"My space was a spare bedroom made into a studio, the paints, the brushes, the blank canvas, my escape. I closed the door, put on the music; watch the hamsters go round and round.
I raise my brush to paint…huh?…there it is again. I become paralyzed in time. What is that?…as if temporally plucked from existence. Hmmm, deliciousness brings tears to my eyes… eternity before me.
It is strange, yet so natural to feel so expansive and know such beauty… It’s like coming home to a warm loving nest, comfort tucked in at every corner. It is a place that greets me with a sweet kiss and strong arms wrapped around me; I know I will be forever lifted to my highest potentials.
I wanted to go beyond perceived limits. I stretched my imagination as far as it would take me. I developed a curiosity with with the idea of boundaries, rules and ideas of society. My fascination and focus on the arbitrary placement of boundaries, had an effect on me, more than I would know. To go beyond perceived limits; I let go of my conditioned responses to objects, things and normal logical conclusions.
As I sought to explore consciousness and life with my painting and art; I looked at the vase (for example) I was about to paint, I realized it had form and it was made of glass, the glass had no color of it own. The glass only reflected the color that surrounded it: too, I had to render a 3 dimensional object onto a 2 dimensional page. In order paint realistically I let go of the idea of ‘vase’ and painted shapes, colors, two planes against each other to form a line that didn’t really exist…or did it?..(I was painting) the illusion of volume, depth, shadow.
I wasn’t painting a vase… I was painting an abstraction!…all of painting is an abstraction…each shape lay next to each other, creating boundaries, slight of color there, stark contrast here… nothing but an illusion the eye and the brain pulls it all together.
Of course a painting is a painting, but what a metaphor! I began asking…What if, in our minds eye, we lay shapes of concepts next to each other? …and we mistake it for real? What if life really was more like the blank canvas and the vase simply the noise that covered it up and hid it from plain view?…what if we completely forgot that there was even a canvas at all to begin with: and believed the vase to be a vase –and took it to be reality?
I began erasing the boundaries of time, I got up when my body was rested, and I slept then tired. I stopped looking at the clock for signals when to eat or when to sleep. I found I only needed four, or less, hours of sleep…
I erased boundaries of fear, such as speaking in a room full of people and such as having my artwork displayed or visiting a dentist or a doctor. Life became effortless and I slept less and less. I began lucid dreaming.
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The dream was so vivid, lucid, azure blue world, so deep and penetrating into no where and everywhere. A gray fish groveling for food grew wings before my eyes…its girth expanded massively and wings expanded as far as I could see, a giant manta ray began gliding, flowing…a fluid motion through a sea of utter tranquility…
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The tranquility stayed with me all day and days to follow…deep breaths, flowed life’s force through every cell tingling in my body…such peace and aliveness, I’m sure I’ve never felt before
I was willing to spend every waking moment and every sleeping night dreaming of my own creations of color and space. I wanted to put absolutely every part of me into each painting, with my body and soul and all the intelligence and intuition I could muster. My art became everything to me.
Eventually, thoughts and concepts became the paint and my mind, the blank canvas. I saw the genius in seeing this way…I saw how the world was so fluid…illusory.
The breaking down of concept became second nature to me, I found everything was a concept, until you broke it down far enough and it became a vast open spaciousness, a void nothingness, like looking out through a telescope past even the stars.
I had fun with this idea until I began having a hard time figuring things out. Things started to make no sense…My conditioned perceptions disappear; nothing is as it once appeared. I was being stripped naked, not of clothes but of idea, of concept, all perception stripped of meaning… I was reduced back to the blind person that somehow regained his sight, but didn’t know what to make of the objects before him. How could my brain be doing this without my consent!?(or rather not doing)
I don’t know when I became aware of this subtle voice… is it there as a warning? Ah die…I became afraid that I was going to die. What is this void I’ve been experiencing? I’ve got to wakeup…wake up! How can I make myself wakeup?…wake up…wakeup!!
Bliss began alternating with extreme fear…I’d wake up feeling God awful…if I slept at all
I’m so fucking scared!!! Amazing…what is it…that makes me stop and freeze, as if to move, would cause my death? Awh…there is a subtle sense that “I” would be annihilated, wiped out, be totally erased, somehow undone, as if I never was, obliviated….that is: to be obliterated into oblivion.
Night after sleepless night I knew something “God Awful” was going to happen. I could see the curve of the earth and I was about to fall off.
I could see forever, but it instilled a fear so frightful, worse than a fear of dying… it was a fear of annihilation, as if the core of my eternal existence could, or would, be wiped out I haven’t dared to return to that place…
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Since then, I have read all about what my experience could have been. According to eastern philosophies, and Native American traditions, it is an initiation of the shaman or unasked for Enlightenment.
All I know is that it was a brilliant madness, an unveiling of Truth…seeing with clarity and beauty. It would have been cool to have had an enlightened master by my side so he could water and feed me, and clue me in.
Anyway the journey back to that place, where madness began, begins here, with the understanding of what happened. The process is well known in the east and is coming more and more to the west.
It is my journey of the study of consciousness, the etheric brain and spirituality."
-- Christy Lifosjoe
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