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