- ORIGINAL NOT FOR SALE
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There are days when I pick up The Buddhist Sketchbook and feel as if it’s older than I am.
Not because of time, but because of weight. Not physical, but psychic.
Each page bears the residue of a thousand gestures—some forgotten, others returned to like an old wound. Some were made in silence. Others in despair. Some came easily, flowing from the hand like water. Others resisted, demanded blood, demanded erasure.
It is not a book of drawings. It is a book of inheritance—of what I’ve received without asking, of what has passed through me unfiltered: ancestral rhythms, mythic fragments, cultural scripts, subconscious compulsions. I never meant to keep these marks. And yet, I do.
But here is the paradox: the more I draw, the less I obey.
What begins as repetition becomes ritual. What was unconscious becomes choice. And somewhere between the lines—sometimes through destruction, sometimes through beauty—I sense a shift. The inherited becomes transformed. The sketchbook becomes a site of transcendence, not because it rises above suffering, but because it descends into it—willingly, even lovingly.
This is not escape. This is alchemy.
Inherited fate is not just genetics or family stories. It is what we carry unknowingly:
The unspeakable sorrow of a grandmother.
The shame of forgotten wars.
The cultural myths we repeat without question.
It shows up in how we love, how we fear, how we draw the same lines again and again.
Jung called these forces complexes and archetypes—unconscious patterns that shape the personality. In myth, they appear as curses or destinies. In the psyche, they feel like inevitability. Inherited fate is the story written before we arrive, but one we are asked to live.
To transcend it, we must first recognize it. Then we must risk rewriting it.
The Buddhist Sketchbook began as a simple practice. But it refused completion. Its pages layered themselves over years like sediment—fragile, shifting, haunted.
With time, it became something more:
A ritual object. A psychic mirror. A space for transmutation.
In it, the act of mark-making becomes a descent into the self. Not toward understanding, but toward confrontation. And through that, transformation. It is not a sketchbook. It is a process. A sacred one.
This isn’t a method. It’s a rhythm. You’re not making art. You’re making contact—with what lives beneath the surface.
A notebook, a canvas, a wall. It should feel private, like a place where you can be raw and unfinished.
Don’t wait for inspiration. Begin with restlessness, with anxiety, with your refusal. Let the hand move. Let the marks be ugly.
Make it a ritual. Daily, if possible. The transformation lies in your return. The psyche responds to repetition like a drumbeat.
The work will change shape. So will you. But only if you stay.
You may not know what you’re doing. That’s a good sign. Meaning emerges in time. The unconscious speaks in symbols, not sentences.
This work is not about becoming perfect. It’s about becoming yourself. Not the self shaped by inheritance, but the one buried beneath it—waiting, perhaps for years, for a single mark to begin the excavation.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
— C.G. Jung
The sketchbook is not a record of mastery. It is a womb for transformation.
Begin, and see what begins in you.
This reflective essay by artist Milo Dlouhy explores the tension between inherited fate—unconscious patterns passed through family, culture, and history—and spiritual transcendence, the process of becoming one’s true self through creative and introspective ritual. Using The Buddhist Sketchbook as a living metaphor, Milo offers a poetic meditation on the power of mark-making as alchemical process, and invites readers to begin their own practice of inward transformation.
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