Excerpts from Experts (perceptual processes; symbolic thought)
The content of Eye and Mind Studio concerns two primary investigations that lead deeper and deeper into natural systems. We do so to discover a profound source of our own individual being, and the meanings thereby actualized for it and by it. These are traced (like the rest of existence) to the ineffable ground of mind and process itself – which is to say that mystery-of-mysteries that transcends both the perceptual facts of our specialized existence, and the conceptual ideas we must build to structure them into a world.
The two themes expressed in various forms of art, prose and metaphor on this site are (1) a proper appreciation of the active and pre-conscious nature of perceptual processes, whereby the first whispers of our individual being ever-emerge by way of a creative and formative dialogue with our physical and social environments, and (2) the fundamental and overwhelming manner those early sentient processes are shuttled into symbolic processes – in fact a symbolic world – by the human proclivity to reflexively live its concepts, ideas, and ‘meanings’. We live our concepts more abundantly than the actual perceptual, motor, or feeling-based experiences; experiences whose fruition and maturation in the human animale symbolica, requires that they be selected into the abstract constructs of thought: which is to say into meanings already deeply sedimented and lived. We are meaning generators; such is the rich and creative habitat we naturally occupy.
The effort here is at once part of a spiritual, a philosophical, and an
expressive journey – though it is the scientific world that provides
the confident material with which I too seek to describe a set of ideas
to indwell. Nonetheless I can only hint to that transcendent mystery embodying
every active process of the physical universe – and the stillness
from which they arise. An honest assessment of many of our modern sciences
discloses to our rational minds the non-rational: ultimate horizons of
potentials-to-be lying underneath that which has been actualized. These
in turn, seem to be invoked by relations, by interactions and by active
solicitations to gain and sediment greater measures of being according
to that which already is. We call that the coherent manifestation of form
according to physical law. But we discover no isolated forms, only processes
ever in transformation. Organic being is itself always becoming, never
fully become. And yet, although we have used the term non-rational in
our description of nature’s depths, we do not mean incoherent, for
nature in its entirety (as we can know it) is through-and-through coherent
physical processing. And it has achieved being. It is precisely for that
reason – and because the convergence of every horizon: that of space,
time, causality – each a process in relation with others –
points ever beyond that which ‘is’ to a horizon that cannot
be properly conceived, let alone perceived. Such is the real, even I dare
say ‘empirical’ grounding for employing a term for that which
we all seek: the transcendent mystery. Instead of taking the humble stance
of the Orient which proclaims, as our scientific data actually suggests
regarding the nature of ultimate reality: “what it is
we cannot say” – Western positivism butchered
the active sense of profound understanding in the words ‘cannot
say’, not knowing it was a statement about the limits of conceptual
thinking itself, but assumed instead that it was an admittance of failure.
I make no such confident claims. What it is, I cannot say. But we are
called to the task to define and live our measure of it.
Excerpts from Experts (perceptual processes; symbolic thought)