Welcome to Unbound Art, Embracing Life

Welcome to our new blog Unbound Art, Embracing Life. Kim and Fernando will be posting images and observations created to share with you our longstanding exploration of the relationship between consciousness and life.

We clearly sense that the ground of human existence is not in personal consciousness, but in life as a whole.

Personal and tribal identity, which is based on exclusive memory and self-centered and provincial thought, has separated each one of us from most others and alienated the entire species from life. The consequences of this double separation have always been bad, and are becoming increasingly dangerous.

Our present levels of conflict in every sector and at every level of society, as well as the ecological consequences of our reckless exploitation of the biosphere, seems to be placing in jeopardy the very survival of our species. This danger and the urgent necessity for sanity it underlies, seems to be begging every concerned and sensitive human being to question whether there might be an entirely different mode of being in the world.

Is a radical integration with life and harmony with one another possible?

Saturday, March 3, 2012

There Is No Separation...





Knowledge and belief describe the boundaries and constitute the contents and projections of the self. And the groups and institutions from which the self derives much of its identity and sense of destiny, also depend for their own on particular bodies of knowledge and belief. None of this fragmentary psychological and cultural content is related to the truth which is one, total, actual, and therefore not reducible to the knowledge of one presuming to stand outside of it. In other words, the very presence and outreach of the tribal and personal self is the negation of truth.

For one who is only interested in the possibility of finding the truth, there is then only one question then: Can individual instances of a general phenomenon of mental conditioning by previous experience and knowledge (personal memory and cultural tradition), revert to the source, the original truth? Can the human being give way to life itself?


It is of utmost importance to realize that this possible transit from the mental reality created by experience and preinformed desire to what is largely independent from such reality, cannot possibly occur in time. So “transit” is not an adequate term for what we are trying to convey here. We are not asking whether the self can move from one state of consciousness to a presumably better one guided by its own or somebody else's prescription. We are asking rather whether the ongoing accumulation and projection of experience that constitutes the self can come to an end.


No one can “know” the truth because it is unrelated to the trappings of the personal self: experience, knowledge, and desire. But complete and direct perception of the actual nature of the self and of the suffering it creates with its fragmentary, conflictive, and enduring mental content, is already on the threshold of truth because such insight cannot but obliterate the self. 




Drawing by Kim Schrag

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