Saturday Art: Art and Illusion

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It looks like a person is reading in the water. When you zoom in, you will find that there is no person, no book, no reading, everything is an illusion. Just like life, it seems to be the case, but it is not the case at all..

A few days back a friend had sent the above post. Apart from the message it conveyed, one could not help noticing the beautiful art behind it. On the face of it, it is just an arrangement of stones, but the art was is in giving the visual effect of a man reading in water. It involved finding stones of the right size and shape, chipping and polishing them if necessary and placing them in a particular order to create a meaningful image from a distance. 

Most art is instructive as much as it gives joy, but more often we discuss the artistic merit of a piece of art and rarely the underlying message or meaning it conveys.

So in today's art class, we will be deriving meaning from this work of art involving stones. The accompanying note says everything is an illusion. Carrying this line of thought further and going in the domain of metaphysics, at a certain level, all what we perceive is an illusion and thus these may not be stones either, but could be taken as condensed mass of energy that are perceived by us in a particular form. 

Again what we perceive is entirely dependent on our senses and humans notoriously possess limited sensory faculties. For example, we have three colour receptors (RGB) and all other colours are seen as approximations to these three colours, giving us the ability to see 1 million colours. But some creatures have four colour receptors with which they can see 100 million colours. So also our hearing, we have a hearing range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but other creatures like bats have 9 Hz to 200 kHz. And with smell, dogs can smell more than 1000 times better than humans. So too with skin, where contrary to expectations, alligators and crocodiles have the most acutely sensitive skin. So with our limited sensory spectrum what we perceive is only a slice of reality, a representation of it, where everything else is conjured up by the mind, which is basically illusory by nature.

But the irony is that while our reality is real and persistent, what we are expected to do with our lives is not to make our reality more real, but in spiritual terms to break free from façade of reality and experience the essence of it. In short, we stop the play of mind which builds our own little nebulous worlds and seek the source that presents to us our individual realities. 

We conclude the whole drama of life is happening in the mind. Modern science has demonstrated conclusively that space, time, energy and matter all operate in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive to the human mind. Our perceived reality bears little resemblance to the outright weirdness that is the quantum world. We may see a man reading in water, or stones kept in a certain formation, or mass of energy that is no different from what we are and which pervades everything - it all depends on the level at which we perceive our reality. The art involved in the arrangement of stones has opened our perception to the illusory nature of our worlds. Indian philosophy calls it 'Maya' and that is the understanding we derive from this work of art today.

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