True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art

I think the problem is that people are afraid they might be ignored, they might become failures, so they end up explaining everything they know, all the reference points at once. That attitude of poverty or failure makes your theater dirt, your poetry dirt.

Restrictions and inadequacies usually come from feeling burdened, as though we are carrying a heavy load. But if we develop the notion of space fully and properly, we begin to find that there is no burden, no load.

In this regard, we could review the three principles of heaven, earth, and human. Heaven is regarded as space. It provides some psychological space in your state of mind, the sense that there’s enough room for you to work. The space of heaven is primordial mind, free from conditions.

When there’s enough sense of space and of no struggle, we can afford to relax. We begin to discover what is known as sacred world, in which any artistic endeavor is regarded as sacred.

Back to square one is more than simply trusting your intuition.

When you begin to understand relative symbolism, you realize that relative symbolism is like a nipple. You are fed constantly.

It is jumbled up with a lot of stuff we have collected throughout our life of birth and death, our existence in our world. The question is, if we work with that, could we produce a work of art? Is there any hope that finally the world will be what is desired or dreamed of as a perfect world,

If we have an iconographic understanding of the redness of our desire, the blackness of our aggression, and the grayness of our ignorance, then at least we can begin to see some of the patterns in our life. We can begin to understand how all this visualization takes place in our life, in our world.

You don’t need very much inspiration at all. Actually, you don’t need that much vocabulary or tricks of any kind to create good works of art—poetry, painting, music, or whatever. You just simply say the experience you’ve experienced—just say it, just play it, just paint it.