“This side and that side” continued…

Wow, has it already been five weeks since I last wrote in this blog? So much happened, not so much in the studio, so you didn’t miss anything 🙂 Not as an excuse… but to say that life sometimes takes it’s own turns and throws its own turns, and while we make plans God has his own plans 😉

So before I took up working again on my latest painting “this side and that side“, I had some extra time to reflect and think… always there seems to be two sides: breathing in or breathing out, inside or outside, left hand or right hand, withdrawn or extroverted, one truth seems to rule out another, and it seems as if everything in this world is based on duality. Or as Rumi says,

“God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.”

What if the reality wasn’t as it seems to be? What if we refused to look at the world in duality and instead saw the whole picture, hands united, not trying to find the opposites but rather see the thread that holds it all together… so many ways to see, so many truths…

Some articles fell into my hand this week while I was reflecting on this.
One was in a magazine that I picked up as I was waiting at the dentist, written by Martha Beck…

“We’re used to living in an either-or world—but when it comes to yes-or-no dilemmas, says Martha Beck, the most powerful thing you can ask is: What if both answers are true?”

She relates in mainly to relationships, but we could just as well expand it to our relationship with the world at large or our own minds in particular.

Another article caught my attention because it was titled “You are truly loved” 🙂

“What seems to start happening is that while we used to be searching for this to be truth vs. that, we paradoxically discover that everything is a manifestation of truth and nothing is truth. No longer can we say any experience is invalid. All of it is valid. All meaning is valid and yet life is totally meaningless. Every experience is embraced by the one and none of it is rejected even though rejection happens. Who am I? Not this, not that, and yet both this and that. and beyond this and that entirely and yet imminently right here.
We start falling into a space where nothing is valid, nothing is invalid, everything is valid, and everything is invalid.

Every answer is right. No answer is right.” 

And then I was reading in the Bhagavad Gita…

“In the first chapter of Bhagavad Gita Abhinavagupta explains that there is a war going on between your senses. In the organs of senses there is a war always going on. In senses there is joy, and joy fights with sadness; sadness fights with joy. In the same way there is lust, lust fight with detachment, detachment fights with lust. It is all going on in one’s own body–this war.

So this is the conclusion of the first chapter of Bhagavad Gita.

What a yogi has to do in this war, in this battlefield… Which battlefield? …of senses. i.e. good fighting with bad, right fighting with wrong, pride fighting with humility, humility fighting with pride; all the opposites are fighting every now and then. This fight does not persist only in waking state, this fight persists in dreaming state also. Everywhere you find this fight. You have to observe this fight going on in your own brain, in your own mind.

What a yogi must do there, he says.

Should I do right or should I do wrong?

When this fight goes on with right and wrong you are in a fix what to do… should we do this or should we do that?

If there is a way, avenue is only: don’t think right, don’t think wrong, be relaxed in your own nature, just enjoy, enjoy this fight. You just witness it, you have to witness it only. Don’t get entangled in right and wrong–this war. Just witness this war then you will get rid of this war, there will be neither right nor wrong.

This is the conclusion of the first chapter of Bhagavad Gita.

(source: Bhagavad Gita samgraha (summary) by Swami Lakshmanjoo)

or as Rumi also says,

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”