Reflection

If you listen to the depths of your heart and measure the heights of the horizon, you shall hear one melody, and in that melody the stone and the star are equally in tune.

Khalil Gibran

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ceramic sculpture, height 40 cm, width 20 cm, depth 35 cm

During my studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, we were commissioned by the coordinator of the ceramics department Gijs Assmann to make a sculpture on the theme of apocalypse. My response was this sculpture, by which I tried to express what I had learned and experienced during my first two ten-day Vipassana meditation and silence courses in India.

Apocalypse literally means the time when everything that was covered comes to the surface NOW and can be removed. So an apocalyptic time is a time full of revelations, full of exposures and unveiling of secrets. And that is very clearly the time we are living in right now.

Vipassana Meditation teacher S.N. Goenka said in his speech at the World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders in 2014: “To me, to think of peace in the human society we can not ignore individuals. If there is no peace in the mind of the individual, I can’t understand how can there be real peace in the human world.”

We humans are constantly busy trying to solve problems on the outside and often forget to look inside. Personally, I am convinced that the answers to all our questions can be found in our own consciousness and that the only thing we can really change is ourselves. So it makes little sense to look only outwards, as the Christian mystic Angelus Silesius put it so beautifully back in the 17th century: ” Tarry! For whither away? Thy heaven lies within; To seek it elsewhere leads to folly and to sin.”

Of course, we can also learn a lot from the outer world through life itself and through communication with others,  at least if we are aware of the fact that we are mirrored on the outside, which again allows us to learn a lot about ourselves. To express this, I worked a mirror mosaic into my sculpture Reflection and opened the body of the figure to all sides.

The world is reflected in us and holds a mirror up to us, as is so well described in the four laws of mirrors. For me, the laws of mirrors are a very good point of reference in life. Maybe you will like them, too.