Painting the Dao

29 art and consc iousness W e tend to see art as an endeavour separate from other domains, but I find it more useful to see it as the inevitable outcome of creativity, a deep human response to a fundamental universal force.While nature, with timeless indifference, just gets on with energy-fuelled creation, self-conscious humanity has the capacity to respond knowingly . Self- consciousness evolved with the capacity to separate self from environment and consider each independently. With that enormous leap creativity be- came an extremely powerful force, a watershed moment in the evolution of consciousness. We became Homo narrans and began creating numerous languages – the tools of self-consciousness – through which to tell our stories, to ourselves and to others. We gained the intellect, the reasoning faculties of mind, as a creative tool and began the long struggle out of primordial harmony into intellectual disharmony. There was no alternative, and for hundreds of thousands of years angst and confusion – Edvard Munch’s endless scream – accompanied intellect, for with awareness of self came knowledge of its isolation and fragility. With intellect came interpretation, and the capacity to interpret gave rise to argument and conflict, which, combined with an inevitable focus on the separate self and its ego twin, heralded a disharmonious age that could not be avoided. It was inevitable that we first separated the self in order to understand it and its environment, and then became able to forge the tools to transcend that self. Evidence of individual transcendence permeates history transculturally; it is the source of philosophical convictions that do not have gods or God as a governing force, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism, where a higher state of being is supreme rather than a higher being. 1 Deities arose out of lower-level religious structures seeking to explain the mystery to the mystified. Transcendence has not yet achieved sufficient global respect to bring about the next watershed moment in consciousness ak21.77 102–3