|
...Leonardo was the exception (artist and scientist); he was able to wear the masks of both, but not without difficulty. It is interesting that just before his death in 1519 he developed partial paralysis of the right hand. ... The mythic world with its fluid correspondences
between opposites, between greater and lesser things held together
at the center by an ego-transcending mystery, which being a mystery
is no less real, has ceased to exist at the collective level. As a distinct conglomerate of discrete categories, the ego corresponds precisely to the orthodox Christian doctrine of permanent, unchanging souls destined for either heaven or hell. This psychological attitude, more than anything else, prepared the way for the totally mechanistic world view of the 17th century, so eloquently summed up in Newton's laws of gravity and the development of "celestial mechanics." Since the ego perceives the world as a static entity, there naturally developed the powerful philosophy of materialism- the notion that phenomena, being stable and inert, may be grasped and appropriated in whatever way and by whatever means for whatever human needs. Despite the breakthrough of the Einsteinian world view, in which space and time are viewed as interrelated intuitive functions rather than as the separate quantifiable entities of mechanistic science, the collective mind is still in the grip of what Blake so beautifully described as "single vision and Newton's Sleep" A corresponding Einsteinian psychological base for disentitizing the ego has yet to be developed - or, at least, understood and applied.
Even the human body is thought of as a machine, and behaviorism has developed as a corresponding mechanistic approach to psychology. Whatever validity the Newtonian idea might originally have had is completely offset by the dreadful need to believe in it - and nothing else. The tendency for human consciousness to freeze itself, to strive for greater material "proof" of itself, attests to the power of insecurity in the face of constant change. However, this insecurity is but the reverse side of adaptability. Confronted with mounting complexity, the species tends to forego adaptability in favor of a "reliable" guide. An image of the universe is developed and sunk into the consciousness, where it remains, a bedrock image-fix, a final resort or proof that the world is "really" the way we want it to be. The one-point perspective system - "single vision and Newton's Sleep" is one of tithe most powerful means of image-fixing yet conceived. Created by the late 15th century artistic avant-garde, it gave European man the leverage to fix the world according to his will. The interplay of art and science in this process is awe-inspiring testimony to the subtle and irrevocable forces of evolving consciousness. || End of Chapter Two || < < b a c k < < |::| > > Next Chapter > >
|
...
Time and again human consciousness fixates, and slams the door on
its greatest gift, the open-endedness of infinite possibility.
As a result we do not experience reality but merely our concept
of it. The most difficult trials in the development of consciousness
are involved in the dissolution of what William Burroughs has described
as the "image-fix." The Newtonian idea, for instance,
that the universe is like a perfect machine - celestial mechanics
- is one currently widespread image-fix. So pervasive is this idea
that all our attitudes are tainted with it.