Mantra Cora's portrait - photo by Danny Litin
Mantra Cora: "There are no Hollywood Oscars for awakening; there is no drama starring enlightened egos or other impossibilities. Instead, there is freedom"
BPP: Who are you? And who you really are?
Mantra Cora: Omg!!! who am I? Really, who am I? I'm just a girl who wants to be happy... like the rest of us. I don't like to be put in a box with a label that you are this or that. It doesn't really matter who... the question is - why????
“A VEHICLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOLDER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS PSYCHIC LIFE OF MANKIND” - C.G.JUNG
I am here and there, and everywhere, wherever, whenever, nowhere and forever... hahaha... From feeling to thinking to simply being... to learn, to teach, to help, to love, to share... beyond the personal... to liberate myself and others from fear... to transform... to create. On another relative level... I am a woman, student, artist, mother, soon to be ex-wife ... Lulu, and a Diamond girl.
Work in Progress
Heavenly bodies
BPP: If you could say something important to others who were listening, what would you tell them?
Mantra Cora: My art is influenced by many cultures, mythologies, philosophies and metaphysical ideas which become a continuum; woven into the fabric of my work. But most important are the direct and personal experiences and insights which arise from spending hours in meditation and in spiritual practice. The way I best express my feelings for the numinous is through my art in both painting and mixed-media. I have been a Buddhist practitioner for the last seven years, and although that is still my main spiritual practice—I'm aligned with many Wisdom Traditions.
Painting, creating.... is a process in which all my experiences are engaged... this process transforms me.
Freedom and independence are very precious to me.
Everything is impermanent and in constant flux and therefor phenomena changes all the time. However, consciousness is like space, unchanging and timeless, while its objects are conditioned. So much of my work aims to reflect and explore this state of non-dual awareness and the expression of our Being within the awesome, beautiful and often messy wonder of life.
There is this awakening and expansive experience on the spectrum from the personal to a non-personal freedom. This is the birth of a vast non-personal Love for the whole, and for all beings and all things while the personal everyday experience is enhanced. It is the realization that - you are the whole.
The great cycle
Work in progress
BPP: What is your true dream, the one that keeps you up at night and if one day it were to come true you would feel peace and calmness in your heart?
Mantra Cora: At the core of my creative practice I have always been drawn to the exploration and unfolding of consciousness, that is, of our very Being-ness. My intention is to integrate my creative process and art with my spiritual practice and work for the benefit of all beings. I am hungry for knowledge and wisdom to enable me to help others and myself to be liberated, independent and free from fear and all conceptual fetters. I love the diversity found within wholeness and this is why life is so exciting for me. I like changes, therefor traveling and exploring other cultures is so fascinating to me. I would like my daughters and everyone I am close to - to be happy. If people are open to each other, kind, and know that all things as the body, material goods and emotions are impermanent, that they come and go and that we can transform our life then peace and calmness in my heart will become a natural state of being.
Gate
BPP: How is life currently for the people in your country and what would you wish for them and for the planet at large?
Mantra Cora: I have been living in the UK for over six years. My family, my soon to be ex-husband, whom I believe will always will be my best friend, and this country, have all given me the opportunity to grow in both intellectual and spiritual ways. Thanks to them, I started studying and exploring the meaning of art. This multicultural society helped me to open up to diversity. However, we also noted many radical changes caused by the Islamic infiltration in the UK and around the world which has brought the feeling of losing the freedom and independence I mentioned above.
In this case I think that an attitude of 'political correctness' is bullshit... everybody should know what is going on and see the consequences of this expansion... Treating women as less; as property and subject to Muslim personal law (Shariat) is pure and outright aggression.
Muslims are protesting in the streets of the UK. These extremists are shouting aggressively: "British Police go to hell !" This is something dangerous to our liberties. Muslim members in these protests say Islamists do not have to respect the law of the country in which they live and I simply do not agree with that. Everyone has the right to protest but some of these protests are very provocative and extreme. Nobody is inciting ethnic groups that come to this country by making unacceptable rules and practices offensive to any minorities; but somehow only the Muslims find them 'offensive' . What is actually offensive is that some of these extremist Muslim women suggest that British women are 'naked' and trying to seduce men through wearing casual dresses. Other Muslim extremist men tote banners with the slogan "Shariah is the solution for the UK”.
I don't want to wear a burka or anything else dictated to me by some group of men or women... I want to enjoy diversity, freedom, independence, friendship and respect in all of life... with love of course.
Untitled
Breath - work in progress
BPP: If you had a chance to be a child again would you choose the same life?
Mantra Cora: I appreciate the life I have, the people I am surrounded by, my health, kids, love, a chance for education...
I also believe that actually everything which I have gotten in my life was something which I needed the most on my spiritual and artistic path. But If I had this chance, probably I would change something in it... I would like to be a better mother for my girls. I love them very much, I would like to be a better daughter for my mother because I understand how much she did for me... I would like to love better and be more open for love.
But on the other hand we have this opportunity; life by life... and living the same life in every reincarnation would be a very boring experience. I like to touch things in life through different angles and aspects and not repeat the same patterns . We are here to learn; to learn how to work with our emotions... to transform us and others just as a caterpillar changes into a butterfly
Mantra Cora - photo by Cynthia Robins
Mantra Cora - photo by Jody Florman
Mantra Cora - photo by Philip Rubinov Jacobson
BPP: What was the exact moment that you realized what you wanted to do with your life? How did you feel at this very moment?
Mantra Cora:There have been many such moments as this... till I realized that everything is changing... In the summer of 2011, when I went to Austria for the painting seminar, “Old Masters - New Vision” with Prof Philip Rubinov Jacobson and met a lot of artists from the Visionary Tribe, Prof Phil told me that: “I am not the only one”... and since that summer I have felt a natural energetic flow, much stronger than ever before. The last one and a half years I have spent with artists have been wonderful; living and studying in Bermuda, in Italy, and assisting the great master Prof Ernst Fuchs and living with my wonderful brother-in-art, De Es Schwerberger. It is like I finally jumped on the right track with everything I have engaged in this past year fit perfectly... I am happy to have met so many great people along my way as I love to be with them, work with them, create with them. I am going to follow in this very direction through art, contemplation, meditation and ordinary everyday life to work for the benefit of ALL beings. I will do the best I can. All this gives me the sensation not unlike being some kind of Houdini engaged in an amazing series of escape-acts... while the locks and chains of my fears fall away and I can see the possibilities of freedom within all my actions.
Mantra Cora at work with Ernst Fuchs
Nagual
Work in progress
Mantra Cora:Spiritual awakening may seem like a very desirable bauble, a badge, a shining credential, for our false ego-identification, but it is actually its ultimate nightmare for it attracts an inclusiveness as opposed to exclusivity and separation. There are no Hollywood Oscars for awakening; there is no drama starring enlightened egos or other impossibilities. Instead, there is freedom, freedom from self-obsessed subjectivity, freedom from identifying with anything in particular, freedom from dreaming that we are not dreaming, freedom to be, freedom that is not limited by its limitations.
Therefore all of us should look deeply at our old patterns to understand our behavior... and although we must first build the house of self-identification, we then must look on it deeply tear down such false ego conceptions. We can do it differently... My way is through art, creative process and spiritual practice.
Mantra Cora infront of her artwork
If you want to learn more about Mantra Cora you can visit:
http://www.facebook.com/MrsNoBodyy?fref=ts
and soon at: http://mantra-cora.tumblr.com/
Photos copyright by Mantra Cora, Philip Rubinov Jacobson, Jody Florman, Danny Litin. All rights reserved.
ALL CONTENT © ISMINI KARALI 2011 - 2013. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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