When I entered my mother’s house I had quite a shock.
A strange and new experience, taking me by surprise.
It was good to see my mother again, but that wasn’t what was overwhelming me. It hadn’t been that long since I last saw her as she used to visit me in the monastery two or three times a year.
No, this most extraordinary sensation was not about her. As I stepped through the doorway and walked along the hallway I was surprised by the way in which the objects of the house called out to me!
Especially the paintings.
They immediately caught my attention with a sort of vibration I can only describe as being a brightly coloured noise. Of course they were not physically making any noise. Nor were they glowing with a light of their own. I had seen them before when I lived here many years ago. But from the corner of my eye they seemed to be luminescing in vivid colours. I could almost “hear” something from them as I passed by.
When I stopped and studied one of them I was sucked into the detail of the picture; first the expression on the face of the person in the portrait, the look in her eyes as the light reflected from her pupils, the thoughts behind those eternally gazing eyes, the feelings she had in that moment whilst she was posing for the artist, the hair style and her fashion sense which reflected her emotional and psychological state at that age.
Then I was drawn to the textures of the canvas, the ageing oil colour, showing the strokes of the palette knife and brush made by the artisit so long ago. Those strokes had been created in one instant as an expression of the artist’s thoughts and feelings, and they had dried to leave an almost eternal imprint of his or her personality on this canvas. Such a strong urge had driven this artist to invest so much time, patience and creative energy to produce this picture. The vibration of the desire to create and express had been captured and frozen in time, and now generations later the energy of those feelings was still being transmitted, almost as if the artist were here before me in person.
I didn’t want my mum to think that I was going mad or that I had been brain-washed in the monastery or something, so I tried to act normally and not stare at the pictures like a nutter! Walking around the house was an extraordinary experience as I was able to interact like this with all the objects there. Most of the things were from my childhood, and so carried with them many memories which clouded somewhat the impressions of those objects.
However, it was the paintings which were emanating the strongest vibrations. They had been the focus for such strong feelings when they were produced that I could almost hear the personalities of their creators calling out.
So sensitive was I after my years in the environment of Skanda Vale, that I actually felt uncomfortable to be sitting in a room with several pictures hanging on the wall. It was, however, remarkable and fascinating to be able to see and feel so much from these pictures, something which I had never experienced before.
I had never really been particularly interested in art, holding the (somewhat ignorant) view that the majority of artists were rather pretentious. And all that time people wasted wandering around vast, stuffy art galleries, getting tired and bored… what was the point of it all!? But now I could see so much in a painting!
“Wow!” I thought. “The first chance I get I’m going to visit an art gallery!”
It would, however, be quite some time before I would get to realise this wish. I first needed to learn to control my openess to the vibration of energies, as I was about to get a fright from some of the ancient ghosts of this old English market town…
Image: “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer circa 1665
[color-box]Want to read the previous posts in this series? CLICK HERE[/color-box]
Leave a Reply