About the self-evident

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Exploring creativity, integration and meaning

About the obvious or “Our stone and the Creator of the world have a common name” (from Rosarium Philosophorum) Everything is simpler than it seems. We don't have to go anywhere, look for anything and desire nothing in order to gain access to the self-understanding because it is within us. We just need a way to get there. It is easy and obviously difficult to recognize what is self-evident in such-being. Transferred to images, these are the first four Tarot cards (0, 1, 2, 3), where the horizontal and self-evident SO-being is not yet touched by the vertical consciousness. When the development of the mind had begun to make the natural path through "the head" in order to shape the awareness of the self-evident, of being like that, the mind, instead of closing a natural circle, fell out of the orbit and had begun , to develop in a straight line, to become independent and to move away. Like a rocket, he is racing at great speed in his dangerous escalation and has forgotten the whole, the self-evident. We are now at a point in our evolution where we are waiting for integration, for the self-evident, natural creation of the closure of the form, we are waiting for the self-evident and the self-evident does not take place. We almost don't know what it's about! The metaphisical questions of who we are and what is the meaning of life resurface. It seems that humanity has forgotten where it stands and where the path leads. We urgently need to be reminded of what the self-evident is and where it can be found. If the statement is true that it is good the way it is, then the illness of our time and our world is a good sign. We react to draw attention to the disturbed balance. The messiahs of our time and the zeitgeist, each in their own way, feel that the self-evident circle (shape) must be closed in order to be able to say goodbye to the old millennium and to be able to be reborn again. When I started painting and drawing with my left hand and with my eyes closed a few years ago, I didn't know that it was the beginning of the closing of a circle that heralded not perfection but completeness. I did not know that this dark side guards the secret of secrets (secretum altissimus), the “Path of the Left Hand,” as the Indian tantrists call it. I didn't know when I integrated two left elements, earth and water, into my two right-hand elements, fire and air, that through this pairing (coniunctio Solis et Lunae) the fifth element, the quinta essentia, would appear (lapis philosophorum). 2 Painting with my left hand opened up the way to myself. It is the path to the Holy Marriage, to the marriage of myself, it is the path to integration. The text of the alchemists in the “arcanum artis” shows us how this was forbidden in the 16th century in the following words: “Note well: in the art of our magisterium nothing has been hidden by the philosophers, with the exception of the secret of art, that you shouldn't tell anyone; for if that were to happen, he (the traitor) would be cursed, he would incur the wrath of God and die of apoplexy. Therefore, all error in art lies in the fact that it does not take the appropriate starting material. Therefore we want to make use of the venerable nature, because from it and through it and in it our art is born and in nothing else. And so our magisterium is the work of nature and not of the master craftsman.” The critical touch of the left hand indicates “sinistres”, illegitimate, morganatic. Emotional and instinctual, namely the fatal admixture of incest and its “perverse” fascination. This dilemma sheds new light on the mystery of art: it is the serious danger of heresy. If we take the fear of divine punishment in the event of betrayal as what it seems to mean, then it must be a matter that is probably dangerous to the health of the soul, rather than a typical “peril of the soul”. The worship of nature, an ancient heirloom, stood in more or less secret opposition to the church's worldview and, to a certain extent, directed heart and mind onto a left-hand path. The fact that I write so extensively about painting with the left hand has to do with the fact that it helps you find the channel or the path. That opens itself, that is there by itself, where the pictures paint themselves and write poems themselves, where they talk about themselves as a matter of course, where everything becomes a flow of intuition and where the state of integrated consciousness and unconsciousness as a whole becomes self-evident Produces joy, love, health, happiness, peace of mind, tranquility and success. Perceiving the path plays a major role in recognizing the self-understood or the divine. When we paint with the left hand, we are easily led back to our origins, to our own sources, to our own being, to the prima massa, to recognize the chaotic darkness, to include it, so that “lumen quod superat omnia lumina” to be born. As Democritus said: nature delights in nature, nature overcomes nature, nature dominates nature. By painting with my left hand, I connect the opposing nature within me, I marry my soul within me (unio mystica), and through regular painting I approach the divine, the self-understanding within me. By painting I climb the levels of the higher order of the natural, the self-evident SO-BEING. Rosarium Philosophorum: “in habetibus symbolum facilis est transitus”. (For those who have the symbol, the transition is easy.)

Creating paper in the service of becoming human

The post-war period lasted longer in Slavonia, in the eastern part of Croatia, than in other regions. My best friend Marlena, a German interpreter and the owner of an art gallery, lives in the small town on the Sava. She sells and exhibits my pictures, publishes books and takes women interested in art on study trips to the most famous picture exhibitions in Europe. She had had an old, unfulfilled wish for a long time and I knew how much she would like to learn how to make paper. Nobody there knows the ancient art and so this wish remained just a dream. At Christmas my friend Milena called me in Istria and said that the city of Munich had invited Korean paper artists to make paper in the large, white tents on the Teresienwiese. In the workshops they will teach paper making. So I packed my suitcases, distributed the flower pots to my friends, left a few kilos of dry food for the cats and set off along the snowy and icy roads in the Alps to Germany, where I had previously lived and exhibited for decades. In the summer, with my newly acquired knowledge of making paper, with wooden ramen, kaolin and a few other ingredients, I went to my hometown, where a group of women were waiting for me; Women filled with the will to live, spiritual renewal and hope. All of this should reinforce their paper-making skills. For months, a whole year, people recycled, drew, created. During the summer holidays, the warmest month of August was chosen, Marlena decided, together with the women, to create the largest paper picture in the world and thus enter the Guinness record book. The organization and logistical framework of ten women created the conditions for this unheard of undertaking. The scaffolding was consolidated in the main square and 600 hundred kilos of palps (paper pulp) were divided over days to create a picture that would have been 80x60 meters in size, the largest in the world. But the summer weather changed mercilessly. The August rains began, the paper was covered and carefully stored and looked after for days and nights, strengthened with paste, torn and glued again, softened and dried again. TV teams accompanied the stages of the work and reported the results on TV broadcasts. And just like the medieval alchemists in their laboratories, where instead of gold only the wisdom stone was created, so in this small town traumatized by the war, a new quality of life emerged from the creation of paper, liveliness, a sense of community and an interest in creative work. For a few years the paper was made in the courtyard of the art gallery until an entire room was filled and the experienced teachers were able to offer their art to school children in schools. This was followed by numerous exhibitions of paper art objects and pictures throughout the country. Once the gigantic paper picture hung on the facade of the old school in the center of the city and everyone could see the heroic creation, the image of Slavonia with golden wheat fields, red poppies and the sunlit sky over the Panonian Plain.