Art As Evolution by Nicola Siddons
Within the realms of prehistory we find that art was much more fundamental than a mere pastime, a simple way to reflect social concerns. Its place was not only a passive one. Art was central to the process of connection with life, enabling the participant to cooperate with his environment through his religion and magic.
“If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two; first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.” -Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, A History of Myth and Religion.
“According to a fundamental magical belief throughout the ages, the part is integral with the whole.” -Larouse Encyclopedia of Prehistoric and Ancient Art. Frazer goes on to discredit these principles in the same vein as we would today; that they are based on fear and superstition. The old cave paintings depicting religious rites, fertility cults and hunting scenes are simply the products of a less civilised humanity and are not the carefully crafted talismans they were meant to be.
However, if we can place art in a more holistic environment we can also show that its effects are far more radical than perhaps is currently perceived. The creativity of an individual is not just limited to his own sphere of existence but dynamically alters the whole; it is from this starting point that we can begin to grasp the concept of art as evolution.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
“Plate 4: The Voice of the Devil
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors:
1. That man has two real existing principles, Viz: a body & a soul.
2. That Energy, calld evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the soul.
3. That God will torment Man in eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Deliight.”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Mankind will always, it seems, be in a constant state of re-evaluation. The human race seeks this re-evaluation in all areas of life and most particularly in religion, philosophy and through modern science. What we seek is difficult to pinpoint and possibly lies in the process of the task rather than its goal. It has become a contemporary concern that we are living in a state of rapid decline, socially, mentally and ecologically. Whether this misery is greater than the appalling social conditions of the Middle Ages or the Thirty Years War or than the mental and physical terror of the Spanish Inquisition is difficult to say. However, I think that it is fair to conclude that modern mans affair with and definition of progress are beginning to falter.
“We are told that the world is shrinking, that vast distance has been conquered by computer and fax, and that the earth is now a “global village” in which all of us are connected as never before. It feels, however, quite the opposite. It feels as if distancing and disconnection are shaping modern life. If anything is shrinking, it is the fullness of being now experienced by the modern self. ” -Charlene Stretnak, The Resurgence of the Real.
I would suggest that there is a deep imbalance between mans relation between himself and other. On the most abstract level between subject and object. This is most clearly developed in modern science where objectivity (if there can truly be such a thing) has reduced the universe to an external mechanistic machine. In the psyche of the human race this is a very bleak and uncreative existence. The life of man is reduced to a puppet on strings and with the decline of religion this puppet may not even be in the hands of God. Environmentally speaking nature is seen as external and threatening if not controlled, and when controlled as purely a resource for human kind.
The antithesis to such a philosophical dilema can be found in the realms of many ancient religions where we find a more holistic approach.
“29: He sees himself in the heart of all beings and he sees all beings in his heart. This is the vision of the Yogi of harmony, a vision which is ever one. 30: And when he sees me in all and he sees all in me, then I never leave him and he never leaves me.” -Bhagavad Gita.
“The web was so sensitive that any movement, any thought, any happening, no matter how small, reverberates throughout the web, so that everything that happens involves everything else.” -Brian Bates, The Wisdom of Wyrd.
Implicit in this work is the realization that mind and body are at the very least connected if not manifestations of the same thing. It is now possible to return full circle to Fraziers description of primitive magic in the introduction and to discuss how such an archaic tradition could still have application in our world of scientific fact. The shamanic world view is based on an holistic world view where all aspects of the universe are connected. In this world the ideas of primitive magic are accepted since the web of reality is literally that, a network of connections. The universe is a system of vibrations carrying energy and information. Within this reality a sacred object can be more than a symbol it can actually partake of the energy and information of the object that it represents. This is the basis of the many sacred languages we see around the world.
The word cat is by agreement referring to my small fury pet. However, the word is not and never could substitute for her. Within a sacred language (Celtic Oghams, Nordic Runes, Hebrew, Sanskrit) by vibrating/singing the words in a certain way the sounds made are no longer symbols they actually come close to what they are intended to be. Thus, sympathetic magic is based on the idea that one can create something which has a similar content of energy and information as that which it is intended to represent.
“So the Ogham system, far from being an arbitrary set of conventional signs (such as are alphabet now represents), is a complete cosmic index or guide to how things are organized in the multiverse.” -Edred Thorsson, The Book of Ogham.
But what in the way of complementary ideas has modern science to offer? Quantum mechanics is a statistical theory where Newtonean determinism is finally put to rest. It is not that the theory is inadequate to predict the precise positions, motions etc. of particles it is simply that quantum particles do not possess a complete set of physical states with well defined attributes. They possess more of a smear of possible states contained in a wave function. Quantum mechanics is in fact all about probabilities. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the more defined one state of a particle becomes the more uncertain the complementary state becomes. For example, to measure the momentum of a particle exactly then one could never know its exact position. When the wavefunction is observed and a particular value measured the wave collapses into a specific state. This collapse of the wave function has led to many debates about the role of consciousness on the universe around us. At some point in the act of measurement the wave function or smear of possibilities collapses and a value (at the expense of the complementary value) is determined. Thus some physicists have concluded that the measurement we read depends on which aspect of reality we choose to observe.
“Quantum mechanics demands a relationship between the part and the whole, the observer and the observed.” -Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint.
The quantum universe is based on vibrational waves in just the same way as the shamans world is. The idea that matter is condensed energy is encapsulated in that well known equation: E=MC (where energy = mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light) Thus the universe is a composition of energy and information in waveforms i.e. vibrational forms which would seem to be in accord with the earliest mystical writings of the Hermetics “nothing is still, all moves, all vibrates” -Arberry, Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam.
This vibrational energy is interconnected into a web of existence where the conscious observer actually has a direct and substantial effect on the object he observes by the choices he makes in the act of perception.
“Between two events there are many paths, many connections. By focusing on one of these paths, by restricting ones awareness to a single path as the most important the other paths seem to vanish…By becoming conscious of the world around us we create these pathways” -Fred Allan Wolf, The Eagles Quest.
I have tried to explore the possibility of the universe as a unified network of energy and information. For many the notion of this unified system is difficult to uphold, our perceptions throw us into a reality of separately existing objects which interact only by our Cartesian laws of science. However, even our science has now begun to be transformed and we are beginning to realize that what is substantial to our senses is only a small part of the picture.
“Life has two divisions, of which one is accepted but the other is not yet. The accepted division of life is what we call substance; the division of life which is not yet accepted can be called vacuum.” -Inayat Khan.
It is this so called vacuum which is infact undifferentiated and uncategorized potential, perhaps Chaos is a better term, it is the dormant well spring of our explicit existence and the source of our creativity. Thus it is vital to try to follow the natural extension of this idea and bridge the gap between our experience of matter and our experience of mind or to show that there can be no divide between spirit and substance and that this split is just another strange western paradigm.
“In reality matter comes from spirit; matter in its true nature is spirit; matter is an action of spirit which has materialized and has become intelligible for our senses of perception, and has thus become a reality to our senses hiding the spirit under it.” -Inayat Khan.
To some extent even this I find objectionable for I do not see spirit hiding anything, both are the natural extremes of one thing. We are so accustomed to seeing the world around us that we do not see it at all; it becomes mundane and common rather than something to be wondered at. Thus, this idea that spirit is some how higher than matter can only be extenuated by the fact that matter is the cause of gravity, that weak but accumulatory strong force which causes us to perceive up and down and is also responsible for the large scale structure of the universe. We can therefore agree that matter does have a heaviness and a denseness that is not present in the more attenuated energy of mind, however, our interpretation of superiority is merely one of perception rather than actuality. All opposites are essentially the extreme nature of one phenomenon, like the poles of a magnet where north and south would appear to have distinct and opposing characteristics, when in reality the one is the complement of the other and they are both infact part of the same energy system. We cannot have a fixed reference point, a rigid standard in life. When it comes to opposites it is their interaction which is really interesting, as can be readily discovered by anyone who touches upon the history of human thought, much as a pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.
This is not dissimilar to Hegels dialectic process where one has three stages of knowledge: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. An extreme proposal will always result in a contradictory claim and the two will finally be resolved with the synthesis of both. This philosophical balance is eminently illustrated in the work of Kant.
“From Kants point of view the philosophical traditions of both empiricism and rationalism had reached a dark, confused, and useless dead end. What he proposed was a radical new synthesis in which he would incorporate both experience and reason without falling into the scepticism of the empirical school or the vast, unverifiable structure of the rationalist school. The problem of knowledge, as he saw it, was how to connect the is of sense experience with the must of necessary and universal truth” -Christopher Furlong, Kant.
It would be interesting here to illustrate how this idea of synthesis can be applied to a topic which is relevant to everyone; the human brain. The idea that the seat of the creativity is in the right hemisphere of the brain and the seat of the rational in the left is a much flaunted fact, however, it is a strange hypothesis on two counts. Firstly it is their interaction which is of primary interest and secondly the brain does not exist in isolation like some complex machine, many scientists are even questioning the idea that this organ can be seen as the root of consciousness. “a more correct approach to brain function, they found, was that the brain necessarily uses both halves in synchrony, that the dialectic between both halves of the brain is more important than the specific function of each half individually. The truly interesting dynamics take place when both halves of the brain interact in harmony.” -Michio Kaku, Hyperspace, A Scientific Odyssey Through the Tenth Dimension.
The desire to equate the brain with a computer is not dissimilar to the desire to equate the body with a clock in the time of Descartes. The computer has pride of place on humanities mantle piece at this point in time since it is what we consider our most ingenious creation to date. The real similarities between the brain and a computer are actually quite minimal and the harder we try to squeeze the metaphor into its silicon container the more it overgrows its rigid constraints as anything organic will tend to do. We cannot compare society, people or the human brain to machines or computers, not because of any overbearing romantic notion but because they are quite simply different systems. The idea of human cognition being related to that of a computer stems from the misinterpretation of the process of knowing as being a form of information processing or the manipulation of symbols based on a set of rules. This myth has then been perpetuated by the mixing of biological and electronic terminology; use of words such as memory, language, and intelligence.
“Recent developments in cognitive science have made it clear that human intelligence is utterly different from machines, or artificial intelligence. The human nervous system does not process any information (in the sense of discrete elements existing ready-made in the outside world, to be picked up by the cognitive system), but interacts with the environment by continually modulating its structure. More over, neuroscientists have discovered strong evidence that human intelligence, human memory, and human decisions are never completely rational but are always coloured by emotions, as we all know from experience. Our thinking is always accompanied by bodily sensations and processes. Even if we often tend to suppress these, we always think also with our body; and since computers do not have such a body truly human problems will always be foreign to their intelligence.” -Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life.
Such shifts in veiwpoint have been led by an array of radical and challenging thinkers who have questioned our notions of basic scientific fact. David Bohm contributed substantially to both quantum physics and its philosophical significance and since his death in 1992 there has been growing interest in his work. Somasignificance is the word Bohm uses to refer to the unbroken continuity of mind and body. These aspects do not just interact they are the extreme manifestations of the same thing. Thus, soma refers to its physical manifestation and could be illustrated as the north pole of a magnet whilst significance refers to its mental aspect and in our example the south pole of a magnet. On a printed page the pattern of marks, their arrangement and connection is the somatic carrier of their significance. However, this particular somasignificance can be translated into more subtle levels where the somatic form is the chemical and electrical activities of the brain and its significance is apprehended in the human mind (note here Bohm does not simply ascribe meaning to a solely human activity). Thus, somasignificance can be carried at different levels with ever increasing subtlety. Each level might be more strongly somatic (physical, north pole of our magnet) or more strongly significant (mental, south pole of our magnet) but it is impossible to have the content of somasignificance as purely somatic or purely significant. Meaning is inherent as the totality, as the whole. Thus, on a wider scale the whole of the material environment in which we live is an interaction or flux between soma and significance. It can therefore be seen that the physical is directly affected by the mental in one unbroken field. The levels of somasignificance can reach indefinite depths of subtlety both as they become more significant and as they become more somatic, however, there is no bottom level at which they part company. In other words there is no absolute frame of reference either in the heights of knowledge (for all theories must always grow and evolve) or in the depths of substance, for not only is mind something which cannot be pinned down to an exact meaning so is matter. Quantum mechanics is indicative of this limit on the physical plane, their is no unambiguous bottom level here. The very idea of what is meant by electrons and quarks is called into question and is bound up with what we decide to observe. This meaning is not dependent on humanity but is implicit in the unity of somasignificance. Thus, In a sense the universe itself can be seen as a kind of meaning. What is crucially important in Bohms work is his idea that human beings are potentially able to create new meanings between the somasignificance relationship and that these new meanings constitute a genuinely creative act. Not only does this creative act affect the sphere of the individual but because of the unbroken field of connection between soma and significance it influences the entire system which constitutes our universe.
It is interesting to compare the ideas of Bohms creativity with those ideas of Kants on Beauty. In his Critique of Judgement Kant asserts that the perception of beauty can be something more than just a statement of taste or opinion.
“When a person judges something to be beautiful, imagination, perception and understanding are in harmony; there is a harmony of the experienced object with mental structure. [Where these mental structures refer to the categories of the understanding previously defined]” -Christopher Furlong, Kant.
Bohm also talks about an interactive discovery between the inner perceptions (significance) and its somatic polarity where new meaning is the result of their harmonious self reference and can extend to ever greater levels of subtlety. Perhaps then the idea of beauty in this abstract sense is not misplaced in the creative act. Although David Bohms ideas relate an in-depth theory of connection between mind and body and ultimately between substance and significance it is not altogether clear how the parts or organs of this holistic system come to act together in harmony. This is where another and perhaps potentially more useful theory of the connection between mind and substance can come into play in Rupert Sheldrakes Morphic Fields. This in itself is a complex hypothesis but its basis can be illustrated quite simply. (The figure shows the organisational patterns of Morphic fields) Sheldrake turns to the idea of fields (which can be viewed here as similar to Bohms significance or the mental pole of the somasignificance unity), these fields are inherent in the physical and act as an organizing principle on every level. If we take as our example the human body, at the microscopic level the cells of the body are organized by lower level morphic fields, these fields are in turn contained within the morphic fields of the organs which the cells make up. These fields are then contained within a field which organises the individual and so on and so forth. This interaction does not stop at the personal level but can link individuals within a family and a society to the extension of the entire system of our universe. This again is not dissimilar to Bohms idea of somasignificance creating one universal and unbroken field and also correlates well with the idea of the collective unconscious and Arthur Koestlers idea of holons.
Matter and energy can be seen to make up any number of forms, but just because the correct building blocks are there does not imply that anything will be built. As Sheldrake points out, “This is rather like delivering the right materials to a building site at the right times and expecting a house to grow spontaneously.” What makes the crucial difference is how this material is organised and this coordinating principle is provided by morphic fields. Morphic fields can account for the development of a fertilized egg to regeneration by acting as an holistic coordinator which the genes effectively tune into. Each species has its own morphogenetic field and organs and characteristics are built up through valleys within a field leading to a certain developmental end point. The structure of the fields depends on the history of the organism, where the more similar an organism is to previous organisms the greater their influence on it and the more such organisms there have been the more powerful the cumulative effect. The present identity of any particular organism cannot be defined exactly, just as a quantum variable and Bohms bottom level cannot be pinned to a precise meaning or value. Identity is more like a smear of probabilities where its persistence depends on a continuous process of resonance with the fields of the organisms past. what is most fundamental from a human point of view is human evolution itself; if we are to accept Darwins theory then the human race is virtually preventing its own development by artificially sustaining and breeding from weak stock. However, morphic fields allow for an entirely new approach to human progress and one which is fundamental to the very concept of art as evolution. Morphic fields suggest the idea of memory (defined here as the totality of experience up until this point in time) both individually and collectively as being stored in something other than material traces. Memory could be seen to result from morphic resonance between morphic fields organizing patterns of activity within the nervous system now and morphic fields organising similar patterns in the past. It should thus be possible for the habit memories of one organism to influence another by morphic resonance. Morphic fields from past generations could organise the general expression of behaviour and would thus result in accelerated learning if an animal was required to act in a situation which has been tackled many times before by other similar animals. Thus, in a sense Sheldrake leads to the idea that human evolution is not simply a matter of chance variation of genes but also via resonance of his morphic fields.
Now although this hypothesis can account for the regularities of nature it cannot explain how new patterns of organization can come about. The creation of a new morphic field at this point can only be seen as a jump or synthesis from the old. It is at this point however that I see the role of creativity coming into play and in particular how the effects of individual creativity can literally resonate throughout the entire human species. What though is meant by the idea of creativity? If we consider that all biological life has the potential to be creative, that is to evolve into new and novel forms, what is it that defines this life. This is a notoriously difficult question to answer and the potential list would certainly contain ideas relating to complexity, organization, uniqueness, holism, unpredictably, evolution, interconnection, disequilibrium and possibly teleology.
What I am most interested in here is the idea that living organisms exist far from equilibrium via a certain openness with their surrounding environment. Dissipative structures (the term he uses to name such open systems) exist like pockets of order feeding and sustaining themselves by creating even greater disorder in their environments by dissipating waste. In this way we can see that such structures do not in anyway violate the second law of thermodynamics; biological life is still increasing in order but within a certain time frame. The universe is in essence running down the slope of disorder and dissipative structures must kick up their heels and make the most of the time span available to them. Thus it would seem that a living organism is open to its environment in the sense that it requires a continual throughput of energy, but closed in the sense that it maintains its own inherent pattern of complexity.
The term complexity has been used here in relation to living systems and its definition is important in the understanding of exactly what are the most likely constituents of a dissipative structure. The word itself signifies entwined, twisted together and its use here is defined by a delicate balance between distinction and connection. In the process of any art, there is a process of pattern creation which relies on similar ideas of symmetry and repetition (connection) and to avoid stagnation variety (distinction). Imagine a sphere, add a lump and it becomes less symmetrical, add two eyes and there is another symmetry break, however it obtains characteristics. Make so many changes that it becomes chaotic then again it becomes as characterless as the perfect sphere. Thus we can see that these two opposites once again form the two extremes of a whole, a point source expanded into countless possibilities bears the poles of one thing and essentially no-thing for all such possibilities are relative.
Thus for continuity the universe requires the dynamics of repetition and rhythm to maintain forms and ideas in existence, for innovation and evolution we require a chaotic influence. Hence the spiral of DNA which is a composite of two ideas. The circle which represents continuity and eternity and the line representing evolution through a succession of events in time, for in the dimension of time one cannot draw a circle only a spiral.
“Complexity can only exist if both aspects are present: neither perfect disorder (which can be described statistically through the law of large numbers) nor perfect order (which can be described by traditional deterministic methods) are complex. It can thus be said to be situated in between order and disorder, or, using a recently fashionable expression, on the edge of chaos.” -F. Heylighen, Principia Cybernetica Web.
Thus as Bohm pointed out, anything living must exist on that delicate line between the finite and the infinite, between order and chaos. This delicate balance is maintained by an organism being very sensitive to its own life conditions, in effect through feedback loops. In this way the input of a living system is circularly connected to its own output which thus acts to regulate and sustain the entire organism. This process is directly connected to the circularity of nature proposed before and is not just restricted to that which is considered biologically alive. It can be witnessed in the more encompassing cycles of the seasons, the cycles of life and death and the cycles of day and night. It is this circular organisation which is the basis of living organisation and it is from this basis that Humberto Maturana (Chilean neuroscientist) declared that any such system can be seen to be taking part in the process of cognition.
“Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system.” -Maturana, Biology of Cognition.
These ideas of feedback and process open up a vast array of systems to the possibility of being essentially alive. Anything which is involved in the circular activity of self organisation can be placed within this class and it is from this basis that the theory of Gaia sprang. The earth can be viewed as a vast organism with the troposphere acting as a circularity system, the rainforests as lungs etc. Perhaps then Aristotle was not so wrong when he suggested their is a purpose behind everything in nature. It rains because the plants need moisture to grow, the temperature is kept within certain levels to allow biological organisms to survive and reproduce. Evolution would thus seem to be characterised by cooperation as well as survival of the fittest. We can thus see how it is that a living structure sustains and organises itself through its own circular feedback, but this in itself does not indicate any criteria for creativity or novelty.
In the spiral of life we have explored its repetition but we have not grasped the arrow whose flight is the process of evolution. In any system which sustains itself through feedback there is always a danger that this feedback will self-amplify pushing the organism further and further from equilibrium. This possibility is in a sense a crisis point for the system, a point of either make or break. However, it is also at this point that the organism can dip into the river of chaos and pull back something truly creative. These crisis points are technically known as bifurcation points and are dependent on the entire history of the system as well as a potentially limitless array of external conditions. It is at this moment that life becomes inherently unpredictable, the laws of determinism just do not apply here. The bifurcation point represents a collection of possible paths, not unlike the branching out of a tree, where each path leads to a potentially higher state of complexity. In essence then we see mind or significance acting with soma or substance in its own circular feedback loop where the whole organism can be seen to be sustained by a process of feedback and pushed forward by crisis points where the finite is forced to reach into the infinite or Inyat khans idea of the vacuum.
However, how does such a theory reflect onto a more human level. Firstly, it is important to grasp that the idea of the infinite or of Chaos is not to be confused with the disorder brought about by entropy. Disorder in this sense is truly empty in that it contains no information, it has reached a basin of least resistance both probabilistically and energetically, here transformation into higher levels of complexity becomes impossible. Chaos on the other hand is undefined potential, energy on the very edge of transformation, and it is along this edge which any creative organism, including man must live. This state of being is the natural course of any individual and yet it is rarely found in the human race. From the point of birth onwards our lives are very much an act of repression in order to facilitate the workings of the social machine. This very process of being alive is also hallmarked by uniqueness and individuality. Although we exist in an intimate network every human being has the potential for unrivalled autonomy, much as the organs in the body all have their unique role to play. By denying this uniqueness we choose the comfort of our mass produced, and plastic realities. In the shopping malls of our consumer world there is no need to think for oneself, to reach into the unknown. Life has become sanitised, we have tried to remove all sense and possibility of danger and in so doing have encountered the most fundamental danger of all: suffocation and death in the closed, in the finite, and in the monotony of repetition. The play of the infinite with the individual is about a resultant variety and diversity not a herd mentality. As Kierkegaard would have said, the crowd is the untruth or the truth is always in the minority..
It is interesting to note that the Chinese ideogram for crisis incorporates both the idea of danger and of opportunity. Without crisis or danger there is nothing to push us from our zones of comfort, nothing which causes us to break old stereotypes and taboos. Thus it would seem that we are in need of a revolution but perhaps on an individual scale. An upheaval which will force each in their own way to forget about comfort and control and to discover what is their own real course in life. Any kind of revolution is usually greeted by fear on all levels of society and, of course, especially by those whose best interests are served by maintaining the status quo. But revolution need not be as all encompassing as the English reformation or a civil war, it can be as simple as waking up one morning with the intention of changing a deep-seated habit. Such small scale rebellion is often associated with youth, and in a society obsessed by maintaining youth, it is this flexibility and freshness which is probably the most important thing to conserve and the one thing which is most often overlooked. The punk, the underground artist, the experimental musician, the political anarchist and the comedian, they all act to remind us of the danger of too many preconceptions.
We each emerge from the actions of the whole cosmos but individually our interactions with that cosmos constitute our own unique reality of meaning. Society tries to force on every individual only one reality, only one right way to be. There can be no such right or wrong way of being only an appropriate way which varies as does every facet of humanity. Social repression is the worst repression of all because it tears the individual in two. Men and women exist as gregarious and social beings who are drawn to the fellowship of the group, however they also seek creativity, autonomy and the possibility of constant personal evolution. When society demands that the individual deny this personal evolution then a tension is produced between the desire for companionship and the desire to be whole. It is unfortunate that most individuals when placed in this position would not choose ostracism even in the face of some quite appalling human crimes. In spite of these criticisms of our society, our science and our language, they all serve to suggest a unique possibility for every human being. They are an indication of our transcendence of mere instinct and yet they also represent a partial separation from what is natural to us. The animal lives in nature, and is of nature; man in a sense transcends nature and is aware of himself as separate, in the words of Eric Fromm “He has to live his life, he is not lived by it.”. Thus, although the intellect is by its very nature is finite and relative its symbolic nature can, if used properly, serve as a spring board into something wider. In effect the mind can reflect a map of the truth and if navigated properly can be used to negotiate an effective point of contact with a kind of consciousness which lies beyond the intellect and beyond the instincts of the animal or the child. This wider consciousness is literally that; the linearity of the intellect can map it and point it out but this consciousness in itself is a matter of direct experience. It involves the whole man freed from social repression and thus able to interact with his root source in an explicit way. It is the union of subject and object, finite and infinite which leads to the direct awareness of the whole here and now. There is no linear description here, only the complete awareness of the martial artist. This is the essence of life, a dynamic system, autonomous and self organising and yet completely open to its environment in a way which allows for spontaneous evolution. This is also the inherent power of life, the power for complete awareness and the power to make changes both on a microcosmic and macrocosmic level.
However, the choices that a living system makes at any one time are intrinsically connected to the fluctuations in its environment as well as its entire history. Thus we see the idea of Karma coming into play; there are no morals here but any decision made is based on the totality of past actions. Thus we carry past experience with us and this past is in constant feedback with the universe to which we are connected. Only by making full use of each and every moment can we be released from the memory of lost opportunity- regret. Thus, this process of being is about efficiency in its purest sense, obtaining the most possible from any given instant whilst expending the least amount of energy. It is about following ones natural course in full consciousness. Politically speaking this is an expression of absolute anarchy, it follows the ideas of Kropotkin who saw that if everyone was allowed to follow and find who and what they really are, a harmonious social order would arise as a matter of course. This can be compared with an ecosystem which, containing a myriad of different plants and animals can still adjust and regulate itself as a whole if their is no artificial interference. What is meant by artificial here is something forced or intellectually imposed. Thus the problem with most political systems is that they try to institute a fixed system or way of life for all, which is rather like forcing every cell in the body to form only a kidney or a lung. What is required is the provision of an environment which allows the individual to function freely and to naturally find his own place within the whole organism. This idea of natural is not to be confused with want for this utopian vision is clouded by the unfortunate fact that what we want is usually related to feeding and sustaining our social repressions. It is more akin to the idea of Will, which is a much more fundamental and primary force.
What is important in this discussion is the realization that the freedom of humanity creates an environment where the kind of creativity touched upon within systems theory becomes possible. By existing in an unforced and natural manner we live in an open state with our environment, thus allowing us to touch Chaos and to be truly creative in a totally undetermined way. To use scientific terminology, we could say that the creative act is responsible for the birth of a new morphic field or in less abstract terms for the evolution of the human race. It has been my implicit desire here to span the divide between mind and body and between the individual and the cosmos. In so doing it becomes clear that evolution is not just bound to some mechanical genetic process but that the creativity of the individual, which can be released in everyone and anyone, is the true driving force behind the growth of our universe. Everything one does is implicitly linked to the totality of our cosmos and thus the creativity of one person can influence the whole. It is also no longer relevant to question whether this creativity has its roots in the mental or the physical for they are just polarities of one system which cannot be divided. Thus it would seem that to live ones life ,br>
as art can truly be evolution.
Lila Nicola Siddons is an artist and researcher with a background in magick, philosophy, yoga and physics. She is currently living in Manchester.