#Bodily awareness than I have. I Cannot do body language acting for the life of me. Too autistic. Can't dance for shit especially

[vamptastic]

I need to get into cosplay or drag or something because I really like some subtypes of women's fashion but I simply cannot wear any of it without feeling miserable. If I was dressed as a character or persona I don't think it'd bother me so much

[ozgeersoy]

Witnesses at Best, Bystanders at Worst

The below text was published in Giving Voice: Erkan Özgen (Sternberg Press, 2018), in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition curated by Hilde Teerlinck of the Han Nefkens Foundation and hosted by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, November 16, 2018–February 24, 2019. 

Erkan Özgen, Purple Muslin, 2018, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2016, when asked about his last will as an artist, Erkan Özgen wrote that he wishes not to pass on the burden of recent history to next generations. “I would like to leave a single will for children and to my children.” He states in his will: “Reset the memory.” [1] It is precisely this idea of reconstructing memory and the conditions of remembering that the artist investigates in his work.

Özgen’s videos do not show images from battlefields, they show what war leaves behind. The Memory of Time (2018) captures how people interact with war tools from the past; Aesthetics of Weapons (2018) portrays a man’s emotional attachment to his gun; Wonderland (2016) shows how a child who is mute and deaf narrates a war he experienced firsthand; and Purple Muslin (2018) documents how a group of women survive the systematic violence against their religious minority group. In these works, Özgen explores narrative practices related to acts of violence. As he explores testimonies through performance, language, and forms of solidarity, he proposes that witnessing is more than a legal or ethical category. 

The Memory of Time (2018) opens with a scene in which three young men sit on top of a cannon, facing a woman taking their photograph. One of them raises his fist to make a victory sign, the second claps his hands, and the last one fixes his hair in the wind. In the background, there is a family, looking aloof, sitting with their back to the cannon. In another scene, a young woman gets more intimate with the cannon as she places her head in it for a photo opportunity. In another, a young man takes a selfie and leaves the site within ten seconds. Using fragments of the footage taken at the same site, Özgen shows a series of repeated acts, as people enter and exit the frame one after another: People pose next to the cannon; they capture the moment and walk away. The next group of people walks into the picture. And repeat. 

The video does not give many clues about the site or the visitors captured by the camera. There is a little sliver of sea in the back, and small parts of buildings are visible from a distance, which do not give any immediate hints about the location. Also, the video is without sound: the viewers don’t hear what the visitors talk about or hear their language to guess their cultural background. Instead, Özgen wants them to concentrate on the repetition of bodily gestures. He creates a sense of anonymity, which helps him to investigate the act of habitually looking. 

Özgen’s camera always remains on the sidelines. The artist does not intervene in the scenes or engage with his subjects—he only observes them. (With the ubiquity of cameras and photographers, visitors seem unaware of his presence). The camera records many moments of people taking photographs with the cannon but cannot capture how these images are negotiated between the photographed and their future viewers. On the one hand, one could argue that the documentation of the self next to a war tool consumes or desensitizes the historical site of war, as it does not amount to more than an exhibition of faces and bodies. On the other hand, this particular documentation can offer performative narratives about how individuals remember wars and battlefields, as the meaning of the image waits to be negotiated through social interactions. Without making a moral judgment, Özgen plays with this opposition and our presumptions about what a competent witness might be. 

Aesthetics of Weapons (2018) is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of how individuals relate to weapons—weapons as desired objects rather than tools of violence. The work shows a man speaking about the attraction he’s had to his gun since he bought it in the mid-1990s. “Every so often, I touch all of its curves with my hands, just like I would touch a woman’s body,” the man explains. “And then I kiss it to express my feelings for it.” Here the gun represents something more than a weapon designed for inflicting physical harm or damage or a political issue around reliance on weapons. This particular attachment seems to be more than mere fetishism as well. The story implies that the pistol is not only eroticized but becomes an ideal object and a living being—“a life partner I have been carrying with me for years.” 

The video shows close-ups of the man gripping, caressing, and speaking about his pistol. In one of the scenes, he walks away from the camera, pulls his gun out of its holster, turns back, aims at Özgen’s camera, and pulls the trigger—his arms fully extended. At this point, the two acts of shooting meet each other. Özgen’s camera confronts the gun that is not synonymous with violence or protection anymore; it presents the artist’s own difficulty in questioning it as an object with emotional value, where a discussion of witnessing or violence becomes inaccessible. 

In contrast to these two works where weapons are separated from a memory about violence, Wonderland (2016) presents a witness account, this time of a boy who is mute and deaf, as he uses bodily gestures, hand language, and facial expressions to narrate a series of recent acts of violence. The young boy moves his arms back and forth to recount a scene with people shooting machine guns; his hands and mouth mimic the movement of rockets; his throwing gestures imply the use of grenades; he points at a bottle of water to talk about the water shortage. He also narrates more direct encounters with violence: he sits on the floor, reenacting a scene where someone is blindfolded with hands handcuffed behind his back, who the next moment, gets shot from the back of his head. Towards the end of the video, the boy describes decapitation with minimal gestures. This time, Özgen sits on the floor, directly facing his subject. 

The video is taken in a safe place conducive for a dialogue. Özgen and the boy communicate in what looks like a temporary lodging, as suggested by empty walls and the cupboard in the back, with a TV, DVD player, and plastic bags, with no personal items at all. “Thirteen-year-old Muhammed fled the Syrian town of Kobanî with his family when ISIS attacked it in 2015,” Özgen says over our Skype conversation as he sits in his living room in Diyarbakir. “When the family escaped to Derik, my hometown in southeastern Turkey, he was one of the very few who were eager to talk about what they had experienced.” 

However, Wonderland does more than simply transmitting a war narrative or presenting an eyewitness account as evidence to human suffering. In contrast with the physicality and severity of the circumstances that form the boy’s narrative, the title marks a fictional place, through which the artist explores the perception of war as a remote and abstracted site for those who feel safe in their own reality. Özgen confronts his viewers with how they engage with war witnesses and often fail to acknowledge their own complicity.

Özgen is aware that images do not act as tools that immediately produce a field of action against what is recorded. Testimonies, however, open the interpretation of recorded acts, their reasons and consequences. It is to this space of continuous debate that the artist is committed to contribute with his images. In a time when the attention economy becomes more and more competitive, his insistence on the repetition and the reappearance of testimonies is as crucial to their impact as what they depict.

Similar to Wonderland, Purple Muslin (2018) captures firsthand accounts of war. The video documents a group of Yazidi refugee women who fled the war zones of northern Iraq. Filmed in a refugee camp, the work shows interviews with around ten women who speak about their hometown, their memories of the violence carried out by ISIS, as well as what keeps them together as a community. They provide accounts of how ISIS fighters killed, kidnapped, abused adults and children, how people died from thirst and starvation, and how they tried to survive in the camp. 

Özgen’s camera captures most of the women in their living spaces, in tents, with stacks of beddings and mattresses in the back. There are few personalized items, one or two teddy bears next to the children, suggesting the temporality of these spaces as well as the impossibility of creating a sense of belonging in the liminal space the refugees inhabit after a major trauma. In one of the scenes, a woman with white hair and aged skin speaks about her psychological distress: she confuses her children’s names, puts sugar into food instead of salt, and does not remember her age: “Maybe twenty, or thirty, or forty years.” “It looks like I have no mind,” she continues. “My whole body aches. Nevertheless it is still good.” At this point she directly faces the camera. 

In another scene, a young woman sits on a rock with her back against the barbed wire and directly confronts the camera, telling about the work conditions in the camp. Speaking about the lack of jobs, she states that domestic work is the only thing they have: “You sleep at night and wake up but the work is the same.” The direct eye contact suggests that these women do not consider themselves simply as victims of violence. They create a space for self-representation that demands visibility, recognition, and engagement from the viewers themselves. Thereby the work not only represents a group of subjects, it also becomes an instrument for them to address the potential viewers and make their civil claims public. 

The video goes back and forth between images of talking heads captured in intimate settings and the aerial views shot by a drone, remote from the stories in the camp. After listening to a woman’s account about how she suffers from trauma, the viewers find themselves wondering at the grid formed by tents and temporary structures in the camp, or observing, from a distance, children playing next to UNHCR, UNESCO, and UNICEF signs. In another scene, as the camera shows the streets of the camp, a woman states, “There is protection all around us but we are as afraid as before.” The juxtaposition of this narrative with the drone and street shots does more than give information about the living conditions of the refugees—it creates an estrangement effect to push the viewers to contemplate their own position. The artist asks the viewers not to see the work as a direct document of a trauma but as a tool to question their own position as witnesses. 

In the video, Özgen also shows that there is no consistent voice among the refugees who sit in front of his camera. Some want to go back to their homeland, while others say they will never return, as nothing remains the same and the family is destroyed: “I do not think we can live those old happy days again.” Despite the lack of consensus about the idea of returning to their home, the artist chooses to emphasize the forms of solidarity among his subjects. 

The work portrays women who speak about the rituals of their community—how they celebrate the sacred month, how they marry, how they share food in communal celebrations. In the middle of the video, a young woman places her scarf on the ground outside a tent (hence the title, Purple Muslin). In the next scenes, different women visit this site, placing various items on the scarf, including a string relic, a piece of hair, and other materials with symbolic value. This act of collecting materials with healing power shows a sense of solidarity and collective effort for endurance. Towards the end of the work, an older woman makes a braid from the pieces that different women cut from their hair: “We will be stronger and we will rescue and protect each other.” 

Özgen’s images do not speak the imperative. They circulate individual testimonies over and over again to contribute to the existing debates about memory and contemporary history. They act as a device of inquiry, much more than a device of documentation. The artist’s work resists generic narratives of war and encourages the viewers to question their own position in the contemporary economy of visual attention—at best as witnesses and at worst as passive bystanders. Özgen reminds us that image-making is not simply a political act to record: it offers a tool to imagine how human suffering is perceived and constantly reinterpreted to inform the present and the possible futures. As our Skype conversation comes to an end, Özgen pauses between words when he says: “We are all potential refugees.”

[1] Özgen’s statement about his last will was published on m-est.org as part of Vasiyetimdir (2016–ongoing), an online series initiated by artists Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Merve Ünsal, and myself, which explores how artworks will subsist over long periods of time.

[photoforumpasquart]

Hester Keijser – A few notes on Bank of America, posthuman embodiment and the curious absence of the viewer in the mind of the contemporary photography critic

A rather baffling article in the British newspaper “The Independent” informed its readers on Wednesday 14 September 2016, that “analysts at Bank of America have reportedly suggested there is a 20 to 50 per cent chance our world is a Matrix-style virtual reality and everything we experience is just a simulation.” What is baffling, is not the suggestion that the entire universe might, in a sense, be said not to exist as such, might be immaterial, might be someone else’s dream. Philosophers and scientists have been postulating this for centuries. What is baffling, is that this is communicated by a big commercial bank seated in one of the most powerful nations in the world. What reason can a bank have for sharing this ‘news’ with their clients? What kind of vital implications do they expect this to have for their and their clients’ business activities? Is virtuality something they will now start to calculate with in their own computational models of future risks, strategies and opportunities?

The ramifications of this step are not to be underestimated. It’s as if a rogue theory about the ontological foundation of our tangible reality has escaped from the confines of the lab, where until now it was contained by a handful of scientists. Set free into the wild, this new cosmogony will wreak havoc in the minds of ordinary citizens, who are wholly unprepared to entertain this notion as anything more than something from a science fiction movie. And now we are supposed to seriously engage with it? Just wow. Isn't there enough anxiety and paranoia in today’s world already? Neither is it very reassuring to be told that, even if we were to be simulated life forms, we would never know about it. Except they just told us so. I had half expected the article to conclude with helpline information for readers who were upset or distressed by the story.

The headline would probably not have caught my eye, had I not just been exposed to Katherine Hayles’ book “How we became posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics”, published back in 1999 (1). Hayles writes:

“The emergence of the posthuman as an informational-material entity is paralleled and reinforced by a corresponding reinterpretation of the deep structures of the physical world. Some theorists, notably Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, claim that reality is a program run on a cosmic computer. [...] living in a condition of virtuality implies we participate in the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important, and more fundamental than materiality. The preamble to ‘A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age’, a document coauthored by Alvin Tofler at the behest of Newt Gingrich, concisely sums up the matter by proclaiming, ‘the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter.’”

With her words on my mind, the communication of the central bank of America felt like the final act of this event. Matter has officially lost out against code, computations and information, which, as we have come to believe, are essentially bodiless. For Haynes, the central question is: “what happens to the embodied lifeworld of humans in this paradigm, [in which] embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman?”

Even though embodiment is widely discussed in cybernetic theories, it is not a topic that regularly crops up in the now – so – popular publications on the how, what and where of photography in the digital age. My own interest in the matter developed through my correspondences with Urs Stahel (2), published on the blog platform of Foto Colectania (3). After having participated for several years in various conversations on contemporary photography, the realization had crept up on me that the body (and in particular that of the viewer) is conspicuously absent in our readings of photographic work. “Embodiment, as I searched to explain to Urs Stahel rather clumsily, “is the word I use for the way an image doesn’t speak to the eyes only, but calls on our other senses like smell, hearing and touch, affects our breathing, our posture and our vestibular sense, which helps us orient ourselves in space, and ultimately addresses and transforms our way of being in the world.”

As is often the case, once you figure out what questions want asking, doors open, and you’ll soon happen upon others grappling with the same issue. I discovered that ‘embodiment’ is also a ‘thing’ in contemporary photography theory, even if efforts are still mainly concentrated in academic circles (4). For instance, Ellen Esrock’s research traces the neglect for the body as the primacy locus for the experience of art to the onset of modernism. While it was in line with scientific developments in the late nineteenth century for “humanists and scientists [to theorize] that spectators respond to art and architecture through their bodies, projecting themselves into material objects and animating them with their own bodily life”, this had become less acceptable just a few decades later.

Esrock: “...the influential art critic Wilhelm Worringer (1908) identified two fundamental principles of creative impulse: empathy and abstraction, arguing that ‘the urge to empathy’ was not an appropriate response to the emerging abstract art of the time. Influenced by Worringer’s ambitious argument, other artists and critics of the early twentieth century came to regard empathy as a comfortable, multisensory response to naturalistic depictions and to associate empathy with passive, feminine, imitative forms of art making (Koss 2006). Abstraction, on the other hand, was understood to be a sheerly optical response appropriate to avant-garde abstract art and was associated with experiences of estrangement and discomfort and with active, masculine modes of authentic creativity. Characterized in this way, empathy had little to offer proponents of the burgeoning modernism, with its abstractions and its ethos of alienation.”

In other words, the conspicuous absence of the embodied viewer that I had registered in the existing writing on photography was perhaps not accidental, but directly related to the history of artistic discourse, which had set limits on what can and cannot be talked about. Not surprisingly, these limits were set in a time when talking about the body and how one is aware of its inner sensations - our interoceptive sense - was frowned up. And still today, there is a lingering embarrassment and a sense of shame in talking about own’s own body, especially in public when strangers are present. We are encouraged to control and even to police our bodies, which we possess like masters possess a slave, to be punished at will, to be exploited in hard labor, to be worked out in exercise, or to be given a brief respite in spare time. What we know much less, is how to be a body, let alone having the language to express ourselves adequately when prompted to describe inner sensations (5).

Esrock’s arguments are more nuanced and far richer than I can convey within the short span of this article. At present it should suffice to point in the direction of her research, and also that of Katherine Hayles (6), or of people like Sarah Kember (7) and Ariella Azoulay (8). In their work lies a potential to break down and lay bare the conventions that rule our aesthetic and political appreciation of photographic images, and to explore what this absence of the body and the erasure of embodiment tells us about ourselves, our societies and our wicked dreams of escaping the material world by convincing ourselves that we are nothing but weightless, bodiless and potentially immortal data and code.

Finally, I want to Bank of America for reminding us once again that many of the boundaries and limits we struggle with or feel defined by, are wholly arbitrary, and can safely be suspended in wild acts of imagination.

—————————–

(1) Excerpts of her book can be accessed via: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Hayles-Posthuman-excerpts.pdf

(2) Urs Stahel was the co-founder of the Winterthur Fotomuseum, which he has been managing for the past 20 years. Since 2013, he has been the curator for the platform Paris Photo (2014), the new Institute for Industrial Culture (MAST) in Bologna, and the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg Photo Festival (2015). He also works as an author, a consultant and a lecturer (at the Zurich University of the Arts, the University of Zurich, the Sammlung Bank Vontobel). He is the writer and editor of numerous books, for example, books about Paul Graham, Roni Horn, Rineke Dijkstra, Anders Petersen, Amar Kanwar, Ai Weiwei, Shirana Shahbazi, Boris Mikhailov as well as books on themes such as “Industriebild” (‘Pictures of Industry’), “Trade”, “Im Rausch der Dinge” (‘The Ecstasy of Things’) and “Darkside I + II”.

(3) Foto Colectania is a private non-profit organization created in Barcelona in 2002 with the objective of disseminating photography in the social, artistic and educational spheres. http://correspondencias.fotocolectania.org/en/

(4) This is not a bad thing, even if many photographers profess to have a dislike for discursive writing. I would argue that, in fact, many academics are currently more avant garde and future forward in their thinking than most of us who are writing on photography.

(5) For example, who hasn’t sat at the doctor’s office at a loss for words to describe what ails us?

(6) Hayle’s profile and a selection of her writing is available at: http://nkhayles.com/index.html

(7) See Sarah Kember’s profile at Goldsmith University London, where she is Professor of New Technologies of Communication https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/SKember.

(8) Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Independent curator and film maker. http://cargocollective.com/AriellaAzoulay

[bepresent10]

Everything began with Eckhart

As mentioned at the end of the previous post Eckhart led me back to my original and primary calling which is the solid nurturing ground for each secondary, temporary or  partial goal I can ever set for  myself. My calling (as the calling of everybody and everything in existence) is just to be freely and fully what I am – and express it towards others.

To be the “I am” and know that this is an eternal experience of continuous expansion.

When I say Eckhart I am not referring to his person but to the universal teaching he is allowing to flow through him, giving a form to it. This is the teaching everybody has access to without his or anybody else’s books simply through the pure experience of the ultimate truth of who or what we are. The circumstance that obscures this innate access in each individual is the way of sleepwalking through life completely lost in judgments and interpretations, conditioned and encouraged  by society especially in the West, entirely cut off from the pure sensation of being and living in a body.

Can you stop interpreting and evaluating for even just a moment just to purely live what is right now?

If you can, you will know and experience that sensing - each sensation regardless of the content and of the possible concepts the mind could wrap around it - is a sensation (it is sensational!) indeed in the sense that it is a messenger of the miracle that life is.

So Eckhart got me back on track since this track was familiar to me.

I always knew that there were traces of connection to the divine or let’s just say to an extended dimension of human experience in me – I knew it from early childhood on without a doubt. Given my Christian-Catholic upbringing I was trying to recollect these traces carefully putting them together like the yellow stones for my path by studying the Bible and works of theologues, priests and vicars and mainly through listening to my dad speaking words of amazing insight and wisdom.

The secondary school - Dóra

Connection with God – or with my higher Self or ultimate nature – became from an interest to a need in the years of the secondary school. For years I was captured in a relationship of emotional dependency to a friend of mine who after a while started reacting to my actions and vibrations - unsaid but sensible claiming of attention - with open and sometimes abusive rejection. Since I regarded her judgement of me as the most important measure of my self-worth at those times, I went through phases of intense grief and suffering sinking into the feeling (illusion) of being unloved, ununderstood and only worth to be pushed away, globally.  I was blind to all love streaming towards me from all directions: from other people and from all phenomena of the world. Instead I was craving the evidence I regarded at the time as the only relevant, the only valid proof of my “loveableness”: her love and her appreciation for me. In other words – as I realized later but still during the period we were classmates and shared a dormitory along with six other girls: I was in love with her. And it had nothing to do with sexuality related to visual or physically based attraction. It confused me for quite a while though since I experienced intense bodily sensations interacting with her mainly verbally, even in her physical absence while conversing in online chat or through text messages.

With time I just figured how I function and discovered the direct link between the awareness of an overwhelming emotional bond, physical sensations and sensuality.

There was a very special, deep understanding between us – we knew we are exceptional for each other and could not explain why. There was this quality of exclusiveness in our private communion; we created a closed inner circle of two and felt like we are speaking a secret language no one can decode – by using common Hungarian words. We were thriving in the intimacy of our secret society separate from everybody else, diving really deep, discussing topics like God, Church, literature, artistic performances, music, group dynamics in our class - hours long in the middle of the night. We were perfectly tuned into each other instinctively knowing one another’s thoughts and feelings.  

What scared her away from me initially I think was the parallel she drew between our relation and the one she experienced before me with her kind of “ex-boyfriend” as she was 13. She saw our relationship as reminiscent of her former one in respect to the high grade of mutual admiration and attachment. I think none of us could really make sense at the time of this overpowering emotional intensity constantly vibrating between us. Especially not in the context of us being of the same sex and both knowing ourselves as hetero-sexuals.

It made me doubt and re-evaluate my overall sexual identity and through years I came to the conclusion that conventional sexual labels do not define my identity since I am predominantly emotional. My sexuality and sensuality are subordinated to my emotionality. The urge to express the deep bond I feel by touching and being physically close to somebody is directly proportional to the level of intimacy in the communion with this person.

Nevertheless after Dóra only men came who triggered these feelings for long term in me. Besides there is an additional quality to the energetic exchange between representatives of the two sexual polarities. I guess, when it comes to physical interaction I still prefer men, although it is hard to tell without any experience of the sort with women – so far I just never felt the inclination to gather such, because I did not get involved in intimate communion of the kind with women  in the post-Dóra period.

All in all between the age of 15 and 19 I had lots of things to sort out. I felt guilty and hurt most of the time. Guilty of my physical sensations I – considering social standards – adjudicated as inappropriate. Guilty of my surfacing clinginess and neediness fuelled by the abandonment by the one I loved the most.

I  started to question my sexuality as the first boyfriend came into my life (I was 16 and half) and I recognized that he evoked the same sensations in me Dóra did (so I concluded in retrospect that I was in love with her too). The difference was that in the relationship with him I got conscious of the female aspect of my personality. I enjoyed it immensely as more light fell on my neglected female qualities (both physical and emotional) in our contrast.

After he left me the grief after him replaced the grief after Dóra. As a consequence Dóra and I made peace and our friendship began to recover. I felt I have to share with her my perception of having been in love with her for a certain period. We discussed it one night in the bathroom of the student home and it was one of the most purifying and relieving conversations I have ever had.  She listened sincerely with full attention and answered honestly. The circumstance helped that we were approximately on level in self-awareness. After years of doubt and self-condemnation the first time I felt completely OK. Completely embraced, understood and accepted. I was forgiven since I realized that the only one judging me was neither Dóra, nor God nor anybody else, but only I myself. Dóra is one of those very special friends of mine who can just hold with a caring detachement whatever I am and how ever I feel, without being worried about me and trying to fix me. Because she sees pass my temporary shortcomings, she sees my completeness, my ultimate perfection. In other words she relies on her spiritual sight.

In our personal history though it came to a heavy conflict again towards the end of the 4th year. I cannot recall poignant details I just remember that she started acting in a way I was convinced was not authentic of her and did not reflect her true personality. She engaged in superficial friendships with people I knew she did not have much in common with and went out drinking frequently. Just because I did not (and still do not) have any natural affinity to alcohol especially not for the purpose of socializing I was disappointed by her behaviour and could not accept and respect that her individual path contains elements leading to other places than mine. I felt personally betrayed by her choices. We left high school being estranged from each other and did not get in touch for years.

Throughout secondary school mostly related to Dóra but also to my professional development I was confronted with all sorts of inner conflicts and dilemmas. My sense of self-worth was shaken I thought by external circumstances, by the lack of personal or professional approval of others. I loved the community of the class and of the whole school but I still had the feeling that I do not fit in. I was incapable of showing interest for anything or anybody I did not feel genuine interest for ��� I was incapable of putting on a mask trying to blend just to be accepted in a wider range. I was hoping to get a better understanding of human existence by reading philosophical novels, the Bible, psychological books, and works of a famous Hungarian vicar, who was a pastoral-psychologist himself. Through these reads I found a connection to the divine indeed and was led back to the state of peace and clarity. I kept a prayer diary where I was addressing God every day with my questions and expressed my gratitude for everything that happened to me, regardless what it was.

Even in the midst of swirling confusion I always knew one thing: happiness does not depend on any external factor. Happiness is the only and ultimate reality which only gets obscured by layers of fear-based thoughts. We have to recognize joy, happiness, unlimited freedom, expansion and love as our essential being and then we have a choice how to project it outwards. Then our actions will result effortlessly from being. We have to realize that we are the source of everything we want to see, feel and experience in the manifested world - and so everything happening to us is a mere reflection of our inner focus.

I always knew it and every true teaching I encountered just echoed and amplified this original knowing. I just did not know how to put it in practice, how to live and create from this place of self-realization.