Painting the Dao

42 It is useful here to consider the three stages of enlightenment: aspiration, realisation and integration. The first stage is the intellectual understanding that enlightenment is both real and meaningfully transformational; both achievable and crucial for fulfilling the evolution of consciousness. The second stage is the experience of enlightenment, of transcendence beyond the interpreting intellect. Its happening is beyond our control, but given aspiration there are many ways of encouraging it, including a variety of meditational means. The third stage is what happens for the rest of a life as the enlightened integrate the two ways of knowing.With the full bandwidth of consciousness the enlightened return to the tools of the intellectual domain armed with a wondrous metaperspective. Finally, it boils down to grasping essence, but there are different interpretations of how to do so most efficiently. In a fully mature aesthetic culture, the hierarchy of the arts arises out of, rather than governs, creativity. In China an activity’s status as art was based solely on what best facilitated self-realisation. By the fifth century BCE the arts included archery, charioteering, writing, music and ritual, and across the first millennium, poetry (often as songs), calligraphy and painting also came to be recognised as art. The idea of the Three Perfections – poetry, calligraphy and painting – arose naturally as a syncretic approach to three integrated art forms serving one ultimate purpose. Tap-dancing on an upturned bucket could qualify as art if the aesthetic elite decided it expressed essence of wisdom. It mattered less what was being done than how it was being done, which, of course, also concerned who was doing it. If a child says the moon is made of green cheese, we laugh; if a revered sage says it, we ponder underlying profundity. authentic ity If enlightenment is the ultimate goal of self-conscious creativity, what are the means of perceiving and expressing it? One all-encompassing answer is authenticity, at the level of process rather than of product. That seemingly small shift in focus has the capacity to change everything; authenticity takes on a more far-reaching remit. The authenticity of an art object is a simple binary issue – authentic or fake – even if we have insufficient data to determine its status, but there are far more subtle levels of authenticity which are an important part of determining our other fundamental issue of creativity: essence.