Belief and Vision

The stories that represent cultural worldviews create expectations that guide the mind’s perception of surroundings. Vision filters for what matches the inner model of reality constructed of personal experience and cultural/educational background. What doesn’t fit the model is often not seen at all. A persistent story told by science creates an image of the universe and everything in it as a machine that can be explained by its parts. That image first began its necessary breakdown when Michael Faraday envisioned the presence of magnetic fields and immaterial forces rose in scientific consciousness. Yet the machine model still directs the reality many people see.

The standards of so much of the modern world are based on hierarchical and mechanical models that fail to see deeper patterns. In the quest for more and more production and accumulation what’s seen as valuable is what will further those narrow goals. The earth is seen as a source of raw material to be exploited. The worldview of native cultures sees the earth as sacred, as all nature deserving respect, and is similar to Chinese Taoism in the emphasis on awareness and harmony with continual flow. The mechanical model makes laws that support the needs of the machine and private ownership though Lao Tzu pointed out that “as laws increase so do the number of rascals.” The enormous apparatus of modern media keeps attention on consumption and the illusion that having things is the source of satisfaction because it serves the purpose of materialist society. Not only is this not a sustainable attitude, it distracts from the satisfactions of being and centers attention outside the self. It promotes a competitive attitude toward others instead of connection through multiple networks in the larger system that supports us as part of the world body. Recognizing this imagery’s effect on what we see and shifting the underlying model is the only way to rescue the planet from the collapsing machine model and re-integrate all the talents and capabilities now relegated to the piles of parts that don’t fit.

Our inner picture of the world affects what we see. The accuracy of what we perceive is strongly influenced by what we already think about it. We may not see at all, what we can’t believe is there. The things we’ve heard in the past are part of the formation of this inner view, stories from the culture in which we’re raised create a bed of imagery we combine into new thoughts. What’s inconsistent with what we understand to be true of reality either is missed altogether or is perceived as a mistake of some kind.  It’s hard to make change when the underlying model still leaves so much out. Like Faraday we need to see the patterns of underlying influence, see how things link in systems within the organism that is ourselves and the larger organism of humanity. We could learn from ancient goddess cultures focusing on connectedness. Gaia has no hierarchy. The consciousness of the earth, like the body, moves toward balance.

Finding the Word

Standardization

Working to expand cultural diversity can run into opposition over the issue of standards. The creation of standards by a dominant culture marginalizes legitimate values held by other ways of looking at the world. The idea that excellence can only be achieved by matching the dominant value ignores the importance of diversity to ecological health and narrows personal choices in ways that don’t always suit the individual. Whether in regard to children’s test scores or religious morality, criticism, judgment and ranking constrain the development of talents and capabilities outside those limits and deaden the mind.

Younger people see that we are all on a spectrum and no single way of being can be best for each individual. Yet still people stand up and prescribe for everyone the mode of being they themselves practice. When they talk about standards, it’s their standards they want to impose on everyone else. By restricting what’s to be valued, a range of capacities go unnoticed and the richness of the culture thins.

In her book “Jane Addams and the dream of American Democracy”, author Jean Bethke

Elshtain, wrote that Addams felt standardization was a holdover from militarism. She appreciated the diversity of cultures among the immigrants in poor Chicago neighborhoods and created Hull House as a place of art and theatre that welcomed all. Reading about how people dismissed her efforts as lost on the poor I remembered when I was doing a mural for the city, the two homeless men that sat against the wall of the abandoned gas station across the street, watching me paint day after day. When I finally got up the courage to talk to them, I was surprised by their gratitude. They thanked me profusely for bringing some beauty to their part of the city. As I was finishing up a few weeks later, a well dressed man who never stopped or broke stride complimented me on the mural but said it was wasted on the people around there.

Jane Addams knew that art was for everyone. Though she was criticized for bringing art into nurseries and underprivileged communities she insisted that “being surrounded by beauty developed the mind.” It’s through the arts that we find the commonalities between us all. As Jane Addams herself said, ”the things that make men alike are stronger and more primitive than the things that separate them.”  She saw ugliness and beauty as ethical categories and guidance in relation to truth. The general population needs to be reunited with the pleasure of looking at art, of feeling that connection to humankind that response to what’s personally meaningful gives.

Today concrete benefits are demonstrated in the work of Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine. Their “Visual Thinking Strategies” show how talking about art frees up verbal creativity. In her paper on the subject she writes, “In the process of looking at and talking about art, the viewer is developing skills not normally associated with art.” http://www.vtshome.org/ Without fear of wrong answers it strengthens anyone’s ability to generate ideas and fortifies their connection with archetypal themes.

Heavy Ideas

Looking At Art To Learn About Yourself

“Seeing is the essence of consciousness.” Roger Penrose

Every visual choice is a self-expressive action. Walk into a room and five different people might notice five different things. Perception is always searching for what we need to see. Just like we pick different things from a menu, vision is always scanning and selecting, looking for what it wants, avoiding what it doesn’t. Perception is never passive. It’s always on the hunt for what will satisfy our various needs from the level of organism to the level of thoughts and feelings. And since each brain is constructed by individual experience, the brain is our first creation.

One of the most surprising new discoveries in neuroscience is the way we sort memories.  The assumption that everything can be broken into categories results from the dominance of the brain’s left hemisphere, where words, symbols and classification are the primary tools for understanding. This creates the impression that everything can be labeled and that what something means depends on the definition of the label.  The right hemisphere responds to the gestalt, the entire scene, and represents its significance through feeling. As an instant assessment of overall meaning, the inner adjustment of our response reflects how it feels to be where we are, part of a pattern in a particular type of situation.  So it makes sense that rather than sort memories by category as previously believed, our memories are sorted by what scientists call “mood congruity”. Scenarios and events with the same felt qualities will be called to mind to clarify the meaning of the event. The feeling is indicative of our relationship to that pattern. Memories that match the mood of a circumstance will rise to support the feeling state and underscore its meaning. A work of art is an armature upon which one’s own similarly felt experiences attach. This is why art can be such a great tool for self-awareness. By paying attention to the thoughts that follow a strong reaction to a work whether positive or negative, we can reflect on the underlying feelings and learn about emotional themes in our own psyche. Since feeling is an instant judgment of importance and an urge to act, these correspondences reinforce our sense of the significance of the situation, a quality that grows from our sense of balance and proportion.

Finding the art that moves you offers rich new territory for introspection. Art has always been about feeling. Though there may have been other things at work it’s the feeling that connects. Recognition gives a sense of understanding. A wonderful passage in the “I Ching” says, “Music has the power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.“ Likewise, visual art helps us identify and recognize complex emotional truth.

Since recent brain science has shown that feelings lead thinking, we needs tools to help recognize them. Time spent looking through an art book, in galleries or museums offer opportunities to experience responses that point to personal themes that open the way for greater self-awareness and strengthen the guidance provided by the aesthetic sense.

(This Saturday I’m giving a miniclass on this topic at a SkillShare for Baltimore Mesh.

http://meshbaltimore.com/ )

Correlation

The Feeling at the Sight

So much of how we respond to art is automatic and neurologically based. Art distills essential patterns of emotional response, revealing them for reflection. This educates the sensibility that responds to future experience. Our inner state of readiness must match our outer circumstances and is always adapting to change. Though the physical shifts may not be perceptible we are always in a dance with the changes in the scene around us. Since feeling and emotions are the first awareness of some kind of inner movement, the felt impression of what we see is the instant unconscious assessment of what it means to us, how we might need to act. When we have a strong response to art the inner adjustment reflects a resonance with meaningful inner patterns.

Though scientific method can analyze and observe the parts in detail, it can miss important qualities in larger systems, and relationships that can’t easily be named or symbolized. Art integrates and synthesizes. Throughout time art has helped viewers recognize their personal currents of feeling and what it’s like to be human at a given time in history. Today it can also show scientists the underlying structure of the whole. The importance of art for developing everyday human insight is a theme in the books of philosopher Susanne Langer. Her fascinating in-depth discussions of visual art as an extension of expressive gesture, underscores the importance of “qualia” and “relations”, how much information is in visual nuances. Her simple statement,  “Art looks like feelings feel” articulates this fundamental truth. In her book, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, she writes, “Feeling is a dynamic pattern of tremendous complexity. Its whole relation to life, the fact that all sorts of processes may culminate in feeling with or without direct regard for each other, and that vital activity goes on at all levels continuously, make mental phenomenon the most protean subject matter in the world. Our best identification of such phenomena is through images that hold and present them for contemplation; and their images are works of art.”

The relationship between the complex dynamics of feelings and the structure of art makes art the best way to learn about human emotion and to understand universal patterns of response. This complexity cannot be reduced to one variable at a time, since the meaning is in the whole and the dynamic relationships involved. There are correlations between the balance of our surroundings and the feelings we experience being there, and we seek out the visual structures that show us what we need to see. Art serves others by translating feeling into expressive imagery that can help with recognizing obscure felt states.

When any group gathers to talk about art, amazing discussions evolve if the image hits a common chord. Our differences in background enrich the variety of responses evoked by the structure and emphasize the commonality beneath surface variations.

Intellectual writing that makes judgments about art can obscure the personal relationship anyone can have with the art that moves them. Every choice of where to look reflects the personal psyche. Where we linger in an art book or museum shows us feelings within that want our conscious attention. It’s a portal to the depths of our common humanity.