Reflection

Visual philosophy, like any philosophy, has central ideas upon which many other ideas can be structured. One primary visual principle is mirroring, the essence of understanding. Mirroring an expression is how we know its meaning. Whether we spontaneously make the expression physically or just in the brain’s mirror neuron system we get the expression’s meaning because we feel it inside. Mirror neurons fire as though you were in the face or body position whether you watch or read or hear an action described.

This correspondence can be useful to unfurl the murky areas of our psyche. We find what we need to see in order to unlock what wants to be noticed. Every image stirs connections prompted by that structure. Reflecting on where our attention is drawn can show us themes of our inner dynamics that may be influencing our behavior without our awareness. In all the possibilities the world offers, the thing that captures attention often mirrors current inner conditions. The feeling attached to every image is a result of the adjustments and associations we make for that structure in combination with the existing mood and predispositions affecting the way we respond. Still water reflects most accurately. As the state of mind becomes more agitated so does the distortion in the reflection. One of the many benefits of meditation is simply letting the ripples of the mind settle so as to better reflect. We can’t grasp something until we see it. To see it requires attention to the subject in the here and now and not the internal weather. To develop visual intelligence, understanding the internal weather that predisposes our response to overall patterns is the first step. An unfolding event that can be taken in stride most days might cause a meltdown if the initial conditions are turbulent. This is where art can help to increase self-awareness. Art distills the essential structure of feeling so that we can reflect on it externally. Looking at what we respond to in art shows something of our own feelings at that time. As Joseph Campbell said, ”The eyes are the scouts of the heart”. Finding the art that moves us will trigger the associations we’re trying to organize.

Rupert Sheldrake sees the task of consciousness as the act of making choices in the “field of possibilities”.  Reflecting on the movement of thought reveals the choices made and the ones that are pending. Listening, looking and every act of attention make selections that open new choices. All choices participate in consciousness but deliberate mindful awareness swells the quality of the experience.

Mindfulness is a capacity that can be developed with meditation. Even starting with ten minutes of watching the wild uncontrollable movie of the mind is to learn something important about what wants attention and how little conscious control we often have regarding its movement. If you don’t follow the thoughts they’ll give up and start to subside, and then you can feel the air come in your nostrils, and your chest rise and fall, and places where you are crooked can be noticed and straightened. In the I Ching it says “With the back straight the ego disappears”. If we could get the marks of life’s difficulties out of our bodies perhaps they would fade from our minds. It might be easier to do than the other way around. With the habit of meditation it becomes possible to reflect more mindfully on right where we are.

Materialism

True Fiction

So, I’m reading a novel where the character is describing the moment of death, according to the "Tibetan Book of the Dead", and I’m struck, again, by the evidence that a core of truth underlies all our fabrications. Awareness of the same scenes as though from a template, arising in such varied lives gives a glimpse of everything as part of a grand idea, individualities structured on a universal core. In the book the daughter is telling her father that it says the only moment of clarity we have in life is at the instant of death. The scene transports me to a moment when my father and I were the only ones left at the dinner table after a family gathering. He was in that early stage of his mental withdrawal which made him less reactively argumentative (he became much easier to be around as he continued away from us) and I suggested that at the moment of death we would realize something about life that could not be seen while still clinging to the personal being, that when all the urgencies of living fell away, the striving and intention over, it would be then that the meaning of it all might be clearly visible. It was an idea that made sense to me, though hadn’t come across it in my reading yet, an idea floating up from the depths of the collective consciousness that now resonated with the thinking of the daughter in the story. We all draw from the same well.

The imagining of scenes draws from the materials of personal memory where it resonates with the chords of being human. Reading a story by David Foster Wallace has left me shuddering with its radical honesty. James Baldwin affects me like a force of nature, which leads me to consider whether it’s the “nature” in human nature we should reflect on with compassion. The deep truth of fiction is often the stuff we don’t see or admit to ourselves, and then are reassured seeing that those traits are there in others. The complex emotional bindings intertwining in human relationships are nature unfurling within us. Intellect grows with the size of the social group. Every individual has unique quirks of signaling so each different relationship has its own patterns and associated feelings. We are each other’s best education. Yet in the past that mental/emotional schooling had levels of physical signaling to draw from. Body language, facial expression, tone and pace of voice can be lost as technology intervenes. So looking at art is all the more necessary to compensate for the lack. We can use the essence of feeling distilled by the artist to extend our sensitivity to the expression of places and people. Works that stir personal depths mirror unrecognized emotions triggering thoughts, memories and ideas that help us makes sense out of life. All of the arts can serve to sound the depths and it’s the depths that provide our guidance whether we’re paying attention or not. It’s revealing to discover what draws attention whether in a museum or in a book or on line. Choices in art are highly individual and mirror personal truth. Literary fiction uses character and scenario to invite insight. The reader imagines with the palette of personal imagery that resonates with the universal.

If a response is there it’s because something within relates to it. And recognizing it means strengthening that area of sensitivity. The feeling guides attention and that makes it very powerful. Understanding personal feeling helps avoid misdirected reasoning and open depths for insight.

Dispersion

Divine Mind

In a recent email my friend Issam asked me how I envisioned the divine and I’ve been circling the question ever since. The first response that popped up in my head was the imagery of the natural world as a dynamic manifestation of the underlying Tao, the creative power that structures manifestation. Taoism is the philosophy behind my religious practice so somehow that felt like too easy an answer this time. Our correspondence started with my post about imagery and religion where I suggested the old hierarchical imagery may have worked for its time and culture but didn’t work for the interconnected global culture of today. My hope was that artists could offer some much needed focus to people’s yearning for the sense of connection that comes from the spirit. There are growing numbers of artists creating images of networks, showing the reality of the fields of influence that wrap around the visible world. This has been an animating idea behind most of my drawings, most recently using the illusion of ripples breaking down the absoluteness of barriers, a way of showing ongoing influence that breaks down separateness.

The more we learn the more the vast mystery of intelligence unfolds around us as structure. For my model I would use the nested layers I see everywhere in nature. What we experience as our personal mind is like the outer cortex of the material intelligence which is enfolded in a larger intelligence beyond the scope of our perception. To borrow two terms from Sri Aurobindo, the “Subconscient” influences us from the body and connection to the physical world whereas the “Superconscient” influence us from larger more comprehensive levels of intelligence moving us in ways we’re for the most part unaware. To use an image based on the structure of the brain is enough to extrapolate beyond personal boundaries and consider the individual brain within layers of mind that go beyond it. One of the differences between the brain waves of monks who have practiced meditation for a long time and those with more recent training was that monks were better able to generate feelings of compassion. Evidently it took the development of the areas of the brain associated with those feelings to arouse them voluntarily. This is a power to be reckoned with.

The idea that we can train and develop the divine within may offer the power to stimulate gamma waves associated with intense focus and sudden insight that open a deeper vision of the divine and encompass the notion that the experiencing self is more than the personal story and not just a phenomenon of the physical body any more than the eye is the whole of our seeing. But if we start with an image of the divine as the enfolding layers of mind as represented physically by the brain but continuing beyond it, experiences etched in the akashic field akin to our neural networks blazing trails of our experience for future memory. We have the capacity to give more and in the doing feel more thoroughly the exhilaration of life and realize a greater potential in that more intense participation.

Link

Drive

The metaphor of driving is easy to elaborate because the action is so ubiquitous in modern life. It doesn’t have to have a destination. When someone is said to have “drive” it generally connects to ambition as a quality, and that just tops the stack of less conscious urgencies. We stay on the roads we’ve traveled unless something draws us elsewhere. Since “being driven” cedes the power to the one who is doing the driving the important question is who or what gets to choose the direction? We may think we’re in charge when we are simply repeating a pattern conditioned from before we had memory. In regard to personal motivation, where does it shade into “overdrive” and is that a refinement of conditioned reactions? As a person who works all the time at projects with no deadline and that no one demands, the question of “why” is a frequent visitor. Examining my need to work
doesn’t change it, never seems to get close to the core of the drive to write and draw. They are the vehicle that takes me to see what I’m trying to see.

Shifting the blog to one essay and one drawing a month instead of two is hopefully a victory of realism over compulsion. This inner debate is a scene from the continuing drama of finding the distinction between motivation and irrational urgency. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it has more to do with the mood that makes the identification. I always look to this line from Henry James.
“We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.”
Each time I reflect on these words I take something different from them. This time it confirms my sense that motivation and compulsion are just different parts of a multidimensional spectrum that takes its character from the other emotions involved. The nature of doubt prompts its resolution. Likewise we create images for what we need to see, to clarify and fill in the gaps in a pattern.
Attention is drawn to imbalance, to something missing or something that doesn’t belong and its feeling of tension requiring release by action. Even when actions have no concrete use, like obsessive
compulsive habits, repetitive activity sooths the emotional manifestations of what the hormones signal. Unproductive action may calm but ultimately leads nowhere. I once got stuck in an eight month compulsion, shading a long tube in a drawing. What I needed to see was there without the perfectionism that kept me making adjustments that required more adjustments. When a current project has a particularly demanding area requiring extended days what I think of as my OCD
drawing reminds me to ask what there is still left to see. Endless revision can leave new ideas as unexpressed impulses that become a burden as they accumulate. It’s useful to have the stark example of those months in an obsessive loop as an image of where motivation is a mask worn by underlying patterns of self-comfort. In the language of “driving” imagery, the odometer might have been going up, but I was still circling the same block, staying in motion, but not getting anywhere. All the variations expressible by this metaphor are as universal to the planet as driving itself.