Acknowledgement
Many of the ideas expressed in this book are in alignment with those of Djwhal Khul, as reflected in the writings of Alice Bailey. More than twenty years after I began implementing this philosophy in my life and teachings, I was delighted to find a volume of his work, and my own work has been enriched over the years as a result.
There are three perception types, with possible intersections and combinations:
1) Sensory perception is highly developed in most artists, many of which represent the involutionary wave. Sensory oriented humans try to understand the objective world by seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching it. In this process, the visual aspect is most important for most people, and especially for painters. However, the characteristics represented by form, color, sound, taste etc. are merely effects of internal causes which remain unknown to the sensory subject. Such artists cannot access subjective ur-energies and have no way of establishing true identities and value systems. Among them are countless baroque and some impressionist painters: Titian, Rubens, Holbein, Caravaggio, Watteau, Renoir, Matisse and many, many others.
2) Mental cognition represents the next developmental stage. The conscious mind is able to register mental processes and to contact forms which are created by vibrations and which express certain ideas. Due to complications both in sensory perception and interpretation of forms, mental cognition distorts reality and can merely connect the subject to the lowest realms of nature. The relatively large group of mentally oriented artists consists, among others, of Michelangelo, Velasquez, Goya, Vermeer, Cezanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Dali, Miró, Magritte, Picasso, Mondriaan – and, last but not least, Kandinsky. Most surrealists and abstractionists are to be found in this category.
3) The ultimate stage of enlightenment allows for absolute vision, free of distortion. Like absolute musical hearing, the enlightened artist perceives reality not filtered through form, but “an sich”, as it is. The few truly enlightened humans represent the acme of mental evolution, be they artists or musicians, philosophers or saints. In the visual domain, enlightenment had been achieved by old Egyptian masters, Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Rembrandt, Turner, Claude Monet, Čiurlionis, Malevich, Filonov – and Paul Klee.
To proceed analyzing these three types, we have to keep in mind the structure of thought. Ideas can be categorized as following forms of thought:
1) material objective forms in the physical everyday world
2) feelings and desires in the emotive world
3) other human beings’ thoughts
4) personal thoughts
5) ideas
[…]
Sound is the basis of matter in all its diversity. The most gifted musicians and some artists realized it, at least subconsciously, long before it was established by modern physicists. Today, music is a much more active and wider available component of most Western people’s everyday lives than ever before. This phenomenon is connected to the development of technology, but its ultimate results are far more important than a mere increase in convenience and entertainment. Some of the deeper changes have been described in Walter Benjamin’s seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. What interests us in this context, is the omnipresent permeation of music.
We are exposed to high fidelity reproductions of musical harmonies, of different instruments and human voices intertwined into melodies, of sound patterns that are sometimes close to perfection. Musical rhythms become the rhythms of life, thus connecting humans to cosmic vibrations. This enables our deeper mental selves to achieve immediate contact with our surface personalities. Thanks to music and art, mankind is on the way to an era, which is freer, happier and more constructive than any period of history before. Barriers erected by personalities can be swept away by a surge of music.
Wassily Kandinsky was a synaesthet. Like Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Rimbaud, he could literally hear colors and see sounds. It was not a matter of mere association or symbolism: synaesthesia is a physical talent which has been much studied; the only irrefutable scientific facts are as following: it is real, and it is rare. About 1% of all people are true synaesthets – their perception of sound and color (sometimes also of texture and taste) is closely interconnected. However, most of us are synaesthetic to some degree: we associate the visual with the acoustic and vice versa. This ability can be trained and developed.
Most synaesthetic artists were men of letters. Luckily for the history of art and mankind, Kandinsky happened to be a painter. He could demonstrate that the visual, chromatic aspects of sound are the crucial vehicle of its influence. His art aimed at showing the mental equivalence of sound and color. In musical terms, he was influenced e.g. by Wagner's “Lohengrin” which, he felt, pushed the limits of melody beyond standard lyricism towards a space where visual and audible art can interconnect. He saw landscapes in terms of sound and hoped that the most perceptive among the admirers of his work would be able to do the same:
“The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every color to the zenith of life […] like the fortissimo of a great orchestra”
It might be trivial to say that sound equals color and that color equals sound, but it is important to notice just how true this truism is. Sound permeates all forms, just as light does. […] To turn to the latter: all objects in the macrocosm interact via chemical signals that carry concrete information, just the way it happens in every single microcosm. Countless suns contact each other by emitting intense light. The bursts of sun activity as well as all other changes in cosmic objects observed by physicists are the universal means of communication. The language of the universe is light, the language of the art both light and sound.
