Whatever your heart desires, Andrew

Aerial view of Diepsloot, 2013

So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.

The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.

The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)

The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?

People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.

Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.

“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”

Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.

Every Buddhist should recognize Buddha’s four noble truths that there is suffering, there is a cause of suffering, there is a cure for suffering and there is a path to that cure. With that in mind, any Buddhist who finds themselves suffering knows that they have the ability to transcend their suffering. If a Buddhist is suffering, they can be consoled and comforted by the Dharma. If a non-Buddhist is suffering, they can also be consoled and comforted by the Dharma. It is just a bit more challenging, because  words like Buddha and Dharma have no meaning. Everybody understands suffering though.

Just like the Buddhist path, the non-Buddhist path to end suffering is mindfulness. Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment. If the present moment is full of suffering, then mindfulness is paying attention to suffering. Mindfulness is not pretending that things are other than they are, but also knowing that things are not exactly what they seem. Mindfulness uses the mind to see how things seem and how they are.

How things are is your direct experience. You can feel hot, cold, hungry, tired, sad, happy, or scared. Those are all reactions to how things seem. How things seem depends on what you believe. If you believe that suffering is just awful and needs to be avoided or endured, then suffering will be extra painful. If you believe that suffering is a passing feeling that is teaching you about the path to end suffering, then suffering becomes somewhat interesting and a little less painful. Mindfulness is staying with each of your experiences, whether they are pleasurable or not. It’s what we routinely do in the dentist’s chair.

by  Saṃsāran 

What are Intrusive Thoughts?

“Intrusive thoughts” is a clinical term for a symptom of many psychological conditions including depression and anxiety. The reality is that all of us experience intrusive thoughts i.e. those thoughts which we do not control as well as harmful and destructive thoughts. It is a simple fact that our inner talking, that is to say our inner dialog, runs on autopilot most of the time. Even when we try to focus on school work or a project in our job our mind wanders. This is the way minds work. 

Unlike a computer which “thinks”, if you can call it that, linearly, we think using a neural net. Thoughts bounce around in this net of brain circuitry more or less randomly. This allows us to make associations a computer could not make. This is how those annoying “captcha” programs work. This random bouncing of memories, ideas, dreams and plain old thoughts allows us to be creative. You could say this is part of what makes us human. A problem arises though when these unbidden thoughts become negative, painful or self destructive. 

Stopping a thought?

How do we stop a thought … if by the time we are aware of it it has already been in our mind? Well, you can’t. A bell once rung cannot be unrung. What you can do is learn the yogic technique of focus and concentration. This will give you a tool to prevent these unwanted thoughts from occurring at all. It takes time before an unbidden thought can create an emotion such as anxiety or sadness. Socrates famously said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Yet, it is the unobserved mind which causes most of our problems. What do I mean “unobserved mind”? 

Most of us live our lives inside of ourselves never taking a step back to observe what goes on within our minds. In fact some people don’t even realize that such a thing can be done. Well, it can. Once we gain an awareness of our thoughts we can then begin to control them. Thoughts create emotion. So by observing our thoughts we can control both the thinking and the feeling. We can reject harmful negative thoughts. We can accept and reinforce positive thoughts. We can recognize patterns of harmful thinking which lead us into anxiety and depression.

The skills we need:

We can aid ourselves in this by acquiring some skills. Mindfulness training and concentration are skills we can use to let this painful memories go permanently. The techniques are taught to soldiers returning from battle who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and have all but replaced electroshock therapy and other more intrusive and stressful therapies. Another useful skill which has seen considerable success in erasing, not suppressing  but actually eliminating painful memories is self hypnosis. Self hypnosis can gradually reduce the recurrence of these intrusive thoughts and unwanted memories and lessen the emotional impact when they do arise.

“Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.”

— Daniel L. Schacter

Listen to: NPR Podcast: “The Secret World of Thought” for more on this.