Spiritual Self-Inquiry - Spiritual teacher's blog. The teacher/student relationship. Are spirituality and therapy compatible?

The ancients had the same troubles we do!

2/4/2019

On Sunday, February 3rd I shared a few quotes in the meditative self-inquiry group. I'll post some of the quotes here for those who were unable to join us for the meeting.

Less than 200 years after Christ, Marcus Aurelius wrote:

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.

If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of my contempt.
Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose you self-respect.

Around 1300, Meister Eckhart wrote:

People say Alas sir, but I would prefer to stand well with God, to have the devotion and divine calm of some people, or I wish I could be like this or as poor as that, Or they say, It will never do if I cannot be here or there and do thus an so. I must get away-or go into a cloister or cell.

The truth is that you yourself are at fault in all of this and no one else. It is pure self-will. Whether you realize it or not, there can be no restlessness unless it comes from self-will, although not every person understands this. This is what I mean: people fly from this to seek that-these places, these people, these manners, those purposes, that activity-but they should not blame ways or things for thwarting them. When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.

chase away the winter blues clay printing workshop

12/28/2018

I'm going to be offering a 1/2 day workshop which will be open to children as well as adults. The theme is printing on clay. This technique, beautifully demonstrated in the video below was pioneered by Mitch Lyons.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0r5EMuMCsY

The purpose of this workshop is to enjoy art making and pushing back the winter blues. The workshop will begin in the morning with the demonstration at 10 am on Saturday __TBA__ but if you bring your lunch, you are welcome to continue work into the afternoon.

You will learn to make a monotype prints using clay, clay slips, tempura paints, stencils, texture and your imagination. You will be able to complete and take home a frame ready print, or several. You will work with color and explore the ways color can be intensified or minimized depending on proximity to other colors.

The group will meet on Saturday, 3/16/19. If you are interested in this workshop, please send me an email using the contact page on this website. Let me know your date preference and if you are planning to bring a child, the age of your child.

cost per adult: $85
add $50 if you are bringing a child with you.
fee includes all materials
I welcome feedback on this suggestion.

First Thing

8/7/2018

first thing

in the morning
I have my chance
to grab the day
and be ready
mind and spirit
body and soul

what choice
do I make first thing
as the sun rises
and I feed the cats and
I think on
the one hundred things
I want to do with a ‘free’ moment
like this
this morning

why isn’t every moment free-
what makes it free
other than my will
and how I do a task
and how I greet the day
that greets me?

in the morning
I have my chance
to say good bye
to yesterday’s follies
to bring this dawn
to birth with my
own intent
change night to day
change the many
scattered moments
to one
strong
willed
prayer
to
day

Found Time

7/30/2018

today I laid my roses to rest
their long stems gently strewn to
criss cross in garden grasses and forsythia
and a thousand other plants
hungry to live and grab sky

blood red found art
with green skeletal lines
sixty blooms for sixty years
hungry for light
~ now it is all found time

Dawn

1/30/2017

Well here you are. In your life. It is not happening tomorrow or yesterday. It is happening now. Mystics might say that all is happening simultaneously: past, present, future. Yet you have only a grasp of your past, to some greater or lesser extent, and an anticipation of your unforeseen future. Is your fate already present in some way, opaque to you but easily read by some all seeing one? Is your fate inscribed in your will, your ambition, your blindnesses? Whatever it may be, it remains unknown to you.

As if arriving at a party that has been going on for thousands of years, you attempt to take stock of the lay of the land. Decision after decision has been made without your input. In addition, your own talents and attributes are only partially in your power. You did not choose your parents (unless in some mysterious way before your birth) nor your height, eye and hair color. You have no control over what diseases may have come with your genetics, although you can influence your health in many ways. Like one of a handful of seeds cast into the wind you land, whether on rock or loamy soil, and consider.

What is in store for you? Are you angry or grateful? Do you rail against it all, appealing to fairness-shouting out to the vast, tangled beyond? Will you, like someone once told me, “Punch out God’s eyes” when you finally see him in fury at all that has befallen you? Punch His lights out to render your opinion of His gift of life? No. You pause, take a deep breath, and ask your first questions. How shall I live my life? What is my purpose? How do I design a life that reflects this purpose?

You have a feeling of urgency. Like some race horse before the bell, your eyes, partly blinded by dark leather, see only the path in front of you. You paw the earth and inhale the sweat of the trembling bodies around you. Then you burst forth, with no sense of direction other than that which is offered by your sliver of vision. Pounding soil, breathing dust, gathered into a ball of tight, insistent energy you rush until you have grown weary with the years. Finally you ask, Where have I arrived? Where am I headed? Sourceless, yet bound by the restless energies of life and passion to move ever forward- the grace of wonder opens up a question, albeit dark and terrible: Am I moving toward a destination or mere end?

If you have the wherewithal, you work to determine your life’s design with reference to a focus. And yet, merely to ask the question, what is my focus, you will have already used many breaths. No matter. Where do you want to go? You decided on the most insistent of the questions that knocks on your soul. Why am I here? A dialogue begins wherein you are both interlocutor and subject.

   I am here to find out why I am here.

   With what capacity can you even attempt to find out? Aren’t you profoundly    limited in your    abilities?

   I am, but there remains no choice for me. I must ask. The urgency I feel will    not allow me to rest my head if I cannot come to understand this mystery of    my life.

   Ah, so you recognize it as a mystery, then?

   Yes-a mystery that I am and see. It can be described with no less a word than    mystery.

   A mystery of terror and wonder.

   Yes, of terror and wonder.

Surprised, you notice that you are fully capable of two entirely different voices. You can question and answer easily. Like a sharp scalpel that you never knew you had, you twist the blade this way and that, conducting a surgery on the fathomlessness of your own existence. A new wonder arises. How is it possible that you can both ask and answer?

The blistering sun is reflected on a thousand peaks of water in the vast ocean of nothingness that stretches before you. Tempted to shield your eyes, you nevertheless open them and gaze steadily forward. Blinders removed, a new question rises up within in you. Am I Self? you ask. You are Self, you answer.

January 12th, 2017

1/12/2017

If I were going to write fake news I think I would begin with some good old fashioned wish fulfillment. Psychotherapists use the phrase ‘wish fulfillment’ to describe the type of dream that pictures what the dreamer is wishing for but unable to attain in waking life. My first headline might be something like this, Surge in Giraffe and Cheetah Populations Confound Scientists. Or perhaps, Widespread Tiny House Movement Reduces Carbon Footprint. Unsettling as the fake news phenomena might be, it is also an opportunity to be creative. As I gather my wish fulfillment headlines, I would throw in: Artists to Receive Annual Grants and Artists to be Given Tiny House Retreats on the second page of my newspaper.

Writing fake news is a wonderful assignment for a writing or therapy group. One option would be to describe your fear in the form of news, say Protectionism Leads to the Return of the City State, or Man Jailed for Cloning Tyrannosaurus. Imaginative exercises give us the opportunity to track the voices of our unconscious, and mine them for the jewels they shelter. There is great mystery to intelligence. We ourselves, while we take ourselves to be the source of intelligence are actually more like the recipients or witnesses of Intelligence. Of course, we quickly claim to be the cause of the wonders that unfold within us, but in truth we are no more the source of them than we are the source of the color of our hair or the height of our bodies. These gifts are granted us with human birth.

I would write headlines of a mystical nature. Woman Discovers that she is Emptiness, or Second Childhood Holds Key to Wisdom. Describing incidents occurring during live news on TV, I might say: Hit by Insight, Reporter Walks off Set. While I’m at it, I would revise commercials to say what they really want to say. The real message of every advertisement is that buying a particular item will grant you Infinity (like the car) or Inner Peace, (like a vacation) or Satisfaction (like coffee). Are we not better off when we drop the material representations of our psychic requirements and attempt to describe that which we truly crave without reduction?

The real questions, the ones which are answered pre-reflectively by what we are sold or induced to buy are profound spiritual and philosophical questions. What is Infinity, and can a human attain it? Can satisfaction be found within the contingencies of Space and Time? What is Inner Peace, and if it cannot be purchased, how is it to be attained?

Intelligence, the Intelligence that we are, has infinite creativity. While we take ourselves to be the source of this creativity, we are actually the recipients of it. Once, while walking along a stream and marveling at the rocks and the water-the water shapes the rocks over the aeons while placement of the rocks determines the flow of the water-I contemplated the muse. The way I experience inspiration is always as an interest and then as a question. My interest in this case was the mutual determination of the rock by the water and the water by the rock. Mystified, I began as series of sculptural vessels replicating this mystery in a multitude of incarnations. On this particular day my soul resonated with the qualities of the near eternity I saw in the rock, and utter fluidity of the water. My muse led me further and further upstream both in my reflections and literally along the water’s edge. What intelligence my muse has, I thought, what magnificent depth!

Then it dawned on me. I am the muse! This voice of mystery is mine; not as a finite individual ridden with flaws and torments, but as the Self which seeks to wake up as me.

New headlines flower forth. Waking Up is Natural if One Steps Out of the Way, and Woman Discovers She is Not What She Took Herself to Be. I continue my journey upstream. It leads me to read, in the symbolism of our activities as humans, all the barely hidden mysteries of ourselves as Self. Each advertisement is presented as if it is an answer to a koan. Each psychic complaint that my clients bring me are poorly articulated and yet perfect descriptions of their disconnection from Self. I can’t bear that I have to die, or I must be perfect but I always make mistakes, and I wish I didn’t need anyone. The study of our representations of freedom and self-sufficiency, whether in advertisements, our dreams or our made up fake news all lead us inward to self- discovery.

Still Point Arts Quarterly.

On Throwing Things Away

9/28/2016

It’s not easy to throw things away. Not for some personalities. That ugly fabric, there might be a use for it. The sandals that don’t look as fresh as they did, maybe I’ll use them for a walk on a rainy day when I don’t want to ruin my new ones. Single bed sheets-I don’t have a single bed anymore but they might do in a pinch. Not the fitted one, perhaps, but surely that top sheet can be useful?

Throwing things away means so many things. It means that you no longer have a purpose for the thing, and maybe it was a mistake to buy it. The notion of ‘mistake’ is a loaded one. It suggests fault as much as trial and error; waste and a carelessness in decision making. Perhaps it is the refusal to admit an error that keeps one from throwing something away. Do we live in an environment of our own making? One that we have outgrown? Is our childhood dresser still in our adult bedroom? Does our clothing fit well, or did we miss the fact that it is no longer flattering?

Mistakes can weigh heavily on the soul. Maybe that’s why, when I am exploring fabric dying with a squirt bottle and a damp cloth spread out on plastic on my table I am reluctant to toss an ugly piece. It really was beautiful just moments ago, before the dye spread into such dark blotches. The mountain scene looked stark and powerful against the old tweed. The tweed was a previous mistake, dyed while being washed in proximity to one of another color and hence condemned to practice. Why don’t I declare ‘uncle’? Sometimes my art studio resembles the house where Dr. Seuss’s Thing One and Thing Two carried on a rampage.

Not yet prepared to toss my ugly fabric I wait before making the final judgement that is actually already obvious. I go through the motions of washing the cloth in cold water to set the dye. Then I dry it and iron it, my playful joy fading with each step. I still won’t let go. It’s as if my beautiful mountains remain there somehow hidden by the color’s violent expansion. Finally, with relief and determination, I toss the stuff. My good sleep the night before and the fresh morning light helps me. I am immediately relieved. It’s gone! I can begin fresh. There is a much nicer piece pinned to my bulletin board (a success by the way! I used a neutral fabric to upholster a half inch piece of foam insulation. With two panels I was able to create a wall-sized surface on which to pin my work.)

Art is a series of decisions. Which lines to keep, which to cut away or paint over. How to frame. The glass artist, Catherine Newell, showed me how to create a frame with four strips of cardboard. She showed me how to move it around on my image until I found the portion I liked. There is a moment, when you make a choice, that the soul says, ‘Ah, that’s it!’ This satisfaction, mysterious and certain, offers relief to the wandering soul. We seek harmony and meaning-the reflection of certainties deep within us that we long to see and express.

There is always a movement toward simplicity that acts on the underside of an acquisitive society. Perhaps it is the medicine needed by the capitalist world where every open public space is littered with advertisement. Marie Kondo urges us to keep only what ‘sparks joy’-ruthlessly tossing everything else. She is followed with ardent fervor. Those who succeed in attaining her stringent discipline of discarding are new people, converted, with thanks, to the Spartan school of beauty and need.

Others long for a tiny house, seeking a cure to their malaise by purging their excesses: get rid the thousand moments of self-indulgence that now lay scattered in ever too small spaces! In my art, I too, purge. That added bloat of spread dye, the extra embellishment that ruins a piece, the interesting turned grotesque by too much texture-all swept away once I resolve myself to the rule of rendering only what is needed, and not more.

Aristotle compared good writing to the human body. In the body every part has a function. There is nothing in the body that is not needed. When we see the slim and fit we enjoy, not just lustfully, but as meaning. Socrates, when he described the levels of representation, used the body as an example of an early representation. What is wanted in the Form of the Good is first seen in the athlete.

The Shakers, too, discovered purity in vision by removing all excesses. Who doesn’t sigh in relief upon seeing their simple, elegant forms-inventions dictated by use and translated into graceful wooden tools, baskets and chairs. Their barns, tall and regal, stare out at us with faintly stern but edifying grace. We hunger for something that their song suggests, “Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free…”

One of my own feelings about art is that it should be beautiful. A simple enough statement, perhaps, but witness the expanses of idiosyncratic art. Art made as self-expression where beauty is not relevant. Art that is there to express the strange, or the different for difference’s sake. On the other hand, art that depicts the universal has staying power through the centuries. The essential in art parallels the universal in philosophy, where the mind can finally come to rest. Picasso’s mother and child is every mother and child. Rembrandt’s woman is every woman.

A temptation might be to throw out the idiosyncratic. Are the wrong lines of our lives merely self-insistences? Do we reveal our misguided visions by elevating out individual significance over the universal? Are we all just bad art?

To answer this we have to turn to the mystics. It is not our goal to eliminate ourselves in service of the real. That is the failure of religion. Rather, it is to step aside so that the real can appear. Here, truly, is the ultimate mystery. How are we ourselves representations of the Real? Can we know ourselves as both ‘this one’ and Self?

I throw out more of what doesn’t work. I am energized. I assign myself the task of finding peace in the balance of colors, the allure of space. I will work until my mind finds peace even if that means I will work for a very long time.

Shibori, an Exercise in Seeing

7/4/2016

I am sharing my upcoming essay for Still Point Arts Quarterly here as a teaser for a new group I am forming. The group is called Art and Perception. Each session will begin with an art exercise and be followed by a discussion exploring the meanings to be found in our work. If you are interested in this group, please contact me.

~

You’ve probably seen it without knowing what you’ve seen. You might mistake it for simple tie-dye, although shibori is much more exciting. It is showing up in clothing, pillows and sheets and even rugs.

This ancient technique of hand dying originated in Japan and comes to us through the centuries with the beautiful aesthetic of Japanese culture. As they did with poetry, refining and clarifying until they had created the most elegant forms (think haiku, the three lined jewel, tanka, a five lined poem which ventures to more personal themes than haiku, and haiga, which combines haiku with an image-just to name a few) the Japanese explored and refined shibori until they had created an elegant and surprisingly precise language of pattern. Using indigo dye and natural fabrics these patterns were dislayed in kimonos, robes and costumes. The modern fabric artist can borrow techniques centuries in the making.

Matsukaze arashi means ‘Wind in the Pines.’ It is a shibori pattern formed by wrapping cloth counterclockwise on a pole at a 45 degree angle. Thread is then wrapped around the fabric on the pole in the opposite direction. Then the fabric is compressed on the pole and the pole dipped in an indigo vat. Both predictable and yet random since the maker can not know exactly how the pattern will emerge, arashi is stirring, like wind, and evokes a feeling of both movement and detail.
Boards and clamps are used to create the kikko pattern, or tortoiseshell. Here the fabric is folded and clamped into a neat triangular stack. After submersion in an indigo vat, the fabric is unfolded carefully to reveal a precise but trippy pattern of hexagons with shadowy triangles meeting at their points in the centers.

Folds, clamps, resists were explored and cataloged until each pattern can be reproduced. The folds, clamps and various methods of resist prevent the dye from penetrating the fabric all the way, and hence create a pattern. Thread brings in another set of binding techniques. Midori shibori is a pattern called ‘willow leaf.’ It is produced by pleating and binding sections with thread. Modern shibori dyers can use rubber bands, but don’t picture the garish star-like patterns of 1960’s tie-dye. The refined resist and indigo work of ancient Japan transcends this splashy version.
In my own work with shibori I gratefully accepted the modern person’s conveniences. My indigo vat didn’t come from my own cultivated indigo plants, but was ordered from Amazon as a kit. Rather than thread and twine, I used rubber bands. My poles were pieces of drainage pipes and my binding wood pieces were the stir sticks givenaway by paint shops and squares of balsa wood from craft shops. My patterns emerged equally entrancing nevertheless.

I started with raw, slightly tinted sheets of linen. Washing the fabric first to remove any residue coatings, I bound and tied my pieces before submerging them briefly in cool, clear water in my sink. After pressing out the extra water, I dipped my wrapped pieces, one by one, into my vat-a cobalt blue Lowe’s bucket on my counter filled with the indigo dye I had mixed. In the indigo vat a foamy froth develops on the surface, a bit like the foam that can form in a homemade soup. This foam is called an indigo ‘flower.’ My instructions say I should remove it, but I am too reluctant to do so, as if this foam contained the essence of my indigo. So I leave indigo ‘flower’ that had bloomed on the surface of my dye and simply swish it aside as I dip my fabric. Careful to avoid introducing oxygen to my vat, I help my pieces down with copper wire hooks left over from some other project and now adapted to a selection of hooks in various lengths.

After dipping, I left my cobalt blue bundles to rest for a good hour. The excitement was pressing. Even as I did my other tasks, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the tight indigo presents I had made for myself, siting on my plexiglass covered kitchen counter.
When I finally rinsed and then unfurled my pieces I was delighted and awed. My inexpert handling of the fabric and dye yielded marvelous variations; shading and pattern repetitions with ghost-like octaves in fainter and fainter blue.

As I went on into my day (which in my case means meeting with my psychotherapy clients) the images of the shibori seemed to be whispering in the back of my mind. The cognitive understanding that I was undertaking with my clients as we explored their relationship patterns was haunted by an echo. This echo was the repetitious and varying patterns of the shibori cloth I had made. Pattern, so disturbing sometimes when to the person who has unknowingly been living one has the opposite aspect in art.

Later, ironing my jewels and marveling again at the indigo markings-strange, pattern-like yet shifting from the sterile regularity of factory made cloth-the conversations from the day returned. ‘Aren’t these the same patterns,’ I wondered. ‘Yes, they are the same, for sure,’ I thought. It seemed to me that the patterns of human relationship were replicated in the cloth. This is after all what concerns us. Working its way through the layers of our unconscious, the representation, like a lotus flower breaking the surface of the water, emerges in art. The swishy burst of Willow (yanagi shibori) is the pattern of closeness then distance between a husband and wife. The dizzying pattern of mokume shibori (Wood Grain) pictured a dense and conflicted family. Itajime, with its pleasant repetition of softened triangles is a healthy and restorative relationship supported by personal ritual. Here they touch, here they grow apart-painted in indigo the dance of our love lives finds its voice. The indigo shapes seem to shift in a comforting rhythm, almost like music. I felt quite sure that the patterns were communicating to me. Pattern is, after all, what we both hate and love depending on what is repeated.

Ordinarily, among the people who come to see me, pattern is frightening when discovered. Perhaps, as is often the case, you find that you married your parent. Of course, not your actual parent, but the pattern of your childhood has been instinctively reproduced against your conscious intentions. Perhaps this is the truth that Sophocles recognized when he wrote Oedipus Rex.

Not all patterns are stultifying. Some we create and will, especially, perhaps, when we create ritual for health or celebration. The body loves repetition. Sleep better when you keep a pattern for sleep. Be stronger when you build your body with a pattern of exercise. The moments of celebration we choose for the fabric of our lives can be happy repetitions. The generations themselves are repetitions of discovery. Each child discovers the butterfly, what walking and tumbling is, what love is.

There are dark patterns, too. The darkest blue indigo-almost black-you feel trapped as if guided by an unseen and diabolical hand. You are steered steadily and without knowing how to repeat what you so yearn to be freed from.

I don’t know where my explorations of shibori will take me. I feel that I am listening to a voice as much as I am creating. That which is beautiful in the abstract-repetition with small variations-can be frightening as lived. From where do these patterns arise? Could we, with great care and perception identify ourselves right there, in the pattern we have created? Is the distastefulness of a blotched pattern a strange representation of what it means to leave the security of a pattern that we live? If we venture too far outside of the norm of our society, is the life we encounter splotchy like an aborted pattern?

I am certain that pattern speaks of meaning. At the Johnson Museum on the Cornell campus, just up the hill from where I live, there is an exhibit of aboriginal Australian abstract art. Paintings in bold colors of line and dot are displayed with small typed explanations. What might appear to us to be a childlike drawing is in fact a story of personal history, or even a map of home and that which is not home.

Perhaps, by undertaking a study of pattern we could indeed discover depictions of relationships. As I iron my cloth, letting the deep blue become a permanent part of my fabric, I reflect on the nature of choice and artistry. As if some unseen hand guides us, we follow our muse and determine what seems beautiful. We are not the source of our determinations, however, any more than we are the source of what inner workings have led us to love one person and not another. Our freedom, in as much as we have it, lies in discovering the meanings that are already present. Our actions and our art reveal our hearts.

I am indebted to the book, Shibori, The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Mary Kellogg Rice and Jane Barton for technical information about shibori.

You are the Mountains, You are the Sky

4/11/2016

In the field of psychology there is a famous test known as the Rorschach. You’ll recognize this test by the ink blot images it is known for. In the test, the recipient is shown a series of abstract, roughly symmetrical shapes and asked to comment on them. The test taker might see two people kissing, or a couple of horses galloping, or simply a storm cloud threatening on the horizon. It is the imagination of the test taker that offers information to the tester. The beauty of the ink blot test is that the images don’t actually represent anything! The tester witnesses the recipient’s mind directly and intuitively in the remarks and imagery that the recipient offers.

Another tool from the field of psychology is the identification and analysis of human defense mechanisms. The terms that psychologists use to describe these mechanisms are now so common that they are easily, and often accurately, used by lay people. We speak of denial, rationalization, and displacement in our ordinary language, but the terms originated in psychology. The most significant defense mechanism, in my opinion, is projection. A well known discussion of this psychic mechanism is described by Jungians who discuss it as the shadow. The shadow side of a person is his dark side. He may project this side onto another person. Hence the animosity one may feel towards someone who exhibits one’s own flaws. The 1940’s fictional character, the Shadow, was inspired by the Jungian discussion. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Projection plays a role in all of our relationships. In Jungian psychology the discovery of and analysis of these projections is key to psychic health. We project psychic meanings onto others. The goal of analysis is to help the person reintegrate the aspect they have projected. Bringing back into oneself what one has projected precipitates an internal conflict. Where previously the individual attempted to work out contradictory traits and interests through projection, the reintegration of projections shifts the conflict from the interpersonal realm to an internal one. This is true whether one loves or hates one's projected aspect.

Archetype refers to universal human qualities. For example, there are feminine and masculine archetypes. The warrior, or the nurturing mother may reach the elevation of archetype. An individual person may represent an archetype to us, and this picturing of a meaning in an individual is another sort of projection. The failure of actual person to carry the value of the archetype can be a source of unhappiness. Take ‘mother’ for example. There is the particular person who is our mother, but there is also the archetype, mother. Relative to the archetype mother; the great nurturer, many mere human beings don’t measure up.

The artist works intuitively with imagery. The images that the artist chooses can, with care, be traced back to psychic meaning that concern the artist. Even the abstract artist who attempts to use only color and not image cannot escape psychic picturing. Color itself relays meaning. Rarely would the artist undertake an analysis of their imagery, perhaps even eschewing such an effort as an obstacle to the dream like lure of the muse. For me, though, reflections on projections illuminate the dream and lead me further along my spiritual path.

It is also inevitable that we project our own visions and thoughts onto a landscape, or scenes in nature. This is as common as projections onto a person. Take, for example, a small tree growing ‘bravely’ on a precarious precipice. We have all seen those miracles of nature. Perhaps you have been as struck as I by the lone pine tree at a cliff’s edge, or the hardy mountain laurel nestled in a tiny crevice surrounded by wind and rock. What do these real life images say to you? Do you momentarily project human attributes onto these plants? Do they seem ‘lonely,’ ‘strong,’ or ‘frightened’? They do to me.

My extensive exploration of orchid pots in my work as a potter was stimulated by a projection. How brave the little orchid, needing so little, offering so much in its luscious and subtle blooms seemed to me. I spent months devising the perfect orchid pot. I left openings for the ariel roots that would extend and intwine. I patterned my hand built pieces with impressions from Indian wooden print blocks. I fired them in a raku kiln so that they would suggest the rustic environment that the wild orchid thrives in.

I felt that I myself was a kind of orchid. Raised with little, I learned to be self-sufficient and imaginative. Living on air and the micronutrients that travel by air, I am content in a small place. Like a cat, I can make a home anywhere. Sturdy, self-reliant and, with my words, or in my youth, lovely. In a way, the orchid is both showy and hidden. I am like that, too. The orchid seems to do so well what I aspire to do: thrive on nothing, bring beauty to those with the patience to seek it.

Natural scenery offers an infinite number of opportunities for discovering one’s mind-because that’s what it is to clarify one’s projections. Imagine yourself at an overlook in the Blue Ridge Mountains. From where you stand you see an ocean of space with waves of silent, still mountains fading into the distance. You see the gradations of color; first deep green, then blue green and finally a whisper of gray fading into cloud. Are you not yourself as wide and as expansive as space when you see such a scene? Don’t you, by the magic of projection, imagine the freedom of soaring through the skies, unlimited by the hundred contingencies of your daily life? For a moment, with your inhale, aren’t you yourself space?

What if this spaciousness that you feel were an aspect of who you truly are? Better yet, what if spaciousness is the visual representation of yourself as free awareness? We know the mystics use that word when describing their consciousness.

We can inquire into our projections onto scenes in nature for the health of our own spirit. The expansiveness of a vista might call on us to experience a loving expansiveness toward others. Discovering the direction our muse wants to take us might also be understood as coming to understand our own spirit voice, or inner teacher. For psychic health and self-clarification, we can learn to identify and then internalize our projections. As I suggest this, please don’t recoil into an intellectual stance. If you do, you will be disappointed. Remain with the imagery alive. Then notice, no, recognize yourself in the imagery. Doing so will galvanize both your spiritual and artistic energies.

turning my eyes
to my shoes
from the mountain vista
I notice I’m pretending
to be a woman and not the sky

Solve or Dissolve?

3/21/2016

When people come to see me they hope to solve a problem. It is possible to solve certain orders of problem. For example, you can make a decision. With your decision you hope to make the best choice and you understand that you may be eliminating certain options that were also attractive. For example, you buy a house, or marry a particular partner, or decide on a degree program for your education. In each of these cases you solve a problem with a decision. What you cannot do by decision is retain all options. Nor, ultimately, would you want to. You marry a particular person in part because a monogamous relationship with one person seems richer to you than relationships of less depth with many.

There is a dark side to every decision. The options which you don't affirm in making the decision are lost. The other person, the other career, the other house. You accept this loss because you are making a bid for satisfaction along particular lines.

Other difficulties don’t yield to decision alone. Let’s say you have contradictory interests, or the decision you are required to make by circumstance will eliminate something that is very important to you. You love a particular person, but in order to be with that person you have to live in a place you hate and leave a place you love. The conditions are such that you cannot have both the things you want. If you are not able to transcend or abandon one of these desires you become depressed. Depression is just the psychic aspect being “stuck” wears. Such a situation is truly painful, but it is not the one I want to address, because even in this case the remedy is decision, if a painful one.

The problems that I want to address are even trickier. The root of these problems are your way of seeing. Your way of seeing is constitutive. In other words, the very mind that is trying to escape the problem is itself a case of the problem that it tries to escape.

I once saw a show that illustrated this point nicely. The main character was a paranoid man who spent years building an underground shelter in case of a nuclear holocaust. At a certain point in the movie, he believes the holocaust has begun. Frantic to find his family, he is forced, finally, to take shelter himself without them, and seals off the communication with the world. As the story ends, we see him with his supplies prepared to live out the fate he has so feared. What the audience knows that he doesn't is that he brought it on himself. Outside of his shelter the conditions of life are as they always were-green trees, fresh food, and so on. It was his mistaken understanding of what was happening that caused him to imprison himself in his shelter. He believes he is the lone survivor, but his family mourns him from outside.

Although not a perfect fit, this story suggests what I am trying to describe. In my example the man’s paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Attitudinally the man saw a holocaust. There wasn't actually a holocaust, but because his mind was prepared to see it, he did and his life unfolded accordingly. Mind form is like that, but it is much more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mind form, or way of seeing, is constitutive. It shapes your life so that your life appears to conform to your un self seen vision of life.

So when I ask the question, solve or dissolve? how can I apply it to this problem?

Imagine that you are the type of person who always questions him or herself when something goes wrong. You have a self-faulting personality. If something goes wrong or falls short of your or others’ expectations, you blame yourself. You do this for years. If anything goes 'wrong' you respond by trying harder, not by asking whether or not human failing alone could even be the cause of the trouble. Then one day, in what might seem like a miracle, it occurs to you that you can not yourself alone be the source of the failing in your or others’ lives. I don’t mean that you just get tired of it all and say, in effect, 'the hell with it' (which people sometimes do at a certain point in their lives). I mean that you realize you are attributing to human capacity something does not belong to human capacity. Its not that you don’t have failings. You do, probably many. It’s that what you imagine you can correct by ‘trying hard’ simply can’t be corrected that way.

You begin to feel great relief. You are no longer burdened by the weight of the world. Neither anger towards others or yourself is appropriate to the frequent and commonplace failings of life. You feel relief. Your attitude of self-blame lifts. You have dissolved a problem rather than solved it.

There are many other examples I can describe. Imagine that you are a person for whom the notion of community is central. When you attempt to explain what goes wrong in life, you do so along the lines of this notion. Either you or the other is failing the community. Or, on the other hand, either you or the other is giving too much to the community and failing yourself. Back and forth you go, over and over, attempting to find that elusive balance. How much do I give? How much do I take? How much did that person give? And so on and so forth.

Then you meet a person who has no community notion at all. That person simply sees 'a bunch of people’ where you see a world. You don’t know whether this person is a miracle or a curse. Your chastisement bounces off them like so many rubber bullets. Your praise is absorbed into their own notions of what might be praise worthy about them. You discover, in essence, that you don’t even speak the same language.

What do you do? Do you go to marriage counseling to try and elicit the help of a third party in enlightening your partner as to the nature of community? Or do you return to a self-inquiry, seeking clarity about your own explanation for the negative in life?

Obviously I am a proponent of the latter. We need other people situationally, but we also need them in order to come to see ourselves. It is only through this endless bumping up against one another that we have a shot at identifying our own constitutive ways of being/seeing.

Problems of this order cannot be solved. I’m telling you that but I know you will ignore me. Most likely you will try again and again to redouble your efforts to make right what seems wrong. You will do this along the lines of your own mind form without noticing that you have a mind form.

If you do listen to me I can tell you a secret. The problem of limited seeing is not open to solving by persisting in seeing limited by mind form. You cannot keep your mind form and solve your problems any more than the man in our story could solve his problems without dropping his expectation of a holocaust. His mind form prevented him from asking himself whether the bang he heard so loudly could be anything other than the beginning of the end he was primed for. The problems that arise due to our being limited in our capacity to see are not open to being solved but only repeated endlessly until the mind form itself is dissolved.

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An Ocean Cannot Drown