Working Everyday

Pictured here is one of our most complex custom stone designs.

For many years I have been involved as the founder and director of design in a business with about fifty employees and lots of high-tech machinery. Our family design team creates architectural inlay floor designs and wall murals in natural stone. Our company, Aalto Design, exports projects for clients all over the world.

We oversee the various stages of manufacturing from the initial design to computer programming, stone selection and cutting on high-tech computerized machines that precisely shape all the different pieces of stone for hand assembly, finishing and installation. It is a creative process that ranges from the initial, abstract design concept to its final, material expression, such as a mural or a decorative marble inlay floor.

This process could be likened to the activity of consciousness, which ranges from subtle knowledge-levels of intuition and progressively expresses more and more concrete aspects of the heart, mind, body and environment. All processes in our lives, whether we know it or not, follow a similar dynamic, starting from the subtlest, most still regions of our unbounded-consciousness all the way to daily activity. We could even stretch a point and say that one of the most common, densest materials on earth—natural stone—along with the most pervasive, lightest material in the universe—pure-consciousness—together typify the range of human experience. From physical and material life to the subtle field of inner awareness is the scope of our perception. For most people, the natural connections existing among these layers of spiritual- to-physical activity are unseen and unknown. But because those connections are already inherent within all human experience they are not really that hard to find.

From noisy manufacturing to quiet meditation, from booming thunderstorms to balmy summer days: the whole story and natural relationship among personal, divine and universal consciousness can all be known and seen as one interconnected, flowing unity without any loss of detail or enjoyment. Our consciousness is expanding naturally anyway but by adding a meditation routine to our daily activity and by going after and gaining the knowledge of what is being experienced, our progress will be greatly enhanced.

Owning a noisy factory did not in any way hamper my expanding or even celestial experience. In fact the state of growing, stable Self-awareness will only produce more and more understanding and divine clarity in the up and downs of our busy lives.