 LIGHT |
 INSIGHT |
 MEDITATION |
CONSCIOUSNESS ONLY "Consciousness Only,”—the very title of the course offered by the Dharma Realm Buddhist University near where I live in Mendocino County grabbed my attention, and my interest only increased as we delved into the “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only,” written in Sanskrit by an Indian monk in the second century CE and translated into Chinese by a Chinese monk of the seventh century, who also added hundreds of pages of commentary, all of which we read in a modern English translation. The term refers to the notion that all we can know of ourselves or the world around us is what our senses perceive and our minds interpret. The verses and commentaries detail the psychological mechanisms of how this situation comes about and what we can do about or with it. Something about the detailed step-by-step explication exerted on me the same fascination that weaving does, where I proceed row by row with wool and silk yarns to build up my tapestries. Predictably, my interest manifested in actual weaving, culminating in this tapestry comprising three panels, each about one yard square. The weaving took a long time (December 2019 to April 2022, which included the covid lockdown), affording many hours of meditation on both weaving and consciousness. The
triangles and swirls and birds relate symbolically to the text I was
studying, but the
finished work must now stand on its own. I will note only that the
glyphs
angling across two panels come from early neolithic ceramic
spindle whorls from Southeastern
Europe, their meaning undeciphered, but presumed to be spiritual in
nature, related to weaving and probably made by women. The two
dancing/praying figures are from neolithic rock art in Spain. I
see these
as remnants we can no longer clearly make out of the knowledge,
understandings and beliefs of
women in particular that antedate modern religions.
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