Ron Dowd
Hyperthyroidic Field #2
Coloured pencil and ink on paper, 26 x 19 cm (approx)
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Here’s a nice introduction to the cross-over between science and nonduality (“the no-state state”) and the scientific method as a “way in” to the subject, for Westerners. It’s from the Science and Duality Conference site, for their conference that’s happening in October this year.
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Yesterday I brought Nonduality as a subject in its own right into the Art + Psyche fold. It’s a new category in the blog. Now, here together are the three major areas I’m interested in, both personally and in my psychotherapy practice.
What’s Nonduality? There’s a lot on the subject around the web, for example, at Jerry Katz’s original Nonduality site. And it goes by many other terms in the many traditions of which it is spoken, such as presence, awareness, advaita, sunyata, and one term that I’ve constructed myself (an amalgam from Kant and Gestalt), the noumenal field.
Here’s Gangaji on the subject of the play of our lives of thought and suffering, and the underlying nondual dimension:
All the while, there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. [Diamond in your Pocket, p113]
Gangaji’s spiritual lineage is the East (Papaji and Ramana Maharshi), and she has managed to fuse the understandings of contemporary Western psychology to this ancient spiritual tradition (advaita vedanta). Her teaching has been a strong influence on me, enabling me to bring the nondual dimension into my psychotherapy practice. I look forward to blogging more on this subject in the future.
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Ron Dowd
Hyperthyroidic Field #1
Coloured pencil and ink on paper, 26 x 19 cm (approx)
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The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
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Yet more on emptiness: he’s a nice quote from an interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher. The interview is in a collection of essays and interviews The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy, which I consider to be a pretty good survey of what the book title states it to be!
Q: Is the avoidance of emptiness the root of human suffering?
Adyashanti: I like to call it the dirty little secret of humanity. It’s the emptiness, the abyss, that’s right in the middle of every human being. It’s right there, the silence that is always there, just waiting for some recognition.
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More on the subject of the void and emptiness, I re-read Bernadette Roberts’ impressive book What is Self? over Christmas and there was one paragraph that struck me as deep wisdom, being as it is so simple.
Instead of going down into their own emptiness, people try to fill it with the pleasures of this world. They run from darkness, nothing and emptiness and often become embroiled in various delusions regarding its true nature. Too few people come to the unitive state [union with the Divine] because they are outside the proper religious tradition or context for having a true understanding of their experiences. (p 62)
Roberts’ path happens to be Mystical Christianity, but the wisdom she speaks of, arising as it does from a living tradition, transcends that tradition.
And raises questions within that traditional as well: I’m particularly taken by Roberts’ revisioning of the metaphorical (archetypal) meaning of the crucifixion, as, rather than a transformation into the unitive state (or a shedding of the ego, as some commentators have it), a transformation out of such a state, to one of a wholly higher order – one in which all experience of Self (which in the unitive state she understands as an experience of oneness with the Divine) drops away, leaving a void at the centre of the Self, that void being the Divine.
And as she says later:
Psychological and spiritual freedom is the ability to live with not-knowing. (p 101)
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A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:
Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.
Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper
There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.
(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)
It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.
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I have been enjoying this William Hawkins image during January, during a time of upheaval and a move to a temporary location, due to our upcoming renovation.
(We’re now on the eleventh floor of an apartment block in Woollahra, from which we survey the Russian Consulate, and the AFP (Australian Federal Police) car that’s often idling in front – its sole occupant, I imagine, grateful for his air conditioning chewing on the muggy Sydney heat.)
The image is from a calendar of Outsider art given to me by my good friend Ardslie. I’ll post an image each month from this beautiful production; the images too good to last just a month each!
Willima Hawkins
Untitled (Rearing Stud Horse)
Enamel on Masonite, 122 x 144 cm (approx)
Hawkins was born in rural Kentucky in 1985 but it wasn’t until the 1970s that he started painting in the style of this work, a style for which he became well known. His rural background and long years of manual labour informed much of his work. This man knew about animals (Two Dark Horses is also great; more at the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists.)
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it’s like this at the fish market -
standing around
when all I want is
pink glistening salmon flesh -there’s a problem with knives
and by the time I get one
you’ve offered me
your breast to cut -I go for the cheek
incising thin red
around the jaw lineand throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflictedhiding the act
from the rest of my life
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