AN INTRODUCTION TO V6 No3 KIDS OF LOWER UTOPIA - LETTERS FROM THE FRONT LINES BY RIVER SCOUT FINNAGAIN

This book is an allegory of the truth as I have experienced it. The only story worth telling, (the only conversation worth having), is about what is Real. The Real is that which does not change. So, the question at the heart of the story and at the heart of each image, is "what is it that does not change?"

Nothing I say here is new. What is True was True long before the Woolly Mammoth stopped singing, and will be True when this earth is swallowed. The world we know is coming to an end. An end in which we humans will either destroy ourselves in destroying our environment or find a way to live in peace. It is one or the other. The way to a new world of peace and justice does not depend on governments, leaders, new ideas, concepts, precepts or religions. It will occur by each of us individually recognizing what is True and living it.

In this time there are two forces on the rise in the human story. One force is that of the mind and it has dominated humanity for some 50-thousand years. The mind's nature is one of conflict, comparison, judgment, control, and ultimately, separation. As consequence, it leads us towards war and suffering, and perhaps self-annihilation. The mind is properly a tool for our survival, but it has dominated and grown far beyond its healthy function, and so we live with constant war and suffering because the mind is running the world by its nature.

The other force on the rise is that of truth, whose nature is peace and love. The truth is beyond thought; it does not belong to the mind. It is neither a concept, nor an idea beyond all other ideas. It is an experience beyond the mind. It lives inside you. It is you. It is life itself. It is available to you when you realize that "what is perceived cannot be the perceiver." You are the perceiver beyond all thoughts of identity in the mind. From the vantage of the perceiver you are free from the reactionary nature of the mind.

You are that close. And this is The Work. The Work is that of realizing and experiencing the truth. It takes NO time. Literally! Because the truth exists only in the Now. (The Now is not an idea like the past and the future, the Now is the Real.) The Now is your very experience of the truth alive . . . as you. You Are the truth already, you need only realize it. Understand that you can not "do" this - doing requires time - the experience is already, right Now, in the Now, so you can only allow what is . . . to be. That is why "finding" the Truth is called Realization. You realize that the Truth is who You Are (unclouded by thought -- thinking is the problem, not the solution).

So why would you want the truth? Because "truth," as I am using it here, is synonymous, in my experience, with love, peace, joy, freedom, beauty, eternity, the Self -- everything we understand to be The Good. You are - within you - the very source of all that you desire, but the world only reflects what you have allowed yourself inside. So . . . why limit your Self, why not Be all that you are. It is, after all, who you are … already … right Now.

In this, my 8th book, Kids of Lower Utopia: Letters from the Front Lines, V6.No3, I am drawing, through the lens of Zen Non-dualism, an allegorical dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages of realizations to finally arrive at her Self.

This story couldn't be told better in another medium than the pencil. Nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor undisguised then the pencil. Simple - direct - elemental. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points" where life's attention waits gathering silence.

The pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of Truth. At first this book was a series of wordless long-jumps, like visual Zen sutras describing the greatest of the hero's journeys - the one of Self Realization - but even my most perceptive friends asked for words to fuel their jumps. So I created the "possible" subtext pages (like diptychs) that are each a detail from their original page. On these pages I added one-of-many "possible" subtexts dialogues, along with a piece of the letter (as an ongoing narrative), that I found in a lucid dream which was the original impetus for this book. And it is in essence just a comic book - a story in words and pictures.

Art is a metaphor for being fully conscious, it mimics Self-Realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "Now" that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences observation free of thought. This is my Work. Thanks for looking, your Brother Toc

 

 

V6 No3 page 4 - Pre-introduction 1