I spend a lot of time thinking about the mind-body relationship. A lot. More than I care to admit. It’s a little embarrassing actually.
Lately I have been contemplating the difficulty of talking about, sharing, and exploring the “interior” experience of human consciousness, our interior landscape so to speak. I believe this is a huge problem for human evolution. Because our interior experience is also the source of our sense of unity, our inability to collectively share it is a huge problem for the hope of living non-violently in the world around us.
By interior, I don’t just mean the psychological and emotional realms. I mean the interior “space” that we experience while living our lives. This is the space we expand into when we take a deep breath, the space that hums when we finally get into bed after an exhausting day. This is a neutral space within our mind-body relationship that precedes our thoughts and emotions. For the most part, this is what I meant by the term “silence” in my book Waking. It is the place/space/silence (as you can see, words are difficult here) where we experience dread, stress, and ache with loneliness, but it is also where we feel love, beauty, and hope. This ‘invisible” part of us is also the ground of our true strength and resiliency.
For the moment, I want to introduce a distinction for descriptive purposes. Let’s say our thoughts and intellectual awareness exist in a two-dimensional plane. They do not take up “space” in an ordinary sense. This is why we say things like “linear” thinking, i.e. thoughts that travel in a line on a two-dimensional plane. Thus contradiction becomes so powerful for the intellectual level – two opposing lines of thinking are forced to collide because they exist in the same plane and something has to give. The physical, external world, on the other hand, exists in three dimensions. Two non-parallel lines do not have to collide because they can exist in skewed planes. There is enough space. There is the glass in front of me and all the space around it. This is the world of action, the world in which I pick up the glass and not just think about it. This world is commonly referred to as “objective” reality.
Believe it or not, this brings me to Matisse. His artwork fascinates me, in particular his paintings. Among many other things, he painted space and perspective in paradigm-shifting ways, especially his interiors with windows (See above). I was at an exhibit of his work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) a couple months ago. One of his quotes really struck me and I paraphrase, “I love painting windows in my interiors. It reminds me that there is no difference between what is inside and what is outside.” One of the things that struck me was something I hadn’t fully realized. If one looks at one’s visual field without any brain interpretation, it is flat. It can all be seen as if existing on a flat canvass. Matisse, however, did not paint things flatly, without perspective like the ancient Egyptians. He offered depth and yet it is not fully realistic either. Consider the picture again. There is a hint of a table, just a partial demarcating line, but the color is identical to the wall behind it. Are the flowers and branches both part of the tablecloth and wallpaper design? Or is everything hovering in space without any grounding? Notice the chair is not quite correct proportion with all of the other objects. Everything is floating and everything is settled simultaneously. Then, of course, the window. Color and shape with a definite boundary. The linear edges of the window trim presents a view into a scene that may or not exist outside that particular window, in that particular room. A beautiful metaphor for our imagination.
I am sitting in a bathroom at the MIA, trying to absorb the world that Matisse is conjuring in me. I am in tears, not crying but water welling. I wonder if he was lonely as he tried to convey this world in-between, the world between two-dimensional thinking and three-dimensional physical objects. I wonder if he was lonely as he searched for ways to express the unseen world of our felt interior. Did he know that he was creating a profound metaphor for the experienced intersection between mind and body? Did he know he was going to help me? Obviously not. But as I sit there, I feel company. I feel that I am riding on the shoulders of giants. Look again at the painting. He treats our interior with kindness and love. He reveals colors and patterns, not darkness and discord. The first tear rolls down my cheek.