Dyads

Some days ago, as I was reflecting on recent work, I noticed that dyads showed up rather frequently in my recent work. Take a look at these:

The Parking Lot

The Homestead

Look at this painting of a single item:

The Blue Bicycle

           Two wheels! Also object and shadow.

            My most recent:

Ed's House

Pairs of pairs, for Heaven’s sake!

What does it mean? Is there a secret significance here, something symbolic? Does it represent, for example, a wish to be part of a pair? Or an awareness of being part of a pair?

Other paintings appear to represent something about choices.

The industrial or the natural:

Leaves and Steel

                In The Bridge we can choose to enter the dark door or we can gaze out into the green trees.

The Bridge

        The lit building or the dark copse:

The Grove

        The canoe or the dock:

The Yellow Painter

        We follow the zig-zag railing in The Patio to a point where we choose, again, a door or a little natural area at ground level. And look, there are two pipes in the ground.

The Patio

These pairs could characterize choices, some of which are fraught with meaning, some not so much. We could go on and on about choosing the canoe or the dock and what each choice represents in a life. What does it mean if we enter the door or go into nature? Three paintings juxtapose architecture and nature, most dramatically in the choice between dark trees and a brightly illuminated building.

I can assure you I was not thinking about choices or dyads when I created these compositions. I was looking at colors and shapes, as I was when conceiving the compositions of the many other, non-dyadic paintings I am not showing you here.

And yet, it is engaging to think this way. We do enjoy pondering possible meanings and significance to our own lives of these apparent symbols, intended or not. Here again is that recurring theme of self-reflection. When you think about it, symbolism functions only with self-reflection. For a symbol to operate as a symbol, awareness of both the symbol and its meaning is necessary, as well as the realization that their relation is symbolic! 

Is it interesting to wonder what was in the artist’s mind, especially if he claims not to have been thinking in terms of dyads at all? Possibly, but not for that long. Such pursuits are the work of art history, which is very different from the creation or the contemplation of art.

Once a painting is hardened into its final form, the important dialogue is between the viewer and the painting. The purpose of visual art is to engage the viewer and provide stimulus for contemplation, hopefully for a very long time. Symbolic content may be there, but its true value lies in what it does for the viewer, and the viewer has more important things to wonder about than the mental state of the artist.

I hope. 

Brahman and Idea

We can equate God with the sum collection of all self-awareness.

The trouble with imagining God as a personality working with physical reality is that in anthropomorphizing Him in that way, we trivialize Him. I have wondered about arguing that we are made in God’s image, and so we must resemble Him, but the resemblance must not be so strong as to include our weakness. No, we resemble God in our self-reflective consciousness.

God, therefore, looks out at us through every pair of human eyes we encounter. The owner of those eyes may or may not be aware of her own God consciousness, but she is conscious and she does have the capability to self-reflect, and so she carries God consciousness.

Sufis say that humanity is the lens through which God observes the world, a beautiful way to put it.

 For a long time I have been wondering, why would God need a lens? Why would God need the eyes of people?

The secret is that there is no reality. Reality is not real. We cannot prove that anything exists outside of our senses and so for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside our sensory sphere. Sure, physicists and mathematicians have proved that there are ten dimensions to reality, but those dimensions exist only as idea to them. And so, since we have no outside-of-senses reality to back them up, our sensory experiences are just as transparent, just as flimsy, convincing only because that is part of the construct.  

Would it be fair to say, then, that reality exists because God wishes it to exist? Yes, sort of, and yes, duh. An infinite consciousness is capable of conceiving infinitely many ideas, many of which (infinitely many) are capable of self-reflection and self-reference. Here, then, we have our multi-verse, hypothesized by quantum physics. I need to think about this more, but it seems right to suggest that a self-referent idea or program needs something to refer back to, something complicated enough to support self-reflection. Since to be truly self-reflective requires the capability of an infinite regress, that complicated structure must needs be very complicated. For such an idea to be so capable, it must appear to have some durability, and, hence we have reality with people in it. 

Note that this is all in the realm of idea. We think we are living a hard life, but we and everything "around" us is idea.

The Word was in the Beginning because self-reference has something of a linguistic nature, even if it is in the form of some sort of symbol.

As this is just the beginning of a train of thought that began for me today, I need time to flesh out some of the assumptions contained in my argument.

Surely others have thought the same thoughts as I express here, and the scriptures of many spiritual disciplines treat of the same concept. I just need to figure out the correlations. I am putting together some pieces I have not seen put together before.

For what it's worth, I picture idea springing from Brahman like plumes of snow blow from a great mountain, like the whorls of tiny cyclones spin away from a whistle. Not creating the snow, not making the sound, but its nature and their nature somehow the same.

I know, I know! I thought I was going to be posting my art on this blog and all I am posting is this dang philosophy!

So now you know. This is my internal world, all I really care about.

Watching Myself Watch Myself Watch Myself

Well, I’ve been trying all day to remember to view my self as the perceiver of body and brain sensations. I have been working at this for a while—years. Decades.

It’s not easy. If I don’t have a mechanism in place to remind me, I can go weeks without observing myself as perceiver; without, in short, recognizing my true self.

But wait. I was awake. I was watching things, hearing things, feeling things. I was aware, conscious, whatever you want to call it.

Or maybe not. From those times when I was just operating in the world and not being the observer, I have no recollection of having that fully awake feeling I get when I do identify my self as observer. Now, when I am thinking about it, I do have that feeling, and I have that feeling as I recall experiences. I am self-aware as I remember; I was not self-aware back then.

It would seem that I have two levels of awareness. I can walk around in the world, do things and feel things. I am conscious then, sentient, mentally alert. But when I reflect on myself, pay attention to myself, I step up to another level of consciousness. This may be the state William James called spiritual self-awareness. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called it remembering oneself.

The assumption most of us make is that when we are awake, we are in this state continuously. Being able to reflect on our memories fosters this illusion, but we are just plodding around like robots most of the time. We can call up our memories and reflect on them, but even then we most likely do not feel our own awareness—and we don’t really call up that many memories anyway. We just know that we could if we wanted to, and so have convinced ourselves that we are thoughtful, self-aware beings.

Do you suppose it is possible to live an entire life and never attend to one’s own awareness? It may well be. I’ve known people who have made me wonder. When philosophers talk about a quale, which is a word for the experience of a sensation, they must be aware of the experience of self-reflection. When a philosopher avoids talking about qualia, or acts as if they don’t matter or exist, well, you have to wonder.

Without language, animals cannot ascend to self-reflection. Our favorite animals, our dogs and cats respond to us emotionally, and can be very intelligent—for dogs and cats—but all of that is quite possible without a moment of self-reflection.

I want to contend that we operate on either of two levels of consciousness. At the most common level we are observers, recorders, reactors. It is this level of consciousness that some philosophers explain in terms of brain structure and behavior. We may be self-conscious (in the sense of being anxious), or aware of the condition of our body or feelings or mind. We may be thinking about ideas, even working hard to learn something. But in this state, though we are observers, we are not necessarily aware of ourselves as observers.  

When we become aware of our own awareness we enter that more rare state of consciousness: we are here now, we remember ourselves, we live in the present. It is so easy to do, if I could just remember to do it!

Self-reference is a pretty powerful concept.  Playful examples include sentences like, “This sentence is false.” Bertrand Russell’s mathematical example was the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. (So what is the status of that set?) Kurt Gödel showed that every complete logical system contains such a statement, which is therefore true but unprovable, or false and provable. This means that no mathematical system can be entirely true and complete, which changes the way I look at the Universe I’ll tell ya. More on this paragraph next post.

And then us—sporting our self-reflective consciousness, when we remember it. That the Universe could contain such a thing is disorienting. If you don’t feel a bit disoriented by it, you haven’t been paying attention.