the essential and indivisible fabric of reality

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

Announcing two exciting additions to the site today.

The artisans’ gallery welcomes artist, teacher and writer Jordan Wolfson, who lives in Boulder, Colorado. (What is it about Colorado? It’s strongly represented in the gallery!)

And – Jordan’s insightful and inspiring essay how painting can help to save the world, actually, has been posted as a page, with his generous permission.

 

Jordan Wolfson: Still Life with Red Tapestry X

Still Life with Red Tapestry X, 2013
oil on linen, 28″ x 25″

 

About his work, and the investigation fuelling its process, Jordan writes:

I believe it is through the identification of the self with a pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic sense of being that actual change occurs.  While our identification remains within the confines of discursive thought and language our model of the world remains one of fragmentation and conflict.  Language isn’t to blame – it’s just the way it works.

Actual change occurs through a shift in our identification of the self and the growing awareness of the essential and indivisible fabric of reality.  It is to an investigation of this sheer presence, which is not only pre-conceptual but also resides before and between form, that my work is committed.

Visit his page at the gallery to read his entire artist’s statement and view more of his artworks.

 how painting can help to save the world, actually

In this image-rich essay, I’m confident Jordan speaks for all of us who understand our practice as a passionate movement towards unity with something inconceivably larger than our programmed personality. Something that signals the end of fragmentation and disharmony by disappearing the illusory gap between the observer and the observed.

A couple of extracts:

What is presence? And how does it get associated with an object? What is the process with which material gets charged or imbued with it? How is it that a human being can take colored mud, smear it around on a piece of fabric and end up charging the materials so greatly that it resonates with vitality hundreds of years after the person is long gone? How is it that a human being can take raw material and form it in such a way that it moves our hearts and quiets our minds? And what does this have to do with saving the world? […]

We are not who we think we are. Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being. That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own. The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation. As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story. Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going. As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story. […]

http://jordanwolfson.com

I’ve lost track of which is which

Posted on 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]

the soul of the whole

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

Photograph: Alan Larus

 

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photograph by Alan Larus

the eyeless eye

the realization of not-two-ness

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

 

It is [the] flash of realization of not-two-ness, that is both the centre and the endpoint of our human experience.

In every seed of every weed, in the knee-joint of a dead wasp’s leg, the structure of the Whole of Reality is laid bare for those who have eyes to see.

 

Image by Laurent Schwebel

 

Our brain filters out the overwhelming poignancy of this Structure of Reality, of the Divine, as it manifests in all that is.

The eye, however, when it awakens, sees all things as “unseparated” from itself, to speak with Eckhart*.

– Frederick Franck
The Awakened Eye

* Meister Eckhart: The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.

Photograph: Laurent Schwebel

Frederick Franck at the artisans’ gallery

seeing/drawing as meditation

the Face of faces

the 10 commandments
(Frederick Franck’s guidelines for the creative life)

the process of perception is one of creation

Posted on by miriam louisa simons

Perception underpins all human behavior and helps interpret sensory information to make sense from the senseless. The brain, to create meaning where there is possibly none, processes perception from the unperceived and thought from the unthinkable. The process of perception is in fact one of creation. What we perceive is not what is out there or within. There is no inherent value in the incredibly complex patterns of light that fall onto our eyes, and yet we see coherent forms and motions that enable us to survive. Exploring the nature of perception can help us glimpse life beyond experiencer and experience, perceiver and perception.

– Science and Nonduality website

This year’s Science and Nonduality Europe Conference is only 5 weeks away.
Hop over to the website and register now!

SAND_EU13

SAND13 EU – “The Science and Mystery of Perception”
Doorn, May 28th to June 3rd 2013.

Instead of saying, ‘An observer looks at an object’, we can more appropriately say, ‘Observation is going on, in an undivided movement involving those abstractions customarily called “the human being” and “the object he is looking at”.
– David Bohm

The observer is the observed.
– J Krishnamurti

There is no separate, inside self and no separate outside object, other or world. Rather, there is one seamless, intimate totality, always changing when viewed from the perspective of objects, never changing when viewed from the perspective of the totality.
– Rupert Spira