Bookmark 2021

Sharing Cultures

“Wisdom is directly proportional to the size of the group whose well-being it takes into account.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self One of the great things about teaching at a school that draws students from all over the world is that I’ve had the opportunity to have close relationships with people with very different backgrounds. Since art is understood through similarities in our emotional core, I feel connected to what they do and the different wells of imagery stimulate a wider perspective. Gregory Bateson defined information as “the difference that makes a difference”. When something new actually changes the way we view the world, it enlarges the scope of our understanding. The world is full of untapped sources of knowledge from which to build a bigger picture of reality. Every human being is a library of unique experiences that form a particular window on the world. No one view can see it all. Each individual outlook has something to teach us. When someone else’s background is radically different from our own, we can learn more than we might from someone similar to ourselves. Yesterday a wonderful young Chinese student came to visit and brought me a Christmas present. She said it was the first time she’d wrapped a Christmas gift. I gave her some of my homemade Christmas cookies, one of my bookmarks and her choice of ornaments to hang on my tree. Her contribution enriched my pleasure in the tree and I’ll think of her when I hang the bell in the future. We have novelty to offer each other and novelty stimulates dopamine, so it’s clearly good for our well-being. Every culture teaches me about being human. What kinds of things are celebrated and how, where the true principles are beneath the modern surface manifestation. This is where the disillusionment blossoms and people can miss the wisdom found at the source. The polarization being pushed by destructive elements in society denies the value of what thinks differently. To create an atmosphere that includes all points of view rather than setting them in opposition, invites knowledge. Put aside the competition to have the right idea and we can have a whole landscape of ideas to choose from to match a particular problem or situation. Insight into a range of ways to consider an issue offers more opportunities to think creatively. With a larger intellectual range established, everyone is set free to speculate more widely and more interesting constructions and hybrids can occur. The greater the range of ideas from which to draw the better the final synthesis will be.

Ko

Deep Seeing

The more we see something the better we see it, each time taking new details and variations in the overall state. Visually educated to more specific knowledge of something builds sensitivity to impressions at more subtle levels. Looking builds visual understanding. The larger meaning of seeing always includes the depths, insight goes beneath the surface. When we feel someone “really sees” us they “get” us to use the current term. It can’t happen without a certain level of attention. Feeling that level of attention is feeling visible and known to the world, having a witness to our being. Rupert Sheldrake thought the act of attention created a connection that could be felt which he describes in his book “The Sense of Being Stared At”. We give the most attention to is what we most care about, and care and attention makes anything flourish. Plants are said to grow better with proximity, touching or talking to them. It’s not just the water and sunshine but the attention itself. To really see is an act of love. The I Ching is certainly not the only ancient text that says something to the effect, “If you want to know what a person loves, look where they direct their attention.” This is where the overlap between love and fear is most evident. Fear is the thing that grabs attention away from what we love for as long as the sense of threat persists, a fact exploited by commercial media to manipulate our emotions and attention. Recently, I heard a man on the radio lamenting how beset with notifications people are now, how hard it can be to give full attention to anything. Art is quiet and undemanding. What we seek out shows us something that expresses us in some way Art is a pleasurable way to extend personal understanding of feeling since that’s where you find it boiled down to its essence. Portraits can reveal essential qualities in complex and often conflicted expressions. Looking into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait shows an understanding of the human dilemma that speaks directly to the heart. There is tremendous depth and variation in centuries of portraiture available for developing sensitivity to facial expression. Mindful attention is fully present. To be fully present with someone feels good to everyone involved. Thanksgiving is a perfect opportunity to practice mindful attention to people in person and appreciate our connections to others.

Hypothesis

Healing Fragmentation

What’s brought us and our planet to such crisis today is a habit of thinking that only concentrates on parts of a situation, fixing symptoms and flare-ups, and not the whole inter-related organism of being. Seeing the web extending from us in all directions, what we depend on and what depends on us, we’d be less inclined to damage what would be experienced as part of us. Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor described one of the effects of the stroke in her left hemisphere as losing the sense of a clear boundary between herself and everything around her. Without the naming and separating function, things lose their individual identity and become part of an inclusive continuity. The dependence on verbal knowledge has led to the habit of separating things. Nobel winning scientist David Bohm, reflecting on the revelations of quantum physics, thought that the dominance of words did violence to experience by unnaturally dividing things, which led to more sense of separation from others and in the self. People often treat words as real things that should be defended, creating a misplaced antagonism toward fellow humans because of what they call them. Every category and label becomes a barrier toward the place where we understand each other. Not seeing the whole picture leaves us blinkered to the implications for other areas, the interrelationships that are part of every experience. This ignorance creates damage, hardship, and reactivity. Treating just the symptoms can create other symptoms. Breakthroughs in medicine are usually about better pictures for seeing what is wrong. Examining our psychology, art offers pictures about the feelings of being human. It’s available to everyone as a way of looking inward and prompting related insights. Separate objects in a picture are joined as part of a particular vision that is there in its entirety. Einstein said he saw his ideas in his mind. Understanding relationships requires imagery. Looking at art is a way to heal the division that has grown from generations of dependency on words and the division that comes with them. So much could be accomplished if people were working together. So much energy is lost in jockeying for power, competing with others to have more. The competitive mindset may have been useful up to a point, but as civilians coming back from outer space have come to realize, we only have this one small planet that we share. Our different perspectives offer more choices and possibilities for solving the serious problems that we face together. Pushing capacities is what gives an individual the best brain chemistry. Endorphins for learning, dopamine for new territory and the joy of involvement in a task. Putting the many ideas of the group mind in service to the world body is a collective effort that could revolutionize the way we live together. Art is a link to our common humanity. The feeling of understanding when a work opens something inside pushes through the isolation. It’s a first step to feeling like part of humanity, caretakers of our common world.

Chagrin

Susanne Langer

Philosopher Susanne Langer stood alone in her emphasis on the correspondence between art and human psychology. She felt there could be no better way to understand the human psyche than what is revealed through art. The variation, nuance and emotional range available in art enables a person to identify qualities of feeling far beyond verbal description. Literature needs to conjure mental images to capture depth of feeling as is reflected in Booker Prize winning Richard Flanagan line, “Words were and are inadequate to all that we felt, all that we knew, all that I have lost. Words were part of it, but they were also cages in search of a bird.” When Carl Jung wrote “Image is psyche” he was recognizing that only images can touch the mind with feeling. That words are a tool for gaining distance and a sense of mastery over something and useful in that way, paring down the fullness to what suits our current purposes. But to understand the life of feeling in all its contradictions, images can contain and clarify emotions as a whole. Langer’s book, “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling” describes how much of our thinking is led by feelings as representations of overall judgments. Feelings indicate what matters most and shade attitudes and overviews. Art is able to examine and express feeling more accurately and specifically, a representation of the whole. In all of her books she describes how the structure and movement in each of the arts resonate with inner structures of feeling. Her essential idea, that the mind starts with feelings was later confirmed by neurologists. Antonio Damasio stated bluntly that feeling leads thinking, makes the determination of what is important to think about. Feelings are guided by personal significance. The art your eyes are led to helps you see the feelings you may not have noticed that uncover values and anxieties we may be unaware of that point to the worldview that organizes opinions. Everything we see reflects something about us. Unlike a mirror or camera that passively reflects what’s in front of it, our eyes are directed by our purposes, are actively scanning for personal and hardwired priorities. For humans, the mental life has goals and challenges with their attendant stresses and time constraints. It takes the inner awareness of our entire situation to guide progress through linear time. Looking for art that rings true gets to the center, opens a deeper personal reality. Langer was pointing the way. Brain science confirms the connection. The modern world needs comprehensive big picture thinking. Looking at art is a pleasurable way to build sensitivity to the whole and learn more about our minds.

Worry

Larger Consciousness

“Without the development of an overall perspective, we remain lost in individual investigations.” Robert E. Ornstein- The larger consciousness that’s the subject of this essay isn’t beyond the body but of the body. Though it may not be defined by words, symbols and descriptions, our physical awareness of our whole situation takes care of the thinking self. It is felt in our physical adjustments to the surrounding world. People are so much bigger than they think. With all the devices and apps available today, attention is endlessly distracted by the surface of things. Held in thrall by the life in the postings, the neglected center grasps at attention with unexpected moods and out-of-proportion reactions. We can find names for certain feelings and recognize triumphs and disappointment, but the ebb and flow of day-to-day emotions has no chance to show us deeper yearnings and satisfactions or to pull together a bigger perspective. People are left with a shallow sense of who they are, unaware of the enormity below, which includes a whole category of personal intelligence that goes unnoticed and uncredited. The verbalizing conscious mind is just the part of the iceberg above water, but what’s below is a crucial part of understanding. The core mind looks after our well-being and navigates the world led by our desires and fears, some current, some deeply rooted in personal history. It’s an unrecognized part of intelligence that can be developed by looking at art, the best expressions of visual form. . Many have said that perception is the basis of wisdom. We see what’s out-of-balance, where proportions are off, make near instant appraisals of overall situations. Winston Churchill said he liked to paint landscapes because it trained “the highest qualities of mind.” We think of our sense of proportion as intrinsic to justice. But it isn’t necessary to go outside and paint when so much art is available with a few clicks. Right proportions are part of the beauty of form. Looking at art increases awareness of right proportions which carries over it all aspects of life. Art presents the feelings of being thus refining our susceptibility to the personal feeling that attends the larger perspective, the overview that organizes response. Images that draw attention show what matters personally, illuminating aspects of your world view. This is the larger part of consciousness because it contains the whole, is influenced by the total perspective and what aspects of it are most alive in the mind at a given time. Perception is guiding each person’s actions throughout the day. The action of balancing is ongoing in every level of mind.

More Contact

This image was posted at an earlier stage two months ago.

Seeing Feelings

In his books psychologist Nathanial Brandon writes that visibility is the most central of human social needs. The need to feel seen and part of the world is key to our sense of belonging. Having a person’s attention directly on us is reassurance of our existence at the least, and feels like love at its best. The more and better we feel seen the more we feel loved. An abusive relationship is often sustained by the feeling the person sees you better than others, and though this may be an illusion, the level of attention makes it persuasive. Bad attention is better than no attention. To feel invisible is to disappear to ourselves. We use others’ attitude toward us to locate ourselves in the scene, feel the rippling outward of our presence in the surroundings. How others react to us affects us on a primal level the emotional center of which was seeded in being noticed or not noticed when we cried as babies. Understanding ourselves is our central mystery. Relationships with others aren’t the only way to see ourselves. Within the murky land of unnamed feelings is what matters to us. Responding to art and the particular images that attract reveals what is significant and meaningful to us. When an image strikes a chord it’s because it feels like someone has articulated. a personal truth . Bringing this to conscious awareness is knowledge of the deep structures that organize response to the world. The life of feeling is the living center of art. As philosopher Susanne Langer wrote, “Art looks like feelings feel.” Looking through an art book is not so much about pictures as experiencing moments of shared feeling. Being moved by an artist’s work is connection between human beings about something that mattered to both of them. Response to art mirrors the heart. To identify with the feeling may excavate a shared pain or fear. Art is not just about culture, it’s about psychology. When Edward Munch’s “The Scream” was stolen people were upset. It wasn’t just because of its value to culture but about their personal connection to the emotion in that image (There are four versions two of which have been stolen.) It is consoling and illuminating when intense emotions have been shared and recognized. It affirms our most personal experience and engagement with that feeling.

Re-Portal

Tennis and Cultural Expansion

Watching the French Open this year renews my conviction that human excellence develops from the mix of all nationalities representing a range of styles and backgrounds. The best players school each other, push skills and uplift watchers with their stamina and virtuosity. Through cultural expansion we can move forward as a species, sharing knowledge and perspective. People have a choice about where to give their attention. It’s so much better for the psyche to choose admiration and inspiration. In a time obsessed with labels, individual excellence demonstrates that what matters is what we do, not what we are. Beneath the surface is the rich individuality that produces excellence when following a passionate interest. Watching tennis offers the privilege of sharing the peak moments of dedicated careers. When I was first caught by the look on Bjorn Borg’s face that started me watching tennis, I felt like I was being let in on something deeply private, intense and exposed. The appeal of virtuosity is positive brain chemistry. The satisfaction of pushing our boundaries is available no matter what the personal interest. Finding groups that share that interest can now reach all over the planet. In every area of life, we are enriched by difference. With more different kinds of people and backgrounds, our own choices are expanded. Society needs to make the evolutionary step that moves toward difference, not away. This weekend are the finals of the French Open. The play leading up to them has been outstanding and it’s a time when a shift of generations is underway. The legendary Serena Williams lost and the Russian and Czech in the finals are the next young women to inspire. The men’s final will be a battle between the current #1 from Serbia, Novak Djokovic who has been around two decades and emerging star, Stephanos Tsitsipas from Greece. Women’s Final are at nine am Saturday, men’s at nine am Sunday. They’ll stir some positive brain chemistry and give mirror neurons a workout.

Contact

Reflections on Teaching

One of the best things about teaching has been looking at and talking about student work. Nothing better demonstrates the limitations of words than to see how a single word can mean so many different things to different people. The word is no more than a category for the radically diverse ways we experience it. Given the topic Isolation, particularly in the midst of the COVID pandemic, students created images of moving particularity, merging physical confinement with the psychological impact. No matter how different the details, everyone understood the feeling. This is what we share as a species and why art can help unify in a time when we desperately need it. As classes became more international, the universal feeling that is understood by the mind as a whole through art, connected us in our essence. Visual art is felt in the body which picks up the nuance in small variations that words can’t reach. Each work can stimulate new conversations. After talking about a Chinese student’s painting, she said, “Thank you guys. You described my heart.” Awash in a terrible worldwide focus on surface differences, art connects to the place that we are the same, a place crucial to reinforce right now. Art is not just about culture, it is a picture of human psychology. Teaching has been a way to demonstrate the joy of being involved, the pleasure of giving attention lavishly and like when watering a plant, fostering growth. Showering students with attention is the part I’ll miss most, to watch something ignite and spread as they feel seen through their work. Art helps us past the external shell to where the essence connects. It communicates through generations and widely varied backgrounds. Every artist is a teacher on some level, sharing their insights or questions to stimulate the mind of the viewer. An image can change how we see. Art students always make me optimistic. From a range of difficult circumstances, they willingly draw from the core and make beauty. Thinking about them right now makes me smile as so much individual work through the years floods through my awareness. We share art. We don’t have to own it. Once seen, it’s available in memory. An observation that reflects a point-of-view, window onto a philosophical stance, the feelings resonate beyond words, unifying a diverse group by putting the emphasis on what makes us human. This year’s speeches by students at graduation showed me we’re in good hands. Evidencing a broad, wise and compassionate perspective, their generation will responsibly evolve human minds, tapping the diversity of potential too long overlooked. In the past few years I’ve re-connected to a few students from every decade since the seventies and it startles me even though obvious that the young people I knew could be facing retirement, enjoying results of hard work in middle age, on down to very recent graduates. I feel so lucky to have been part of so many people’s beginnings. They all feel like family to me.

Beyond Night

Interbeing

In an article at the Garrison Institute website, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about coining the word Interbeing to emphasize the extension of our being beyond the physical self. He quotes biologist Lewis Thomas saying our bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by many, many other tiny organisms that we depend on to make our own systems run properly. They facilitate the proper operation of all the systems of the human body, each separate system with a role to play yet contributing to and dependent on the others. We have many thermostat-like elements to keep us in balance and systems compensate where the balance is upset somewhere else. Brains are the best example of this since they grow and build mass in areas we use most and shrink in those we don’t. Some say that the planet as Gaia has the same properties. Wikipedia states that the Gaia hypothesis “proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system. “ We depend on so much outside the body. Our food comes through a chain of workers cultivating, harvesting, packing, delivering and finally put on shelves in stores for use. And that doesn’t count all the manufactured items we use. We move through a world of interaction and interchange, a web of systems that support every aspect of living. This is a worldview than can be shown. Images integrate and connect in a way that clarifies meaning. We’ve overidentified with the body as the edge of our being when we couldn’t survive without everything else. We each experience a specific unfolding within and dependent on the environment that supports us. We contain the genes of ancestors that combined in certain ways to make us who we are. Mentally there have been ideas and people that help us develop our way of thinking. Emotionally we have the people with whom our lives are interwoven. Even when we struggle with the world we learn about ourselves. Nature cooperates and gives up resources that we have up until now mindlessly extracted. Though the scale of the crisis we face may be overwhelming, once faced we can choose our place to make a difference. Thinkers are now considering the idea that consciousness could be the base of everything, not an outgrowth of human beings. Art can show alternatives, offer perspective to linear thinking which is such a thin thread through a big picture. Images can spur a speculative philosophy that can shift paradigms for the better. What’s important is to see.

Grief

Art's Consolation

Though I usually focus on visual art, when emotions sink deep to the core, I reach for music. When I first heard that my mother died, I went downstairs to play “Moonlight Sonata”, badly, but I fed off the depth of feeling as a participant. It was consoling. Now I’m learning a hymn she liked, am hearing her sing it in my head right now, just thinking it puts it inside me. When I think of songs she used to sing around the house, I see her in action, a happy person living a satisfying life. Music is so deeply woven with memory, its power can be startling. I once sobbed uncontrollably at a rendition of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” at a funeral for a colleague I hardly knew. As writer Anne Lamott says, “Music is about as physical as it gets. What other art can make you burst into tears? “ Or like it says in the “I Ching”, “Music has the power to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.” We’ve lost so much in the past year. Normal patterns of living we’d come to take for granted were disrupted or erased and the duration of it is wearing us down. When patterns are out of synch what could make more sense than music for restoring rhythm to our lives. Like some have said about depression, that the system shuts down when the old ordering system isn’t sufficient for the volume and complexity of new content, the brain uses the empty space of melancholy to construct a better system. In ancient Egypt, the Temple Beautiful used all the arts to heal, but music in particular was considered very powerful. Music speaks to the physical body on many levels. Science has shown that high pitches stimulate the frontal lobe, home of imagination and other higher mental functions. Middle tones resonate with emotion and low pitches vibrate in the body. Our body is not just substance but layers of rhythms working together. Art connects to the actions of the body. Getting back to balance involves immersion in beauty. Art does not show people what to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action.’ – World Economic Forum, Why art has the power to change the world, 2016 I keep this quote on my desktop as affirmation of my conviction that the development of right hemisphere knowledge, the sense of meaning in the whole, is the first step toward positive change. The intuitive feelings that are the messages of this intelligence are most easily schooled by looking at art. As Philosopher Susanne Langer wrote. “Art looks like feelings feel.” To see and recognize is to better understand and people’s confusion about how they feel is part of the problem. Feelings direct thinking and need to be taken seriously. Our world is filled with traumatized people. Having tools to recognize our emotions provides a necessary step in order to move beyond them and the problems they cause by going unrecognized. The arts are the opportunity to heal that self-estrangement.

Exposure

Mental Entities

After a radio story on Thomas Edison, my imagination was fired up by his idea of humans as swarms of life energy units that persist for awhile then disperse and eventually join other energy units to form something else. As an image for death it’s more comforting than the image of a body decaying. It also puts emphasis on the energy of consciousness as opposed to the physical body. I’ve always liked the idea of a soliton as an image for a particular existence. Like the shape of an eddy in a stream that keeps its form as long as the conditions of the current and rocks stay the same, once the supporting conditions are gone, so is the shape. A similar dynamic occurs with a class. For a time we are a swarm of minds that each influence the other and bring out different qualities and ideas that none of us might have arrived at alone. It’s a mental organism that grows and matures over time. It’s a dynamic with its own qualities and behaviors. The mixing of different backgrounds and ideas fuels a broader creativity and the participatory energy has its own field of influence. When it’s time frame ends, the energy units disperse enriched by the shared experience and new understanding. The disintegration of any strange attractor (pattern of energy that holds its form) is a kind of death of a specific form, but the word shifts meaning with the understanding it was always part of a sea of energy flow that is constantly reorganizing. At every level from cells and systems, to societal groups and the larger fields of consciousness that organize the physical realm like a semester organizes a class, the patterns of collaborating elements of consciousness repeat at every scale. Too much emphasis on an individual physical body doesn’t give enough weight to the many collaborative mental entities with which we participate. When the entity disperses, the ideas and points-of-view are still available in the larger consciousness.

Pre-Union

Beauty's Guidance

One of my most popular posts, “The Sense of Beauty”, https://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/search?q=the+sense+of+beauty ties together ideas that emphasize the guidance that our attunement to beauty can provide. Not the marketed beauty of glamorized physical appearance, but the inner response to what goes together, what’s in harmony, the sense of things in place. Philosopher Susanne Langer sees it as a sense in its own right, like smell and taste which don’t wait for cognition to decide if something is bad or good for us. What we see has within it a discernment of what matches, what is wrong or out of place in a scene, a precognitive judgment led by an instinct for beauty. In a time when we’ve been bombarded with so much behavior that’s been ugly, the importance of beauty needs revaluing. I recently read that left hemisphere thinking, which is what most education is directed toward, is narrow and utilitarian and not responsive to values. This is where the sense of beauty and right hemisphere assessments can balance the distortions that come with limited focus by seeing the whole as one. Alan Watts talked about the need for both spotlight and floodlight consciousness. The spotlight is great for seeing more of one thing but we need a floodlight to see the context, how it works with the rest of the scene. Focusing on one area is an act of separation. The floodlight may be dimmer, leaves out the details, but shows the whole so the spotlight can zoom in on what’s needs attention. Looking at art is an opportunity to refine the floodlight consciousness. The experience of art always starts as a whole. It refines our awareness of the feel of experience all at once. This leads to better understanding and attention to the intuitive feel in other situations, what’s right, or wrong, or off about it. Looking at art is training the sense of the whole and the values shown by harmony, graceful form, attention to detail, appreciation of virtuosity in all things. We all have an inborn ability to set the picture right when something looks off. We when respond to an image it connects to our own inner world. We’ve witnessed more delusion than we could have imagined and see how important self- knowledge can be. Looking at art is a powerful tool for learning about oneself. The pleasure that comes with beauty is a signal of the reward system in action, encouraging what is good for us and fortifying our capacities. With so much visual imagery in our technological world, refining the visual sensibility will develop a long-neglected capability necessary to navigating the future with awareness of the interlocked whole.