Continuing from:
- 387. The Love/Hate Relationship with Art
- 388. Regretting Choices and Definitions
- 389. Are Emotions Necessary to Be Creative?
- 390. Making Decisions Based on Feelings, Not Facts
“So the disillusionment with arts have to do with My Own expectations about it. How I thought that this was ‘the way’ to change the world and of course I didn’t follow through with ‘becoming an artist’ in the traditional sense which I then perceived as myself already ‘opting out’ of it all and seeing the sheer idea of dedicating myself to ‘create art’ as utterly selfish, without realizing how much I had desired ‘that’ to be my reality before. I’ve also been recently sharing about these points with people, explaining how I’m not proud of the decisions I made earlier on in my life and how I would not recommend anyone to study arts. I do however not say ‘don’t study arts’ but simply place my own expectations, my own experience, my decision to do something else and how such studies were a nice platform but not real tools that I can apply to what I am doing now.” From 387. The Love/Hate Relationship with Art
Facing Myself, my Relationships through the Relationship with Art
I suggest to read: What does it Mean to Have a Relationship with Oneself? – An Artists Journey To Life: Day 608 by Andrew Gable
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to define my relationships based on emotions and feelings wherein it doesn’t matter whether it is arts or a person or a responsibility or a place, the moment that I create emotional and feeling attachments to places/people/objects/professions then I begin creating my own trap through definitions based on what I believe that ‘I like’ and what I believe is ‘my thing’ based on nothing else but emotions, feelings, experiences that I went attaching toward something/someone over time, and then believing that I am in fact all of these experiences, emotions and feelings in relation to something or someone, without realizing that such experiences cannot define what such something or someone is in fact, as it is all entirely self-created, it is me-myself that has created this experience within me.
Within this premise, I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to immediately automate the words ‘my relationship to/with something/someone’ being defined as an experience that I have built toward something or someone instead of the actuality of how I participate, interact with, communicate with /through something or someone and within that realizing that any experience that I create is entirely my own and has nothing to do with that something or someone but myself at all times.
Therefore I realize that the projections upon ‘art’ is in fact the experience that I have created toward the who I was within that time of my life when I chose to study art and that If I were to place myself within that same frame of mind 7 years ago, I would probably still go for that choice in life, which means that it is a decision I made entirely based on what I wanted to experience and who I wanted to be as a personality, an ego and satisfy my drive that I went building up throughout time to ‘make it’ within the art world – so this point I have opened up before however now I am able to see that it has nothing to do with ‘art’ in itself, I’ve made of art the excuse to project my own judgments toward my decisions, the way that I established relationships toward this something that I ‘built myself’ around, and as such because I realized I could not continue constructing myself as ‘an artist’ within the initial ideals I had, then I acted in spite and begun regretting and embarrassed by my choices in life as I see them as ‘useless’ without realizing that I was actually reacting at all the various others things I did in my life throughout that time of which I cannot be proud of either and that I cannot certainly recognize as ‘myself’ any longer so
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to define me according to the relationships that I built with people and with specifically my career as ‘arts’ which in fact reflect all the choices in my life, the people that I chose to surround myself with and that I cannot really judge myself for who I was back then as back then I had no awareness of the points I am aware now.
So I realize that I have to stop being ‘hard’ on myself based on this hidden-experience of having ‘the past haunting me,’ and so be able to finally let go of it as I do not have to re-enact this kind of shame or embarrassment about myself, my past relationships, my emotionally-driven decisions in life because it is to realize that back then I didn’t know any other way – and so instead I am grateful to be able to be here writing myself, having deviated from ‘the path’ that I had initially chosen as god knows where the hell I would be if I had followed through my ‘lifestyle’ and the relationships I built around the same ego and personality that I was. I rather see and recognize that I’ve definitely moved on from that phase of my life, but! Also realizing that every time that I create an experience toward any memory, any relationship, any past choice including my decision to study arts, I recreate the entire network of ‘the who I was’ in my past and as such I continue enslaving myself to those relationships and only fuel the negative experiences that are the opposite polarity to the initial positive experiences that I used to build my relationships with people and with the profession/career I was veering myself toward.
And within this, I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to follow the usual pattern within the mind which is ‘dissing’ something once that one has squeezed the last drop of positive experience out of it, which means that once that it ‘served me’ and ‘its purpose’ and I’ve hit the ground back into reality about it and I am no longer seeing visions based on emotional and feeling experiences, then I go into the opposite polarity of talking bad about it and feeling righteous within that, without realizing that it is only the predetermined and rather predictable outcome from an initial positive experience that I created with such ‘passion’ about it that when the whole experience was no more, I ‘dropped’ down to the bottom and the opposite – so it happened just like a typical relationship wherein people first get in love with each other and as time progress and the energy runs dry, they part ways and talk shit about each other, so that’s what I did toward ‘art,’ and I didn’t even realize it because to me it was so right that it hadn’t fulfilled my expectations that I believed I had ‘the right’ to feel that way about it, without seeing the obvious: it was a feeling, an emotion, a judgment that came from nothing else but the ‘who I was’ toward art and so, within this ‘dissing’ recreating my past relationship to art over and over again – trapping myself in my own past.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to form emotional relationships toward what I deemed as ‘my career’ or ‘my path’ which in this case was art/being an artist and within this allow a physical process to become a rather emotionally driven relationship, similar to those that I’ve walked with individuals wherein there are a lot of feelings and emotions attached to something/someone that I want to hold onto and when the relationship is no more, such dependency then turns into a ‘lack’ of this fulfillment gotten from something or someone and as such, it turns into a form of bitterness ‘toward something or someone,’ without realizing that this all is really not about ‘art’ in itself or the people in my past relationships or else, it’s about myself and how I created relationships of dependency upon others in order to ‘satisfy me’ or ‘complete me’ or give me some kind of experience to which I could define myself, build myself, construct and upgrade myself as the ego that I was wanting to be within the ‘who I am’ as a professional artist as well as within the relationship formed in relation to who I am as an artist and in relationship to others.
Therefore I realize that the best way to follow through with this is to entirely let go of my experiences toward my past specifically and so be able to give myself back to myself as being able to focus on what is here, what I am working with, what I am developing as myself and also to align my relationship to art and be able to enjoy it, visiting museums or read about it, hear it, interact with it without loading the entire experience of ‘going to the museum’ and defining myself according to that any longer.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be spiteful in the past few years and whenever I would talk about some forms of contemporary art become infuriated and a bit angry about what I defined as being utterly selfish and self-centered and ‘useless’ to the problems that I was then realizing were ‘much more important than that’ – and in this, I still agree that there are more important points in life than some kinds of art that are merely conceptual and contemplative and ‘useless’ as a tool to create practical solutions to the world – however, this obviously doesn’t justify the fact that I’ve been spiteful and holding this love-hate relationship to it, and within this only fueling an inner conflict of still being interested in or curious about the current art forms that are emerging while at the same time judging it as useless so here
I had considered myself to feel bitter about art
Bitter: causing pain or unhappiness. Feeling or showing angry hurt or resentment
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel bitter about art as in becoming resentful toward it and toward the people that create it, not realizing that I had exactly done the opposite for a prolonged period of time which is why the inner conflict arose in the first place, all based on me wanting to make of art the quintessential human experience and making it the most ‘honorable profession on Earth’ or so, and so believing that being an artist was the same or similar thing as to say I was chosen by god and/or touched by god, so in essence a lot of delusions of grandeur that I created within me and that I projected toward art. So, this bitterness as in being angry, resentful, dissatisfied toward art has to do with me having to let go of my own desires/hopes/dreams related to me becoming an artist. So once again, it has nothing to do with ‘art’ in itself but the expectations and experiences I created toward it and so, when realizing I had to stop pursuing my mind any further and only feeding my ego, that’s when the opposite relationship came up.
When and as I see myself feeling bitter about any form of art that I may see, read about or even people that create art and discuss their work – I stop and I breathe, I ensure that I am not tensing my physical body and experiencing that bolt of energy within me wanting to ‘let them know the truth about their creation’ which is in fact nothing else but me wanting to ‘express’ through reaction, as if I had ‘the truth’ within myself and so within this actually becoming nothing more than an ego that wants to be recognized for ‘my new position’ which is not really supportive but only a packet of resentment, judgments and overall bitterness toward that which I once praised.
I realize that this all comes from how much the entirety of ‘my world’ and ‘myself’ that I deemed as ‘real’ and ‘genuine’ were in fact not, so this whole relationship with art I remember very well was the first initial ‘big hit’ that I took when understanding who we are as the mind, as a preprogrammed mind consciousness system and that the thing I feared losing the most was the personality I had created through/as art and having chosen that path for myself, which is why that initial big fear of loss about this self-definition had such a ‘big impact’ in the aftermath, wherein I allowed myself to not be entirely self-directive toward art but instead then create the opposite polarity and so still participating within the mind. And this came through even though I believed I was ‘well over with it,’ only to test out not long ago that there were still reactions coming through the more ‘artistic’ documentaries I would watch and wanting to ignore the reactions to it until I simply believed that I had to ‘speak my mind’ about it – and yes, it was ‘my mind’ and a till here no further to when and as I see myself questioning or asking another about their creation from the starting point of the ‘bitter drop-out of an artist’ that I became in my mind, and so stop defining myself based on the choices of the past and focus on communicating or creating a dialogue based on what we can learn from it, what can be useful to understand our human condition or even innovate and take points to be creative in the ways that I can support myself and others through this process while using art as a supportive tool for it, without endowing it the entire ‘duty’ of ‘changing the world’ in itself, which as I’ve previously discussed, it’s impossible.
When and as I see myself wanting to create an experience of spite or disdain and bitterness toward ‘art’ and seeing it as useless or pointless while at the same time being curious about it, I stop and I breathe – I realize that both the negative and positive experiences are only re-creations of the ‘who I was’ in the past as an art-lover and then the who I became as the anti-thesis of that which was pretty much being very critical toward art within a negative context, and so I simply stop, breathe and observe/interact with it without creating any experience but rather seeing it objectively for what it is. And this is the challenge really because I had cult-ivated the experiences attached to works of art and becoming emotional about it, which I also learned from books at the same time. So I realize that all of my emotions and feelings are in fact nothing else but knowledge and information that I’ve translated into energetic experiences that serve no purpose for me to interact with something or someone.
I commit myself to be able to be here as breath while witnessing performances, watching/visiting museums or art galleries and also to remain here as breath when getting too excited about seeing something because that’s also once again recreating the same pattern of the visual vicious – which I’ve talked about extensively of – and so realize it’s just images, it’s just pictures, it’s just a part of reality and the only way I can ‘react’ to something is if I ‘load’ all my past-definitions in order to react based on memories and the knowledge that I had built around art and the ‘who I am’ toward art. So I can practically simply stop those past definitions and focus on reality.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to read about the Stendhal syndrome in some book and consider that I would get this kind of experiences such as seeing ‘the sublime’ and mostly images that would depict the end of the world, which is why I focused myself so much on depicting the end of the world and getting a kick out of it, and believe that these emotions were ‘normal’ to me and that I had all the right to ‘express them’ but, the reality is that it was all a self-created experience and that there was no ‘magic’ or ‘real connection’ to painting or anything like that which I believed was something ‘special’ within me. Therefore I realize that these experiences were pretty much all created within my desperate need to ‘feel something’ because I had deemed the ability to ‘feel’ as in becoming emotional as special, as sensitive, as ‘unique’ in a human being – and so I created my own web of experiences according to how I would see others would feel and so mimic it, read books that were very emotional and then going determining what I would find as ‘emotional’ and what I would like to experience and so integrate as part of the ‘who I was’ as the characters that I read about and that I eventually wanted to create for myself.
I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to made of past relationships as something conflictive and filled with ‘turmoil’ inside my mind as I realize that this was also part of the definition of who I wanted to be as a very sensitive person in order to be able to have stories to tell or talk about, as I believed that I had to suffer to make any real art. Therefore, I realize that any experience I created toward something or someone wasn’t part of reality as such, but entirely self created in my mind. Within this, I realize that also in my relationships the experiences I created about others were never ‘real’ as such, but only the plethora of experiences and definitions I created upon them – that’s why once the energy ran dry and seeing the individuals or situations that I was in within my life with sober eyes and frame of mind, the ‘truth’ of myself and the interactions with others/something came through as it is.
So a way to redefine a relationship it is to first of all no longer define tit through/as an emotion or feeling, something that we believe is ‘real’ in the mind based on memories, ideas, beliefs, past experiences that we then make real as our preference, as that which ‘we want,’ without taking physical reality into consideration.
Therefore an emotional relationship will always end up as a ‘fuck-up’ if it is not aligned to physical reality wherein I can stand as an individual that first of all ponders what it is that I sought in my relationship with something/someone that I believed I didn’t have myself, alone – and so realize that whichever I was expecting to get from ‘art’ or someone in my life were and had been all points of separation, illusions that I believed were unable to be experienced within me. So this is how the best way to create a relationship with someone or something is to ensure that it is seen through the eyes of physical reality, where no emotions, feelings, no past experiences, no ideals, wants, needs or desires become a decisive factor in terms of defining who I am toward others, as all I have to consider is myself and within doing that I can then interact with something/someone based on the principles that I can integrate within myself, as the relationship that I want to establish for myself so that no matter what I do, where I am, with who or alone, I remain stable, supporting myself, getting to know about others in the relationships formed with my reality, recognizing myself as one and equal with them, instead of seeing them as points to ‘fulfill me’ or things/experiences that I believed I lacked.
I realize that it’s been supportive to revisit this aspect of ‘my relationship to art’ to review my state of affairs in relation to other relationships based on emotions in the past, and so to focus on preventing further ‘fuckups’ as the ups and downs and polarity relationships of ‘love and hate’ as that is all of the mind – instead there are more physical aspects and perspectives to consider here as well.
Life on Earth in itself is built through relationships, so I cannot define relationships only as personal relationships with something or someone, but rather realize that we are all made of and constantly require and exist as relationships that define the way we live in our world – therefore the more we are able to act, participate and be part of these relationships in a physical and common sensical manner without being driven by desires, hopes, dreams, fantasies and illusions, the more we will be able to begin changing the focus of our reality – from the distraction that emotional relationships are to a rather physical process of aligning ourselves to that which enables our coexistence in the best possible manner – no feelings/emotions required for that, no special relationships but rather the equalization and realization of who I am as this interdependence
to be continued…
To learn more about how to establish proper Relationships suggest the Re-defining Relationships – Agreement Course as well as: