Mock

Suspending Judgment

“All authority is an obstruction.”   J. Krishnamurti

One thing that can be crippling to creativity is getting bogged down in external ideas of right and wrong, best and better. This global conditioning focused on right and wrong answers creates anxiety about following the guidance of personal intuition. No attention is given to training this perception of the whole picture that is led by the sense of what’s missing or what doesn’t belong or as Nobel prize winner David Bohm said, by a sense of what fits. Looking at art and talking about how it affects you is excellent training in visual understanding.

 In more than forty years of teaching I’ve watched many a piece fresh with personal vision be sabotaged by the comment of someone else with different standards. Humans only have their own experience to go on, but it’s time to jettison the assumption that our experience builds the same outlook as others. If you grow up in a world where cheating and deceiving are all around you then you’ll assume everyone is a liar and a cheat and treat them that way. Marcus Aurelius may have been the first to observe our tendency to condemn our own faults in others. At the same time in China the I Ching was saying the same thing.

To suspend judgment opens an opportunity to see things as they are and examine our own lapses from harmony. If we can deprogram ourselves from judgment we’re in a position to actually observe what each person has to offer. Every individual can only develop by their own pattern of growth. As personal decisions accumulate unique style shines in its own way.  Judgment is useful in one way, everything you would criticize in others is something you yourself possess. If you see your own errors through this then your future observations will be cleared.

In the mid twentieth century, the philosopher Susanne Langer wrote many books about the importance of human feeling in organizing the mind. She felt that art was the best expression of human psychology and having beautiful things around was the best way to educate values. Elaine Scarry has followed up more recently with her book “On Beauty and Being Just” describing how many ways beauty cultivates what’s best in us. A program called Visual Teaching Systems goes into underprivileged areas and gets kids to talk about paintings starting with the question - what’s going on here. The ability to imagine answers to questions with no wrong answers stimulates the brain to such a degree that their test scores improved in their other subjects. Studies in intelligence have shown that most intelligent thinking happens when both hemispheres are working together rather than one dominating. Talking about art strengthens the communication between them while exercising imagination and creative thinking. Shifting our attention from judging and evaluating takes pressure off and let’s the mind extend its boundaries. Bringing art to everyone coulddevelop another dimension of intelligience that may be up to the problems of the 21^st century.