encounters with nondual awareness

namgyal rinpoche, les nuages

When I paint I am color.

There is painting but no one painting.

Trying to make a perfect, successful final statement is suffering.

Our intelligence is allied with seeing, that’s why it’s good to paint.

The major hindrance to success is having to succeed.
 

For artisans curious about the awakened 'eye' as synonymous with the awakened 'I', Namgyal Rinpoche's book Unfolding Through Art will be a treasure. The extracts posted here were jotted down many years ago.

Unfolding Through Art
Namgyal Rinpoche

namgyal rinpoche

unfolding through art
 

I couldn’t care less about art.
All I’m interested in is awakening.

There isn’t one painting that doesn’t show the state of mind of the creator.

... in the pure craft the great artist leaves no trace of his personality whatsoever,
you just have the craft.

In your work you first have to forget that you don't know how to paint.
Then you have to forget that you do know how to paint ...

Light [color] always affects the hormones. The pineal gland ... is responsive to rhythms. Each painting you do will change the rhythms, the hormonal releases, however infinitesimal.

Art schools, having made the major contribution toward removing art entirely from life, are now seats of distraction and abstraction.

The on-going search of a human being is important, to grow something in the mind,
to study it. Loving is knowing.

- real passion is the life-force itself.
- the more passion there is the less choice one has.
Read biographies of some great beings and you will see that they had passion, non-choice.
Only beings who are stagnant think they know what they are on about.

It’s the weak ego that wants to do its own thing. But you can’t do anything except what the universe states. All you can do is become consciously involved in what’s happening anyway.

Actually, philosophically speaking – there’s no one to be here and now so it’s impossible for you to be here and now. There is continuum, but, I’m sorry to tell you, here and now does not exist. I know it’s the slogan of fringe Buddhists, but speaking from dharma, from truth, there’s no here and now, there’s no subject or object to distinguish between here and now. Not only can you not step into the same stream twice, there’s no such thing as a Stream-Enterer. There’s just stream-entering. It’s all streaming. If you speak about abandoning here and now you must abandon time and space.
If there is no stream how could you enter it?
 If you’re in the stream how could you enter it?
If you are the stream how could you enter it?

The greater the bundle of doubt the greater the awakening.
~ Namgyal Rinpoche