Any visual medium is acceptable (photographs, paintings, prints, drawings, 3D etc.) Send an image or two along with title, medium, your name and Diamond group to: alexis@alexisstjohn.com. This is not a juried show; all artists who submit will be represented in next month’s newsletter.
Spotlight: The Almaasery
by Alexis St. John
In this issue, we’re taking a break from the usual artist interview to bring focus to a valuable tool; the Diamond Approach Glossary, affectionately nicknamed “the almaasery.”
Cruising around the alphabetical list of Diamond Approach terms can be quite the worm hole, but a rich source of creative inspiration. I’ve chosen the first two entries in the hope they will inspire. The rest of the entries are paired with the submissions for last month’s call for art.
Change is Due to a Transformative and Creative Power
Being’s dynamism implies more than the fact that experience and perception change; it also implies that the change is due to a transformative and creative inherent power. It’s not solely a matter of cause and effect, although cause and effect is part of it. When I say “dynamism,” I mean a living force similar to the biological evolutionary force: it doesn’t always respond in the same way or in predictable ways. It is intelligent, and therefore its manifestations keep shifting around, moving toward more optimization of life. This is why I say that Being inherently possesses the optimizing force, or the optimizing thrust.
When you have a lot of basic trust, you are courageous and authentic. You take risks. You don't sit on your capacities. You engage in life wholeheartedly, doing what feels appropriate to you with the confidence that it will work out. Without much basic trust, you are paralyzed with fear of failure and fear of rejection.
Welcome to the virtual DAG art gallery.
Here are the submissions from the last month’s call for art. We asked artists to pick a term from the almaasery and let it inspire them.
Yellow
Irmgard Himstedt, DANS2, photo credit: Michael Dick
The Presence of Pure Joy and Delight
So, for example, activating the Yellow Latifa opens up one of the faculties of the heart, which is to wish, want, or long for what it misses. The wish is for what the soul, or its heart naturally and spontaneously loves. The Yellow latifa is the presence of pure joy and delight, but it also causes the soul to become curious and activates its sacred impulse of true and innocent wanting. This means that the greater and deeper that the realization of the Yellow Latifa, the deeper the truth one's heart loves and wants to behold.
Mountain of Integration
Lucy Johnson, Cascadia 3, mixed media, 18” x 24”
A True Experience of Integration
This process usually continues of its own accord if the individual is committed to the truth. The essence keeps extending its territory, displacing the personality, until it reclaims the totality of the body. Then the essence fills the whole body, the totality of the organism. Each cell is then full and vivified by the presence of essence. The whole organism is then unified and integrated. This is a true experience of integration. It is not only that the individual experiences his body as a whole, as one unit, but he experiences himself, all of himself, as a unified, integrated, homogeneous presence.
Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment, pg. 158
Spontaneity and Flow
Henry Stindt, DHR5, drawing
Experience of Flow
...In the direct experience of the soul, we know directly and intimately the sense of a direct attunement to the flow. We are not only cognitively noting flow, we are the flow. The flow becomes experientially more significant than the particular experiences or inner events. We actually experience ourselves as a flowing river of impressions. The river becomes the foreground of experience and the events recede to the background.
Green Latina: Compassion and Action in the World
Gail Staal, DHR 1-2-3 & Emerald Mountain, mixed media
Compassion is a Vehicle that Frees You from Self-Centeredness
Kindness also brings an unselfish attitude. If you have kindness, you have kindness for everybody, for everything. You have kindness for anything that suffers. You’re doing the work out of kindness because you suffer. You see that you suffer, and out of kindness for yourself you want to do something about it, and that kindness in time extends to others. Other people’s suffering hurts you too. You want to liberate yourself and you want other people to be free from their hurt and suffering.
Our Habitual Dichotomy of Experiencer and Experienced
The soul, then, is not simply an organism of consciousness, but is also an organism of knowledge. When we recognize knowledge as the fabric of all experience, we cannot hold on to our habitual dichotomy of experiencer and experienced, knower and known. The knower is knowledge, the known is knowledge. The knower is the field, and the known is a form that this field assumes without ceasing to be the field.
