Limitless Fire

Krishnamurti, The Flame of Attention, Harper & Row, 1984.

p. 15: “Thinking is a process born out of experience and knowledge. Listen to it quietly, see if that is not true, actual; then you discover it for yourself as though the speaker is acting as a mirror in which you see for yourself exactly what is, without distortion; then throw the mirror away or break it up. Thinking starts from experience which becomes knowledge stored up in the cells of the brain as memory; then from memory there is thought and action. Please see this for yourself, do not repeat what I say. This sequence is an actual fact: experience, knowledge, memory, thought, action. Then from that action you learn more; so there is a cycle and that is our chain.”

p. 22: “The word ‘discipline’ comes from the word disciple, the disciple whose mind is learning-not from a particular person, a guru, or from a teacher, or preacher, or from books but learning through the observation of his own mind, of his own heart, learning from his own actions. And that learning requires a certain discipline, but not the conformity most disciplines are understood to require. When there is conformity, obedience, and imitation, there is never the act of learning, there is merely following. Discipline implies learning, learning from the very complex mind one has, from the life of daily existence, learning about relationship with each other, so that the mind is always pliable, active.”

OBSERVATION: Neural plasticity: As thinking beings we are always challenged with this process of observing our own thought process. Krishnamurti points out that we must exhibit personal discipline, and personal responsibility for this process of learning, and that we must be careful to not defer this reponsibility to other persons, or materials. Through the proper application of direct processes, we have the capacity to act upon learning, and while some of these processes are automatic and unconscious, others are precisely calculated conscious processes.

Read, Art & Society, Schocken, 1968.

p. 102, ‘The best instance to quote is perhaps the description of a poet which Socrates gives in Ion: ‘For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains; but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles.’ 1 Jowett’s translation

OBSERVATION: Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud continue this line of thinking with their investigations into the mechanics of the psyche. Both psychologists defined aspects of the workings of the human mind in the realm of art. Jung, ed., Man and his Symbols, Aldus, 1964, has a variety of essays dealing with this subject.

Jean Cocteau, in his Orphic Trilogy, Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1949), and Testament of Orpheus (1960) looks into the description of the poet, as Orpheus (that mythic being who possesses the power of poetry and who can keep the awesome powers of Hell at bay with his words, and lyricism), states, ‘I am a writer who does not write’. Jean Cocteau, Orphic Trilogy (three films) dvd available through Criterion films.

Socrates’ reference to bees continues in the twentieth century in the work of Joseph Beuys. Beuys understood and expressed much interest in the life of bees, as evidenced in several works, and especially in his Honey Pump in the Workplace 1974-1977. (Honigpump). Beuys stated ‘The generation of energy means the production of warmth and hence the link with social sculpture.’ Beuys Honeypump in the Workplace was installed at documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany pumping two tons of honey for 100 days. (honey) as energy, and (heat) generated by the machine.

INVINCIBLE BOX 2009: MEMORY OF 1963

Past, Present, Future: It all exists. Materials can be organized to contain ideas relevant to history, relevant to contemporary culture, and all related to how human beings think and react to organized stimuli. The language of idea and material is moved from outside oneself, recognized by sensing systems, where data is transferred and processed by the higher functions of the brain. The aesthetic experience takes action, coming alive within the conceptual framework of the participant, connecting neural networks, forming new pathways to the yet unknown.

‘THE EUCHARIST INCLUDES THE RELATIONS OF MEANING WHICH THE ELEMENTS GENERATE IN THE MINDS OF THOSE WHO EAT THEM’

Fuller, Beyond the Crisis in Art, Writers and Readers, 1980.

p. 221 “I have to take you into the relations existing between ideology and perception, because it is here that I find my own critical criteria.
The consciousness of men and women, of which their ‘ways of seeing’ form a part, is self-evidently subejct to continuous change and development…..Since it would be absurd to assume that modifications in ways of seeing were solely the product of the inexorably slow biological evolution of the human perceptual apparatus, I conclude that the dominant mode of peception–the way in which objects are seen–at a given historical moment, and also those modes which oppose themselves to that which is dominant, are themselves determined by historical forces.
Let me give a single example. In the seventeenth century, soon after the discovery of the microscope, scientists began to study human spermatazoa beneath the lens. Within each individual sperm, they reported seeing a homunculus, that is a diminutive but fully formed little man, within whom, they claimed, was another homunculus, and so on, ad infinitum…..It is not, and I would stress this, a question of saying that their ideology pervaded and distorted what they thought about what they saw. The distinction between perception and cognition had vanished….their perception itself was forced to conform to an elaborate degree with their pre-existing framework of prejudices. If this is sometimes (and perhaps more often than is usually admitted) true of scientists, actively trying to identify the attributes of objects, we may readily understand how much more true it is of perception exercised within the territory of aesthetics; here, we find that what people see is very often simply swarming with homunculi, as the art columns of our Sunday newspapers demonstrate week after week.”

OBSERVATION: Bias, and subjectivity actively form personal opinion. The statement ‘anything can be art’, is an interesting entry point for examining what art is. Is everything art? Can anything be art? Perhaps anything and everything can be art, though we might observe that not everything is art. Every standard, definition, context, and connotation of the word (art) must be held under severe scrutiny in order to fully comprehend a genuine meaning. The base of knowledge and experience brought to the aesthetic encounter determines the level, or levels of cognitive and perceptual contact activated by such an encounter. What one sees, and what one perceives in an aesthetic encounter result from accumulated life experience, sensory capability, and the ability for every person to participate fully in such an experience.

KOHLER, The Mentality of Apes, Harcourt, Brace & Co., NY, 1925. p. 190-91

“We can, in our own experience, distinguish sharply between the kind of behavior which from the very beginning arises out of a consideration of the structure of a situation, and one that does not. Only in the former case do we speak of insight, and only that behavior of animals definitely appears to us intelligent which takes account from the beginning of the lay of the land, and proceeds to deal with it in a single, continuous course. Hence follows this criterion of insight: the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole lay-out of the field. The contrast of the above theory (parts put together by chance) is absolute: if there the “natural fractions” were neither coherent with the structure of the situation, nor among themselves, then here a coherence1 of the “curve of solution” in itself, and with the optical situation, is absolutely required.

(To anyone who is inclined to regard the above explanations as detailed trivialities, I would suggest a glance through the psychological literature of man and animal. These trivialities should be thoroughly emphasized; in the first place, they are not always clearly understood, but are seen only through a veil of general principles2, and secondly, the last part, about insight, appears to some students not at all obvious, but rather as a sort of belief in miracles. No such superstition is meant or prepared here, and nothing that has been said involves it in the slightest.)

1 The physicists have no word that fits exactly. We use the term “Coherence” from the theory of radiation as being the least inappropriate.

2 E Wasserman, e.g. Die psychischen Fahigketen der Ameisen, 2nd ed., 1909, p. 108, seqq, has sharply defined this contrast. But he absolutely denies intelligence in animals, and further points to a logical theory of intelligent conduct (intelligence) in the case of man, which I cannot accept. O. Selz, Die Gesetze des geordneten Denkverlaufs, I., 1913, treats of reproductive thought in man from a point of view somewhat related to mine.”

Observation: Katz and Kohler brought to light the concepts of gestalt psychology in the 1930′s. Clearly Kohler had already been thinking about archetypes in human thinking earlier in the twentieth century. The quote listed above brings to mind important ideas about an attempt to define (in words and concepts) the process called insight. Much like the intellectual process of intuition, insight is that ephemeral process that does seem magical, though brilliant psychologists, such as Kohler, try to define this process clearly without allusion to miracles.

Recently, some discussion has described information that is lost, or obscure from access. The statements quoted above were selected to bring knowledge held deep within books and libraries to the interested reader.

How the mind collates data is sometimes difficult to define. The mind constantly extracts information from past experience, recombining bits of data, ultimately transforming them in the creative process. The conscious mind acts upon these ideas in conjunction with bodily action bringing the concepts to life in various media.

Message from Steve can be read on many levels:  childhood, family, mother, the bringer of life, sustenance, bilateral symmetry, cloning, material, process, action, etc.

Message From Steve