The Zen of Painting....

30 Years Later and the House Demolished, Did It Matter if We Used Glossy or Flat?

[Nyerges is the author of Enter the Forest, Guide to Wild Foods, and co-author of Extreme Simplicity.   He has led wilderness trips since 1974.  He can be reached at the School of Self-Reliance (Box 41834, Eagle Rock, CA 90041); or on-line at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com.]

 It was the summer of 1973 when my brother and I lived on my grandfather’s farm in Chardon, Ohio.  One day, we decided to paint the kitchen a beautiful shade of light turquoise.  

We turned on the radio, and began our task.  We opened the windows, and I did the trim while my brother rolled.  We listened to the radio as we busied ourselves with our individual tasks.  We worked the corners, the edges, the front surfaces.

There’s something about painting -- perhaps it’s the fumes, perhaps it is the long quiet times of many little tasks.  Painting requires no moral decisions, no great choices, no necessary pontifications about the meaning and purpose of life.  And yet...

And yet, there you are, with your self, and the task before you.  For me, painting time has often been a time to re-enter the inner I, to think, to remember.  In many ways, it is the ideal task for self-enlightenment.

When we were done, we felt we’d accomplished something, and felt we’d given something back to the old farmhouse.  

When the weekend came, another uncle came to visit us .  He strode into the kitchen, looked around at the paint, and simply said “you didn’t use glossy!”  

Glossy?  We were teenagers from California, visiting the home where our mother grew up.  Though it may be second-nature to us today, back then we had no sense that a kitchen should be painted glossy.  
Glossy vs. flat were not issues that we thought much about.  We didn’t think it mattered all that much?

But Uncle Joe seemed to think it was a big deal, and just one more bit of evidence that teenagers from “the big city” were a bunch of  dimwits who wouldn’t know a cow from a goat.  Uncle Joe shared it around to family and friends that we’d painted the kitchen in “wrong” paint, so we heard about in the weeks that followed.  Some relatives didn’t care, but others would comment as they came in, “Oh, so there’s the flat paint job,” instead of, “Hey, hello, long time no see!”   

Dumb city boys who don’t know the difference between flat and glossy paint, who actually had the stupidity to paint a kitchen in flat paint.

Of course, our intent was to make the family happy that we’d improved the old farmhouse.  We wanted the relatives to comment that we were industrious nephews who proved that all city boys were not idiots.

Today, while I was painting my own bathroom -- glossy paint, white -- memories of the summer of 1973 in Chardon began to play again in my mind.  Perhaps it was the paint. Perhaps it was the cool breeze blowing fresh oxygen through the room. I heard the chickens out back and it reminded me of my brief period of farm-living.

I began to think about how Uncle Joe responded, and how he could have responded.  I realized then the great truth in the phrase that WHAT we do is of  little or no importance, but HOW we do it is everything. 

Uncle Joe died over 10 years ago, and when I visited the old farm site in 1999, the entire farm house and barn had been torn down and were now just a field.  None of it mattered anymore in the world of physical reality.  Joe was gone, and the entire farmhouse was simply a memory, glossy or flat.

Joe could have congratulated us on taking the initiative to paint, and could have explained why kitchens are always painted glossy.  He could have told us that it was a great  primer coat, and enthusiastically offered to drive us right then to the hardware store to get glossy paint, and we’d all do the final coat together.  That would have been something.  Our memory would have been profoundly different had Uncle Joe taken that route of inclusiveness, familyness, and helpfulness. 

 I do not fault him for what he did do -- he probably knew no other way.  In fact, from what I knew about his father (my grandfather), his father probably would have beaten him had Joe painted the kitchen with flat paint.   So to Joe, that was just one of millions of automatic reactions to things in his world.  He probably forgot about in a few years, after the novelty of talking about Marie’s silly nephews wore off.

I realized then how important such “little things” can be, and I wondered how well I would do when my next opportunity arose.  It is especially important with impressionable youth to do the very best we can to be a good example.

It seemed like an important insight, that the “how” is more important than the “what,” and that flat or glossy really doesn’t matter.  Perhaps it was the paint.  Perhaps it was the cool breeze blowing fresh oxygen through the room....

             

The Death Seminars

[from “Til Death Do Us Part?” which is available from Kindle, or from the Store at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]

Dolores and I were active students of metaphysics, mostly through our association with WTI’s Spiritual Studies classes.  We spent a lot of time studying Harold Percival’s “Thinking and Destiny,” and other books such as Fromme’s “Art of Loving” and Hayakawa’s “Language in Thought and Action.” 

By the early 1990s, we began to conduct weekly study sessions and classes in our home, mostly readings from “Thinking and Destiny” on Sunday afternoons.  Then we started doing regular evening classes on weekdays also.  Some weeks, we’d have up to five classes, though usually we’d have two to three a week.  These would be classes based upon the metaphysical studies we were doing in association with WTI, or they were survival and self-reliance classes based upon how we lived our lives.  We called our enterprise Gateway (short for Gateway Research, Education, and Training, or GREAT – my, how modest we were!), and we published a monthly schedule of our classes and lectures.

One night, we offered a class called “What Happens After Death.”  About 10 people showed up for this one, which was a large gathering for our small meeting room. 

We began by telling everyone that this was not some sort of religious exercise, nor was anyone required to “agree with” or “believe” anything we were telling them. Rather, we simply asked that they consider the scenario that we’d be sharing as a possibility, and that we would not consider “arguments” or “debates” about it.  In other words, something does “happen” to us after our body dies.  This “something” can range from “nothing” to reincarnation to “going to hell” and many other possibilities. 

We were students of Harold Percival’s “Thinking and Destiny” book, and we explained that for this class, we’d be sharing his version of what happens after we die.  Obviously, Dolores and I considered this version to be not only acceptable, but possible and plausible. 

A brief explanation about Percival is required.  He claimed in the preface to his monumental “Thinking and Destiny” book that he “came to” the information that he shares by means of what he calls “Real Thinking.”  He further defines “Real Thinking” as a four-part process. The first step is the selection of a topic and turning the Conscious Light on it.  (The Nature of Conscious Light is addressed repeatedly in his book).  Next comes the fixing and cleansing of the subject, which is done by training the Light upon it.  Then, the third step is to reduce the subject to a point, which is done by focusing Light upon it.  This is what we would call "concentrating.”  Lastly, by following this procedure, with the Light focused on the point, the result of this Thinking is a “Knowing” about the subject.

He provides no bibliography, no references, no “proofs” for anything he proffers except that the reader can do his or her own Real Thinking for verification.  In general, Percival describes the evolutionary path that each of us should be on to awaken our minds of which we are composed.  In fact, he says we really have no choice in the matter, that the purpose of life is to evolve, sooner or later.

Upon body death, according to Percival, we “automatically” go through a series of steps, which he initially describes as a brief overview on pages 240 to 253.  He describes a specific order of 12 events, which includes a life-review, a judgement, a heaven-state, etc.  

So, the purpose of our “What Happens After Death” class was to emphasize that all of us WILL die, and that “something” WILL then occur or begin, even if that something is “nothingness.”

After our brief explanation, we asked each participant to lie on our floor. 

“Now you have just died,” we announced, and we covered each person with a sheet to further simulate the death experience.  We then read through the after-death stages, one by one, slowly, in the darkened room, asked each participant to work hard to fully feel the experience.

Talking through this process took about 45 minutes.

Then, we got through the entire cycle, and explained that these steps could actually take several hundred years of earth time.  Then it would be time for being reborn into a suitable and appropriate family, in the place on earth that we’ve earned for ourselves.

We turned on the lights, and removed the sheets, and let everyone take a few minutes to get their eyes adjusted to the light.  Slowly, each person opened their eyes and slowly got up, and sat down in a chair.

We began to share significant experiences that each person had.  A few folks were very quiet and would not talk at all, but others were very talkative.  Some were even in tears.

We closed the class by telling everyone that they had not died tonight, and that everyone now has a “new opportunity” to still “do the right things” since they were still alive in a body.

We shared some freshly-made coffee-elixir and healthful cookies, and we discussed a few of the upcoming classes and poetry readings that we’d be having in the coming weeks.  But no one seemed interested in our announcements.  Most everyone was strongly affected by the experience, and they wanted to ask more questions, which we tried to answer.  As usual, we didn’t feel like the most perfect examples in the world, but we knew that “the future” is all the result of each and every choice that we make, second by second, and the consequences of those choices.  To make the wisest possible choices every second of one’s entire life required a unique sort of sobriety and focus which itself required a unique lifestyle regimen to maintain – and, of course, those details were the subjects of our on-going classes.