An old and honorable strand in monotheistic but king-ridden history is the idea of "natural religion" defined as studying creation (nature) in order to deduce what the Creator is like. Far earlier than that is the ability to create things ourselves. In the Sixties or so, the ability to create -- whether art or machine -- was considered a prime characteristic of intelligence and people wrote a lot of books about it. I have a half-shelf of samples. Most of them pushed the idea of combining two known things into something unexpected. This is the Picasso theory of found art, when a bicycle becomes a goat. The most obvious example here is the four pairs of Guardians at the four compass points of the Blackfeet rez which is conveniently squarish with highway entry from four different points. The splendid pairs by Jay Laber are made from the skins of junkyard autos.
Far earlier than all this, possibly Neanderthal, humans began making art, envisioning and making things that weren't there earlier. It's generally suggested that art is formed in the pre-optic forebrain, where the most advanced concepts are housed, but Neanderthals had only a small and undeveloped lobe in that spot. Creativity and art must happen in some other part of the brain.
We don't know whether apes can see beauty. It's clear that birds can see it, make it and wear it. It's an integral part of their sex lives. They can become symbols of holiness, like peace doves, or avatars of stupidity like domesticated fowl, or even the symbols of men, like cassowaries in New Guinea.
But beauty is a matter of both perception and culture and both are limited even between humans, overwhelmed by convictions and associations so that some humans believe that stretching their necks until they look like giraffes, binding women's feet until they can't walk, stretching ear lobes or lower lips, make the person more beautiful. Today's equivalent might be tattooes and metal inserts. The earliest art might be painting oneself. We only know what will fossilize.
Even as we find peculiar things beautiful, we also see the ugly, the horrifying, the preposterous, as part of art. It's the intensity we're after, pushing it towards "religious" ideology, meaning that which carries intense emotion, like a crucified person. But if depicted enough times in enough variations, we no longer react. If we are betrayed by what the image stands for, we are contemptuous and destructive, like burning flags or putting a crucifix into a jar of urine.
At what point does art cross over into religion, not because of a message from Heaven or in a book, but because of the aura around it, the emotion and memory it carries. There's no clear line. And there are blind alleys like obsessions or kinks. Or a turn to horror like killing babies.
When I was small, my bed was against a bookshelf and on the ledge closest to my eye-level, I kept a row of tiny ceramic cats. Also, a penguin and a sleeping spaniel. I moved them around, imagined them talking though I have no idea now what they said. Each object had for me some deep significance about life and its orderliness. My mother had no feelings about them -- they were nothing. Nor did she quite realize how I felt about them. She thought I was a bit delusional.
I deduce that some people do not see the "virtual" (unseen) meanings of things nor do they see that others are seeing them. It is a limited but recurring capacity. Not everyone evolves at the same pace or in the same way. They do not consider creations in order to figure out the Creator. Nor do they create. Things are just objects.
But wait. The point of this inquiry is not art per se, nor is it religion, which has turned into a human institutional reflex that yields aggression instead of peace. What I'm looking for is the capacity to feel the Holy. If one must have eyes in order to see. what in human beings allows some to feel the Holy? The religious would like the ability to confer importance, significance dictated by the pre-existing institutions, the really Big ones that formed around 1300 AD, maybe related to the idea of "nations." The ideas competed, umpired by the Pope, combining religion and kingships until the invention of the Secular, the separation of church and state. Some found that for them the king and country were a more potent ideology than Christianity or Judaism or Islam.
I'm looking for an intense experience of meaning, wholeness, and universal relationship. To some people, this is confined or defined by certain places or objects or people. But to other cultures everything is Holy and nothing is separated out as Taboo or Exalted.
"Fundamentally, it’s about seeing all of our struggles as interconnected, all of our destinies as interconnected, and therefore seeking to do one of the things that humans are uniquely good at, which is to be compassionate as a species." Julian Brave Noise Cat
A major issue in "religion" is that of the supernatural. A feature of the human mind is the ability to imagine a reality apart from ours and only present occasionally as magic. Thus miracles are a part of conceiving of the Holy. The new StarTrek Picard uses an excellent phrase for the experience of something powerful coming into one's being: "lightning seeking the ground." This is a transcendent, heaven-identified feeling using the electrical charge of clouds coming down with fire and explosion, since it is used in battle in the story. But there is an immanent side, leaping up from within the ground. A great electromagnetic release of tension? It's a new metaphor.
And now scientists propose that "reality" is just a matter of networks and patterns in the tumult of the brain, circuits of electromagnetic energy that create meaning. It begin during gestation, is guided by nurturing in the early years, finds a place in community and is shaped by the environment, and finally blossoms into making, possibly carriers of virtual meaning called "art". But how do we know who is able to "see" the Holy, and who is just faking it?
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