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At The Brink of Mysteries
Van Gogh looked at sunflowers and night skies very differently than most of us. The artist saw an explosion of colors within the “yellow” of sunflowers and a swirling depth of colors expressed in the “black” of a starry night.
The artist wasn’t so much painting what he saw objectively, but sharing what he felt intuitively. He felt an explosion of meaning in the ordinary objects all around him. He wanted to give us the gift of such sacred seeing. He used to say, “Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see.”
Art comes from the inside out, there’s no way science can do that. Science comes from the outside in, there is no way art can do that. For me, religion is finding the invisible ineffable depths of our being that can bring heart, mind and will into harmony.
— Jim Rigby
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“If only you pay attention to it, you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it is obvious that putting little white dots in the blue black, is not enough to paint the starry sky.”
— Van Gogh
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“The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form.”
— Eckhart Tolle
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“People live at the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whether you approach the Great Mystery from the head or the heart, from intuition or logic, you are rare in our culture. Most of us are truly hypnotized by the “world of fluctuating forms.” I think that artists of all kinds are teaching themselves to see by doing their work. Their work shows what they find, which other people can learn from so they too may see more deeply. I understand artists better than scientists, but I agree that they are both coming at the same mystery. I think it’s a mistake to assume science ignores beauty. Scientists are more skeptical of a clumsy…
