LIVING OUR EXPERIENCE
“I have been fascinated and waylaid by abstraction, painting the picture I would rather have instead of living the experience I would rather not have.
“What I abstract never comes to be, or only sometimes flickers into life like a watered-down approximation.
“My abstraction is a smoke-screen born from longing or frustration, and it offers me a holiday of dreams. It is always safe and predictable, and an indulgence in the known.
“When abstraction collapses there is what there is … my bodily sensations, the symphony going on. Not necessarily in tune, but nonetheless constantly changing and moving, coming and going. Something is happening here or there … it evaporates and something else takes its place. There is nothing that I can control or manipulate. It is immeasurable and unknown, being and then not being.
“In the same way, if I seem to let go and listen, touch, taste, smell or see, there is no way of knowing beforehand the exact quality of those sensations. I could say that I can anticipate the sound of a bird singing, but it is only on information based on memory.
“It is not alive, vital and unknown. The sound I actually hear, the sound of what is, will not be the same as my abstraction of it. When I first listen to the sound I will try to grasp it and label it in order to control it. When I apparently let go of that control, there is simply the listener and the sound. When the listener is dropped, there is only the sound. I am no longer there – there is simply the naked and vibrant energy of what is. Nothing is needed. All is fulfilled.
“It is within the very alchemy of this beingness that freedom resides.
“Life beckons me. It whispers, it calls to me and in the end it screams at me. The scream of crisis or disease is often what will bring the rediscovery of what I am, for it is difficult to abstract suffering.”
Tony Parsons The Open Secret Shaftsbury: Open Secret Publishing, 1995 (Updated 2011)
NOTE: Tony Parsons describes The Open Secret as “a book declaring that enlightenment is a sudden, direct and energetic illumination that is continuously available. It is the open secret which reveals itself in every part of our lives. No effort, path of purification, process or teaching of any kind can take us there. For the open secret is not about our effort to change the way we live. It is about the rediscovery of what it is that lives”.
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