Today’s guest is Dr. Ha Vinh Tho, the Programme Director of the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan. He’s here to talk to us about the project, it’s underlying philosophy, how it’s applied, the challenges it faces and how it might relate to the Middle Way.
MWS Podcast 47: Ha Vinh Tho as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_47_Ha_Vinh_Tho
How can we put the Middle Way into practice on a daily basis? I have been recommending various already established practices for the integration of desire, meaning and belief, but a practice may also be needed to bind them together and provide a constant reflective reminder of the Middle Way as a framework. It is that recognition that has led me to develop this Middle Way Meditation Practice. As yet this practice has not been extensively trialled (only by me), so I’d like to invite you to try it out and feed back to me how you get on. The weekend retreat on meditation in June should be a further opportunity to improve on this practice.
This practice is loosely inspired by Buddhist vipassana practices, with one important difference: whilst vipassana practices involve trying to bring oneself into alignment with some ‘truth’ that is the subject of the meditation, in this one, one works only through the process of balancing and integrating desires, meanings and beliefs that one finds in one’s own experience. The goals are open ended, and only the general integrative direction is prescribed by the practice.
This practice is intended to start from a base of mindfulness meditation. I would recommend at least five or ten minutes of preparatory mindfulness practice (e.g. consolidating posture, following the breath, body scanning, just sitting and accepting whatever experiences come up) to help ensure that the following practice is done in a state of sufficient overall awareness. If you have never done any kind of mindfulness practice, I suggest that you learn to do one (and become familiar with how to sit in meditation) before attempting this practice.
After the mindfulness warm-up, the practice is divided into four stages: desire, meaning, belief and absorption. These could be done in variable amounts of time, but I would suggest at least 5 minutes for each stage. If you find there is too much content here, it could potentially be broken up into separate meditations so that desire, meaning and belief were reviewed individually, each preceded by mindfulness practice and ended with the absorption stage.
My initial experience with this practice suggests that one potential issue is overlaps between the stages, and another is that one might find it easier to engage with the same conflicts through one type of integration than another. Neither of these is worth worrying about, and the practice needs to be pursued flexibly in relation to whatever conflicts it turns up. For example, if you turn up three desire conflicts but no meaning or belief conflicts, that’s fine – just focus on the desire conflicts. In this case, though, you might also find it helpful to consider the same conflicts from the standpoint of meaning or belief. The use of the three types of integration needs to be taken more as a prompt than as a rigid structure.
My own experience so far is that this practice can be very helpful, despite the fact that the conflicts I alight upon may have been ones that I was considering outside meditation in any case. By putting them in this framework I am obliged to consider them in an integrative way, which should lead to better judgement.
On the news recently I heard discussed the growing number of families who have to rely on food banks to supplement their meals, I was thinking about the next painting blog at this Christmas time and thought I would discuss the subject of an early painting by Vincent Van Gogh where peasants are seen eating a meal of potatoes.
Van Gogh was born in Neunen, the Netherlands, his father was a Calvanist minister and his mother has been described as a moody artist. Many of us will have heard of the difficulties Vincent had throughout his short life dealing with epilepsy, depression and his eventual suicide, I was surprised to learn that in the ten years he spent painting he created nearly nine hundred oil paintings and over a thousand water colours. Originally he wished to follow in his father’s footsteps but he was rejected as unsuitable on two occasions and decided to become an artist in 1880. In 1882 Van Gogh moved to Dreuthe and led a nomadic life, he studied Japanese art and Eastern philosophy, he wrote in ‘my own work, I am risking my life for it’, he wrote extensively about his work. He returned to Neunen in the north of Holland where he painted The Potato Eaters in 1885, the work is considered to be one of his earliest master pieces, he made several versions and preparatory sketches, working on the composition, this is his only group painting, he hoped the painting would promote his career, unfortunately not until after his death was it seen for what it is. Van Gogh felt very close to the peasants, he saw them as hard working and honest people who tilled the ground, planted and lifted the potatoes they were eating, he was also poor and struggling in his own way. The main character has her back to us, there are four women and a man, they may be related, who are sitting around a square table with rough edges on which is placed a large dish of potatoes, their faces are lit by the low- hanging lamp but the rest of the room is dark and cramped, we can see the rafters, a supporting wall which juts into the room and a picture on the wall, no light seems to be coming in the window at the back of the room. The characters are rather ugly and their hands are gnarled portraying the life of manual labourers.
Van Gogh knew the work of the Impressionists but he was more influenced by the Hague school, his brush strokes were long and bold, in the room the colours are muted, black, dark green and brown, not until he moved to the sunshine of the south of France would his palette be more colourful, the bright yellows of his many sunflower paintings or the violets of irises, the reds and greens in his scenes and portraits, he made several self portraits of great intensity and insight.
Van Gogh hoped to set up a group of like minded artists and rented a house in Arles, he invited the painter Paul Gaugin to share it with him but they quarrelled and Gaugin left. Van Gogh become increasingly ill, his younger brother Theo with whom he remained close exchanged many letters, Vincent’s were filled with his theories and plans for paintings and his emotional state of mind, which he attempted to portray in his work, Theo arranged for him to live in a hospital in Auvers under the care of Doctor Gachet, he was given two rooms so that one he could use as his studio, he would set off to paint in the country side each day and return to the hospital in the evening, until his suicide. Van Gogh did not know how much his work would later be admired, he failed to make a living from his work.
I wish you all a happy Christmas.
Image from wikipedia.
My guest today is Mary Searle-Chatterjee, a retired anthropologist and resident of the Lancaster Co-housing Project which won the Observer Ethical Award for 2014. She’s going to tell us something about the history, aims and values of the project and she’s also kindly agreed to give us a tour of the place. I went along with my camera too so the slideshow is maybe worth a look.
MWS Podcast 42: Mary Searle-Chatterjee as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_42_Mary_Searle_Chatterjee
Colour is used by painters in many ways, cave painters would grind the earth around them to mix with water to create reds, ochres and browns to draw animals, Italian Renaissance painters would often depict the Virgin Mary clothed in blue, blue paint was derived from very expensive lapus lazuli to symbolise the esteem in which she is held in the Catholic Church, another symbolic colour is gold that was used by Byzantine artists. As time went by many new colour theories arose, here are two .
Pointillism. Capo di Noli Italy. 1898.
Paul Signac was born on Paris and began his career studying architecture but then changed his mind and took up painting when he was eighteen after seeing the work of Matisse, he studied the colour theory explained and used by Georges Seurat, they were two French painters who belonged to the group called Neo-Impressionists , Seurat developed the use of pure colour which he applied to his canvases in the form of dots which became known as the Pointillist style having abandoned the Impressionist method of painting with short brushstrokes, it was slow patient work, this experiment meant using scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure colour which were intended to blend not on the canvas but on the eyes of the viewers. Signac learnt a great deal about this technique from Seurat, they became friends. Signac liked to sail around the coasts of Europe painting landscapes and making water colour paintings of French harbour scenes, the sunlight on the south coast produced sparkling seas and heightened colour. He had met Seurat and also Monet in 1884, Van Gough and Gaugin were also painting at this time. Signac was very interested in the ideas of anarchist communism but had to tone down these ideas in order to gain public acceptance.
I have chosen the painting called Capo di Noli 1898. The sparkling colours expressing the sunshine of Italy are seen in this sea – side view, whether or not you think the colours have merged to create a flat plane is left for the viewer to decide, the brush strokes of the Impressionists rather than dots of colour are perhaps more easily accepted? The shadows are in pale to dark violets set alongside the yellows of the sandy ground. Matisse experimented with pointillist painting but just for a short time.
Homage to the Square 1965.Joseph Albers.
Joseph Albers was a German-born American artist who after studying with Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus school was asked by its founder and director Walter Gropius to join the stained glass department to teach foundation students, he also worked with Paul Klee designing glass and furniture. In 1925 the school moved to Dessau, there Albers met a student, Anni, whom he married, he worked there until in 1933 the Nazis closed the school and the artists dispersed. Albers went to live and work as a professor of art at the art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1950 he left to head the department of design at Yale University, he retired in 1958.
In 1963 he published ‘interaction in Colour’ to demonstrate his theory ‘that colours are governed by an internal and deceptive logic.’ He favoured a very disciplined approach to composition and painted hundreds of works in ‘ Homage to the Square’ in which he explored the chromatic interactions with nested squares. I remember when we students would experiment in a similar way with colour, for example we painted the same colour with a different coloured background, this showed clearly how the colour seemed to change, becoming darker or lighter, or more bright, our colour perception was changed. Albers paintings consisted of three or four squares of solid planes of colour nested within one another. These studies made very interesting viewing I think, although we see a flat surface which seemed to contain no symbols or metaphor in a left brain hemisphere way they do possess a beauty and balance that enriches our sense of colours working together. I wonder what you make of this painting. Mark Rothko painted large canvases with what looks at first like simple flat colour, but there is activity at the edges of the squares and oblong shapes he uses, the intensity and depth of colour can envelop the viewer – perhaps.
images from wikipedia.