Visual Consciousness

In the sphere of perceptual knowing there is a space where everything is happening. It is a single arena fluctuating to include anything that triggers sensation. If you close your eyes and listen, every sound takes place somewhere in this field of consciousness from the boom of a faraway explosion to an insect buzzing nearby. So the first meaning is where something is in relation to us, closer having more urgency. Even when we’re talking about sound we create a space and what’s in it is located somewhere in visual consciousness. Thinking coexists with sensations in the space of what’s known to perception but it’s just a trail through infinite space like the vapor behind a plane.

 Scientists have shown repeatedly that action between neurons involved with a decision precedes conscious awareness of making the decision. Though some claim this means the machine/brain is the agent and not individual free will, that doesn’t consider the key role of the overall visual assessment that directs conscious attention. Perhaps you never even thought you were making a decision as your eyes zeroed in on one part of your surroundings, but spatial understanding adjusts to the needs of the scene whatever you consider the scene to be, physical or mental. Feeling is the awareness of that adjustment. Attention is moved by visual consciousness. We know what fits and doesn’t fit and where things are out of proportion. This capacity is essential to our reasoning in all areas. Since visual consciousness sees the implications of the whole, cultivating response to visual form tunes pre-analytic assessment. Having art you love around you reinforces something particular in the feelings most valued.

Looking at art trains visual consciousness, reinforcing our sensitivity to nuance and essence. This is particularly important in such an information saturated global culture. Having so few words, “feelings, emotions, intuition,” for highly intricate judgments of proportion, most people don’t credit the vast level of intelligence that goes on before what they consider thinking even starts. As I say to my students, we react to a scene before we recognize what we’re seeing. The meaning of its structure has already been registered. This predisposes where we look and how we take what we eventually identify. Becoming aware of that level of thinking is an important step toward the wisdom of visual consciousness.

When Alan Watts advises us to think of the thoughts that arrive while meditating like waves swirling around the rocks, going as quickly as they arrived, our feelings would be the character of the waves. Whether they are gentle or rough carries a more important meaning for how we behave. Feeling represents an overall assessment by the whole mind, a prediction of what may unfold and how to respond to it. Looking at art educates the sensitivity to significant pattern, to harmony of proportion. Visual consciousness sees excess and absence and how to address an unfolding condition, giving us tools to tackle global problems that interpenetrate many areas and can only be solved by seeing the whole picture. Having skills to present information as visual relationships helps people understand at a glance the relationships and what they mean to the whole.

Cycle of Anticipation

Cosmic Order

Every type of art connects us to chords of feeling that are understood in a primal way through the shared experience of keeping balance as a human being. This automatic balancing act of vision is ongoing. Science tells us that 90% of our sense of balance is visual and when I ask my class to stand on one leg with their eyes closed I see how true that is. Most begin to wobble within seconds and the few that stay upright initially show a concentrated awareness of position I associate with dancers and meditators, people who do yoga. And even then, without sight, they’ll eventually begin to sway. We depend on what we see. It’s instantaneous, an adjustment of the body to surroundings. What we feel is that adjustment registering in conscious awareness. When something feels wrong with the scene in front of us it’s the eyes that find what is out of balance, whatever doesn’t belong or is absent. We feel it before we find it, directed by what vision senses.

It was the philosopher Gurdieff that once said, “Feeling is the foundation of common sense”. The overall sense of things is represented by a complex interplay of feeling that can be very precise yet verbally unnameable. Art develops responsiveness to the overall feeling so we can better recognize the important patterns. A composition is always a state of balance showing whatever is relevant to us about that feeling. It presents a set of relationships that we understand as though confronted with them in reality, but the artist pares it down to what really matters. Looking at art develops that capacity to see what counts. Because it depends on the overall sense of “what fits” as Nobel winner David Bohm puts it, “All of our concepts and explanations… have at their core the perception of a totality of ratios or proportions.” In his book “On Creativity” he writes, “The role of art…is not to provide symbolism but rather to teach the artistic spirit of sensitive perception of the individual’s particular phenomena…” It can be a spur to psychological insight and philosophical modeling.

The philosophical expression of overarching connectedness has been a subject for spiritual vision expressed independently in different religions yet sharing a basic structure

Though the Above/Below structure of most western religious imagery is most familiar Mandalas have expressed unity of the whole, nested structures as the underlying patterns of the universe. In a center based form there is no window, no single point of view . All is within the cosmic whole.

As a Christian saint, Hildegard of Bingen’s cosmology showed with painting the whole of creation as divine, expressed as harmony and balance. She used circles to show a reality that is all inclusive. Her image of us as a body within a soul and not the other way around transcends the separateness that’s seeped into religious attitudes of all types. She used images to illuminate a larger view of the cosmos, a visual philosopher.

She shows the dimensions of reality as nested, one type of energy enclosed within the next, like the layers of an onion, all enclosed in the arms of god, an archetypal image re-envisioned not as above but around, something we’re are enclosed within, a visual idea that can radically change the way we see ourselves in reality. It’s how the human body is organized, layer upon layers with subgroups of layers. It makes sense that we would be enfolded in layers beyond the power of our perception.

Anticipation 4

Goodwill- A Police Story

       Recently I read that of the 12,000 police officers in Chicago just over a hundred were responsible for a third of the misconduct. This points to the obvious question of “What are they still doing there?” But more important is how many good police are being dragged down by a few.

  The police officer I met today was one of the unrecognized majority. I was waiting for a tow truck in the rain and had long since used all my quarters in the meter. It had been  flashing “Empty” for over an hour so I’m expecting the police sooner or later and desperately hoping the tow truck arrives first. My heart sinks when I see the uniform heading my way, and I jump out of the car to explain that the truck should have been there by now.

     Before I can open my mouth she asks, “Are you alright? I just wanted to make sure you’re alright.”

    The concern on her face touched me and settled my agitation like a tonic. I told her my story and she nodded sympathetically.

     She says, ” You want me to get you a tow truck?”

     Like a magic wand blasting away my mistaken assumptions, her solicitude spread around me like a sheltering wing. That was what I always liked about Sheriff Andy of Mayberry, his attitude toward the town was protective, everyone a real person and not a category. By his gentle interventions he rebalanced situations before they turned worse. I thought his type had disappeared but I was wrong. The fact that she was standing out there in the rain offering to help me set things right soothed my spirits when my mood had begun to deteriorate badly. Gratitude is healing and gratefulness for her caring stimulated ripples of gratitude for all the systems that support me. I thought of all the police officers who probably view their jobs like she does, who offer a sense of security to an area they know well enough that they can solve and defuse problems before they arrive. Like Andy’s, their goal is a peaceful community. The misconception that leads us to expect the police to brandish their authority grows from the misrepresentation of police behavior on the news. By playing the same incidents over and over the images are reinforced in the circuitry of our brain creating negative expectations whenever we see a uniform. Lots of people have probably had similar experiences to mine and know differently, but it’s personal knowledge. Where there is no first hand experience there is nothing to contradict the distorted view given the public mind, planted by repetition of the worst.

     I wonder what would happen if the news restricted itself to what actually happened that day. It’s because they repeat the same stories and footage for weeks the impression is made that the police are a brutal force that treats the neighborhood in their care as “Other”.   But how much of real day-to-day policing is actually more like my experience. But for the repeat-fortified mental circuits created by negative images, we could see them as sources of help and not sources of danger.

     Recently I heard a Ted speaker suggest that violence is catching in the same way as illness, that being surrounded by it increases the chances you’ll act violently. Media should be accountable for the misrepresentation created by the repetition of the same incidents day after day, building the unconscious impression it happens all the time. Creating a climate of goodwill might have the same power, with emphasis on alliance and cooperation instead of antagonism. If my officer had been wearing a body camera, the footage of her generous spirit would have lifted people up just like any good example does. Maybe such a large part of the public wouldn’t be reaching for politicians that feed on their fear if the more accurate picture of human goodwill was part of our daily news.

Anticipation 3

Beauty's Guidance

In an earlier post I suggested that beauty itself is a sense, an attunement to proportion, harmony of form, and orderly arrangement. Our sense of what fits, like the other senses,  is a response to qualities in the world and not an idea about them. We put a piece of colored glass by the window or three objects together on a table guided by our sense of where they belong.  If the quality wasn’t in us we wouldn’t respond, couldn’t recognize what fits and what doesn’t. When we admire beauty we participate in it. It is the beautiful part of us that understands it. Sacred geometry is part of our own design and resonates in its presence. Denis Dutton in his Ted Talk says the instinct toward beauty has adaptive survival value. Evolution favored the sense of beauty to guide us toward health and wisdom with balance and harmony as guiding principles. Just as at every organic level there is homeostasis, the ongoing adjustment to the disruptions of living, always striving for the next balanced state, beauty fortifies what will balance our connection to the world we see, for wherever we respond to beauty it’s an action of connection akin to love.

Where researchers have tried to pin beauty down to find out general preferences, polls showed that a majority of global people like the color blue and landscapes with water in them. These few commonalities are clues to the link between beauty and our spatial relation to the world. Both blue and landscapes with water suggest expanse, and having space is being free, uninhibited. Our nervous system matured learning the demands of moving in physical space. So the feeling associated with spatial reality carries universal meaning.We trust it like we trust our ability to walk. Visual art distills the essential elements, clarifies the spatial structure to resonate with the feeling of that relationship to space. Understanding visually contains a sense of knowing whereas much of verbal thinking is shadowed by the uncertainty from all that’s left out.

Immersion in what is beautiful strengthens its power to create harmony in ourselves and the world. Being drawn to a work of art is a connection to the artist and the species. The heart says, “yes” to a feeling recognized but perhaps never expressed before. We can reflect on what we can externalize. Art educates our sensitivity to beauty and primes the circuits for lively response since active circuits respond more readily. We recognize and admire the qualities that we ourselves possess and strengthen them as we find them externally. As Psychiatrist Alfred Adler said “Art may be esteemed the highest training for social life, inculcating into us attitudes of value and thus improving the nature of our responses.” Likewise, philosopher Susanne Langer felt that having beautiful objects around was essential to educating a child’s sense of proportion and quality.

Beauty inspires caring. What we find beautiful stimulates gratitude. If it looks perfect we want to keep it that way, what throws off the balance needs adjusting. Like plants have a tropism toward the sun, intelligence leans toward beauty. Balancing proportions, discerning underlying patterns and finding what fits are the tools of reasoning as well as art. Finding images you love is the most personal kind of education and now, with the internet, one of the easiest. Start with museum or gallery collections to find artists that move you and then you're off on an associative journey all your own. Knowing what you like is all you need.