In this conversation with Olya, I look at what meditation with paintings on my website is and how to work with it. What can you perceive in a painting beyond the image, why can energy be not only seen but also received as knowledge, and why, according to Rudolf Steiner, will people one day stop looking even at recognized works of art? This conversation is about taking a broader view of paintings, of people and of everything around you, and expanding your perception in life.
What meditation with paintings is
– Your website has a section called “Meditations with Paintings.” What is it? How should we approach it?
– The thing is, people fundamentally have different forms of perception in their lives. And certain forms of perception will give a person visual images of energy. It's enough to keep practicing, attend different forms of meditation and watch the images that come into your mind. For normal or even initial perception, for telling things apart — “Why did I see that particular light?”, “Why did I see that particular color?” — and for relating to it calmly, it may take months, years, decades. Because all their lives people have been taught — and you have been taught — that you don't see anything and don't perceive anything. The only thing you can see, you see with your eyes.
Forms of perception and images of energy
When you see a certain energy, you can see it directly as a visual image, or you can receive this energy as knowledge and then bring that knowledge into a certain visual image, a certain form. This image may be interpreted by you, by your brain, by your spiritual being, your system — the interpretation of this image may come about for different reasons. In any case, it is something.
A game of telephone: how an image loses its energy
And if you convey this image in a painting, in some written or drawn form, it may carry certain energies. The question remains: what does “may carry certain energies” mean?
If you have interpreted the result too much and then simply transferred the final forms of the interpretation onto a sheet of paper, it's like lining up fifteen people and showing them all a painting, and then another person passes on their own painting, thirty people pass on another painting, a fourth painting, a fifth and so on. In this game of telephone, what comes out at the end is completely false information. Not real, not alive — not what is actually there: that will no longer be in it.
Energy that stays on you
But there is a point at which you can transfer energy onto paper, or into video, or into audio — into different forms of expression — so that it's as easy as possible to come into contact with that energy.
It's like when you take a piece of tape and peel it off — you can feel very easily that it's sticky. And it can be so sticky that it stays on you.
In the same way, energy can be so sticky that it stays on you, or becomes embedded in your system, or spreads through your system. You won't be able to get rid of it.
Just as you can pick up viruses — both positive and negative — that exist in the world. You pick up viruses without understanding why and certainly without controlling the process. Today, by the way, science and medicine are not developed enough to control this at all, to truly identify it or understand it. Imagine: you walk into a space and see this virus. Or you have some device with you, you press it — and you are immune to this virus. They don't know how to do that.
People are pumped full of huge quantities of medications that supposedly help preventively so that you won't catch this virus. But it works only very conditionally, because a huge number of people don't use these medications and don't catch the virus either. Some get sick, some don't. Something happens to some people and not to others. Why? Because people don't understand the causes of death scientifically.
What energy books and paintings carry
A very important aspect here is what you open, what book or what painting you look at in terms of energy. There are certain paintings you come into contact with — and you see and feel that energy.
Rudolf Steiner has a very interesting account of paintings that people all over the world look at — the Sistine Madonna, for example. Or people love to look at art created by, say, Michelangelo. And he says that time will pass, and people won't look at this art at all — at the paintings, at these buildings, at these objects. They won't be of any interest to a person at all. Why? Because the energy a person comes into contact with now — the energy that is inside this painting, or statue, or building, or city — is, at this moment, as widespread as it can be and interesting to a certain kind of human consciousness.
Notice: there are people who travel somewhere, and there are those who don't. There are those who find it interesting; it brings about some state in them. And there are people in whom it brings about no state at all. They think, “Can I escape from here, leave? Can I not be here? I can't look at this. I don't understand what people are even doing here, what the point is.”
This is a very important aspect of perception. Whether it's a reprinted text, a painting, a statue, some room, a video or an audio recording, it is very important always to understand that everywhere, absolutely everywhere, such things carry certain energies.
The next question is how much a person comes into contact with them or doesn't.
Paintings on the website and their energies
Accordingly, the paintings on my website carry certain energies. Some of these energies are described, some are not. Some are connected with particular meditations, some with entirely different realms. There are paintings that come first, and a meditation I led emerges from them. There are already dozens of meditations on our website — or perhaps, by the time you watch this video, hundreds or thousands. Or perhaps they have ended and are no longer released. Or I no longer exist. And some of these paintings were created independently.
The energies transmitted within different states — in this case, within different paintings — run in very different directions.
Can paintings be divided by subject
That is, you can't simply say — as people in our society love to do, Olya, and as is suggested from time to time — this is for business, this is for spiritual development, this is for marketers, this is for a new profession, this is for your personal state, this is for health. Can paintings be divided up like that? Can meditations be divided up like that at all? By some set of objects, you can. And if that space still exists, you know there is such a division on my website. Each video has a set of entities. I say that a given video relates at once to a person, to the concept of love, to the concept of compassion, to the word “children,” and to certain regions. A kind of complex.
So it's a nonlinear approach. And in the modern world in general — at the time this video is being recorded — you and I have the opportunity, with the help of modern artificial intelligence models, to finally show the world as more nonlinear. I'm always trying to show it nonlinearly.
Why a painting cannot be described in words
But really, can certain energies be conveyed by a set of entities like that? Of course not, because there are realms that cannot be conveyed in any words. Just as there are words that can carry eighty meanings — we'd simply start listing dictionaries. Or certain paintings made from realms will evoke something of its own in each person. And that something of its own is a boundless multitude of everything. It's like infinity on one side and infinity on the other. So how can it be described? But they will evoke these realms and these states.
So a painting is a way for a person to enter different spiritual realms and worlds: sometimes in connection with audio or video, for example, sometimes in connection with a text, sometimes with something the person heard before.
In any case, a person will come into contact with these paintings at the right moment for their spiritual system, for their spiritual being. And if that realm needs it, it may even, as it were, summon the person to itself. The person will feel a need to visit one place or another.
Can a painting be alive
Is a person able to truly perceive what surrounds us in the material world this way, to relate to it this way? This video is interesting not only in terms of the paintings on my website, but in terms of your ability as a human being to relate this way to everything around you. And not to stop at the idea that only a tree or a cat is alive.
A painting can be far more alive — so alive that it's hard even to imagine.
Because there are paintings that contain not just some energy, and not even just some world, if one could put it that way — they contain time. And this is a very interesting immersion and expansion of perception, an incredible meditative state. And then — your ability to carry all these worlds with you. That is what I wish you.
How to look at a painting, and how to live
– Is there any recommendation for how to approach it in the moment? You open it and simply sit, look, do nothing, observe? Or how should it be done properly, so that it doesn't turn into an exercise again?
– What you're asking now is a question you can spend your whole life answering. How do you do it? That is exactly the human task — to study yourself, to study life, including how to live.
When you ask how to look at this painting, you're asking how to live, Olya. And how do you perceive everything around you? It's exactly the same question.
How do you perceive another person? Simply look at them, sit down and look at them, ask them questions, look at them inspiratively, intuitively, imaginatively, look at everything through images, observe them at different moments, in different times, in different realms.
In fact, that's what I talk about — on this channel, on the other channel about personal development, and generally everywhere I convey this: how a person can expand their perception in life.
🎥 Video for this article
Original video · Russian audio