Home Blog Page 311

When a Way of Life Gives Birth to Art ~ Karmym

1

‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.’ ~ Pablo Picasso

Art is like visual affirmations that elevates consciousness and is a gateway to experience deeper realms. One such artist that caught our attention was Karmym (Markus Meier), a painter, yogi and traveler.

His art integrates yoga asanas (postures), sacred geometry and various elements of eastern philosophy to create stories and open your eyes to newer realities. Karmym’s art is vibrant and comes to life with the use of different colours that have a psychological effect on the mind. It creates a soothing and uplifting experience. Karmym captures his yogic practice of witnessing his mind as a way to connect with his core, and that reflects in his paintings. His art speaks to your soul in many unknown ways.

karmym_marcus_meier
Karmym aka Marcus Meier

We spoke with Karmym aka Markus Meier who talks about his journey as an artist and a yogi.

Your art is quite unique and enlightening, what got you on this path?

I started painting when I became a father at the age of 30. Earlier I was interested in all kinds of art like books, music, dancing, painting, films but I spent my free time mostly dancing and traveling. So when I became a father I wanted to spend more time at home and I rediscovered my love for yoga and meditation which I use to practice in my childhood.

I began to connect with various yogis and discovered yogic art from around the world. I was delighted and started creating my own simple samples. These were paintings about hand mudras and yoga postures. With that I learned new aspects about yoga and so my yoga practice started to go deeper. Today my yoga practice and my art creation support each other.
yin-yang art
What does Karmym mean?

Karmym was my email name at the time I started to paint. It is a play of words with my real name and then it is referring to the Sanskrit word ‘Karma’. For me it is clear that all my actions show results in the future. So it is important that we are as conscious as possible about how we act and react.

There are many sacred elements in your art, chakra symbols and yoga asanas, what is your reason behind this?

tree-of-knowledge
I felt very much at home when I began exploring the chakra system. It is for me a logical hierarchy of self-motivation or qualities of energies that influence our daily life. With a chakra symbol Yogis know exactly what quality I place in the painting.

While creating an art piece I try to tell a story that goes through the whole image. I grow with every painting and so I explore new possibilities to include new aspects and new symbols. Next to chakra symbols I include archetypal symbols that have a general meaning.

What is the importance of Yoga and meditation in life?

They both are tools to come back to normal life. There is no technology nor tools needed. You just return to a normal experience of your body and your consciousness. For me it is a possibility to calm down and to balance the energies in my body.
savasana_yoga_art_karmym
kundalini-art

What has been your inspiration?

The inspiration to begin yoga has been a book about a yogi in my parents home when I was a little boy. This was in the 80s, when Yoga wasn’t as common in Europe as it is now. I was fascinated about the cleaning process for the body and mind.

With the book I learnt my first asanas. The inspiration for my artworks are the lives and teachings of people who found peace within.

Are there any visions or past experiences that has influenced your art?

Yes of course, it is my life until now that I see as a journey that influences my perception. There is no specific event but I traveled a lot backpacking and I was always excited to witness all the diverse cultures around the world.
balanced_yoga_art_karmym
bandhasana_yoga_meditation_art

What role does art play in shifting or raising consciousness of our fellow beings?

I’m a person that is very much inspired by art. Earlier I loved to read and watch valuable movies. Music always carried me in other moods and colorful fantasy worlds. All these experiences teach us a new aspect of life. Now I have a special interest in visual art, especially paintings. With my own painting I have the possibility to explore my own inner images and ideas.
It is the possibility to create a world or situation that speaks to the visitor who hasn’t had same experiences like myself. I love to explore artwork from others that show me another way of thinking. So artwork should be provoking in a good way, and it can help to find new ways or simply bring you back to your own core.
joy-of-teaching

What is your philosophy in life?

I try to live a balanced life. When I was a child I realized that there are a lot of aspects to grow in. I can’t remember why but I always choose to train my weaker aspects instead of being very good in one aspect. Today I think that this was a good philosophy because it brings balance. As a youngster I was so very impatient and got angry when life didn’t run as I desired.

I always loved to do jogging and fitness, this helped to reduce aggression. Since I’m a father I learn a lot from my family and in these last years’ the most important aspect was to learn to accept the present situation. This acceptance helps a lot to maintain harmony in life and I’m very thankful for it.

power-of-love

vipassana art

Have you gone for Vipassana?

Yes, I’ve participated in a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat as taught by S.N. Goenka in 2008. It was my first meditation retreat and I still am very thankful for this opportunity. Afterwards I went to some shorter meditation retreats because I didn’t want to be away from my family including my two boys.

But when they are older I’m sure that I want to go for a 10-day retreat. In my daily life I sit from time to time in meditation but this isn’t a deep meditation. In yoga there are meditative aspects as well, when I rest for a longer time in an asana, I try to feel the body without thinking.

To see more of his artwork, visit – Karmym art.

Self-overcoming: Investigating Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Superman)

“We stumble on; the Übermensch plants a foot where there is no certain hold; and in the struggle that follows, the whole of us get dragged up.” ~ William James

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote some powerful and gripping philosophy in his day, from which he derived many prolific ideas. And there is probably no concept more perplexing, to both philosophers and laymen alike, than the concept of the Übermensch (which translates loosely to superman, and directly to overman).

In this article we will attempt to dissect this curious concept and try to bring some clarity to it so that we can use it as a tool toward our own self-development.

nietzsche-philosophy
Wanderer above a Sea of Fog

The interesting thing is that Nietzsche wasn’t the first person to write about the concept. The term first appeared in Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808), 40 years before Nietzsche was born, appearing only once in the entire play: “What vexes you, oh Übermensch!” says a spirit from Heaven responding to Faust’s desperate pleas for a glimpse of the Eternal. No doubt Nietzsche read this play and was so moved by it that he decided to dedicate an entire book to the idea: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

It is Nietzsche’s magnum opus. The book’s single task and raison d’etre(reason for existence) consists in turning the human soul inside out. But it succeeds only if the reader is open enough to receive it.

And yet even in Zarathustra there was only one short passage that directly speaks to the concept, although the entire book alludes to it. For our purposes here, we will break down this brief passage and see what we can make out of it. The passage begins…

“…Behold, I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…”

It seems as though Nietzsche is mocking mankind and its failure to evolve. He seems to be calling for a kind of aggressive evolution, one dependent not upon things being, but upon things becoming, upon things changing and transforming into what nature has in store for it. Similar to the way an acorn becomes a tree, or a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Our unique chemistry, our primal core, is perhaps similarly transcendent.

Like the acorn and the caterpillar, we each have a natural, healthy, transformative process that only nature knows. Perhaps nature knows that just as the ape had to overcome itself to become a man, man must overcome itself to become the overman.

The caterpillar is to the butterfly as man is to overman. Maybe this is what Pema Chödrön meant when she wrote, “Only to the extent that we can expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”

“…Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing…”

He is calling for devotion to the earth, saying the overman is literally the meaning of the earth itself. He’s beckoning us to lay siege to otherworldly hopes and embrace the world as it is, in all its earthly glory.

It’s almost like he’s trying to remind us to get back in touch with Mother Nature, to reconnect the severed umbilicus, and to quit poisoning her to no end. One can even imagine the overman with deep roots and long branches, pulling the sky down and lifting the earth up in order to reconnect our higher and lower selves.

zarathustra-nietzsche
Zarathustra

He’s teaching us that in order to avoid self-abnegation we must dive into the primordial self: that place where nature and the human soul merge to become one continuous thing.

Otherwise, the modern romance with self-realization consumes itself and our wild self becomes disavowed, as is evident from the suffocating consumerist culture rampant in the world today. When we pull down the afterlife, we pull up the underworld. It is an existential upheaval of monumental proportions. Hence the urgent need for the overman.

“…Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman–a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself…”

He’s basically informing us that man is a cocoon, a passage, a go-between; that man is just the gestation process between the caterpillar of the ape and the butterfly of the overman. We’re merely a bridge between beast and overman. And just as the chaos within a cocoon gives birth to a butterfly, so too will the chaos within ourselves give birth to the overman.

But he also warns us, forebodingly, of the despicable man: the result of not becoming a being that gains the ability to overcome itself. Lest we become this despicable man, we must discover the inner-overman, the primordial genius, the coalescent-self, the chameleon of the human condition, the epistemological elite longing to emerge.

Some might argue that it’s too late, that the “despicable

Bridge-Man-Fog-Dark
Bridging the Gap

man” is too much the majority and overmen are too much the minority. Others might argue that’s always been the case.

Either way, the goal isn’t to change others. The goal is to reveal to everyone that change is possible and, at the end of the day, its inevitable anyway. So why fight it?

In German Überwindung means self-mastery, or self-overcoming. Überwinden means to overcome. Mensch means man, or human. So ‘Self-overcoming Human’ seems to be the most accurate translation of Übermensch. Nietzsche used the overman as a personification of potential eco-centric genius, demonstrating that Truth moves, and moving, demolishes thrones and altars. Indeed, self-overcoming is the life-task of man.

If we never discover this life-task, we limit ourselves to merely existing. “He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has earned my contempt” Einstein wrote. “He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.”

Lest we inadvertently earn Einstein’s contempt we must discover a method of self-overcoming, of self-questioning, of self-capitulation that pushes us past our inadequate mental paradigms and too-comfortable comfort zones and forces us to brave the enriching storm of life. Nietzsche’s Overman is just such a force.

Nietzsche and Self Overcoming

Image Source:
Wanderer above a Sea of Fog
Zarathustra
Bridging the Gap
Ubermensch

Eco-moral Tribalism for Progressive Sustainability

ubuntu african concept meaning I am because we are
Ubuntu is a traditional African concept, which means ‘I am because we are’. It’s a term for humaneness, for caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation

Progressive sustainability, as opposed to progressive unsustainability, is a challenging prospect. Perhaps the only thing more challenging is figuring out how to live in a compassionate empathic way with our fellow man. I mean there are people caught up in the progressive unsustainability paradigm who are downright lazy, ignorant, stubborn, and mean to contend with.

But can we all agree that we don’t want people to starve? Can we all agree that we don’t want people to go without fresh water? Can we all agree that we don’t want people to go without shelter, unnecessarily? If the majority of us can agree on this then the solution is simple, albeit deceivingly simple: provide basic food/water/shelter FOR ALL that meets with basic needs to keep people healthy enough to make more of themselves if they so choose. If they choose to remain lazy, or unskilled, that’s on them. At least they won’t starve, die of thirst, or die of exposure. And maybe with the right kind of help they actually can make something better out of themselves.

There’s no cure for laziness. Only the lazy person can cure themselves. However, there is a cure for poverty. But it takes those of us with enough, to actually help out. This is the tricky part. This is the proverbial fly in the ointment. This is where people puff up their chests and espouse culturally-prescribed platitudes such as: “I earned this. Why should I be expected to help people who are too dumb and lazy to help themselves?” The answer is: compassion, empathy, and love for your fellow man. The answer is: because otherwise people will die. But I realize that all this “Jesus-hippie-talk” doesn’t jive with most people, so here’s a little analogy for you…

Let’s shrink our entire society down to a single tribe of ten tents with a single family in each tent. Each tent has a hunter. One tent has a hunter of great prowess, skilled with all weapons. The ten hunters go on a Great Hunt to provide food for the people. The skilled hunter kills 5 buffalo! The next best hunter kills 2 buffalo. And only two other hunters get a single kill each, while the other six hunters get exactly zero.
Charles Darwin quote
Maybe these other six hunters were lazy. Maybe they were unskilled. Maybe their weapons weren’t adequate enough. Maybe it was a combination of all of these. It matters little the reason. What really matters is that they, and their innocent families, will most certainly starve. Unless?

…Unless the skilled hunter(s) share their meat (wealth) with the tribe so as to maintain a healthy tribe (eco-moral tribalism). The skilled hunter would get more of the meat, and the choicest cuts, of course, but at least the other people in the tribe wouldn’t starve. Easy right? No, not really.

This is a ridiculously simple concept to learn and to rationalize, and yet it is an excruciatingly complex concept to really understand and apply to everyday reality. The main cause of this is that most people are egotistical about what they’ve “earned.” It’s a cultural problem. We’ve been raised to believe in the false ideal of greed. Our culture has become ego-centric, as opposed to eco-centric. It whines, “Me! Me! Me!” instead of declaring: “We!”

Enoughness: Restoring Balance to the Economy

The problem is we imagine that our sense of worth is wrapped up in how skilled we are at something, because we were raised and conditioned in a culture that values competition over cooperation. This creates ego-centric specialists concerned only with narrow-minded one-upmanship. But we are social creatures first and foremost. We need each other.

Competition has always been secondary to cooperation; otherwise we wouldn’t have survived as species (Darwin). So when it comes down to it, our worth is actually wrapped up in how much we care for other people. The problem is that we’ve had the cart (competition) in front of the horse (compassion) for roughly 2,000+ years. It’s time we got the horse back in front of the cart. This will be an arduously Herculean task, considering our cultural conditioning. But it is very important, for the survival of our species, that we get it right.

The interesting thing is that when the skilled hunters distribute their wealth they become New-heroes with honor, power and prestige, as opposed to just typical heroes who only have power. We must go beyond being just a typical hero (hoarding hunter) and become a New-hero (wealth distributor).

‘I Am’ is a non-fiction film that poses two practical and provocative questions: what’s wrong with our world, and what can we do to make it better?
http://youtu.be/Ba98nH8Z8nY

Image Source:
Ubuntu: I am because we are

Darwin

The Indicators of a Balanced Mind

0
Mental-Health-Icon-2
Mind and Psychology

“What does your anxiety do? It does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but it empties today of its strength. It does not make you escape the evil; it makes you unfit to cope with it if it comes.” ~ Raymond Cramer

According to the definition of mental health, it is the psychological state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioural adjustment. The term “mental hygiene” was invented in the mid 19th century, and it implied maintaining peace of mind even in the midst of turmoil or incidents that would constrain or devastate its energy, quality or growth.

Only few people claim to have maintained perfect mental health throughout their life. The concept of maintaining a balanced mind seems impossible to most of us, but desired by everybody. Clustered thoughts and the inflow and outflow of matter and material in the mind lead to a battlefield in our system. Sometimes, we all know our way to peace but the mind is unable to let go of the perplexed matter.

In such a case, knowledge of the constituents of mental well-being can bring a lot of clarity to one’s life. One can introspect and flow in the right river of thoughts instead of being stuck in a tangled web.

The school of psychology defines the constituents of mind, but few noted psychologist have gone beyond to expand this model, M Brewster Smith (1950) being one of them. According to Smith the three universal, positive indicators of optimal mental well-being are: Adaptive adjustment, Integration, and Cognitive adequacy. All three are interconnected and one needs to understand that relation in order to be in a perfect state of mind.

Beginning with the Adaptive Adjustment, which means that no individual can feel well and happy unless his needs, biological and psychological, come to terms with satisfaction. Satisfaction of needs results in the dynamic equilibrium, which is desired by the mind. Each mind is different and hence, everyone’s approach to the state of homeostasis (mental equilibrium) is different.

Next is integration or self-realisation. It is a state where the individual avoids being influenced by the conflicting situations or circumstances. The individual is free to channelize energy along any path of adaptive adjustment.

Fragments of the mind.
Fragments of the mind

Integration also refers to the harmonisation of needs, means, and goals. The goals of the organism are well matched with the resources of his culture and environment.

When solving a biological and psychological problem, the integrated individual is able to retain a sense of harmony or self-consistency. This is also known as individuation.

The concept appears in numerous fields and is encountered in works of Carl Jung, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Friedrich Nietzsche etc. According to Jungian philosophy, individuation leads to holistic healing of a being, both mentally and physically.

And the last indicator of the series is cognitive adequacy.

 In any community the individual’s well being demands that his cognition and perception of reality – his capacity to select and interpret stimuli- be adequate to ensure both adaptive adjustment and integration. (Abt and Bellak, 1950:60)

The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses is known as cognition. Ability to understand the perception, sensation, idea and intuition falls under cognitive adequacy. It becomes a prerequisite for a healthy state of mind as no goal can be achieved without the knowledge and condition of the self. An example of cognitive inadequacy is debilitated sense of self-realisation or false consciousness.

How can one fix the problem without knowing that there is a problem?

Mind is an instrument of the soul. It is like clay. It will mould itself according to your guidelines but not vice-versa. To eradicate chaos and achieve a balanced state of mind, knowing the root cause of the chaos is a major achievement.

Image source

Signature Psychology

The Path of the Sacred Clown: Where Trickster and Shaman Converge

“If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” ~ William Blake

Most of us are familiar with the prototypical clowns: red-nosed clowns, court jesters, and Tarot fools. But sacred clowns take clowning to a whole other level. The Ne’wekwe “mud-eaters” were the Zuni equivalent of a sacred clown. The Cherokee had sacred clowns known as Boogers who performed “Booger dances” around a community fire.

lakota-heyoka-sacred-clown
Stanley Good Voice Elk, Lakota Heyoka

In Tibetan Buddhism it’s referred to as Crazy Wisdom, which the Guru adopts in order to shock their students out of fixed cultural and psychological patterns. But perhaps the most popular type of sacred clown is the Lakota equivalent of Heyoka, a contrary thunder shaman who taught through backwards humor.

buddha-nose-sacred-clown
Usurping the Sacred with the Power of Humor

Almost all types of sacred clowns combine trickster spirit with shamanic wisdom to create a kind of sacred tomfoolery that keeps the zeitgeist in check. Their methods are unconventional and typically antithetical to the status quo, but extremely effective. They indirectly re-enforce societal customs by directly enforcing their own powerful sense of humor into the social dynamic. They show by bad example how not to behave.

The main function of a sacred clown is to deflate the ego of power by reminding those in power of their own fallibility, while also reminding those who are not in power that power has the potential to corrupt if not balanced with other forces, namely with humor. But sacred clowns don’t out-rightly derive things. They’re not comedians, per se, though they can be. They are more like tricksters, poking holes in things that people take too seriously.

Through acts of satire and showy displays of blasphemy, sacred clowns create a cultural dissonance born from their Crazy Wisdom, from which anxiety is free to collapse on itself into laughter. Sacred seriousness becomes sacred anxiety which then becomes sacred laughter. But without the courageous satire of the sacred clown, there would only ever be the overly-serious, prescribed state of cultural conditioning.

Lest we write our lives off to such stagnated states, we must become something that has the power to perpetually overcome itself. The sacred clown has this power. Christ was a sacred clown, mocking the orthodoxy. Buddha was a sacred clown, mocking ego attachment. Even Gandhi was a sacred clown, mocking money and power.

Like Thomas Merton wrote, “In a world of tension and breakdown, it is necessary for there to be those who seek to integrate their inner lives not by avoiding anguish and running away from problems, but by facing them in their naked reality and in their ordinariness.” Sacred clowns are the epitome of such integration.

heyoka-lakota
Modern-day Sacred Clown

Heyokas, for example, remind their people that Wakan tanka, the great mystery, is beyond good and evil; that its primordial nature doesn’t correspond to human platitudes of right and wrong. Heyokas act as mirrors, reflecting the mysterious dualities of the cosmos back onto their people. They walk the Red Road, following in the bloody footprints left behind by their Heyoka fore-brothers.

They go forward, to that place where emptiness is full, and fullness empty. “As a representative of Thunderbird and Trickster,” writes Steve Mizrach, “the heyoka reminds his people that the primordial energy of nature is beyond good and evil. It doesn’t correspond to human categories of right and wrong.

It doesn’t always follow our preconceptions of what is expected and proper. It doesn’t really care about our human woes and concerns. Like electricity, it can be deadly dangerous, or harnessed for great uses. If we’re too narrow or parochial in trying to understand it, it will zap us in the middle of the night.”

Sacred clowns are adept at uniting joy with pain, acting on the higher and more inscrutable imperatives of the Great Mystery. They tend to govern transition, introduce paradox, blur boundaries, and mix the sacred with the profane. They are called upon to reestablish the bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds. They dare to ask the questions that nobody wants answers to.

They are the uncontrollable avatars of the Trickster archetype, constant reminders of the contingency and arbitrariness of the social order, poking holes in anything taken too seriously, especially anything assuming the guise of power. They are a conduit to forces that defy comprehension, and by their absurd, backwards behavior, they are merely showing the ironic, mysterious dualities that exist within the universe itself.

HEYOKA
Thunder Shaman

Sacred clowns understand that humans fail, and failing means that sometimes we need to change. They remind us that the goal is not to stick to the same old path, but to embrace the vicissitudes of life and to discover new paths and the courage it takes to adapt and overcome.

Taking the universe into deep consideration, letting it be, and then letting it go, is far superior to clinging to a “belief” and becoming stuck in a particular view. Sacred clowns realize that the highest wisdom lies in this type of counter-intuitive detachment, in accepting that nothing remains the same, and then being proactive about what it means to change.

Most importantly, they teach us that there is no such thing as an enlightened master. We’re all spiritually dumb. The closest we can ever get to being “enlightened” is simply to understand that we are naïve to it, and then to laugh about it together as a community.

Sacred clowns have the ability to plant this seed of sacred humor. They are constantly in the throes of metanoia, disturbing the undisturbed, comforting the uncomfortable and freeing the unfree. They remind us, as Rumi did, that “the ego is merely a veil between humans and God.”

Image Source:

Stanley Good Voice Elk, a Heyoka
Usurping the Sacred
Modern-day Sacred Clown
Thunder Shaman