Creator’s Attention
Your attention holds a unique significance. If you read this text to the end, you will learn how attention becomes creation. This is vital for everyone, but, I know, it is not accessible to all, otherwise, only happy people would inhabit this white light.
Born into human bodies, we inevitably operate with the concept of "time," which allows the life process to be observed in detail, operating with the nonlinear capabilities of our mind. Time, however, carries no physical properties, and any of its qualities, including its illusoriness, are created individually by each person.
Thanks to the possibility of retrospective viewing, one can construct a picture of the cause-and-effect relationships that led one to this moment, specifically in this quality. Yet even that picture is an illusion. After all, the entire set of events is reprogrammed by your mind from the present moment, creating a comprehensible logic and reality for the personality of what is happening.
Observing myself and analyzing my professional creative activities—theatrical directing, television, music, parties, performative practices—I have witnessed thousands of manifestations of human destinies, both bright and joyful, and those filled with grief and despair.
When you see such a diversity of lives, you realize the absurdity of the manifestations of behavior both in people and in yourself. Is this not what Contemplation of Emptiness meditation speaks of, in which the meditator grasps the illusoriness of things and events, observing that the surrounding world is not what it seems, and that every human being is trapped in their own daydreams, fears, and waking nightmares, composed of the individual qualities of the personality, its ability to filter information through its own system of values, leaving only what allows it to 'justify' (a director's term, thus in quotes) the past and the present, to justify the reality of the personality residing in the body, to justify its 'I'.
In the process of rediscovering the world, by stepping outside the limitations of the firmware of past systems, a person inevitably faces the unknown, as old neural connections die off, making room for new ones that are yet to form. Quite literally, old neural pathways lose activation, making way for new ones that have yet to be established. This cessation of the energetic fueling of old narratives is what brings pain: the pain of the Ego's resistance as its system of values collapses, mercilessly burying everything each of us calls Life under its ruins.
Exploring life as a space for art, living out the roles of my productions, living the destinies of characters in plays and performances, I, without unnecessary questions, threw myself into circumstances of Italian passions, dramas incompatible with a healthy psyche, filled with carnal pleasures, alcohol of all types and strengths, and drugs—that is how the love of freedom revealed the other side of the coin.
I have not written about this. I have not touched upon these topics in the media space, but now, I feel that it is necessary.
People who wished to help me were rejected, psychologists were, with particular refinement, convicted of professional incompetence—that is how my mind tried to preserve its identity and inviolability, and the Ego pushed further into the foreground, creating conflict after conflict. I now perceive those events as a black hole accumulating critical mass in order to collapse.
The collapse was inevitable and is probably happening even now, as the process of Creation is continuous, but the other extreme could also have materialized.
By driving myself to the extreme, by re-understanding myself and the nature of my activities, in order to embody that picture of the world in which people, like all living beings, are free from suffering and full of love, and, simply put—to not die, I began to pay attention to meditation, became a meditation teacher, and freed myself from drug addiction, as we—humans—are already full of attachments that compel the personality to suffer.
Help from the outside was temporary, and sometimes selfish motives were hidden behind the cover of help. Now, without pride, as there is nothing to be proud of here, but with joy, I say that I walked this path myself. The effect of such self-therapy is the most reliable of all possible choices.
Buddhist and Taoist practices, which make up a large part of acting training, focusing attention on Creation, wise teachers, and professional deformation—or rather, the knowledge and understanding, and repeated practical application in theatrical activity, of subtle energetic instruments—formed that fertile ground for rethinking my actions, accepting them, and letting them go, which constitutes the most simple and universal way to pass through any life's tribulations. Everything further is merely an accumulation of not always necessary theory, and practice, practice, practice.
For the last two years in Russia, I was absolutely clean, sober, and perfectly happy, until the restless mind found a new field for the game of resistance. Such is its nature—to find, or if there are none, to imagine, a field of conflict where danger is possible. And all would be well when one embarks on such a path consciously, understanding all the risks and recognizing oneself as the creator of situations—this is not available to everyone, but everyone, one way or another, knows what is being discussed, because such feelings are certainly part of everyone's biography. On the other hand, this is the realization of one's 'I' as a consequence of the established causes, which is popularly disseminated in 'kitchen psychology' as 'feeling like a victim.' And where there is a victim, there is a predator. One excludes the other.
Having gone through a 'survival school with myself,' it was impossible not to notice the old patterns by which, out of habit, a new life attempts to be built. Only they are 'old,' like the past system of values and beliefs that has already collapsed, and a new one must now grow in its place.
At this moment, it is important to gather all one's awareness and capacity, first and foremost, for logical reasoning, analysis, and critique of all one's experiences; second, to realize them and let them go. The simplest and most effective method. Not everyone is capable of passing it independently. I thank my teachers for the tools in my hands, and for the personal desire to feel life in its fullness, even while being captured by the vortex of events, to focus on the awareness of choice and love, whatever manifestations she may encounter. It is the teachers who illuminate that love which we sometimes forget, or leave unattended, focusing on the division in our imperfect, basic human firmware, within divisions, like the ancient and familiar symbol—Yin and Yang.
Residing in human bodies, we are already present in a world of divisions into dimensions of all possible perceptions, which, at a more 'high,' 'subtle' level, become the unified energy of love and the contemplation of oneself in everything. This is precisely how the Buddha sees Buddhas around him. This is precisely how each person, by their inner nature, creates what is called the surrounding world, the external world, the universe, etc., in the human world, based on their own ideas and 'faith in the proposed circumstances'—that is another theatrical term.
The entire physical world was created for the very purpose—and it must be said, created by you yourself—for the belief in the proposed circumstances to become an unquestionable axiom, which, upon closer examination, is plastic, like the liquid-crystalline essence of mobile being, where the human mind dissolves into an infinite black hole, where time merges with space, causing the rejection of one's own body, in all projections of height, width, and depth, multiplied by infinity. And even here there is a light side of perception, and there is a dark one.
That very 'light at the end of the tunnel' turned out to be an illusion that fucked over many. The illusion of choice of lives and destinies has reduced the illusion itself to illusoriness. This is how the surrounding world manifested as your reality. Here and now in your sensations.