 IN SEARCH OF THE EFFORTLESS LIFE
a painting exhibition by Maya Munoz A script of the Mindful among the mindless To plot out this journey of and to satori is to pose a dilemma. Linear narratives are impossible. Overlaps might just work, only in paradoxical sequence. I. The premise is a projectile with an unwavering view of “the effortless life.” Ironically all things are not qualified: departure points, direction, traits of the goal. Almost like Waiting for Godot, in a dog-bite-tail merry-go-round kind of way. It is a punch of desperation in a ring where one accepts loss forever but goes about being a shadowboxer. II. The Samana (the Arhat, the Mindful among the mindless) is an ascetic, an outlaw-institution. The operative agenda to enlightenment is lost in rigid austerity programs. Outlaw turned institution. To paint is to be austere, to be disciplined. It is a self-institution where a painter binges and turns to a seclusion from everything that was covetous before. This is a chase-flight sequence. III. The heart of Practice is conflict. A teetering between extremes, mostly, then consequentially the clamor to unify them (look past the binary scale). Like: evisceration and nonchalance, grit and idyll, sex and charity. But most of all, the paradox is already introduced to the seeker of Tathagata. Masao Abe speaks of the three stages of ego-self, no-self and true-self. Stages not as marks of progress but the incomprehensible composition of Buddha-self. IV. In Search of the Effortless Life- Thom Pham, “If it is Effortless then why search for it?” Following Abe, to realize that the Object world is bull is the first negation but there is no moving forward. The no-self is still ego-self as much as it's the first genuine existential disarming of the tool of GRASPING. It is still a hankering after Reality, a swipe at Tathagata. To search is to be conscious is to be rabid is to hold tight. “Of” is to put distinctions, to separate Subject from Object (the goal that is the “effortless life”). Now, the question of the cast. Also the qualification and worklist of a Samana. I. The physical traits are irrelevant, all that is necessary is immediacy. The best shot is their silhouettes as they leap out of nebulous and angry backdrops. Suspended in an air formed in retribution, they are characters indifferent to the pedagogy of suffering. Buddha is not their answer. Despite of that, they become characters entangled in solipsistic lives of self-imposed conventions. II. To return to the second part of the first section – since painting is an act of austerity, the sitters must be by all means lacking the capacity to engulf the painter. The sitters must be let go because as much as they are repulsive, they are are strangely a puzzle. The painter cannot succumb to, nor be driven mad. The subjects are not the Amorous Object. The hurt in this series has as its motor its own denial. Barthes, “It is an unhappiness which does not wear itself out in proportion to its acuity; a succession of jolts.” III. The operative agenda of the portraits is to examine most of the sitters' insides. The outlined males are posed with a secret question: “What is your misery?” After promiscuity, obedience and brokenness lose their clarity, banality becomes satisfaction becomes divinity. Betrayal of the no-self which grasps the bottomlessness of reality and just become. Redemption within the world, not beyond the world. IV. In Search of the Effortless Life is not the sitters' predicament. Shifting between furious hues and deeply saturate cool palettes to dissect pale bodies as allegory of an internal battlefield. Desperation will never be this easy. The resolution when there is nowhere to go is futility or fulfilment. I. Resolution number 1: treating this search as a Sisyphian enterprise. In Search of the Effortless Life is an enchantment. II. Resolution number 2: In Search of the Effortless Life. “In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled. Only the will to fulfillment shines.” III. Thus I have heard. At one time the Buddha was evaporating into wisps and was faceless together with a gathering of great humdrums. | 
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