Wow! Another wonderful essay! How do you keep doing it?
I wonder if the body itself is a portal for the imaginative realm? We focus so much on the products of the hands, the information from our eyes and our mouths, but what if we could listen to the more subtle energies flowing through us through the other parts of the body? Would that be the start of cleansing the doors of perception?
I definitely think that interoception and related phenomena carry super important information. Though on the level of art, I think you have to be quite careful when you're sourcing your meanings and messages very internally. Things can quite quickly get quite muddy. (I'm basing that on many years of reading unpublished manuscripts while working in publishing, plus some very bad writing I've done myself, in my time!) My teacher Alice says that "matter is a courtesy", and I love that. I love the work of being truly embodied and meeting the world/matter as truly other and embodied and miraculous for that fact.
Beautiful piece Eleanor, thank you! I especially like that phrase 'matter is a courtesy'.
These days I am thinking of art more and more as a kind of 'report from my body'. My body is both the instrument through which I perceive, & the means of expressing that perception. In a sense this way of thinking eliminates a great deal of egotistical weight. Just follow what interests you, then note what arises; just make a record.
So so brilliant Eleanor. The metaphor of how we've flattened and disintegrated and simplified the process of creation -- here, lets outsource the complexity of animating life force into little bits with uniform shapes that fit into each other on a two dimenisional plane no less!! Even our metaphors have become so anemic. We can start to re-member ourselves and our talismanic relationship to consciousness by starting to breathe life into these imaginal fields. puzzle piece into canvas, then canvas to sculpture, then sculpture to ritual theater.
What beautiful thoughts, and writing. Thank you so much for reading. Intrigued by the progression you trace at the end! I’m always intrigued by where the line is between ritual and theatre. x
Beautiful and inspiring. Art is the way we try to share our experience of the numinous. Words and even images fall short, but if the artist has let his heart show through, the viewer or reader gets an inkling and it may spark a resonance of that numen. True scientists experience the same thing and try to explain it by maths and rules, but the great ones never lose their sense of awe and wonder. Take the most powerful force in the universe: love. Everyone feels it but no one has been able to define it. A psychologist might say it's putting someone else's welfare above your own. A romantic might say it's being two halves of a whole. A scientist might call it gravitic attraction or the affinity of one element for another. None of these give the complete picture, or even a fuzzy photo. It's something that just is, that has to be lived and experienced and created.
While the rational/scientific inquiry seems to have a goal of replicability, seeking to fine tune a picture that everyone can agree on, so the world looks the same to everyone (which does have concrete and practical value)…..the profound gift/insight of this broader imaginal/sculptural approach is that it engages the world from many different perspectives—with some deep sense that it’s in the synergy or accumulation or kaleidoscopic blending of all our different portals of perception and understanding and representation that we might cultivate a resonance with the “tissue of creation“ (per David Hinton).
While any given perspective or artistic representation may be fuzzy/imprecise/incomplete, by sharing the fruits of our creative/artistic inquiries, we create the opportunity to collectively see/know/feel, embracing many ways of seeing, kinds of knowing, and qualities of feeling….
Thank you, Ellie, for the dedication you’re showing to sculpt this magnificent wordweaving, which is always an integrative and expansive inspiration.
What beautiful thoughts. And yes, I totally agree. And also, I think this is why there’s such value in returning over and over again to the true greats. To Shakespeare and Dante and the rest. Because while there’s no such thing as objectivity, there are perspectives that are incredibly rich and expressions of them that keep unfolding more and more.
It's always exciting to see a new essay of yours pop up, Eleanor!
Lots that resonated here.
The title immediately made me think of Iain McGilchrist's account of the right and left hemispheres (in "The Master and his Emissary", which I'm working my way through rather slowly this year). I now see practically everything through this lens, but the jigsaw puzzle as left-brained view and sculpture as the right-brained approach clearly seems to fit.
- and a bit of the impetus for that came from your mention of Julian of Norwich as an "imaginal ancestor", which led me to buy her book, in which I was struck by the vision of "God in a point”, which took me back to my experience 25 years ago of feeling like there was "no distance between me and any other being, place or time". Some other links and references to this concept are in the post. I'm pretty sure Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum" (a book I don't have any more) contains something similar to what you've said here about the "flatlanders" and the idea that what we perceive as space could be the intersection of another dimension(s?) with our own.
And AI as "just a direct and obvious extension of a mistaken belief that modern, Western culture has been deepening into for at least half a millennium" - totally agree and said something kinda similar in yesterday's piece here - https://heronfeet.substack.com/p/on-artificial-and-natural-intelligence
Thanks for your patient and engaging work to help us perceive differently.
Wow — what an absolutely lovely and very generous response. Thank you. I’m so thrilled to know about your unfolding experiences, and that anything I’ve said might have helped with them. And yes, it’s a very McGilchrist dichotomy I’ve traced here, for sure. I think my philosopher friend was drawing on Heidegger’s ideas about poiesis and techne when he came up with the analogy. x
I like this. I think art is often seen as too fuzzy, too imprecise a guide for worlds beyond worlds. Compared to science, art lacks certitude and measurement. Why is there all this extra stuff in consciousness? So much seemingly unrelated feelings and sensations that have no direct link to survival. Is this extra stuff ripples of the worlds beyond?
Dear Eleanor, thank you this stimulating piece of writing. My attention was sparked by the mention of a new kind of science, or better of 'human inquiry'. I think we go quite a way to developing disciplines of inquiry based on experience (and drawing on imagination) in co-operative inquiry which I have been using to explore relations with Rivers as sentient (with colleagues and over 100 human and River co-participants).Co-operative inquiry adds a reflective dimension through cycles of inquiry If you are interested see my Substack postings at Learning How Land Speaks (peterreason.substack.com) and maybe best summarised here https://www.peterreason.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Sacred-as-Immanent-in-a-Sentient-World.pdf
Absolutely brilliant! This will support our future generations as we slowly shift into a new way of thinking about “reality”. It comes at a perfect time. I will turn to these ideas to support the ways we define the importance of art. I will bring this conversation to the Psychedelic Science Conference. Thank you for your passion and creativity 🙏
Yes, yes, and yes! So grateful to have this to read and re-read and embrace. I also love that your essays always send me to the library to place an inter-library loan request!
Oooh, so good! Beautifully written and lots to chew on as ever. In a lesser-but-still-perfectly-serviceable essay the idea of reality as a sculpture or painting rather than a jigsaw puzzle could have been the big reveal of the whole thing. But of course here it's only the beginning!
Thanks for the reminder to get back to listening to Lights On, which I took a pause on due to brain-leaking-from-eyeballs syndrome (I have a pigsty of a flat that needs cleaning today, so perfect timing). I was finding it completely fascinating, though. Everything I hear/read about modern physics seems to reaffirm that material reality vs some kind of separate divine, ineffable realm is a very arbitrary distinction. Material reality already contains countless other weird and incomprehensible realms. And as I think Harris says somewhere, anything that interacts with material reality counts as part of the material - so the 'divine' would not actually be something separate from us at all. And then there's the fact that when you push science to its limits it eventually starts to butt up against belief, as demonstrated very literally by a sentence I read in the New Scientist recently which began 'string theorists believe...'
I mean… I probably SHOULD have left it at the “reality is a sculpture” thing, instead of stalking off into string theory. I struggle with not being a maniac, I think. Always very all or nothing. No essay for months, then boom, here are 3k words that people probably don’t have time to read. Would like to get better at this!
Let me know how you get on with Lights On. Can’t remember if we discussed it when we met at the NT? I thought bits of it were breathtaking, bits mind-melting, bits a little bit silly. Which is all as it should be! x
This piece makes ME feel alive too, Eleanor! I'm struck by "..the nature of reality itself, to keep unfolding more creativity". That really is the essence of all life, to keep unfolding more creativity - and for us to recognize that the essence of that creativity moves equally, uniquely, within plankton, grizzly bears, humans(animals)... It comprises a sculpture of elemental kinship. Love it so much, perceiving the fabric of the universe in this way. Thank you so much for your way pointing and for peppering your work with humour! You're a true gem!
Ah Val, thank you so much! What a joy, to be read so kindly and with such enthusiasm. Thank you. And I love what you say about the essence of creativity moving through all living beings. x
Wow! Another wonderful essay! How do you keep doing it?
I wonder if the body itself is a portal for the imaginative realm? We focus so much on the products of the hands, the information from our eyes and our mouths, but what if we could listen to the more subtle energies flowing through us through the other parts of the body? Would that be the start of cleansing the doors of perception?
I definitely think that interoception and related phenomena carry super important information. Though on the level of art, I think you have to be quite careful when you're sourcing your meanings and messages very internally. Things can quite quickly get quite muddy. (I'm basing that on many years of reading unpublished manuscripts while working in publishing, plus some very bad writing I've done myself, in my time!) My teacher Alice says that "matter is a courtesy", and I love that. I love the work of being truly embodied and meeting the world/matter as truly other and embodied and miraculous for that fact.
Beautiful piece Eleanor, thank you! I especially like that phrase 'matter is a courtesy'.
These days I am thinking of art more and more as a kind of 'report from my body'. My body is both the instrument through which I perceive, & the means of expressing that perception. In a sense this way of thinking eliminates a great deal of egotistical weight. Just follow what interests you, then note what arises; just make a record.
yesss it is! I have found myths in my body from my ancestral lands -- I found it in my body first, then found the myth.
Here’s some proof that art can indeed intuit truths not immediately available to our ordinary senses.
https://www.space.com/van-gogh-starry-night-physics-accuracy
So so brilliant Eleanor. The metaphor of how we've flattened and disintegrated and simplified the process of creation -- here, lets outsource the complexity of animating life force into little bits with uniform shapes that fit into each other on a two dimenisional plane no less!! Even our metaphors have become so anemic. We can start to re-member ourselves and our talismanic relationship to consciousness by starting to breathe life into these imaginal fields. puzzle piece into canvas, then canvas to sculpture, then sculpture to ritual theater.
What beautiful thoughts, and writing. Thank you so much for reading. Intrigued by the progression you trace at the end! I’m always intrigued by where the line is between ritual and theatre. x
I'm working on sussing it out here: https://marijeanelizabeth.substack.com/p/sinners-kendrick-lamars-halftime
Beautiful and inspiring. Art is the way we try to share our experience of the numinous. Words and even images fall short, but if the artist has let his heart show through, the viewer or reader gets an inkling and it may spark a resonance of that numen. True scientists experience the same thing and try to explain it by maths and rules, but the great ones never lose their sense of awe and wonder. Take the most powerful force in the universe: love. Everyone feels it but no one has been able to define it. A psychologist might say it's putting someone else's welfare above your own. A romantic might say it's being two halves of a whole. A scientist might call it gravitic attraction or the affinity of one element for another. None of these give the complete picture, or even a fuzzy photo. It's something that just is, that has to be lived and experienced and created.
While the rational/scientific inquiry seems to have a goal of replicability, seeking to fine tune a picture that everyone can agree on, so the world looks the same to everyone (which does have concrete and practical value)…..the profound gift/insight of this broader imaginal/sculptural approach is that it engages the world from many different perspectives—with some deep sense that it’s in the synergy or accumulation or kaleidoscopic blending of all our different portals of perception and understanding and representation that we might cultivate a resonance with the “tissue of creation“ (per David Hinton).
While any given perspective or artistic representation may be fuzzy/imprecise/incomplete, by sharing the fruits of our creative/artistic inquiries, we create the opportunity to collectively see/know/feel, embracing many ways of seeing, kinds of knowing, and qualities of feeling….
Thank you, Ellie, for the dedication you’re showing to sculpt this magnificent wordweaving, which is always an integrative and expansive inspiration.
What beautiful thoughts. And yes, I totally agree. And also, I think this is why there’s such value in returning over and over again to the true greats. To Shakespeare and Dante and the rest. Because while there’s no such thing as objectivity, there are perspectives that are incredibly rich and expressions of them that keep unfolding more and more.
Thanks so much for your very generous read!
Yes, your reference to Shakespeare is especially eye-opening for me!
It's always exciting to see a new essay of yours pop up, Eleanor!
Lots that resonated here.
The title immediately made me think of Iain McGilchrist's account of the right and left hemispheres (in "The Master and his Emissary", which I'm working my way through rather slowly this year). I now see practically everything through this lens, but the jigsaw puzzle as left-brained view and sculpture as the right-brained approach clearly seems to fit.
I wrote about my own experiences of sensing that "space is an illusion and everything is right here" a couple of months ago: https://heronfeet.substack.com/p/the-whole-point
- and a bit of the impetus for that came from your mention of Julian of Norwich as an "imaginal ancestor", which led me to buy her book, in which I was struck by the vision of "God in a point”, which took me back to my experience 25 years ago of feeling like there was "no distance between me and any other being, place or time". Some other links and references to this concept are in the post. I'm pretty sure Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum" (a book I don't have any more) contains something similar to what you've said here about the "flatlanders" and the idea that what we perceive as space could be the intersection of another dimension(s?) with our own.
And AI as "just a direct and obvious extension of a mistaken belief that modern, Western culture has been deepening into for at least half a millennium" - totally agree and said something kinda similar in yesterday's piece here - https://heronfeet.substack.com/p/on-artificial-and-natural-intelligence
Thanks for your patient and engaging work to help us perceive differently.
Wow — what an absolutely lovely and very generous response. Thank you. I’m so thrilled to know about your unfolding experiences, and that anything I’ve said might have helped with them. And yes, it’s a very McGilchrist dichotomy I’ve traced here, for sure. I think my philosopher friend was drawing on Heidegger’s ideas about poiesis and techne when he came up with the analogy. x
I like this. I think art is often seen as too fuzzy, too imprecise a guide for worlds beyond worlds. Compared to science, art lacks certitude and measurement. Why is there all this extra stuff in consciousness? So much seemingly unrelated feelings and sensations that have no direct link to survival. Is this extra stuff ripples of the worlds beyond?
Dear Eleanor, thank you this stimulating piece of writing. My attention was sparked by the mention of a new kind of science, or better of 'human inquiry'. I think we go quite a way to developing disciplines of inquiry based on experience (and drawing on imagination) in co-operative inquiry which I have been using to explore relations with Rivers as sentient (with colleagues and over 100 human and River co-participants).Co-operative inquiry adds a reflective dimension through cycles of inquiry If you are interested see my Substack postings at Learning How Land Speaks (peterreason.substack.com) and maybe best summarised here https://www.peterreason.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Sacred-as-Immanent-in-a-Sentient-World.pdf
So interesting. Thanks, Peter, I’ll take a look. And thank you so much for reading. x
Well, the Multiverse has definitely collapsed... Thank you for this, Ellie <3 You explain it so well.
Thank you for reading xx
Absolutely brilliant! This will support our future generations as we slowly shift into a new way of thinking about “reality”. It comes at a perfect time. I will turn to these ideas to support the ways we define the importance of art. I will bring this conversation to the Psychedelic Science Conference. Thank you for your passion and creativity 🙏
Thank you so much! Makes me very happy that this one hit for you x
Yes, yes, and yes! So grateful to have this to read and re-read and embrace. I also love that your essays always send me to the library to place an inter-library loan request!
Ha! I love that too! What did this one prompt you to request? Would love to know. And thanks so much for your time and attention on this piece. xx
I'm requesting Eye of the Heart by Cynthia Bourgeault - curious to read it through this lens.
Oooh, so good! Beautifully written and lots to chew on as ever. In a lesser-but-still-perfectly-serviceable essay the idea of reality as a sculpture or painting rather than a jigsaw puzzle could have been the big reveal of the whole thing. But of course here it's only the beginning!
Thanks for the reminder to get back to listening to Lights On, which I took a pause on due to brain-leaking-from-eyeballs syndrome (I have a pigsty of a flat that needs cleaning today, so perfect timing). I was finding it completely fascinating, though. Everything I hear/read about modern physics seems to reaffirm that material reality vs some kind of separate divine, ineffable realm is a very arbitrary distinction. Material reality already contains countless other weird and incomprehensible realms. And as I think Harris says somewhere, anything that interacts with material reality counts as part of the material - so the 'divine' would not actually be something separate from us at all. And then there's the fact that when you push science to its limits it eventually starts to butt up against belief, as demonstrated very literally by a sentence I read in the New Scientist recently which began 'string theorists believe...'
I mean… I probably SHOULD have left it at the “reality is a sculpture” thing, instead of stalking off into string theory. I struggle with not being a maniac, I think. Always very all or nothing. No essay for months, then boom, here are 3k words that people probably don’t have time to read. Would like to get better at this!
Let me know how you get on with Lights On. Can’t remember if we discussed it when we met at the NT? I thought bits of it were breathtaking, bits mind-melting, bits a little bit silly. Which is all as it should be! x
Yes!
This piece makes ME feel alive too, Eleanor! I'm struck by "..the nature of reality itself, to keep unfolding more creativity". That really is the essence of all life, to keep unfolding more creativity - and for us to recognize that the essence of that creativity moves equally, uniquely, within plankton, grizzly bears, humans(animals)... It comprises a sculpture of elemental kinship. Love it so much, perceiving the fabric of the universe in this way. Thank you so much for your way pointing and for peppering your work with humour! You're a true gem!
Ah Val, thank you so much! What a joy, to be read so kindly and with such enthusiasm. Thank you. And I love what you say about the essence of creativity moving through all living beings. x
Fantastic. Needed this today.
Glad it found you, then! Thank you for reading. x
i am so relieved. it is so easy to forget! thank you
You’re very welcome! Thank you so much for reading. x
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