Aesthetic Awareness (Part III)

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Aesthetic Awareness (Part III)

February 7th, 2018

Awake Goy

What role does beauty play in our life and how does the perception of beauty function in our mind?

Sensitivity to beauty tends to happen mostly in the more intelligent and cultured people. That it makes itself felt in a direct way as an instinctive feeling or even emotion shows that it is an autonomous response of the mind to certain sense impressions. Face recognition is dealt with by the autonomous nervous system of man in a split second, without conscious thought. It is not an intellectual act and it is also not directly related to memories gathered in one’s lifetime. Beauty is an eternal phenomenon, a character of things and situations, and does not arise out of education. It is clearly a biological phenomenon as the elaborate use of colours in animal life shows.

Friedrich Nietzsche has an interesting view on art and beauty. (Lit.10 : Friedrich Nietzsche “The Birth of Tragedy“) He distinguished “Apollonian“ art and “Dionysian“ art as the two different main spheres in which art can be expressed. Apollonian art is the way of the sculptor, the architect and the painter. It has a coolness, a sensuality, serenity and power, which is connected with the dreaming state, having inner visions. There is a certain restraint in it, but it satisfies the search for harmony and balance.

Dionysian art is the way of the musician and dancer, and is connected to the expressions that our muscular system allows us in our body movements. It is closer to ecstasy and intoxication; it is about getting “drunk” or lost into the dance, surrendering to an unknown force and letting that speak through the human body.

It is not so simple to say this would mean they are a male and a female art, as science has shown that both hemispheres of the brain are used in the art forms. It is the same energy, but making use of different faculties of the psyche.

My understanding is that the perception of beauty is a recognition, a faint remembrance of deep unconscious patterns in our psyche. Beauty is life supporting because it is the codex, the language of energy patterns, visual forms really, in which biological life is anchored.

This is supported by scientific discoveries. The mathematician Prof. Mandelbrot discovered that so called “fractals” are created by graphically plotting certain basic mathematical formulas. By an endlessly self repeating this graphic plotting on a finer and finer scale organic forms of a tremendous beauty are created. (Lit.11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpbP5BVtiA)

The latest scientific developments in the field of neuroscience are showing that what we perceive through our senses is a projection managed by the mind, using the brain as a vehicle; literally it is an interpretation of “something which is out there“ and is provided with meaning, significance, coloration and moods etc. by our mind. I am not saying that nothing real is out there, but these moods and colours are definitely coming from the back of our head where the visual cortex is located.

I have a suspicion that we are being fed continuously with a stream of beneficial energy out of the higher Bodyfields we have, and that this is the cause for everything that we give meaning and beauty. Only the very sensitive ones, who are used to keeping contact with their inner happenings, the introvert ones, the artists amongst us, are able to pick up this stream and become aware of the continuous flow of this energy that translates itself into visions.

One of those sensitive people in our recent history who was focusing on the world inside us was the renowned psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. (Lit. 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NnrCOym71Y)

Beauty is the essence of human life because it mirrors the laws that are valid in all the dimensions of the Bodyfields. Beauty is also a very physical experience that one can become aware of. Many times in the past I noticed that when I started listening to certain music the immediate recognition of certain melodies ignited an intense and pleasurable shivering over my whole spine.

Only when the Bodyfields are freed from their entanglements and distortions, related to emotional shocks and traumas, can the resonance that the perception of beauty creates run through the Bodyfields and interconnect the highest Bodyfield with the lower ones. That is why the resonance that Beauty can create in the human psyche is a remote but potent remembrance of the highest ecstasy.

From this it might be obvious that Beauty is not for the masses; it is by nature an elitist phenomenon. Let us say that it is for the advanced part of humanity only. Basically I believe that we all have that potential, but it has to be earned by a conscious dedication to inner awareness.

The whole phony cult of “art“ that we have to face these days is nothing more than an Ersatzreligion (a fake religion), a cultural-Marxist strategy with fetishist characteristics, a tribal entertainment at best, that allows certain factions to speculate and make money over the back of the ones who create, as happens in the well known pyramidal ponzi schemes that are used by the social parasites.

It is clear that the overall disappearance of beauty in art and the present dominance of distortion and ugliness as forms of expression signify a worrisome loss of psychological health for western mankind. This is shown very well in a video that deals with how women have been portrayed in the course of the last 500 years. (Lit.2: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=500+years+of+female+portraits). Knowing that 2500 years back in Greece the European peoples had reached a level of artistic sophistication in the representation of the human figure that since that time hardly has been surpassed, makes one really wonder what has gone wrong.

In spite of the differences in ability of the painters and sculptors of the past and their use of artistic freedom we can always clearly perceive an anthropomorphic clarity in the portraits. But about hundred years ago there started to change something in the Gestalt of the portraits, distortions and deformations of human proportions seemed to become expressly exaggerated, to be purposefully done while we safely can assume that the artist in case could have produced easily an anatomically correct image. That just means that there is a desire to represent the human figure that way. The lack of technique is not a barrier anymore that has to be overcome, but is sought as an expressive value in it self.

Just like in that time shortly after World War II Picasso started focusing on African negro sculptures and it became the fashion of the avant-garde.

What does this mean in human terms? In very plain language it means that artists do not stay faithful to the image of the human body, and that automatically means that they don’t like the shape of their own body. As a psychologist and an artist I conclude that this is a practical definition of self hate.

The next question then would be: is this self hate a voluntary choice or an involuntary one? In the last case we can speak of a disease, a pathology of the mind, especially that part of the mind that is emotional.

In my understanding it belongs in the category of instinctual degeneration, with as a result involuntary negative emotions coming forth.

The fine tuning of all our movements is coordinated by the cerebellum (small brain). Scientific research has been done by the scientist and musician Manfred Clynes on how in our muscle movements emotions can be expressed(Lit. 12: Manfred Clynes “Towards a View of Man“, chapter seven). It has come out that our mind uses an algorithm that imprints or “colours” all movements that we make. This algorithm translates all the basic emotions like anger, sadness, sex, love, peacefulness and joy into movement characteristics. In a time sequence this algorithm has the shape of a sine wave function that has a different form for all the basic emotions, which means expressions of emotion are based in a “morphology”, a form language. The recognition of emotion in others goes through the autonomous nerve system of the eyes and is thus an instinctive affair. When we realise that in visual art the driving factor is on an emotional level, most likely could be a damaging influence active in the functioning of this autonomous nervous system, assuming that the artistic expressions are of an involuntary nature.

It might become obvious that, having understood the above, that the self hate is on a deep level caused by the fact that the distortions in our system don’t allow us anymore to receive the flow of vital cosmic energy as an aesthetic pulse of life. The connection is squeezed or maybe even broken.

That means that the personality, the ego really, which is a phenomenon that is only rooted in the physical and the second (electric) body, and which is anyway going to die, does harm to the soul. When you compare the human body to the organisation of a nation state, it is like the situation when in a governing political system the secret police has taken hold of the real power and takes all the higher leaders as hostages. An unhealthy ego destroys our fluid and vertical connection to the experience of beauty. The reason is that the ego is at its deepest level nothing else than the fear of death.

My understanding is that the modern western European culture that is based on the industrialisation of our society has become malignant in its influence on our human functioning. Exactly with the start of industrialisation the deviations in art start to become dominant.

The question is why this has been going on for one and a half centuries now, creating untold psychological misery, which for whatever reason we don’t want to let come to the forefront or even name it. I suspect that enough misery has to happen before there is enough momentum to move again in another direction. It needs time.

With a fair amount of objectivity we can say that the millstone that we have around our neck, in the form of the many obligations that almost all of us have to fulfil in order to get a place in society, is so harmful to our inner life that we start to hate ourselves for having created this. Think of the financial and economic system with its usury, its taxation system, traffic rules, complicated judicial systems that have no connection with people’s sense of justice, never ending education, stress in the workplace etc. Something has been too much for too long time.

To be precise: A natural flow and processing of our emotions has thus been negatively affected in the sense that an accumulation of memories of unresolved emotional conflicts in our psyche reduces our ability to be fully present in the here and now. This is the cause of stagnation and degeneration of cultures.