In my own history of anxiety, I’ve unnoticed come at the problem from different directions. One was through logic and reason, another through insight and awareness. Now as an artist it’s imagery and metaphor. It made me reflect on the different ways we relate to and cope with our hopes, fears and worries. In the … Read more
‘The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing‘ Pierre Bonnard We might ask ourselves in a moment of contemplation, ‘why is there something, not nothing?’ or ‘why is the cosmos the way it is and not some other way?’ But that’s like asking ‘why does a bee sting you?’ It’s an absurd … Read more
‘Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Sunyata, or Emptiness, is … Read more
‘Our life is what our thoughts make it’ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations To find happiness, we have to deal with the suffering we experience. I used to suffer badly with anger and loneliness. Angry, I would get so angry. I was alone and hurting. I looked out at the world with a glare, feeling as if … Read more
‘To study the self is to forget the self.’ One of the more well-known ideas from Buddhism is the notion of No-self or Non-Self and is one of the Three Marks of Existence (Pali: tilakkhaṇa; Sanskrit: त्रिलक्षण, trilakṣaṇa, Japanese: 三法印 sanbōin). The Buddhist idea of ‘No-self ‘(Sanskrit: Anatman, Japanese: 空 kū) is an idea in early Buddhism … Read more
When it comes to understanding the Buddhist worldview, it cannot be overstated just how the rest of it is tied to the view of existence as constantly changing. This view of Anicca (Pāli) or Anitya (Sanskrit), or Impermanence, is one of the most important ideas in the Buddhist paradigm. It’s one of the Three Marks of Existence in the … Read more