Aesthetics is the creation and appreciation of beauty. It can find expression in any number of ways, including drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, tapestry, beautiful furniture, music, writing, prose or poetry, dance, computer images, film, scientific formulae, a form of mathematical aesthetics, and supremely in the living of one's life.

Exploration

Aesthetics is a fruitful way of exploring one's personal being, of entering upon the journey of self-discovery. It helps us gain access to the essence of the body/self, and, particularly, to feelings and emotions. It is also a bodily expression of, and a ritualization of, what is discovered. It helps us escape the prison of the mind, which blinds us to those dimensions of reality that lie beyond mental constructs.

Expression

Aesthetics is also a means of expression. Exploration and expression are intertwined.

One difference between the two is that expression is often public; we express ourselves to others. While the presence of another can sometimes inhibit inner exploration, if it distracts us or subverts our authenticity, it may also assist us. It can do this in two ways. First, the presence of an empathetic other may help us gain access to aspects of the shadow self. The art of the therapist may enhance the artistry of the client, giving depth to their self-understanding and a new competence to their self-management. Second, an audience can sometimes draw the best from us. The success of preaching depends as much on the readiness and participation of those listening as it does on the skill and the preparation of the preacher.

Appreciation

Aesthetics also has to do with appreciation. Not only are we capable of producing beautiful things, we are also able to appreciate the artistry of others. What they produce may enhance what we contribute to the general good. Karl Barth listened to Mozart while developing theological insights.

The Dynamics of Aesthetics

The dynamics of aesthetics involves two parallel movements, letting go and tuning in. Letting go involves the relinquishment of conscious control. Tuning in is a matter of cultivating an attitude of attentiveness. Both represent an aspect of flowing with the Tao. [175]

Images are birthed in us. They are given and received.

I remember reading, many years ago, The Soul's Sincere Desire, by Glen Clark. In dealing with prayer, Clark argued that if we approach God in an attitude of patient anticipation, openness and receptivity, helpful ideas will often come to us fully developed.¹ While our unconscious minds will undoubtedly have played a part in this process, we will recognize the giftedness of this expression of divine grace. I have sometimes found that addresses have come to me in this way, complete and seemingly out of the blue.

True art is not contrived, in the sense of being totally controlled by us. I enjoy writing poetry. If I attempt to work out before-hand what I want to say, and then proceed to search for images to express it, the poetry is wooden. It lacks life. What I have committed myself to doing is flowing with my feelings. I centre myself, an image begins to emerge and I flow with it. I find the end of the string and I begin to pull it from my being. It unravels, in its own dynamic energy, onto the page. This sort of poetry pulses with life. It has chosen me. I have not consciously chosen it.

I work in this same way with dream analysis. While it is helpful for someone interpreting dreams to be familiar with the academic and biographical literature on dream interpretation, and to have worked with a competent analyst, exploring the many layers of meaning in the symbolic language of dreams will benefit from a developed intuitive capacity that is able to dance with the symbols.

Scientific exploration proceeds by this same route.

The classic example of this is the work of Michael Faraday. Faraday had no training in mathematics and was ignorant of all but the simplest elements of arithmetic. Yet, with his visual imagination he saw the stresses surrounding magnets and pictured electric currents as curves in space, which he described as lines of force. He saw the universe made up of these lines of force and pictured light as an electromagnetic radiation. We owe to Faraday the development of the dynamo and the electric motor. In 1881, Herman von Helmholtz, the greatest mathematician of his day, paid homage to Faraday's remarkable ability. In his Faraday Memorial Lecture, he argued that Faraday developed a large number of general theorems, the deduction of which required the highest powers of mathematical analysis without the help of a single mathematical formula. The insights came to him intuitively.²

Einstein, reflecting on his own process of creativity, argued that word and language didn't play any role in his mechanisms of thought, but came later, in a secondary stage, when he laboured to express what had come to him intuitively.³ No less intriguing was Mozart's comment on the way in which he composed music. As his mind began to excite over the project, his subject [176] enlarged itself and presented itself to him complete, in finished form. He did not hear the parts successively. He heard them all at once.⁴

Max Knoll, a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton, speaking of ideas that come to us full-blown, usually in a state of relaxation and often after a period of meditation, argues for the existence of a special intuitive function.⁵ Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall see this phenomenon as a manifestation of the quantum potential of the human mind.⁶

Aesthetics, or creativity, while it is not without effort or preparation, results from contact, both with one's inner being and with the larger Self that gifts us with freedom, life and the potential for maturation. It is both an expression of one's spirituality and a fostering of it. [177]

[SFM 175-177]