#23: The "location" of Transformation and the possibility of real and lasting positive global change...

    Real change is pretty scary business.  There is a great deal of pressure to lessen this fear, and even horror, by keeping the familiar around, even if it has not worked out very well.  Stepping into a true void not knowing what is coming next is often not a very good idea.  It is also probably essential in making any real and lasting change or true transformation.

    In a mixed media sculpture, entitled “Artificial Transformation”, I constructed a whimsical caterpillar that has made of itself a false butterfly.  The large plywood wings with gold tasseled pull cords give the impression of the impossibility of flight.  The stitched on face and tied on antennae, and a look of something dead or dying, represent the error of manufactured metamorphosis and the futility of making “the new” strictly by disguising the old.

    Real change means leaving the old behind.

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   Being a life long learner, enjoying critical thinking, and taking great joy in mystery, the idea of change seems natural and desirable and a source of bliss.  With great surprise and astonishment, my wildest dreams and fondest wishes fade away in the light of events and experiences that reach far beyond my conscious pictures and mental visions.  I have learned that not knowing who I am (in a grander sense) or what is going to happen can be a truly lovely thing.  The fear of the unknown is displaced by the love of mystery.  Transformation becomes a way of life.

    Change is a natural part of being alive.  In my philosophy, life, consciousness, the universe, and everything is inherently mysterious.  Maintaining a fluid and creative attitude offers a wider perspective and a broader range of perception with which to approach living.  To the extent I may believe in fixed and unchanging ideas, I miss opportunities for learning and change.  It is not that I feel that people need to change; it is that I believe people are changing as living and dynamic beings.  Part of my work is about locating the nature of change and being creative and purposeful about it.

    I am an artist with visions of radical global transformation.  The problems going on in the world are essentially human problems.  In the process of making art and being individually expressive, there may be an opportunity to represent the larger elements in human nature and even to bring about change there.

   Our essential nature, personality and belief systems are not usually experienced as having real form and substance.  Through intuitive art and creative process, these aspects of ourselves may be represented through shape, sound, or color that can be concretely experienced, shifted, and altered becoming more accessible to observation and change.

    The dynamics of such an experience within an individual also related to the way large populations might undergo transformation.  In pondering the enormously complex problems of modern culture, the idea that very simple principles may be at work is very important to consider.  The research, development and expression of these dynamics and experiences are goals of my work as an artist and as a philosopher.

    Capturing aesthetic beauty in a work of art can mean more than just making pretty pictures.  Political, social, and ecological activism is very beautiful also, especially when it is effective.  Making it work may involve some disturbing words or images and it may draw angry fire from people who wish to see things remain the same.  Being a radical thinker or artist involves being true to ones intuition and making views and ideas known that may be hidden to others, regardless of opposition.  Even my view of another person may reveal something vital, hidden or dormant in that individual.  We can offer each other the function of not only being outer mirrors of each other, but inner viewers as well.  My intuition about an individual’s life or nature may give them important information, guidance, or inspiration that might not otherwise be seen.  In my work, impressions and feedback from people are so critical and important because I depend on this instead of using recordings, video or photos.  Participants, audiences, students, and art viewers give me my only real view and impact of my work that matters.  Of course, my own personal feelings are important, but I do not trust my own judgment alone.]

    Part of the nature of transformation is that it is not completely within me or outside of myself.  There is a balance and intricate relationship with people that is critical to my work.  When we speak with one another, and when we share our stories, hopes and dreams, it is like wishing upon a star.  We have so much to offer each other that sometimes all it takes is speaking aloud.

   In my written work related to the location of transformation, I draw comparisons between the nature of individual transformation and cultural change in larger social systems.  The word “location” is a device I use to trigger broader definition and examination of the nature of change.

    Though change is something one may wish to make, find, accomplish and experience, the actual realm in which the change occurs may not be definite.  Major change may be psychological, emotional, habitual or imaginary, etc., or it may be seen as a holistic or integral experience.  The act of locating (finding) transformation and the actual nature of change (who, what, where, when) may be best defined loosely.  Using words that might not be expected may act as a catalyst for deeper thought and intuition in the matter.  It is the relationship between thought, word, definition and belief that lies at the heart of global problems and transformative process large and small.

    The Paradigm shift that is needed to bring about a process of stability and sustainability to life on Earth appears to be vastly complex.  It hardly seems related to the nature of a single individual at all.  It is a vicious circle of enormous proportions.  We need a massive change in order to find a grand solution to worldwide problems, and we need a grand solution in order to make this massive change.  Finding the magic solution to such an apparently complex and intricate process of change is like finding the end of the rainbow.

    Perhaps though, some of the answers are related to the nature of one single persons process of change and transformation and are not so grand or monumental at all.  The complexity of massive social systems may relate to the complexity of the individual human being.  Like chasing one’s own shadow, there may be a direct relationship between the source of the problems, the illusiveness of the solutions, and the nature of the process of individual transformation.

    The nature of revolution or transformation in thought, in general, is an end to one way of thinking giving way to the new.  This is often met with great resistance and anxiety.  Holding onto the old is an inevitable problem in every great and sweeping change.  Change is not welcomed and encouraged, but rather stifled and avoided at all costs.

    There is always something sacrificed in the face of change.  When previous ways of thinking and seeing give way to new ideas, beliefs and behaviors, something new emerges.  Unlike the metamorphosis of the butterfly, human change may not be so easy to observe and locate.  When an individual breaches the surface of the popular context, critical thinking leads to a new view of the oceanic cultural paradigm and shifts into something wholly new.  It is not more of the same, a better version of the old, or a different brand of the former paradigm, but rather something new altogether.  How was this done?  Can this be engineered, and does this engineering apply on a larger sociological scale?

    Radical positive change in the essential nature of an individual does not happen every day.  Beyond the natural changes within the life cycles, such as metaphorical metamorphosis from adolescence to adulthood, or dealing with extreme circumstances such as war or disaster, people tend to remain essentially the same.  Humans do not usually engineer metamorphosis and become whole new entities.  Transformation may not be easily located in a physical sense.  “Where” substantial or essential change happens may be difficult to point to and may also be as individual and diverse as people are.

    This radical transformation is not merely a gain of more confidence, becoming better at what on already does, or feeling different in a familiar way.  Radical positive change brings about something new in an individual that was either latent or otherwise unavailable in action, and the person becomes new in natural yet perhaps unexpected ways.  The essential nature of the individual transforms such that previous descriptions may no longer be suitable, and one may even wish to take on a new name.  Previous ways of thinking and acting can be lost.  New experience emerges and becomes the underlying ground of being.

    What are the ingredients of such a transformation?  How does one go about having or locating the stuff of such radical positive change?  Are we doomed to engage only in false transformative process, only believing that real change is taking place?

    Some ideas and visions defy the use of words or conventional description.  When I first began to work in the area of cosmology, it was not the printed word that first lent itself to the expressions of ideas, but rather imagery and symbol that seemed to be more natural and true to what was there to be expressed.  Words usually have specific accepted meanings and triggers to familiar images and ideas.  It may be the focus on words and literal meaning that is at the heart of many problems in the relationship between modern science and popular culture.  Theories and ideas are often mixed with reality and truth.  Mystery is lost in the thirst for answers.

  The form and substance of human consciousness is warped and twisted by ideas living as fact and truth.  Through art, humor and creative expression, these alleged “truths” can be returned to their rightful place as ideas, and a transformation of popular paradigms may occur returning respect, wonder and joy to mystery and creativity.  Art has the power to bring emotion and experience into the realm of myth and idea.  Art can bring “nature” back into human nature to give voice, color, shape, and form to the unknown mystery of everything, allowing truth to be a natural, living, flowing and creative process again.  Art moves beyond words.

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  In modern times, the underlying mysterious nature of everything seems to be buried in dogma, rigid philosophy and literal meaning. The necessity for words, explanations, definitions and myths can short circuit the natural power of perception and the creative ability to envision.  We are so quite to place exacting definitions upon phenomena that explorations are thwarted and investigations undermined.

  One of the reasons I am working in art and cosmology is to explore the possibility of making radical change on a large scale and to make a contribution to the return of humanity to a more natural way of seeing the cosmos.  I have sometimes been asked what it is that I would replace current popular theory with (big bang) and my answer is that I really do not wish to place dogma upon dogma.  My intent is to celebrate mystery while exploring the universe.

    Along these lines of inquiry and exploration, the first thing to change may be my view of myself.  I am not a fixed and knowable thing.  Along with air and water, the sun and the moon and all the things of the Earth, I am a living system, complex and mysterious.  This is not a bad thing though it may not be a typical way of human operation.

   Learning to observe how we operate can be revolutionary.  Sometimes, just seeing or discovering this context may be a transformative experience.  Our relationships to our memory, thoughts, beliefs and ideas can be very revealing and our entire view of time and space can shift and change.

   My idea of the past is critical to the manner in which I approach living.  A very interesting way of looking at the characteristics of viewing the past comes from one of my primary influences in philosophy, Alan Watts, who helped design The California Institute of Integral Studies.  Dr. Watts was most famous as a Zen Buddhist philosopher and lecturer and as the author of more than twenty books.  Many of his books consist of transcribed lectures and in one piece from The Essential Alan Watts (1974), he compares one’s point of view to driving a car.

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                     (The Essential Alan Watts, Alan Watts, p. 102)

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    This referencing the past in generating the present and future can stifle, or even eliminate, opportunities for new experiences.

    When an individual repeats a pattern or expresses a recurring theme or habitual behavior, there may not be an opportunity for growth and change unless this is actively seen as a pattern from a broader view and something new is allowed to happen.  Otherwise, all that may be possible is something within the realm of that which is already available to the individual.  Something more, better or different is not quite something new and transformative.

    The idea of having a wonderful experience and moving outside of ones daily behavioral patterns can be a desirable and healthy thing.  Within the fine distinctions of the word transformation however, there is more than merely a vacation, diversion, temporary altered state or just a pleasant experience.  Of course, in any of these cases, something may occur that actually does make for substantial positive and lasting change, but this is not typically definitive of a particular event or behavior.  Often the nature of transformative experience involves something that is challenging or even disturbing to the normal way of thinking, seeing and feeling and something of a breakdown and breakthrough may occur.  It is more of an integral or holistic experience relating to all aspects of the individual.

    Delving into work that brings about change and transformation may involve thoughts that go against previous beliefs and this may also include doing some things that we may not logically wish to do.  Part of the challenge is to keep looking even when one is confused or frightened.  The great physicist and thinker, David Bohm, looked at this relationship between thought and acceptance of new ideas in his book, Thought as a System (1992).

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    We have mechanisms within our personalities and psychological make-up that limit what we can and cannot see and distinguish in any given situation.  Since it is within the power of art to take us beyond the rational and psychological structures of things, art can open up windows to new ways of seeing that might not be available through the structure of language and rational thought.

    There is something about transformative experience that goes outside the lines and opens up new possibility.  This is not to say that it is a better system of living to constantly break things apart and foster revolution at every turn.  This can also be a limiting paradigm and restriction of a different kind.  David Bohm, along with Quantum physicist Dr. F. David Peat, point out the dangers of living at either extreme end of thought.

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     “People, for example, generally tend to be rigidly attached to the tacit infrastructure of their cultural milieu so that they resist all social change in a blind and often destructive way.  Others, however, are rigidly attached to the call for revolutionary change and pursue their ends in a similarly blind fashion.  Clearly what is called for is a kind of free play within the individual and society so that the mind does not become rigidly committed to a limited set of assumptions, or caught up in confusion and false play.  Out of this free play could emerge the true creative potential of a society.”

               “Science, Order and Creativity” page 111 (9187)

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    In other words, rendering transformative process viable does not include promotion of any particular rigid mode of being or thinking.  It is a promotion of free play.  It is not for me to say that a shift in the wrong direction (in my point of view) might not be a vital and necessary experience for an individual (or group or even humanity as a whole) approaching real, lasting substantial positive change.  In fact, the appearance of something I do not understand or recognize may hold an opportunity for learning and enlightenment.  But of course, I do always reserve the right to my opinion against something and my ideas other than the popular ones.

    Ideas become entrenched in social systems over time.  Often part of the functioning of formal academic institutions is the inclusion, and even promotion of, old popular ideology and philosophy.  The “New Physics”, for example, is decades old by the time it is taught in an accredited academic setting.  A discussion of “New Paradigms” may even include ideology that is hundreds of years old with great care taken to protect popular religious and political views.  The reasons for this may even be part of the law of the land related to discrimination, or they may be so engrained within the beliefs of those setting the standards and content of the curriculum that nothing is noticed.

    Another element is a sort of blindness that occurs within scientific circles related to the interpretation and evaluation of data.  Recently, an article appeared in my newspaper claiming that a deep space satellite had gathered data greatly supporting The Big Bang Theory.  The satellite had produced an egg shaped picture of the greater cosmos.  While people involved in the project heralded this “evidence” as stunning and profound, none of them stopped to realize that there is no other shape such a project could have produced.  When an instrument “looks around” itself to collect light or micro waves as far as it can detect, the only possible result is a circular or spherical one.  Like looking “around” from one spot in a forest, one might conclude that the forest was round.  The data picture of course only represents the limits of vision, or collectible data all around the device.  There is no Big Bang evidence here except in the predetermined translation and interpretation of the believers in The Big Bang Theory.

     If these phenomena are so prevalent and invisible to the people immersed in them, how then does large scale transformation occur?  What is the process through which a flat Earth society becomes a round Earth one?  How do new ideas make it into public institutions?

    Part of the process, I feel, points toward broader respect for individual expression moving beyond popular structures.  It is not always the most experienced and seasoned thinkers that come up with new ideas that work.  In fact, it may not really be possible for the people who are deeply connected to and surrounded by the old ideas to come up with anything radically different.  In one of my favorite books, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), MIT professor, Thomas S. Kuhn points out the possibility of contributions offered by people who are new to a system of work or thought.

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    “What is the process by which a new candidate for paradigm replaces its predecessor?  Any new interpretation of nature, whether a discovery or a theory, emerges first in the mind of one or a few individuals.  It is they who first learn to see science and the world differently, and their ability to make the transition is facilitated by two circumstances that are not common to most other members of their profession.  Invariably their attention has been intensely concentrated upon the crisis-provoking problems; usually, in addition, they are individuals so young or new to the crisis ridden field that practice has committed them less deeply than most of their contemporaries to the world view and rules determined by the old paradigm.”

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,

Thomas S. Kuhn, p. 144)

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    Truly new and radical ideas may be something that the experts and current leaders of a field are blind to.  I’ve even been told that there are grave dangers related to those who stray too far from the popular belief systems.  Grants may not be renewed, university jobs may disappear, telescope time may be revoked, and even ones livelihood can become threatened (if not worse) when one steps out of the popular belief systems to question something like the speed of light, for example.

   In a simpler and more basic way of looking at this phenomenon, one might look at how various fields and philosophies are defined.  In the process of definition, there must be that which is and that which is not the particular thing, such as “professional cosmology” for instance.  If one deviates too much from the definition, this can lead to something else such as metaphysical studies, intuitive art, or fantasy and imagination.  The basis upon which great weight is place upon certain ideas in science is not due to a close relationship with the truth or greater reality as much as it relates to the dictionary.  The definitions make a confine in which ideas that are too radical or that might redefine the science are systematically left out.  This is part of the nature of revolution.  A radical force makes changes that are not desirable within the old definitions.  This includes even the definition of what it is to be human.

    This shift and change in what it is to be human does not mean that humanity is more complex and differentiated from the Earth and life around us, but perhaps just the opposite.  Perhaps we are more like the system in which we exist and more closely linked to everything around us than popular science might indicate.

    A shift could take place in which people feel more related to the larger system as opposed to experiencing themselves as autonomous and independent entities merely inhabiting the Earth having been placed here by extraterrestrial means.  Humans might see their universe as having come from the larger systems around it, rather than believing in a myth in which everything just burst forth from a pin point in no time or space, etc. (Big Bang Theory).  There could be a more natural and organic view of life and the universe as a whole.

    Fostering this type of vision of what we are, and promoting mystery, is very much a part of my work and art.  Mysterious and unknown elements may exist more closely to us in our experience, emotions, intuition and our resonance with the world, than in words, dogma, and rigid ideas.

   This may relate to a very primal aesthetic principle related to what it is that makes life so exciting and full of pleasure, and why we are here in the first place.  Life as a work of art and death as a part of the process of life brings a connection between what it is to be human and what it is to be part of the larger system around us.  U. C. Berkeley astronomy and physics professor and author, Timothy Ferris, makes a point about life related to aesthetics in his book, The Mind’s Sky; Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context (1992).

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     It is part of human nature to be creative and artistic in one way or another.  While western culture limits the term “art” as a definition of a profession and products produced by professionals, to a certain extent, the actual definition in an historical sense is much broader and more common in nature.  Human beings have a variety of creative skills and in many trades and professions the act of using intuition and creative process is part of everyday life.  In physics, art is part of the beginning of every new idea, and many experiments related to old ideas as well.  Science is an art.

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  Faster Then the Speed of Light; The story of a Scientific

   Speculation, 2003, Joâo Maguelo, Ph.D., page 14

    If we then take a look at just what a “hard, cold fact” is, we wind back around to the beginning.  Just who and what is doing the thinking, fact and truth making, and what basis is underneath that which is judged to be the fact or law in terms of the larger questions, comes into question and we end up back where we started.

    It’s a mystery….

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   Now though, in 2007, the word "Mystery" has so much deeper meaning.  Millions of things can be known, and billions of facts cataloged, and our experience as human beings so much deeper.  The acknowledgement of "not knowing" or seeing mystery is not a negative statement of lesser intelligence, in fact it is quite the opposite thing.  It is the very wisest of humans who can see this and be quite happy and comfortable with the great mystery of things.  It is a much higher state of being and knowing than living inside the limitations of a single belief system of assumed answers.  Mystery is a very big and wonderful word.  Saying the words "I don't know" is brilliant.  And, there are other ways of "knowing" beyond words as well...the painting below has very deep and special meaning for me and is actually a symbol of my self in the world and my interconnection with everything...yet "I don't know" what it means....and it is very deeply meaningful to me.  It's a mystery, yet I know it.