Into our inner being

The riches of the senses pour.

The Cosmic Spirit finds itself

Reflected in the human eye,

Which must ever renew its strength

From that spirit source.

— Rudolph Steiner, 51st week (March 23-29), Calendar of the Soul

A temporarily homeless man in London describes how he becomes more and more attentive to the interplay of ravens and magpies, squirrels and crows while he waits for night to fall.

You become enthralled by nature because you’re there for hours… you feel you’re touching nature or you’re just a part of it. And then the night closes in and you can hear the traffic decreasing and the pubs getting louder as people are going home. It’s at that point you think, now’s the time to go to sleep.

— Raymond Lunn (Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now– as Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It And Long for It, by Craig Taylor

The sun shines on our front yard at 9:30 am today on Spring Equinox, day of balance.

I have been down with the flu for a while. This has been frustrating in that I haven’t had the strength for doing the drawings. But it has perhaps offered time for something to gel so that I can express it more clearly.

For some time I have been making efforts to experience the senses in a more deep and integrated way. I have felt that the experience of the senses can be a gateway to a more profound perception of/way of being in the world. I have been working to see with the eyes of the Heart and hear with the ears of the Heart. These efforts have brought forth fruit and I have been able to enter another realm of being in the world. The moments when I am in this state are like many-faceted jewels. In these moments I am no longer seeing the world as something moving past me, outside of myself, invoking my standard, and, in comparison, crude reactions. In these moments I feel I have entered the world of the poet.

The price of entering this world has been high from the point of view of personal ego. I have had to struggle against laziness and conditioned ways of seeing things. I am grateful for the help I have received in this effort, and consider this help to be an act of grace, without which no efforts of this sort are possible.

Now I see that this drawing assignment is a challenge to go farther on the path of seeing with the eyes of the Heart. I guess you don’t step off Easy Street and then get to drift on a raft like one of those commercials for taking a vacation in the tropics!

I have capitalized Heart because I am talking about something other than, yet inclusive of what we often describe as heart. This Heart extends far beyond the experiencing of the range of human emotions.

Thanks for reading this, if you have gotten this far. Here’s to the next step on the path!

In truth you will cease to be observers at all and become part of the thing you are looking at.

— John Matthews, The Sidhe: Wisdom from the Celtic Otherworld

As I was drinking my coffee this morning, I thought about how– when I was doing the “Things Are Alive” series of drawings– I had connected with the intention that gave birth to the mass-produced bench on our back deck. I realized that the intention of a thing is reflected in that thing. It makes me want to reflect on the intention for my drawing this week so that I have it clearly set when I begin. Because the drawing will reflect my intention no matter how conscious it is. I would like it to be conscious.

‘It’s hard getting inside this guy for a lot of reasons, Mr. Hoffman said. (Not once during the interview did he utter the name Willy.)… Certain moments make sense, then they don’t, then others do, then they don’t anymore. All of a sudden you’ve lost what you found– you thought you knew what that moment in a scene was about, and then you don’t anymore. And then you do.’

‘You go into any role asking a question, accumulating half-answers, partial answers, full answers, and then different questions come to you– and through it all you have to trust your instincts, which is a private process.’

— Philip Seymour Hoffman, about playing the role of Willy Loman (“Searching for the Life of a Salesman” by Patrick Healy, The New York Times, Sunday, March 11, 2012)

Awareness serves to relate objectivity with subjectivity in such a way that the object ultimately comes to rest in the self-awareness of the subject. In reality, reflective awareness is always awareness of ‘I’ (ahamvimarsa); it never objectivises even when, in the form of the awareness of ‘this’ (idamvimarsa), it reflects upon the object. The experience we have of things existing outside consciousness is due to lack of self-awareness. The awareness of the object is never ‘out there’; it is registered and known within the subject. All forms of awareness come to rest in the subject.

— Mark S. G. Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration, An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism, p. 71

Thus, the advice to “Know the Knower”! To know even as one has been known:

English Standard Version (©2001)
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.        1 Corinthians 13:12