Meditation Through Images and Paintings: What Can You Perceive Beyond the Image?

AVAlexander Volchek

And a painting can be far more alive—so alive that it is hard even to imagine.

OLOlya

Your website has a section called “Meditations with Paintings.” What is it? How should we approach it?

AVAlexander Volchek

The thing is, people have different forms of perception throughout their lives. Certain forms of perception give a person visual images of energy. Keep practicing, attend different forms of meditation, and observe the images that come into your mind. It may take months, years, or decades to perceive them properly—even to begin perceiving and distinguishing them. “Why did I see that particular light?” Or, “Why did I see that particular color?” And learning to relate to it calmly takes time, too. Because throughout their lives, people have been taught—and you have been taught—that you do not see or perceive anything. The only things you can see are what you see with your eyes.

When you perceive a particular energy, you may see it directly as an image. Or you may receive that energy as knowledge and then give that knowledge a particular image, a particular form. That image may be interpreted by you, by your brain, by your spiritual being or system; its interpretation can arise for different reasons. In any case, it is something. And if you convey that image in a painting, in some written or drawn form, it may carry particular energies.

The question remains: what does it mean to say that it may carry particular energies? If you have interpreted the result too much and then put only the final forms of that interpretation onto a sheet of paper, it is like lining up fifteen people and showing them all a painting. Another person then passes on their own painting, a third person passes on another, then there is a fourth painting, a fifth, and so on. At the end of this game of telephone, you get completely false information. It is not real, not alive, not what is actually there. What is actually there will no longer be present in it. But there is a point at which you can transfer energy onto paper, or into video or audio—into different forms of expression—so that people can come into contact with that energy as easily as possible.

It is like taking a piece of tape and peeling it off: you can easily feel that it is sticky. It may be so sticky that it stays on you. Energy, too, can be so sticky that it stays on you, becomes embedded in your system, or spreads through your system. You will not be able to get rid of it. It is just like the viruses, both positive and negative, that exist in the world and that you can pick up. You pick up viruses without understanding why or controlling the process—certainly without controlling it. Incidentally, science and medicine today are not developed enough to control this at all, or truly identify or understand it. Imagine walking into a space and seeing the virus. Or having some device with you, pressing it, and becoming immune to that virus. They do not know how to do that.

People are pumped full of large quantities of medications that supposedly work preventively so you will not catch that virus. But this only works up to a point, because a great many people do not use those medications and do not catch the virus either. Some people get sick and others do not. Something happens to some people and not to others. Why? Because people do not scientifically understand the cause of death. There is a very important aspect here: what are you opening, what book or painting are you looking at, in terms of energy? There are particular paintings you come into contact with whose energy you see and feel. Rudolf Steiner has a very interesting account of paintings that people around the world look at, such as the Sistine Madonna. Or people like to look at works of art created by Michelangelo, for example.

He says that time will pass and people will not look at this art at all. They will not look at the paintings, these buildings, or these objects. They will not look at them at all; they will have no interest in them. Why? Because the energy people are currently coming into contact with—the energy within this painting, statue, building, or city—is, at this moment, extremely widespread and interesting to a particular kind of human consciousness. Notice that some people travel to certain places and others do not. Some are interested; it brings about a particular state in them.

For other people, it brings about no state at all. They think, “Can I escape from here? Can I leave? Can I avoid being here? I cannot look at this. I do not understand why—what are people even doing here? What is the point?” This is a very important aspect of perception. It does not matter whether it is a reprinted text, a painting, a statue, a room, a video, or an audio recording. It is very important always to understand that everywhere, absolutely everywhere, such things carry particular energies. The next question is how much a person comes into contact with them—or does not. So the paintings on my website are paintings that carry particular energies.

Some of these energies are described and some are not. Some are connected with particular meditations, while others are connected with entirely different realms. In some cases, the painting comes first, and a meditation I have led emerges from it. There are already dozens of meditations on our website; perhaps, by the time you watch this video, there will be hundreds or thousands. Or perhaps they will have ended and no more will be released. Or I may no longer exist. Some of these paintings were created independently. The energies transmitted within different states—in this case, within different paintings—move in many different directions.

It is not simply a matter of saying—as people in our society like to do, Olya, and as is sometimes suggested—“This is for business, this is for spiritual development, this is for marketers, this is for learning a new profession, this is for your personal state, and this is for health.” In other words, separating them out. Can paintings be divided up that way? Can meditations be divided up that way at all? Well, you can do it according to a particular set of objects. And if that space still exists, you know that there is such a classification on my website. Each video has a set of entities. I say that a video relates simultaneously to a person, to the concept of love, to the concept of compassion, to the word “children,” and to these particular regions. A whole combination.

It is a nonlinear approach. In today’s world, at the time this video is being recorded, modern artificial intelligence models have finally given us an opportunity to present the world in a more nonlinear way. I am always trying to represent it, to show it nonlinearly. But can particular energies really be conveyed through a set of entities like these? 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 would simply start listing dictionaries. Or there are paintings created from realms that will evoke something of their own in each person.

And that something of their own is a boundless multitude of everything. It is like infinity on one side and infinity on the other. How, then, can it be described? But the paintings will evoke these realms and these states. A painting therefore offers a person a way to enter different spiritual realms and worlds: sometimes in connection with audio or video, sometimes with a text, sometimes with something the person heard earlier. In any case, the person will come into contact with these paintings at the right moment for their spiritual system, for their spiritual being. Or, if that realm needs it, it may even call or summon the person into that realm. The person will feel a need to visit a particular place.

Can a person truly perceive what surrounds us in the material world this way, 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 is hard even to imagine. Because some paintings contain not merely a particular energy, not even merely a world, if we can use that expression, but time itself.

This is a very interesting immersion and expansion of perception, an incredible meditative state. And then there is your ability to carry all these worlds with you. That is what I wish for you.

OLOlya

Is there any recommendation for how to approach this, in the moment? Do you open it and simply sit and look, do nothing, observe? Or how should you do it, without turning it into an exercise again?

AVAlexander Volchek

What you are asking now is a question you could spend your whole life answering. How do you do it? That is the human task: to study yourself, to study life, including how to live. When you ask how to look at this painting, Olya, you are asking how to live. How do you perceive everything around you? It is exactly the same question. How do you perceive everything around you? How do you perceive another person? Simply look at them, sit and look at them, ask them questions, perceive them through inspiration, intuition, or imagination, see everything through images, observe them at different moments, in different times and different realms. It is exactly the same question.

That is what I talk about on this channel, on the other channel about personal development, and generally everywhere. It is what I communicate: how a person can expand their perception in life.