Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: What is today's wisdom?
A: "The world is wrong side up. It needs to be turned upside down in order to be right side up."
- Billy Sunday
"From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon."
- Wilhem Dilthey
Posts
"From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon." - Wilhelm Dilthey
ReplyDeleteBefore I can share my experience of this remarkable drawing of “mind’s theater,” I must explain why “perspective” is the most appropriate title for it. This Buddha-like central figure, donned in his astrologically-inspired stellar robe, and round and blue as the world, is one serious philosopher, but more of the classical kind, more concerned with wisdom than mere knowledge and abstract logic. He is a sage. And the bat, hanging from two wires above and lying over the philosopher’s left shoulder, is the “Guardian of the Night,” and symbolizes death and re-birth. The bat is also “bat medicine” and teaches us to release fear, the primary emotion of suffering. Beginning to get the picture?
It is almost tragic that the philosopher Descartes almost completely ruined our relationship to language, and thus our ability to spiritually guide it. Because of Descartes so-called “Representational Theory of Perception,” language, like subjective experience itself, merely represents itself against a physical, objective reality. According to Descartes, perception is ‘an internal, subjective representation of an external world.” This is what has been called the “Cartesian Theater.” This fundamentally fallacious viewpoint, or theory, is the malady of dualism that is mind’s handmaiden and the cause of suffering. The remedy: perspective, or understanding. And this is essentially and intuitively what is conveyed in Monika’s drawing.
Monika, in artistic, visual form, expresses what the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, states as: “perception is my “opening” onto a world that is not merely a screen of ideas. It is a “synergy” between my living, embodied self and the transcendent, natural world. It is the site where other embodied selves emerge, where our perspectives meld, cross, or intertwine…. It is a new way of understanding our intersubjective, yet subjectively organized, perceptual experience beyond the paradigm of representation.”
My “theory” is that (primarily unconscious) negative afflictive emotions have driven us to split ourselves off from living experience. The instinctual need for survival certainly fosters fear but, as the brain evolved to allow for a perspective of reality not engendered in mere survival, mind, as of yet, has not caught up with that radical perspectival neuronal shift that reveals: “Hey, this is all a dream, all illusion; the self, time, and birth/death are all constructions of mind.”
This is exactly the function of the bat, dramatically and so playfully letting the philosopher know (or, I’d like to think, the bat is a visual of the philosopher’s thought process letting itself “know”) the mere folly of the human mind. The “wires” he is hanging from, for me, are the three times (past, present, and future), and the drama of world that displays itself as “time.” Time, along with space, are the greatest illusions second only to selfhood, all of which cause the fear that drives the mind that drives the self, time, and space, into a spin cycle of suffering. Underneath the high wires is the wizard who knows and who knows he knows, especially since he knows nothing.
Om mani padme hum
Great interpretation of the drawing. I especially love your understanding of the three wires as "past, present, future". It rings true to me. Your last line made me laugh: "Underneath the high wires is the wizard who knows and who knows he knows, especially since he knows nothing" :)
ReplyDeleteIn this drawing I enjoyed how the bat is cozying up to the main figure, saying something like: "Come on now! Hang upside down and get a fresh look at the world and a new perspective!" The slight smile on the main figure's face gives us the clue that he already knows. However, the bat is a necessary reminder that he/we shouldn't get cozy in "knowing", because as you and Socrates said: "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." And that's all I know :)