"Somehow – whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it – some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity. What, physically, is this unity which seems to speak to us of I?...
"Every center in the matter of the universe starts this tunneling towards the I-stuff. And the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self." - Christopher Alexander
_________________________________
The Connection between Beauty and Goodness (or between Aesthetics and Ethics)
by Justin Good
The cosmos is not indifferent to you. In fact, every act of creating to witnessing beauty is not only an ethical act. It is also a cosmological act which serves to bring forward the evolution of Reality, the evolution of the Spirit which created and creates the world. Sustainability has a metaphysical significance. The reestablishing of social and ecological coherence within a community as a vehicle for sustainable living is metaphysically identical to a new moment of self-recognition of the Void (the universal self, the quantum vacuum, the Akashic Field). If we can discover our own deeper identity within the world, for example, in the sunlight dancing on the cool waters of a forest stream in the early spring, then the metaphysical conclusion is that the self that you find inside your skin-defined ego body and the self you find in the dancing light are two aspects of a single universal Self. This explains the unity of ethics and aesthetics, or of goodness and beauty.
Ethics and aesthetics are the same phenomenon viewed from reciprocal directions in the flow of energy-information-awareness. Both concern the essence of a coherent system: a system is coherent (has a high degree of life or wholeness) if its activity helps both the systems around it and those which it contains. A coherent system is therefore a just or ethical system, because it minimizes its destructive potential and works to harmonize the beings around which it lives. And when we perceive a coherent system, we experience it as beautiful, because we are naturally attuned to perceive wholeness and naturally directed by Spirit to work to nurture and evolve wholeness.
Ethics looks at information-awareness as informing reality. Aesthetics studies the experience of a reality informed by selfness as the universal medium or self-plenum. Beautiful objects are centers of space-time which create multi-dimensional tunnels connecting their spatio-temporally located, physical matter and properties to the universal self plenum which interconnects all centers in the cosmos, past and present. Since the connection one discovers in a moment of transcendent self-discovery is already there, what is being actualized is simply the recognition of an identity that was somehow forgotten.
This echos the Hindu cosmology. When Spirit creates the cosmos, she decided to play a game of hide and seek with herself by involving her self as the material world. Alongside the process of natural evolution, there is consequently a deeper process of spiritual involution – the process of wholeness. In the phenomenon of wholeness, the past meets the future. The new holistic worldview is more realistic than materialism, more meaningful than religion, more optimistic than capitalism, more idealistic than socialism, more alive than humanism. The cosmos is not only alive, it is conscious.
How does this relate to art? The Theory of Art as Unfolding Wholeness sees art making as in the service of the cosmological evolution of Spirit, of the universal Self-like stuff that unites all beings (every point of space-time) in the universe. On this view, the ultimate effort of all serious art is to make things which connect with the I of every person. This ‘I,’ not normally available, is dredged up, forced to the light, forced into the light of day, by the work of art. The more personal art is, the more universal it is. The more alive it is, the more divine it is. The less Ego it has, the more Self it manifests.
No comments:
Post a Comment