Chronic Vigilance

Art/Mind

“A myth is an image by which we make sense of the world.” - Alan Watts Myths enact deep psychological features of human behavior in relationship to the world. A relationship is best understood in imagery that shows how elements interact. Modern thinking is so focused on things that can be named and separated, the capacity to see the meaningful relationships is weakened. Philosopher Susanne Langer said art is the creation of symbols for human feeling. This is why she thought of it as the best and most nuanced expression of human psychology. As a field, trying to find categories is inadequate to the range and specificity of our species. Only art, all of it, spanning all times and cultures, gives scope to our emotional range. Studies have shown, the feelings we experience are limited by the language we use to name them. Looking at art broadens the emotional vocabulary. The artist Egon Schiele shows feelings I could never find words for, but I recognize them. For a viewer, recognition is expression. The power of art is its capacity to evoke the feeling of recognition, a connection to a set of relationships that makes sense and strengthens our felt responses to what counts. Strengthening intuitive feeling builds thinking on response to the whole picture and not just a few elements. “The mission of visual philosophy is to see more, to become aware of the complex web of relationships that visual intelligence deals with best, and to express meaning visually. Knowledge of all kinds can be communicated with images” Quoted from my most viewed essay what needs emphasis now is “the complex web of relationships” under assault by modern life. Biology is finding communicating systems everywhere in life, between types of trees, and webs of mycelium, between our organs, connected systems everywhere. The linear analytic character attributed to the left hemisphere of the brain keep breaking any subject into detail. A flaw in modern medicine is the lack of communication between specialties when the human body is an outstanding example of multiple interdependent systems. And medicine depends on images, every kind of scan for diagnosis, after which the label takes over. Language is beset with more and more divisions, new labels and categories to shatter the unity by ignoring it. Art calls to us through relationships. The interaction of the whole has a particular effect on us and an experience of relationship reinforces that capacity. The culture’s tendency to break things down needs counteracting by our visual mind’s capacity to re-integrate. As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing.” To comprehend the relationships is more essential than knowing facts and specifics. Looking at art educates our ability to see meaningful relations between elements that can get lost in focus on the details.

Contention

Patterns of Energy

Still thinking about the influential resonance between similar shapes, I remember how gestalt psychology used the term isomorphism to refer to the similarity in the pattern of activation in the brain to the structure of the perception. A metaphor could be said to be isomorphism, a way of understanding one set of relationships through a similarly structured set of relationships. Fractals are the repeating shape at multiple scales. To be able to map many features together can enable a structure to emerge. In the realm of energy, the torus is a recurring pattern that when I looked into it in relation to nature made me catch my breath. As the shape of the human energy field, within the similarly shaped magnetic field of the earth, it is speculated by some that it is the organizational structure of the universe, aligning with the world tree of ancient shamans. It is the shape of growth, visible everywhere in the garden with flowers’ central tubes and fountain of petals as the most visible part. Recently I heard a talk that suggested we had a specific heart wave, shaped like a torus that expanded as we felt more loving feelings and in itself could affect others. I’m curious about these life energy waves and how they interact with other waves. The body has a system of tubes for digestion, blood, lymph, nerves. Flow along tubes is a primary organization for life, fields within fields. I’ve explored the human energy flow in drawings, as a torus-field, thinking of the physical body as the center tube. The energy flows in and out and beyond the tube. Just as a plant reacts when something comes close suggests its field of awareness extending beyond its physical space. Perhaps the ancient concept of chakras could be small torus nodes at other centers, not just the heart, areas that expand and contract with emotions associated with those areas. I can often see a relation between sickness in the urinary tract as alienation I wasn’t aware of. On the gut’s third chakra, issues of fear and control, congestion in my chest as clogs in my capacity to connect with others. When it’s the head my loss of ability to spill that energy back out into the world. These underlying themes can be drowned out by the areas of physical and intentional awareness, day to day concerns. With an image like the flow of clouds around the planet, I can sense ”the Tao that can’t be told”. With the essence of understanding in an image, these ideas about the torus have led me to see it as the path love takes as it weaves a whole that we share in with our personal torus.

Re-Centering

Same Shape Resonance

We’re in a time when, despite the resistance of mechanistic, materialistic science, new models of reality are cropping up in different fields that insist on the recognition of phenomenon that doesn’t fit the current machine model. Multiple instances of telepathy often occur between non-speaking autistic people and their mothers, the many Near Death Experiences where consciousness watches as a medical team works on the flat-lined body, the feeling of someone looking at you, or how your dog knows you’re on the way home are all phenomenon without explanation by current science. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book about each of the last two and since his early work, I’ve been fascinated with his idea of memory not being stored in our head. The active neuronal circuit that accompanies a particular memory could also be the way the brain tunes in to a memory that exists in a larger field of mind. The circuit that tries to remember would take the same shape as the experience that encoded it so would resonate with the matching shape to tune it in, a possible explanation. Like the pulses that create frequency and amplitude in time, the ever present here contains information that resonates in shape. In her book, The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger gives many examples of how keenly some plants are attuned to shapes of leaves. Ultimately resonating with any frequency is resonating to the same shape wave. Sheldrake suggests every species has a field of their shape that contributes to the development of new members. Fields that are encoded by shape would open lines of influence that could be affecting us more than we know. We’re already aware of how we resonate with another’s posture and know something of how they feel thanks to our mirror neurons, our body’s understanding of what it feels like in that shape. Human psychological complexity is a constellation of relationships that requires a work of art to express it through form. Art is a composition of sensations that resonates with the internal dynamic in the human structure of feeling. As philosopher Susanne Langer wrote, “Art looks like feelings feel”. How a composition of visual form is organized is a language encoded during our non-verbal infancy as we come to understand gravity and what to expect of the surroundings we navigate. This is the practical meaning of what we see. The deep structure of balance and all the metaphors extending from it reach beyond surface information to a humanness that sustains art through history. Though more sophisticated than a tuning fork or the shape of leaves, the resonance with a work of art is a connection to the human drama even at its most subtle.

Mandala of Loss 6