7-week online art retreat
… described by Aldous Huxley as seeing, moment-to-moment, the miracle of naked existence?
Or — in William Blake’s words — your doors of perception are cleansed, and you see everything as it is, infinite?
I don’t shut my eyes,
I don’t close my ears,
I don’t mortify my body;
I see with open eyes and smile
And see His beauty everywhere.
— Kabir
Perhaps you have had this experience within your own creative process, or when your eyes were suddenly cleansed by a work of art — a painting, a poem, a piece of music?
... because the brain’s powerful unconscious mechanisms of visual processing would kick in.
These mechanisms are there for a purpose: they help you orient yourself in the complex world, to feel in control, to survive. To do so, they filter out the “inessential” — but the side effect is that the infinite richness and beauty of reality remains hidden.
These are fundamental mechanisms, but they are also fluid, changeable, evolving. And Art — the magnificent art of painting — has a unique capacity to hep us in this evolutionary process.
As an artist, I’ve spent decades studying the art of seeing from the greatest masters of painting. I looked at their paintings as insights into reality, into the nature of things, learning to see what they saw and integrating these visual experiences into my own sense of vision.
But for quite a long time, I could reliably access this expanded sense of vision only within my own painting process. In “normal” life, it would only appear as occasional glimpses, rare peak experiences of seeing (mostly after visiting museums).
Otherwise, I was living firmly “in my head”, my visual perception routinely filtered and dulled by the mind — an ordinary, “default” seeing experience, so painfully different from what I knew was possible: the miracle of naked, fluid seeing opened to me by art, an indescribable reality beyond what the mind can comprehend.
But then my “painting” vision began to spill over to other moments of my life, and, moment to moment, and step by tiny step, it became my “new normal” — and transformed my life beyond anything I could have possibly imagined.
... by witnessing it in myself and in sharing it with hundreds of other people.
And through many trials and errors, I refined the process I’ve come to call “synergistic seeing”: simple practices and rituals which allow you to tap into Art’s potential to transform and expand your sense of vision, to get “out of your head” and into the direct, sensory, moment-to-moment-to-moment, embodied experience of infinite beauty in the heart of all things.
This is why offer See What Is, an online synergistic seeing retreat designed to make extraordinary, peak seeing experiences an ordinary, ever-present quality of your every day life, accessible to you in every waking moment — effortlessly, almost imperceptibly, through tiny daily steps.
Here is a week-by-week breakdown of what you'll find inside:
Discover and cultivate the inner experience of celebration — the fuel of transformation, the magical ingredient which makes any change effortless. Seven great artists — from Raphael to Marc Chagall — will help you to explore this experience, and set the stage for a deep transformation.
Dissolve the visual illusion of separation with the help of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-August Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh. Discover and experiment with seeing practices which make this illusion disappear from your moment-to-moment seeing experience.
Witness how your mind creates the familiar visual experience of three-dimensional space — in painting and in real life. This week’s masterpieces span four centuries, from Jan van Eyck to Gustav Klimt, so you can see three-dimensional pictorial spaces emerge and then dissolve into the infinite richness of colour.
Explore the inner dimensions of colour with the help of Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh, and learn to see the nuances of colour and light through their eyes and discover reality seen as pure colour vibrations.
See through the illusions of three-dimensional space and linear time by entering multi-dimensional pictorial spaces of Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Vincent van Gogh, and Franz Marc.
Transcend the illusion of separate Self and fill your heart with infinite compassion, to yourself and to your fellow humans, guided by geniuses of Rembrandt van Rijn, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh and Edouard Manet.
Discover the experience of time-transcendence, the flow of all time present within every single moment of it, and the stillness that lies beyond it. From J.M.W.Turner to Pablo Picasso, from Pierre-August Renoir to Marcel Duchamp — this is going to be a breathtaking journey through time…
but know you aren't fully tapping into its power to inspire you, to expand and transform your experience of life, your moment-to-moment experiential reality (which, by the way, is true for every single one of us, because this power is infinite).
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