Chapter Eight



Perennialist Art

Psychic Upheaval
and Epiphany

The distinguishing feature of Perennialist art is its power to produce psychic upheaval in a prepared mind and transport that mind to a higher dimension. I am using the term " Perennialist art" to include the conscious production or arrangement of words, sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that enables a person to understand Justice, Truth, Beauty, and the other Forms in the Higher Realm.

Within the term "Perennialist art," then, I include those specially created instances of literature (prose and poetry), drama (including screenplays), painting, sculpture, music, dance, or illustration (including illustrated books and Web sites) which possess the distinguishing quality of empowering a reader or viewer to gain a higher state of consciousness.

The person must have carried out specific preparation to be able to conceive of new possibilities, understand new concepts, and participate in transformative experiences. To an unprepared psyche, Perennialist art appears lackluster or bizarre.

Preparation "For a Sufi at a sama', 1 prepared readiness involves a special attentive listening. In the Muslim tradition, hearing is the most highly valued sense, the ear the way to spirituality and gnosis. One does not read scripture silently to oneself; one listens to it being recited by others, or recited aloud by oneself. The habitus of the Sufi listener at a sama' in New Delhi begins with the listener's understanding of the passages in the Qur'an that remind the faithful of the need to be a careful listener. . . Sufis are concerned to bring about a transformation of ordinary consciousness to make receiving spiritual knowledge possible. Attentive listening is the path." Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, 2004

Transformative art leads the readied psyche to dimensions higher than previously experienced, to epiphanies. These epiphanies involve inspiration, a fusing with the universe, transcending time-space-ego, infusion with knowledge and awareness, and gaining a sense of endowment. Psychic upheaval and transport to higher awareness can occur in any area of human life at a multiplicity of levels. Illuminating art has been with humankind since its beginning, leading humans in their evolutionary ascent.

Upheaval is required to displace the psyche--mind and personality--from its entrenched intellectual and emotional routines. This is not some vague feeling of uplift or emotion; it is an eruption within the soul.

"The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems    Crash in the mind." Wallace Stevens. "The Glass of Water"

As Stevens indicates, the metaphysically unconstrainable elements of poetry CRASH IN THE MIND. They do not merely suggest quietly or show gently. The ontologically astonishing, fantastic, outlandish, or contradictory concepts smash into one another, creating cacophonies and eruptions.

Virginia Woolf felt that the upheaval element was a key component of her being a writer.

"And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we--I mean all human beings--are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are part of the work of art." Virginia Woolf. Moments of Being

Coleman Barks, the remarkably insightful interpreter of Rumi, speaks of how this psychic upheaval occurs in Rumi's poetry through the use of disparate, incongruous points of view.

"The voices in Rumi's poetry come from many points on the inner-outer spectrum. There's a modulation between realities. This is similar to what happens with the fluid pronoun in Rumi's poetry. The you and I are sometimes the lover talking to the beloved, the personal self and a without-form presence within and beyond the senses. Yet sometimes that presence, amazingly, speaks to Rumi through the poetry; voices slide back and forth within the same short poem! Often the poem serves as a slippery doorsill place between the two, 'partly in my self and partly outside,' the voices coming from a between-place. This expanding and contracting of identity is one of the exciting aspects of Rumi's art." The Essential Rumi, 1995, Harper, San Francisco

To take another example, the Enlightenment art of the eighteenth century produced upheavals in religious and social dimensions, causing mental apoplexy in the dictators and their scholastic lackeys. When Voltaire published his Philosophical Letters Concerning the English, extolling the intellectual emancipation fostered by Newton and Locke, the horrified French authorities had the book publicly burned as a "scandalous work, contrary to religion and morals and to the respect due to the established powers." King Louis XVI of France would later say that Voltaire and Rousseau had destroyed France.

And so they had--they and the other Enlightenment thinkers. The previous intellectual and social realities of the Old World had been done away with by the salvoes of men such as Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Diderot, Thomas Paine, D' Alembert, Patrick Henry, Kant, and Rousseau, among others.

Along with this overwhelming psychic upheaval, intellectually and metaphysically prepared thinkers both within and outside the Enlightenment movement gained a new awareness of higher dimensions. Socially these new dimensions included a realization of greater possibilities for human life--beyond the stunting limitations of ecclesiastical and state totalitarianism. New words such as "happiness" were coined and the common people realized that they had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Enlightenment thinkers created ideas to illumine the people's minds and create a new social order. Franklin, Henry, and Paine wrote attacks on British imperialism which was trying to make raw-materials-slave-colonies of the British dependencies. Voltaire created a famous motto: crush the infamy.

The Enlightenment activists saw their task as initiating intellectual upheaval that would lead an awakened populace to create a freer, more equitable, liberating social order. They demonstrated to the world the power of ideas to arouse people to recognize oppression under despotism. Perennialist ideas created an empowered activism built on solidarity. Since that time, rulers by whatever name have seen the necessity of creating celebrity mandarins who preach the propaganda of their masters and counter radical thinkers who might awaken the populace to an awareness of modern oppressions.

"The artist . . . possesses the capacity to discern the element of reality which is latent in the object, to disentangle it from the sensuous material in which it is embodied, and, by expressing his vision of it in his picture, to enable us to glimpse the pure form which he has visualised.     It is for this reason that, though the form of artistic expression changes from age to age, the feelings which great art awakens have been the same in every age. The forms of art are inexhaustible, but they all lead along the same road of aesthetic emotion to the contemplation of the same ultimate reality . . .     And since art enables us to glimpse a reality which lies outside the realm of that of which we are normally aware, the emotions which it arouses are not of this world. Aesthetic emotion is emotion felt not for this world but for reality; it is, therefore, unlike all other emotions, being both unanalysable and unique . . . So long as the vision which art vouchsafes endures, we are shut off from the interests which this world begets . . . It is as if we were enabled for the moment to escape from the stream of life and, forgetful of the turmoil of want and desire, of striving and seeking, which life involves, to be at peace upon the banks . . .     If he [the artist] possesses the capacity for vision, in virtue of which he is able to disentangle the manifestation of the Form of Beauty from the physical setting in which it appears, then the work which he produces will possess that quality of significant form in virtue of which we say that is has aesthetic value . . .     There is--the fact is obvious--no known formula for securing the manifestation of the Form in a work of art. If there were, art would not be art but science . . .     . . . Training and study will not enable the artist to command the Form, or to ensure that beauty will clothe his work. The coming of the Form knows no law. It is the incalculable element in all art; it can neither be compelled nor cajoled . . .     This explains also why beauty attaches to the work of some men who disregard all the rules, and throw all canons of taste overboard, whilst it eschews the laboured productions of those who follow rigorously and with perfect taste the best traditions of the elders. But it is equally true that the Form of Beauty is more likely to be attracted where a knowledge of technique is present than where such knowledge is absent, and that, other things being equal, knowledge and skill are more likely to produce works of beauty than the so-called inspiration which is too often devoid of them." C.E.M. Joad, Guide to Philosophy

Perennialist art leads to human liberation in all areas of life. We understand social liberation to include some means of control of rulers by the ruled, protection of the individual against government by legal rights and civil liberties. In a broader context, liberation means the ability to make decisions and carry out purposes, free from internal and external coercion, using the powers of the psyche to develop human potentialities, some of which may be unknown until revealed by illuminating art.

     In studying the Perennial Tradition it's necessary to develop an understanding of the subtleties and power of illuminating art currently available to us. We can more easily discern the dislocation produced by illuminating painting than the upheaval of illuminating poetry. Not only because painting is often more explicit, but because in this TV era we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to a devaluation of and deafness to poetry. If, as some modern Perennialist figures have said, the Perennial Tradition is transmitted through poetry, as well as other forms of literature, art, and ordinary human experience, then we must study the nature of transformative poetry in gaining intellectual and spiritual awareness.

Part of readying ourselves for illuminating poetry is gaining the ability to read thoughtfully and with focused attention. When we begin a search for transformative poetry--for it is undeniable that only some poetry is illuminating--then the two characteristics we earlier examined stand out in bold relief. Illuminating poetry produces an upheaval in the prepared reader's psyche and assists the person to gain a heightened state of consciousness.

To illustrate the first of these attributes, the upheaval of the mind caused by transformative poetry, we examine a poem by Coleridge. The dislocation of the psyche begins even with the title:

Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream--a Fragment.

We begin by thinking this poem is going to be about a man named Kubla Khan. But the psychic roller-coaster starts at once and we are swept into a different meaning: the poem is "a vision in a dream"--whatever that might mean. But we're then jolted again--this is only a fragment. A fragment of what?

Then begins the extreme psychic dislodging as we are yanked from one meaning-experience to another totally different meaning-experience without any bridging transitions whatsoever. (You can actually "hear" the clash of one universe of meaning against another.)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Head-over-heels our psyche plunges:

• The poem's about a country named Xanadu

• No, it's about a ruler named Kubla Khan

• Wrong, a stately pleasure-dome

• Nope, a sacred river named Alph

• Now we're rushing through caverns measureless to man (measurable to God?)

• And we plunge pell-mell down to a sunless [?] sea.

For discerning readers, this headlong jolting from meaning-experience to meaning-experience produces a strange heightened state of consciousness. Something you can only see out of the corner of your mind's eye.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

[How did a demon-lover get in here?]

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail;
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.


It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight t'would win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

      A forceful way to experience the psychic upheaval of illuminating art is to view, with receptive mindfulness, the movie, The French Lieutenant's Woman. The screenplay by Harold Pinter wrenches us from one world of meaning-experience--the lives of the actors making the movie in the late twentieth-century--to a totally different world of meaning-experience--the lives of the nineteenth-century characters of the movie. At one point, for example, the two actors are practicing a scene where the woman falls. Suddenly, as the actors in the twentieth century are practicing, we are propelled into the experience-events of the nineteenth-century characters as she falls in front of him.

Pinter's screenplay involves the overlapping of the two experience-event worlds. For example, we think of the female actor's feelings as she relates to the male character of the movie, the amateur paleontologist who is smitten by the allegedly scarlet woman. The female actor likes the male actor but he is married--as the male character in the story is betrothed. We experience the emotions and thoughts of both the actress and the French Lieutenant's "woman" in the single dramatic enactment of the character.

In Coleridge, the tumultuous plunge from one meaning-idea to another takes place primarily stanza by stanza. Other transformative poets such as Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare sometimes thrust us from one meaning-event to a totally different meaning-event word-by-word. The speed of being wrenched from meaning-world to meaning-world is so fast-paced that we must carefully focus our attention on each word.

Wallace Stevens begins this poem with a seemingly academic title: "ANALYSIS OF A THEME" Then we're told that next comes the: "THEME" When we're then given the theme, the psychic upheaval occurs in a split second! "How happy I was the day I told the young Blandina of three-legged giraffes . . ."

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. William Shakespeare

The defining characteristics of Perennialist art, as we've seen, are psychic upheaval and epiphany: the disruption of the psyche and the production of a higher state of consciousness. Having seen this illustrated in poetry and drama, let's examine how this occurs during contemplation of a Perennialist mystical writing.

This is a partial record of a meditation on a Perennialist mystical writing. The writing is by an unknown author who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite. To highlight the characteristics of upheaval and epiphany that occur during contemplation of a mystical composition, we'll scrutinize each segment by itself.

The Mystical Formulation	Contemplation and Meditation
"The simple	clear, direct, plain, uncomplicated	I wonder to what these words are referring
"The simple, absolute	certain, positive, undeniable, supreme	Whatever these words are referring to, it is something unusual
"The simple, absolute, and immutable	constant, enduring, unchanging, everlasting	Okay, it is uncomplicated, undeniable, and unchanging
"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries	mysteries?	How can mysteries be uncomplicated? Undeniable and unchanging, maybe
"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth	mysteries of divine Truth?	An extraordinary kind of divine Truth whose mysteries are uncomplicated, undeniable, and unchanging
"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness	gleaming, glowing, light-producing darkness?	So this is something other than what is encountered in the "natural" world
"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret.	The psyche experiences upheaval; the intellect cannot fathom this	I must use spiritual discernment if I am to understand this

This is a single illustration of how one meditation proceeds. You'll be able to meditate in your own individual manner on Dionysius' mystical formulation.

"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of transcendent beauty. . .

"We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness and, through not seeing and not knowing, to see Him who is beyond both vision and knowledge--by the very fact of neither seeing Him nor knowing Him. For this is truly to see and to know and, through the abandonment of all things, to praise Him who is beyond and above all things.

"For this is not unlike the art of those who carve a life-like image from stone; removing from around it all that impedes clear vision of the latent form, revealing its hidden beauty solely by taking away. For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise Him by taking away than by ascription; for we ascribe attributes to Him, when we start from universals and come down through the intermediate to the particulars. But here we take away all things from Him going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that may be known. And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light."

Dionysius the Areopagite (translation by C. E. Rolt)

To get the full effect, it's necessary to read this mystical composition several times in succession--each time coming to it with a new mind. Meditating on this composition while reading it can (not absolutely will) produce an altered state of consciousness in an earnest, receptive reader.

When we experience Rumi's poetry, we are thrust not merely from one meaning-world or event-experience to another, but from one realm-of-being to a completely different realm-of-being.

     "In the orchard a certain Sufi laid his face in Sufi fashion upon his knee for the sake of mystical revelation.
Then he sank deep down into himself. An impertinent fellow was annoyed by his semblance of slumber.
'Why,' said he, 'dost thou sleep? Nay, look at the vines, behold these trees and marks of Divine mercy and green plants.
'Hearken to the command of God, for He hath said, "Look ye!": turn thy face towards these marks of Divine mercy.'