Indecision

Unmixed Attention

A friend was showing me her new work a few days ago and I was struck by how well it portrayed the modern mind, so many levels of mental activity, vying for attention. With competing storylines running after so many levels of preoccupation, it’s hard to pay attention to any of them, like a radio station with several frequencies bleeding into the foreground, impossible to follow. Around the same time another friend sent me a video by he and his wife that had a similar effect but expressing the effort to tune out the distracting layers of drone and buzz of multiple conversations with a mandala like emergence that came and went. Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, very hard to achieve in our time. Living today produces so much mental clutter, so much competing for our attention. Though I meditate twenty minutes a day, random thoughts always invade that space. Working on my art, however, is almost always unmixed, and I like the idea that it’s when I’m working, I’m closest to praying, that I’m participating in a flow of consciousness that’s bigger than myself. Other artists have mentioned to me that they see their work as prayer. It is, in fact an offering. As a person who often feels like I’m channeling the work, that it comes from beyond me, and often surprises me, it makes sense that the pure absorption in the task joins with a larger aspect of consciousness. The key to pure focus is absorption in a task. Like in some video games, there’s an alert participation in what’s unfolding that loses the game when attention strays. I’ve had conversations with friends that were occasionally so focused as to qualify as unmixed, and many situations with other people can do that. Arguments might seem unmixed in their intensity, but often personal history, with pre-existing ideas and opinions flood in alongside personal baggage. The distracted nature of everyday consciousness has the mind so full of competing areas that even in intimate contact, there can be mental interference. Weil’s distinction of the personality and the soul might help with sorting through those layers. Personality is concerned with the public self, cares what others want from us and aspires to their esteem, source of so much anxiety. Absorption in any interest takes us out of personality and into the subject of interest. She sees the soul as beyond the personal, our connection to the universal in humanity. That deeper Self is where we know justice, balance, beauty and truth. Any choice in where to focus is an opportunity. The closer you look the more you find, and in a state of fascination we have unmixed attention. The key is to fully be there, attention flowing outward to enfold what draws us in.

Formative Energy

Art Goblin

Nothing is as specific as an image for conveying a feeling. But since language is the currency of everyday communication some languages try harder to offer words where the importance and intensity of the feeling warrants it. The Spanish language is rich with words for emotion, and the one I love best is ‘duende’. I discovered it by accident online and when I inquired of my niece’s partner to see what it meant for sure I was surprised when the answer was goblin. When I googled it the first definition was goblins, associated with folklore. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Languages used by google it also means “a quality of passion or inspiration”. Google’s AI describes duende in art as “a mysterious force that arises from the depths of the artist's soul, compelling them to create, and deeply affecting the viewer.” To think that it took me until my seventies to find the word for what I have so often had the privilege to experience. The examples used by AI mostly regarded music and the powerful effect of live performers on their audience. I’ve heard many students speak reverentially about a concert they attended and the spiritual connection they felt to the musicians and the crowd. The capacity of art to meet such deep layers in our humanity has an integrating effect. Better than any language, art has the subtlety to show more closely the endless variations of melancholy or any other deep feeling. Think of all the ways that people are devastated, from the personal to ecological. One word for such a range of tragedies. For people to develop their emotional awareness we need more ways to see how we feel. The word “duende” and the goblin that represents it also connects to magic. That seals my affection for this word and concept. My lifelong pursuit of illusion is the trickster in me that wants to prod at conceptual certainties. My inner goblin is the part within that has one foot in the collective unconscious, the spiritual realm where inspiration finds its source. The use of an imagined entity, my duende, is a way to refer to something real that can’t be verbally expressed any other way. As representative of the spiritual realm, it’s the resonance music and art offer connecting to the multidimensional life force that mystifies and fascinates. Finding personal connections to the larger consciousness may require more goblins to be conduit for the positive qualities they reinforce. Orwell knew that the ability to think for oneself depended on having the language to describe it. Rather than allowing labels to lessen what it means to be human we need to find the words and images that show how much bigger the picture.

Loosening

Images for Spirit

A young woman in my ceramics class is making artifacts dedicated to the goddess Diana. Having heard her talking with another woman about Catholic school I couldn’t help but think how absent women were in most of western religion, one of many reasons people have rejected them. There is a spiritual yearning that isn’t addressed. In his book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Schlain wrote about how early more unifying cultures, revering the feminine, centered on community, were crushed by the armies of the male god. The male in charge is still the center of western religions more concerned with obedience than spirit. The imbalance of the male dominated structure of most religion has imprinted itself on modern attitudes even in the absence of the religion itself. For twentieth century Indian teacher Sri Aurobindo, the Mother represents the divine source of energy at the center of everything. The female brings forth life. Robert Chilton Pierce emphasized the need for the feminine in his writings. The last chapter of his book, The Biology of Transcendence, is called The Resurrection of Eve. He puts great emphasis on birth and early development as laying the foundation for capacity to love and engage with the world. His recommendations for changing our troubled world begin there and he offers science that supports them. To understand something better it helps to see it, have images that allow a person to examine details and relationships that stir their own thoughts about mysteries beyond the visible. Structures of insight like archetypal compositions or mandalas that focus attention inward offer scaffolding to find a personal connection to a spiritual center. The problems of today can only be solved with love. We need better imagery to connect to the universal love that includes all. Finding core visual structures that attract us personally resonate and integrate our energies. So much of today has degenerated into top-down autocratic with conditional love used to control. Those mindsets have led to chaos and disruption of individual peace. Personally meaningful imagery to contemplate can be a unifying light. Since Michael died, I’ve watched many documentaries of Near Death Experiences hoping to get a sense of what he might have undergone when he left his body. He definitely wasn’t there anymore, but the idea that all that he’d been simply disappeared seemed utterly implausible. One of the most consistent features of most people’s descriptions included the tunnel toward brilliant white light. Carl Sagan suggested about this phenomenon that we might be remembering birth. The choice of Diana as personal image underscores birth and connection to nature and cycles. Imagery to help integrate the feminine could start with the tunnel, apt metaphor for the journey toward a loving unknown. Time to balance all those obelisks with sacred wells and grottos.

Mis-Assumptions