TRANSCENDENTAL SERIES
FROM THE SOURCE OF BEING
A Day of Creative Self-Inquiry
From the Source of Being is a day-long retreat part of the Transcendental Series presented by The Deserted School where artists will join Óscar Mascareñas to collectively inquire into the creative process.
The sessions during the day aim to open up exploratory avenues and interrogations into the process of creation based on observation and attention. Through un-doing and observing, participants will inquiry into the limitations of a mind that has been conditioned by education, industry and society.
Echoing legendary Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, artists will come together to learn ‘by getting to the source of being from which everything making up our daily experience ensues’.
The day will culminate with artists joining Óscar Mascareñas and composer and ambient guitarist Tony Monahan in one of their AIRE explorations, inquiring further into the power of attention and observation.
From the Source of Being is an invitation for artists from all disciplines to be and inquire together.
Date: Saturday the 15th of November 2025
Location: The Attic @Hotel Doolin, Co. Clare
Time: 10 am to 6 pm
Lunch provided
Cost: €75
i
A POEM-HUT of self-inquiry harbouring those moved to know by themselves and for themselves.
A HOUSE OF CONTEMPLATION where discourse becomes observation and philosophy turns into action. Where the exchanges are no longer of ideas, but of in-sights.
A LOCUS of rest, learning and reflection where texts are no longer texts, but images of truth. Where the frames no longer belong to a discipline, and all disciplines are restored to actions.
A POETIC CELL where the book and other forms of authority dissolve, intellectuality surrenders to sensation and the argument to observation.
A RADICAL SITE for experimentation and experience with a view to transcending current understanding and knowledge. Where theory is dis-placed by stillness and narrative is superseded by truth.
A PROCESS-LED PLACE where the lens is not reason, but attention.
AN ENVIRONMENT of practice for exploring the ‘gaps in-between’ and the ‘spaces beyond’ current, organised fields, in the pursuit of a new and free order of knowledge, as well as a poetics of presence.
A SPACE where the existing methods, practices, approaches, premises, technologies, forms, media and platforms that govern the current world of knowledge are exposed, suspended, deferred and ultimately dissolved through observation and reflexive practice with the purpose of unfolding transcendental pathways of exploration, meta-integration and self-alteration.
A RHIZOME-LIKE HUB distinct and free from any established logocentric, argumentative and categorical approaches to, and hierarchies of, knowledge and life.
A CRUX POIESIS that focuses on practice, and seeks freedom from thought, conditioning, time and intellectual division towards the bringing forth of the unknown.
A LATITUDE for beings to create and share experiences that lie on the far side of human understanding and actuality.
AN INDEPENDENT AND EMANCIPATING SETTING led by a group of free, transcendental, all-embracing and undogmatic individuals.
i The name is inspired by the poem Aonar dhamhsa eidir dhaoinibh (The Empty School) believed to be from the early 17th century, around the time when the last bardic schools of Ireland are said to have been closed. See 'The Irish Review' (Dublin), Vol. 2, No. 23 (Jan., 1913), pp. 594-596. The poem's translation is by Osborn Bergin.
