I was struck by this quote from Sailor Bob Adamson on Charlie Hayes’ blog (See New Book “Only That”) and in my struckness merely repeat it here:
Without any concepts, you are seeing and knowing. Can you say the seeing, the knowing, hearing or functioning has any beginning? Can you say it has any ending? Can you point to where you start seeing or where you end seeing, or hearing? So it’s ever-fresh, self-shining, self-knowing. You don’t need another self to try to find yourself. That would be an impossibility. We have created this false sense of self and then we go looking from that point of view to try to find out what we really are. Yet that self-knowing is constantly with us.
I think this is a hugely important statement and it thrills me in its potentiality for freedom. Take seeing alone: the visual field is seamless as we move through our lives, one scene panning into another; there’s no boundary to it (even when the eyes close and re-open). The beauty in meditating upon this, in following closely the never-ending explication of the visual…
“Explication”, above, comes from David Bohm. The explicate order (what we see in the case of the visual) unfolds from the implicate order, the holographic template, the matrix…
I’m also led back to Thomas Traherne and his illimited field:
I felt no dross nor matter in my soul,
No brims nor borders, such as in a bowl
We see, my essence was capacity.
(Traherne, from My Spirit, in The Dobell Poems.)
Tagged as:
Charlie Hayes,
David Bohm,
Noumenal Field,
Sailor Bob Adamson,
Thomas Traherne
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.
Tagged as:
Noumenal Field,
Psychotherapy
Ron Dowd
Field with Seed-Bearers
Ink and acrylic on paper, 47 x48 cm
Seed-Bearers
Fog horns sound in early morning
mingle with waking reflections.
Soon the yellow sun rises
as fresh as lemon water
burns off the dark mist without effort
warms it to wisps and they disperse.
In the field, bathed in light,
there’s movement.
Seed-bearers begin to rise.
Tagged as:
Noumenal Field
Ron Dowd
August Field
Coloured pencil and ink on paper, 16 x 16 cm (approx)
Opening Krishnamurti’s Notebook, after photographing this piece, I chanced upon the following passage:
It was an evening of light pink and dark clouds. The moment one stepped out of the house, talking with another of quite different things, that otherness, that unknowable, was there. It was so unexpected, for one was in the midst of a serious conversation and it was there with great urgency. All talk came to an end, very easily and naturally, The other did not notice the change in the quality of the atmosphere and went on saying something which needed no reply. We walked that whole mile almost without a word and we walked with it, under it, in it. It is wholly the unknown, though it comes and goes… (Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti’s Notebook, p185.)
Tagged as:
Art,
J Krishnamurti,
Noumenal Field
Finally, in this series of four posts on the field, here’s a painting of my own from 2005, painted during a period of strong interest in the noumenal field.
Ron Dowd
Field Painting 2005 (40 x 40 cm)
The poem (from 2003), that “fits” with this painting, is called vision:
a cambered green
fringed by dark trees
field of luminous shoots
delicate, massed
bright spring growth
lit from the soil
signal low and mute
a swathe of soft light radiating
Last year during a trip to Italy I visited the Santuario di San Francesco at Monteluco (on the hill-top near Spoleto) and had a strong experience once more of the primacy of the noumenal field, in the form of the courtyard of the Sanctuary. Here is that courtyard:
In this case the field was the extent of the courtyard – and the perception was, as Berger states it (see Part 2):
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
This life had a simplicity about it – I had the strong impression of how unseen hands cherished this courtyard (no one was around); that it had been cared for for many years (the Sanctuary was established in the 13th century, although monks have inhabited the caves in this area since the 5th century) and that the greatest respect that could be, and was, paid it was regular sweeping with a simple broom.
On the Field, Part 3 of 4: Richard Long
On the Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan
Tagged as:
Art,
Noumenal Field
The Guardian (UK) is abuzz at present with articles on Richard Long, the British sculptor whose “time has come” as one of them says. (You can read three of these articles here, here and here.) Plus there’s a slide-show of his impressive current retrospective at the Tate Britain, which really shows the international standing of this “sleeper” in the world of sculpture.
Seeing all this work online reminded me of how, when I was studying sculpture, I was influenced by this artist, particularly by his early works such as A Line Made By Walking. As Robert Macfarlane says in one of the above Guardian articles:
His best-known early piece is A Line Made by Walking. On a sunlit day in 1967, he caught a train south-west out of Waterloo. When the suburbs gave way to countryside, Long got off the train, and found a field whose grass was starred with daisies. He walked back and forth, until the flattened grass caught the light such that it was “visible as a line”. Then he photographed the line in black and white, and went home.
And here is that photograph:
Richard Long
A Line Made by Walking, 1967
I don’t imagine that Richard Long had in mind the noumenal field when he walked this work – it’s my overlay onto the work that it stands for me as a kind of “ur-work”, a definition of an attitude to art making and a reverence for the underlying ground that supports this attitude. And it has the overlay of a remembered work, the only trace of which is the artifact of the black and white photo above. It’s like the feeling I get when walking into a local gallery in Paddington, and seeing (maybe it’s behind the counter where the minders sit) a small study or drawing by the current artist, setting the theme for the show; and having the feeling that the paintings for sale on the walls are “blow-ups” of that single, energised study – that the sum of the energy in the entire gallery space exactly equals, and is determined by, the energy generated by the single dense study, that ur-work. A good metaphor, for me, of how the noumenal field, the original ur-work, explicates.
On the Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan
Tagged as:
Art,
Noumenal Field,
Richard Long
The final little essay in John Berger’s About Looking is the exquisite, the personal, Field (1971). It’s a meditation really, on Berger’s understanding of the “field that I have always known”.
Berger’s understanding of the noumenal nature of that field which is the template for all fields is clear in this memory from his childhood:
Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation for my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise, came the cackle of a hen from a nearby garden, and at the moment of that cackle, its distinct sharp-edged existence beneath a blue sky with white clouds, induced in me an intense awareness of freedom. The noise of the hen, which I could not even see, was an event … in a field which then had been awaiting a first event in order to become itself realisable. I knew that in that field I could listen to all sounds, all music.
Here is Berger attempting to describe in language experiences that “exist at a level of perception and feeling that is probably pre-verbal” (as he later says). And he goes on to show how certain correlates of this experience can be found in nature – there are actual fields that (given they have the right physical characteristics, which he is generous enough to list for us) can invoke this remembrance of the “field that I have always known”. We are even supplied in this essay with a picture of such a field:
This accords with my own experience. And I add that for me personally, along with the shock of such re-discovery there is often the heaviness of grief for those extended periods of my life during which I’ve been without this awareness.
In the shock of re-recognition of the field there’s a merger of the temporal and the spatial. Berger speaks of this: “time and space conjoin”. He finishes the essay with this beautiful sentence:
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
This is to say that there’s a deep recognition that we are in fact the extent of the field we observe, we are moment by moment arising from this extent, are, at an essential level, no different from this extent.
Perhaps it is Berger’s deep connection to the field that enabled him at age 80 to make the following statement (on ABC radio’s The Book Show, last year):
I live the present moment as though it perhaps is the last. Okay, at my age now that is not a surprising thing to say, but I felt like that and acted like that when I was 16 and when I was 30 and when I was 42. You name the year and I was living like that.
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan
Tagged as:
John Berger,
Noumenal Field
Here’s the first of four short posts on the field, a topic dear to my heart.
This post’s a personal reflection on Robert Duncan’s exquisite poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, which appeared in his 1960 book The Opening of the Field:
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.
She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.
It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down
whose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
The phrase “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” has me thinking of David Bohm’s implicate order, unfolding in time to form the explicate order of which we are usually only aware. And “eternal pasture” is a lovely poetic form for what I usually refer to as the noumenal field, “so near to the heart”.
“Wherefrom fall all architectures I am” has the sense of that place from which the constructions of selfhood occur, the developments of self-representations, those patternings with which we then subsequently live, mistakenly taking them to be our real selves. As A.H. Almaas says:
The experience of the self is actually determined by the self-representation. The phenomenology of the self’s experience presents itself through this representation, and hence, what the self perceives and experiences as itself, in its present experience, is greatly determined by it. The self-representation actually sculpts the forms that arise as the phenomenological particulars of the self’s experience of itself. (A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, p59)
“as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos” speaks to me of that noumenal place – we can see it in Unica Zürn’s work and I mentioned it in my previous post – that place which for many of us is a creative centre – which holds the psyche against dissolution. Duncan puts it so beautifully, “a place of first permission.” And this is a “made place”, a place we make for ourselves by giving it (finally!) the importance it deserves.
This is merely a series of notes – the poem stays alive and available to me as a source of inspiration, always more rich than any attempt I might make to analyse.
(There’s a more literary reading of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.)
Tagged as:
Noumenal Field,
Poetry,
Robert Duncan,
Unica Zürn
Ron Dowd
Landing field
pen and coloured pencil on paper
16 x 17 cm, 2009
Landing field in a state of expectation
Tagged as:
Art,
Noumenal Field
