Soul-Project Challenges
"These ideas are not reality."
BY ANTHONY ROSS
It's a fine thing to have a soul-project. A project like this is both captivating and challenging. It tests your will and it inspires you like nothing else does. The challenges that come up with it are what breaks the patterning or conditions that one is accustomed to. The project brings them up and inspires greater growth to places unknown and not yet reachable, or something.
The project I'm working on is super secret right now, but at some point it will be seen by the public and will be critiqued by many. I am the artist on this project, primarily. Meaning, all the pictures to it are my responsibility. Such huge responsibility. A lot of the times it's overwhelming, even though I am placing this on myself, and I know this, it is still something I am taking as a personal development project and something that I want to be good.
I realized that I had fallen into a trap here. The trap is that I was thinking of myself as my work. If the work fails, I'm a failure.
I don't think I'm alone in this, as someone who has done that to themselves. A mental clinging to what you do, and the effort in which you do that thing. This doesn't actually make the work better or the work more enjoyable. Though, I think it's a fine line in these areas to determine how much 'want' you need to do a thing well, rather than just the doing of it with a detached ideal to do it as such. So the question is, can the desire be there without the attachment? Can the understanding of what the result should be be there while the process is free to not have a conclusion? Can I work on what I want to work on without feeling like I need to? This is a bit paradoxical. This is the very question of playing and of how to describe it.
It is fortunate to not have the conditions of life play the part of pressure on an individual. In actuality, it is rare for most of us to have the pressure of conditions in such a manner. The real conditions are mental, much more subtle, and they, when unconscious, control your ideas, action and aspiration. So in this fashion, I continue to witness the coming and going of waves of uncertainty regarding finances, security in general, and future happenings. What will I be doing if I don't do well on this project? Am I doing enough financially so that I can work on this project and will this project help me have security later on or should I do something else that's financially stable in the meantime?
These things have nothing to do with the art, and are of importance for anyone, yet, their importance must be secondary to the real wealth of life and of qualitative being. If you plan for these, you could be missing a great deal of actuality. These thoughts occur and they bring my attention away from my work, because the feeling is that there is not enough in them. I run after these conclusions to what would be my preferred conditions, and I lose the unconditional and detached sense of well-being and peace. These ideas are not reality.
These same ideas of 'not now' can infuse any topic into their sense of self. Meaning, I can think 'not enough' or 'not good enough' about just about everything. This is also saying that 'now' is not enough. Without a detached understanding, these mental convictions will contain themselves in the projects and things that we are most observably influenced in and by. They will contain themselves in everything we see as conditions. It's in this way that this project of mine is so very difficult and exciting. The difficulty is something I attach to when I go to work on it. It's the idea that it should not be difficult 'now' (when I work on it), when I try to do a 'good' drawing. I have the conclusion of how it should be and the effort is to keep that conclusion in tact. That is the way one must work to have something come out as good as they feel it can be, compared with other things.
I know what good art is, so I want to make my art good. To know what that idea of good is and not be swept up in it is a skill. It's basically having the space to be a complete failure that is detachment. Anything goes. When anything goes, one ends up playing. When one ends up playing, the art or project generally turns out nice, or at least the making of it is fun. When the making of it is fun, the result is secondary. That is just how finances and security must be secondary to the fun that is the detached understanding. So the question is, how does one work on anything with this detachment? How does one remain in this detachment, and still do something that is just for fun? Again, it seems the doing of something just for fun is an odd idea, and that maybe the fun is also in things like the difficulty, which are found to be so NOT fun so much of the time. Thus the chasing of the conditions which is seen as fun is short-sighted. Real fun is understanding these mental blockages we have in anything we do. In that understanding, they transform. Then everything we do is fun and free.
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