Zen Garden

200x160cm

Doppelganger

The other day I ran into myself on the street.
I knew it was me. Same face, same pants, same shirt.

I wonder what I was thinking.

I got in my car and someone already was behind the wheel. It was me.
When we got home, I opened the door and there I was.

By Unknown

Ghosts Before Breakfast

By Hans Richter, 1928

Karin's Cabin

There's a lodge on the hill

and it's buried in snow

it's a home to awake

 

it's a home for lost souls

where a family's born

at an opulent meal

 

halved oranges glow

the pomegranates reveal

a cluster of crimsons

a still life come true

nothing that we are lacking

nothing that we could lose

 And exstatic laughter is filling the air

a baroque celebration

under gold chandeliers

Stars enlighten the passage in the night

where the moon is radiating

everything will ignite

like the fireworks guiding us in a new year

the corona in colours so bright in the sphere -

delirious dancing beyond the dimensions

a festive sensation of our existence.

Samsara

From the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists. And to think that all this springs from a civilization that claims to adore life, but actually starves it of any real meaning; that endlessly speaks of making people "happy", but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy. 

This modern samsara feeds of an anxiety and depression that it fosters and trains us all in, and carefully nurtures with a consumer machine that needs to keep us greedy to keep going samsara is highly organised, versatile, and sophisticate; it assaults us from every angle with its propaganda, and creates an almost impregnable environment of addiction around us. The more we try to escape, the more we seem to fall into the traps it is so ingenious at setting for us. As the eighteenth century Tibetan master Jikme Lingpa said: Mesmerized by the sheer variety of perceptions, beings wander endlessly astray in samsara's vicious cycle. 

Obsessed, then, with false hopes, dreams and ambitions, which promise happiness but lead only to misery, we are like people crawling through an endless desert, dying of thirst. And all that this samsara holds out to us to drink is a cup of salt water, designed to make us even thirstier.

Caravan

Caravan by Seri Cig on Mixcloud

Poem of the Atoms

O day, arise!

The atoms are dancing,
overcome with ecstasy.

I'll whisper in your ear where their dance is leading them.

All the atoms in the air and in the desert know well,
 they seem insane.

Every single atom, happy...or miserable,
becomes enamoured of the sun, 

of which nothing can be said. 

Jalal ad-Din Rumi