In 1977, German director Werner Herzog bet with his American colleague and friend Errol Morris that he would never be able to complete his first documentary, “Gates of Heaven”. Herzog's bet was a promise to eat his shoes. In the short film "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" you can see how he redeems the lost bet.
The absurd & surreal nature of Werner Herzog is not only linked to his diet. Herzog is a director who hypnotized his entire cast for his film “Heart of Glass”, who filmed his first feature films with a stolen camera, believing firmly he had a natural right to it. A man who founded a rogue film school where he teaches students how to pick locks and forge documents.
In his films and writings, subjective experience always counts more than verifiable facts. Cinema becomes a medium for reaching what he refers to as the “Ecstatic Truth” – for him, “The deepest essential that defines us as human beings.” For Herzog, facts and benign everyday images reach a merely superficial truth.
Facts do not constitute the truth
“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” [0]
- Werner Herzog
Only in this state of ecstasy, truth can be found according to Werner Herzog. On the other side of the truth spectrum, Herzog identifies the “accountant’s truth”, the factual truth of deconstructed facts. Data points without meaning or existential context.
“Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual […] were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality.”
-Werner Herzog
This “ecstatic truth” sounds at first like a mystical spiritual expression, yet reflects a reality that is connected to the way how we create our knowledge about the world.
The Aesthetic Of Our Representations
Recognizing Pablo Picasso in a train compartment, a man inquired of the artist why he did not paint people "the way they really are". Picasso asked what he meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, "That's my wife." Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?"
- Rosamund & Benjamin Zander: The Art of Possibility
Our brain does not directly observe the world but it constantly creates mental models about the world outside. These models are tuned to predict the patterns of our senses and depend on our perception, our needs and previous mental structures. The reality that we experience is always the one that is constructed in our minds. Our memories are mere interpretations, not records of the external reality. We are still dreaming while we are awake, only when awake our dream is coupled with our senses (sight, sound, tactile, etc) so that we can create a more accurate model of the external world. We cannot be awake outside of a dream state.
In this sense, understanding something means finding a suitable representation and is the result of a complex search process (we usually call it "intuition"). There is a drive that relates to the shape of these representations - they should be as elegant as possible, i.e. suitable in relation to their object, concise, sometimes stimulating the imagination, sometimes clarifying and, if necessary, have references to other representations. If we succeed in finding such representations, we also receive a signal of pleasure. In this way, we can call the drive "search for aesthetics".
“Our models of reality are attempts at distilling invariances from patterns.”
-Joscha Bach
Despite the constant changes that occur in our environment when processing e.g. visual information (distance, viewing angle, etc.), the brain has the unique ability to recognize patterns of constant and essential properties and discard irrelevant dynamic features. Our mind creates models that capture the essential patterns of the world.
This applies also to the recognition of faces at varying angles and distances. You can still recognize your aunt with a crazy new hat and too much make-up on her face. In other words, the essential presentation in your mind of your aunt is invariant to clothing, style and even age to some extent. You can still recognize your aunt in a 10-year-old photograph.
In similar ways to our mental modeling, the process of painting involves distilling an object down to represent it with fewer redundancies and variances. In this way, sketches try to capture the essence of our personal perception of a certain object. We usually don’t paint the infrared or x-ray vision of a situation but distill the features which are essential to our subjective human experience. We represent the world in a way that strikes us as meaningful. A piece of art does not try to capture the reality of an object, but it tries to capture the essence of our representation of the object. Art points to our personal subjective experience of reality.
Art is not interested in the facts, art is interested in our dreams. Artists use media like novels, movies or music as tools for triggering deep neural representations. In this sense, fabrication and stylization enhance the truth of those artworks. All films are structured like dreams.
“I modify facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.”
-André Gide
Perceptions of "Deeper Truth" when absorbing art are triggered by our internal pattern recognition system. Art taps into or even caricatures certain innate pattern recognition filters in our brain. Similar to the effects of conceptual problem solving, grasping a metaphor is rewarding.
When you are in aesthetic resonance with a beautiful landscape, you can feel one with the eternal cycle of life and death; when encountering stunning musical compositions, you feel unified with the artists’ emotions across centuries.
“I didn't know whether to believe you about your own film. But I know you speak of "ecstatic truth," of a truth beyond the merely factual, a truth that records not the real world but the world as we dream it.”
-Rogert Ebert, A letter to Werner Herzog
In this sense, Werner Herzog wants to map the inner territory of our emotional existence and not the factual truth. Herzog’s “ecstatic truth“ can be compared to Paul Watzlawicks concept of reality. Paul Watzlawick made the distinction between first-order and second-order reality: First-order reality is about the physical properties of an object, the information that we receive through our senses. Second-order reality is about the attribution of sense, meaning and value to this information. Contextualizing the pixels of our mental representations.
"The belief that there is only one reality is the most dangerous self-deception."
- Paul Watzlawick
Dissecting the Frog
In contrast to art, the contemporary mindfulness movement tends to deconstruct our mental representations. Different meditation techniques are designed to realize the impermanent and impersonal nature of our perceptions.
Mindfulness is grounded in the Buddhist doctrine of anattā, or the ‘no-self’. Anattā is a teaching about the virtualism of the self, defending the idea that there is nothing like a soul or any ongoing self. That what we perceive is as world & self are mere dreams.
Attachments are seen as hindrances on the path to realizing this truth. In this context, freedom is defined as freedom from the Sense of Self. By deconstructing with laser-focused attention the pixels of our dreams, we can realize their constructed nature. By observation & insight, we can unlearn our attachments, our identifications and let go of our emotions.
Suffering is characterized as a genetic holdover from the Stone Age, that we can meditate away. It is a retreat into private solutions in the face of increasing collective problems. In the worst case, mindfulness legitimizes prevailing states rather than challenges them and feigns normality where frustration would be appropriate. “Relaxed in the here and now. Above all fit for the future as an employee.“
“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. It’s not very interesting, and the frog dies in the process.”
In extreme forms, mindfulness practice can lead to the pathologization of attachment and identification itself. Leading to a mind virus of "incompleteness" similar to the original sin that has the power to undermine a whole person. Destabilizing confidence & peace towards a perceived lack. This can lead to an obsession with spiritual purity and perfect mental health. Trying to find The Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything in meditative contemplation.
Mindfulness techniques are designed to help us dissociate from our emotions, thoughts, and even our sense of self. And exactly these goals of detachment and “No-Self” can lead to a sense of self-estrangement and disorientation. Risks of intense meditation practice include dissociation, depression, derealization, pathological spaciness, and depersonalization.
In her article “The problem of mindfulness“, Sahanika Ratnayake describes how she lost after intense mindfulness practice her contextual understanding of emotions:
“I found myself to be calmer, more relaxed and better able to step away from any overwhelming feelings. […] Yet I’d also become troubled by a cluster of feelings that I couldn’t quite identify. It was as if I could no longer make sense of my emotions and thoughts. […] I couldn’t tell whether I had particular thoughts and feelings simply because I was stressed and inclined to give in to melodramatic thoughts, or because there was a good reason to think and feel those things.”
Within the framework of mindfulness, we don’t question the reasons for the stress. We unchain our thoughts from each other, in this way, we become more relaxed yet dissociate from our emotional context. Meditation deconstructs our context of meaning which usually builds and motivates our sense of self.
Our sense of self is a constructed fiction, and, from an evolutionary point of view, it’s actually a very useful and functional fiction. Our sense of self constructs motivation (biological and social needs) that we scale into an aesthetic for how we want our society and our interaction with it to be. When organizing our collective of humans, we use this fiction of self and its free will to communicate responsibility and agency.
“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
―Alan Moore
In contrast, from the Buddhist perspective, our sense of self is a problematic illusion that leads to harmful attachments. Calming the narrating mind, reducing identifications and being free from conceptual illusions are clear goals of Buddhism-inspired meditation techniques.
Daydreaming: The edge between charm and harm
In order to understand some of the effects of mindfulness meditation, it is important to look at the so-called Default Mode Network (DMN) in our brain.
The DMN is a collective of brain regions that becomes active when we are doing nothing and is deactivated while solving tasks. This network is highly active when it comes to self-referential or when processing information with high personal significance. Apart from that, it is particularly active when we are inspired in the creative process.
Several studies indicate that the DMN works particularly creative when we appear to be calm on the outside, analytical-cognitive self-control is low and we daydream. The content of our daydreaming determines whether or not daydreaming benefits one's well-being, enhances our creativity or if it leads to loops of suffering and rumination. In extreme cases, for instance, people with depression can no longer get out of the endless loops of self-reflection.
Mindfulness tries to put a stop to this unrestrained knotting of chains of thought. The techniques of meditation are designed to weaken the coupling of the DMN areas to each other. This calms our hyperactive daydreaming network and centers us in the clarity of the moment. Grounding us in naked perception without getting lost in thoughts.
When looking at a tree. A daydreamer remembers his childhood in the forest. A firefighter perceives a trap for cats. A biologist recognizes growth patterns and plant trait characteristics. An artist gets inspired to create her new song about having “no roots”. A Zen Master… sees a tree.
“…take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual”
- C.G Jung The Red Book
An advanced meditation practitioner perceives the world in its “accountant’s truth”. Without interpretation, without context. Just here and now. In contrast, a trained artist perceives his “deeper truth”, the deeper patterns & invariances of his world.
Mindfully observing the pixels of a television set, realizing the accountant’s truth of naked perceptions might help to not freak out while watching a psycho-thriller but it robs me of the opportunity to experience the adventures of another mind or the passionate love of two young souls on the Titanic. Personally, I don't want to watch a movie while being always lucid about it being a fiction. I wanna get lost in the thrilling novel, a wild passionate movie, I wanna get lost in the emotional rhythm of a song. The same is true for a computer game, we can only experience the world of a medieval knight if we limit our experience to that specific context.
A New Grammar Of Images
Narratives and analogies are the core of cognition, they create context and meaning. Within vivid emotional context, memories are far easier to remember (e.g. usage of a Memory Palace), especially when that context is emotionally outstanding and experientially unique. Further, the imaginary context in form of metaphors analogies is used for training high-performance athletes.
Stories and metaphors are “trojan horses” for sneaking in cues for intuitive actions as they allow you to map a familiar experience onto an unfamiliar one, leveraging the mind’s seemingly unlimited capacity for associations. When you read a book 10 years ago, it's a different book, when you read it now. Each sentence you read triggers a whole network of mental fireworks of associations. These associations are colored in the specific context of each scene of life.
Art creates new insights, by laying the emotional & associative fundament. In this context, the deepest communication is bottom-up inception, carried by stylization, fabrication and themes that awake our most personal perceptions of the world. This creates a feeling of resonance with the artwork. The best art has this implicit power that makes us recognize our deepest dreams, in new ways. We recognize an “ecstatic truth“ about the world, that touches and moves us.
A study in Science magazine provides experimental evidence that literary fiction “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences.” Reading Literary Fiction improves Theory of Mind meaning if you read novels, you train your capacity to comprehend other peoples feelings and perspectives.
When reading a novel, watching a movie or playing a computer game, we are experiencing another character’s mind. The same happens while dreaming, where our mind simulates multiple interacting personalities and protagonists. Experiencing a different consciousness than your own within your own consciousness is also called Narrative empathy.
“Narrative empathy is the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another's situation and condition.”
- Suzanne Keen
As highly social animals, we live in a complex web of desires and behaviors. Stories, analogies and images are the source code that builds up our inner chronicles coloring our inner worlds with meaning and value. Each of us, lives in its one universe. By sharing our stories and dreams, we build wormholes that connect. We can build threads of shared values and meaning. We can find inspiring visions that drive us towards common goals. When we dare to create meaningful narratives, deeper truths, then the individual webs are woven together into a single web over the whole community.
"My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. Simple as that."
- Werner Herzog
We do not define ourselves by what we know but rather by how we judge, value and integrate it into our lives. When it comes to the things that matter most to us on a more existential level, our passions, our ethical beliefs, our sense of self, all the things that really drive us that shape our identity and guide our actions, factual truth simply doesn't mean as much to us as we might tell ourselves. A deconstructed perspective of the individual emphasizes detached reason and fails to value passionate engagement with self, others and the world.
Our sense of self is not just a sum of facts (“accountant’s truth”), but rather a mosaic of all of the interactions with others and the world that make it up: the trillions upon trillions of “in-forming” processes that trace and transform our identity. And it is our responsibility to not simply move blindly forward where the various currents of these information streams might take us, but to take an active and selective role in them, to be our own filter of information.
In this way, we can decide for healthy story creation and become “Connaisseurs” of narratives and their aesthetics. Cultivating a taste for the stories and images we feed our subconscious. Cultivating passion and inspiration, feeling the fire of creative ecstasy. We are the architects of our own Matrix, we decide what is valuable, what is meaningful to us. We decide which inner images rule our subconscious. Feeding either deconstruction or building a new grammar of hopeful images that drive us into new territories full of curiosity.
By playfully investigating and sharing our most inner dreams, we can find joy in creating healthy artful meaning which serves our interconnected community of animals, plants and fungi.
“In a world of infinite experience, it is the aesthete who is safest, not the ascetic. Abstinence will not work. The only cure for too much fiction is good fiction.”
—Erik Hoel
When you look at photos of the Chauvet Cave, it's not the archaeological discovery of cave paintings that move but a realization that our human spirit was already alive and burning with passion over 37,000 years ago.
“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies... Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”
- Pablo Picasso
Sources:
https://aeon.co/essays/mindfulness-is-loaded-with-troubling-metaphysical-assumptions
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/enter-the-supersensorium-hoel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroesthetics#Peak_shift_principle
https://www.paulwatzlawick-institut.at/konstruktivismus-als-lebens-philosophie/
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13b6j6bt
https://www.proquest.com/docview/1709675483