Noumenal Field

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.)

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This Field of Life, the Same in Each of Us

by Ron Dowd on March 20, 2010

in Art+Psyche

This Field of Life, the Same in Each of Us

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Nonduality joins the fold…

March 8, 2010 Contemplation

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, [...]

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Field with Seed-Bearers

September 22, 2009 Art+Psyche

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 [...]

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August Field and Krishnamurti’s Notebook

September 3, 2009 Art+Psyche

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, [...]

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On The Field, Part 4 of 4: A Painting & Monteluco

June 21, 2009 Art+Psyche

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 [...]

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On The Field, Part 3 of 4: Richard Long

June 17, 2009 Art+Psyche

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 [...]

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On The Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger

June 9, 2009 Art+Psyche

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: [...]

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On The Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan

June 3, 2009 Art+Psyche

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 [...]

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Landing Field

May 1, 2009 Art+Psyche

Ron Dowd Landing field pen and coloured pencil on paper 16 x 17 cm, 2009 Landing field in a state of expectation

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