Martin_ wrote: ↑Fri Dec 10, 2021 9:46 pm
I like those Beeples. Especially the banana, (i like surrealism), but the others have merit as well.
Why are we discussing him though? and I do not get the emphasised Barfield quote. My best reading from it is that you should stay away from art depicting bad things because your world will change towards it if you immerse yourself in it.
Martin,
It's all about the evolution of consciousness from abstract intellectual reasoning to participatory Imagination. It is about becoming more conscious of what it is our Thinking activity is
always doing, but we have forgotten in the modern age. Barfield is talking about how our own concrete Imaginative thinking structures the world we perceive, and that is most clearly reflected in aesthetics right now and certain cognitive sciences and theoretical physics. It is no coincidence these are the ones least riddled with abstract assumptions, relative to many other fields of inquiry. They all present data which simply cannot be glossed over with those assumptions. That is why we have people like Hoffman and Nima Arkani-Hamed who speak of "space-time is doomed". What Cleric is trying to point us to is the concrete reason
why abstract space-time is doomed, not in the sense of competing intellectual theories, and the "space-time is doomed" theory winning out over other ones, but in terms of the concrete and immanently verifiable evolution of cognition itself away from abstract spatiotemporal representation, which emerges into what Gebser calls the 'aperspectival', time-free mutation, or what Barfield calls "final participation".
Gebser wrote:The new mutation of consciousness, on the other hand, as a consequence of arationality, receives its decisive stamp from the manifest perceptual emergence of the spiritual....
Two apocryphal statements of Christian doctrine clarify in their way what is meant here: “This world is a bridge, cross it but do not make of it your dwelling place,”2 and “I have chosen you before the earth began.”3 They point to the spiritual origin prior to all spatio-temporal materialization. We may regard such materialization as a bridge that makes possible the merging or coalescence, the concrescere of origin and the present. The great church father Irenaeus presumably had these sayings in mind when he stated: “Blessed is he who was before the coming of man.”4 We have seen him; he revealed himself in space and time. In his departure he was beheld by his disciples in his transparency, a transparency appropriate only to the spiritual origin (if anything can be appropriated to it), the transparency which a time-free and ego-free person can presentiate in the most fortunate certainty of life. The grand and painful path of consciousness emergence, or, more appropriately, the unfolding and intensification of consciousness, manifests itself as an increasingly intense luminescence of the spiritual in man.
Throughout the millennia the traditionalists, the “initiates,” have seen man’s previous journey as a decline, a departure from the affinity to and a distanciation from origin. Painful as this distanciation may be, it has served the requisite intensification of consciousness. Only distanciation contains the possibility for the awakening of consciousness. The phenomenon releasing origin is spiritual, and with each consciousness mutation it becomes more realizable by man. With respect to the presently emerging mutation we may speak of a concretion of the spiritual.
