Thoughts on books, reading, running, and international flight — and Jim Carrey’s “I Needed Color”
Back to New York
So I drove back home after my misadventures at Global Entry at Newark Airport, exhausted and deflated after three hours of sleep and five hours of driving. I wanted and needed sleep so badly, I jumped into bed but was wide awake from all the coffee I had to drink to stay awake for all that driving. I started to look at Facebook, which I rarely do, but as my publicist Ermolay tells me, it is something I’ll need to do. When Ermolay suggested writing a blog for my novel six months ago, the idea seemed patently ridiculous and absurd. I genuinely enjoyed the creative process and didn’t want to be distracted. I acquiesced, and as I started to write for the blog, I realized that the blog was not necessarily about my novel “The Twin Flames, the Master, and the Game,” which is about Consciousness, but in fact, about Consciousness, which encompasses everything in my life, your life, the world, the Universe — in other words — EVERYTHING!
As I was looking through Facebook, I came across this YouTube clip about Jim Carrey in which he states (paraphrasing):
“Art is form coming out of energy, conscious awareness dancing for itself for the sole purpose of keeping itself amused. One year later I realized that the painting is telling me what I needed to know about myself a year before. What makes someone an artist is they make models of their inner life, they make something physically come into being, that is inspired by their emotions or their needs or what they think the audience needs.”
This resonated with me very strongly on several levels. First, I’ve recently arrived at the deep-seated understanding that there is only Consciousness and non-duality. I have heard many fervently espouse this idea, just as those who revere Ramana Maharshi’s prescription for enlightenment, which is to ask the question “Who am I?" repeatedly?” However, few take this to its natural and inevitable conclusion. It was Jed McKenna who first pointed this out to me, and at the time, I couldn’t grasp it because it isn’t the mind/intellect that gets it. It’s something much deeper that defies logic. In Maharshi’s pronouncement, you actually never arrive at who you are. Instead, you learn that you are not an independent entity with your own reality. You are Consciousness, just as a wave is the ocean. If there is only Consciousness, one and not two, then again, you, we have no independent existence. There is only Consciousness manifesting itself in the roles of everything and everyone. It is not that we are Consciousness, but the converse: Consciousness is all of us and everything else in the phenomenal universe. Consciousness is merely playing the role of each of us. Why, you will ask? Jed McKenna explains that it is simply for its amusement. I was fascinated that Jim Carrey said the same thing!
Second, I’ve had the very same realization that my writing, thus far wholly channeled, was “telling me something that I needed to know about myself a year before.” This was certainly the case with my collection of poems, “Reflections on the Nature of Love and Sex,” where months and sometimes years later, the meaning of what had been put down on the page took on a meaning that was highly relevant in my personal life. Likewise, the novel has helped me to understand many things at specific points in my life and, more importantly, has helped me to move beyond those ideas. It’s not that those ideas were false, but somewhat incomplete. They served as stepping stones for me to view further and better appreciate Consciousness's full contour. It is analogous to the story of the three blind men who are told to describe an elephant based on what they are feeling with their hands. The blind man feeling the hind leg has a different perspective than the ones palpating the elephant’s nose or abdomen.
In a way, Jim Carrey’s words and my revelations about my writing process were presciently described in my poem entitled “The Artist,” written in 2013:
THE ARTIST©
One life dedicated to one opus.
Every action, thought, gesture, word, serving one end, one purpose.
One lifetime as a gestation,
with the hope and promise of birth.
Sadly, 99.99% end in stillbirth.
How so?
The atelier is grand.
The natural light sublime.
Every brush and tool, in every size, available.
The canvas is already stretched and framed to your specifications.
All media-oil, acrylic, watercolor, pencil, marble, wood, plaster- in endless supply.
Most important, you have a personal Muse, whose raison d’être is to delight you.
It is constant, ever-present, and relentless.
It is capable of morphing into whatever form is required,
to inspire your creation.
How is birth not a certainty?
One life to fulfill one opus.
You gladly accepted the commission.
After all, the reward seemed so appealing at the time.
So many choices with which to birth a masterpiece.
Every conceivable advantage at your disposal.
Why the utter,absolute failure in realizing the product?
The answer is one of mistaken identity.
Yes, you are the artist,
but it is not your hand that holds the brush, pen, or chisel.
You are, rather, the oil spread upon the canvas.
You are, rather, marble that is chiseled.
You are, rather, the clay that is molded.
You are, in fact, the very media used to express the art,
to birth the opus.
You are, in fact, the masterpiece.
Clearly a case of mistaken identity.
It is your very intention that mobilizes the world to birth you.
It is your very intention that holds the canvas onto which you are painted.
It is your very intention that frees you from your marble prison.
Michelangelo said that his sculptures were already in the blocks of marble,
and his chisel only served to birth them.
In the same way, you, unmanifest and formless,
have existed for all eternity and are waiting to birth fully manifest.
Everything in the world that you experience is your Muse,
shifting in novel, intricate, sometimes violent ways,
to inspire you to create yourself, to birth.
Once understood, every person you encounter serves as a canvas onto which you are painted.
Once perceived, one can only express gratitude to one’s Muse,
which manifests as every living being, and everything in the entire Universe,
selflessly manifesting as a canvas onto which you birth yourself.
In this light, I am eternally grateful to you as a manifestation of my Muse,
who inspires me to create, who brings me close to the completion of the opus that is to be me.
You inspire me to envision the sculpture that is me,
not as fetus, but who I might become when I birth, perhaps as a butterfly.
I thank you for being the luxurious canvas onto which I am blissfully spread,
each stroke delicately and precisely laid.
What divine pleasure to be conscious of my very being smeared onto you.
The distinct and effervescent delight of drying into your pores, your very essence.
The ecstasy and anticipation of knowing that the final masterpiece that will be birthed as me,
will be one with you.
No canvas, no paint.
Ultimately, only creation.
The further I got along with the novel, the more interested and intrigued I became about the creative process. It was effortless and the words just flowed. I became an interested spectator who was really excited to know what would happen next in the story. There were moments that I feared I would sit one day and there would be NADA…absolutely nothing. I accepted this as a possibility but at the moment, I stuck with the only constant with which I was familiar in my life as a writer: Just show up and be delighted by what unfolded!
By the time I had written more than half of the novel, I came to another fascinating realization. I began to see parallels between my actual life, or rather my life as it was unfolding, and my earlier writings, the poems, as well as the wisdom that I had learned from Mother Vine. One clear example was this poem where I explored the notion that it is the artist that is in fact the masterpiece that is being birthed rather than the artist as creator.
When I first wrote the poem, I enjoyed the words and its overall sense and beauty. However, I really didn’t connect with its true meaning until much later. In fact, the Reflections on the Nature of Love poems, including “The Artist,” were inspired by a woman whom I had known for a while. She was a beautiful woman, super talented singer, and an amazing human being. Despite the strong connection between us, I had never had any romantic feelings for her. During two consecutive weekends of ayahuasca ceremonies with an intervening week of pujas, a few of the women in the group decided to shave their heads. There was no coercion or pressure on anyone to do this. My understanding, which is more than likely limited, of the idea behind this act was to sever the connection between the identification of who they believed themselves to be in relation to their hair. It was clearly a powerful act for those who did this. My friend shaved her head during the second weekend, and after the ceremony, I saw her in a completely different light and, for the first time, felt a strong love for her.
Expression
As I mentioned elsewhere, the last time I wrote anything creatively was in 2005, when I wrote a collection of poems entitled “Reflections on the Nature of Sex.” Similarly, the poems were written in a few weeks after the spark of inspiration. In each case, the words appeared on the page almost as a purge during an ayahuasca ceremony: There was first the inkling that something needed to come out, so in each case, I prepared myself to facilitate getting out whatever it was that was trying to express itself- a bucket in the case of ayahuasca, and my laptop in the case of the writing. In either case, it was effortless and everything flowed out of me.
I became an engaged participant in an improvisational or participatory theater and was as surprised and often intrigued as the audience by what was evolving. As my deep love for this woman inspired the poems, the last few stanzas after “I thank you” were the ones that at first caught my attention and most pleased me. However, it wasn’t until recently, as I was writing the novel that I started to understand the overall implications of the poem in regards to Consciousness, but also how it was unfolding in my own life.
My first interpretation was that the poem implies that the artist is not the “doer,” that there is a higher power, Consciousness, moving us, and we have the blessing of having front-row seats to observe. It made sense to me based on my experience with Mother Vine and my experience of the creative process happening through me rather than being generated by me. This realization made me curious to know how the stream-of-consciousness development of The Twin Flames, the Master, and the Game would relate to my own life as it unfolded.
I stated that this was my first interpretation because I recently moved to a more profound understanding of Consciousness, which I will likely share elsewhere. It was a great surprise and pleasure to come across this video on Jim Carrey, in which he emulates a very similar idea. Ultimately, it is not very surprising because there is only Consciousness!
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