See what is
Tap into the transformational power of great Art to see Indescribable Reality
SEE WHAT IS is a 7-week online art retreat with daily painting masterpieces, seeing practices, videos and live Q & A hours.
It is here for one purpose only: to help you truly see the world's indescribable, infinite beauty in every moment of your life.
Early bird discount ends May 2, 2020
Do you know this extraordinary experience of profound seeing...
… described by Aldous Huxley as seeing, moment-to-moment, the miracle of naked existence?
When the mind falls silent, and there are no boundaries between your inner space and the outer world, so that — in Paul Cezanne’s words — nature mirrors itself, thinks itself within you?
Or — in William Blake’s words — your doors of perception are cleansed, and you see everything as it is, infinite?
All colours are suddenly brighter, more luminous, and the familiar three-dimensional space and linear time dissolve into their fluid, infinite vibrations…
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?
Or this peak experience would wash over you as though from nowhere, as a gift, as a touch of grace?
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
But then it would disappear, replaced by the ordinary familiarity of “normal” seeing...
It's not your fault. It's the brain’s powerful unconscious mechanisms of visual processing kicking in...
These mechanisms are here for a purpose: they help you orient yourself in the complex world, to feel in control, to survive. And to do this, they relentlessly filter out the “inessential” — but the side effect is that the infinite richness and beauty of reality stays hidden from you.
These are fundamental mechanisms of vision, but they are also fluid, changeable, evolving. And Art — the magnificent art of painting — has a unique capacity to help 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.
I explored how it happened in every minute detail...
... 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.
This miracle is unlocked by three seeing practices:
Deep contemplation of paintings: approaching each painting is an insight into reality, a potential breakthrough, which can transform your life and change you forever.
Seeing pauses: this is as simple as it sounds: pausing — throughout your day — to enjoy seeing what’s around you.
Synergistic seeing: it is like holding the inner experience of a painting and your present-moment experience of seeing within the same space, and fusing these two experiences into one.
And this is basically all you will have to do in SEE WHAT IS... (with lots of suggestions on how to do it, and a carefully chosen sequence of painting masterpieces to guide you on this journey).
And these are three habits you will take away with you, to sustain this experience of profound seeing well after the retreat is over.
SEE WHAT IS leads you through a unique sequence of paintings
designed to expand your sense of vision, day by day and step by tiny step
Week 1: Celebration
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.
Week 2: Unity
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.
Week 3: Creating space
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.
Week 4: Mutual intercourse of colours
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.
Week 5: Shattering space and time
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.
Week 6: Self in space
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.
Week 7: Time-transcendence
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…
Here is how it is going to work:
Every week, there is one core practice to explore, plus a variety of optional deepening practices. You will need no more than two minutes a day to sustain your ongoing connection to the synergistic field of art and cultivate the new practices of seeing — but there will always be more suggestions to expand and deepen this experience.
Module overview
The theme of each week is introduced in a short video, including “guided seeing” of the first masterpiece of the week. This material is also available as an audio, and in the written form, for easy reference.
Daily support
Every day, you will receive an email with a link to a high-resolution reproduction to this day’s masterpiece, and some suggestions for today's seeing practices and tiny action steps to help you integrate new seeing habits into the flow of your life.
All your questions answered
In case you have any questions, or something doesn’t seem to work, there are optional weekly live Q & A calls (scheduled to accommodate all time zones).
Lifetime access
All materials are available to you forever on the course platform — so you can review them at any time.
So if you love the art of painting...
...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).
If NOW is the right time for YOU
- to expand and deepen the presence of art in your life
- to practice the sublime art of seeing by seeing through the eyes of its greatest mastes
- to liberate your sense of vision from the mind’s limitations, and
- to integrate Art’s greatest insights into your moment-to-moment experience of life and and its creative expression (whether or not it has anything to do with painting...)
please consider joining today, because SEE WHAT IS was created for you!
"See what is" opens on Sunday, May 3, 2020
And once it opens, you can start this journey any time.
But till then, I invite you to take advantage of the early bird discount (30% off the regular registration fee)
Early bird discount ends May 2, 2020
Life has a way of interfering with our best-laid plans, so this purchase gives access to SEE WHAT IS forever.
You can pause your journey at any time, and then resume it where you left it.
My Promise to You
SEE WHAT IS invites you to make a commitment to daily contemplation of a painting masterpiece.
Basically, all you have to do is open your daily email and click the link to the painting of the day…
Open an email, click a link — something you do many times during the day anyway!
You open the painting, and inwardly celebrate this tiny success… this as easy as it sounds!
And this is what unlocks the miracle of synergistic seeing.
If this experience disappoints you, I will happily refund your payment in full.
Your guide for this journey
My name is Elena Maslova-Levin, I am an artist — but, first and foremost, I am a humble spectator, in awe, amazement, veneration of the whole evolutionary unfolding of great art through the eons of human evolution.
This ever-present, and intrinsically synergistic, field of art is what gives me my power as an artist.
In SEE WHAT IS, I invite you to liberate and expand your sense of vision through deepening your own connection to this field.