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
