Dis/Connection

If connection is the essential motion of spirituality, then disconnection must be the essential motion of criminality. Both are easily visible, and the growing forces of deliberate disconnection can be seen everywhere. The methods begin with the labels. A label separates, disconnects, says this is different than that and creates a boundary between. The label comes with a built-in definition of all the ways the other is not like us. Human understanding has become so dependent on language that people can be directed to disbelieve what they see with their own eyes. Politicians use a host of labels. Nationalities, race, religion, gender, any deviance from who is doing the labeling, to justify (note the word) injustices, disconnecting others from the human community. We are an evolving species, a process that accelerates as groups become more diverse and therefore more complex. When intention is toward growth, human capability is woven harmoniously. As Nobel Laureate David Bohm wrote, creativity is finding what fits. Fighting the disconnecting of family from community, father from family, student from education, country from alliances to other countries and services to their own people, are people coming together to protest. The size of the crowds is a beautiful image of connection, the assembly of so many people from every differently labeled group, together as one, in cities and towns all over the country. Assembly is often used in a spiritual context, and a unification for the higher good is apt testimony. Protesting the criminality of this separating behavior, a pageant of humanity floods the streets, unwilling to condone the shameful actions done in our name. Talk about ugly. The prideful ugliness of a sexualized female posing in front of enormous cages of human beings with less space than factory farmed animals stirs revulsion. The mix of sex and fear is the fat and sugar of propaganda. Our sense of right and wrong is nested in our sense of beauty. We see and react to the difference before we think. The recoil at ugliness is automatic. The attraction to beauty is automatic. Built in. We can trust it and we know the difference because we see it. It’s individual and nuanced. To separate, to divide, and to destroy are violations of our sense of beauty. Kindness is beautiful, an expression of connection. We can’t see the wrong happening around us if we’re asleep. Asleep we see dreams and not the reality we share with others. The fact that there are politicians that denounce being awake as negative clearly want their constituents to stay unaware of reality. The obvious destructive force at large remains unnoticed by those hypnotized by an artificial reality that explains away the destruction as necessary for an even better fantasy.

Dis/Orientation

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