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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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I haven’t seen him for quite some time, although our blood is the same and his hidden scars are no doubt to be found within me too. He drinks coffee; I drink tea, just a block away from where I live. He eats a chocolate cake, fast, as if he is afraid to really taste what he eats. Fastness, there has always been this fastness with him: no time to tune our hearts, ever. Now that he’s becoming older, fastness manifest itself as unease.
He has his black leather jacket on, zipped, ready to leave any minute, although another coffee is on its way. I watch his lips turning dark brown, and take a sip of my tea; salty-tasting water. He dyes his hair dark ever since a few of them turned grey, covering the aging that would actually suit him so well. Although I’m watching his lips, I suddenly see that he is dressed completely in black. I can barely remember him in colours. And with that vague memory, the past suddenly arrives as a hole between us, our conversation disappearing into its nothingness. No words left to say ‘after’. Our jaws are muddy, having difficulties digesting the past.
He is dying of something that he had hoped to live longer. My mind is full of anger, screaming ‘how could you ever’.
I turned what I loved into light again
And God wrote in the air about love first, death
His kitchen full of white
The sea so blue
Impossible to know where it all begins
He looks at me and talks through a mouth full of chocolate. And although his tongue speaks words that disappear before they reach my ears, I hear his voice reaching out to me, trying to tell me what my heart already knows: that he couldn’t have done it differently. His voice and my knowing, holds me fast.
When the world screams for peace, there can still be war
Between ‘then’ and now it is dark
And for it to become bright
The world that we hold between us, needs to leak
Its anger and tears
For years I have wanted to really meet him; confused by the idea that there was something in him still to be discovered, that somewhere deep in his heart there could be something more true than what I had encountered. But this is all what he is, and all what I am: this ‘thisness’, right now. The search for someone different made the hole bigger. And this thisness is much more than my ideas of him.
“When are you going to marry?” he asks me, chocolate still covering his lips. I am surprised. It is such a sweet question. “I would love to see you get married to her.” + more
tagged: father light circle consciousness God love wholeness life
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 Photo: André Platteel
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He says he has conquered thirteen thousand feathered animals. His words are like birds. I cannot really catch them.
“She is falling. Softly. She loves me. But something says she does not.”
I believe him; I believe that he has fought thirteen thousand feathered animals.
He’s not wearing any shoes. His big toe is thick and blue, as is his ankle. Little scratches here and there. His sweater and trousers are dirty. His face decorated with small scars, from fighting. And feathers in his hair. I envision thirteen thousand feathered animals in a battle with this bare-footed man.
“I had to escape you know; they were after me.”
He sees my questions building, but pretends not to. Salty air hangs in the street.
“If she really asks me to go, I will leave. And I will never come back begging for her love. But she does not tell me to leave. Instead she sends me fighting feathered animals. Look.”
His blond hair is reaching out to the sky. He conjures without hands; a high black hat is lifted from his head, a hat that was not there a second ago; a bird escapes. Not the white pigeon one would expect - just a bird; grey, small and with a funny beak. Not long ago I had dinner with this man. I know him for quite a while. This man is a professional in his discipline, and well respected too.
“When you don’t wear shoes everybody thinks you’re a homeless person. One guy gave me some money, but I have enough of that. I want nothing but her love. For the first time I feel ground.” He stamps his foot.
“Now I understand why God asked Moses to take off his shoes, since he was on Holy Ground. This is Holy Ground.” He stamps again. “And it has never been different.”
His voice becomes stronger.
People walking past are staring at us. Among them are people that I recognise and who I am sure also recognise him. I see them thinking: Has this man gone crazy?
“How many times have I been killed the last seventy-two hours in the chambers of love’s desire? How many times?” He raises his hands heroically. Every second I expect the scenery to collapse. And for the audience to applaud. But he’s not playing a role; I have never seen his eyes so deep and bright.
“I am not a crazy man.” He is clear, he reads minds. “I am hyper. Yes. So, I might look like a crazy man. But that is because all the craziness of the past decades has hit the surface of my system. What have I been doing? First working my butt off to gain more knowledge. But what have I learned? And what has work done for me but enable me to buy something I thought I needed. There was no time for love. There was time for girlfriends, and all that stuff - but no time for love.” + more
tagged: animals love consciousness movement blood doubt Shakespeare mountains
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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There were grass and trees on both sides of the railway, with stones between the railway and the greenery – a kind of a path but never meant to be used that way. I rode my bike twice alongside the tracks to go back and forth from my house to school. Both times during breaks. It was a dangerous route, but the shortest and the only possible means to be back in time for when school began again. One day someone came out of the bushes. He looked like a farmer. He had an axe in his hand and was shouting at me in a language I couldn’t understand. He came after me, axe in the air. I peddled as hard as I could but the stones stopped me getting my speed up. His shouting grew louder and I raised my left arm to the heavens in surrender. But when I looked over my shoulder, there was no one to be seen anymore. I still heard his voice, the language still feeling unfamiliar.
During the four years that I rode that route, I quite often heard bells ringing, announcing that a train would come along in just a few seconds. Somewhere, not far from me, barriers would come down to stop the traffic. I had to hide myself in the bushes, but I must have been visible to the train driver. A loud whistle blew me away. The draft caused by the speed of the train was so strong that I had to dig my feet into the mud.
Via this route it took me twenty minutes to get home and twenty minutes to get back to school and lock my bike just before the bell rang to summon the kids back to class. I really never became friends with the other kids, because I never had time to actually meet and play with them.
It didn’t matter if it rained, or snowed, I needed to go home during breaks for that one moment: when I knocked on the window of our house, I saw my mother looking surprised to see me (but I knew she was acting); we waved, she blew me a kiss, I laughed and felt light, and I rode back to school. When I got home from school for the day, we never talked about my short appearances in front of the window. And she never asked me not to come home during breaks; she knew those visits made going to school possible for me. I needed to see her as much as I could, as if every moment with her was precious.
"I always thought of myself as a gypsy boy. But since she was my mother, I could never be too far away from home."
“How much older was she than you are now,” he asks.
“Two years.”
tagged: body consciousness brightnes mother light home
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 Photo: André Platteel
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He was riding a tiger, snake in his right hand biting it every few moments to spur on the once wild animal. To remind him of his true nature: to run like a beast. If someone had seen him riding a tiger while holding a snake, no doubt they would have applauded him, cheered him. What man could tame the strength of a tiger? What man could hold a reptile whose body is so hard to grab?
He was heading for the world, not far from where he had made his home; heading for a cliff just over the hill. The gap between the place he lived and the world was no more than ten feet wide. It was the shortest route to the world, or at least he believed so, since he had not taken another route. It seemed possible there was another route, but that seemed less well defined, less convenient. Probably.
He had spent more than thirty years out in the world. But ever since he had seen the light and felt that all that is made of light is also made to disappear, he had lost interest. Why love something that is just a shallow projection of the divine? He had lived in isolation for years, away from the world. In a dark place. But safe. A place he ruled. And because he had learned to see light in everything, and gained the wisdom sages have spoken of for centuries, the darkness did not bother him. Over the years some cats, probably sick and tired of the world too, had visited him. Somehow found their way to his place. Only one cat seemed immune to the cans and stones he threw at them. Every time he shouted at it or tried to hit it, the cat leaned over, stretching its neck towards him, like some cats do when you stroke them.
The wind was mild, the night advanced, the darkness blue and the stars yellow. In his mind he started a conversation. He picked up his binoculars, a pen and a notebook, his eyes casting light onto the paper. He watched, and wrote what he saw in the margins. The images entered his mind, which was trained to reflect on them. Somehow, he hated himself for being here. Why did he long to watch, knowing that what he sees is worthless? His mind always had a good answer. He was here to remind himself that all that is made of light shines grey. His notes were almost mathematical. Sometimes, at the end of a visit, back home, he tried to combine everything he had written into a mathematical formula whose outcome was ridiculous, exactly the outcome he was seeking.
That night he saw a man in an office, a lit-up box in a tall skyscraper. The man was wearing a suit, sporting a tie. Nobody left to impress but himself. He saw a young couple making love in ridiculous poses that he tried to reproduce with geometrical forms. He saw an old man in front of a TV set, watching coloured forms that drugged him. He saw a woman, probably having trouble sleeping, water plants and flowers. He saw much more but felt nothing, his mind working overtime.
tagged: physiology thinking feeling consciousness
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 Photo: André Platteel
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“No, that’s nothing; no need to worry about that.” Five seconds and a fear that had stayed with me for years, vanishes. Just like that. I am already lifting myself out of the chair when he says: “You are trying to love this, aren’t you.” On ‘this’ he spreads his arms, and I think I see a twinkle in his eyes.
Now fear has left me, my system is more open to really looking at this doctor, this doctor with the practice deep in the woods. And he looks funny. Early fifties, grey hair, glasses, white coat, of course, jeans, sneakers – also white, with three white stripes, barely noticeable. Actually, he looks a bit like Dustin Hoffman.
“So, what I notice is that there is a certain resistance in your system, making it hard for you to be fully open to this moment. Is that right?” He is leaning backwards. He is enjoying this more than the investigation of some small bumbs on my head, a few seconds ago.
“Listen.” Bird sounds.
“Feel,” he says, striking his cheek and pointing his head in my direction, encouraging me to do the same. I feel a bit embarrassed.
“What is it that prevents you from being fully open to this moment? This is all we have. Now – this moment – isn’t it?” Without waiting for me to answer he grabs a paper and a pen and gives them to me.
“I will ask ‘it’, and also for you to come up with something that will support you in becoming fully available.” He puts his hands behind his head, letting it rest in them. “Please write down...”
His breathing becomes louder. He closes his eyes, opens his mouth, but nothing comes, not yet. A few seconds later: “Love and happiness are what the world will give to me...” He is breathing loudly through his nose and takes a little pause, “…I am part of all that is happening, every moment. What could please me more than to receive love in the deepest of my being. Everything is so easy, and the reason why is not important.” He stops. Opens his eyes and meets mine. I put down my pen. Unexpectedly, his mouth issues more words. “What a pleasure it will be to allow love to ground me, to form the basis of my being.”
He asks me to repeat what he has just said. I do. Quite fast, feeling a bit strange.
“Again please.” I do. Then: “Could you do it one more time, but take your time for the words to blossom in you.” In the slowness of repeating I feel the words finding their way into my body.
“I know this is quite unusual. You go to a doctor, and well...” He lifts his arms and opens his hands. “For thirty years I have been a doctor: what most doctors do does not help one bit to make you become more fully alive.” He gets out of his chair and walks a bit. His office is quite big. “Are you okay with this?”
I am. + more
tagged: body spaciousness consciousness knowing spirituality love
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 Photo: André Platteel
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I wake up in a mind that never sleeps. Colours. Forms. Me. It’s all still there; fresh but barely noticeable, even if you do your best to see the differences.
I make a cup of tea, enjoy the tree I can see through the windows, shower, dress and head to the bakery. Small streets with small shops. Not yet defeated by bigness. So quiet here, this morning. I look up and there she is, as always. She waves. I’ve never seen her up close, only there, up high.
The wind whips her grey hair into a late winter day. She’s wearing a nightie; a flowery pattern, I think. She throws something, it begins to snow and pigeons eat from the air. I wave back and duck: a reflex to avoid being hit by a bird blinded by hunger. She laughs, her right hand covering her mouth. From down here she looks like a lovely teenage girl. And I am sure she still is.
I buy some bread and choose another route back. It’s then I see that the neighbourhood bar has re-opened. Serious renovation work – nothing had been changed for four decades. I head in, order a freshly squeezed orange juice and pick up one of the newspapers they have. The bar feels even more authentic than before; not because it has changed a lot, but because the changes are barely noticeable. A big, long, wooden table. Five small tables down the right-hand side and, at the end, a wooden, oval one with a nice semi-circular wooden couch. Simple lamps. Posters announce festivals and plays. A long bar; metal and wood in one. It’s all still there. The owner is bald and warm and tired. Congratulations. Thanks. Orange juice.
A man at the other end of the long table is looking at me – has been for a while now. Tall man in a suit. Skinny. Braces. Not a businessman – suit’s too old, made at least thirty years ago, now unexpectedly back in fashion. He wears big glasses. Long, thin hair touches his shoulders at the back. I wait for the moment he’ll start to talk to me; meantime, my mind reads about everything and nothing.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I hope the age-old cliché isn’t a chat-up line. He releases some cigarette smoke and my lungs fill with his exhalation. Through his mouth, into his lungs, back out again. A part of him is inside me now. I don’t know if I like that. I look at him. Nothing comes to mind. “You helped me some time ago. The supermarket bag. I live next door, high up.” He tells me his name and apologizes. He has had many names, he says, and he changes them quite often. When we met, probably a half year ago, he must have been called Marc, he says. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but carrying a supermarket bag up 12 small, steep flights of stairs certainly does.
It’s coming back to me: “Can you help me?” he had asked. “My hip’s just been operated on.” A man with long, dark hair. Army boots. Metal noises. Big belly. Long coat that looked heavy, its pockets filled with something substantial. The coat stretched out like a yoga student. Cigarette between lips; bag in hand. Yellow fingers and big glasses.
I’d agreed to help. As we walked up, the air became dryer the higher we went, the smell more intense. He had opened the door. A cat jumped and I could barely hold the bag, barely regain my balance. He had turned on the light, revealing a carpet covered in torn-out magazine pages. Lots of text and some images. I counted three other cats in two seconds. Heard my feet on the paper.
tagged: sun evolution consciousness falling mind form spirit
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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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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Although he had stood in front of the mirror probably a million times over the past decades, he had never before seen the little boy inside his heart. It happened by coincidence: he was walking in a shopping street, passed a window and suddenly clearly saw something inside him. At first he thought it was his reflection and that of something else coming together in the window. But the moment he saw the image he also became conscious: he felt the boy inside his heart.
Although he felt the little boy, he didn’t feel he was discovering something he had known was there all his life, something that was suddenly and finally revealed to him. He didn’t know the little boy; had never seen him before. He was not shocked to see him inside him; it just felt as if his world had become utterly new, in less time than time can measure.
He knew it by his breath.
He thought of his breath as a fresh meadow in Spring, blossoming grass telling the animals it’s time to come home again.
It was as if his heart had opened and he himself had just walked in.
He knew how it felt when his heart opened slowly, like a flower. He had known love. But inside his heart now was not a lover but a little boy. And his heart was opening not because he wanted to give it to a lover: there was someone in his heart already.
He moved closer to the window and saw how the little boy had found a small but perfect space inside his heart. The little boy was part of its flesh and blood. It felt so completely strange and so natural. He knew things were about to change for him. Everything always changes, so why not his heart, why not his breath?
He had walked away from the window; people had passed him, one of them almost bumping into him, he had closed his jacket; he had crossed his arms high, protecting the area around his heart. He didn’t want anybody else to see the little boy he, himself, had only just discovered. What he had found was too precious to show to anyone else at this stage.
When he arrived home he undressed and walked to the mirror. He stared at himself, met his naked reflection and saw two people. He had never before experienced his nakedness from within.
tagged: otherness image consciousness fear Spring flower blood change gravity darkness brightness heart knowing earth irony experience
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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It was the 12th of October. A Friday. And the sky had already turned gloomy. For the last four days he had had recurring dreams of a woman he had never met, whom he had fallen in love with ever since. Although she may just have been a product of his mind.
He went for a walk in the woods near his house, and dreamed of her while he was awake. He forgot time and lost track – in a place he had known since he was a young boy. When he was a child he had tried to get lost but somehow never succeeded.
I almost lost track of him that night. It had grown darker and his body was no more than a vague form between tall, dark trees. Only when my eyes adjusted to the darkness could I make him out again.
He was a philosophical person, interested in life, but a philosopher only from a scientific point of view. He once told me there is nothing but language – through language we form life.
Out in the woods he ran into someone. A woman, the one he had met in his dreams. At first he couldn’t speak, then tried to make conversation. She spoke in a strange language, one that shared nothing with any language he knew, or I knew.
The sky turned a bit lighter – some clouds had moved on – leaving just one that was still dividing the moon in half. I could get a better picture of them now.
She didn’t use her hands to make herself more understandable. It was as if she had no idea that he couldn’t understand her. He listened carefully. Logically, there was no way he could form even an idea of what she was saying. For me she spoke in sounds, carefully, silently, like a Satie composition.
Why, I wondered, did I had to compare her speaking to something else.
They hadn’t broken their stride when they met, which is what most people do when they encounter each other for the first time. She just joined him in his walk and they had kept on walking ever since, as if their encounter was pre-arranged, bound to happen. He spoke too, sometimes. No longer in a language I could understand. Not in the language he spoke before he met her. Not even in a language similar to hers.
The light faded again. I saw darkness and movement in darkness. Their voices had become softer, as if the darkness absorbed the higher tones of their voices. But it could also be that they no longer needed to speak so loudly to communicate with each other. The words they spoke became less. Not like a conversation coming to an end – as if intensity now needed fewer words.
tagged: consciousness wholeness language darkness God Babel philosophy
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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I have to change planes in Budapest, Hungary. I have a cup of coffee in the only bar outside passport control. It is busy and almost everyone is smoking. I join some people sitting at a table not too far from the entrance; my idea is to try to breathe some clean air.
The man next to me is wearing a beautiful, dark blue woollen suit with grey stripes, a hat and dark, shiny leather shoes. He is not old – my age – though he reminds me of my grandfather. He too always dressed up and polished his shoes almost every day. And he wore amazing hats. You had to look carefully to see the differences between the hats he wore; they were all the same colour and shape. They were different, though, I could see. As a kid I loved putting them on and trying to be my grandfather, sitting in a chair pretending I was drinking gin, like he did.
The man starts to talk to me. I tell him I don’t speak Hungarian. He switches to English and tells me that he too is not from Hungary; he tells me that every time he came to this country he got such a warm welcome that he started to learn the language: “To understand their loveliness to me.”
Somehow I have always felt attracted to the central and south-eastern European states.
Although my father knows little about his family, leaving me with blanks about my roots, he does think his grandpa and ancestors were Gypsies. His father told him stories about travelling uncles and brothers selling stuff out of their cars in Romania and Hungary. I could be the son of Gypsies. My father’s skin is Gypsy-coloured, neither white nor black but somewhere in between. And my father too was a travelling salesman.
Actually, I doubt I have Gypsy roots. My father hates music and he hates dancing. And I always felt an affinity for black people. Just recently, someone told me he had met a Nigerian man with the same last name I have. The man told him that it was quite common in Nigeria.
As a child I was always amazed by the stuff my father was about to sell. Nearly every week our house morphed into a kind of wholesale market, full of stuff my father had bought from people who had gone out of business. One week my father bought and had to sell thousands of sausages; another week he bought and had to sell jeans that were decades out of style. But somehow he always succeeded. And on the rare occasion that he didn’t, he went to a bar where other salesman gathered, playing cards and betting their unsold goods in the hope of losing them and winning something more valuable instead.
tagged: consciousness Hungary Romania stars moon uniqueness love family Gypsy
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 Photo: uncle of my father, a travelling salesman.
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I have to wait for transport. Around here, waiting for transport can take hours. So I try to get rid of the feeling of ‘waiting.’
At a certain point I need to go to the toilet. I find it behind a small square building with no doors. Instead of a water tank, the toilet has a straight pipe that goes into a beautiful river that I can see through the broken wooden floor.
Walking back I come a cross a strange object: an installation made out of various materials that were probably found by the road or in one of the dumps that are on almost every corner, including next to the most beautiful Roman, Greek and Ottoman remains. The installation has been created from various objects made from metal, wood, wire and stone. I have no idea what the purpose of this installation is. In a museum it could easily be the creation of a Dadaist, but here I doubt that it has been made from an artistic perspective. Although the object has many pieces that seem to have been picked at random, the object feels coherent, which makes it feel like one piece: as if the combined materials have begun a second, new life.
It must be about ten years ago that I was invited to give a presentation at the Arthur Andersen training centre near Chicago. When I arrived it was obvious that I didn’t conform to the Arthur Andersen dress code – and my haircut was way out of line. Every man there wore a dark blue suit, a dark tie and black shoes. I wasn’t. Every man wore his hair short; mine was quite long.
Because of this, the conference organizer advised me to stop by a tailor and get a haircut. Easy: both shops were part of the Arthur Andersen compound. At the barbershop, the barber didn’t ask what I wanted, so I asked him how he would cut my hair. He smiled, walked back to a desk, opened a drawer and took out a sketch of a man who looked just like the many men I had already encountered at the centre.
In the middle of my house there’s a big table, about four metres long. It has many chairs around it, which I have collected over the years. Most of the chairs don’t match. But you can sit on all of them. And all the chairs are recognizably chairs because in some way they reflect the concept we have created of what a chair is all about.
tagged: understanding consciousness oneness life spiritual business community
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 Photo: André Platteel
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As I sit in the back of the four-wheel drive and look down through the window, everything looks upside down. Things I usually look up to see are now far below me: houses and mountain roads are all down there. The only other time I have been this high is in a plane.
The boat that was to bring us back didn’t go. Why is not clear and, at this moment, almost on top of a 1600-meter-high mountain, no longer relevant. We have decided to take the mountain road instead, a seven-hour trip through an astonishing, empty landscape. Our driver has never driven this road before. This road is the reason people use the boat. It’s a road that isn’t really a road, more a surface of dirt and mud barely wide enough for a car.
It’s raining outside. We drive slowly, slipping and sliding. The driver tries to reassure us, telling us he’s concentrating to the full – he wants to see his wife and children again. But somehow his words do not reassure me.
How close do you have to get the edge of the cliff before you decide to jump and test the powers of gravity?
The road’s height and narrowness play an interesting game with my mind. The road is just wide enough to hold the car, but for some reason I begin to doubt the solidity of the mountain itself – will the mud and stones hold us? And although I am sitting on a solid seat, I also begin to doubt the solidity of the car: what if it suddenly decides to grow?
Then another question starts to bug me: Why do mountain roads always go so high? One of the reasons becomes visible after we make a sharp turn: the rain has moved on from this side of the mountain and the view is unbelievable: I see a huge lake with five rivers entering and leaving. Various dams form ‘compartments’ that control the flow of water. The rivers come down the mountain into the lake then leave it again to continue their journey, to discover the land.
The image resonates with my picture of the human heart: blood from different veins and information from different cells flowing into the heart, welcomed within the different chambers of the heart. Blood and information brought together, momentarily becoming one then immediately leaving as separate flows once again. The heart – the organ that welcomes differences – both brings together essence and accepts that this essence will leave again via different, separate routes.
tagged: heart flow fear wholeness oneness consciousness body river unity
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 Photo: André Platteel
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First we drove for four hours - away from the coast heading north. Then we took a three-hour boat ride through narrow waters between high mountains. And after another three hours driving north we arrived in a forgotten valley close to the border of Kosovo.
It’s cold and dry. It starts to get dark: it is three o’clock in the afternoon. I grab another sweater from the small bag I’ve been carrying around for weeks now, and pull it over the other two I already have on. I can’t close my coat anymore. The three sweaters won’t compress enough to allow it. I’m wondering what would keep me warmer; two sweaters, coat closed, or three sweaters, coat open? The idea of again having to struggle out of my coat and take off a sweater decides it.
Our plan is to spend the night in a house owned by a mother and her daughter, who will cook for us. The house is unusual in this land of only trees and mountains. It is small and coloured brown and yellow. Just like the leaves that have fallen to the ground and now form a crispy carpet under my feet. The moment I go to enter the house, the door opens and a strange animal welcomes us. At first it frightens me: it looks like a dog with big brown eyes, but it also has huge wings, so it cannot be a dog. Then an old lady, the mother no doubt, walks towards us, talking to me in a strange language. She is old - I can see it in the way she walks - but her face is still young. She has skin as bright as snow. My guide tells me to take off my shoes and go in, and to be careful with the bird since it cannot see or hear. I am surprised: despite the size of its wings the bird cannot fly; despite the largeness of its eyes it cannot see.
How come the bird cannot use its natural capabilities?
Mother and daughter spend almost the whole afternoon preparing dinner: washing vegetables, carefully cutting vegetables, cooking and grilling. The result is delicious – the love put into the preparation adds to the taste. I am being fed wonderfully. After dinner, there doesn’t seem to be anything on offer except darkness. There isn’t any electricity; the little light there is comes from candles, which is too little to read by, should you want to. There is no television, no radio and no urge to talk. It doesn’t quite feel comfortable to me: did these people choose to live here? Why? What is the meaning of their life?
I go up to my room before most kids’ bed time, the strange bird following behind me. I close my door as quickly as possible to stop it from entering my room. To the blind, this mustn’t feel impolite, I think to myself.
I try to fall asleep. But trying is more than good enough to fall asleep.
tagged: consciousness life feeding natural vitality
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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In one of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, a group of people is asked to make a map of a city. It must be as detailed as possible, charting every street and river. Every time the mapmakers present their work they are sent back with the request to make the map even more detailed. Eventually, the mapmakers end up in the nearby desert, where they have enough room to produce a map that is an exact copy of the city. Then, when the men have nearly finished the map, a storm whips in and destroys it. Only a few pieces of the map are ever found.
The experience of being conscious, being connected, is often referred to as the experience of ultimate love. Everything is love I have often heard. Everything is love I have often said myself (to myself). Consciousness as the source of all life can only be good, bad is nothing more than confusion.
What is love?
Not so long ago I was in Big Sur, California, a beautiful era of rough nature between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was surrounded by thousands of trees, many of them many hundreds of years old, thousands even, and by many plants and animals I had never seen before, neither in reality nor in books. To me, it felt like true perfection: the beautiful colours, the bio-diversity and the astonishing vibration of energy. Hiking for hours caressed my system. Life was streaming through my veins. I felt connected. Being here felt like heaven. Harmonious. Right here one could experience that consciousness is simply love.
Looking closer, however, I could see a battle: trees fighting to be the tallest around so they receive more light (and so take light away from the others trees); plants twisted around trees, initially protecting, later suffocating them; animals hunting and playing a deadly game at every moment.
There was a war going on! Where did love and goodness go in this God-like nature? Are these trees, plants and animals confused? Or is the sensation of perfection that we often encounter in exquisite nature, and which we often tend to call love, actually based on a misconception? Are we confused in what we call love?
We tend to see love as something that feels good, something that touches us. To be more specific: as something that pleases us. But is that all that love is? Going by what I have seen around me and in what I have experienced, love can also say no. Love can also hurt. Love can suffocate. Love can damage. Love can even destroy and kill. Love can be anything. Just like life – and just like consciousness, being all.
But we do not refer to all when using love; we refer to only that what pleases what we have called 'I'. + more
tagged: love consciousness wholeness spirituality Borges desert experience
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 Photo: André Platteel
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It’s cold outside; at least that’s what I read on the monitor.
Degrees man can never take. Inside, it feels like a microwave. I haven’t had much sleep. Sleep will not happen high up here, I know. I am too busy fighting. It does not feel natural to be above the clouds. I just read in a scientific journal that high above we are exposed to certain radiation from the sun that the earth normally protects us from. But the journal also says that these results are ‘most likely’.
She talks about her brother, about how he loves watching moving things: windmills, records, wheels of bicycles or cars, flushing water. I just met her, an hour before we took off. She is a radiant girl. We will spend the next two weeks in each other’s company. She graduated from art school and wants to be a documentary director.
“What kind of documentaries?”
She loves to film people with passion.
“What is that, passion?”
Passion is an unstoppable force doing a certain thing, reaching a certain goal, she says. She tells me she sees life in people with passion, not in the object of passion but in passion itself.
I try to think of my own passion. What makes me alive? Already, and for a long time, I seem to have lost a certain passion that belongs to the laws of physics. What to create? Is it necessary to create? Why should I create? I think of the things I used to be passionate about. Actually, most of them turned out to be a form of resistance to things I did not want to experience. I loved collecting books. Now I can see that I needed other stories in order to escape my own.
“Does passion makes us alive? Or is passion the ultimate escape from life?” She answers sweet and clear; talks about people who use passion to create and protect a certain truth for themselves. She knows someone who was passionate about bodybuilding. The guy turned out to be afraid for his body, afraid of losing his physique, hence body-building like a madman, including using dope to construct, to de-construct. “But,” she adds, “if passion is an act of giving, one comes alive.”
“I know someone who gives a lot,” I reply, “but always with the idea of receiving. He never stops giving, and his friends and loved ones can never give back what he needs in return. With his giving he takes away the space for others to react and be the way they want to be. His giving is a form of control over everyone around him. Even the things he gives that are normally ‘labelled’ love are intended to control.”
tagged: passion life consciousness resistance
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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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What happens if fear comes to you while you are in your most comfortable place? What happens if fear, instead of coming from something outside of you, ‘out there’, comes with no warning from inside you?
We seem to live in a culture of fear. The media landscape surrounds us with pictures that feel anything but relaxed. It isn’t only the fear of terrorism that makes us feel unsafe, there’s the fear of global warming, which makes us fear for the future, or the fear of other religions invading our bubble-like Western society, with its hard-fought-for values.
Brands that promise a better world are also trading on fear: we are not beautiful enough; we are not friendly enough; we are not clever enough; we don’t have enough friends; we are not safe; we are not adventurous enough; we don’t smell good enough – unless of course we buy the brand that will enable us to enter a world in which all our shortcomings are compensated for – and more.
Marketing not only uses fear, it creates fear as a means of seduction – not accepting us for who we are, and so in fact continually insulting us. My view is that fears are ‘created illusions’ that look convincing, put there to make us consume – a product, an ideology, an event, a whatever that promises to make the fear go away. Since most of these fears-slash-illusions arrive from ‘outside’, we can see them coming – sooner and sooner, actually, because the system of manipulation-through-fear leaves tracks that we increasingly recognise.
But what if the fear is not coming from outside, but from somewhere more unexpected, a place that we inhabit ourselves: our body-mind system? Lately, I have met many people who are being terrorised by fears from within. The fear of losing: oneself, others or the world. I have met people who no longer want to travel, who do not want to go out anymore; who do not want to fall in love anymore; I have met people who have stopped watching the news, watching CSI, watching Six Feet Under. The presence of fear is probably nothing new, something that’s existed throughout the ages, but it is new to me. Not only do I sometimes encounter strong fear; I have never met so many people who start talking about their fears openly. It seems too difficult to reason those fears away as mere illusions.
What is fear I ask myself (often to figure out my own fears)? For me, David Lynch is a director who plays around with fear quite cleverly: you never know what to expect, what will come next. His characters don’t follow a logical psychological pattern: a guy who seems to be the nicest uncle can suddenly become extremely violent – because of nothing, out of nothing; a cowboy who seems to be a red-neck killer turns out to be an intellectual and an interesting debater – something that doesn’t, however, make him less fearful.
tagged: fear consciousness merketing brands Lynch TV-series seduction body spaciousness
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 Photo: André Platteel
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I’m sitting outside Olive, a great bagel-cum- coffee shop in the heart of SoHo. It’s early and most of the shops are still closed. Some street artists are unpacking paintings and drawings for sale. Trucks are unloading stuff. Morning is awakening, although the sun is still hidden behind typical New York buildings: huge warehouses with beautiful exterior stairway constructions. Dozens of people are passing me by and a child-like surprise hits me at noticing how different all of their faces are and how, at the same time, none of these faces seem to be so unknown that they shock me. It is as if I already know these people I’ve never met.
Some of the people pass me in a hurry; some of them give the impression of still being asleep; others are vibrant and have intense discussions through small microphones hanging around their necks. All these people are going somewhere; all of them have their unique destinations; all of them are ‘on the move’.
I wonder: What is it that drives us? What do we long for? What is it we search for in a world that seems to be violent, restless and insecure? I long for peace of mind; I would like to be wholehearted with the people I’m with and about the things I do; I would like to enjoy every minute of the life that I live. I haven’t met many people who don’t want to enjoy their lives, so I imagine that what we long for is to live a life of joy.
Joy can be found in many things. I have found joy in lovers, books, clothing, eating, holidays, places, friends, and probably many other things that do not come to mind right now. All of those things have, at certain moments, satisfied me. Which is more than the Rolling Stones got. But this kind of satisfaction doesn’t seem to satisfy me to the degree it used to. Satisfaction has a short lifecycle and continually demands something else to be satisfied with, or about. Satisfaction and consumption go hand in hand: we look for joy in something outside of ourselves. But after a while we begin to understand that enduring joy can never be found in something other than in ourselves.
This understanding, which more and more of us are feeling these days (and which is in all of us), stimulates an inward journey: self- inquiry kicks in and the question comes up: ‘What truly matters to me.’
tagged: NewYork SoHo Olive matter consciousness spirituality consuming knowing
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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I’m wandering around somewhere north of New York’s Little Italy district, where the streets have names like Mott and Baxter. I suddenly stop in front of a shop. Something must have grabbed my attention – in a split second and before I am conscious of what it is.
The window in front of me plays a wonderful game with my imagination. I see a table, made from wood and beautifully done. But that’s not what has stopped me in my tracks. There’s a vase of flowers on the table and somehow the image of the vase with flowers looks like a paper cut-out by a photographer I recently bought a picture from. Looking closer, however, I see that there is actually nothing on the table. The table is bare, and the vase with flowers combination is a reflection from the flower shop opposite. As I turn around I see an exact copy of the vase with flowers, calling for attention. The flowers themselves are very colourful, but I prefer its reflection, for now. The reflected image makes the colours look more withdrawn and seems to bring forth the shape of the flowers more accurately.
Is my mind tired of being coloured?
I walk to the other side of the street and indulge myself in the flowers’ colours. The red and orange of certain flowers is intense. Looking longer, more closely and giving the colours the chance to grow in my mind, I suddenly see something other than the colour in the colours. The red, for example, is no longer just a certain shade of red; the red has a ‘floweriness’ to it as well: the flower adds something to the red and makes it unique to that flower. The red also communicates the velvety feeling that is part of the flower. I can see little spots bearing a slightly different shade of red and which give the flower its particular character. And at the centre of the flower, the red turns to black, giving it a specific shape. So although the reflection across the street actually communicated the outer form of the flower more accurately than the coloured version, the colours bring out the 'inner' part of the flower far better.
tagged: WoodyAllen consciousness KarlBlossfeldt Ursus NewYork flower red mind Nolita imagination
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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I see advertisements on the roofs of New York’s cabs for Heroes, an award winning NBC show now entering its second season. I’ve never seen it, so a few hours later I decide to watch some episodes from the DVD box set I have just bought.
The show is about regular people from all around the world discovering that they have special abilities. Not knowing where their powers came from, each deals with life’s changing events.
One of the heroes is Hiro Nakamura, a 24-year-old Japanese geek who can bend time and space, giving him the ability to both freeze time and teleport through it. One day he teleports to New York and discovers a comic describing his life, including his life yet to be lived. The comic is the creation of another hero (Isaac Mendez) who can draw the future. In the comic, Hiro Nakamura reads that he will move to New York – and of the horrific events that are in the making. Hiro wants to contact the comic’s writer and use his powers to stop the horrors on the page from actually taking place.
In his latest film, Ober (Waiter), Dutch director and actor Alex van Warmerdam plays a waiter who, when he is bullied by his clients, protests to ‘his writer’ about his life. He asks ‘his writer’ to re-write him – including a new girlfriend, new neighbours and nicer clients. The writer of course complains: he’s the writer and his characters have only one choice, which is to live out his ideas.
tagged: Waiter StrangerthanFiction consciousness power authetic totality Hero NewYork AlexvanWarmerdam MarcForster
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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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It’s foggy outside and I have a flashback to one of Antonioni’s films – Identificazione di una donna – in which a couple decide to break up. Stuck in fog, she gets out of the car and disappears. He tries to go after her, shouts her name, but the fog is so thick that he not only loses sight of her, but of his car as well. He’s lost. As always, Antonioni illustrates beautifully the mental state of his characters by showing their surroundings.
There is no breaking up where I am right now, besides the waves. The weather is not only murky, it is rough, too. But even waves, no matter how high they are, return to the sea.
It took me two hours to get from Shelter Island to here. Montauk is at the absolute end of the island of Long Island, and the landscape is totally different from every other part of it too. Greener and less organized. And the waves make this place a secret surfer’s paradise.
A friend of mine had advised me to turn left just before the lighthouse. I drive into a green area with no cars and no people. I park my car and get out. The fog not only takes away the visibility, it also absorbs the sound. Through a thick whiteness, I see a gigantic radar system on a white house.
I walk further, through the forest, and the fog starts to become less intense. I hear a dog barking, but see no dog. Through trees I see three concrete walls with black letters: ‘No entering. Closed to public.’ I can’t see how you could enter, even if you wanted to. In front of me houses appear and as I come closer, a whole street becomes visible. Green and yellow houses, a church, even, and something that looks like a village hall. Here too, there are no people, and there is no sound, besides the barking of the dog, which has become louder. The barking doesn’t seem to come from the streets – it sounds like it is coming from under the ground.
The houses look like they are made from wood, like the houses in those typical US fishing villages. Up closer I see that the houses are actually made of concrete and that the wood structure is actually paint. There is no way to enter these houses: the doors are concrete, too. And so are the windows. And as with the three concrete walls, earlier, here too I am warned not to enter. The warning works on me like a puzzle: how can I enter these concrete fake houses?
Out of nowhere a dog runs up to me, barking as if I am his biggest enemy. A man shouts something at the dog. I can’t hear what he says as I’m too busy wondering what to do to stop the dog from attacking me.
tagged: consciousness Antonioni NewYork Montauk time mind God
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 Photo: André Platteel
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I’m en-route to Shelter Island, the most southerly part of Long Island. From Brooklyn, I take the Utopian Highway, all the way down to what New Yorkers describe as ‘heaven’.
A few months earlier I was invited by the Eindhoven Design Academy to lecture on and discuss Utopia. Also invited was Isaac Shapiro, a South African teacher in non-duality, a man who has taught me many things that truly matter to me.
Thomas More coined the term Utopia in 1516, in his novel of the same name. In it, he refers to an exotic, non-existent island of perfection. This was in the time that new worlds were being discovered – South and North America, for example, with their new and exotic cultures – giving Europeans hope of a better world after the darkness of the Middle Ages.
Before More introduced the term Utopia, a better world was thought of as being something we could only reach after we die: the Christian promise of Heaven. Since More, many utopian worlds have been described, appearing in novels, theories, paintings, films and the dreams of many – each utopia describing a slightly different version of how the perfect world would look.
What does Utopia mean?
Utopia is often seen as a place where there is no drama, no war, no pain, no racism, no sexism; a place with respect for all that is living, where everyone has equal chances and where everyone is treated with care and love.
In short: a place of true perfection.
tagged: utopia NewYork Shapiro mind McLuhan film media marketing consciousness
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He fights for her to get better again. She has embraced her death and she becomes, as she describes it, ‘more full’ – every breath bringing her closer to the end.
As a scientist, he doesn’t accept her death; he doesn’t accept death in general, describing it as a sickness that must be defeated. She drinks from the fountain of eternal life, knowing from what she experiences in her state-called-sickness that death must be no more than a transition to a different form – a different form of life. After discussing mind (in his film Pi) and body (in Requiem for a Dream), director Darren Aronofsky has chosen spirit as the theme of his latest film, Fountain; spirit: the endless source of life that cannot end in death.
I am having dinner with friends in Manhattan. Earlier, an Amsterdam friend who was born and raised in New York and happens to be visiting at the same time I am, takes me to a fashion show for the company he works for. About twenty models, all young and beautiful, show the latest designs of a global fashion brand. The public is young and beautiful too.
Afterwards, during dinner, we are joined by his two brothers and friends (still living in NYC). One brother is about to get married. His girlfriend describes how she envisages her wedding day and who they have invited. He tells about the day they met. They were at the Jukebox, dressed as superheroes. She wore a Catwoman suit with leather gloves – her fingers sticking out. He was dressed up as the Green Hornet. His eyes sparkle and illustrate how blessed he feels to have met this super woman.
Someone asks if they met on Halloween. “No. When I go out I always dress up as a superhero,” he confesses without shame. “I love superheroes. As a child I loved to go to school in different superhero outfits. And at St Marks, there are plenty of places where you don’t look silly going out dressed up, even in the middle of summer if you want to.” His brother makes a cynical remark, something along the lines of “You’re too old to be a superhero now.” But superhero brother doesn’t understand this at all: “Superheroes don’t age,” he states.
Everybody laughs but he – he knows.
tagged: hero Manhattan death consciousness Aronofsky Coppola body NewYork
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 Photo: André Platteel
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The other day, I decided to visit the New York Museum of Modern Art, MoMa, which has been holding a major exhibition by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.
Born in San Francisco, California, in 1939, Serra is known for his enormous metal sculptures. He treats lumps of metal like sheets of paper: his gracious steel-plate forms, often measuring several meters thick and several meters tall, are made at one of the few remaining shipyards with the equipment to shape steel plates as if performing an exercise in origami.
But before I head for the two floors containing Serra’s work, I grab a look at the MoMa’s permanent collection. In short order, I find myself standing mesmerized in front of one of Jackson Pollock’s works, a huge piece that takes up an entire wall on the top floor of the museum. I know his paintings from books, but now I understand why the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, in a now classic essay, emphasizes the importance of seeing the original work rather than a reproduction. The clots of paint and hurriedly applied stripes go every which way: this is a work with no beginning, no specific direction, and no end.
I back up till I’m a considerable distance from the picture, the way you do with a Monet (which reminds me of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless when she describes a hunk of a guy as “such a Monet,” because “He looks very good from a distance, but up close it is such a mess”). I’m now so far away that people keep walking between me and the canvas. But + more
tagged: NewYork Moma Serra Pollock Benjamin painting art Clueless disorientation Monet mind consciousness
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I’m drinking a cup of tea in a bar in MacDougal Street in the heart of the Village, New York. I’m sitting at an outside table, it’s late and it’s still warm.
The bar doesn’t have opening hours, as it points out at the top of the menu: Always Open. At the table next to me are four men. In an obviously English accent, they order an expensive wine – but want to try it first. The wine isn’t served by the glass, which means opening a bottle. Yes, you guessed it, after trying it they conclude that it isn’t up to the mark, and send it back. I wonder to myself if they really tasted it.
The waiters and waitresses have beautifully cut blue overalls. And on the street you see all kinds of people. Like the man in yellow shirt and shorts who stops and asks me if I could ask the waitress for some cream when she reappears, so he can put it in the coffee he just bought a bit further up the street.
After adding the cream, he hangs around. A number of passersby greet him – I assume he’s known around here. He asks if can smell the smell. I don’t know what the smell is. He points towards a woman dressed in black. “She has magic powers,” he explains, “and she doesn’t like me. She’s already tried to curse me a couple of times by trying to confuse me by releasing a disgusting smell. But I’ve beaten her,” he says, without any note of triumph in his voice. + more
tagged: NewYork magic knowing curse evil consciousness
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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Is it matter that moves us or are the things that move us the cause of matter? For instance, not long ago it hit me that a piece of music that annoyed me had truly moved me when I heard it for the first time, and many times after. Looking back, the reason for my irritation was that I was on the telephone and the sound of the music made it almost impossible for me to hear the person at the other end of the line.
Thinking this through, it seems to me that, generally, the meaning we give to the things that surround us dependents on the way we relate to them. Our comportment towards things determines what they mean to us.
I read somewhere that Shakespeare once wrote: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Somehow, I feel this quote captures my music experience. Shakespeare, however, does not use the word ‘relating’, but ‘thinking’.
How we can describe ‘thinking’? If thinking is what makes something good or bad, as Shakespeare wants us to believe, then thinking can be seen as creation. Good or bad does not exist in matter, in other people or outside ourselves, but should be considered a purely mental activity. This would mean that everything that is created is the effect of thinking.
This belief, that we can call objectivity, has long nurtured the Western idea of consciousness. The Cartesian ‘I think therefore I am’ believes that mind and thinking are inherently different and of a higher order than matter. This perspective has led to a world-view that is mechanical and fragmented – the opposite of consciousness as being Whole.
tagged: consciousness Bohm Shakespeare BigMind SmallMind Merleau-Ponty Cartesian thinking Zen repetition
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Are we becoming conscious of more or are we becoming more conscious?
Have we gained more consciousness now we have freed ourselves from the belief structures, which were once the fundaments of our modern society? Or has the lost of power structures weakened our late modern society - have we as an industrialized and wealthy society lost our heart? If so, knowing that it is impossible to live without a heart, is it imaginable that another heart has invaded our society without us knowing who's heart it is?
I saw a beautiful film with many story lines not long ago. One of the stories tells about a young man with a weak heart who gets a 'new' heart implanted. Once out of the hospital the man is restless, his new heart feels strange to him, something unknown has invaded his life. He wants to know who's heart he is carrying and invades the life of the woman who was once the wife of the man who gave him back his life. From the moment he meets her it becomes impossible for him to live without her. He falls in love with her. This does not prevent his body from rejecting: his heart stays unknown.
tagged: totalitarian disorientation consuming heart fragment consciousness
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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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