I love this Accepting Impermanence series, in progress here, most of all my pieces, and I am very excited to show them off this weekend!

The first noble truth in Buddhism is essentially that Life is suffering. We can never be satisfied until we reach liberation, which is the ceasing to exist.

From Wikipedia: The Four Noble Truths (Sanskrit: catvāri āryasatyāni; Pali: cattāri ariyasaccāni) are “the truths of the Noble Ones,” which express the basic orientation of Buddhism: this worldly existence is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but there is a path to liberation from repeated worldly existence. The truths are as follows: The Truth of Dukkha is that all conditional phenomena and experiences are not ultimately satisfying; The Truth of the Origin of Dukkha is that craving for and clinging to what is pleasurable and aversion to what is not pleasurable result in becoming, rebirth, dissatisfaction, and redeath; The Truth of the Cessation of Dukkha is that putting an end to this craving and clinging also means that rebirth, dissatisfaction, and redeath can no longer arise; The Truth of the Path Of Liberation from Dukkha is that by following the Noble Eightfold Path—namely, behaving decently, cultivating discipline, and practicing mindfulness and meditation—an end can be put to craving, to clinging, to becoming, to rebirth, to dissatisfaction, and to redeath.

I have been through my own share of suffering lately (see my last post). It brought with it the luxury of time and space to work through inner dramas and to express them artistically, and to consider what these “truths” mean for me. As I stumbled across them years ago in a frantic search for meaning through any and all available spiritual and scientific frameworks post-vision-quest / psychotic episode… reflection is warranted.

I decided that for me, myself and I, The Four Noble Truths are true, though personally I am not on the Noble Eightfold Path as I’m not ready for “liberation” from existing.

Through pure observation, I conclude that CHANGE (creation / growth and deterioration / death / destruction) is the cause of Suffering. Life is change; that’s the only constant, really. I cannot visualize a single instance of suffering not mediated somehow by change, or any experience of change which does not require something to suffer.

Please understand that my primary belief is in a Universe made of consciousness as all matter, where discrete beings are pieces of awareness experiencing themselves as separate from the whole, greater awareness in which they are immersed, and also from each other, through a complex and dynamic filtration system. For example, human beings think of themselves as separate from Gais despite being organic and electromagnetic fields immersed in the electromagnetic field of this massive, complex, self-sustaining system. Our skin and our own fields provide buffering and tension, but eventually we become part of the larger system as smaller pieces. Everything eventually ends, and goes on to be something else which likely knows absolutely nothing about what it was before. (e.g. A fish may become a cloud of parasites.)

I mean this very literally. I conclude for the moment that suffering is caused directly by change through pure mechanical friction as matter transmutes between discrete beings / organs / systems nested within one another. I really believe that there is no separation between the material and the physical; they are intimately interwound and made of the same stuff.

The traditionally “metaphysical” and “spiritual” constructs are merely energy fields for which we lack the necessary tools of perception to usually perceive (without training or introspection or advanced Scientific instruments). I believe that we will locate auras and the matrix of the Jungian(ish) cosmic consciousness in the realm of the very small, at the level of waves. The perceived experience of it (for those who have such experiences) it appears as a very large and complex place outside ourselves, because everything happens so comparatively fast at the level of the particle.

If there is movement, there is friction. If there is a blockage of the movement, there is pressure. Thus the suffering in life is purely the pain of pressure caused by the existence of what we tend to colloquially call the Ego, the defining set of filters which we consider “ours” which separate our human vibration from the vibration of other matter.

We create the change / suffering / friction because we have a role of making choices through the action of free will. Free Will is our manipulation of those parts of the system of filters which our “Self” considers our “own”: or rather our Ego, the arbitrary definition of a bubble located on the line where we choose to differentiate “our” space from “other” space.

Ego, and therefore Free Will, is what allows for change – which is really the transmutation of matter into other matter. Therefore change is inevitable if we are to have any experiences at all. Even the experience of appreciating a purely static state is facilitated by the transfer and therefore movement of information from one space to another. I am certain that without change there is no experience. Thus without suffering there is no experience.

So, basically in order to have an experience, we accept an experience that is imperfect, with some friction and therefore some suffering. It’s all a bit depressing, really. For life to exist, it must be fundamentally unsatisfying. We are only part of the whole, so pieces will always be missing. If we go back to the Godhead, the whole, by losing all of our attachments to our reality, then we have no experience. Blah.

So, this thinking has all been a bit much to cope with. Who needs to be planning their afterlife? I am not an ancient Egyptian.

Accepting Impermanence, my new series, is about processing these ideas and exploring them metaphorically while having a cathartic experience.

I have been spraying oil and ink, the whole rainbow, and carving away at layered oil and acrylic while it runs to the floor. I have opened three cans of spray paint with a pair of pliers, to get exactly the right base colour and splash effect. I have taken my paintings out to dry in the sun, while I scrubbed purple cat footprints off my couch and windowsills. I have washed my hands and my bathtub fifty times with solvent. I have waited three months for them to dry, while I manipulated the canvases for the best drip effects and continued detail work in the wet oil, exploring how acrylic and oil consume one another, as we are consumed by the Earth that we rose from.

I am letting go of my process a little, to come back to greater understanding and control over it. I am letting the painting teach ME.

That’s where I am right now, and life is suffering, but it is also peace and joy and light and love and wonderment and beauty, if you live in the moment. So far, I love this series the most of all my pieces, and I am very excited to show it off this weekend!

Love and Luck to Everyone! Be your best True Self and let your personality shine; help reduce the friction in the system! 🙂

Yours,

Christine