Be it music, dance, poems, novels, painting, photography, film, architecture, sculpture, weaving … I reckon that listeners, readers, image and film connoisseurs, shape huggers, textile lovers … many of us … occasionally perceive the deep emotional significance of what is conveyed, though sometimes even artists themselves may only faintly sense the deeper underlying symbolic essence of their work, where superficial layers of seeing sink away to the bottom of the Akashic ocean, from where original creativity emerges.
That’s just how it is, except maybe for some universally powerful masterpieces of the arts, old and new. So I wonder, were these masters aware of the emotional depth from which they expressed their art? Were they conscious of their mastery? Or, to put it in another way – is consciousness a factor in conveying deep levels in their most powerful way.
Or, like most of us, including many artists, do we grow only slowly into our depth, connecting us with our own symbolic essence, and through such recognition affect our collective reality?
My occasional deep seeing surprises, and shocks me alive, in pleasant or unpleasant ways.
Deep seeing can seem like the invasion of a psychopomp, in a Jungian sense – a mediator between conscious and unconscious content. It could come from an item on the virtual web, from an image, from a wise being, spirit, or animal – whatever rattles my comfortable ignorance. I may feel embarrassed when discerning a deeper truth, as if I had long failed a task my psyche suggested, or, physically, it may feel like hitting a sore tense point in a muscle.
At times I notice that when my body is tense I can fall into some weird associations, interspersed with trickery. The associations and the meanings I discern may be useful, or not, or outright confusing, as if the wavelength of a familiar radio station is crackling.
In my experience, when I’m contemplating an idea, a project, I tend to attract, like a magnet, tiny messages from anywhere. But what orders these messages into cohesion.
Instead of projecting invaders, why don’t I assume my relaxed self being in tune with my diverse inner crowd, and my soul’s angel … with that extra PSI sense that awakens all the other senses, and a sane inner voice, my normal crazy, which on and off I am asleep to, or intentionally avoid.
Meanwhile, every instance my body recovers from accumulated tension is a birthday, and a day of fresh unlearning, a new unknown.
Course of Mirrors 