We're filming a video in front of the mural, Sunday, 5:30-8:00 pm. Wear white shirt to participate in the filming of a music video for local artist Honore's song "Haven"
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| This is the actual Altadena Mural we created, but it's horizontal on site. |
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| Impact Artist Ekaterina Sky |
It has a secret purpose. It is a giant golden disc (kasina) surrounded by shooting beams of red, white, and maroon lines that produce a pulsating, stroboscopic effect. One takes a meditative seat in front of it on a yoga mat or towel, under the shade tree of what remains of Oh Happy Days Vegan Cafe and the city's main post office parking lot.
- DIRECTIONS: Travel north on Lake Ave. just past the Grocery Outlet. Turn left on Mendocino St. Turn left down first driveway after Jack in the Box. The mural is on the right behind the former site of the post office.
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| Don't "try" to try; just do it. It's as easy as that. |
Using the brilliant gold disc as a Buddhist kasina (disc) or Vedic Hindu mandala (or yantra-chakra), the lines producing a sensation of entering the disc, blurring then erasing the line between subject and object. It is a kind of nondual (advaita) experience of "oneness" in the sense of a Beholder blending with the Beheld.
Can't "concentrate" (unify the mind, gather the faculties to stay on one thing)? Use binaural beats with headphones while softly viewing the disc and doing nothing else.
Can't "concentrate" (unify the mind, gather the faculties to stay on one thing)? Use binaural beats with headphones while softly viewing the disc and doing nothing else.
I hear Chicago's "Colour My World" when I start to sit
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| Does the world suck, Winston? |
Who knows! It might be a utopia. We never see it objectively; we are always looking at it subjectively. So removing the difference between the two and becoming ONE with it, even for a moment, is very instructive for how the world and our experience of it has really been working.
The secret to meditative absorption, what the Buddha called jhana (Sanskrit dhyana), which literally translates as "meditation," is happiness. There is no "way to happiness," some wit once said. Why? It is because happiness is the way! Happiness and singlepointed attention on certain objects leads to piti, a blissful welling up of joy from within. It isn't that the world has changed and given us permission to be happy. It is that our cultivated happiness has all of a sudden bloomed and blossomed, sprouted and shot up. It is a kind of rapture, or better to say an effortless effervescence.
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| If stared at long enough, with a soft focus not tightness, it moves on its own. |
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| Artist a |
- I can't "do" it! No, you can't. But it (jhana) can happen when we set up the circumstances for it to arise by itself, like gardening. No one can garden, that is, no one can make a plant grow. But anyone can set up the circumstances for a seed to sprout and a plant to come into being. Bhavana, often translated as "meditation," means "cultivation" and literally "bringing into being." Leigh Brasington tells Dan Harris it's deceptively simple. Stop "doing." Just attend to the object.
- Samadhi is a super-conscious, coherent unification of mind accompanied by profound attention and stillness.
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| What is the Prayer for the Earth? |
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| Oh, I see it now, at my third eye. |
(Why do they call it "noble"? The word is Aryan, and it literally means "Enlightening," so we should call it the Ennobling Eightfold Path, the practice of which brings us to bodhi and nirvana, awakening and the ultimate truth).
Altered States (trailer)
(Sierra Fotuhi) Who would ever make a song about little ol' Altadena?
We are going to return soon to film a music video with the mural. Then we are going to move it. It's portable. So this free meditation is a limited-time offer. At the next stop it will have its QR code to listen to the prayers embedded behind the gold. Do you know what alta means in Spanish? "High." Not because it's above Pasadena, but because it's a place for a natural altered state.
- (Sleeping on Trees) We create our reality without knowing it
- Dhr. Seven and Ekaterina Sky, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly; Sri Yantra (Pin de Jen Browne | Arte de la geometría sagrada, Arte fractal)
