Facets of a Diamond – Blog
The most basic and primitive emotion is love in its various manifestations.
This has been neglected in medicine, neglected in psychiatry, and neglected in our society. We don’t read in the newspapers about love. We don’t read in the medical textbooks about love. We don’t read in the psychiatric textbooks above love, except to study it
You look at some modern art and proclaim that a child could paint it. But you’ve got it the wrong way around! Instead look at the Art on a refrigerator door and declare that no artist could paint that – for it was done with love.
So it is that every child is a Greater artist
In the old days, when the spirit left someone, when the will to live and to be whole and perfect left him, he just died.
The great Confucian philosopher Mencius stated – and I’m sure believed – that love is basic to our nature as it is the nature of water to flow downhill.
Every problem is a pebble, perhaps a rock, impeding the natural flow of chi, of our human nature, through us.
(January 2017)
At some level – superficial, shallow or deep – every work of art still transmits the basic problems of life, for example, the fear of death. For few persons have ever really overcome them, at the deepest level.
Therefore to listen to any music, contemplate any painting, feel any sculpture – and relate to any person
Ethics is the taking responsibility for all of one’s actions — and thoughts, for they, too, radiate just as far.
How far? Every action, physical or mental, lives on for ever, resonating through its effects on all and their sequential subsequent effects on all to come.
Everyone affects everyone – for ever.
“Revelation,” Emerson wrote, “is the disclosure of the soul.”*
To go to the soul – of the composer, of the poet, of the painter, of the sufferer, of every thing and every one – this alone will lead to Revelation. To find the soul and reveal it to the world. Especially the soul of the mother,
Think back to a time just a few thousand years ago. Talking, writing (such as it was) and music-making was with friends. Now it is usually with strangers.
Who am I writing this to? I don’t know you. And who am I? You don’t know me.
How differently, more openly and lovingly, we sing to friends than
I start each day with two forms of meditation. One is quiet. The other is active: say, painting, writing or singing.