(2/10/09)
Tree
was recently ask a series of questions about her relationship between
the transcendent and activities.
1.
The relationship between the transcendent
and Meditation?
I sit quietly with an awareness of mental activity and an energetic aliveness
in my body. With complete effortless acceptance of whatever I am experiencing
in the moment comes a great ...letting go of the heaviness that comes
with being a ...person and relaxing into the Now. Ahhh, home again. I
Am.
2.
The
relationship between the transcendent
and Physical
exercise?
Often as I walk or run in the woods, my mind gets more active and likes
to do the ...hamster-on-a-wheel thing, spinning repetitive concepts and
stories about the past and the future. Some of the time I suddenly find
myself swamped with thoughts, but more often I can just watch the thoughts,
allowing and accepting them. This allowing, saying ...yes to what is,
creates a separation, a space between …me and the thoughts. I am
that space. It is a total high at an affordable price. Yeeha!
3.
The
relationship between the transcendent
and Driving
a car?
The answer to this is pretty much the same as #2, but in addition, to
watching thoughts, I get the added bonus of feeling and sometimes watching
...anger. I drive with two large dogs in the car that ferociously and
fervently bark at everything. I have tried to stop them, but cannot. They
are my sadhana. They bark, I pretend I am calm, they keep barking, pain
and anger starts creeping in and I can feel the tension in my body. The
tightness in my body is a reminder to allow whatever is. I say ...Yes,
I allow it to be. The anger lets go of me. And then I do it all over again.
It can be fun.
4.
The
relationship between the transcendent
and a
moment of great love or sorrow that impacted your life and that you experienced
as transcendence?
Any moment where I realize there is only the Now, which is my Very Self,
not the form or thing which is happening, but the space in which things
happen then I am love.
I did have the experience with both Bean's birth, and my friends Chuck
and Gary's deaths of ...something else walking into the room, a presence
that was absolutely transcendental. Interesting that it was with birth
and death, a doorway to a Presence that is before and after form.
5.
The
relationship between the transcendent
and a
change in emotional intelligence?
Emotions are transient forms. We are the Very Self, and the Self is here
for the play. If you don't identify with it then it is just the play.
When I refer to emotions I am talking about the forms that exist in the
realm of duality: happy/sad, good/bad, joy/sorrow. "Feeling"
has no opposite, it is what we essentially are: love, bliss, peace, deep
intelligence, the words can only point to it.
Once you don't identify yourself with emotion, you can watch and allow
them to pass through, which is the play.
6.The
relationship between the transcendent
and
Empathy?
I have found that if I am listening to someone, if their eyes start tearing
up, mine do too. I have stood and cried with complete strangers in hospital
waiting rooms and vet offices, hugged them and never seen them again.
7.
The
relationship between the transcendent
and
Nature?
I love the woods. When I sit, stand still, or lie down quiet in the woods,
I am so amazed at the silence that emanates from everything, from a tree
or animals. The silence in me recognizes the silence in them, it is the
same silence. They are incredible teachers. And O the Coyotes!
8.
Transcendence in a church, in a business meeting, or in any situation
where the experience was unexpected?
That would be in any situation where I have identified with my thoughts
and my mind becomes attached to a mental position, which in its simplest
form is ...I am right, therefore you are wrong. It is the physical tension
that gets created by this concept that reminds me to be aware of what
is happening inside my body at that moment, without judging, just accepting
what is. And then I experience the thought as a concept created by the
mind to maintain the illusion of separation. I am not my thoughts, I am.
Tension can be a great teacher too!
9.
Describe a real moment that you would consider cosmic or transcendental
in your life?
The most cosmic moment in my life was the realization that I am not my
thoughts or emotions. O my! Freedom at last! I am the space in which the
thoughts occur. Sometimes I lose myself in thoughts, but I always return
to the awareness of the Very Self.
10.
Describe your experience and understanding of prayer and its relationship
to silence?
I don't pray, who would I pray to? Silence and stillness is who we are.
I Am That from which Gods are born.
11.
Describe your experience of love in relationship to silence
In Silence we are love.
12.
Describe your experience of unconditional love in the context of spirituality?
Spirituality is just another conditional idea. Unconditional love …is
the only game in town. Conditional love is not love, it's an idea of what
love is.
13. Describe any experience of transcendence you
have had in art, science, business, or friendship?
I sculpt a form and thoughts come in and out of my head. As I sculpt I
treat the thoughts the same way you would in meditation, I don't mind
them, I don't let them guide me, I just effortlessly return to sculpting
the form. In sculpting, my awareness usually goes into my body, and the
mind stills. It is a great form of meditation.
14.
Describe experiences of witnessing while asleep or awake and the impact
on your life?
I go back and forth all day, I become immersed and identified with thoughts
(to get things done), this creates a slight tightness in my body
which makes me notice, and then I completely accept whatever sensation
is occurring in that moment and in that ...Yes, I become Aware. I become
what I Am.
15.
Describe any experiences you have had with death and the impact of the
experiences on your consciousness and your understanding of spirituality
and humanity
One day I had a shocking revelation that my fear of death is the fear
of the death of the small self, the ego. Previously I had a kind of fantasy
of an enlightened Tricia that was just a wonderful-in-everyway, filled-with-bliss
version of me. Ha! There is no me! Ha!! I am a concept created by my mind!
No need to get personal, it's not even my mind, it is the human
condition! Ha! So now I say, Today is a good day to die! Yeeha and amen!
16.
What do you mean experientially that you realized you were not your thoughts?
About three years ago I was sitting on a couch with Toc visiting with
our dear friend, Arebear. It was a very quiet and calm experience, I felt
incredible bliss. I suddenly realized the bliss was the absence of thoughts,
the absence of mental noise, and feeling bliss was simply what I was.
What I am.
Any thought, belief, emotion, or memory is a form. All forms are temporary.
Once you know that you are the formless, you can enjoy or simply allow
all forms to arise and pass through. This is the play of the Absolute.
It (which is you) creates endless forms, to witness It's Self in them
all. What fun! Pain, sorrow, joy, happiness, agony, and ecstasy are all
forms passing through Consciousness.
17.
Having had celestial experiences when you were young how have they changed
your life?
They were breakthroughs into an experience of a deeper consciousness.
It was beautiful.
The thing is, I could have those experiences into deeper consciousness,
but then in activity I would continue to identify myself with my thoughts,
my story. I would replace the story of "I am a janitor in Alaska"
with the story "I am a TM Teacher and a spiritual seeker" Both
are forms, just different versions. There was a tendency for my ego to
become even more identified with the spiritual story, to become even more
trapped in form of the teacher. Only until I realized that I am not my
thoughts, "that which is perceived, is not the perceiver", did
I know who I am.
18.
In Switzerland you met with Maharishi do they remember that first experience
with him?
We had waited for hours to talk to Maharishi. It was 2 in the morning.
He came out of a room and started walking down the glass hallway that
connects the Kulm and Sonnenberg. In the middle he stopped and waited.
It was quiet and dark with the snowing falling all around the glass and
covering the world outside. We took turns, Lizzy and I, walking alone
down the hallway to stand still next to Maharishi as he whispered things
to know. And years late I realize that I am that space in which that experience
occurred.
(9/18/08)
I
got a note a little while ago that said
"Hello...I'm Claudio Parentela... I'm an
artist and a journalist free lance... I like much your art and I should
like to interview you on one of my art blogs."
Q) Well, first of all please tell us a little
about yourself.
A)
I was born in Brooklyn in 1953. Since my father was a painter I grew
up with art. “I have been obsessed with making art longer than
I can remember, (or so I’m told).”
After serving a year in RISD in 1973, I knew that what I needed was
not more schooling, what I needed was to understand my self—the
primary tool of The Work. So I began to study and practice the discipline
of (Zen) Non-dualism in Europe and the US for the next 16 years while
making art. In 1989, the toxic nature of oil painting led to a year
of cancer. During that year I came close to death and studied life from
that perspective. That time away from the world opened revelations about
the nature of my work and the virtually untapped possibilities inherent
in the medium of comics as art. In 1990 I moved back to NY (the Catskill
mountains) and began making comics. By my third comic I came to the
attention of Roger Ricco of the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in NYC, who came
knocking on my door. On September 13, 2001, I had my first one man show
at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery —a story told as an 11 page comic
(each page measuring 33" x 52"), drawn in pencil on paper.
My show opened two days after the World Trade Towers fell (“The
timing felt like a mythic wink”). I have published six graphic
novels, have received two Xeric Foundation grants to publish. One of
my books has been translated and published in France by L'association,
Paris. I have been working for the last six years on my eighth book
and I have been showing the pages with sculptor Tricia Cline (also of
Ricco/Maresca Gallery) who I work with very closely and whose images
and experiences come from the same Non-dualist allegory. In my eighth
book I am attempting to draw every impossible thing I can see inside
as well as out.
(my bio)
Q) How would you describe your work?
A) I make books whose by-product is art. I am drawing sequential stories through the lens of Zen Non-dualism - allegorical dreams in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages of realizations to finally arrive at her Self. This story (my eighth book) couldn't be told better in another medium, nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor undisguised, then the pencil. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points" where life's attention waits, gathering silence. My pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative (inductive-deductive) flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of Self. 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.
Q) Did somebody encourage you to become an artist?
A) Yes. My father, a math teacher I had as a kid named PapaWolf, and an art teacher I had in High School named Eats Lions.
Q) What is your favorite medium?
A) Pencil – it is so kind and willing.
Q) Can you describe your process, from the seed of an idea to a complete work?
A) My work comes from a kind of knowing that I know nothing about, I would like to say I wait for instruction but in fact I am so behind in what has already been presented to me that things have been falling by the way side for years, many entire books are long gone. This latest book I am working climbed with me out of a dream about seven years ago. It is an autonomous creature with its own breath, and I am just its worker. In each page, I am presented with a complete Image, and for love of it I must create a kind of sculpted language of vectors to describe things I haven’t the slightest idea how to. So I just continue working at it until it shows it self, no matter how long it takes. I just don’t give up.
Q) Generally speaking, where do your ideas come from?
A) I don’t know. Or… they come from some place prior to thinking, where feeling and form are indistinguishable, (where thinking doesn’t stand in front of experience, and Images belong to themselves).
Q) How long does it take to complete a piece?
A) A month - two months - three month … what ever it takes.
Q) Who are your favorite artists…and who are some artists you are currently looking/listening to?
A) Tricia Cline, Haruki Murakami, Agnes Martin, Vermeer, Rumi, Rilke, Neruda
Q) Are you represented by a gallery? Do you have any upcoming exhibits?
a)
In Los Angeles: Obsolete Gallery, In New York: Ricco/Maresca Gallery
b) Just group shows for now
Q) Do you have any 'studio rituals'? As in, do you listen to certain types of music while working? What helps to get you in the mood for working?
A) I do a meditation that I cobbled together from reading Nisargadatta and others
Q) What is your favorite a) taste, b) sound, c) sight, d) smell, and e) tactile sensation?
a)
Water that has just come out of a mountain spring and has no taste
b) Tricia laughing hard
c) The early morning sun in a clear sky
d) The top of my granddaughter Kattieboo's head
e) Tricia Cline
Q) Do you have goals that you are trying to reach as an artist, what is your 'drive'? What would you like to accomplish in your 'profession'?
A) My profession is perception, the art work is a by-product of my research in awareness. What I would like to accomplish is already.
Q) When have you started using the internet and what role does this form of communication play for you, personally, for your art, and for your business?
A) I inherited my first computer, from a friends death, in the mid 90’s (big thanks to Chuck). The internet’s usefulness hasn’t changed my world so much as the computer itself has. The computer has saved me years of work time and made publishing for me possible. If you understand how a film shoot works then that would tell you how I prepare for a book. Creating a script, scouting locations, preparing actors, props, shooting everything and more than everything by digital camera, downloading immediately to see if we have it, and/or shooting more until every possible tiniest bit of information is gathered. Then by way of photoshop collaging all the information into a single page that closely matches the vision. And finally through the language of pencil bringing the image into reality with a single subtle voice that is without judgment. What takes me a month to do with the speed of a computer would take me 6 months to do without a computer (and digital camera). Comrade-X (my computer) is only second to the great Red Pencil herself.
Q) What do you obsess over?
a)
Witnessing my thoughts as separate from my Self (which is just a way
of backing-up into experiencing the sublime).
b) Being honest by way of Pencil.
c) Everything in my Work.
Q) Do you have preferred working hours? Do you pay attention to the time of the day or maybe specific lighting?
a)
Early Morning
b) No, I have constant light indoors - no windows – I could be
anywhere and Nowhere. I go outside to see the world
Q) Do you do commissioned works?
A) Never.
Q) Any tips for emerging artists?
A)
I think the following is one of the most important poems in my life,
not for its beauty but for its true encouragement. Everyone who makes
art should give it to everyone else who makes art. It is a kind of virtual
no-holds hall-pass for all students of art. In the words of Robertson
Davies: "Feeling is the point. Understanding and experiencing are
not interchangeable. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only
the martyr experiences the fire." Feeling is the point,
So.
. . A Poets Advise to Students (by e.e.cummings)
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.This may sound easy. It isn't.A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it, we're not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn't It's the most wonderful life on earth.Or so I feel.
Q) Your contacts
A) www.tocfetch.com
