Month: April 2021

Categories
Buddhism

Stop the Brain Farts

The worldly Winds howl into the brain and start generating farts as hit it, if I’m not careful I can spend the day farting. It’s like a circle of farts as Pleasure & Pain, Praise & Blame, Gain & Loss, Fame & Disrepute bounce my head around in circles from my own behavior to all the horrible demons I have to live with.

In meditation the most common solution to any problem is to go back to paying attention to the breath, the pleasure, refreshment and wonder of the breath coming in and going out. If you stop and watch, you can develop it like a craft, sure I’ve been breathing all my life but I haven’t paid any attention to it. It really is a learned skill to notice a small physical breath and what is pleasant in the breath and what exactly is unpleasant.

Everyone assumes that if you sit down to meditate the lotus pose and a little chanting empties out your skull. It’s never worked that way for me and the thoughts just keep popping up, what happens now is I see a thought and I don’t have to chase after it like a deranged hound dog. I just go back to my breath.

Unfortunately Worldly Wind Farts can often keep stinking up the place. That’s when the next paintbrush in the craft comes out.

Categories
Teaching

Desires of Comics

In considering thought Buddha broke it down into two part, the cognitive, as in here’s all the crap I know about doing comics, and in the action oriented thoughts, the intentions you create. And in all of this there’s two sides of this the thoughts one controlled by desire, ill will and harmfulness and the opposite of this Renunciation, Good will and non-harmfulness.

So what are my desires in drawing comics? Of course I want to draw “good” comics in itself a well done comics page can be fun and a pleasure to create. But obviously drawing comics should make me filthy rich and praised from the mountaintops. Hollywood should be making movies of my work and I should be hanging with the movie stars. Buddha calls this 4 of the Eight Worldly Winds, things that happen in the wold, they are all Pleasure & Pain, Praise & Blame, Gain & Loss, Fame & Disrepute. Reviewing my work I’ve seen all of these howling through my life.

So the next question is how to deal with my desire to draw comics? That’s tomorrow’s challenge.

Categories
Teaching

An Intention of Doing

To just breathe actually requires a fair amount of attention, developing the craft of watching things come up and letting them go. That intention is the first thing to set which is for sense input, a creaking wall can generate a hundred thoughts of doom says the homeowner. Bad smells can create even more doom. But if you look at those sense inputs (which include thoughts) and realize they can create only three kinds of feelings positive, negative and neutral, the hundred thoughts of doom are fabricated out of the labels you apply to it, you then group those labels into stories and soon you’re worried about your houses collapse.

Understanding that process is going on almost continuously as we live is important because then you can say, just a negative feeling and stop there. That process of noticing this sequence is what you are doing over and over again.

IN doing a drawing breaking your craft down helps immensely in setting your intention for your work. Make a list of what you are doing when you draw, gesture, composition, form, light and shade, costume, expression. Then do just that, one panel at a time. It’s just to easy to jump into an expression, a costume detail or a cool little background piece when I am working on a composition and or a gesture.

The moment I go off of just that one thing is when the problems start and my brain wanders off seeing something that creates a negative or positive feeling. Evaluation happens when you finish the drawing not when you are working.

Categories
Carabella

A+++++ or D- What is Evaluation

Buddha’s big question was , “What makes me happy without hurting anyone else?” Anyone includes everything from mosquitos to the myriad demons and demonesses swiped from other cultures that practice was going on in. His solution, finding the pleasure in the breath so you can let go of desires eating away at you.

How does this apply to comics? That’s what I’m working on. I tried this approach to driving yesterday. Going north my brain started chewing on whatever I was mad at when I left. The right turn went by without really checking at the other corners by rolling thru the stop sign. Not a big deal as the street is usually pretty empty. But not really safe and no solving the problem. So I set my intention on driving. Just checking my hands, the street, scanning the space as what is important. The next left turn was done with calm and checking but up the street suddenly the issue was global climate change in my head and I barely reached the end of the block.

The trip was a constant lose attention, reset my intention on driving, lose and reset and an endless process. Driving while more complicated then breathing is still not comics. the challenge is to bring each step of comics into existence and then set the attention on that, not the whole process of doing comics.