Behaviorism

Variety and Enrichment

What made talking about the art from my “Imaging the Idea” class such a pleasure was partly due to the wonderful variety of approaches this semester’s class represents. It was stimulating to go from paintings and constructions to photography, animation and video collage, stuffed objects and reconstructed prints offering a thorough exploration of expressive iconography. That combined with the interesting and perceptive responses from the group got my own ideas moving into brand new territory. This is serious enrichment. I can revisit any one of the works mentally and get to know the mind that created it, feel their humor and priorities, the particular gifts each brings to the things they need to show us. Perspective is enlarged by the accumulation of many ways of seeing. This was the reason I created this class and the “Imaging from Current Events”, as a way of spreading a variety of visual and verbal ideas on the table so everyone gets a sense of the range of the ways others come at a topic without dispute. No idea has any more claim to being truth than another. Building the skill of moving through and pooling ideas rather than using mental resources to defend and prevail offers a more interesting, open journey through the field of ideas, the extended mental space of collective perception.

Variety is enrichment at every level of biology. When people are threatened by difference it can often be because they aren’t attuned to essence. The idea that everyone has to come around to one way of
thinking is an archaic remnant of colonialism. The availability of multiple points of view needs a more open-ended orientation toward belief that allows for growth and change. Understanding underlying relationships, how things function and the patterns of behavior formed in early development provide a platform for understanding all that is shared. Every human being has the experience of being a helpless baby that then begins to sit, to crawl, to begin the struggle to stand and
walk, and these shared early experiences are an important component of how we respond to gravity, position, obstruction, imbalance and their analogue in the composition of art. Art communicates through the human response to space. The metaphors based on functioning in the world are universal.

Understanding this essential responsiveness should enable us to transcend superficial physical descriptions and appreciate the ways in which human beings are varied as valuable. A restricted gene pool and monoculture weaken a species and make it more vulnerable, whereas interbreeding takes advantage of the best genes on both sides to makea more vigorous next generation. When Picasso saw African masks it opened a new creative direction for him. Whatever is new and different stimulates dopamine in the brain, which is represented in behavior as curiosity and focused attention. This is not something to be suppressed.  One way to make use of the untapped potential of the mind
is to expose it to more difference and find the novelty that most inspires creative thought. If as so many are now saying, we are moving into a post-knowledge era our tools for depth understanding and creative thinking will be essential to the future.

Behaviorism (detail)

Unconditional Attention

It was back when I was in my twenties working at a mental hospital that I learned the two most important lessons about the mind even after forty more years of study. The first was that the labels put on people’s misery told you very little about individual reality and nothing at all about the situations that led up to why they were there. We who worked there and the patients weren’t that different as human beings, the ones inside were more overwhelmed by their circumstances, but we that were the aides were there as part of a searching led by our own psychological fragility. It was while I worked there that I heard Thomas Szasz speak on “The Myth of Mental Illness” as something used by society to standardize people.

The other thing I learned is that what really healed people, at least on my hall, was Katy Phair. She was a wonderful woman who listened with wide-open acceptance and I could see people relax in her presence, even when they weren’t talking, because she was so totally with them. And she included the aides in her generous attention. Her look seemed to value me and helped me accept myself. One day in regard to something I was saying which I don’t remember she said, “Susan, you can’t have expectations of others.” Now this was the most revolutionary idea that had ever been said to me. I’d been brought up in a web of expectations. I couldn’t imagine not expecting things of others and couldn’t accept it at the time. It took me years to shake off the baggage of expectations when it comes to other people. The brain works by predicting, so expecting what happens next is part of its method but projecting the “shoulds” that are part of our own conditioning is a hazard to healthy relationships because expectations put conditions on how you pay attention.

What does it mean to say something given is unconditional? The obvious answer is to need nothing back, have no expectations resting on what’s given. Less obvious are the automatic internal judgments triggered by the receiver’s reaction. To give unconditional attention means to have no agenda, to take someone in as they are, really observe and learn the individual background and personal sensitivities. Taking someone in and learning about their reactions gives an understanding of what something means to them. People protect their insensitivity by saying the other over-reacted, that it was not our intention for them to react that way. We don’t learn our lessons when we say the other took it wrong.  To dismiss another’s reaction is disrespectful and refuses to learn about the legitimate response of another. The I Ching says if you want to know what kind of person you are look at the effects your actions have on others. The ripples started by the action are the messages left in the field around you.

Practice attention as a gift to others. Like a plant grows and flourishes with careful tending, true attention feels like love. It’s the concrete evidence of love that words alone can’t show.

Setting Limits

The Inner Self

Human response to visual art is as personal as it is to music. The feeling in the work resonates with feelings in the heart that want recognition. As real and substantial as this inner world is for us, the world of surface functioning tends to see only surfaces, signals like shoes and attitude. People are sold a set of values that disrespects human depth and creates boundaries based on marketed standards. The range of perceptions is narrowed to the superficial categories linked to surface appearance. From the very beginning of life there are currents of being that aren’t recognized and acknowledged by others, yet this rich inner life feels like the heart of who we are. Just as history has told the story of what has happened in the outer world, art has chronicled the inner, showing what it feels like to be human. It is the artist that verifies the life within. Whether in the mood of a scene, the associations with a still life, the energy of an abstraction or the attitude in a portrait, we’re attracted to what relates to our own inner life. Preferences vary with the emotional climate so what we’re drawn to at a particular moment in life will shed light on how we feel at the time. It validates an emotional truth and its connection to the feelings of others. Recognition of this level reminds us how much more there is to us than merely the surface roles we play.

The wide range of art accumulated through time offers many choices to reflect different temperments and different states of mind. The fact that novels like “The Goldfinch” and “Girl With A Pearl Earring” build around a single work from centuries ago is testimony to the centrality of the emotional essence and mystery of the inner world. When art captures the expansive moment the connection to a deep human pattern celebrates the inner self. It can be a powerful tool for self-knowledge that is much more aligned with how people actually experience life than the few words we have to express it. The connection is forged by recognition of an active personal archetype, a truth in our life drama. Modern culture lives on surfaces but the power in human beings is in the depths and any comprehensive understanding needs the clarity of perceptual cognition. Perception sees the whole picture and the interrelationships. Educating perception develops the intelligence that understands the whole. It is the only thing that can help us find solutions to the problems in a fragmented and complex world.

Looking at art has dual benefits in the development of visual intelligence. First is the insight into personal psychology that can unearth blocks and distortions. People are so used to hiding the weather within that they come to disregard it and lose access to the guidance offered by the response to the whole. Second is the refinement of holistic seeing, awareness of overall structure that guides attention to the truly significant in how that structure functions. It reinforces the original intelligence of the body, knowledge of what we expect from spatial relationships, which can get ignored in the labyrinth of the seductive intellect.

Causality