Extract from: Beyond the Stage of Time, Volume I Realised Realms. The Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat

26 27 Th e emphasis on how the intellectual tool is used and its proper place in the scheme of things di ff ers widely in global culture, but China is a particularly good ex- ample of its importance, given its status as the oldest continuously surviving culture on earth. G I’m with you so far. But I’m still struggling to understand how that reconciles with the idea of greater maturity in Chinese art. M Bear with me. We know from both the legendary and the historical record of the past few millennia that ego gradually enshrined the sanctity of the separate individ- ual in western societies, and that initial separation led to other forms of separation. More and more, the western mind relied upon the essentially fragmenting capacity of the intellect, complete with its tendency to separate and name increasingly complex elements of self and environment. Th at overarching tendency is one of the reasons why there are so many separate gods across early religions; but it’s also why we have the eternally separate, supreme God of the Abrahamic tradition of Jews, Christians and Muslims, a fi gure vastly remote and invisible other than through the imagina- tion. As I’ve already mentioned, it also led to the importance of individual opinion and debate in philosophy, including political philosophy, and the scienti fi c mindset that fuelled so much progress in the West as knowledge and consciousness expanded. Th e word (not just the ‘Word’ of the biblical tradition, but the de fi nitions of fragmentary details in life) gained predominance; small, individual units conveying single ideas. As the intellect grew in power, individuals took care of everything within intel- lectual grasp. Anything beyond that rational grasp was conveniently outsourced to faith. Th is granted the intellect dominance even over the ultimate, higher power it had vested in God, because it was intellectual individuals who interpreted His will —which is why we have so many existentially threatening and con fl icting versions of what He wants or means. Th e intellect prefers binary decisions; either/or, true or false, right or wrong, black or white—and of course, art or not art. Th e binary intel- lect abhors a contradiction where something may be both at the same time: such a state is a dangerously suspect vacuum to the intellectual tyrant. In China, where the separate individual was less important than the broader collective, the individual intellect was valued but was not allowed to govern; it was a servant to human needs, not the master of them. By the time Quietism had evolved into Daoism in the sixth century bce , contradiction was perceived and embraced everywhere. It was a fundamental expectation of reality, not a challenge to it. Th e only certainty was an indescribable, undi ff erentiated higher state of existence, both of life and of consciousness. Further, it was recognised that everyone had an equal opportunity to attain to such a state. Th is encouraged an inherently syncretic rather than binary view of the world; a state of mind that was completely comfortable with the idea that apparent contradiction was simply the result of di ff ering levels of under- standing. G I’m still not sure what any of this has to do with art! M Everything! We’re nearly there now. In the West, the idea was essentially that the intellect could eventually gather together all the intelligible facts of reality, and weave them together into complete understanding, as expressed in the deeply questionable scienti fi c concept of a uni fi ed fi eld of laws attainable within the domain of science it- self. ( Th is, incidentally, contradicts Gödel’s Incompleteness Th eorem, one of the gems of the mindset that gave rise to the autonomous intellect, but one which paradoxi- cally also opens the door to prove such autonomy a false goal.) Given time, it was ar- gued, the all-encompassing, supremely competent, fully autonomous intellect could ‘know the mind of God’, in the famous words of the late Stephen Hawking—despite the obvious conclusion that this would then make God obsolete. Even Hawking came to question this assumption before he died. In Chinese thought, the intellect was always seen as an extremely useful tool for realising the higher goal of consciousness—to reunite with the transcendent Dao (the Way , but as an existent if indescribable entity, rather than just a path; in Daoism the path becomes the destination). When Buddhism was introduced from India nearly two millennia ago, it was immediately acceptable as part of this philosophical pursuit, since it too was a non-god ‘religion’; it too saw an enlightened, higher way of knowing as the goal, and regarded the culmination of human aspiration as attaining that su- preme state for the self. And the moral philosophy of Confucius was entirely compati- ble with this too, since it wasn’t a religion at all. Confucianism proposes a harmonious way of life for those in pursuit of that goal, while syncretism allowed anyone to be Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist all at the same time without any fundamental con- tradiction. Th e basic di ff erence between god-based religions and non-god religions is that the fi rst relies on a supreme being, the second on a supreme state of being—the fi rst irrevocably separate from individuals, the second open to all to attain. G Let me guess. Th e maturity of Chinese art is related to this less structured and autonomous mindset, while western art still clings to identifying and labelling everything? M Exactly! Full maturity implies not just the shi ft to process-based aesthetic theory, but full autonomy of art as a primary vehicle in the evolution of consciousness, free of any governing constraints from the other three main vehicles: religion, philosophy and science—or indeed prejudgement as to what is and isn’t art. In the West, this maturity was delayed egregiously by the subjugation of art to the other three. In fact, I consider art ultimately the most powerful of the four, since, as I argue in my book, it is the only one capable of subsuming the other three. If, as noted earlier, we take the de fi nition of art to be ‘any creative response to experience’, religion, philosophy and science can all be considered a subset of art; all three are fundamentally ways in which humans respond creatively to experience. Art’s subjugation to religion is obvious in the West, thanks to centuries of reli- gious patronage and endless proselytising images. Its servitude to philosophy is very similar, thanks to an obsession with subject matter—portraits of the great and good, battle scenes, idyllic pastorals, even the humble still life with its demonstration of hu- man domination of nature as ordained in Genesis—which re fl ected prevailing belief systems in order to perpetuate them.