Final Blog Entry

Final Blog Entry

A lot of people think meditation is this relaxation thing, almost like a trance, but in actuality it is this incredible awareness. To be present from moment to moment is to brush (gently) away all the thoughts and emotions that normally are racing through the brain, so that for however long one is meditating they are just constantly aware of only the present moment in time. This is a mental and a physical process. At least, in my head I always seem to separate my body and my mind as two different things. Certainly, they correlate to each other directly, however, in their core they function on different levels. The mind must be clear of thoughts and focused on moment-to-moment perception, while the body has to be in a physically aware state as well to be able to allow the mind to perceive things from moment to moment.

I feel like anyone that uses the right side of their brain on a regular basis, such as an artist or designer, already has a special aptitude for the ability to stay aware and present. For example, an illustrator probably gets pretty close to that state on a daily basis, even if they didn’t realize that they were. When somebody draws, there is this tendency to get into this similar state of just being physically aware of what you’re doing, where the pencil is going, how the paper feels against your hand and how various materials feel underneath the pencil. They already have the ability to get halfway there. However, they wouldn’t know how to go the rest of the half way there mentally, without practicing being aware from moment to moment. I am sure a lot of artists and designers may separate themselves in two when they are working on art. Their bodies would be fully attuned to what they are doing, but they might disassociate themselves mentally and use the time their body is busy working to think about things. Therefore, if they could just focus mentally on being mindful present moment, to present moment, they would be able to be successful.

I’m not sure I full understand the question about a contemplative aesthetic. A contemplative aesthetic could mean a certain look or feel, certain constant emotions or contemplative beauty. I think that no matter what the answer to that is, that it would vary from person to person and there wouldn’t be just one contemplative aesthetic. Each person is so different in how they think and how they achieve certain mental processes that it would be inherent that not every single person on the earth would have the same idea about a contemplative measure. There are certainly contemplative techniques that are the same, but I think the aesthetics, being such a beautiful, artful thing to begin with, would always have to be individualized. Each person would have their own preferences to music, colors, sounds or textures that would allow them to be contemplative.

I do believe there is a relationship between contemplative practice and creativity. Certainly, they help each other, and certainly practicing one would better the other, but there is a difference between the two. Contemplative practice involves a sort of training of the mind to be aware from moment to moment, where as creativity isn’t always so trained, it is more like a spark that suddenly has come and gone. This is why I think practicing both would make both practices stronger. If someone spends a lot of time with contemplative practices, they would have more connected neuron pathways for creativity to travel down. Also, it might be easier for them to brainstorm for creative solutions, because they would already be trained to gently push conflicting thoughts aside while they were trying to work. Also, if people practice being creative, they too have a lot of different pathways that are connected and they inherently must brainstorm to be creative, and so they might already have some of the skills necessary to be aware from moment to moment. The relationship between the two is fairly similar in the give-take ratio. As one grows, so does the other. Also, if one did not practice either for a while, both would suffer. The biggest difference is that contemplative practice requires a constant practice, where as creativity tends to be more spontaneous.

Contemplative practice certainly influences interactions between persons and among communities. It is such a widely world spread idea that it may influence people in one country to discuss their experiences with people from another country. People who practice contemplatively have the propensity to always want to know more about practicing and how to become better at it. Also there are so many different cultural ways to attain the same goal, that practitioners would be curious as to how it is handled from place to place. It is also such a gratifying experience that people would want to share their experiences and ideas with other people. It is one of those things that people would instantly create bonds with someone else who practiced, because of how affecting the experience itself is. Also, contemplative practices affect people and may allow them to handle situations better or to function more easily on a day-to-day basis with other people. This in itself would affect interactions between people and communities. People who do contemplative practices may handle situations of interaction better than people who do not. Their mind is in a different place and they are obviously more aware than people who do not practice at all.

I think my experience with tarot reading before I started doing my daily practice for this course certainly helped me to learn more about being aware from moment to moment. There is supposed to be the same meditative sense when one reads tarot cards. Most pagan activities like tarot reading or spellcasting involves being in a centered, focused and mental state. It is interesting because I have read a lot of books in the past about that sort of thing, and it is practically the same things we discussed in the contemplative arts class except perhaps worded a little different. At the core, however, there was the same idea of being present from moment to moment. I think paganism just uses a lot more specific visual cues in order to get people to that state of mind, where as the things we discussed in our contemplative arts class focuses more on physical sensations and direction to get people into a meditative state of mind.

Also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry, because of the various art oriented practices that I do daily, there was already this understanding of how to get my body to a state where it was aware from moment to moment, and from brainstorming for creative solutions there was the ability to clear my head of thoughts. In class, I feel like we learned how to integrate these two skills.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and what it had to teach me. I feel like it opened me up to all these different subjects I never thought about before and now that I am aware of them I want to know more. Also, I really enjoyed the sittings and the yoga practices that we learned in class and look forward to continuing those (in particular the body scan). I think for artists and designers, that it is especially important to be able to learn how to be mindful, and to practice it because it helps tremendously for the arts and for people who need to be creative. It also is just a very healthy thing to practice in general.

Daily Practice Final Project

In the end, I created a physical response and representation to the sensations and the processes I go through during my daily practice. Everything in the built project has a symbolism behind it. I wanted the glass base structure to represent my thoughts and the ability to clear them in order to focus and center myself. There are four cards (the ones I drew most often) that I chose to represent the four directions I normally concentrate on when I am trying to center myself. Obviously this is the balancing part, because it is very difficult to focus, especially when there is ComDesign on the horizon. The color around each card is the color of light I normally picture in a circle around me when I practice tarot reading. Also, amusingly enough during the final crit, the one card I had pulled the most often of all was the heaviest for some unknown reason, even though it had the same number of paper clips and everything. The four cards were: 3 of Shields, 2 of Spears, 11 Justice and 6 the Lovers.

Final Daily Practice

I find it incredibly interesting that the last card I drew for my daily practice happened to be "13 Death." This is actually a good card, though many people obviously think it is a bad card because it must mean someone is going to die (untrue). The card itself represents the end of something and the beginning of something else. Therefore I am incredibly amused that I pulled it for the last card of this daily practice. It is the end of the class, but hopefully I will go on in my life to learn new things about these subjects.

Also, on a side note, I am always surprised at my 'artist abilities' to judge space. I had the huge stack of my index cards to lay out so that I could take a picture of them all together, to show their quantity at the end, and I just started placing them down, with no forethought of how many there were. When I got to the last one I realized that I had laid down the specific amount needed to create even rows. Very odd.

Anyways, here they are!

I'm not sure if it was because I was concentrating so much on the project for this week, but it flew by and then when I was organizing my index cards to write this blog I realized I had only done three readings since last Wednesday! That's pitiful! Oh, finals week...

It seems at least now though that I have gotten into an easy flow about doing the daily practice. I haven't had difficulty concentrating on them in a while, not even with finals and projects looming over my head. I enjoy taking the time to sit down and do them. Also I feel like I know the cards themselves more and I am finding that my three words pretty accurately match up with actual meaning of the card. I had the easiest time with the first two readings this week, probably because they were after ComDesign. The one I did tonight was still easy to concentrate through, but I didn't spend as much time on it as I did the first two from this week.

Daily Practice

My daily practice has been going strong since last Tuesday. I have been able to do it every day since then, even while I was home for break. I found it a lot easier to do in my own room when I was at home. I think that scent had a lot to do with it. Obviously I am the most comfortable at home, but also the familiar smell of the wood furniture in my room mixed with the smell of incense that I've used in the past, reminds me of tarot reading in general. Over last summer I did a reading every night before I went to bed, it is the inspiration behind my daily practice for this semester. Though while I was home this time I did most of my readings during the morning hours, because these hours were the less hectic, and it was the most quiet time in my house (which is important because I have a younger sister and a dog who can both be very noisy, haha). Now that I am back in Syracuse, however, I want to start doing the readings again at night.

Beginning Pics for Project

These are two ideas for part of the cards that I have in mind.

Nowhere from Here

Although I enjoyed reading Jacquelyn Baas's article about art, I am at lost for an example of art that I have enjoyed in this way, or a piece of "relational aesthetic art." The part of her article that I enjoyed the most is the idea of an artist's life being full of art, instead of just when they choose to sit down and create it. I think this is important because as someone who enjoys studying art, I can't help but just enjoy certain moments in my day that I find beautiful, or scenes I see before me. It's a good thing that Duchamp changed the idea of art from just the product into including the process, because it would be a bit absurd to think that art is only just finished, typical pieces. I searched for quite sometime online to try to find a piece that interested me, but I often found myself becoming confused within articles full of art and intellectual jargon instead of finding actual projects. I'm sure that I would enjoy pieces like this in real life, in person, but reading about them only muddles my thought process. In fact, not to sound belligerent, but sometimes when reading about these artistic practices and theories I get a bit angered and frustrated, because I think a lot of artists, even if they really mean all the things they say, sound ridiculously pretentious. This could be frustration coming from not understanding what they are getting at, but you know that there are people out there that talk just to make themselves sound important. Anyways- I apologize, that was sort of a mini-rant. That's what I get for googling half an hour. Any piece of art or design that a viewer enjoys should have a certain aspect of relational aestheticism to it. There has to be something to draw the viewer in and keep them there. In ComDesign when we talk about creating design, our professors often say "seduce the eyes, and challenge the mind," or something along those lines.