Art Reboot

88 of the intellect where it holds sway are inadequate to deal with the full bandwidth of consciousness on their own, and that such puzzling, paradoxical questions can only be dealt with by raising consciousness to the transcendent level. The practice was orig- inally Chinese ( gong’an ). The Daoist patriarch Zhuang Zi would have approved as he was a language sceptic. He didn’t believe that language alone could deal with the meaning of life. In its role as a high-level tool of communication serving the evolution of consciousness, art too can be seen as a form of koan . It provides a channel of communication between our two ways of knowing and is an efficient means of transcending the intellect. This is why so much of the process of art has one foot in the realm of the explicable domain of the intellect and the other in the transcendent state. Art can multitask. It is the very complexity of this process that makes it so effi- cient, once we approach it knowingly. As we are drawn into the languages of art, moving from surface to more esoteric inner languages, they become increasingly difficult to follow analyt- ically. The intellect finds itself led into a realm where it can no longer adequately cope. It reaches the limits of its capacity and begins to recognise the fact. That is ultimately the role of art, to first encourage the intellect to question its own autonomy, and then to help transcend it entirely. As our experience of art leads us beyond the intellect, it encourages access directly to the un- differentiated experience, even if, as with the common musical eclipse of the self, only in glimpses. Art, in that sense, and at that depth, is efficiently meditational and is as good a path as any towards enlightenment.