Primitive Emotions

Angry Kitten 2016-17...

I may go back to this painting after the first of the year when I have some concentrated time, so any input is welcome.

Angry Kitten   2016-18            photo by Kyle Kutner

Now showing at the Peale Center until May 6.

Location

The way our location shapes us is profound. We grow into the space of our lives in a network of relationships. Our actions and behaviors develop around its requirements of us. People are affected by the overall state of the location they are part of, an interaction of multiple systems at work in the area. The patterns of living are structured within these systems and adaptive to them. We don’t choose our starting locations but do carry them around in the circuits of our brain where we can return and search the spaces of memory for strategies to apply to new places. The first homes and the social relationships within them create the conditioned patterns that later overlay other homes and surroundings. Our relationships in our first home create expectations for how they are structured later. If they are difficult, we may seek out those who provide the same difficulties to try to heal old wounds.

In the effort to understand who we are, more attention might usefully be given to where we’ve been and its influence on our present way of being. Those that argue that we don't have free will because activity happens in the brain before we are conscious of having the thought aren't considering that the Where circuit in the brain is faster than the What. We realize what we feel by the adjustment within to where we are. It is the stage for how we are, the setting for further action in relation to it. Each of us is a center of awareness at a particular point in spacetime, a perspective for consciousness. What we come to understand from the accumulated locations of our lives is the foundation of what we have to offer. It’s different for everyone but the pattern of human needs, enacted wherever we are, is universal, so while the perspective is different, we share a responsive core.

We understand the meaning of a place by its relationship to us which at first we feel as a sense of safety or uncertainty, so the essence of visual intelligence is in the ability to read the meaning in what we see. That is why looking at art makes such good education. Its emphasis is meaningful relationships, in the distillation of what is significant. As the world of information becomes more complex, seeing the relations in the whole will be essential.

Spending more time with screens has sensitized people to the power of imagery and using visual language. A picture says more than a text, gets further inside your head. Even with the simulation of being somewhere else than the body in virtual reality, you know you put on the goggles. Your consciousness recognizes the layers of reality. This extension of imagery to immersion could build intelligence and be therapeutic. Because the actual dangers are neutralized it could be an effective way to face fears and develop empathy, to feel what it is like to inhabit another’s world. It could open new ways to think about consciousness. The accumulation of imagery from the locations in a life creates a symphonic worldview that encompasses the complexity of experience and is the perspective we offer the world. It is time to imagine new levels of mind.