Easter commeth! And with it art. As a small note to Schuon in his book, The Transcendental Unity of Being, in it he describeds perfectly why many in the Church were so infuriated with Renaissance Art. It was, as we would call it, naturalistic art, in that it captured in sculpture and paint realistic portrayals. For me, this period has always meant the beginning of good art (the end coming with the "modernist" movement begun in the late 19th century. In over a hundred years it has not caught on with the Folk, a sure sign of their superiority to the cultural elite), but not to Schuon and the Traditionalists. Here he notes that art in medieval Europe before this classical revival could not help but be sacred art, for that was the reason for art: to divine the meaning of form and translate that deeper meaning to the laity. It served a purpose - to expose the sacred meaning of creation. Naturalistic art, on the other hand, only copied the work of God - always an inferior copy that concentrated the viewer's attention on form rather than substance; in other words, naturalistic art represents a form of paganism, where the form is mistaken for the substance (as in: a tree has the spirit of God and so might be worshiped. Correctly, the tree would rather express facet of God, being only a form itself). My reply: I understand but cannot wholly agree. I find that much of Renaissance art DOES serve as a vehicle to higher understanding (Botticelli comes to mind). I will not go into the nuances for his argument here, but thought it interesting. I had always heard of the conflict over art but have never fully understood it until now.
On to intuition; the idea arose after a friend of mine explained how he came to stay up late to watch Harvard win its first NCAA tournament game. Harvard had been leading, then was trailing, and it was late and pretty much a given that it would lose - again. But after he turned off the set, something told him to turn it on again. He did, and was rewarded with a live witness to the first win.
Something told him...that is intuition. We can parse it in many ways - for instance, we could say that it is no more than a subconscious deduction of factual probability. That might work for the Harvard game, but would it explain cancelling a trip because of an eerie feeling, and finding that the plane broke down, or even crashed? Perhaps - for you have thousands having such intuitions but one only hear of the ones that work out. But then again, there are many examples, countless, of phone calls you know you will receive, of the sudden impression that a relative has died, of love that comes about through unusual means. The list goes on and on (and I would love to hear from readers some of their own examples).
The best explanation for this comes from the quantum theory/metaphysical knowledge that the universe is interconnected and timeless - that is, that even the separation of events through time does not exist at the ultimate level. Therefore, everything becomes explainable. I won't go into the stuff here - we've touched on it before and undoubtedly will again - but I want to point out two observations I have had associated with intuition, the first being: how do you know? How do you know that the little voice talking to you out of nowhere is not a random thought or a wish-fulfillment? I get intuitive messages all the time - and also many random thoughts. I generally cannot tell the difference until a future event validates the intuition - and all too late. The only thing I can say is, the voice of true intuition is generally calm, matter of fact, and out of the blue. So much so that it is easy to ignore. There are methods I have read about as to how to tell intuition from randomness, but the best probably is by the quiet ordinariness of the real thing. Which belies what you think, and makes you often pass it by. Like the zen archer who achieves his bulls-eye without thinking of the outcome, it is by calm movement with the self that such a voice can be discerned. In China, this is called recognizing the Tao, or Way (of heaven).
In any case, I am lousy at it, but I did think of a naturalistic phenomena that describes it (much as the Chinese attempt to describe the Tao - see the I Ching). Several years ago in a local park, the managers planted a score of so of new trees to create an oak-hickory-field gallery forest that "was how Southern Wisconsin was before Euro settlement." They never mention that the mosaic was an artificial one created by American Indians with regular burning, but that is besides the point; what they did to reproduce this "natural" forest was to plant several trees, many close to other much larger, established trees.
After a few years of growth, I began to notice something: that the smaller trees, still young but no longer saplings, were growing away from the larger trees. This might seem natural - as a friend pointed out, they must be reaching away from the other trees for better sunlight. But no: the larger tree were well behind them and to the north; in other words, by growing away from the larger trees, they would not gather more sunlight. To understand why they grew so, risking possible uprooting as they grew larger because of the slant, one had to project their growth and the larger trees behind them 30 years or more into the future. In that time, the trees would be large enough to grow into each other, something that is decidedly not good for trees. But to understand that, the younger trees had to understand where they would be in 3 decades. How did they know?
We would do it through the logic of observation, but trees do not have logic. They have no brains, for that matter. They do have photo sensors, however, and through this they might be able to detect some shade behind them (somehow) that otherwise does not touch them. Let's give it that. But still, the shade is not affecting them yet - that is a conjecture for the future. But tree can't conjecture. By this I understand that the trees understand the situation beyond time - for they can only react to the present. And so the future is there as a potential in the present, affecting events before the cause actually happens. That is, affect happens before actual cause; that is, normal lineal time has been transcended.
This may seem complex, but what I am getting at is that beings without intellect can respond to stimuli before they directly stimulate, without thought. Because of this, we might say that the potential, whether it is understood or not, can warn us before it actually affects us - and can warn us in a supraintellectual way. That is, we would feel it as the tree does, and this might then be translated into a softly transmitted set of words that relay the meaning to our intellect (softly because it does not belong to the dominant ego.) Thus we can know the future. And this future has a "shade" that extends for us well beyond what it does in the example of the trees; it would extend perhaps across the cosmos, but certainly throughout the social and natural realms that can directly affect us.
Thus intuition is the language of the cosmos, spoken by every living, and perhaps inanimate, thing or object. It is the knowledge born from eons of the effects, subtle or not, that the world has upon the thing form the thing's perspective. And yes, we can go back to quantum theory to explain, but we don't need to. Only to know everything about us is on the same plane and KNOWS itself, every bit of it, just as we would if we knew how to listen.
On to intuition; the idea arose after a friend of mine explained how he came to stay up late to watch Harvard win its first NCAA tournament game. Harvard had been leading, then was trailing, and it was late and pretty much a given that it would lose - again. But after he turned off the set, something told him to turn it on again. He did, and was rewarded with a live witness to the first win.
Something told him...that is intuition. We can parse it in many ways - for instance, we could say that it is no more than a subconscious deduction of factual probability. That might work for the Harvard game, but would it explain cancelling a trip because of an eerie feeling, and finding that the plane broke down, or even crashed? Perhaps - for you have thousands having such intuitions but one only hear of the ones that work out. But then again, there are many examples, countless, of phone calls you know you will receive, of the sudden impression that a relative has died, of love that comes about through unusual means. The list goes on and on (and I would love to hear from readers some of their own examples).
The best explanation for this comes from the quantum theory/metaphysical knowledge that the universe is interconnected and timeless - that is, that even the separation of events through time does not exist at the ultimate level. Therefore, everything becomes explainable. I won't go into the stuff here - we've touched on it before and undoubtedly will again - but I want to point out two observations I have had associated with intuition, the first being: how do you know? How do you know that the little voice talking to you out of nowhere is not a random thought or a wish-fulfillment? I get intuitive messages all the time - and also many random thoughts. I generally cannot tell the difference until a future event validates the intuition - and all too late. The only thing I can say is, the voice of true intuition is generally calm, matter of fact, and out of the blue. So much so that it is easy to ignore. There are methods I have read about as to how to tell intuition from randomness, but the best probably is by the quiet ordinariness of the real thing. Which belies what you think, and makes you often pass it by. Like the zen archer who achieves his bulls-eye without thinking of the outcome, it is by calm movement with the self that such a voice can be discerned. In China, this is called recognizing the Tao, or Way (of heaven).
In any case, I am lousy at it, but I did think of a naturalistic phenomena that describes it (much as the Chinese attempt to describe the Tao - see the I Ching). Several years ago in a local park, the managers planted a score of so of new trees to create an oak-hickory-field gallery forest that "was how Southern Wisconsin was before Euro settlement." They never mention that the mosaic was an artificial one created by American Indians with regular burning, but that is besides the point; what they did to reproduce this "natural" forest was to plant several trees, many close to other much larger, established trees.
After a few years of growth, I began to notice something: that the smaller trees, still young but no longer saplings, were growing away from the larger trees. This might seem natural - as a friend pointed out, they must be reaching away from the other trees for better sunlight. But no: the larger tree were well behind them and to the north; in other words, by growing away from the larger trees, they would not gather more sunlight. To understand why they grew so, risking possible uprooting as they grew larger because of the slant, one had to project their growth and the larger trees behind them 30 years or more into the future. In that time, the trees would be large enough to grow into each other, something that is decidedly not good for trees. But to understand that, the younger trees had to understand where they would be in 3 decades. How did they know?
We would do it through the logic of observation, but trees do not have logic. They have no brains, for that matter. They do have photo sensors, however, and through this they might be able to detect some shade behind them (somehow) that otherwise does not touch them. Let's give it that. But still, the shade is not affecting them yet - that is a conjecture for the future. But tree can't conjecture. By this I understand that the trees understand the situation beyond time - for they can only react to the present. And so the future is there as a potential in the present, affecting events before the cause actually happens. That is, affect happens before actual cause; that is, normal lineal time has been transcended.
This may seem complex, but what I am getting at is that beings without intellect can respond to stimuli before they directly stimulate, without thought. Because of this, we might say that the potential, whether it is understood or not, can warn us before it actually affects us - and can warn us in a supraintellectual way. That is, we would feel it as the tree does, and this might then be translated into a softly transmitted set of words that relay the meaning to our intellect (softly because it does not belong to the dominant ego.) Thus we can know the future. And this future has a "shade" that extends for us well beyond what it does in the example of the trees; it would extend perhaps across the cosmos, but certainly throughout the social and natural realms that can directly affect us.
Thus intuition is the language of the cosmos, spoken by every living, and perhaps inanimate, thing or object. It is the knowledge born from eons of the effects, subtle or not, that the world has upon the thing form the thing's perspective. And yes, we can go back to quantum theory to explain, but we don't need to. Only to know everything about us is on the same plane and KNOWS itself, every bit of it, just as we would if we knew how to listen.
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