I feel this. And I’ve felt this. You’re onto something real, by trying to express this numinous quality in which it feels like aspects of our world are speaking to us through color and light. This is timeless, human, and magical. Experiences like this are why people invented religion in the first place!
“It feels like aspects of the world are speaking to us through color and light.” Yes, that’s what it feels like. It feels like something is “nodding” at me, observing me, signaling me. I find myself suddenly wondering if all the objects around me at this very moment: the couch, a houseplant, the spider climbing up the wall, the tree bobbing outside the window, aren’t “objects” so much as subjects looking into me.
Your comment made me think of myself not as a Subject looking out into a World of Objects, but rather as an Object worked upon and attended to by a World of Experiential Subjects. I don’t mean that in a PanPsychic way exactly…but things are “experiencing” me.
There is something captivating here. The way you convey your experience—through both pictures of the flowers, visual representations of them, and verbal descriptions of how they affected you—resonates with me. The first visual image bursts with the numinous. It’s a reminder to me of the richness available to all of us by simply slowing down. The norm in our thought-dominant culture is to seek-and-consume stimuli of all sorts for delineated purposes. A purpose-less perception thus becomes like a rare jewel. The “Information Age” is more accurately the “The Information-Consumption Age”. Quantity over quality. Consumption over being consumed (the latter being a kind of lingering fear just under the veneer of contemporary selfhood). These flowers appear to have been sparse and to have consumed your consciousness. When I die, I hope to have had my consciousness consumed by disarming and purpose-less beauty much more often than to have consumed packaged information for some clearly delineated purpose. To tip the balance, it seems, at the very least one must slow down. There is also an analogy with regard to ego. The norm (which is inextricably connected to personalized suffering) is for the ego to consume things and experiences for the purpose of gratifying an insatiable appetite that leads to more consumption. Is it possible, perhaps at first by slowing down, for the numinous to consume ego without purpose resulting in a certain peace or satisfaction? Is it possible to transition from a state of insatiable suffering to satiated peace by flipping the paradigm or approach to being?
“It’s a reminder to me of the richness available to all of us by simply slowing down.” And yet there is continual pressure to “speed up.” Slowing down becomes an act of non-compliance.
I’m particularly intrigued by this part of your comment though, “The norm (which is inextricably connected to personalized suffering) is for the ego to consume things and experiences for the purpose of gratifying an insatiable appetite that leads to more consumption. Is it possible, perhaps at first by slowing down, for the numinous to consume ego without purpose resulting in a certain peace or satisfaction?”
If I understand you correctly, you are proposing that aesthetic or numinous experience “consumes” the ego. Thus slowing down and seeking these kinds of experiences is a form of egoicide. This seems separate from “eating one’s shadow.” Not to get too esoteric, but I wonder if the state of melancholy (heaviness, slowness) that is caused by eating one’s shadow (facing shame, accepting and integrating “negative” aspect of the self) is necessary first before an experience of the Beautiful or Numinous. In other words, we take a little bit of the poison mushroom (shadow,) feel sick (melancholy,) and in a state of mushroom-like altered consciousness we see what was hidden (the flowers.)
Rolling with your comment, it may be the experience of mystical beauty that is what actually dismantles or consumes some of the illusory ego. If we ONLY eat shadow and make our selves ill, the Ego recovers, and is less apt to try eating shadow again. This may even make the ego stronger. One must “push through” and “go deep” and “slow” into this altered state.
It sounds a bit insane, but we are, after all, talking about metaphors (numinous flowers) working on other metaphors (Ego/shadow). It’s a chemical reaction in “Imaginal Space.” I do think it leads to “peace” to “depth of meaning” to “aesthetic joy” to “freedom” but these aren’t experiences that lend themselves to words, unless the language is so metaphorical/poetic that it would strike anyone who isn’t pursuing this kind of experience as utter nonsense.
I feel this. And I’ve felt this. You’re onto something real, by trying to express this numinous quality in which it feels like aspects of our world are speaking to us through color and light. This is timeless, human, and magical. Experiences like this are why people invented religion in the first place!
“It feels like aspects of the world are speaking to us through color and light.” Yes, that’s what it feels like. It feels like something is “nodding” at me, observing me, signaling me. I find myself suddenly wondering if all the objects around me at this very moment: the couch, a houseplant, the spider climbing up the wall, the tree bobbing outside the window, aren’t “objects” so much as subjects looking into me.
Your comment made me think of myself not as a Subject looking out into a World of Objects, but rather as an Object worked upon and attended to by a World of Experiential Subjects. I don’t mean that in a PanPsychic way exactly…but things are “experiencing” me.
There is something captivating here. The way you convey your experience—through both pictures of the flowers, visual representations of them, and verbal descriptions of how they affected you—resonates with me. The first visual image bursts with the numinous. It’s a reminder to me of the richness available to all of us by simply slowing down. The norm in our thought-dominant culture is to seek-and-consume stimuli of all sorts for delineated purposes. A purpose-less perception thus becomes like a rare jewel. The “Information Age” is more accurately the “The Information-Consumption Age”. Quantity over quality. Consumption over being consumed (the latter being a kind of lingering fear just under the veneer of contemporary selfhood). These flowers appear to have been sparse and to have consumed your consciousness. When I die, I hope to have had my consciousness consumed by disarming and purpose-less beauty much more often than to have consumed packaged information for some clearly delineated purpose. To tip the balance, it seems, at the very least one must slow down. There is also an analogy with regard to ego. The norm (which is inextricably connected to personalized suffering) is for the ego to consume things and experiences for the purpose of gratifying an insatiable appetite that leads to more consumption. Is it possible, perhaps at first by slowing down, for the numinous to consume ego without purpose resulting in a certain peace or satisfaction? Is it possible to transition from a state of insatiable suffering to satiated peace by flipping the paradigm or approach to being?
“It’s a reminder to me of the richness available to all of us by simply slowing down.” And yet there is continual pressure to “speed up.” Slowing down becomes an act of non-compliance.
I’m particularly intrigued by this part of your comment though, “The norm (which is inextricably connected to personalized suffering) is for the ego to consume things and experiences for the purpose of gratifying an insatiable appetite that leads to more consumption. Is it possible, perhaps at first by slowing down, for the numinous to consume ego without purpose resulting in a certain peace or satisfaction?”
If I understand you correctly, you are proposing that aesthetic or numinous experience “consumes” the ego. Thus slowing down and seeking these kinds of experiences is a form of egoicide. This seems separate from “eating one’s shadow.” Not to get too esoteric, but I wonder if the state of melancholy (heaviness, slowness) that is caused by eating one’s shadow (facing shame, accepting and integrating “negative” aspect of the self) is necessary first before an experience of the Beautiful or Numinous. In other words, we take a little bit of the poison mushroom (shadow,) feel sick (melancholy,) and in a state of mushroom-like altered consciousness we see what was hidden (the flowers.)
Rolling with your comment, it may be the experience of mystical beauty that is what actually dismantles or consumes some of the illusory ego. If we ONLY eat shadow and make our selves ill, the Ego recovers, and is less apt to try eating shadow again. This may even make the ego stronger. One must “push through” and “go deep” and “slow” into this altered state.
It sounds a bit insane, but we are, after all, talking about metaphors (numinous flowers) working on other metaphors (Ego/shadow). It’s a chemical reaction in “Imaginal Space.” I do think it leads to “peace” to “depth of meaning” to “aesthetic joy” to “freedom” but these aren’t experiences that lend themselves to words, unless the language is so metaphorical/poetic that it would strike anyone who isn’t pursuing this kind of experience as utter nonsense.