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It was almost finished: the detailed model of the memory he had spent the last few years searching for. A search begun after a short but terrifying moment one particular night (a night thus far unmemorable). The night had gone something like this: woke up; realized the reason he had woken up was a lack of breath; reached for oxygen that his body failed to absorb; opened his mouth only to find nothing there, nothing that was willing to fill his lungs; noticed he had left his body and saw himself choking into nothingness, just white, recently washed sheets around him.
And then, out of nowhere, something, a little sound (he thought), or at least something that sounded like a sound, something not so trivial, a vivid but veiled memory that made life flow again. That which had brought life back into him had not only brought back his body; his body was brought back into something, something full and sweet, something he knew he knew, but was forgotten. He became obsessed with the sweetness and fullness he felt connected with, something that he called ‘it’. Immediately the same night, the night now made memorable due to what had happened, he crammed his ideas and thoughts about what ‘it’ could be onto small, sticky pieces of yellow paper.
He was tracing ‘it’ and felt how he was coming closer and closer to knowing it. There were moments when he thought he would embrace what he was looking for in a split second, something ‘just around the corner’. But always, the thing he was chasing found a way to escape. The harder he tried the more he seemed to forget what ‘it’ exactly was all about.
He changed his strategies; he surrounded ‘it’ carefully and peeled the mystery from the thing he wanted to know so obsessively.
That’s actually how the idea of a model began. Since ‘it’ had hit a memory deep inside him, ‘it’ had to be something in his brain, he thought.
He created a copy of his brain with its collective memories represented by the sticky yellow notes, by images he had drawn or torn out of magazines, and by sounds he had collected. Sometimes (almost always when he was not so busy chasing) images entered his mind that resonated with ‘it’. He wrote them down and stuck them into his model: jigsaw pieces of a puzzle soon to be whole.
tagged: light spaciousness connectedness life Body mind memory
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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I had no idea that you could walk to the end of the world.
Finally, after hours and hours of walking, Goodness came to me unreservedly.
The ground had turned soft and sandy. I felt how the earth was sinking into me. My eyes had had time to adjust to the brightness of her beauty. Now that I was in front of her, I realized that she had been visible throughout my journey. Too close to see at first.
The more I walked the brighter and more visible she became. She looks amazing, dressed stylishly in black, not a colour I had expected. A furrowed face reveals infinite layers of life that you can see in a single moment.
“Welcome home; the place you have never left.” Her voice is tender. Every word placed carefully into silence.
“You are so alive.” I didn’t mean to speak, but it’s what happens.
“Life’s aliveness shines through us vividly when we remain alive and die in the same moment.”
Her feet start moving. Just a little. The rest of her doesn’t move at all.
A beautiful maroon flower in her hair.
Two feathers.
Somewhere.
“Don’t you miss the other world?” Her brightness catches fire deep inside me. I know there is no way back. It’s nostalgia speaking: I fear losing what I thought I had.
“From this perspective there is no other world. All worlds are included. And yet this place is beyond every world. Your question comes from memory. You are now no longer bound by memory. But you may use your memory freely.”
She pulls a torch from her pocket, creates a circle of light around her and starts dancing. Funny faces. Funny movements.
“Join me.”
We dance.
“From now on you are no longer in experiences; you are in relationship.” This woman could be my grandmother. She could be my daughter. She could be my sister. Or brother. It starts heating up. She becomes my lover.
I cannot help saying it: “I think I’m beginning to love you.”
“I know,” she says. “When you become intimate with what is, Love’s face appears naturally. Irresistibly. From now on, everything with which you are in a relationship will be recognized as love.”
tagged: love connectedness movement dancing sun connectedness life beyond opposites
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 Photo: André Platteel
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The window needed shutting: the rain was getting in. Autumn wetness drumming on the windows, drowning out the sound of Keith Jarrett breathing loudly as he played his black, polished Bechstein. The speakers whispered: “The rain, the rain, we will defeat it.”
But they couldn’t.
You were lying on the velvet green couch, meeting it with your simple silk ochre dress. More albums on the ground. Van Morrison, Bartok, Sigur Ros and some that were unfamiliar to me. You were ignoring them, just like you were ignoring the music and the rain; your eyes were on me. An unknown scent of aliveness came at me from all sides; from the books, from the glass chandelier, from the flowers on the table and from the windows the rain was trickling through.
Your legs were at an angle, trying but failing to reach the wooden floor. An inch separating your right foot and the ground. Your left further away. Your left hand on your belly, your right hand next to your body. Lean hands; small wrists; long fingers. Your shoulders rested against a cushion, your head was tilted back. Your golden hair was like a monotone rainbow.
The whole of you seemed to melt into the air around us.
It felt to me like perfect balance: the rattling rain, Jarrett’s playing, the shape of your body on the couch, the colours of your dress, the faded green velvet, the scent of aliveness.
The velvety structure of your eyes made me go deeper inside myself. There was no way I could reach out to that look. I had to meet it somewhere deeper. What does something that is being reborn every moment feel like?
I felt how everything that seems to be unique is connected to all other things as well. A code? It was more than a mathematical formula in which different letters suddenly form logic; there were holes in the formula, opening up to as yet unborn worlds about to unfold. Never-ending spring. Blossoming. I felt dazzled: too many shadows became forms, too many forms disappeared into the holes. I felt happy. I could have laughed hysterically. My soul appeared to have holes too: every single sound, every single colour, every single touch and every single taste was absorbed. I lived in everything, and everything lived in me.
tagged: consciousness God understanding love connectedness flower silk Jarrett Bechstein
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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A man with a dog, jogging and jumping across a rough meadow, white shoes and headphones, the music providing the rhythm for him and his companion; a little girl with a lollipop, holding hands with her mother, chasing a swan; a young couple in love, having an argument in the shade of a weeping willow; a man, not shaved for days, big bag in hand, eyes focused on rubbish in waste bins; a guy, early thirties, wearing a white apron, placing tables and chairs outside a little café that overlooks trees and a lake. If your eyes weren’t focused on not hurting your ankle; if your mouth wasn’t focused on the taste of a lollipop; if your mind wasn’t focused on words to win an argument; if your attention wasn’t focused on rubbish or café furniture; if you were open to everything, you could feel how wonderfully, how naturally, all the different parts that make up this garden fit together.
Purple, brown and dark orange are turning white, yellow, red and blue. Trees are already in blossom; the rose garden is filled with brightness. Some sun after four days of rain and even snow, crocuses in its light. The little flowers are fragile, they somehow remind me of the swan I saw earlier: at ease and elegant in the water, drunk and clumsy on land. The crocuses appear to be heading to the water. I watch more closely. Is the sun actually lifting them up? Dark clouds pass in front of the sun but the crocuses remain in light. The girl with the lollipop has left her mother to see what is going on. She studies the crocuses and discovers that it’s not sunlight, it’s beauty. The mother is sitting a bit further up, on a wooden bench. Legs crossed, with a dark, zipped bag next to her; she takes out a book and starts reading, one eye on the book, one on her little girl. What kind of world does this combination of sights create in her mind?
There are trees around the crocuses, a lake to the left, and a rose garden a bit further away. The lake, the rose garden and the trees don’t shine as much as the crocuses. Beauty has decided to pay special attention to the still young, vulnerable flowers, some yellow, some purple.
How must the lake, the roses and trees feel? I like to think that they have lent some of their beauty so the little flowers can become as beautiful as they are. As if they know that at another time the same generosity will flow their way. If you look closely you can actually see the lake, the roses and the trees forming part of the crocuses: their beauty is embedded. They are all crocuses now.
Unchanged and yet unrecognizable as being only flowers.
I have always thought that you can never grasp the experience of sheer beauty, that beauty is surrounded by borders that make it impossible to feel it fully. Now I can see that there are no borders round beauty; borders are part of beauty, opening themselves to all that is beauty – slowly, just like a flower.
tagged: flowers connectedness meadow borders beauty nothing freedom roses crocuses attention
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 Photo: André Platteel
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She’s standing on the corner of a quite street, her left hand shaking the liquid inside a little canister; she takes off the cap with her right hand, puts the cap in her pocket and, still using her right hand, begins sliding a small stick in and out of the container, soaping it with the liquid inside. She brings the stick to her mouth, and blows. Transparency, carried by the wind. Her eyes follow her newly created world, the stick still at her lips. No movement: it could ruin everything. There it goes, higher. Her eyes travel with it.
At the far end of the street, someone is walking her way. But the strength of her belief makes him stop. Don’t interfere. Not now. She knows that the slightest doubt could make it collapse. The bubble has already been aloft for seconds. Her left hand holds the canister tighter, tighter: how strongly can you grip the source? Will it help – holding the source tightly – to prevent what it creates from disappearing?
For no reason, the transparent world pops.
There is no sadness: she is not a child anymore; she’s familiar with things disappearing. She covers the stick in liquid again and seconds later a new, even bigger transparent world is created. I walk up to her, clap my arm around her shoulder and feel her strong body through the soft wool of her sweater. Whatever she has borne has shaped her beautifully. She lets me have one go. “Blow.” And I do. I blow and create a world just by inhaling a little oxygen – a tiny quantity compared with what my lungs can hold – and letting it escape through my mouth. I am making something.
“What do you want?” she asks.
Her question jolts me. Three transparent worlds’ thinking time, a million pieces of wanting, all projected into the last transparent circle. “What do you really want?” The bubble collapses. The million pieces disappear. The wind has stopped.
She was wearing a boat on her head when I met her. It had suddenly started raining. The ink of what had been a newspaper had almost disappeared. I was en route to nothing, she to everything. She was wearing red shoes; a bit quaint like the rest of what she had on, and just perfect. Three seconds – life started to course like a river knowing it is almost at the sea.
“What you want is what created silence there.” She puts her finger into the little container, covers it in the liquid and draws a little heart on my forehead. Her fingers are long; short nails, and soft skin. The soapy water doesn’t smell particularly nice. It feels sticky. The spring sun slices through some clouds that are hanging motionless. We cross the street and enter a park. Trees in flower. Blood running everywhere. She has her arm around my shoulder now, and occasionally pinches my arm, as if she wants me to be conscious of her.
tagged: consciousness connectedness light reality playing everything love hearth
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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The photographer was writing his memoirs.
He had gathered up all the work he still owned and offered them for sale in a little gallery in a city he had lived in for many years, more than two decades ago – back in the time when his work was still considered art, not something for which you could be convicted. He felt old, not because of his age, but because of the culture he was living in.
Our paths crossed by chance.
My girlfriend and I decided to go to Paris. A spur-of-the-moment decision that took us to the railway station, and five hours later, the City of Light. We only had one day, so we decided not to sleep but to wander through neighbourhoods we had never visited before. In a small area full of bookshops, art galleries and little hotels, we stopped in front of a window, our attention caught because it revealed nothing, curtains forming a wall of dark-coloured cloth. The door was open and a white-haired older man with young twinkling eyes stood in the passage. He seemed pleasant. Without saying so, he asked us to come in. We hesitated; our eyes focused on what there was to see inside. No people, just small photographs with little lights above them, so you could see what was being displayed.
We went in and began walking past the photographs: portraits of girls – or were they young woman? – posing innocently, supposedly unintentionally exposing parts of their bodies. The girls were not completely naked. And the poses were not pornographic. The photos gave the impression that what was portrayed had occurred by accident. There was a photograph of a girl eating an apple while her dress was casually falling open; a photograph of a girl arranging flowers while wearing see-through pyjamas; a photograph of two girls practicing ballet without wearing tops. Cliché-like scenes; soft-coloured, soft-focused images.
The pictures appeared to be innocent.
The girls posed as if unaware of the sexual connotations of their nakedness, as if their nakedness was nothing but natural. It was like they were saying: “Moments ago, my body was that of a child no-one paid attention to; suddenly it appears to have become an object of desire, something I can do nothing about.”
Somehow I felt ashamed of looking: I felt like a voyeur being aroused by forbidden fruit. The girls were no older than twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t allowed to see this, was I? At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I felt aroused. Because of that, I didn’t know how to react. Could I take my time looking at the photographs or should I pass quickly by? What was I going to say to my girlfriend, also looking at the photos? Could I confess what the pictures were doing to me? And what, exactly, was seducing me?
tagged: innocence consciousness body life photographer virginity youth connectedness pornographic Paris shame
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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As long as there is even the slightest bit of sun about, you’ll find him there, sitting on a bench in Spui square, in the heart of Amsterdam, shouting at everyone who passes by: ‘Who do you think you are?’ His voice is not aggressive, nor ironic – it’s just his voice speaking, asking. He almost always wears a sweater and always has his racing bike next to him; he leans it against the bench he’s sitting on, which makes it impossible for others to sit next to them – should they even dare to consider it.
Some people are annoyed by his challenge, some act as if they haven’t heard the question, some answer by giving their name, some just laugh, and some – although I have not seen more than a few people try this – attempt to answer the question seriously and walk up to talk to him.
‘Who do you think you are?’ In my case, the question reminded me of Pirandello’s story ‘Uno, Nessuno e Centomila’ (‘One, None, and a Hundred Thousand’). A man looking at himself in the mirror is confronted by what he sees when his wife points out his big nose, which he had never noticed. He becomes confused because he thought he knew himself so well, his behaviour modelled on the picture he had created of himself. He starts asking his friends how they see him and discovers that each has a different picture of him and that none of these pictures match the picture he has of himself. So he abandons his mental self-image and the behaviour he thought went with it and starts to act and behave in the moment. His ‘I’ is released and in doing so he escapes the rigid, suffocating structure of his earlier self-image; he becomes ‘fresh’: his thinking is no longer connected to a mental structure but to what appears at every moment, again and again.
‘Who am I?’
The confusion is already in the language. When we speak of a flower we use the word to refer to a collection of sensations: its colour, scent, shape, form and so on. There is no flower without these sensations or qualities. There is no flower behind or besides these. The flower is in the sensation, in the phenomenon that we call ‘flower’. It is similar with ‘I’: there is no such thing as ‘I’ behind or besides the sensations we experience. There is only what we experience. Most of the experiences we have, at least my own, anyway, are not even experiences but mental projections – just like the guy in Pirandello’s novel. We do not see a flower, a friend, a building or a guy sitting on a bench; we see a mental projection – we are looking in the past and relating a fresh moment to something we have already experienced.
tagged: consciousness spaciousness Pirandello language flower wholeness connectedness
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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Five hours north of New York, following the Hudson River all the way, I reach the Adirondacks. At Lake George, the start of the Adirondack Mountains, I will attend a week-long silent retreat with Gangaji, a teacher in Advaita, the Hindu philosophy of non-duality.
A half-year earlier my girlfriend and I had also attended a retreat with Gangaji, at the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The experience was mind blowing. This time the retreat is at a YMCA, a big venue built in a beautiful style that pays tribute to those typical family holiday destinations of the 1950s, the ones that have been so beautifully captured by photographer Martin Parr and in the film Dirty Dancing.
The consciousness of all being one has been burning in me ever since I discovered Advaita, seven years ago. The experience of Wholeness that is at the core of Advaita has led me to investigate who I am – a process that is ongoing. Gangaji is a great teacher: through silence you experience the essence of who we are. Her pointers are clear and she is sweet about any question that arises.
After a few days spent in silence, experiencing the intense love that comes from the feeling of being all connected, it suddenly feels weird to be in this retreat. I feel a strong hunger to know ‘outside’. Of course, if all is one, there cannot be such a thing as ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. However, being in this retreat feels that way: you have to wear a name badge all the time; alcohol is forbidden; you have to stay and wait for five minutes after Gangaji has left the room; you have to answer certain questions; and couples are advised not to hang out with each other all the time. It is true that every ‘social community’ has its rules and regulations, but it is just this knowledge that leaves me with no reason to stay.
After four days, my girlfriend and I decide to leave the retreat: it has never felt so good to play truant; it has never felt so strong to demonstrate the experience of freedom for real. We spend hours driving south beside the Hudson River, hit the Holland Tunnel and enter downtown New York. It’s rush hour; New York streets don’t have lanes and we get squeezed between hundreds of cabs. Finally, after being stuck in traffic for yet more hours we reach our hotel.
The last day of our stay in New York we decide to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there is an exhibition of Dutch Painters. The Age of Rembrandt features 228 masterpieces displayed together, works of Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and – of course – Rembrandt van Rijn. Being Dutch, we feel a bit like Japanese, eating only Japanese in every country abroad.
tagged: NewYork consciousness BigSur spirituality Gangaji Esalen MartinParr DirtyDancing MET painters Advaita India God connectedness fear
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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I’m in New York. The city of Woody Allen. I turn on the TV in my hotel room and watch Zelig, a mockumentary, or fictional documentary.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it (you should), Allen plays the title character, Leonard Zelig, a man with the ability to transform his appearance so he blends in with the people around him. Put him with doctors and he becomes a doctor. Put him with overweight people and he starts piling on the pounds. Among Orthodox Jewish men, he sprouts a beard and his clothes transform into a black suit.
To those around him, Zelig is the "human chameleon". To doctors, he’s a puzzle: no one understands how he can be constantly someone else.
Enter Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), a psychiatrist, who establishes that the cause of Zelig’s condition is his overwhelming desire to ‘belong’. So overwhelming that it leads him to forget his own identity and assume that of the people around him. Zelig’s mind – his thoughts – determines his appearance, his physical form.
Dr. Fletcher sets out to help Zelig trust his own identity. Who he is. It works, but there are problems. When Fletcher’s boss makes a casual remark about the weather, for example, Zelig doesn’t just disagree with him, he beats him up. Zelig’s self-trust is now so strong that he can’t accept other people’s opinions any more.
It doesn’t take long before Zelig starts to feel the consequences: his whining, his insistence on being right, makes him unloved. No surprise then that his desire to be loved + more
tagged: Allen NewYork Zelig body patterns Nazis uniqueness wholeness connectedness
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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For a long time I worked as a strategic consultant for various corporations. This involved putting my ideas into models to meet the desire of both my clients and myself: making the world identifiable, making my strategic ideas understandable, and reassuring others and myself with a logical outcome: ‘If we do this, that will happen.’ During my conversations with clients it had was not uncommon that at some time during the conversation I would take out my pencil and my notebook and that I would draw a circle with some inner-circles, words written in those different circles, interconnecting the words with lines suggesting correlations.
Look: this is how reality works!
The idea of observing the world, and being able to measure it, has been a fundamental believe in Western civilization. Galileo and Newton are our grandfathers. And as their grandchild, I enjoyed making models - actually I still do. However, I have been noticing - after some time and after the willingness to check the status of my models in reality - that once such a model is created, most of the time reality does not unfold accordingly; instead it is behaviour trying to act accordingly.
The models do not placed others and myself in reality, we are placed outside of reality and into our own multi-mirrored worlds. It has been painful to see that the efforts of trying to make reality clear results in these self-created illusions. Once you want to put reality into a model, realty itself just seems to want to go another direction. In a sense reality is like water: once you think you can touch it, the water moves away from you, going in all sorts of unexpected directions.
tagged: concepts reality connectedness ever-unfolding strategy marketing
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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Due to increasing media and interactive media qualities it is easier to connect with others. Does this form of connecting lead automatically to more consciousness – are we becoming more aware of our connectedness with all that lives?
Are we becoming more conscious when we are outside using our mobiles to talk to someone, to connect to that other one, at the same time not being aware anymore of our physical surroundings? Are we becoming more conscious when we are connected with others in a multi-player game on the net, at the same time being addicted, not leaving our space behind the computer anymore, for days, weeks, or even months? Connecting media have the possibility to create more consciousness, but only if, in my view, our being with these media is coming from the space of consciousness. Else we will just create a society of mediocrity – our experience of life being depended of media.
Due to media we are becoming conscious of more phenomena, seeing more places, more cultures, more habits and more patterns - but are we seeing these phenomena in there own depths?
Consciousness for me resonates with spaciousness: consciousness being the space for all phenomena (without preference, without judgment) to arise in; and also, at the same time, consciousness as being the space for all phenomena to appear in into their own being.
tagged: flower spaciousness connectedness phenomena
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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I was invited by a friend to join the Tallberg Forum. This Forum is organized every year by the Tallberg Foundation, an international non-profit organization established in Sweden that aims to deepen and expand our knowledge and understanding of patters of change in the world. By creating a sphere for open conversations, the forum tries to bridge the gaps between the worlds of business, arts, philosophy, social activism and technology. This year’s theme: How on earth to live together? Many renowned speakers shared their visions; many participants were ready to contribute with their own ideas.
I was surprised to notice that almost all participants, including CEO’s from large international companies, departed from the awareness that we are not separated form others and the earth; almost all attendees were conscious of our all connectedness – our relation with each other and the earth.
Within this feeling of all connectedness, besides the awareness of each and every one of us being part of the whole, there is also something that you could call ‘our particular manifestation of the whole’: our individuality. Education, religion, culture, upbringing; they all create structures and patterns leading to a sense of I.
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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This Blog is focusing on the growing awareness that everything is connected and that we are all part of one whole consciousness. As part of life you are an expression of consciousness - you are a highly individual and therefore particular manifestation of Wholeness.
It takes no great vision to understand that the questions we are confronted with in our lives cannot be solved in isolation. We have no choice but to think and act together. Though the fact that we think and act in connection with others is only the beginning of our understanding of interconnectedness.
We are coming to understand our true nature as a coherent whole which is ever changing and unending. The growing insight that the perceived world of duality is embedded into a greater whole transcends our relationship for the good with others, the earth and ourselves.
This Blog has the intention to document the unfoldment of consciousness, which gives rise to natural, more enduring behaviour and new expressions of being. As the initiator of this blog I would like to share my thoughts, struggles, doubts, insights, confusions, ideas and understandings regarding consciousness. Not with the idea to oppress any truth or to cause any confusion, but with the intention to share. I would love to invite you to use this space for conscious sharing in order to co-create the emerging biography of the conscious society.
tagged: wholeness co-creation consciousness connectedness understanding
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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