ARTICLE - Aesthetic Awakenings

Aesthetic Awakenings - To Art

It was the fulfilment of a long held wish to visit The Van Gogh Museum  in Amsterdam. Van Gogh being my first artistic love. It was such an immense pleasure to see all his fabulous paintings laid out in front of me. It was like conversing with old familiar friends. I ambled slowly around the busy galleries, trying to soak up as much as possible, staring for longer when I came across particular favourites. Then as I turned one corner on the wall facing me was a picture I hadn't seen before. It was a simple painting of a woodland floor called Undergrowth. The moment my eyes saw it I instantly felt a pulse of ecstatic energy awakened in me. This moved from head to foot and back again like a bliss filled strobe. This continued for some time, until that analytical bit of my brain kicked its way through my motionless transfixed state. I then rushed around trying to locate where my husband was to tell him what had just happened.

This type of embodied thrill of experience is not an everyday experience for me. I can only recollect two other occasions with a similar intensity. One, being strongly moved spiritually by a the oscillating shimmer of Rothko's brushstrokes, another, was a second painting of Van Gogh's called Long Grasses with Butterflies. It is significant that both experiences with the Van Gogh's were simple paintings of the ground - woodland undergrowth and grasses. That said, I don't need to fully pin down why this might be, I'm content to leave this with a little aura of mystery. To intellectually explain everything might rationalise it out of existence. My heart understands.

Aesthetic awakenings to art can span a wide spectrum of feeling, from fondness, to besotted love to full blown bliss. The opposite ( aesthetic terminations?) is also true when indifference shifts to mild dislike and ends up in violent hatred. However strongly a piece of art strikes us its leaving an indelible mark upon our perception and being. We tend to judge the worth of art based on our feelings, of our likes and dislikes, by its monetary value, or according to the current fashion, the personal taste of whether it would go with your curtains. If we stayed loyal to that first aesthetic awakening we would know it has nothing to do with any of those things. Once we've made the decision we like or dislike something, its then become solely an object for intellectual curiosity. Seeking out further information to back up and validate whatever our initial response was. The aesthetic awakening disappears beneath our analysis.

As soon as matters of taste or intellect become the primary mode, our way of swimming in the aesthetic awakening to an artwork, then enters the shallower end of the pool. We have moved from a pure aesthetic experience to one that propagates ideas and judgements, where well defined interpretive boundaries begin being set up. We cease being receptive to anything not previously filtered and passed through this self vetting. The aesthetic awakening becomes incorporated into your self view, as an informed discerning person with the sensitivity and refined form of taste required to experience this sort of thing.

Aesthetic Awakenings - To The Truth

When I first heard The Four Noble Truths my initial response was like an aesthetic awakening.  My spirits were uplifted at being given important sustenance. Since then I've had a few such significant moments, when I first heard the Ten Precepts, when I first heard the words of Dogen from his Instruction To The Tenzo, to name two. Each time they resonated with an often unrecognised need within me. Suddenly I was awakened to a different way of seeing my self or the world.  I could never go back to how I was before. Sometimes the spiritual path is a gradual evolution in our awareness and opening up to a truth, but these aesthetic awakenings are more abrupt revolutions, overturning our previous way of perceiving. Its the essence of vidya an aesthetic knowledge or intuitive sense for the truth when its laid out before you.

Afterwards of course you think about it endlessly, often in great detail. You read the background books and learn all you can. This is what the intellect is good at, explaining and expanding the breadth of your understanding. This intellectual rationalisation of an aesthetic awakening has a unfortunate side effect of neutering the original experience. Creating inhibiting obstacles that further direct communication of the truth has to overcome. Our practice can turn into one of self-improvement, refining personal spiritual tastes and self-expression, where openness and receptivity get demoted or lost.

I know I have particular preferences for certain types of Dharma, I hold that these are things that 'work for me'. Overtime these self-definitions can close down experiencing anything that doesn't quite fit within the autobiographical brief I've now set out for myself. I create an equally strong dislike to reinforce my strong like. Though knowing what works for you can be useful, when times get difficult you need to know where to go to find sources for inspiration, support and guidance. At times my hold on faith deserts me. Time and again reading Dogen reminds and reconnects me.

I recently experienced a strong aversion whilst studying The Diamond Sutra.  Its a text I've read numerous times over the years and not had any noticeable difficulty with before. The Diamond Sutra should never be light reading, it is extremely challenging, the repetitive literary style alone can be confronting. But, considering my familiarity with it, the vehemence of my indignation and frustration, took me completely by surprise. I was struggling to find a way of relating to it.  I found myself trotting out all sorts of self justifications, why this translation of the Diamond Sutra wasn't a good one, as a teaching I connect better with impermanence rather than sunyata, that studying it just didn't work for me. This wasn't a lack of intellectual understanding, this was emotional and personal, it was about my individualistic preferences being traduced, the exclusivity of particular Dharmic preferences. I was putting up a fight with these and resisting engaging or changing them with all my might.

Like with art, whenever someone pulls out justifications of taste or intellectual rationalisations for why a Dharma text doesn't work for them, we have entered the same shallower end of the pool.  I'd turned away from the possibility of an aesthetic awakening and tuned in to Radio Self Justification. There are artists whose work I didn't like or understand when I first came across them, whom I now really love, value and appreciate. Partly what changed was me or my perspective, over time I'd become more receptive. Usually I'd encountered something that provided a way in, an aesthetic sense for how to appreciate what the artist was trying to do.

Our responses to Sutras and other Dharma texts can follow very similar pathways. You may simply not be ready for it yet, but how will you know when you are if you walk away every time you encounter it? My resistance and insistence upon dislike was flagging up that I needed to sit with and hear what lies beneath this response. There will be a way for you to appreciate any text. But this needs to be allowed to emerge, unsolicited and arriving often from an unexpected direction. Whatever way they arrive, they will arrive despite our reservations, because we've been willing to stay open and stay with it.

Rather than over indulging in emotional re-activity and rationalisations for why its justified to loath The Diamond Sutra. I'm trying to take a step back, to not close and bolt the door entirely against it. Trying to stay open to the possibility that the inflexible nature of my views could change. Remaining patient with both the Sutra and myself. For the time may come, when something will present a particular key to a teaching, an aesthetic awakening that opens up the Sutra and point out a way to the truth.