STRETCH...Language and Spirituality

STRETCH

June 20th, 2016

3:00 to 5:00 PM

Myron Stratton Home

Facilitator:  Charlie Coon
(charlesrcoon@hotmail.com
polarityinplay.blogspot.com)

THE AWAKENED EYE

is the eye that perceives without labeling;

we could also call it the innocent eye

or the eye of beginner’s mind

Many artists and artisans have found that the practice of drawing, and/or engagement in creative encounters in the visual arts can open the mind to another way of seeing, a way that transcends habitual dualistic assumptions. They may use different words to describe this transcendence, but all infer a relation ship with something inconceivably larger than their everyday experience, something referred to here as the intimate unknowable.

When consciousness is no longer divided into subject and object an inexplicable wholeness pervades and one’s actions flow seamlessly from and AS that completeness. Yet we have no language with which to speak of this seamlessness – even to use the phrase “art and the intimate unknowable” invites confusion, for within the encounter there is neither entity nor activity separate from the unknowable. Logically and experientially it is clearly meaningless to speak of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and yet speak one must.

Throughout history there have been – and still are – many wise teachers who speak of this transcendence of duality as one’s original nature – an a-priori ‘beingness’ which we seem compelled to simultaneously seek and overlook. Their teachings are sometimes referred to as advaita, which means ‘one without a second’ – or more simply, nonduality. Regarded in this wider context the awakened eye is synonymous with the awakened I...

--miriam louisa simons  (See her blog:  theawakenedeye.com )