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Mother of all memories by Andre Platteel , June 1st

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. + more 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. One night, a night when sleep would not come, he went downstairs, switched on the light of a room that was once his office space but which now provided space for the model that had outgrown the size of his brain by at least twenty times. He saw how the light brought life to the fragments and realized, out of nowhere, that all the different pieces could never unravel the memory he was so obsessed with. All these fragments could never add up to what he was seeking. How could he have thought that he would discover the totality of ‘it’ by isolating fragments, by analysing memories? Not a single piece of what he had gathered said anything about what was so important to him. Every connection he had tried to make, every effort to connect two or more fragments together, had created only the idea of something that was about to become whole. He had been tracing something that could never be revealed by assembling fragments to serve as a manual. And yet it did. He was about to leave the room when, for no particular reason, he turned back with an almost unnatural faithfulness. He flicked the light on again and saw how his model of many fragments had come alive. It could have been something about the artificial light, or the sleep that was about to knock him out, but he saw how the fragments not only told their own story, he saw ‘it’ in every fragment. ‘It’ was not a particular memory; ‘it’ was omnipresent. He saw how his model became a hologram, 'it' being present in all the different parts of his model. And fragments he had not connected became connected by ‘it’. He turned off the light again, went to sleep and dreamed about what he had seen. He knew that what he had seen was something that can never been seen by the eye, and yet is present in everything we see. He slept well that night, heard the sound of light, and felt how the memory that is embedded in everything made all memories come home. - less tagged:   light   spaciousness   connectedness   life   Body   mind   memory    permalink  read: 7073  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

God’s Gods by Andre Platteel , October 21st

He came in from the cold, his skin as thin as paper, his head covered with angel hair, arms and legs carried by the wind. It was around five in the afternoon, exactly five weeks previously, on the fifth day of a cold month. The weak, low-hanging sun had spotted him first, following him all the way to the seat he took at a long oval table, not far from where I was warming my hands around a mug of hot chocolate, my fingers sticky from the cream. Seeing his face turned the chocolate cold. Frozen hands. You could see his veins, his muscles, his bones, his tissue, his structure; you could see what was inside him. I stared into a face I knew so well that was simultaneously completely and utterly unknown to me. A face like my own. He put the bag of colours he was carrying on the table. He stretched out a hand to me. It was weak and warm. Ants. I could feel his blood streaming. “How do you do?” A glass shattered into a thousand pieces. I could not let go of his hand; the ants building a bridge between his and mine. “Listen,” he said, the sound of a fallen glass hanging in the air behind us, still tangible. The moment the sound was gone, he asked: “Where did that sound go to?” I started warming my hands again: sip of chocolate; cream in a two-day beard. I read some headlines that didn’t make sense, trying to regain my own space. His eyes were inside me, watching me from a position I could not occupy. I surrendered to his eyes. He told me his life story, his words pale and crispy, coming without a hitch. His story was too long to fit one life; his experiences too diverse to fit one man; his adventures too grandiose to fit one time. Centuries passed like the watery reflection of a lantern in a black canal. The moment he finished his story, he turned into a child and showed me the colours in his bag. There was no room in his excitement to ask questions. Dozens of leaves were spread out on the long, stained, wooden café table, forming a Matisse pattern. He giggled. His blood turned a deeper red. “They have all fallen, fallen softly to the ground.” He clustered the colours; red, orange and yellow dominated. He spoke to me through the colours of the leaves, telling me that he had had to return from the world the sound of the falling glass had gone to, and that his return had to do with solving one question. The colours were clear about that: paper man was a man with a quest. + more He came in from the cold, his skin as thin as paper, his head covered with angel hair, arms and legs carried by the wind. It was around five in the afternoon, exactly five weeks previously, on the fifth day of a cold month. The weak, low-hanging sun had spotted him first, following him all the way to the seat he took at a long oval table, not far from where I was warming my hands around a mug of hot chocolate, my fingers sticky from the cream. Seeing his face turned the chocolate cold. Frozen hands. You could see his veins, his muscles, his bones, his tissue, his structure; you could see what was inside him. I stared into a face I knew so well that was simultaneously completely and utterly unknown to me. A face like my own. He put the bag of colours he was carrying on the table. He stretched out a hand to me. It was weak and warm. Ants. I could feel his blood streaming. “How do you do?” A glass shattered into a thousand pieces. I could not let go of his hand; the ants building a bridge between his and mine. “Listen,” he said, the sound of a fallen glass hanging in the air behind us, still tangible. The moment the sound was gone, he asked: “Where did that sound go to?” I started warming my hands again: sip of chocolate; cream in a two-day beard. I read some headlines that didn’t make sense, trying to regain my own space. His eyes were inside me, watching me from a position I could not occupy. I surrendered to his eyes. He told me his life story, his words pale and crispy, coming without a hitch. His story was too long to fit one life; his experiences too diverse to fit one man; his adventures too grandiose to fit one time. Centuries passed like the watery reflection of a lantern in a black canal. The moment he finished his story, he turned into a child and showed me the colours in his bag. There was no room in his excitement to ask questions. Dozens of leaves were spread out on the long, stained, wooden café table, forming a Matisse pattern. He giggled. His blood turned a deeper red. “They have all fallen, fallen softly to the ground.” He clustered the colours; red, orange and yellow dominated. He spoke to me through the colours of the leaves, telling me that he had had to return from the world the sound of the falling glass had gone to, and that his return had to do with solving one question. The colours were clear about that: paper man was a man with a quest. During the weeks after our first encounter I visited my paper-skinned friend often. I joined him in the forest and saw him picking falling leaves from the air. I helped him group the leaves’ colours in his house. I saw him transform the fallen leaves into paper, feeding them into a big machine that made them come out as smooth as paper. He rolled the paper he’d made out of the dominant colours endlessly, creating an ever-growing expanse of paper. He cut the paper made of the minority colours into smaller and smaller pieces, the rhythm of his cutting a perfect legato. One night we went to the forest. It was windy, snowflakes hanging in the air. The man spread out his arms to gather more and more of what was floating to the ground. The wind had blown the clouds to an unknown place. The sky was bright, the heavens dark; bright planets tried to shine their light on the mystery. But the light revealed nothing of that mystery. “Did you know that the skies above us are actually not dark but have a sandy colour?” I did not know. “And did you know that when we shine our light onto a part of the universe, it widens itself, as if escaping?” I did not know that either. “The universe is breathing itself bigger and bigger, becoming wider and wider.” In saying this, he had already answered the question that had brought him back to this world. But I could not tell him. I didn’t yet know what his question was: he had refused to tell me; it was a question he had to answer himself. Without help. I enjoyed being with him. Although he was in search of something, his cutting and enlarging the paper leaves felt so peaceful. I saw things becoming bigger and I saw things becoming smaller. I saw things going in two directions at once. He used more and more advanced tools to cut the paper into smaller and smaller pieces. For days, the pieces he had been cutting had been invisible to my eyes. And the paper that had been getting bigger and bigger had exceeded my imagination for even longer. I admired my-friend-in-search-of-something-he-could-not-grasp-but-who-at-the-same-time-believed-he-could. It takes a strong belief to believe in something you cannot grasp. “What does God mean to you?” He was making pasta for the two of us, posing his question just a bit too carelessly. The blood I saw streaming in his face was boiling, just like the pasta. I could feel he was close to the answer he needed. And I knew that the question he had asked was a way of sharing his quest. We started talking. We arrived at a point where God could mean everything. Something that is unchangeable and includes all. “But if things can become endlessly bigger and smaller, and God is all, God can become bigger and smaller too. God changes.” He wasn’t only speaking to me, but to himself as well. And the colours of the leaves gave the answer to his quest: God has Gods too. The One is many. The pasta was perfect, al dente. The sauce simple yet tasty. I knew this was the last supper paper-man and I would enjoy together in this world. - less tagged:   God   colours   blood   stars   heaven   spaciousness    permalink  read: 6957  print  forward  comments: 2  add comment      name:  Louis, October 22nd • Mooi, Andre... greta, October 22nd • I love your stories, Andre. This one reminds me of Alan.

Photo: André Platteel

Dr. Feelgood by Andre Platteel , May 13th

“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 “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. “Look, we can investigate what it is that is bugging you. We can also ask this great intelligence (lifting his arms again, opening them to receive) to show it to us.” He closes the office curtains. Some workers have arrived to fix something and can see in. “I don’t like people watching me when I’m doing this,” he says, moving to the middle of the room. “I will ask this intelligence, or love, or consciousness, or whatever we want to call it, to show, through me, who you think you are at this moment. After that I can ask it to show, through me, who you really are. Let’s see if there is a difference.” He takes off his white coat, revealing a blue polo shirt. A man on a horse. He concentrates. His body begins to change. He starts walking with his chin slightly tilted, chest pushed out. All in slow motion. He raises his arms and puts them in front of his chest, his hands becoming claws. His feet move heavily, stickily. He walks for two, maybe three minutes, doing circles in his office. Changes in his posture, but not significantly different. I am watching myself in a mirror. He breaths out, heavenly, and lets me out of him. “Okay.” One word to close session one. He walks to the centre of his office and closes his eyes. He makes contact again. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, he bursts out in a laugh. “This is funny, this is so funny. Look.” He begins to pace again. He touches his heart with his right hand and then makes a movement with it as if sowing seed. He doesn’t stop giggling. His acting out of ‘me’ goes on for minutes, encompassing different movements and poses. I cannot help but burst into laughter too. It doesn’t disturb him. He keeps on acting me, and my systems recognize what it is that wants to show itself. A few minutes later I am standing at the door. We shake hands. They feel good: his and mine, both hands. - less tagged:   body   spaciousness   consciousness   knowing   spirituality   love    permalink  read: 5755  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

The eagle and the condor flying together by Andre Platteel , January 23rd

There are four of us, maybe six. It feels completely dark. The only light comes from the sky: thousands of stars and a sliver of moon reaching to the earth. Yet even though the sky above me is clear, the heavens still don’t provide enough light for me to see my immediate surroundings. Although we have walked this path along this amazing coastline at least a dozen times over the last five days, most of us carry flashlights. The near abyss is magnetic. I am having a lazy time in the place that gave birth to the Human Potential Movement, back in the early Sixties. Actually, the Sixties never stopped. There are people gardening naked; the food comes from little gardens within the compound; girls are painting flowers on the walls of buildings; in the evening we gather around a fire outside and those people with guitars play Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Bob Dylan. I went hiking through the wilderness the other day. The sky changed second by second. I walked through rain, in the sun, through storm and even snow, all in no more than half an hour. I felt like Hugh Grant near the end of Notting Hill, with a bit of Indiana Jones thrown in. I tried to find my way through the tall trees and wild bushes. There was no path. Then, the moment the wilderness opened up a bit, my eyes met those of three huge, powerful birds. They stared and shifted their long, thin necks in my direction. They spread their wings – at least six feet wide, I guess – not to take off but to impress on me how big they were. At first, fear stiffened my body. I tried to relax and backed off a bit, still looking into the eyes of these creatures. Condors. I had read in a guide that they used to live here, but had not been seen since the end of the Sixties. Had they been hiding since then, or had they returned? Watching these Condors, I felt a strange otherness I had never encountered before. I felt so alive. Sometimes it takes otherness to remind us what we are made off. + more There are four of us, maybe six. It feels completely dark. The only light comes from the sky: thousands of stars and a sliver of moon reaching to the earth. Yet even though the sky above me is clear, the heavens still don’t provide enough light for me to see my immediate surroundings. Although we have walked this path along this amazing coastline at least a dozen times over the last five days, most of us carry flashlights. The near abyss is magnetic. I am having a lazy time in the place that gave birth to the Human Potential Movement, back in the early Sixties. Actually, the Sixties never stopped. There are people gardening naked; the food comes from little gardens within the compound; girls are painting flowers on the walls of buildings; in the evening we gather around a fire outside and those people with guitars play Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Bob Dylan. I went hiking through the wilderness the other day. The sky changed second by second. I walked through rain, in the sun, through storm and even snow, all in no more than half an hour. I felt like Hugh Grant near the end of Notting Hill, with a bit of Indiana Jones thrown in. I tried to find my way through the tall trees and wild bushes. There was no path. Then, the moment the wilderness opened up a bit, my eyes met those of three huge, powerful birds. They stared and shifted their long, thin necks in my direction. They spread their wings – at least six feet wide, I guess – not to take off but to impress on me how big they were. At first, fear stiffened my body. I tried to relax and backed off a bit, still looking into the eyes of these creatures. Condors. I had read in a guide that they used to live here, but had not been seen since the end of the Sixties. Had they been hiding since then, or had they returned? Watching these Condors, I felt a strange otherness I had never encountered before. I felt so alive. Sometimes it takes otherness to remind us what we are made off. In the darkeness I tell about my encounter with the birds to the four (or is it six) others I’m with. A girl’s voice reacts. I recognize an Esalen-girl I had met earlier and who has lived here all her life. She says that the area is known for eagles and that the condors left decades ago. An Esalen legend tells that when the eagle and condor fly together peace will descend on Earth. Light will defeat darkness. The moment she finishes her story, we all look up into the sky, our attention grabbed by a huge fire high above. Something’s burning. An enormous fire, blazing away, the seconds dragging by. We stop and watch. We don’t speak. It can’t be a plane crash – it’s too high up and too intense. And it’s burning too long. You can see whatever it is trying to reach through the earth’s atmosphere. The fire crackles and bangs. It makes the normally invisible atmosphere visible. Watching the mysterious fire I find myself in the same situation as when I was eye to eye with the condors. Primal fear invades my body. My mind is posing questions that make me feel small: Just how little do we know of the place the fire comes from? How little do we know of the Earth as part of that? How little do I know about myself as part of all this? I feel vulnerable and mortal. Suddenly I feel the fire I see above burning inside me. As if there is no longer any difference between outside and inside. Vulnerability and mortality going up in flames, creating a huge fire. Earth, the Heavens and I are burning, too, but are not destroyed. There is only aliveness. Sometimes it takes fire to show us that what we are is always burning, and always will be. - less tagged:   fire   fear   life   heart   Eagle   Condor   light   darkness   Esalen   sky   understanding   spaciousness   reality    permalink  read: 7382  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

The man on the bench by Andre Platteel , October 22nd

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. + more 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. The confusion I repeatedly encounter with self-inquiry and understanding who or what I am, lies in language. In spiritual literature, to refer to what we truly are often means using words like Self (with a capital), Spirit (also with capital) or Big Mind (something immense, probably behind something that is called Small Mind). But what I am, what I experience, lies in the phenomenon itself. There is no Self, Spirit or Big Mind behind or besides what I experience. Believing there was would put me on a endless journey to find what can never be found, because it is here – all the time and readily available. In being with what is. Making space for the phenomenon to settle and ‘unpack’ in my mind is not only seeing what truly is at that particular moment (a flower, for example) – and therefore experiencing it afresh – but also and simultaneously understanding who I truly am. In seeing the flower anew, I see myself. In that process my connectedness with others and the world becomes more than just a thought. - less tagged:   consciousness   spaciousness   Pirandello   language   flower   wholeness   connectedness    permalink  read: 4832  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

Culture of fear by Andre Platteel , October 16th

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. + more 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. Is it the unknown that we fear? But how can I be afraid of something I don’t know? If I don’t know it, I don’t recognise it and so it can’t touch me, can it? If I were afraid of death, would I be terrified of death itself (which is unknown to me), or would I be terrified of losing everything that I know, of death ending my relationship with all that’s known? I think it is the known that makes us afraid. Fear comes when we are afraid for something that we know will go away in the future: our body, our loved ones, our parents, our children, our status or our money. Instead of enjoying what we know and have right now – things so dear to us (because otherwise we would not be afraid losing it) – we worry and are afraid of losing it in the future. At the same time, strategies to prevent bad things happening seem only to add to the fear because, once again, we are creating something we know – and which therefore we will be afraid to lose. If fear is known and related to the future, what could the remedy be? The only thing I know that helps me, but only if I do it wholeheartedly, is to be present at – consciously open to and aware of – everything that happens without forming any judgement, even when it involves fear. Rather than seeing fear as something that is not part of me, something to be got rid of, I must accept that it is part of me. Fear is something of me and can be welcomed within me. Which isn’t to say that is easy, especially when fear is knocking uninvited and from within. Everything that enters our consciousness becomes known, becomes an idea that is inherent to change. Consciousness itself is more spacious than anything that may arise and is always present. In being the space that we truly are there is no thing that could make us run; even fear is just another interesting guest to be welcomed. - less tagged:   fear   consciousness   merketing   brands   Lynch   TV-series   seduction   body   spaciousness    permalink  read: 4720  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

Spaciousness for a flower to grow by Andre Platteel , August 28th

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. + more 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. We become consciousness of more through experiencing more divers phenomena than ever. But do we really see these phenomena or are we only interested in experiencing, not giving the phenomena the space to come into being in our consciousness? Almost always when experience takes place, I notice myself, the habit is to revolve myself around the phenomenon, imposing meaning externally from the phenomenon. When I see a flower all my ideas of a flower are being projected on the image I see. I therefore do not see the flower in front of me; I see a mental image of a flower already present in my mind. I do not receive the phenomenon 'flower'. I project meaning on the phenomenon 'flower'. Consciousness for me would be to open up to the phenomena in such a way that the phenomenon itself can come inside ourselves into being. For this process to happen we need to be attentive. We need to create space in order for the phenomenon to dwell in our consciousness. It is then the phenomenon itself that will appear as an idea in our thinking. The actual flower arises. - less tagged:   flower   spaciousness   connectedness   phenomena    permalink  read: 2992  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

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Advaita  AlexvanWarmerdam  aliveness  Allen  animals  Anschauen  Antonioni  Aronofsky  arrogance  art  attention  authetic  awareness  Babel  balance  beauty  Bechstein  Beloved  Berber  beyond  BigMind  BigSur  bird  blackhole  blindness  blood  Body  Bohm  books  borders  Borges  brands  brightnes  brightness  BruceLee  business  Butterfly  carpet  Cartesian  CEO  change  child  Chinese  circle  Clueless  co-creation  colours  communications  community  concepts  condor  confusion  connectedness  consciousness  consuming  Coppola  creation  crocuses  Curse  dancing  darkness  Death  decadence  decay  desert  desire  dialogue  DiegoMaradona  difference  DirtyDancing  disorientation  doubt  dream  Duchamps  Dunaway  eagle  earth  endless  erotic  Esalen  ever-unfolding  everything  Evil  evolution  experience  faith  falling  family  father  fear  feeding  feeling  fighting  film  fire  flame  flow  flower  flowers  fluid  foam  form  fragment  freedom  friend  Gangaji  God  Goethe  goodness  gravity  grip  ground  Groundhogday  grounding  guilty  Gypsy  heart  hearth  heaven  Hero  holy  home  horizon  house  Hungary  hypocrisy  ignorance  image  images  imagination  India  innocence  intimacy  inviting  irony  Japan  Jarrett  Jewison  judgement  KarlBlossfeldt  Knowing  language  laughter  leaves  lie  life  light  Linklater  love  Lynch  lyrics  Madonna  Magic  Manhattan  MarcForster  marketing  martial-art  MartinParr  master  matter  McLuhan  McQueen  meadow  media  meditation  memories  memory  merketing  Merleau-Ponty  MET  mind  MIT  Moma  Monet  Montauk  moon  mortal  mother  mountain  mountains  movement  Murakami  Muslim  natural  Nazis  Newton  NewYork  Nolita  nothing  Olive  oneness  opinion  opposites  otherness  painters  painting  Paris  passion  patterns  phenomena  philosophy  photographer  physiology  Pirandello  plane  playing  Pollock  pornographic  power  promise  punishment  reality  red  repetition  resistance  river  Romania  roses  sadness  seduction  self-consciousness  Serra  shadow  Shakespeare  shame  Shapiro  silence  silk  singing  sky  Slacker  slopes  SmallMind  snow  SoHo  sorry  space  spaciousness  spirit  spiritual  spirituality  Spring  stars  stone  stories  StrangerthanFiction  strategy  stress  sun  swan  swordsman  T'aiChi  TallbergForum  tears  thinking  time  totalitarian  totality  travel  trees  TV-series  understanding  uniqueness  unity  untrue  Ursus  utopia  virginity  vitality  voices  Waiter  warrior  water  wholeness  wind  wing  Wing-Chun  wolf  WoodyAllen  youth  Zelig  Zen 

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June, 2010 Dutch Political Leaders Receive book Our World		May, 2010 Resistance Decadence New Book: Our World		April, 2010 Arrogance Naivety Ignorance		June, 2009 Mother of all memories
May, 2009 Come again, and again, and again		April, 2009 The Wolf		March, 2009 The three voices		January, 2009 Born to adore This Dancing with the Beloved
December, 2008 Listen carefully		October, 2008 A fragment of a circle God’s Gods You, me and everything else		September, 2008 Man with powers		August, 2008 The hidden promise Crazy for love
May, 2008 Dr. Feelgood What’s the limit of love		April, 2008 Spring Snow will fall The Cleaner		March, 2008 Motherless Child What I am made of Falling upwards Northern Lights		February, 2008 Glass-made-mind The outer layer of the mind Growing younger On Holy Ground
January, 2008 Watch for the wind to blow How is Diego Maradona doing? What are we guilty off? Everything is what is besides language The eagle and the condor flying together In the heart of Otherness		December, 2007 The man who loved too much The dark brightness The windmills of our mind To make two mountains one, gone Bigger than the stars		November, 2007 Act of passion Making love Life has no meaning Where the heart is Oneness is never the same		October, 2007 Mind blowing Becoming authentic Coloured Mind Hide and Seek Culture of fear The man on the bench The Swordsman
September, 2007 What is thinking? World happening Unity in diversity Smell no evil Going in all directions without beginning or end Alternative routes Superheroes don’t age No place like Utopia? Fog		August, 2007 The Wholeness of being Spirit through matter Looking in the mirror A new heart Is matter what matters? World of opinions. Spaciousness for a flower to grow