Gatsby and Gestalt Shifts

(This article is hosted by The Culturium.)

THIS IS A love letter to literature, by which I mean all art. It’s dedicated to other lovers, as well as to those who are still courting.

Paula Marvelly and I met at the first Science and Nonduality Conference a few years back in California. We hit it off right away because we shared a love of Schopenhauer, Victorian novels and the expressive arts in general. We loved the arts not only for themselves but also for their connection to spirituality. This connection between arts and spirit has been dear to my heart for many years. So I was excited to see the birth of Paula’s The Culturium blog and delighted when she invited me to contribute an article.

The subject crosses paths with a new book I’ve written, called After Awareness. In that book, I recommend a passionate engagement with the arts as an antidote to attachment and suffering. The idea is that literature and the other arts are not only inspiring and enjoyable but they also present us with new ways of seeing the world. Seeing the world in new ways helps dissolve attachments to our current views. The arts, especially the written and spoken arts, can free us from the narrow assumptions that meaning is only literal. Freedom from literality in turn helps dissolve our attachment to all images and views, including those we have about ourselves.  More …