Seeing Truth

Back when I was a pre-schooler, my mom put me in a program in a lady's backyard called Monart. It was my first art instruction. Mona Brookes was apparently testing a new method of teaching children how to draw. What it taught me was seeing without prejudice.

I don't mean prejudice as in the racial or sexual types. Take that to the extreme, I mean seeing without any judgment or intepretation of what I'm perceiving. I was trained to turn off the normal filter through which we see things, no longer abstracting from my perception anything other than shapes and colors. While painting Taj Mahal, it isn't Taj Mahal I'm painting. It's a collection of shapes distinguished by their values and their boundaries.

This skill leads to the philosophical desire to avoid categorizations, to reject descriptions in words, and to cease assuming. I try to take in my perceptions without analysis and certainly without opinion. If you can do this, you can see without the voice in your head telling you lies, like Ruiz says in "The Voice of Knowledge", you can appreciate the perfect beauty of all this world presents you, and you can love without qualification.

Sounds corny, sounds like what I was objecting to in Ruiz's book yesterday, but I guess I mean "love" in the sense of accepting everything Life is. It's kind of a peaceful feeling, but also sort of disconnected. To be a part of humanity means communicating with language which inherently labels and categorizes with nouns and adjectives. If we could communicate without speaking normally, we'd be set.

Hey, wait a minute. Look at the painting of Taj Mahal above. 'Nuff said.

Peace.

GIFTED - Taj Mahal 05/30/08