New Realities recorded on June 23, 2009
Summary
In this episode of New Realities, host Alan Steinfeld speaks with artist and teacher Meriel Gold about her drawing process, ‘Drawn Home.’ Meriel discusses her journey from a conventional painter driven by the desire to succeed, to discovering art as an intimate language of feeling and connection. She explains how drawing can help people bypass the conditioned mind and tap into the ‘quietness’ or essential mystery of being. Together, they explore the true purpose of art, the nature of consciousness as it seeks to experience itself through the manifest world, and how returning to the body’s simple sensations can heal the wounded self and reunite us with our deep, shared humanity.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld, and each week I present a program that really I feel is at the investigation of consciousness, whatever that may mean to you, but it’s a time of transformation. It’s a time of bringing a new awareness to who we are as a culture, as individuals, as a planetary formation. And tonight’s guest is someone who combines everything that I really love about doing this show, which involves consciousness, art, creativity, who we are as personal expression. Her name is Meriel Gold, and she does a process called Drawn Home, and we’ll be talking about that process and her work. Hi, Meriel.
Meriel Gold
Hi, Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
Hi, thanks for being a guest. But talking to you, hanging out with you, meeting you, this act of that you do as in your work, let’s see, let’s start from the beginning. So, Drawn Home is a process that you’ve created to help other people tap into their creativity. Would that be fair to say or how would you describe that, your process?
Meriel Gold
Yes, I think it would be fair to say it that way. I didn’t really know I was starting it, in fact. I was just having a conversation with a friend exactly like you and I are, and out of that conversation came me sharing what I was learning with my teacher, a man who’s now died called Cecil Collins.
Alan Steinfeld
Let me just back up and say Drawn Home is a life drawing class that you teach people, but you teach them to draw in a way where they’re tapping into themselves more, in a way more than expressing what they see in the world, it’s more their feeling about what they’re seeing.
Meriel Gold
Well, I would put it really like this, I think, that Drawn Home, it wasn’t like that how it started, but it’s become like that over time. I discovered that drawing in a certain way was a language with which we can talk to ourselves. And by that I mean, I discovered when I was already getting on halfway through my life, that I didn’t really, I wasn’t really in touch with myself. I didn’t know myself. I wasn’t intimate with myself. I was living what I’d been taught to do, which was basically to try and be a good girl, and I was lonely. So what this guide taught me was a way of touching with my hands and with instruments, reeds and brushes and quills and chalks, touching whatever it was I was drawing in this arena, it was life drawing, which is traditional in the arts, touching the atmosphere of the pose, you could say, which eventually for me became touching the mystery of life as it lived itself in this human form.
Alan Steinfeld
So, when you say you were lonely, you weren’t lonely for people, you were lonely for something else, deeper.
Meriel Gold
Not at all. I was lonely for something that I didn’t know, I didn’t know I was lonely, and I eventually didn’t know what I was lonely for. It was like I had an itch which I couldn’t scratch. And if you see what I mean.
Alan Steinfeld
A longing, really, call it this longing.
Meriel Gold
A yearning, you could call it. Yeah, a longing, a yearning deep inside for something that I didn’t really know existed. And slowly, without knowing it, as I touched the poses, and my models take the poses up from music, so they will move through a range of humanity, and they become very quiet with that, and that quietness is shown in their movements, and people will say, hold it there please, and we will then draw this pose. And by touching the atmosphere of this particular aspect of humanity, it mirrored back the quietness that one felt in the pose into oneself, and I began to feel, oh, this is so sweet, and this I can’t live without.
Alan Steinfeld
Wait, but there’s a step I want to just get or want other people to get. So when these models are moving through the pose and you say, just hold that, then how do they feel into what they’re seeing?
Meriel Gold
Well, I start usually with our hands. So to start with, I would say, just wait, maybe for instance they may then close their eyes for a few seconds or not. So they come to a stop as it were in what’s going on in the mind, you could say, and then if your eyes are shut, I’d say, let your eyelids open up and let your empty gaze fall, if you like, on the pose, fall on the person modeling, and don’t do anything until something in you generates a kind of invitation which comes up as, oh I’d like to touch that. So then I would put my hands in a bowl of water and I would have red clay for instance to start with often, and I’d kind of wash my hands with the ball of red clay as if I was washing them with soap, which would charge my hands up with water and clay, and then I would touch the part of the pose which spoke to me the strongest with my hands, either with the front or with the back, and from that touch, I’d wait with that touch, and then something else in the hand, say I start in the middle of the body in the tummy area, and I’d wait there until something else, it could be the tilt of the head or the position of the hand or the quietness of the back.
Alan Steinfeld
Something touches you that brings on, like we talked today a little bit, a feeling sense, right? Something.
Meriel Gold
It opens something which is palpably touching, affecting one, you could say in the heart, but I don’t mean emotionally.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, you mean there’s a deep core in oneself.
Meriel Gold
Yes, a deep core in oneself responds to something in the pose. And that I ask them to touch and I let them touch it, and then I just show them how to follow touching other things, and these touches slowly, slowly become a language. Each time we touch the quietness of a shoulder resonating with the plainness of the back or the emptiness of the expression of the face or the tilt of the head, that quietness resonates in ourselves, and we begin to enjoy something we didn’t know we had.
Alan Steinfeld
But you’re also creating art or creative art as a spiritual practice, in a general sense.
Meriel Gold
Yes, well that’s true-ish. I’m nervous of the word practice, because I feel this has to be without an agenda to succeed.
Alan Steinfeld
There’s nothing to succeed if we just feel. I mean if you’re talking about feeling, right?
Meriel Gold
Absolutely right. So there’s nothing to succeed at. It’s just to feel, and that feel mirrors back the quietness of what we feel, which is you could call it the quietness, the atmosphere of the pose, it mirrors back that same mystery of quietness which is our basic nature.
Alan Steinfeld
Is that quietness what other people may call eternity or the eternal mystery?
Meriel Gold
Yes, I guess it is. It’s like a presence, a palpable presence of something which touches us and we can’t say what it is.
Alan Steinfeld
And it’s the mystery because we can’t say it.
Meriel Gold
Absolutely. And in my book, that’s why I draw. Because also I would say that this that we’re talking about can’t actually be told. It can be said in words which doesn’t necessarily mean the content of it is communicated, because words are basically just a signpost.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, they’re signposts to the sense, the sensation. What are the words a signpost to?
Meriel Gold
The words, okay, hang on, that’s a good question, let me just think it. The words are a signpost that orientates the mind, if you like, to cooperate with whatever is coming up. So if you give the mind a little bit of something it recognizes, enough, you could say, for it to lie down and say, okay, do what you like, feel what you like. And so in a way our antennae of our sensibility passes beyond the mind and touches and drinks, you could say, it drinks from a well of silence off the pose, which you could call the presence of, well you know, there are a million words for it. I try to avoid the cultural words because they’ve got connotations. I prefer to call it just quietness, and I feel it’s a good word because we experience quietness in the body.
Alan Steinfeld
What do you mean we experience quietness in the body?
Meriel Gold
Well, it’s palpable. It’s, when I say it’s in the body, I mean one doesn’t know where quietness is, one actually if we look, we don’t know where our experiences arise, we don’t even exactly know where our thoughts take place. We can’t if we look at my experiences, we can’t say where I am. We only know that awareness, we only know that seeing, you could say, sees what’s going on, and that seeing can open to a different field of perception which is deeply satisfying, and the nearest I could say to it in feeling is just quietness. It’s not through the ears, it’s nothing to do with hearing with the ears, but it’s got a presence. You could out use your word of eternity.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, so it’s the stillness that is our essential self. Is that?
Meriel Gold
Absolutely. Absolutely. A bit like when we’re born.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right, but you see I’m just trying, I mean we understand this language, but there’s probably a lot of people and artists particularly who might be listening who don’t know what that’s about, because you were an artist up until you said you were 50, and you were busy thinking and creating designs and doing all these things that probably were beautiful or whatever. But, and then you found out that you were lonely, but then to transfer this to art somehow or to create the creative act, you had to make an internal shift, something happened to you, and it wasn’t just that you discovered that you were lonely, there was a type of thinking probably that changed for you, right?
Meriel Gold
Well, I think two things happened, Alan. When I was an ordinary painter, I mostly painted in oils and I loved it. But as well as loving it, I noticed that there was an agenda in me to succeed. And that kind of spoiled it in a way.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, succeed how? Like to capture the landscape?
Meriel Gold
Well, for people to say, you know, she’s a good painter. Yeah, have you seen her work? Yeah, it’s worth fine. And so in a way it patted me on the back, you could say, and that, that did have a, not a good smell about it, I didn’t like that feeling. Because it wasn’t, it wasn’t completely authentic. So what was completely authentic in painting was, it’s very hard to say. It got, it was, it was, it sometimes when the colors flowed and the various harmonies happened and energy ran, it was exciting. But this thing would come in and say, oh wow, maybe this is going to be a good one, maybe I’ll frame it and sell it, and this spoiled it. Okay, so that, that gives you a bad feeling, or it did me anyway. And then what happened was completely without me making any decision, I saw an exhibition of my then teacher, called Cecil Collins, and something in me, though I didn’t particularly like his paintings, but something really rattled my heart, and I thought, ah, ah, I have to go and taste what he’s got. Now what he had, he wasn’t a painterly painter, and there was no much sensuality, which I was, I love the sensuality of paint. I was a pupil and I knew Kokoschka and I loved the way he painted, but Cecil didn’t have any of that, they were thin paintings by comparison and from a painter’s point of view they didn’t really, my eyes didn’t like them. However, when I went away from the exhibition, something spoke to me, and I didn’t know what it was. So I went back again and I found that his, he had paintings like, for instance I can’t quite remember all the titles, but one was like say, The Spirit of the Dawn or The Spirit of the Dust or something like that, and that left an atmospheric feeling in me which had a very satisfying resonance. So anyway, I found him and then I went and being with him changed my attitude, and I began to see that there was more to art than doing a good, so-called painting from a technical point of view. And interestingly enough, that when I first went to him, I did the best I could because somehow my heart knew it was really important, and he looked through about 40 drawings I’d done and he tutted his tongue in his mouth and got more and more cross and tutted and said, oh what a pity, and he hunched over and was getting very unhappy, and he finally said, what a pity, what a pity, you haven’t seen anything at all, and suddenly I saw I hadn’t seen beyond the exterior form, and trying to get that form right.
Alan Steinfeld
And so now, but then the change was, now you’re, well my interpretation is like, you’re not seeing beyond the external form, but you’re feeling something that is beyond the external form. Is that it?
Meriel Gold
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now funnily enough, then I didn’t know this, but now I would say that there’s an aspect of being human which is empty and naked of the conditioned aspect, the life of us, a mystery of we can’t give it a name, and that sees itself, and through the form of my hands or my instruments, it tastes and touches itself, and that’s what’s so deeply satisfying.
Alan Steinfeld
So let me get that, because I mean you’ve said it before in other situations. So that thing that is essentially human or essentially us can feel or sees what’s essential in other things and attempts to express that somehow. And in that, in that emptiness of expression, that’s where the satisfaction on a soul level is achieved. Is it?
Meriel Gold
Yes, I think you could easily put it that way. In my book, I wouldn’t go so far as saying I’m trying to actually express anything. Now for me, touching this that we’re talking about, be it through drawing or through anything else I do, is essential for me to stay in touch with myself.
Alan Steinfeld
What is that that you’re doing in anything that you do?
Meriel Gold
Well, like let’s say you see the wind in the trees, and so you have a tree, you have the branches out, you have the leaves lying still at the ends of the branches, and then a breeze comes along and moves the leaves, and that somehow in me awakens a seeing, and my heart just bows to it, it doesn’t know what it is, my brain and my mind, you could say, doesn’t know what it is, but my heart does know, and it does a sort of bow, which feels just like a very quiet, very deep loving.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but then this thing we call art or something where you then feel that expressing, what is the purpose? I mean if the essential purpose is to feel that, and I get what you’re saying about the heart, then why do we make this thing, these artifacts for other people to, why can’t they just have their own experience of the wind? Why are we doing art is what I’m asking in a sense.
Meriel Gold
Well I do art because of what I told you actually. I don’t do it for other people anymore. I used to think I made pictures for other people to sell and blah blah blah, which of course had an ego-based agenda behind them, because basically I wanted to be accepted, acknowledged, praised, and all the things that the characters want. But then I saw through that and found that it was not a satisfactory way to live, and I just found that I can’t live without touching this. I don’t do it for you, the gallery, the bank manager, the parents, the partner, or anything else. I do it because, I mean why do you have, why do you have breakfast? Because your body is hungry.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I guess I’m asking what the purpose of art, but I’m getting from what you’re saying, if you have that feeling of the wind moving through the trees and you somehow can express that or feel that, and if I look at something that you’ve done and I get that feeling too, or another feeling perhaps, then we’re just encouraging or we are reinforcing each other’s ability to feel. I guess I’m asking what is the purpose of art?
Meriel Gold
Well, you know you could say the purpose of art is to make things beautiful, to bring other people’s awareness to the beauty of nature, of etc. I can only tell you what my own experience is, and to me the primary purpose, in fact I think I’d say the only real purpose for me is to touch this this quietness with which I actually cannot live my life without. I get lonely, I get ratty, I get anxious, I get too busy, and the condition character starts taking over and living what’s supposed to be socially a good life, and it doesn’t hit the spot, unless I go back in one way or another and touch this which has to be touched, which actually I would say is, call it what you will, some people call it God, there are millions of names all over the world, you could call it consciousness, you could call it energy, you could call it mystery. I think this has a yearning to touch itself in others, in the other forms of life. Other people, when we fall in love, in my book this is what we mirror to each other, this mystery of sacredness you could call it. But I don’t really like religious words just because they’ve been so misused.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but I’m also getting what you’re saying is that when you do touch that, and you do feel it, and the character as you say is out of the way, other people feel that too.
Meriel Gold
Ah, yes. Now that I completely agree with, but that’s very different from doing it for that reason. I don’t do it for that reason. When I’m authentic, it’s like the sun, you know, it can’t help shining. When I’m totally myself, it comes out as a shine of presence, relaxation, quietness, celebration, friendship, love, when it’s genuine, it can’t help but shine. That’s why I don’t actually have a reason for doing it other than nourishing this center of what it is to be human. When that is nourished, everything is perfect.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, no, I people might say hold on a sec. That’s a pretty broad statement, but what I mean is it’s okay, so we’re coming into another dimension here. This play we go, I think this is actually what everybody wants, even those of us who go out to be rich, glamorous, successful, etc. this is what we’re really after. We don’t know it, so it gets cloaked in other stories, but I think you’re onto something. This fulfillment of our essential character of being, I mean that’s the sense I get, this thing that’s like as you said the pure virgin self. Why don’t you give your definition of virginity.
Meriel Gold
Yeah, well I think I said it to you before. I actually, because I found that I was using a coined phrase, you could say, I made a coined phrase called which I said was a kind of virginity of being, and I thought well, I wonder you better look up this word virgin and find out really to use it accurately, otherwise, you know, people argue with you from the mind, which I didn’t want to have, so I looked it up and there was a whole lot of stuff about virgins which actually I thought was completely missing the mark, but what it did finally say at the end, which I thought was really beautiful, that virgin is something, virginity is something to which nothing has been added. And I thought oh wow, isn’t that just beautiful? So it’s like I mean the whole of our Christian story in the West is based around what happens in virginity. What happens in virginity is that a principle incomprehensible to the mind, you could call it the Christ is what it’s called in the Christian arena, is conceived and begins to live. And actually it’s really interesting because if you look at our seasons, you know, I sometimes think if we contemplate nature, we wouldn’t need to go to sages, nature would teach it all to us. For instance, you know, we go through summer, the full beautiful flowering, and then it drops off, we go into biting winter, it’s muddy, cold, icy, yucky, whoops the world has died from nature’s point of view, this is how it appears, and so we can come to this emptiness in ourselves, and the mind doesn’t usually let us stay there because it says it can’t be that simple, it must be more to it than that, and it moves off and goes outside looking for something again. But if we can abide there in that quietness, spring always follows winter. And in this virginity of being, my experience is if I’m willing to stay there, which is not always comfortable, because the mind doesn’t know what’s going on, in this quietness, something mysteriously begins to as it were grow, and it’s a feeling of oneself. It’s a palpable rising of a feeling which ultimately we cannot live without. The feeling we get, you know if you go after something in the world, we have and you really succeed, you win something in the Olympic games and wow, I’ve got to what I was going for, and for about five minutes one is in the clear, one is just in quietness, and then the yearnings for other things creeps in again. In that quietness, something new happens. Like your beautiful title of New Reality, which is a beautiful title. Of course it’s not the reality that’s new, it’s that we in our stage in this time that we’re living are more open and we are willing to look more, and the newness is in the way we see things. It used to be the sages, the Moses, the Abrahams, the Jesuses, the Buddhas, blah, the Brahmins, babas, now ordinary folks like you and me are beginning to to have this what used to be special seeing of a seeing past the surface of life to a deeper reality.
Alan Steinfeld
The deeper mystery, the deeper, I think, yes, it’s, but I like this sense that this mystery has to be constantly renewed in a sense. I think that’s what you’re saying, even if you win the Olympic medals and you have achieved a momentary goal, it slides through our fingers so quickly that it’s lost, but this thing that you’re going for, this mystery of being, let’s say, the quietness in a way it’s also a goal, but and it’s also just as elusive, but there’s another something else to it, you know? It’s not a goal in that sense, it’s something that just we are, of course, but it’s just as elusive in some ways because it’s there and then perhaps it’s not. But like we were saying, so how do you explain that? Is it ever just there?
Meriel Gold
It’s always there, whether it’s always there of course, that’s why I say reality is not new, it’s always there, whether we notice it or not is new.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s always there but we’re not always there. That’s the part.
Meriel Gold
Exactly. And that’s what’s new for us, ordinary folks in society are now, heaven knows why, are beginning to notice wow, there’s more to life and being success and and even more to life than being knocked down by being a complete failure. Even if you’re in prison, you’ve committed crimes, you can find this quietness in yourself and you have a life which is worth living. In a way because it’s giving back to consciousness what consciousness needs, which is a recognition of itself.
Alan Steinfeld
That quietness though is… that quietness is just our essential beingness, but then let’s talk a little bit about the relationship of the pure being, that quietness, and this seems to be human compulsion to express. You know?
Meriel Gold
Well I think that human compulsion to express is consciousness yearning to find itself in its manifestation which we call the world. We think it’s us doing it but actually consciousness is yearning to be reunited with itself. Interestingly enough, the word religion, I believe I’m correct, I might be slightly wrong, but the word religion I think comes from either a…
Alan Steinfeld
I think it’s religare, to reconnect.
Muriel Gold
To be reunited with, which is exactly what we’re talking about. So it’s not that you and I are dying to express ourselves, it may look like that, but actually what’s happening is consciousness is looking to be reunited with itself in all forms. And that means all forms. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a manifest world.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re saying consciousness is this compulsion itself or this compelling part of us that wants to express, is that what you say?
Muriel Gold
Well, you could call it express, but I think it’s confusing. It’s as if it’s putting something out there to do. It’s consciousness yearning to be met and to meet itself in others. For instance, if this was the case, and say you and I were at different polarities in the world and our cultures were against each other and we were required to go to war, and I come up in front of you, and I see the same life living you as lives me, I’m not likely to put a knife through you.
Alan Steinfeld
Well thank you very much! But no, of course, because that is the consciousness. But I guess maybe I’m asking something a little different. Humans, our speaking, these sounds we make that are communication, we have this compulsion to express this internal feeling out in the world, or to draw or to make music. Is that what you’re saying is consciousness longing to connect with itself as well?
Muriel Gold
Absolutely. Absolutely. So it’s fine, in ordinary parlance it’s fine to say yes, we human beings have a desire to express ourselves. In ordinary language that’s perfectly true. But in my experience now, I realized that I anyway, I’m part of what’s seen in the world. I’m an object. I’m Muriel, I’ve been given a name, and I was a successful and competitive sport. Is that what my real nature is? No, that’s the role I was playing. I’ve been a mother. Is that my true nature? No, it’s a role I was playing. I’ve been a wife. Is that my true nature? No, it’s a role I’ve been playing. What sees that role is what interests me, and I see it’s a mystery which witnesses itself. And it, you know there’s a term self-realization which probably everybody who’s listening to you will have heard, possibly not been interested in possibly has been. But actually for ages I thought I, Muriel, if I’m a good girl and I meditate long enough and tie myself in knots etc., will become self-realized. And suddenly it was seen that that is not the case actually, it’s not true. It’s actually consciousness or sacredness, or God if you dare to use the word, I’m nervous of it myself, it’s what wakes up and finds itself in form, as form. Not as something that the I am Muriel is separate and I’m a clever girl. Not at all. So it’s what I call the Lord in drag as this character and it wakes up and recognizes, wow, I’m not just that feisty girl, I am the life of her.
Alan Steinfeld
So life is living you, and yet Muriel or me, whoever that is, are these characters, but what’s the purpose of all that? Why are we these characters? Why can’t we just be consciousness, maybe that’s a silly question, but what’s the purpose of the masquerade?
Muriel Gold
Well hold on a second. Well let’s just have a look at that really, really, really carefully because it is a major stopping point. Let’s just ask ourselves for absolute certain, do we really know that there is a purpose? I mean just to save. Look at the trees, let’s look at the trees, let’s look at the wind. Is there a purpose?
Alan Steinfeld
So the character wants to find purpose, yeah. The limited human wants to find purpose for whatever reason, but you’re saying there is no purpose let’s say, because obviously…
Muriel Gold
I’m beginning to see well hang on a sec, the flowers, do they have a purpose in the field? They just grow, and they just grow out to the light which draws them up. They have absolutely no doing in the drawing up. You can’t say clever little flower it did its growing. It was drawn up by the sun. And I’m not sure that there is a purpose from our point of view. It seems…
Alan Steinfeld
But is there a purpose to existence? I mean, can we say there isn’t any either? I mean, is that fair to say there isn’t a purpose? You can’t say that either.
Muriel Gold
Let’s say, well I don’t know is the answer to be truthful. But what I would say is that if there is a purpose, it’s to give, is to, for the body mind organism through hopefully grace, you could say, to cooperate with this awakening that my life is not my life. It’s the life of a mystery of living. We call that mystery sacred because we don’t understand it. The mind doesn’t understand it. And I think if there’s a purpose, for me it is to feed back this, is to realize that I…
Alan Steinfeld
That’s okay, we love that on this program.
Muriel Gold
We love that. I mean basically, I is God.
Alan Steinfeld
The ‘I’ is God, the observer, the consciousness.
Muriel Gold
So me, Muriel the character, is a conditioned thing full of aspects and etc. But what lives that, let’s call it ‘I’, and that ‘I’ is the mystery of call it life, call it mystery, call it the sacred, call it God. But I think I am lived by God you could say. I mean somebody actually asked me not so long ago, “Hey Muriel, do you believe in God?” And I was extremely surprised to hear myself say “absolutely not”. And I thought to heavens alive, what do you mean Muriel? And then I clarified it and said, “Actually no, I don’t believe in God, I am lived by God.”
Alan Steinfeld
I like that. I am lived by God. So that ‘I’…
Muriel Gold
So there’s no ‘me’ there. There’s no ‘me’ there at all. Actually.
Alan Steinfeld
Only when you become the character, but that ‘I’ that is the ‘I’, is the same ‘I’ in all people. That’s why we recognize each other.
Muriel Gold
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So there’s only one ‘I’. There’s only one life, and that life lives everything that’s born. The grass, the animals, the mountains, the molecules, the lot. Shakespeare said it well enough: ‘all the world’s a play’, and it’s really funny because we think Shakespeare is great, but actually I don’t think we know what he’s talking about. Because he’s telling us just this. The whole thing is a play, the whole manifest world is the play of the mystery of sacredness playing.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, and there’s also the Old Testament ‘I am that I am’, which is the only thing that we really are, is that the ‘I am’ nature. But so yes, so it’s the ‘I’ that is the consciousness, but then the character as you call it, it’s also somehow an aspect of that sacredness as well. It’s not different. I don’t see, it’s playing itself out, but it’s not really different than the ‘I’ on some level. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s just a play.
Muriel Gold
Could you say that again? Could you slightly rephrase that?
Alan Steinfeld
I’m saying the character, the thing that’s in the play, let’s say that’s playing out the dramas of our existence, is still life living us as characters.
Muriel Gold
Absolutely. Everything, everything is this. It’s as if, for instance, let’s go into a little story here. Let’s say, it’s childish what I’m going to say. God, let’s say God gets bored or sacredness or life whatever you call it, gets bored and thinks, I think I could do with making some fun for myself. So let’s see what shall I do? Ah, I know what I’ll do. I’ll hide myself and I’ll make it really difficult and then I’ll be able to look for myself. And it hides itself in human beings and does it so well that it actually forgets where it’s put itself.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right. Until those people that remember, yeah.
Muriel Gold
Yeah and then it goes around the world looking for itself. Guess where? Outside. Listening to other people, listening to all the traditions which have been fine in their way but we seem to be coming into a time when we’re being asked is this really true for you? Is this your experience or do you believe what somebody else says? And we’re beginning to be hungry, thirsty, yearning for it to be our own experience. For the sacredness of me, the God of me, to find itself in my mortality so-called, in my flesh.
Alan Steinfeld
You know I like that story, but the only problem I have with that is if it is true, and I think it is true, why do we, when we find ourselves in those moments of life living us, then why do we ever forget? Why do we ever get back into character, because once you think we’d recognize ourselves as that God, we would never forget, and yet we seem to. That’s the only part…
Muriel Gold
That’s the play! That’s the play! That sacredness, nature, God…
Alan Steinfeld
But once we remembered we would remember and there it was, the play is over, or begun.
Muriel Gold
Yeah, but the play wants some fun in it, you don’t want to find the answer in the first two seconds. You know it’s fun looking for it and finding it and then oh shit I’ve lost it again! Where did I put it? I don’t know. Like the other day I put my… I had a mobile phone and I was talking a long long time on it, it got so hot I put it in the fridge. And a half an hour later, I could hear this bloody phone ringing, couldn’t find the damn thing. Looked everywhere for it. And eventually it stopped ringing so I couldn’t find it. And of course I’d forgotten I’d put it in the fridge. And I think actually it’s rather a good metaphor for what our good Lord, call it that, he lost himself in drag as the fridge as you me mortality, and low and behold guess what, he forgot where he put himself. So he has to go on looking for it. And then you find a taste of it, a little smell of it, it rings a little bit and you think oh there it is. Oh shit I can’t find where it is. So you look somewhere else so you go through the traditions, religions all manner of exercises and all manner of stuff. And eventually what happened to me, I looked through all kinds of things. I basically have a religious nature which means I’m curious about what I really am. And I went outside, I listened to people, I believed people and it didn’t work. I still wasn’t satisfied until guess what, I remembered, hang on, I remember I must have heard it again that people say look inside. What could they be meaning? So I began to look inside. And I found I kept, first of all I came up against this apparent nothing. You turn your attention round and you look and you think, so so where is this ‘I’ and how can I locate it? And actually I couldn’t find it. And immediately my mind wanted to go out and follow something else and ask somebody else questions and find out what they did and I eventually something in me stuck with looking inside. And I abided with the quietness I found, which I have to say, felt like nothing. I mean if this is for the people who don’t want anything to do with religion which I completely understand because there are many many dogmas and things that are not delivered truly these days in all the religions. It’s the surface of them. And so I’d done all that and it wasn’t satisfying to me and I eventually abided. I love the word abide, I abided as quietness. And quietly quietly the quietness began to talk to me. Of course not in words, it was in my heart, and I began to release my tension even my muscles and think, ah, this feels nice. This feels true. I think I’ll follow this. And then of course activities would come, the phone would go, the children would scream, blah blah blah, the car would break down or whatever. And you lose it again. And then you think, oh God I feel thirsty, what was it I wanted? Ah yes, it was that that I found when I was really quiet.
Alan Steinfeld
Some people though do seem to abide in it all the time once they found it.
Muriel Gold
Yes it does seem like that. It does seem maybe I… but you know, life is very individual. None of us find it the same way. Some people can find it through great silence, I’m sure top-quality sportsmen find it in top quality performances. They break through something into another field. Certainly musicians do. Look at people like Ashkenazy or various pianists, Alfred Brendel, whoever around here… you learn a craft, which is not learning a discipline, it’s learning to become intimate with an instrument, let’s take a violin or a piano. And you get to know that violin and that piano and the way you play it, the way you touch it so well that it starts playing itself. You play with it almost.
Alan Steinfeld
It plays through you, yes.
Muriel Gold
Exactly. Exactly. And then you’re through into a different dimension of activity and you’re not doing it. I mean when people, I mean I can’t speak about music because I’m not a musician but…
Alan Steinfeld
But you’re a painter.
Muriel Gold
I see it in my students and I see it in myself. When I do it, it always has a slight kind of stink of striving in it. And I really don’t like it. But when you get a run on this quietness and it starts to play itself because you know yourself, you know your instruments so well that you can respond to what’s in front of you in a playful respectful quiet way.
Alan Steinfeld
You said it has the fragrance of eternity when I talked to you yesterday.
Muriel Gold
Yes, I think it does.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re touching all the aspects of one’s being because you’re feeling in your work, in your workshops called Drawn Home, you’re feeling into it, you’re actually seeing, you’re hearing the quietness, you’re tasting this eternal aspect of being.
Muriel Gold
Well I suppose what we’re doing, I mean we’re born Alan as empty like we said earlier. We slip out in the world, we’re absolutely virgin. There’s nothing there but pure naked existence, you could call it being. And then everything gets added. And that being is always there, but it gets more covered and more covered up, you wake up in the morning, oops I’ve got to go and cook the breath, I want to go and have a pee, blah blah blah, and it gets covered. But actually if you wake up first thing in the morning sometimes you can catch that moment when actually nothing’s going on. Now that nothing, like a very newborn child, I mean I don’t know if you’ve ever pretended you’re a newborn child but I have.
Alan Steinfeld
I do this lay there in the morning and just feel like peace, yes, with no thought.
Muriel Gold
Exactly. Now that peace is always there.
Alan Steinfeld
But I love that you can help people then express that peace. That’s what I think is so beautiful about your work, Drawn Home, because you’re drawing people or people are drawn home to themselves in that workshop.
Muriel Gold
Exactly. Exactly. Because I mean my teacher Cecil used to joke with us, actually it wasn’t a joke, he meant it seriously, but it sounded like a joke. He said of course education is nothing but organized crime. Well of course not all proper education, if you lead out that which is there, that’s not a crime. What’s a crime is to be a success, to be frightened of being a failure, and to do all that neurotic stuff of ‘oh I’m no good’, ‘I’m too this’, ‘I’m too that’, ‘I’m a failure’, or ‘I’m great’, or ‘I’m better than most people’, ‘I’m special’. All this is the crime because it cuts us off like clouds covering the sun. These aspects that come up through our education cut us off from the sun of love, you could say. Which burns in our bodies, in our hearts.
Alan Steinfeld
You want to hear a great poem that sort of talks about this by Rumi? He says, ‘If you want the visible reality, then you’re merely a worker. And if you want the unseen world, you’re not living your truth. Both wishes are foolish, but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is love’s confusing joy’.
Muriel Gold
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s what you’re saying, let life live you by getting out of the way and experiencing.
Muriel Gold
Yes, and I mean you brought up Rumi, and I think a lovely quote of him which I would prefer to actually read because I might not get it completely accurate…
Alan Steinfeld
Because I think you are saying that.
Muriel Gold
Yes, this is Rumi now I’m quoting, which is saying we’re talking about a field which is very difficult to put a name on. He puts the name ‘field’ on it. He says, ‘Out beyond ideas of right-doing or wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’, doesn’t make any sense.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, that’s exactly what you’re talking, because it’s our minds that wants to make sense of it, and what you’re talking to is this thing that’s not about the mind at all. It’s about pure being.
Muriel Gold
Exactly. And pure being, of course, is actually the only thing we all share.
Alan Steinfeld
Well we saw each other. I saw you in there, in me, and you saw me in here.
Muriel Gold
Yes. Exactly. Consciousness saw itself. Exactly. Amen actually.
Alan Steinfeld
So this feeling is what means, the thing about your work getting back in a way because as we kind of wrap up, is that you can help or facilitate whatever you want people feel that quietness, somehow you can help them reach that through whatever means. How do you do that?
Muriel Gold
Well, I don’t do it of course. All I do is lead them to touch quietness. Because you know so many of us have been damaged by concepts, ideas, insults, disapproval, inhibition, being pushed back and being certainly emotionally brutalized and often physically brutalized. So we’re wounded. And how do you get unwounded? And you certainly can’t get unwounded with thoughts. And my experience is the only way you can get unwounded is to come back like an animal. An animal gets wounded, it goes away and it goes into a hedge and it licks its wound. And this licking of the wound I’m using just as a metaphor for coming home into the heart which has been, all of us have been betrayed. You know your second birthday you’re given a lovely red ball, and you think this is great and the first thing you’ll do is your parents say you know let the guy next door play with it. And you start screaming and get smacked. Well I call that betrayal.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Right.
Muriel Gold
It’s a very simplistic example but so we’ve all had it. So we’re all separated from love one way or another. So somehow we have to lick our own hearts. Or we have to take our baby back in our arms and cuddle it and cradle it until we come home again to being okay, I’m okay. Actually, I’m fine. Actually, guess what? I really like the taste of myself.
Alan Steinfeld
And how do we do that by just doing what?
Muriel Gold
Well okay I’m going to be very ordinary and functional here and say how I say it to you. I’ve talked about touching the paper which is part of drawing, part of the language of drawing, the kick-off point of the language of drawing. But let’s say you have somebody who is damaged, frightened, anxious, and negative. And words aren’t going to get through to them because they’re completely deaf to words. So let’s say we just get some music, very simple music which has a bit of a rhythm in it. And we just say let’s just stand here together and do nothing. And just let this music come into our bodies and talk to us. And very slowly, you could say well, if the music talks to you, you know maybe you could just let your body move a little bit, sway a little bit. So you sway a little bit, very gently. It’s almost imperceptible. It wouldn’t even show to start with, they’d be moving inside, swaying inside, and there’d be, because they’re frightened, they wouldn’t even dare to let it show. Slowly, that fear melts because the music rhythm is very sweet and beguiling, and it softens the fear, and then suddenly their bodies are actually swaying. And then suddenly maybe a foot comes up, and then maybe another foot comes up, and maybe a hand comes up. And they start moving with the music, which ten minutes before was impossible because they were frozen with anxiety and fear. So that’s just one tiny tiny example of a very simple way to come back to our quietness. I mean I know I must sound incredibly boring…
Alan Steinfeld
No, no, no! It’s interesting. I don’t think you’re boring. I think it’s inspiring that…
Muriel Gold
It’s because it’s palpable Alan. You know we can talk about peace, we can talk about love, we can talk about God, we can talk about sacredness and blah blah blah. And it means nothing to people in words. But what I’m talking about is palpable in us. We can recognize it if we are willing to stop running away and stand still and just stop. And I mean just stop everything. And abide there in that nothing, apparent nothing, of course it’s living, but it appears like oh it can’t be that, that’s too simple. Let it and just say okay thanks mind, I don’t need you at the moment. And we stay there. That rest is alive. And that rest arises like steam comes off a lake in the autumn.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you Muriel.
Muriel Gold
And that steam is palpable, is all I can say.
Alan Steinfeld
And I think you’re right. And I know you’re right, and I know we have that in us and everyone can touch that same place.
Muriel Gold
Absolutely everybody, you don’t have to be clever, you don’t have to be anything. You don’t have to be educated, all of us can do it.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s the only thing in a sense that people really want, is that place to find that place.
Muriel Gold
It’s all we want actually. It’s all any of us want. We just don’t know it. It’s so simple Alan, we miss it actually.
Alan Steinfeld
Well I think we’re getting it. I have to wrap up because we’re almost out of time here.
Muriel Gold
Okay.
Alan Steinfeld
But we will continue. I will do a television interview this week and this will be on the website and your website is drawnhome.co.uk. And you’ll be teaching a class on Thursday of this week at the One Spirit Learning Alliance at 3:30 West 38th Street on the 15th floor. I’m also going to be doing a discussion with Alex Grey that same day on creativity at the extra store at 78 5th Avenue, but thank you Muriel, and we’ll be in touch. I’ll call you later.
Muriel Gold
Lovely, well it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I feel very honored to have done this.
Alan Steinfeld
Well there’s so much more there is to talk about in your process and people should see you work. I think that’s really beautiful. So you’re also doing a course at Omega up in Rhinebeck in two weeks. People can look at the E Omega website and you’ll be back in New York.
Muriel Gold
And then I’ll be back in New York. Well I’ll come back again soon. After the Omega course I go home, but I’ll certainly be back next summer probably for a bit longer.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay thanks. I’ll be in touch with you anyway, and you’ll come back as a guest.
Muriel Gold
I’ll come back when I’m invited.
Alan Steinfeld
You’re invited all the time. You’re always a guest. Anyway, this is Alan Steinfeld for New Realities. I’ve been talking to Muriel Gold, that is her website drawnhome.co.uk. My website is newrealities.com. If you want to reach me, email me at newrealities@earthlink.net. Check out the website newrealities.com and I’ll see you next week or talk to you next week. Thank you.