Art Reboot

41 6 the unif ied mind As soon as we try to persuade the intellect that it is misguided in its assumptions about consciousness, we hit a barrier. This is especially true when we ask it to think about transcendence, a phenomenon that is by no means universally accepted as real, precisely because it exists beyond the domain that we consider to be reality. As we shall see, there is plenty of evidence that trans- intellectual experience is real, and that belief in it is manifestly not irrational, as belief in the Tooth Fairy is, for example. That’s not to say that there are no challenges in discussing it, and in trying to explain the inexplicable. But the fact that it is difficult to comprehend or describe does not mean that it does not exist. Every day we all directly experience emotions that can only be ‘explained’ through allegory or metaphor, or creatively through the arts. Love is a prime example. You have either exper- ienced it directly, in which case you know it, or you haven’t, in which case you are guessing. But even if you have, explaining it is hard, one reason why such a large proportion of our visual, aural and literary arts is dedicated to exploring it. In cultures where a supreme state of being rather than a su- preme being sits atop the hierarchy of meaning, as in much of the