"Reunion" was a originally a pencil illustration I completed in early 2005 very soon after studying the Vipassana meditation technique in the Blue Mountains.

Below is a blog I wrote for Undergrowth's Nomadology project about the experience:

"Journeys Inward"  2005

Eight weeks ago I spent ten days in silence.

i've had a number of amazing journeys since that time, but haven't posted any of them, still trying to figure out a way to put words to the wordless space i found...

How would a bird describe swimming in oceans of oxygen to a fish?
I am still a fish, but i have memories of being a bird.
Does that make sense?

Let me tell you where im coming from.
All year I've been travelling, exploring this landscapes layers of political journeys, activist songlines, gypsy festivals, alternative cultural geographies, urban ecologies, rural agricultures full of international fruitpickers, art scenes hiding between the cracks of the corporate pavement.

in my last entry i began to wonder what it was all in aid of. When do you stop learning new things and start travelling just for the sake of it, because its complicated staying anywhere too long? It's so much easier to pack up and keep going.

So I decided to jump off the merri-go-round to see what else there is to see. I stopped talking so that I could listen for a while. I decided to do something different. To stretch myself in a new way.

I'd heard of the Vipassana meditation technique many times from friends over the years who recommended it as a profoundly affecting experience, especially for someone like myself who thrives on communication. When I was 22 I thought it sounded like the craziest thing I'd ever heard. Now, four and a half years later, on the other end of a Bachelor of Media Arts, I feel ready to get a bit of perspective on the way my mind has come to think. I've been slowly getting more and more distanced from the realms of information overload and spectacle fast foods for a while now. Suddenly silence and meditation makes a lot more sense.

So I logged on to the Vipassana website and entered my details. A week later I received confirmation, I had been accepted for the May retreat. Two weeks later I was on a bus back to NSW after a fortnight of decidedly unmeditative play in Melbourne (see last entry).

The Blackheath Vipassana Meditation Centre is perched elegantly on a hill overlooking the spectacular blue mountains, a valley rolls out beneath the dining hall where we congregate silently at rostered times, signaled by a simple bell chime one of the managers rings walking slowly around the property. From the balcony outside of the dining space you have a perfect view of the west winds, where the sun descended over the horizon each night in endless patterns of solar beauty as the landscape shifted into blue silhouettes, like huge rippled waves caught in one motion for this short eon of time. On the far side two white wind turbines diligently harvest the valleys breathe. Synchronised steel flowers in endless motion.

I was a little apprehensive about what it was I was putting myself in for, but excited knowing it would be something new. A challenge.

A chance to breathe.
We did a lot of breathing.
Breath is the key to focusing your mind. It's the first thing you learn in any meditation. Vispassana is particularly dedicated to this concept, eschewing mantra (sound trance) and visualisation techniques to encourage you to focus on the direct sensory perception of the here and now.

Easier said than done.

At first all I found was my monkey mind. There it was (I am?) swinging from neural branch to branch, chattering endlessly.

I found that the more I tried to remain silent, the more my mind wanted to talk. I had novels of ideas to talk about with myself. Enough memories to fill libraries with stories retold. enough project plans to fill entire museums with creations. Enough daydreams to cloud an entire mind.

After two days of this i began to observe my minds habits like a scientist of consciousness. Thoughts are like tides rising and falling, in constant motion - but are they me?  Because, if that's me, then how come I can observe it like I'm doing now?

Again, I have to ask - is it possible for a fish to understand the ocean?

And then I wonder, how did the first lifeforms learn how to breathe oxygen?

I began to realise that past those gates there is an infinite journey to rediscover. I began to feel ever increasing subtle sensations throughout my body. I felt the weight of gravity on my bones like it was the earth within me. I felt the heat of body, a fire burning through my every being. Worlds to be explored through the freeways of nervous system, swimming the rivers of my veins, the branched avenues of my capillaries. The tree structure of my brain, linked to the spinal column. Shivers up and down. My crown tingling.
My consciousness began to focus like a microscope onto every smaller energies, until I began to feel a beautiful shimmering effect through my body. The atomic powerplay in everything, within me.
It was incredible and transcendental, but it wasn't a separate reality. It was just a deeper insight into the nature of this reality. Another layer in the onion skin. A place to find perspective. To see it all a little clearer.

The clearmind.
There is nothing to say.
And everything to feel.

At the end of the 10 days, I felt like I was only learning how sense the tip of this iceberg. I began to understand that there was an ocean beyond it that I didn't even realise existed, or at least had pigeonholed into the realms of 'religion' or 'new age spirituality' or something equally rationalistic and close-minded.

Essentially, I was amazed that I had never made this journey before in my entire life, through the very body which housed me for every second I have been alive. Why don't more of us make this journey?

Ther answers are obvious of course, there is an endless smorgasboard of distractions from this journey. the social ecology to explore. the fences of cultural normality. The bazaars of art and music to taste from. The entire sensual reality to play within. Not to mention the entire supermarket of consumer culture which we just work to afford a place within.
all in all there is enough spectacle to blind ourselves with for many many lifetimes.


This doesn't really satisfy me as a description of this experience - but i had to put something down here, otherwise I would have missed the most profound journey I've been on all year. One that didn't require me to go anywhere at all - actually the complete opposite. But what I found in there was in some way more eye-opening, exotic and expansive than any trip over seas i could think of..

what are we?
amoeba tree
sweet fruit ripening
skeleton seed
i am i is you is we
broken through the endless see
but what are you, if you is me?
shhh...
just remember to breathe...

semen

egg

a kiss
&
a smile

what are we?

The City Speaks

Acrylic on canvas

Melbourne 2008

by Tim Parish

 This piece was inspired by the poem 'This City Speaks To Me" by Melbourne's bohemian prince of slam poetry SI who has shouted the words of this at the top of his intoxicated lungs on street corners and in dimly lit bars enough times that I almost know the words off by heart. Love yr work brother.

From The World Tree exhibition

The UFO

acrylic on canvas

Tim Parish 2008

This painting was inspired by recent readings on the nature of the UFO phenomenon which link it to some kind of psychic manifestation rather than a physical vessel from outer space. I've always been interested in the concept that if extra-terrestrial species were to visit our planet, they would be more likely to do so as astral energy bodies rather than in metal spaceships but Carl Jung explored this psychological query of the UFO phenomena in his book Flying Saucers written in 1959. He suggested that they were more akin to symbolic manifestations of the human unconscious, projected into reality as collective hallucinations. This theory was expanded upon greatly by psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna at a number of speeches and his books 'Archaic Revival' and 'True Hallucinations'. Here are few quotes from the latter:

"I believe that the transpersonal component of the human psyche is not distinct from matter and that therefore it can literally do anything. It is not subject to the will of any individual. It has a will and an understanding that is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals who compose it as cells compose a body. It has a plan, glimpsed by individuals only as vision or religious hierophany. Nevertheless, the plan is unfolding.  There will be many more UFO sightings, many more close contacts. Our belief systems are undergoing  accelerated evolution via increased input from the other."

"Somewhere ahead of us there is a critical barrier where we will at last have enough data to obtain an integrating insight into the riddle of humanity's relation to the UFO. I believe that as this happens the childhood of our species will pass away and when this is done we will be free to use the staggering understanding that humankind and the UFO are one.
It is the genius of human technology to master and to serve the energies of life and death and time and space.  The UFO holds out the possibility of mind become object, a ship that can cross the universe in the time it takes to think about it.  Because that is what the universe is--a thought.  And when thought becomes mobile and objectified, then humanity--novices in the mastery of thought--will begin to set out."

"Of course we may discover that we are not to set out; the future may reveal instead that there is something out there calling us home. Then it will be our technology and the call of the Other that will move toward meeting.  The saucer is an excellent metaphor for this. When Jung suggested that the saucer was the human soul, he was more correct than he may have supposed. It is not so far away. That is the other thing.  The last shift of epochs gave us relativity theory and quantum mechanics.  Another epochal shift looms, but whether or not it is the final epoch is hard to say.  Our roles as parts of the process introduces an uncertainty in our observations that bedevils prediction."

(True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna: pages 199-203)

"The Greatest Democracy On Earth" and other myths...

Analysis of the US Federal Elections

by Tim Parish

Editor, Undergrowth.org

As the US Election draws to a close, the rest of the world has to just watch and wait as the self described "Greatest Democracy On Earth" continues to be one of the worst representatives of the democratic process of all western nations - although it does create fantastic political theatre... With the global economy in freefall, Republican Party (or GOP as they like to call it there - "Good Old Party", seriously), candidate John McCain has spent the last few weeks of the campaign trying to talk about anything else. They've linked Obama to Bill Ayers of the radical left wing group The Weather Underground from the 60's in millions of dollars of paid advertisment (actually I highly recommend the documentary about them which came out a few years ago to understand where they actually came from and what they represented). Although Obama was eight years old when all this took place it was enough for them to try and pin the dirtiest word in America on him; terrorist, and apparently this was shouted out at various Republican campaign rallys. They've compared Obama to a pop star (Paris Hilton and Britney Spears to be exact). He's been called a socialist by the "pitbull with lipstick" Palin (her words) and McCain having said what I think is one of the worst quotes of the entire campaign; "America didn't become the most powerful nation on earth from spreading the wealth around...". Oh really...

It goes on; Obama has been called a Muslim by right wing pundits, although former Secretrary of State Colin Powell rightly denounced the concept that there was anything wrong with being Muslim when he decided to jump ship from the 'Good Old Party' and endorse Obama wholeheartedly. But my favourite propoganda piece is probably the one which McCain and his crew of media henchmen simply called "The One" (embedded below) in which they seem to imply that Obama's rise has an almost messianic tone to it...

Of course, being the party that tries hard to curry to the fundamentalist Christian vote in America, you'd think that someone who acts and talks like a good Christian would be hard to criticise. The problem they are suggesting is that Obama is too good, and therefore might actually be the antichrist which wackos have been waiting to appear for a long time. No joke. There are so many blogs and Youtube pages devoted to this now that CNN even did a story on it. Scary thing is, there are nuts out there who do take this seriously and they all vote for the 'Good Ol' Party'.

At least when the left makes fun of McCain using religious iconography, they know they are taking the piss such as in this clever series of animations about the Two McCains.

Now, getting past all that bullshit, it might be easy to think that there are only two candidates going here, but that's just because no one pays attention to the others in the mainstream media. In fact, former Democrat Cynthia McKinney is running for The Green Party in ths US and has some great opinions on a range of issues that rarely get discussed, centring constantly on the issue of stolen votes and electoral machine errors which threaten millions of voter's integrity. She's not the only one. Although most of the main media companies have been following Republican Party's accusations about community voter registration group Acorn as the "greatest threat to the fabric of American Democracy" - McCain, Journalists Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have written a story for Rolling Stone Magazine, about the nature of people being taken of the electoral role. They have also created a video and a comic book called "Steal Back Your Vote" detailing how we people can challenge this scenario. So on side of the fence we have people trying to register new voters and making mistakes and on the other side we have people being taken off the ballot as quickly as possible. Seems to me like this whole 'non-compulsory voting thang' causes a lot more problems than just electoral apathy.

Meanwhile CNN has reported record turnout for early voters as encouraged by Obama in the last few days with up to a fifth of the electorate voting by monday. CNN also mentioned the problems with voting machine inconsistencies, but passed them off as having been fixed by this week... and while CNN is lot better than anything like the shite that is Fox News, they still seem too scared to make a real stand on this dangeorus issue. Meanwhile, independent media channel Democracy Now, who reports that 45% of the US electorate is now forced to use these Electronic Voting Machines has found widespread issues of 'voteflipping' from one candidate to another have come about. Wired Magazine (a fairly good source for technology) has also reported that the Electoral Voting Machines are a piece of shit. And in the most high profile indictment of the possibilty of digital electoral fraud, The New York Times has now officially endorsed cancelling electronic voting due to constant voting errors.

And finally, to finish on a story that no one has covered as far as I have seen, Barack Obama might be the only American politician I have ever heard who has actually mentioned the reality of the Native American peoples. This video from his website outlines what sounds like a hints at an apology in the not too distant future similar to the recent Stolen Generations apology here in Australia. About time.

'The Night Doctors'
by Tim Parish
ink on paper
Japan, 2008

from the exhibition 'Visions of Mu'.

Somewhere between midnight and dawn, in a small room on the border of Thailand and Laos my friend Cassandra told me about a vision she had had in the Amazonian jungle a few months earlier. 

'I felt as if all the creatures of the forest, the insects, the snakes, the creatures of the night were surrounding me and ripping my body to pieces" she told me matterof factly. "It wasn't painful, but there was no escaping the fact that my body had been torn to shreds and I had to confront the reality that I was no longer alive..." - and that was only the beginning of her eight hour long Ayahuasca journey.

 The image of a churning, infested darkness from which the soul was pulled into a vision of the afterlife remained in my mind quite clearly. I later learnt from the writings of my friend and colleague Rak Razam that this was a common vision, and the the shamans of the Amazon even gave name to these creatures as the 'night doctors'. Ayahuasca is a healing medicine utilised by the witch doctors of the Amazon for thousands of years, and the visionary insight which it gifts is one that is said to trascend the physical world, and in doing so, the mortal coil. I realised that these 'doctors' of the night, which come to deliver the soul from it's psychic attachment to the body are therefore part of the journey beyond fear and toward the dissolution of the ego that accompanies the apparent near death experience and subsequent dissolution of the ego which people often seem to undergo. I became to conceive of them not so much as demons or nightmarish creatures then, but as gatekeepers of a certain realm through which we must pass in this state in order to let go of the trappings of the material world.

It was not until I after had experienced the plant myself whilst travelling in Japan many months later that the visions I had been told of materialised in the form of this painting. Although I didn't experience the same destruction of my body, there was an intricacy to the visions which seemed to communicate a different kind of language to me. A visual language that spoke directly to my soul and transformed some part of my own way of seeing.  Also, the process of journeying through the darkness of my own fears made sense and was perhaps expected as I had been forewarned of it in advance by my fellow travellers.In Christian theology, people speak of 'the dark night of the soul' which precedes illumination and I feel that this shamanic journey could equate with that concept also. Upon returning I was inspired to communicate my visions into visual language and this painting was one of the pieces that I created.

That is the story behind this painting.

 -Tim

 'The Tempest' is an experimental dance video collaboration between video artist Tim Parish and sound artist/performer Lulu Madill aka Buttons Touching. It is an interpretation of the traditional raindance, and a choreography inspired by the element of wind.

 Utilising shots from Beijing and Darwin 'The Tempest' was predominantly filmed on the windiest day in Melbourne in 2008 when record breaking gales of wind toppled trees, and blew people from their bikes. 

The Tempest was winner of Best Soundtrack at the Fistful of Films Gala Awards as part of the Darwin Festival 2008. 

Performer: Lulu Madill

Video: Tim Parish

Audio: Lulu Madill & Tim Parish

 8mm scratch videoclip for the song 'Dogs of Rotterdam' by Melbourne gypsy deathcore band The Barons of Tang. Shot at the Northcote Social Club. Produced and Edited by Tim Parish, Verb Studios.

For more information on The Barons of Tang:
http://www.myspace.com/thebaronsoftang

To find more videos and art by Tim Parish
http://www.undergrowth.org/user/verb