Maya

Well i don’t have a cohesive narrative for this but rather a bunch of thots and suspicions that i kind of melted together in the making of. It ended up working metaphorically as well cause the it visually looks like a melted liquid.

There’s this dogmatic belief and trust in perception that’s also gotten more and more ocularcentric (a perceptual bias ranking vision over other senses) as we spend more time on our phones, taking high-res pictures and videos. And so, reality and the idea of the self are seen as rigid, carved in marble or concrete. While some sense of shape and form helps you not go insane, it also makes it immensely difficult to imagine a different self or world, leaving you stuck in this lead box buried six feet deep.

The stories we tell ourselves about the world around us and about ourselves are actually what carve the marble of our rigid worldviews and stories.

Humans always saw themselves in the reflections of flowing streams, ponds, and lakes, but never as clearly as in a mirror or our cameras. This gives us a false sense of trust in them, even though our visions are skewed by narratives.

I find it interesting, then, that psychedelics add a haziness, waviness, and fluidity to what you see around you and hold as “solid,” just as they do to your stories, beliefs, and sense of self. I think this is a more “true” state of things – always in flux, fluid, and constantly mixing and interacting.

This reminds me also of subtle energy bodies. I don’t think the physical body is all there is; there are multiple layers of subtle energy bodies always in flux and interacting with things and other beings around. This is my reasoning for why I’ve felt the thoughts and stress drain out of me in the presence of my yoga teacher, and why an anxious person, without any exchange of words, can make me feel a bit jittery.

I also suspect there’s something in embodied states that forces you out of mental models into alternative states that might not be accessible by fighting fire with fire (overthinking with more overthinking).

With all of these clouds in my headspace, I attempted to:

• communicate through embodiment and not just visual or conceptual means
• explore the flow of subtle energy bodies
• help melt the rigidity of perception and the self itself
• question what is real.