NOTHING LIKE MEDITATION

NOTHING LIKE MEDITATION
(Vinod Anand)

You are standing in awe in front of a painting. You are getting lost in this labyrinth of shapes and forms, until you are no more. And yet, you are more yourself than you have ever been before.

If you’ve ever experienced this, you know that art of any kind can induce meditation. Vallabhacharya argued that the ego can transcend through bhava or feelings.

More precisely, if you are gazing at a painting, it can arouse so much bhava in you that your ego gets dissolved in feelings. Aristotle argued that tragedy (and hence, I would argue, also other types of art) can give us what he calls catharsis, a “purification of emotions” and a “pleasurable relief”, occurring as we undergo emotional states of pity and feat which we are in turn able to judge and apply appropriately in real life.

Some even compared catharsis to rasas or aesthetical moods, which are again intimately linked to bhavas, although rasas comprise more feelings than pity and fear—hasyam or humour and sringaram or love. Aristotle’s theory is controversial.

Yet, if we dare to combine it with Vallabhacharya’s thinking, it could enhance the idea. By submerging ourselves in a piece of art, we lose our ego in feelings and experience relief.

It is not only purification of our emotions, but purification of ourselves, a reminder, no matter how briefly, to exist without ego. Some may argue that emotional meditation is not the right way to curb ego, because emotional states are evoked by ego and therefore are reinforcing it. If this is the case, there is still the Schopenhauer cure.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy is in many aspects similar to much Indic philosophy For example, he argued that a major part of ourselves is the will to live, which causes us constant pain through desire.

If we are audacious, we could compare it to the ego. He also believed that space and time cause the “principle of individualization”, maya; hence we perceive each other as separate, even though everything is one, underneath. This underlying unity is somewhat similar to the concept of Atman.

According to Schopenhauer, through contemplation of a piece of art we are able to overcome maya. If one “abandons the entire power of his mind to the view, one entirely gets carried away, and lets consciousness be filled. One altogether gets lost in that object”, then there is no longer the perceived and perceiver.

This state is the inexistence of subject and object. The subject has become one with the object and the dividing dualism, causality, and the other hindrances on the path to truth vanish.

This method of contemplative meditation was oftentimes voiced by Krishnamurti, “to observe with silent mind”, un-prepossessed, the true form of meditation. Unsurprisingly, Krishnamurti also pointed out that the will is the essence of desire and looked for a methodology to exist without it.

Depending on our philosophical disposition, we can argue that art is, either by means of feelings or contemplation (as in silent observation), a gateway to the ego-less sphere. Perhaps, in times where increasingly more people find it difficult to merely be, art could succor or even be, as Heidegger thought, the way out of the “crises of modernity”, by giving access to “truth”.

So next time, bring your incense to the gallery, sit down in the lotus position, and render a homage to gurus of the brush, the pantheon of the pencil.