Chapter 55
When the mastercraftsman
is fully immersed in the Creative Harmony,
he has the innocence of
a child.
Like a child he holds no
position,
thus his perception is unobscured.
[1]
He has no preconception,
thus he grasps things as they are.
Not imposing judgment or
expectation
he allows his work to form
according to its own nature.
His non-resistance to the
expression of the
Creative Harmony increases
his life force;
working all day, he does
not weary,
such is the nature of harmony.
[2]
To know harmony is to know
the essential.
To know the essential is
to be illuminated.
To impose one's will is to bring
disaster.
To aggitate the mind with excessive
thinking
is to loose one's clarity.
When things are taken to excess
the Way of Harmony is lost.
When the Way is lost one's
work comes to nothing.
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footnotes
[1] ...The longer I live, the
more ground I see to hold in high honor a certain sort of childishness
or innocent susceptibility. Generally speaking, I find that when we first
look at a subject, we get a glimpse of some of the greatest truths about
it; as we look longer, our vanity, and false reasoning, and half-knowledge,
leads us into various wrong opinions; but as we look longer still, we gradually
return to our first impressions, only with a full understanding of their
mystical and innermost reasons; and of much beyond and beside them, not
then known to us, now added (partly as foundation, partly as corollary)
to what at first we felt or saw...
John Ruskin; The Lamp
of Beauty: Writings on Art, page 87
[2] “Therefore we must harken
closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words
to the core within... And then the inner voice breaks free--now feebly
and now violently--from the words within which it dwells like a charm...
If we will
surrender our closed personalities, so full of tention, we are in a position
to accept this magical principle of life, whether in thought, intuition,
or in our relationships. For in fact we see every day beings who are absorbed
in one another, whether in living or in teaching, aimless or with direction.
So it is with every created thing, everything we can communicate, every
constant in the flux of living; each one has its own principle which shapes
it, keeps life in it, and maintains it in our consciousness. Thus it is
preserved, like a rare species , from extinction. We may identify it with
"me" or "you" according to our estimate of its scale or its infinity. For
we set aside the self and personal existence as being fused into a larger
experience. All that is required of us is to RELEASE CONTROL. Some part
of ourselves will bring us into unison. The inquiring spirit rises from
stage to stage, until it encompasses the whole of Nature. All laws
are left behind. One's soul is a reverberation of the universe. then too,
as I believe, one's perception reaches out toward the Word, towards awareness
of the vision.”
Oskar Kokoschka,
" On the Nature of
Visions" 1912
translated by Hedi
Medlinger and John Thwaits in Edith Hoffman,
Kokoschka: Life and
work
(London: Faber and
Faber, 1947)
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