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Contents of Part 2
3.6. The Art of the Spiritual:
Blake, Besant, Steiner, Mother Meera
3.7. Colour: Gravity and Grace
3.8. Quantum Theory and the
Anthropic Principle
4. The Spiritual in Modern Art
4.1. An Art of Our Own - Roger
Lipsey
4.2. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee,
and Itten: The Bauhaus
4.3. The American Abstract Expressionists
4.4. Stelarc and Musafar: towards
a spiritual in cyberspace
5. The Spiritual in Modern Science
5.1. Reactions to Quantum Theory:
Einstein and Bohm
References for part 2
3.6. The Art of the Spiritual:
Blake, Besant, Steiner, Mother Meera
While the spiritual enters art through each artist that is spiritually inclined,
artists by definition give their lives to primarily to art. The great mystics
and religionists on the other hand primarily give their lives to God, or
to their particular spirituality if it is not framed in terms of God. People
who are primarily spiritual do occasionally produce works of art, Mother
Meera being a contemporary who does so, and whose paintings are reproduced
in book form. The Steiner movement is unusual for a spiritual movement in
its emphasis on art, as we have seen, but the style is strangely
reminiscent of Mother Meera. So also is that of Blake. William Blake is
the exception to the discussion in this paragraph so far, in that the spiritual
and the artistic were not separate in his life, and one not subordinate
to the other. The common visual elements in Blake, Steiner and Meera relate
to the representation of spirits or disembodied beings or energies, using
flowing wavy forms.
The imagery of Besant and Leadbeater's thought-forms share some of these
visual elements, though the purpose of their production was more illustrative
than artistic, and they were produced by different artists under the instruction
of these theosophists. All four groups of imagery do share in addition an
occult overtone, as defined earlier, though the spiritualities in
each case differ widely. The common, and occult, theme is that of a hierarchy
of disembodied beings or angels, which leave the conventions of established
religion far behind. In Meera's case the occult dimension of her work and
personal experience are downplayed in favour of what is defined here as
the transcendent, and in Blake and in Theosophy the transcendent is also
strongly present. In Steiner it is absent.
3.7. Colour: Gravity
and Grace
The phrase 'gravity and grace' are taken from the book of the same name
by Simone Weil, an exact contemporary of Sartre's; a philosopher, but with
a deeply spiritual bent. Gravity and Grace is a collection of her
brief statements, aphoristic in nature, and gathered under rather arbitrary
headings for want of any other organising principle. The book opens with
this statement: "All the natural movements of the soul are controlled
by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception."
[15]
Her work is profound but largely pessimistic (her intellectual maturation
took place as a Jewess in exile from Nazi France), as some of these quotations
on art show:
A work of art has an author and yet, when it
is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it. It
imitates the anonymity of divine art. In the same way the beauty of the
world proves there to be a God who is personal and impersonal at the same
time and is neither the one nor the other separately [16].
In everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty
there really is the presence of God. There is as it were an incarnation
of God in the world and it is indicated by beauty.
The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
Hence all art of the highest order is religious in essence. (That is what
people have forgotten today.) A Gregorian melody is a powerful a witness
as the death of a martyr [17].
Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is
no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and
also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the
soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and athleticism,
the art of the Middle Ages with the craftsmen's guilds, the art of the
Renaissance with the beginning of mechanics, etc. ... Since 1914 there
has been a complete cut. ... Is therefore quite useless for you to envy
Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course.
Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure and without an echo ... (but
without an echo, no art) [18].
Her views on art, though instructive, are too
pessimistic too be useful here and will be left aside in favour of the more
widely useful concepts of gravity and grace. We can think of these as 'lenses'
through which we can look at any phenomenon in one of two possible ways.
Gravity corresponds the 'lens' of materialism, a seemingly growing influence
which worried Steiner and the peak of which came perhaps with the first
world war: this war seemed to halt the first flow of 20th century artistic
interest in the spiritual (noticeably at the Bauhaus, but also in Weil's
thinking). Grace corresponds to the 'lens' of the spiritual, but grace is
in fact a specialised term in the spiritual, so caution is needed. Grace
is specifically beyond the human will, though it does not necessarily imply
a belief in an external God or other deity: it can be prayed for or prepared
for, but it arrives from its own necessity, not ours. Both artists and scientists
are deeply in need of it for their own disciplines; Arthur Koestler, for
example, in The Act of Creation skilfully traces its role in art
and science (though he does not use the word grace).
In the world of gravity colour is a wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum,
the heart is an organ that pumps blood, and stars are hydrogen/helium fusion
reactors that consume themselves. In the world of grace colour is emotion,
the heart is the axis of love, and stars are the 'forget-me-nots of angels.'
This may be dismissed by some as romanticism, but reminds us again that
artists and scientists alike, if they are to accommodate the spiritual,
have to give up a single world view. This is particularly true in the world
of colour. We have seen how Steiner views colour as a 'space' more appropriate
to painting than perspective; occultists generally describe their experiences,
for example auras, in terms of colour. Goethe produced a massive volume
on colour which has little to do with conventional scientific understanding
of the subject, and this tradition extends into the twentieth century in
the work of Johannes Itten (one of the founder-members of the Bauhaus),
amongst others.
3.8. Quantum Theory and
the Anthropic Principle
Returning to science again we note that the discovery of quantum theory
in the twentieth century has initiated a trend in modern science to restore
man to the central place in the universe denied to him by the early science
of Galileo and Kepler. The high-point of the 'clockwork' view of the universe
came with Newton, and this reductionist view is widely held today as the
scientific paradigm, even in the biological sciences (see below). Quantum
theory has changed this to some extent, suggesting to some that man, or
in particular, consciousness, is as essential to the existence of the universe
as the universe is essential to the existence of man. This is termed the
anthropic principle and is found in the work of Tipler and Barrow
[19],
and also in the work of John Archibald Wheeler [20]. The less radical interpretation
of quantum theory is called the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' and merely states
that the observer cannot be excluded from the experimental investigation
of sub-atomic phenomena. The most-cited quantum example is Schrödinger's
Cat Paradox, which can be understood from the Copenhagen Interpretation
to resolve the life or death of an imaginary cat only at the point of observation
(in another interpretation known as 'many worlds' it can be understood in
terms of parallel universes). The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger
imagined a single photon being directed through a half-silvered mirror (a
mirror that allows 50% of light energy through, and 50% to be reflected).
The mirror is arranged in such a way that if the photon (a single quantum
of light energy) passes through the mirror it triggers a photo-sensitive
device which kills an unfortunate cat kept in an opaque box. Because of
quantum indeterminacy there is nothing in the history of any part
of the experiment that will allow us to predict whether the photon goes
straight through or is deflected, and it cannot split in two by definition.
Hence the only way that we can know whether the cat is alive or dead is
by opening the box: this is not just a problem of ignorance, but one that
goes to the heart of science.
The Anthropic principle does not rest on quantum theory alone however, but
points also to a range of laws and numerical constants that, if they deviated
to the smallest fraction from their existing values, would make life impossible.
Although these ideas have come from physicists, some theologians or philosophers
of religion, notably Richard Swinburne, have picked up on them as helping
to revive ancient 'proofs' of the existence of God.
The Anthropic principle may not strike one in the first instance as having
much to do with spirituality, certainly not of the religious type defined
above. However, parallels can be made with the transcendent category, via
notions of wholeness or union, and we see that this theme emerges with Capra
and Zukav in the seventies (see below), along with occult implications.
More recently physicists are drawing on the same physics to support the
more conventionally religious concepts such as God, resurrection, and immortality.
Let us look first at the early development of the spiritual in artistic
movements in the 20th century.
4. The Spiritual
in Modern Art
Where art of previous centuries reflected mainstream religious concerns,
and indeed for much of history could hardly be separated from religion,
the 20th century, from a basis in Nietzsche's thought onwards, strikes out
on its own. This is not to say that Christian thought is not present in
Western art in the twentieth century; one only has to think of the example
of Gaudi, the Spanish architect, for example. However, artists who are 'conventionally'
religious are probably the exception.
Examining the spiritual in modern art becomes a difficult undertaking, perhaps
for two reasons. Firstly, when we leave the conventional religious spirituality
we are left with the less widely understood occult and transcendent spiritualities.
Secondly, an art which does not generally deal with the old religious symbols
of crucifixion and so on, and is often dealing with abstractions or even
the totally abstract, may not immediately be perceived to have a spiritual
dimension. This is compounded by the writings of the 20th century artists,
or perhaps more by the lack of them. For where the spiritual is central
to a piece of modern art, it may be entirely conveyed in a visual
language, and the scholars of science and theology are not trained in the
visual. Conversely the artist is generally not widely read in the spiritual,
and may be unaware of resonances across cultures and epochs with his or
her work, and may indeed by innately suspicious of possible restraining
influences in spiritual traditions or movements.
In examining the spiritual in 20th century art we are confronted with such
problems, but are however indebted to art historian Roger Lipsey for some
ground-breaking work. One of the premises of his work (and based on Mondrian
and Kandinsky's thinking) is that the arrival of the abstract in
modern art allowed a new exploration of the spiritual. He is also clear
that Theosophy was amongst the important spiritual influences of the time.
The 'Hidden Hands' programme made this point about Modernism:
Kandinsky, Paul Gaugin, Constantin Brancusi,
Theo van Deusburg, Johannes Itten, Walter Gropius (for a while) Robert
Delauney, Aleksandr Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Klee, Franz Marc,
Boris Pasternak, Aleksander Blok, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot all were
great pioneers of Modernism, and all were involved in Theosophy and its
unpronounceable spin-offs, such as Anthroposophy, Christosophy, Theozoology
and Aisophy. In fact, from fin de siècle Paris to 1950's
New York (Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were both one-time disciples
of Eastern gurus), a fascination with magic, the occult and the supernatural
were integral to the Modern spirit [21].
The barely-veiled scorn for Theosophy etc. in
this passage is not surprising in the mid-nineties, but would have been
a surprise for the artists and writers mentioned of the period.
4.1. An Art of Our Own
- Roger Lipsey
Roger Lipsey is well-known for his work on the late Ananda Coomaraswamy,
an authority on religious art of previous eras. Lipsey's book An Art
of Our Own The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art is a thorough and
fascinating updating of Coomaraswamy's interests into the 20th century,
starting, as does this paper, with Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual
in Art. The tension between the spiritual and artistic is immediately
present in the choice of title, for it comes from a quote from Brancusi:
In the art of other times there is a joy, but
with it the nightmare that the religions drag with them. There is joy in
Negro sculpture, among the nearly archaic Greeks, in some things of the
Chinese and the Gothic ... oh, we find it everywhere. But even so, not
so well as it might be with us in the future, if only we were to free ourselves
of all this ... It is time we had an art of our own [22].
The 'all this' we need to free ourselves from,
and which 20th century Western artists and writers have done so thoroughly
is the religious baggage of previous centuries. In modernism and later art
movements the 20th century does have an art of its own, but Lipsey
is interested, as we are, in where the spiritual lies within it. If the
modern artist rejects traditional religion, what is the source of the spiritual?
In the first decades of the century the answer, using the terminology of
this paper, is in the occult. In particular it is in the occult of
Theosophy, but as we have seen, Anthroposophy and Gurdjieff's work have
also played their part (it seems very likely that Brancusi for example met
Gurdjieff, and may well have absorbed some of the influences of his school).
We also find that the transcendent is a strong influence. Using Brancusi
as an example again, we find that one of the books to have the greatest
influence on him was Jacques Bacot's 1925 translation of the thirteenth
century Tibetan Buddhist The Life of Milarepa.
Lipsey's introduction asks of course what the spiritual is, and what in
particular it might be in art, giving firstly a broad outline of the issues
as we have done here. He goes on: "All of this duly noted, spiritual
remains an old-fashioned word of vague meaning. Yet it is this word that
Kandinsky seeded into twentieth-century art, and apart from any individual,
it still speaks. It requires a positive response from us." [23] Lipsey points
out that many intellectuals of his generation were profoundly influenced
by the inevitable conclusion of 19th century religious failure: "Beyond,
there may be a void: whole sections of modern literature address the perception
of a profoundly unwelcoming void. The generation of which I am a part explored
the void at the earliest possible age, under the influence of Existentialist
literature. We sat on park benches trying to validate Sartre's compelling
description of metaphysical nausea ..." [24] The void is a key concept
in the spirituality of the transcendent, particularly in Buddhism, but is
deeply problematic in the West, particularly to the artist. While Lipsey
does not explore this much, he does draw an interesting metaphor from Sufi
thought; the contrast between 'eyes of flesh,' which perceive only the material
world, and 'eyes of fire,' which perceive only the spiritual. He goes on:
"For such eyes nothing is lonely matter, all things are caught up in
a mysterious, ultimately divine whole that challenges understanding over
a lifetime. ... eyes for art strike a balance between these sensibilities."
[25]
This idea, that the artist stands between heaven and earth and somehow mediates
between them, will be returned to later.
The early part of Lipsey's book traces, as we have done above, some of the
spiritual developments on the artists of the twentieth century. He focuses
on Theosophy and Anthroposophy, but only mentions Ouspensky (a close associate
of Gurdjieff's) in the section on Kasimir Malevich, saying: "Suprematism
can be viewed in part as an artist's response to the world-view and implicit
challenge of Tertium Organum." [26] This major work of Ouspensky's was produced before he
met Gurdjieff, but many of the preoccupations in it carry over into his
later work. Its influence may well have been most noticeable amongst Russian
artists.
The strength of Lipsey's work is in its thoroughness and insight into the
lives, concerns, and work of 20th century artists. However, his notions
of the spiritual are not fine-grained enough to deal with the subtlety of
the phenomenon, especially given the difficulties outlined earlier. In this
essay, by starting with the crude boundaries of religious, occult and transcendent,
I am pointing to a way to build on Lipsey's work and take it further. Let
us look at a brief selection of the key players in 20th century art, looking
both at Lipsey's research and at ways to refine it.
4.2. Kandinsky, Mondrian,
Klee, and Itten: The Bauhaus
The influence of Theosophy on Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, plus
the spiritual interests of Johannes Itten, contributed to making the Bauhaus
a focus for the spiritual in the 1920s. Steiner's and Gurdjieff's work had
no comparable outlet in Europe, but in fact various forces conspired to
diminish the spiritual aspect of the Bauhaus. It lay at the heart of twentieth
century Modernism, and was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 in Germany,
and, considering the interests of many of those involved, could have developed
into an artistic version of Plato's or Ficino's Academies. (It even sometimes
had the 'cult' overtones of Ficino's Renaissance Academy.) It is generally
considered that the first world war and the Russian Revolution turned the
current of idealism (sparked by Theosophy et al.) from the spiritual in
the direction of the social. At best this swing had a democratic impulse,
but the materialistic emphasis of socialism, and the drift towards fascism
in Germany, put paid to the spiritual aspirations of many of the Bauhaus
artists (it was closed by the Nazis in 1933). Lipsey has this to say: "It
is a matter of lasting astonishment that the Bauhaus began with a medievalizing,
romantic self-image and emerged in a few short years as the principal artisan
of design principles that are the essence of 'modern' and the hallmark of
the century." [27]
Johannes Itten was deliberately employed by Gropius in the early years to
teach at the Bauhaus because of his strongly mystical dimension, but left
eventually as directions changed. Lipsey comments:
He viewed the Bauhaus as a "secret, self-contained
society" with spiritual goals. In his classes, he offered students
the opportunity to practice relaxation, breathing, and concentration exercises
intended, as he later wrote, "to establish the intellectual and physical
readiness which makes intensive work possible." ... Itten precipitated
the crisis of 1922 by embodying the esoteric and romantic aspects of the
Bauhaus so militantly that he threatened to sever the school from its moorings
in mainstream society [28].
Itten himself made the following comments about the spiritual underpinning
of his work in Design and Form, one of the coursebooks to emerge
from teachers at the Bauhaus:
I had studied oriental philosophy and concerned
myself with Persian Mazdaism and Early Christianity. Thus I realised that
our outward-directed scientific research and technology must be balanced
by inward-directed thought and forces of the soul. ... It is not only a
religious custom to start instruction with a prayer or a song, but it also
serves to concentrate the students' wandering thoughts. At the start of
the morning I brought my classes to mental and physical readiness for intensive
work through relaxing, breathing, and concentrating exercises. The training
of the body as an instrument of the mind is of the greatest importance
for creative man. ... Besides relaxation, breathing is of the greatest
importance. As we breathe, so do we think and so is the rhythm of our daily
life. People of great, successful accomplishments always have a quiet,
slow and deep breath. Shortwinded people are hasty and greedy in thought
and action [29].
These extracts show much of Itten's thinking and character, and the reactions
to them may illustrate the problem that artists have with the explicitly
spiritual. The library copy of Design and Form from the Arts faculty
of my university has a simple pencilled comment in the margin close to the
last point made in this extract: 'Suspicious'. The 'Hidden Hands' team commented:
"Itten was a zealous campaigner for a pseudo-religion called Mazdaznan,
which its adherents claimed was derived from the teachings of Zoroaster
in Persia. Itten wandered around in monk-like robes and instituted a strict
regime of meditation, colonic irrigation and vegetarianism (during Itten's
tenure, observers noted, "everything at the Bauhaus smelt of garlic."
[30]) They go on
to claim that the Mazdaznan experiment was a disaster.
Let us turn back now to Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art
as a turning point for Modernism. It was published in 1911, and was deeply
influenced by Theosophy: he had 'snapped up' a copy of Thought Forms
in 1908 and joined the movement in 1909. Kandinsky's Variations series
is considered by Frances Saunders to be almost indistinguishable from the
illustrations in Thought Forms [31]. The thesis of the 'Hidden
Hands' documentary is that the contemporary art scene is embarrassed
about the early spiritual influences on Modernism, but it seems that even
twenty years ago the editors of the Dover edition of Concerning the Spiritual
in Art only give a passing mention to Theosophy, and disregard it altogether
under 'further reading'. Kandinsky himself only devotes a few paragraphs
to it, apparently quoting from Blavatsky's The Key to Theosophy:
Theosophy, according to Blavatsky, is synonymous
with eternal truth. "The new torchbearer of truth will find
the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in
which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organization awaiting his
arrival, which will remove the merely mechanical, material obstacles and
difficulties from his path." And then Blavatsky continues: "The
earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what
it is now," and with these words concludes her book [32].
Kandinsky shows in Concerning the Spiritual
in Art the seeds of the spiritual dilemma that makes the appearance
of the spiritual in the arts so fitful in the 20th century: the apparent
hierarchical nature of it. In the chapter called 'The Movement of
the Triangle' he likens society to a triangle with those few spiritual or
artistic geniuses at its apex, and, as one goes down, a greater and greater
number of artists of lesser and lesser value; the triangle moves upwards,
thus representing 'progress'. This image fits well with Theosophy, but with
the rise of socialism after 1917 it exposes an elitist view of art that
sat uncomfortably with the new order. The shock of the first world war must
also have shaken the faith of men like Kandinsky in Blavatsky's prediction
of a heaven in the 21st century, and in the later Bauhaus years he tempered
the spirituality of his earlier period to fit the more materialistic and
machine-oriented aspirations of his students.
Piet Mondrian was only briefly at the Bauhaus, but was just as deeply influenced
by Theosophy as Kandinsky, though to the 'Hidden Hands' team only to his
detriment as an artists. They print a triptych of Mondrian's call Evolution
as an example of this period (it is the dominant piece amongst similar work
hidden in the Gemeente Museum, unshown). His later and better-known work
continued to explore one of the Theosophical themes, that of geometry.
Paul Klee was another teacher at the Bauhaus for a time, and shared with
Kandinsky a friendship with Thomas de Hartmann, musician and close collaborator
with Gurdjieff. Kandinsky met de Hartmann between 1908 and 1912, before
de Hartmann met Gurdjieff in 1916, and for whom both he and his wife gave
up everything. Klee's notebooks, like those of many artists, do not reveal
the kind of spiritual preoccupations that we find in those of a man like
Krishnamurti, and I have not found so far any mention of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky,
or even de Hartman [33]. Lipsey comments:
Paul Klee (1879-1940)Swiss-born, mature in
art by 1914, Bauhaus master in the great years of the institution, renowned
for works of originality, wit, and depthis the author of one of the century's
few unerring statements on the spiritual in art. With Kandinsky's On
the Spiritual in Art and Brancusi's aphorisms, Klee's 1924 lecture
"On Modern Art" is all one need know to be certain that twentieth-century
art conceived ideals that in their religious dimension would have been
recognizable to Meister Eckhart and in their workshop dimension to Leonardo
[34].
The last sentiment in this passage, concerning
Eckhart and Leonardo, could be seen as an aspiration at the heart of this
essay. However, I think Lipsey is a little optimistic, particularly in respect
of Klee's 1924 lecture, which makes no direct reference to the spiritual
at all. I suspect that the spiritual in Klee's work has to be approached
via the work itself, and I have no suggestion at this point for an easy
method for so doing.
4.3. The American Abstract
Expressionists
Another influential group of 20th century painters that drew heavily on
spiritual influences in one form or other was the group known as the American
Abstract Expressionists. Coming to prominence after the second world war
in New York, they included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman,
Ad Reinhardt, and many others. A cursory glance at the writings of these
artists leave one again in doubt as to the extent of any explicitly
spiritual references in their writings, but overall there is strong evidence
for a spiritual concern running through their work. Lipsey is similarly
hesitant, though not sceptical. His comments revolve around an exhibition
called "The Spiritual in Abstract Art: 1895-1985" (Los Angeles,
1986; Catalogue Editor: Maurice Tuchman) in which the last two paintings,
one by Ad Reinhardt and another by Mark Rothko had the most impact on him.
Lipsey says: "These works at once 'settled' the exhibition, brought
it home; one could feel again that there is a modern spiritual, and
these works demonstrated it." [35] We are presented here with a quite understandable
subjectivity, shown again in this quote from Lipsey: "Although Barnett
Newman (1905-1970) took keen interest in traditional spiritual ideas, possessed
a sense of scripture, and contributed cogently to the endless murmur of
conversation among American artists of the period, he never succeeded in
giving eloquent pictorial form to his insights." [36]
We should not be discouraged however either by the difficulties in pursuing
the spiritual in the writings of the artists, nor by our subjective responses
to their art. I believe that our whole conception of the spiritual can be
fruitfully softened and expanded by the visual arts: much more work is needed,
that is all. The American Abstract Expressionists have a spirituality that
is firmly in the transcendent category (as defined in this essay); the mainstream
religious is only nodded at, and the occultism of the earlier part of the
century has vanished. Lipsey points out that Ad Reinhardt for example was
a friend of Thomas Merton, read Coomaraswamy, attended Suzuki's talks on
Zen Buddhism, and was literate in Buddhism.
4.4. Stelarc and Musafar:
towards a spiritual in cyberspace
I would like to conclude this brief section on modern art with a mention
of the electronic arts and the virtual territory that they inhabit: cyberspace.
The post-modern, eclectic, and rule-free world of the electronic arts may
produce at worst a New-Age pap, but at best there is a genuine freedom of
thought and spiritual aspiration. Once again one has to look very hard to
find explicitly spiritual references, but this should be no obstacle. We
see for example a transcendent theme again, this time a transcendence of
the biological organism; many indeed speak of a post-biological world, or
of 'obsolescence of the body'. This is the theme of the work of performance
artist Stelarc. This Australian artist works with mechanical and electronical
devices that provide an interface to computer-controlled movements of his
own body, prostheses, and industrial robots: he uses his own muscles to
send or amplify their movements to control mechanical systems, and in turn
allows computer-mediated control over his own body via electrical impulses
of about 40V. His visually stunning performances raise all kinds of questions
regarding transcendence of the body, surrender of personal will, and the
acceptance of pain. In interview however he is rather wary of the direct
spiritual implications of his work; even though he practised yoga for twenty
years he does not want direct parallels to be drawn, and one can only respect
this.
Fakir Musafar is another performance artist, working mainly without electronics,
but is much less reticent than Stelarc about the spiritual indeed he criticises
Stelarc for his silence on this area. Musafar's work turns us back to the
occult (as defined here): it has its roots in out-of-body experiences, shamanism,
and fetishism. An overwhelming spiritual experience at the age of seventeen
(after fasting and a form of self-immolation) led to a conviction that he
had lived before in a completely different culture and time, and that the
erotic and bodily were deeply linked to the spiritual. He comments:
That beautiful experience colored my whole
existence. From that day on I wanted everyone to have that kind of liberation.
I felt free to express life through my body. It was now my media, my own
personal "living canvas," "living clay." It belonged
to me to use. And that is just what I have done for the past thirty years.
I learned to use the body. It is mine, and yours, to play with!
I wrote a poem after the experience. It said:
Poke your finger into Red,
Feel the feeling through.
And when the feeling is no more,
Feel no-feeling too! [37]
This poem has a resonance for me with the following
meditation from the Vigyana Bhairava Tantra (Lord Shiva's 112 methods
of meditation):
Devi, imagine the Sanskrit letters in these
honey-filled foci of awareness, first as letters, then more subtle as sounds,
then as most subtle feeling. Then, leaving them aside, be free [38].
Musafar is significant as an artist who occupies Gurdjieff's territory of
the fakir, that is one who's path is through the body rather than through
mind or heart. The transcendent implications in his poem, and the occult
nature of his out-of-body experiences reminds one again that we cannot apply
these categories too strictly however.
Whether the spiritual in cyberspace will have its emphasis on the transcendence
of the body, or more on the collectivisation of mind and consciousness is
yet to be seen. There is considerable interest in the ideas of Teilhard
de Chardin in connection with the Internet; in particular his idea of the
noosphere. De Chardin is interesting in his own right as a Jesuit priest
and palaeontologist: his life's work represents an attempt to reconcile
the scientific and religious, but lack of space prevents a detailed presentation
of his ideas. Let us turn instead to the way in which the spiritual is emerging
in the work of the scientists of the 20th century.
5. The Spiritual
in Modern Science
We have seen earlier how the spiritual has gained an entrance into modern
science through quantum theory and the Anthropic principle, though both
may be seen more as a humanistic than spiritual development. The scientific
community has not reacted in a homogeneous way to these developments however,
as the following sections show.
5.1. Reactions to Quantum
Theory: Einstein and Bohm
It is a reasonable assertion today to say that the subjective entered
science with quantum mechanics. Whether the spiritual does or does
not is a question that is highly debatable; Wilber denies it (see below)
while a more cautious approach may be to suggest that it gave the scientists
the first real excuse to talk about the spiritual. What is not always appreciated
is that even the first premise was not so easily reached, and we find in
particular that Einstein resisted it, and in a more subtle way so did the
physicist David Bohm. Einstein's comment on quantum theory, that "God
does not play dice," is well known, but in fact it came from a profound
distrust of chance, both in his personal life and in physics, and he spent
the last 30 years of his life unsuccessfully trying to find the 'hidden
variables' behind quantum theory that would bring it back to the fold of
a deterministic science. No one would pretend that Einstein's occasional
use of the word 'God' represented a profound engagement with the spiritual,
and the conversations between him and Rabindranath Tagore are often cited
to show how Einstein wanted to cling at all costs to the idea of an 'objective'
universe out there, against Tagore's Hindu metaphysics.
David Bohm, on the other hand, had a life-long interest in mysticism (as
his conversations with Krishnamurti show). His best-known work Wholeness
and the Implicate Order is dense and opaque to most lay readers; nevertheless
it represents an attempt to complete Einstein's project to find the 'hidden
variables'. Bohm steers clear of the physics-supports-mysticism view, yet
his work is much more than the incidental interest of a physicist in mysticism:
it is a clear manifesto for the synthesis of the two.
References for Part
2
[15] Weil,
S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p.1
[16] Weil,
S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p. 136
[17] Weil,
S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p. 137
[18] Weil,
S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p. 138
[19] Barrow,
John D. and Tipler, Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,
Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986
[20] Wheeler,
J.A., At Home in the Universe, The American Institute of Physics,
1995
[21] Saunder,
Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 6
[22] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 244
[23] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 7
[24] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 8
[25] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 17
[26] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 143
[27] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 201
[28] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 202
[29] Itten,
Johannes, Design and Form, the Basic Course at the Bauhaus, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1964, p.11
[30] Saunder,
Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 9
[31] Saunder,
Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 6
[32] Kandinsky,
Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York: Dover Publications
Inc, 1977, p. 13
[33] Paul
Klee's diaries appear to go only from 1898 to 1918, see: Klee, Paul The
Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1964
[34] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 174
[35] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 326
[36] Lipsey,
Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 301
[37] Musafar,
Fakir, 'Body Play', in ( Adam Parfrey, Ed.) Apocalypse Culture,
Portland, Oregon: Feral House, 1990, p. 105
[38] Rajneesh,
Bhagwan Shree, The Book of the Secrets 2, Harper Colophon Books,
1975, p.199
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