Chitta Vritti Nirodha Series

Our consciousness is an always on virtual reality maker that creates a lot of meaning, structure, pattern on top of the “real reality”. Its tools and mediums are the senses like oil paint and brushes, and the mind as the canvas where there is a continuous painting upon. Structures and patterns and perspective and tone and texture and meaning and effect in painting are symbolic materialisation of this more underlying process. But what would reality be if we could switch off this superimposing machinery we call consciousness and all our natural and instinctual and unquestioned layers and filters of sense making? Could we de-intensify this coupling to the world and then look? Chitta Vritti Nirodha is a famous attempt in spiritual tradition to do that, meaning “to stop the flow of the consciousness field”. In this series I go on a journey to turn the consciousness knob down a little bit, to de-intensify the automatic VR experience we call “reality” and embrace this de-intensification.

Portrait in the fight between dark and opera luminous

De-intensified Velázquez

In my next attempt to turn down some automatic consciousness knobs, i ran into a total defeat. I worked on this painting in my head for many days, all the time coming up with very specific ways of what to do and how. So although i started off with concentrating heavily on how to get under the skin of form, tones, colours and automatic patterns, i was lost exactly the early moment when i made those circular palette knife movements in the middle :-) at that moment the form of the body was centred and laid out. I tried to counteract with putting a seemingly context free simple black line leading away from the nude form, but this counterattack failed miserably again when it turned back into a rectangular form, and at this moment i realised i paint Velázquez’ Rokeby Venus. It was a huge defeat. I tried one more step to overwrite this subconscious plan execution with textured stripes vertically flowing down and eventually overflowing or washing away the human form...but they could not touch the form...I desperately tried the approximation but at that moment another process in me put me in a state where I have built up an emotional relationship with the forms already in place, so my feelings were taken over and didn’t let me touch or reach the form and the centre composition with any vertical structures. It was a defeat again in falling prey to my very processes that were being executed in me since days without noticing where do all these lead....:-) next time .

Comets

Space(time) is the most fundamental building block of our perception and consciousness. It is the trickiest basic automatic process that shapes our reality. Space is the fundamental stuff that is out there, this is our “experience”, being in this big space (big rectangular space :-))) that is everywhere. But since ever we found holes in this seeming triviality, holes that were drilled by Kant when he put space and time from outside into the inside as the most basic tools of consciousness, or by Riemann and Einstein when they realised spacetime and its geometry are subject to the same dynamical processes as a moving object or electricity, and since then both in science, philosophy and in our experience space and time became more discrete and co-created. We got to the point such that we are not so much inside in an external space, but we are ourselves spaces that grow and determine how we see and perceive and experience. We are ourselves holes drilled through this fabric of spacetime that is the very constituent of our being...we are ourselves holes through ourselves and space is created by this drilling!

Absorbing all the energies in the garden

Boringly magical the illusion how quantum I scrape down all after the forms of flowers and grass on the trees how the sound is light in the ears where is end and the outside flows the illusionary magical garden in the song I have sat down in the stop this boring incredibility where this not anymore the boundaries ... there is, there is ... there is