Expand your vision
Part 2: Space and Self through Time
What this video is about
The second video of the mini-series is a journey through time… A bird’s eye view of how our awareness of Self and Space emerged through the eons of human evolution.
The default (“mainstream”) perception of Self in the World is (in short) of a separate, individual Self navigating a three-dimensional world.
We perceive the objective world as three-dimensional, but this perception exists between two poles.
On the one hand, the raw visual data we receive is two-dimensional — that’s how our eyes are built. The familiar three-dimensional world is created for us by the brain (as we discussed in the first part of this series), and presented to the conscious mind — creating the perceptual illusion that we actually see this three-dimensional world.
On the other hand, whatever model of the world, whatever theory we choose — whether we turn for answers to physics or to metaphysics, it is much more complex, much more multi-dimensional than this three-dimensional space we think we see. Depending on the model we choose, these dimensions can be quite different, but there is no doubt that the familiar 3D world is a radical simplification of real reality.
This illusory three-dimensional world is the world the separate conscious mind navigates. This is the current stage of the conscious awareness of Self in the World: it moves through a three-dimensional world it perceives as “objective”, carrying a separate, private “inner space” within.
But this hasn’t always been the case, and this is what you will experience on this journey.
This journey leaves us on the cusp of the emergence of a new type of awareness of Self in the World — a new awareness artists started to explore in the last third of the nineteenth century. This is the new awareness that strives to enter our world… the next stage of our evolution, where the separation between the inner space and the outer space dissolves, and the awareness of space itself transforms.
Here is a still life by Juan Gris for your contemplation:
Explore its inner space as it is, as the artist shows it, letting go of any assumptions of how many dimensions there are... Allow your sense of vision to absorb this space. Then, look around you (perhaps at your desk?) with the same open receptivity to everything that emerges...
About the author
My name is Elena Maslova-Levin, I am an artist — but, first and foremost, I am a humble spectator, in awe, amazement, veneration of the whole evolutionary unfolding of great art through the eons of human evolution.
This ever-present, and intrinsically synergistic field of art is what gives me my power as an artist, and in this series I invite you to expand your sense of vision by deepening your inner connection to this field.