Seven Little-Known Birds of the Inner Eye

by Anand Mulk Raj 1905-2004

  44. "Cosmic Egg" (Courtesy, Bharat Bhavan, Benares Hindu University J.

  45. Symbol of Shiva, Elephanta Caves near Bombay.

  All these metaphors became anecdotal when the human geometrical sense, affecting the heart-blood and thus the body-soul, was clothed with formal signs and tokens. And the whole mythology was carved into a set of abstract terms and images that gives functional expression, "not for what it represents, but for the feeling it signifies." The images are recognisable to ail Hindus from mnemonic recitation of the qualities and the attributes of the various gods and goddesses.

  Since the whole collective memory of the Indian people was saturated with the changeless self behind phenomena, ever-changing patterns are the counterparts of the unity, the harmony and the oneness behind multiplicity.

  Plato considered the most perfect shape to he the circle. Our consciousness was nourished on symbols, myths and legends for generations, enabling us to recognise which images were to be worshipped for well-being or alliance of the body-soul with godhood, even if the feeling of the plastic qualities made one image more integral than another. Such images lift us beyond ritualistic worship to the realm of Ananda, the highest aesthetic value.

  46. Incarnation of Vishnu

  Leonardo da Vinci conceived shapes in terms of geometry. He illustrated the Divina Proportions of Luca Pacioli to show that the human body is both a perfect circle and a perfect square. This geometrical conception also takes form in Leonardo's drawings of heads in which each of the elements—forehead, ear, eye, nose, chin—is enclosed within a rectangle or a circle, and it can be seen in his statement that, "as a stone flung into water causes many circles, so any object in luminous atmosphere diffuses itself into circles." Nature, for Leonardo, is enclosed within fundamental shapes.

  Le Corbusier similarly establishes the human scale in architecture.

  The important point is that sculptures and paintings are human imagery, transcribed from the metaphors suggested by bodily functions and exalted into transcendent vision.

  The onlooker, registering the import of a living image in a work of art, is, I suggest, instantaneously in touch with the design from the immediate response of feeling. But the connection is unconscious, accepted by habit and taken for granted, as it has already been absorbed into the breathing system from past experience.

  In this regard, let me quote the words of an acute critic of architecture, Geoffrey Scott:

  A person, for example, who is taking part in an exciting game will feel exhilaration and may enjoy it; but the overtones of gaiety, the full intellectual and emotional interest of the state, are dressed up in the physical experience. The mind is not free to attend to them. It is precisely because the conscious physical element in architectural pleasure is so slight, our imitative self-adjustment to architectural form so subtle, that we are enabled to value that which belongs to the physical state. If we look at some eighteenth century design, all life and flicker and full of vigorous and dancing curves, the physical echo of movement which they awaken is enough to recall the appropriate mental and emotional penumbra; it is not sufficient to overwhelm it. No one has suggested that the experiences of art are as violent or exciting as the experiences of physical activity; but it is claimed for them that they are subtle, more profound, more lasting, and, as it were, possessed of greater resonance.4

  Apart from the heightening of our life-breath to allow the emergence of the subconscious, the impact of works of art may give a feeling of elation, expansion or well-being. The egg shape was, as we have noted, the basic cosmic egg of the Hindus. And Brancusi returns to this form as a primal image. The Shiva lingam was the phallic symbol of creativeness of the Shivaites. Also, the lights and shadows, and a hundred different devices, like the starting line in a Cubist picture, create movement and excite us into the awareness of space sensations, Cezanne's cones, cubes and cylinders showed acute awareness of the effect of forms. In Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted over and over again for thirty years, he tried to discover basic geometries (Fig. 47).

  Colours create immediate emotional responses, as is suggested in the Hindu shilpashastras, by Kandinsky and by many modern designers. Orange excites us and makes us feel warm. Green soothes us. Yellow relaxes us, almost bringing an instinctive glow to the body. Black depresses the heart, unless contrasted with another colour.

  Similarly, forms and their qualities have different effects. Every object, by the disposition of the bulk within its contours, carries with it suggestions of weight which finds, or fails to find, secure and powerful adjustments. This is true of any block of matter, and the art of sculpture is built upon this fact. But when such blocks are structurally combined, complex suggestions of physical function are involved, greater in number, larger and more decisive through the scale. Architecture relates forms, emphasises physical security and strength. Coherence, mass, space, line, volume, together and separately, all have their parallel emotions in the body and make works of art belong to us through our apperceptions of the heartbeats involved in physical experience after the visual and other responses have taken place.5

  The bird of the heart may thus, metaphorically speaking, begin to fly immediately after seeing a picture, but it does so in excited movements which take their urgency from the heartbeats, until it hovers over the whole image and the breathing ultimately becomes even. The other birds beckon up the feelings, moods, predilections, values and habits of behaviour of different parts of the body-soul, pump blood into the system and make the whole personality of the onlooker glow. If the colour or forms are exciting, the bird of the heart may even make a few somersaults in the air, as a child does from the sheer pleasure of play; if the expression it accosts is violent and angry, the heart bird flies quicker; if a work of art communicates the feeling of freedom, the heart bird may fly oft, the whole body on its wings. It is perhaps the most playful of the seven birds.

  47. "Mont Sainte-Victoire" by Paul Cézanne. Oil on canvas, 28 3/4" x 32 1/8" (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; bequest of Mrs, H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. The H.O. Havemeyer Collection).

  The Hindus considered the act of creation of the world as lila, play. And if the artist, who imitates the functions of God, creates through the sheer love of play, then the onlooker can do no better than ally himself with the playful bird of the heart, with the expression of his own sensibility uninhibited by routine processes, and free himself from the burden of expression.

  It must be pointed out, however, that a work of art is not all "free expression," and so the spectator cannot merely run away with any particular fancy the picture may arouse. The "free expression" of the artist without a vision of wholeness is not free expression at all, but a limited experiment with some odd bit of experience.

  There are certain rules of the game, practised even by the artists who break the rules. Furthermore, there are certain materials before the maker. And the creative artist seeks to fashion nature; he transforms it and creates images in which memories, rhythmic pressures, hereditary and acquired sensibility, the brain, and the imagination, besides his sense impressions, come into play. Anything can start off the creative process; with the first line or brush stroke or dim ideogram the metabolism comes into play; the energies begin to flow, adumbrating instinct, intuition and the sheer physical activity of kinetic gesture in the hand, which is the poetic release instrument of the psyche, and, through the plunge taken into the sea of existence, the artist either begins to swim, or drowns in the welter of confusion.

  The tension of the creative moments involves the heart, not in pure delight, but in the tension of pleasure-pain, the contrarieties of which help biological growth, rather than hinder it. That is how, perhaps, the genius of the artist seeks to gather up into a work those prismatic qualities which either make us recognise our own intense experience so that we say: "Ah, I also feel that way"—or turn aside and wish the painter better luck next time.

  So the bird of the heart has to stimulate the bird of reason and offer to it the gi
ft of pleasure-pain which it has brought from below, before the aesthetic condition of seeing can be achieved.

  6: The Bird of Reason

  48. Two-headed bird of reason.

  THE BIRD of reason emerges from the brain and dominates the whole body with its masterly capacities for receiving hundreds of messages, analysing them, gathering up the multifarious associations of feeling, memory image, idea, vibrations of sound and of sight and tactile experience. It lifts the body and evokes the undertones of suppressed fantasies in the jungle of the unconscious, from the habits of the past, inherited prejudices, predilections and value judgements. And it synthesises them into a semblance of order. These multiple capacities of the brain have given to reason a pre-eminent place in the life of man. Many animals and even some plants have uncommon attributes, The compound eyes of bees enable them to see the direction of the sun's rays and thus fly by celestial navigation. The hearing of supersonic sound by bats and the sensitivity of snakes to temperature changes of a thousandth of a degree are likewise remarkable. But the potentialities of the human brain, along with the general all-round development of the contact with the other constituents of the sensibility, make the two-headed bird of reason supreme in the universe of consciousness (Fig. 48).

  If we contemplate man's achievements detachedly, his genius for monitoring signals, for computing the subtlest entities, for analysing the most immediate sensations and the most abstract symbols is uncanny indeed. Some of the greatest men seem to be gods because of their evolutionary growth to wholeness and their attainment of the highest qualities of awareness. The triumphs of scientists, in putting astronauts on the moon and in launching satellites which become parts of the solar system, make our age one of the most fruitful, in some respects, of all the ages of mankind—and reason has a good deal to do with this whole process of enlightenment.

  What is it about the brain system that makes reason work?

  Recent research at the Brain Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Medical Sciences, in Moscow, has confirmed the predictions of the yoga philosophy that the brain is not the beginning of all the nerves but the near end, where the sum of all the impressions of the sense organs are analysed, organised and communicated downwards. Thus the poetical title of the brain in India, "the Lotus of a thousand petals," is appropriate, because the petals which surround its cavity are as important as the centre which helps release (Fig. 49).

  49. Brain as lotus.

  Knowledge is still lacking as to the capacities of the analysers for that part of the reflex arc which begins in the sense organs and terminates in the cerebral cortex. But we do know that, through the analysers imbedded in the vagal centre, signals from the senses, as well as those from the skeletal muscle apparatus and other internal organs, are perceived and analysed. The brain itself, though in a commanding position, is helpless without the instincts (Fig. 50). Its arrogance of rationality, therefore, seems somewhat presumptuous.

  The analysed signals are transmitted through the centrifugal bonds of the brain to the executive working apparatuses of feelings and emotions, which provide the necessary response reactions of the organism. If we can understand the essence of the vagal centre, we can come close to understanding the complex physiological and psychological mechanisms of perception, of the subtle signal analysis and the consequent synthesis which ensures the interanalyser activity of the brain.

  50. Helpless without instincts.

  As the structural organization of the fifteen billion nervous cells in the cortex of the large hemisphere of the human brain is extremely complicated, depending on variations of hereditary circumstances, as well as on training, individuals differ in their reactions according to the different size and arrangements of their cortex cell field. But of course there are no racial symptoms or national distinctions in the structure of the brain, as some Brahmins, Fascists and racists prefer to think.

  It has also been found that the cortex areas develop differently in human beings than in animals. In human beings, the older cortex formations mature earlier than do the new ones. For instance, the central cortex field of the motor analyser, the electrical irritation of which causes local motor effects, is isolated and ends its development in man earlier than the major motor field connected with a more intricate organization of motions. The same can be said of the cerebral field of the optic analyser cortex, connected with the primary processing of the optic irritations arriving in the cortex. Certain new areas of the cerebral cortex, the frontal and temporal sinciput-occiput areas, complete their development later than others. These are of great importance in providing the specifically human functions of speech and intelligent action.

  There are three basic types of nervous cells in the cerebral cortex: stellate, pyramidal and spindle-shaped.1 There are four upper and two lower strata in the cross-section of the cortex. The neurons in each stratum are differently matched.

  From the brain go the reticular formations which make nervous connections (Fig. 51), Stellate cells are found in the second and fourth strata of the cortex. Their many appendices form complex bands between nerve cells. Such cell patterns permit them, evidently, to preserve for a longer or shorter time the traces of nervous signals. For instance, data exist to show that, in generating conditioned reflexes, the nervous process caused by a light irritant is preserved for a longer time than a process caused by a sound irritant. The optic cortex is known to have a particularly large number of stellate cells, as compared with the auditory sheath cortex.

  Pyramidal cells are in close contact with stellate cells. Most pyramidal cells, except for the short branching dendrites, have a long, weakly branching fibre which passes the signals on to the other parts of the cortex or to the underlying sections of the central nervous system.

  51. Reticular formations.

  52. Brain coordinates responses.

  Studies of the fine neuron organization of the brain have been followed by profound penetrations into the microstructure of the nerve tissue until we can discern the finest details of the bonds between nerve cells. Numerous protrusions or appendages called fibrils, which supply contacts between nerve cells, are revealed. The fibrils are extremely sensitive to various injuries and to the effects of pharmacological agents. Electron microscopy has made it possible to penetrate deeper into the cohesion of the neurons, and the synoptic formations are shown to be variegated and highly useful to the nervous system. Thus the sharper capacity of dogs (and more particularly of bats and dolphins) for sound and supersonic perceptions may be correlated with the highly developed sound analyser subcortex formations in the lower apes.

  The cerebral cortex is extremely efficient as regards the intensity of oxidation processes and can absorb all kinds of information, theories and facts, though it cannot digest them. It coordinates all responses (Fig. 52).

  Distinctions in the structure and functions of the analyser exert an effect on metabolism features. Thus we can speak of the chemo-architectonics of the brain, and the biochemist's evidence on the cyclo-architectonics and neuron structure of the brain becomes significant. That is to say, the brain helps the digestion of ideas in the belly, where lies the pabulum of instinct, emotion and intuition.

  How does the brain coordinate its complicated relationships?

  It seems that certain cranial nerves connect the grey matter with the region of the solar plexus. These nerves have further affiliations, through filaments, with other plexuses situated lower down. There are at least eleven pairs of these nerves. One pair, known as the vagi, or the "wandering nerves," reaches the level of the umbilicus, thus running over one of the longest structures and forming the bulk of the parasympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system.

  In modern physiology, the vagus is said to be the tenth cranial nerve. It arises from the grey matter in the flow of the fourth ventricle, and is connected with the hind brain. The vagus shows a significant swelling at the level of the jugular foramen at the base of the skull. This jugular ganglion at the root of the vagus sen
ds a branch to the carotid plexus at the base of the skull. Still another swelling a little lower down is called the ganglion nodosum. Farther down, the nerve passes vertically along the spinal column through the neck, chest and abdomen, where it ends in a plexus and connects itself with the solar plexus (see Figs. 36 and 37).