click this doll house for more detail

click this doll house for more detail
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Monday, May 7, 2012

reflections on the weekend in SF

A whirl-wind of a journey, as the self encounters the multiplicity of worlds, a unified diversity. At times as a transcendent intellect living as a being devoid of its corporeal features, at other times life-living as a will-to-identity. The seduction of a city  that lives and breaths the air of its multitudes of phenomenal environments. The sensibility of the self, learns to assimilate the values of an individual beyond the foreign-ness of the situation. The coming to "know", an intimate process of unity with the city of light and darkness.

We encounter the All - "the oneness of the universe" - from the subjectivity of personal experience. The moment when the totality of existence is comprehended, however impartial, by our conscious minds, we sense a wonder and an awareness that transcends language. Yet, philosophy and the art of expression tries in its earnestness to express in language, the experience of life-living as a being in pure thought of the meaning of existence in the universe, the one uni-verse that envelops us all.

The separation between animate and inanimate, living-souls and material objects, consciousness and the empirical world, provides us with the frame work for the mind's ability to understand our very own "nature". We exist in the different domains of space, as extension in the material world, and as thought/consciousness in the world of the Mind... like an eternal river flowing through time... "Time" is the medium, the eternal continuum that the will and life-living takes center stage, as the moment of awareness becomes an unification of subjective thought with the workings of the natural world.

The mysterious comes to the fore of conscious thought, as the stillness of the mind, makes the empirical world a phenomena of appearances. We learn from logical inference, that our perceptions of the world is purely "personal" without a perspective of seeing/experiencing/thinking beyond our own consciousness. It is this isolation that the artist, through the medium of philosophy has any reason to create its art work - its momentary landscape, a brushstroke of perception - so that "we" can experience the All of the world from the perspective of the mind's eye.

Our identities emerge a confluence of narratives take shape in the grand narrative of the objective All. Meaning becomes a subjective matter, as the "I" emerges out of the necessity to understand the essence behind the link between the self and the phenomena that it encounters. The self creates an identity that transcends its body, by identifying with the world of the mind and the linguistic structures to a reality of thought. Although the "I" is by necessity a body interacting in the objective and natural world, its identity is a construct of its own narrative in harmony with the narrative of the All.


Somewhere in the depth of consciousness lies the structures of the transcendent world. The "we" of the community, affirms itself in the individuality of the self. The "I" becomes a "reflection" of the essence of the community of light, giving the harmonious whole a telos beyond the darkness of the cave. The unity of the "I" with the "We", and the unity of the human community with the ideals of harmony, moves the present onward to the future of Being.

Self-nature becomes, not a question of identity, but a search into the depths of the Mind and Soul. The striving to "bring-down" or "bring-to-the-present" the transcendent character through the will... a representation of a being that has unified itself to the essence of the "we" of transcendence. Meditation becomes the medium to self contemplate its place in the hierarchy of beings, only to find itself "in" the social-world of dis unified nature. The order, yet to appear, with an awareness for self-nature to realize its isolation from... but also its unity with... the community of transcendent thought. The self spiritualizes itself to form a pure idea of the Platonic "Good" - the essence of identity.

The sense of taste, envelops the world, as the soul momentarily experiences sweetness, while realizing the wisdom of an old and distinguished "other". As the taste of "Life" moves the moment... is it not unification of the self to the Will of the All of nature. A complexity of tastes, unified into the oneness of the source. The emanation of the heavenly aroma brings the self into contact with a foreign and mysterious world. The feeling and intuition that the self is intimately interconnected to the past and future of its own being. With this, the self enters a space where discovery follows necessarily as the rhythms of the moment takes the soul into the desert night.

The self's relationship with its phenomena, at times a wonder, at other times a detachment. The diversity of the world and the forms that are contained in the All, an experience that transcends the medium of language. The creatures that we are, choosing our place in the hierarchy of beings... ascending and descending on the ladder of perfection. A contradiction of sorts, as the representation of the world and the environment that surrounds the self impresses a diversity of ideas onto the mind. The narrative of the All and the knowing of particulars, becomes a task never fully complete. The most that the self can "know" are the structures of reality and the logic behind the diversity of the particulars. Yet, "the other" that impresses its image onto the self, makes known the difference of subjectivity.

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Life in the social world necessitates the need to identify with the world-soul as a Being of authenticity. The will-to-be, finding its actions to be complex. Simplification of the self's narrative, a slowing down of the self to the rhythms of Nature. To begin again as the spring transitions into the summer days, the self learns to be.
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The natural world and the creatures of habit, occupy a space that allows for habitation in a way of survival and "existence". Society has grown and withered and with this growth and corruption, the rise and fall of culture - the diversification of forms that has dis-enchanted the world that was once a unity of sorts. No longer attached to the natural world, we have become creatures that have descended into the realm of "modernity". Souls with consciousness no longer acknowledge one another in the openness of the other, busied by the media-generated content devoid of any meaning. In the heap of diversity in a world in which unnatural creatures semi-conscious of the forms only familiar to themselves are living a life that lacks the content of Being as a mind contemplating the eternal truths about the natural world.

Aesthetics becomes a difficult word to assimilate as the authenticity of character tries to emerge in the will-to-write. In "this" world, the self in thought, constructs the structures of phenomena in a sensible way, placing the souls as a process and transition from one state to another. It is a return or re-discovery of a platonic cosmology with overtones of the an Aristotelian process. While the self learns to refine its being, to be in harmony with both the natural world and society at large, the goals and endeavours - the telos - "the light that paves the path", appears to the soul that believes in the essence of its identity.

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