Awakening into new Dimensions

Before yesterday, when I listened to a refutation of current public education practice on UTube, I had not associated aesthetic and anaesthetic as a pair of words associated as the opposites of one idea. Of course, this is because they are not direct opposites in our language, at least in how they came to us as words; but now being proposed as opposites, there is something to consider.

The definition I found in my dictionary for "aesthetics" is: The science of deducing from nature and taste the rules and priciples of art; the theory of the fine arts;the science or that branch of philosophy which deals with the beautiful; doctrines of taste. "Anaesthetic" is: Pertaining to, characterized by, or producing, anaesthesia. "Anaesthesia" is: A condition of partial or total insensibility, especially to touch, produced commonly by anaesthetics, though sometimes due to to disease.

If one focuses on the level of sensibility in the definition, and the perception of art represents a higher sensibility, then the two words are genuine opposites. The perception  of art, beauty and taste are the result of higher levels of sensibility. In the education discussion, higher levels of sensibility represented more engagement with living and Life.

I think this explanation might help to understand disturbing changes I have been perceiving in the cultural world. The cultural world doesn't seem to be operating under the same rules it seemed to "before"; yet analyzing it, it works just as it always has.

Using the aesthetic/anaesthetic model to see our culture, perhaps the explanation is that the ordinary of us have been jogged into a semi-consciousness of aesthetic existence. Some live in those places already, experience them consciously, and even sense higher levels of existence. The difference is that many of those people are still living in the lower worlds among those who previously did not perceive the higher worlds at all. The effect is that the workings of ordinary culture are now less grounded in the physical than we previously saw.

Linguistic and idea associations used to be tools for the aesthete to make sense of the common world around us all. Magick was something imposed on the ordinary world by those who left the ordinary world behind.

Today, the world seems different in that the associations we used to identify and cause (in fiction) have come alive (in the ordinary world). The messages of word associations travel as freely and surely as the truth of the eyes in former days. That was called magick previously, and was previously difficult to make real in the ordinary world.

What seems to be a complex world, which is difficult to navigate because of the unreliability of the signs which surround us, is perhaps a world in which the reality of art causes a resculpting of the place in which we reside as a culture together. Learn to read the signs and the causes and effects will be predictable again.

I have spent much of the last nine years angry at the lack will that our culture, as a whole, has demonstrated to perpetuate its understood form. I never felt at home with its form, but it did propose an ideal, and I appreciated the ability to see and react to it in a logical way. Cultural behavior over that time seemed hypocritical (and it was), however, the hypocrisy might simply be the cultural stumble into an unconscious, different level of understanding. My discomfort with it might be not yet understanding how it works.

I imagine that this new phase of existence is directly parallel to the understandings held by older cultures than ours, whose methods were seen as dishonest by us before this change of ours. Taking a fresh look at those cultures and how they operate would serve as a start to bringing that change into our consciousness.