Anicca... anicca... anicca...

Every once in a while we might come across some juicy bit of wisdom that we had known and lived, but forgotten, or seemed to have forgotten. I have a downloaded program from the old student Vipassana website on my computer that quotes a Vipassana teacher or a Dhamma scripture to inspire my daily practice. Every hour a quote comes up, along with the sound of a gong, if you set it to do so. I had the gong for a while, but it can be startling. Still, I get a quote every hour, and the one the other day struck me at the core.

"Anicca when properly developed will solve almost all your problems. It might not even be necessary for you to ask questions for answers. As the appreciation of anicca grows, so will the veil of ignorance fade away."

These words are by Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who shared the teaching of Vipassana with S. N. Goenka, who in turn taught it to me through video discourses at many a 10 day course. Anicca ("Ah-Nee-Cha") is a Pali word that is best defined as (the quality of) the arising and passing away. In English, our best translation is the word impermanence, though that carries a slightly different meaning.

In the courses’ instructions, Goenkaji will continuously say, “Anicca... anicca... anicca...” There is a book called The Meditator’s Handbook that has a part explaining the reason for this repetition. When something is repeated again and again in a school setting, it is likely going to be on the test or exam. Therefore, it should be remembered. Anicca is this cornerstone, key point that is on the final exam of Vipassana, right through to Nibbana. And I forgot the vitality of it til I was reminded by this digitized quote from U Ba Khin.

(Sayagyi U Ba Khin)

Why is it so vitally important? It is the basic, rooted observation of anicca within the framework of your own body that liberates you from your bondage of suffering. As one meditates, this is not so much ‘remembered’ as it is ‘felt or experienced.’ It’s not intellectual, though it is useful to understand intellectually what it is you’re observing, or beginning to understand at a direct, non-intellectual level. To return to the quote which says, “almost all of your problems will be solved with this developed,” is not an overstatement. To truly realize, with an understanding in spoken language, but also as a developed, inner knowing-ness that is as true as knowing that you have hair, or hands, or anything like this that is indescribably taken as a ‘usual thing,’ is to have an imperturbability to all of that which is phenomenal.

What does that mean? It means all things that come and go are no longer problems as they were before. To take some of the great, exaggerated examples from Neil Gaimen’s ‘Make Good Art Speech,’ I can say that if your “husband runs off with a politician, your leg gets crushed and then
eaten by a mutated boa constrictor, IRS is on your trail, or your cat exploded,” you will remain more
balanced with a innate understanding that both the bad things and the good things are ever-arising and passing away. As Neil says in the speech, when these things happen, you can return to the salvation of “Making Good Art.” I don’t disagree with that advice, knowing that it can help, but that doesn’t help you actually see these things as lesser problems, but rather is a coping mechanism once the problem has problemed you. Obviously these are examples of negative things, but even the positive or wanted things do not last forever. It is easier to intellectually understand that a painful, unwanted circumstance will pass away. It is harder to full-heartedly be aware of the fact that the most pleasurable circumstances will do the same. When we cling to these, we are creating problems with as much ignorance as we would if we were to worry about the bad thing that has or could happen.

(Actual cover on the left. Alternate 'anicca' version on the right.)

In difficult, pleasurable or also neutral moments, I’ve found that the clarity of knowing and feeling within myself that this is passing has sustained more vitality , joy and true happiness than any other bit of knowledge in this world. Words themselves don’t cut it. We need wisdom of the reality of it within ourselves. Otherwise we can forget and doubt this truth. Even with a daily practice of directly observing and knowing this, we can forget about anicca. In some way, the feeling we cultivate remains with us in moments throughout each day and night. The awareness develops to be used at all times, regardless of how terrible or elating a situation can be. Then, we can fully enjoy or fully experience sadness, and never cling to it, never make a story out of it that creates a boundary to our successful, aware living.

This quote hit home for me so much because of my development in experiencing this impermanence directly. It’s not just words to me, but truth of being. This truth translates into seeing all things, whether it’s writing, eating, working, drawing, playing, moving, sleeping, living - as change. I sometimes get caught up in mental stories. I create them for myself and they cause me misery. Yet it isn’t long before I bring my head above the water and cease the drowning of my ignorance. Again, I arrive at a peaceful place, treading the water of the phenomenal with a smile in my Self. There is a saying in the Vipassana courses that illuminates this truth. Goenkaji laughs when he says, “You’re on the path of Dhamma. Nothing can go wrong.” That is not an overstatement. Take one step in the right direction and keep walking. Walk on the path consistently and you’ll never want to stop. You’ll only stop out of your own ignorance, and you’ll be the first to notice.

Anicca... anicca... anicca...

- Anthony

Loving Letters of the Dragon

Reading the collections of essays and letters by Bruce Lee is fascinating and inspiring on many levels. The legend who lived only to thirty two was a contemplative, intelligent man. He starred in twenty Cantonese-language films before the age of eighteen, founded schools, taught and developed new techniques of martial arts and continued to write, philosophize and make films his whole life. Everyone knows that Bruce is someone who sought to express himself authentically through his art and life.

I am reading two books. One is Artist of Life: a collection of notes and essays by Bruce. The other is Letters of the Dragon, which is a collection of Bruce’s letters to friends and family, often sent from America or Hong Kong. To read the personal writings of someone who was adamant in expressing truth is a wonderful thing. Letters are already a medium of personal richness and for the author of them to be so full of life himself, they are truly a pleasure and insight into a caring, persistent and well-rounded person. As Bruce Lee might say, “Man! So cool.”

Yet with all his magnificence as an individual, Bruce was confined to the collective framework of human beings in his time. Thankfully, we have a collection of letters because of it, as supposed to a multitude of text messages. The care of writing a letter is something that strikes me as a more expansive way to communicate. Reading Bruce’s letters reminds me of how technology has changed our interactions to a global level. We can quickly call, email or send information across the world. We can physically travel to anywhere in a hurried pace and have the knowledge of where we’re going and what it’s going to be like before we even arrive, through our world-wide cloud of information. It is the inspiration for care that I feel through Bruce’s life as a human being who deals with common struggles of us all. Mundane elements such as financial concerns to deeper truths such as death, the art of expression and the cultivation of inner peace.

Bruce was an explorer with a respect to an inner calling that shaped his actions and perspective. It is inspiring to have those who have walked their own personal/impersonal path of authenticity and wisdom. It is with continued appreciation that I read books of the great minds that are now left like footprints in the snow. I will never know Bruce Lee the man, but as legend, expression and wisdom, his essence lives on as a guidance and inspiration. From his readings, I hope to gain a deeper appreciation for the simple gifts of each moment. To see with freshness as the situations reveal themselves. Like Lee’s own jeet kune do, there is no way to the Way.

Our paths will all intertwine, like Bruce’s to mine, yet each moment is unique for us alone. From pages of his words, we can carry the meaning of a live well lived into this unique moment, expressed as what is. The care of this sacred place in time and space will change us more than we can imagine. This can inspire others to have that same sense of freedom and feeling of the truth of being, in all our layers of exchange with this world. The words of Bruce Lee inspire me not to take any friend, foe, moment or sentence for granted. This holds true to the dearest part of my heart.

With love and care for the essence of Bruce Lee,
Yours truly,
Anthony

“I will give you my heart, please don’t give me your head only.” - Bruce Lee

An Honorary of Vipassana Meditation

Why I meditate is obvious to me. It declares in clairevoyance that traces of the mind, back to the past or into the imagined are like clouds in a sky. We could never keep up. It’s either beauty like a rainbow, or black clouds like the storm before it.

These clouds are ever flowing, changing movements inside and outside our human experience. We cannot control them or cling to them. The more we try, the less we live free. The analyzing won’t do us any good either, for how many more clouds are there and for how long can one be analyzed? Let’s be quiet, ripple-less, and see what reflections show up in the water. There it is, the moon, a symbol of floating, effortless harmony.

Clouds are the continuous thoughts. In Vipassana, the aim is not to quiet thought, it is to relinquish suffering, or to see suffering as it is and through direct understanding we can cultivate eloquence, serenity and adequate action in ourselves and in the world we gracefully and reliably inhabit. With a discipline of two daily sittings, I devote discerned time to be aware of the fact that my mind and body are impermanent. This is through observation of the physical sensations that I experience directly. Without reading, observing nature outside myself, or hearing from another, I can still feel the change as it happens without it becoming second hand knowledge. The directness of truth cannot be dissected in a manuscript. Though words at their best inspire intuition and wisdom beyond their descriptions, there is always time to analyze, judge, divide and doubt. The freedom of true listening is doubtless, because no boundaries are known in a complete act of attention. Instead, the sky is empty and the whole of mankind wanders in and out of view. To observe objectively the sensations, we find ourselves touching at the very root of the communion of mind and body, self and other, and the many measurements that we distinct.

Without the calculated mind that thinks in steps, procedure, and movements dictated by the past knowledge it records, we can begin living each moment with perspective and service. There is no turmoil in impermanence. There is only change. When the plan is the action itself, there is never time to think we have made a mistake in how we proceeded. It is respect for ourselves to water the garden of free, unperturbed innocence. Change takes place and we either have the perspective of equanimity or reactivity. The change itself is neutral, like the weather. It is our projections that can cause problems to the contrast of our expectations, false to the unknown, paradoxical nature of existence and the universal laws of nature which can be felt and experienced directly within oneself. The breath is always there, at the beginning of someone living their life instead of solely thinking it. There is no division here. We can renew life and incarnate now, fresh and lively, with no despair. All it takes is ourselves. The garden of goodness within grows with the light we give unto it. Each is responsible for this necessary cultivation of peace in the frontier of a new life, beginning each moment. Meditation brings this absolute truth and these qualities of reverence into action, which I am choicelessly practicing each day due to the credence shared with me by the teachers and community of this practice, a fellowship practicing to live in responsible harmony with every living thing.

To write in plain words is difficult when speaking of the untouchable, the real, the truth of direct, objective perspective of my own life and the lives of all living things connected to this that I am. It is deeply transparent in all I do. The practice has integrated into my life over the last five years with tremendous force, energy and immunity. It is a well I fill each morning and night that spills out jewels as bright as the full moon and as ineffable as the sky. I am like a budding flower and to those who listen, you are the bees who spread my wonderful seeds of Dhamma. It is our garden. Together we are the world that makes the difference. Together we walk anew with every breath, as every sensation compels us to feel the subtleties of how life is so perfect, no matter what we think. Don’t waste your time, sweet bees. Touch the realness that you are, the perfection that you are. Now, or in a hundred years, our abilities of perception will be just as readily available to discover a truth unbound, unhurried, unplanned and unified. Don’t search for galaxies outside. Look within every day and live as you are. It’s so simple, but we tend to complicate things. Don’t give up. Don’t be idle. Rest and be in (y)our freedom.

(All photos by When Anthony Was)

All the best,

Anthony R.

My current process to create an illustrated novel

In this post I'm going to share the steps that my brother and I are taking in a streamlined, non-messy fashion. Of course the actual process has many steps and other aspects that are integrated or left out of these several clear steps, but these are the necessary components of how we're getting our ideas onto and into a finished copy to publish, after much exploration and more to come.

Step 1) Writing

Most of the writing is done on paper by hand or on the computer in Libre Office or X Mind. The scratch notes and ideas are then compiled and interlaced into an actual scene that contains characters and flow of conversation, rather than journal notes, incomplete phrases and monologue inquiries. It's passed back and forth through programs, but X Mind has a nice way to organize the actions of the characters or scene on the left, and the colour coded dialogue of the different characters in lines on the right. Then it may be taken from this format and re-placed into Libre Office to print and work on the scene on paper again as needed.

Step 2) Layout

Once the writing is done, the Layout is a simple process of getting a basic, rough idea of where text and images go together on a single page. The layout of this book is likened to something like Dinotopia or a children's book, but with words more spread out than single large paragraphs on each page. Each page has sketches like stick men or worse at this point, and scratchy coloured pencil to mark where the words of the characters will be placed along with the illustrations. We as authors can barely even understand what we're looking at here, but it's a necessary step in the process. When we can draw really good, really fast, this step will be more integrated with the next.

(Words in red coloured pencil. Super rough sketches in pencil.)

Step 3) Better Sketches

The next step is to draw out some images that would be understood if someone were to look at the page. We are taking standard office paper and sketching out each page in a rough, but much clearer form so that we can see where the final piece might end up. This is a big jump from the stick men, pillow head drawings from the Layout phase. This is done without adding any words to the page.

(Just one sketch example - different from the whole page as it's described)

Step 4) Photoshop text

I then scan these preliminary drawings into P.S. and throw them on a fixed template page that will eventually be the final format and file to print and publish. After doing this, I copy and paste the text from our Writing files and place them accordingly within the scanned sketch pages we have pasted and arranged in the document. This may require some adjusting and resizing of the images and words to make them fit together and not overlap. It is still in a rough format, but it is readable with the words and pictures together for the first time.

(Not an official sketch page. More images and words would be there.)

Step 5) Style Guide

The context of our story inspires many types of art. As a way to continue studying artwork in an academic sense, but directing this studying into a streamlined focus on moving the finished pages of the story along, I've started to create Style Guides for each page. In a sense, it's like doing colour thumbnails for a complete book, such as James Gurney did for Dinotopia, or others would do for movies and so on. In my approach, I'm using other people's artwork that I like and would like to emulate as an overlapping template to guide the visualizing of the finished page. The images carry a certain tone or style that symbolizes and emphasizes what I'm feeling from our story in this page, these words and image. After adding the text into Photoshop, I create a folder with many layers of other artwork I've dragged in over top of the sketches. The art is placed over top of the sketches as a guide to see the whole page with a representation of where the art could be in the end.

(The content of the artwork reference pictures won't necessarily match the content of the illustrations needed for the story, but the style and visual reference will influence the final versions.)

Step 6) Studies and Final Page Creation

With the Style Guide in place, I will first do master studies of the artwork I've selected for each page. Then I will draw the images on the page as they need to be in the story. I will carry some essence of my studies into my own artwork by aiming for the greatness that I see in the referenced art and at the same time creating a new piece that is directly framed into the story and the final pages of it. It will be as good as I'm able to do it at this time, and then I will move on to the next page. I may also have to do additional studying before drawing the final image. Say for example I have pasted a certain style over top of an area where I'm going to draw a character's head, but I don't know how to draw the character yet. I will have to draw the character, based off whatever photo reference or ideas I have for them, as well as the style inspiration, then combine the two together. I have to learn to study while I create this story, rather than learning to eventually create it one day far in the future when I'm 'better.' This is the surest way I've come up with to apply my education in art to the actual goal right now, which is the process of bringing this to a complete stage of readability. Thus, after this step, the images are all compiled into the printable Photoshop document to be read and enjoyed with flow and harmony. Then, we are ready to show it to everyone.

(Example: You'll see when it's done.)

What do you think? Share in the comments or on Social Media.

- When Anthony Was