No auto pls

Dear bloggie,

I feeling the philosophical blues recently, I decided I wan to dissect this conversation.



Ok, I going for the jugular of the conversation above, Wally's opinion on Andre's work in his workshop which is "strip away purposefulness" aka "To live with not having any particular thing to do". In my opinion, I dun really think Wally opinion is exactly what Andre is trying to do. I think rather, Andre is doing something but he is trying to be "alive".

Now, some would call me nuts. What "alive"? Andre's not dead, so of course he is alive. I am referring to "alive" as in "being conscious while living". Sorta like Andre said, trying to avoid to go into auto pilot mode.

There's is in Japan a practice call zazen meditation, which I think something Wally could probably define as an attempt to do nothing. Now, in zazen, during meditation the practitioner will count his breath. In and out, In and out. The whole intention of the process counting breath is so we focus our whole focus into a single thing, we cut out our thinking, we cut out all the external noise, we only count our breath...

I see this as breathing "lively". Often we breath, it's something automatic that we don't even notice. We shift our focus to our breath to breath with our conscious focus on it. Note, in zazen, we don't try to control the breathing, we just let it come naturally and count it.

We start with something small like counting our breath, then slowly proceed to see, feel, hear, smell our surrounding lively. That I think is what Andre is trying to do, to achieve... To be at the moment, to be there, to be awake...