 2017

fellowships for contemplative artists

tethering art to truth

Posted on February 2, 2015May 22, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

I’m delighted to have added a new page to this website’s educational resources:

Contemplative Fellowships offered by the Hemera Foundation

Can art serve to help the world, and, if so, what does that require of the artist? It is our belief that there are certain practices for the artist that help address this question, such as contemplation, meditation, retreat, listening, and discipline. As a result, we are providing a context for artists to investigate those elements on their own and within community.

– Text and graphic sourced from the Hemera Foundation website

The Hemera Contemplative Fellowship programs were created to make the unique benefits of contemplative practice in a retreat context more widely available. Find more information on this page:

fellowships for contemplative artists

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

William Blake: Albion Rose, from The Large Book of Designs copy A. © Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum.

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

consciousness, contemplation and creativity

Posted on July 15, 2009May 24, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

The artist has to re-present our world of conceptualised objects, separated and extended in space and time, as it really is. He has to reinterpret our model of reality in line with direct experience and to convey this ‘taste of eternity’. We could call this twofold activity contemplation and creativity. Contemplation is the passive aspect; creativity is the dynamic aspect. These are two inseparable aspects of consciousness.

I reasoned that if these two elements – the presence of an object in itself and the consciousness to which it appears – are essential ingredients of every object, there must be a relationship between them. So I began to explore the relationship between consciousness and its object, between that which sees, hears, feels and thinks and that which is seen, heard, felt and thought about. I reasoned that if there is a distinction between the two, there must be some perceivable interface or border between them. I looked for such a border between the subject and its object, but could not find one.

– Rupert Spira

rupertspira.com

rupert spira at the artisans’ gallery

nature’s eternity