Contemplating Identity: Art

"Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me." - Sigmund Freud

In recent years I have only started to realize how important creativity and art are for healthy human development. For many years I viewed art simply as a fun hobby for those with extra time on their hands. Now I am starting to see that art has the ability to elevate our awareness and transcend the limits of our individual perspective like few other things can. Far more than a hobby, art provides a vital pathway to see life around us more richly and experience our lives more fully.

As we have been contemplating our identity in prior posts and exploring how to transcend the limits of various identity markers, the central theme has been allowing our minds to see and experience the liminal space between our binary categories of identity. With our human tendency to categorize everything as black or white, and right or wrong, something has to come along to open our eyes to the full spectrum of color and nuance in the range of human experiences.

“These are the principles for the development of a complete mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science… Realize that everything connects to everything else.” - Leonardo da Vinci

In contrast to the limited scope of experience and thought that we hold on an individual level, art is able to usher our minds into a much broader way of seeing. Music, movies, sculpture, paintings, and poetry are able to abstract the experience of the artist in a way that it can become a universally shared experience. Like a well-told story, we are pulled into an empathetic experience that we may or may not relate to rationally.

I remember listening to an elderly Hispanic man share his life story to a group of mostly non-Spanish speakers, including myself. Though we understood very little of the words he communicated, there was hardly a dry eye in the room. His story transcended the language barrier and we were experiencing his life on a deeper level than facts or ideas. Somehow, in that moment, we were all connected in a way that can't easily be described in words. His story took us somewhere else, like an epic novel or painted landscape.

Art, if we allow it, can transport us to another place and time. It extends our consciousness beyond whatever identity categories we have imposed on ourselves. It can be an incredibly vulnerable experience for some of us - like unexpected tears while watching a movie or being taken back to a specific moment in time while listening to a song. In these moments, our individual experience and our collective experiences become one and the same. The perspective of the artist and the perspective of the viewer are merged into something greater than the sum of its parts.

"All great transcendental art is not merely symbolic or imaginary: it is a direct invitation to recognize and realize a deeper dimension of our very own being." - Ken Wilber