While I'm alive, I'll feel alive

Spore print of Amanita Muscarius. Our edible toadstools and mushrooms and how to distinguish them. 1895.

The Body

“The physical body is the most external degree of ourselves. That is, it is the lowest or ultimate degree through which all higher or more internal degrees, such as belong to thought, feeling and will, manifest themselves. The body does not think. The spirit of Man thinks and communicates through the body. The body is in touch with the external world and it is also our own external world.

If you take the lowest degree as the whole of yourself you will miss something of the greatest importance. You will not be able to remember yourself.

You are not your body. You look through your body into the external world which you would not see if you had no body because the lowest or ultimate degree would be missing. In that case the next degree would constitute your lowest or ultimate degree and you would see another world and where you are in it, as is sometimes possible in dreams, or even by direct perception.

Try, then, to feel at times that you are not just your body, but that you are looking through it and seeing things and people in this world by means of it. This gives a feeling of Self-Remembering.

Self-Remembering from one aspect is the practice of a certain relation of consciousness to one’s body and through it to the world as rendered by our senses.

If we take it like that, then there are three things (1) consciousness, (2) the body with its external senses, (3) the external world of things and people.

If you can reach and maintain this relation, you will experience quite definitely the taste of Self-Remembering. You will taste it as long as you can maintain the triple relation – I, looking through the machine of my body into the apparently coloured and moving world of things and people.”

From “Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: Vol. 4” by Maurice Nicoll (1952).

Image: “Theologue” by Alex Grey (1986).

Cosmic Dancer Pen and ink on paper 40x50 cm Prints are available

I'm happy to share with you the first illustration i finished in 2023.

The Self is realized through the union of the Sun and Moon. The sun represents the higher, spiritual self while the moon governs the desires, the lower and instinctual aspects of the self. The 4 fixed astrological signs (Aquarius, Taurus, Scorpio, Leo) represent the pillars of the world, the 4 elements in their most stable form.

More beautiful tapestries by Diedrick Brackens, b 1989, Mexia, Texas. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

“I was born in a small town in Texas but I really grew up on Army bases around the country, my father was in the Army. My family is from Texas and I went to high school and college in Texas. I think growing up in a household that wasn’t defined by the home we lived at any given moment but was defined by our relationship to Texas, the South, and family in Mexia, Texas. So in some ways I have always been interested in the ideas of searching, navigation, mapping, etc. by virtue of growing up with distance from family, spending countless hours on road trips to and fro.”

Diedrick Brackens is a Los Angeles-based artist working in the medium of textiles. He received his BFA from the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, and his MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts, Oakland, California. He is an assistant professor and program head of the fiber department at California State University Long Beach.

  https://www.craftcouncil.org/recognition/diedrick-brackens

Nikolaos Gyzis  -  Dance of the Nymphs  (detail) 

Greek, 1842-1901