Art Reboot

42 East, the transcendent mode is simply self-evident, part of the furniture of collective consciousness. The mystical realm, and the enlightenment experience that connects us to it directly, has been well documented since the beginning of recorded history and has been afforded the greatest respect in several of the major civilisa- tions of the world, including, of course, China. But in the West in recent centuries, this transcendent way of knowing has been marginalised and often almost completely denied. The entrenched western intellect saw the idea of trans- cendence as a threat to its sovereignty, believing rationality to be the only sane form of human consciousness. And as European imperialism brought western anthropologists into close contact with other cultures, prejudice against other ways of knowing be- came further entrenched. Anything other than rational thought was quickly discredited. The irony of waving a bible in the face of the irrational was apparently lost on globe-strutting, monotheist conquerors. But blindness to this paradox was hardly surprising. There was con- siderable bounty to be won from intellectual dominance, not least in the domains of science and technology. A laser focus on rationality granted the European axis global dominance on an unprecedented scale for hundreds of years; little surprise, per- haps, that it was reluctant to abandon it. Geopolitical power has shifted greatly since the peak of western hegemony, and today’s technological and scientific land- scape is a very different one. But considerable prejudice remains, even among those who actually experience transcendental states. Many people experience glimpses of something other than their