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Thread: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Throwing some quantum physics in:

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Chocolate, reading your PS, I am not trying to leave the topic at hand or send it off on a tangent. I hope everyone understands that. I am simply trying to help clarify and explain what it is. And it is quite simple in my experience.

    But by all means, I will leave the discussion to those who prefer to make it very complicated and not interfere with the discussion on the huge and almost insurmountable complexities if this is what this thread is supposed to be about.
    Last edited by Ealiss; 5th March 2014 at 21:39.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Ealiss, I am not trying to explain to anyone anything, just giving my share of what I know from practical, scientific and spiritual perspective.

    Quote:
    Quote Posted by araucaria (here)
    Although the topic is SRV, scientific remote viewing, with all the theorizing that this entails
    [...]

    I want to keep the focus here on the scientific/theoretical aspect, because this is where Courtney Brown is on topic for a forum ‘where science and spirituality meet’. While it is more than likely that science cannot meet spirituality without making great strides away from what generally passes for science, this would seem to mean that the opposite is also true: that traditional spirituality (as opposed to religion) has work to do to make this possible. Basically, if science needs to include the non-physical, then as a corollary, spirituality needs to become more grounded.

    Also, this has a topical aspect in connection with Courtney Brown’s imminent announcement. We need to be as prepared as we can to interpret this in the most positive manner possible, avoiding any pitfalls.
    More clear than that I don't know how to say it.
    Last edited by chocolate; 5th March 2014 at 21:48.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Last edited by chocolate; 5th March 2014 at 22:02.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    I haven't seen this one before... RV is a very fascinating phenomenon, Courtney Brown seems to be very passionate about it and I think that he is quite a sincere person.



    Dick Allgire is said to be a very good remote viewer.






    Here is one full session though the subject is not very pleasant. I hope that these videos fit the topic!

    "When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there." ~ George Harrison

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Because there are so many here interested in RVing, maybe we could set up our own sessions here in this forum? Would anyone be interested in doing that?

    I've participated in other forums in the past in Remote Viewing and here's how it works.
    Someone picks out a photo with coordinates inserted in the corner of that image and saves it at a file sharing place that also time-stamps that file at the exact time it is saved.

    Then we each do our own RV session on that target and post our sketchings and/or descriptions on what's in the target. Then a day or so later, the photo is revealed.

    Then, someone else in the group will assign coordinates to another photo and so on. We rotate.

    I've participated in numerous such exercises in other forums over the years and they're a lot of fun!

    But one thing is certain, no one can truly understand Remote Viewing unless they themselves practice at it all the time.

    Those who have decent hit rates know Remote Viewing because if one is successful at identifying significant details of their targets on a relatively consistent basis, this is an indication that that person has mastered those techniques required of RV viewers to be successful at it. This takes practice, and a lot of it. This is why at the Olympics, for example, we only see those former figure skating medal winners analyzing those competitions on the air for network television during those games. The reason why is because they know all about figure skating inside and out at a much more advanced level than anyone who is not a high ranking figure skating competitor.
    Last edited by Roisin; 6th March 2014 at 08:50.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Roisin, I have never done a map. Only places. I did try and find a few missing persons and solve a murder but that was with all the psychic senses and not just RV. Even if I make a fool of myself, I have no problem giving it a go.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    I'm not very good at remote viewing yet but I know if I practice at it all the time, I will eventually improve. Your psychic abilities sound better than mine are and it goes without saying that there are many here who claim to have psychic abilities which is not surprising because psychic development often times is a side-effect of spiritual development too. It should be stated though that one does not need any demonstrable psychic abilities in any area to become a successful Remote Viewer. In fact, the whole beauty behind Remote Viewing is that anyone can be trained to become proficient at it, at least to some extent. But like anything else, this only comes after one practices at it.

    Like you, I'm not afraid to practice at Remote Viewing in a more or less public venue because I'm not afraid to fail. This is why I have posted some of my predictions in that members prediction thread. My attitude is if you get a hit that's great but it that doesn't happen then that's fine too. It's all about practicing and getting better at it and no one should be criticized for at least trying.

    To get started with this, we need at least one more person for our first run at it. Hope someone else here will want to join in on the fun too!

    If no one else joins by the end of today, then you and I can just start off with a run and take it from there.

    ------
    For anyone who wants to participate in these RV sessions, please sign up at Dropbox which is a file sharing website that timestamps each file that is saved.

    Here's a link to that site: https://www.dropbox.com

    No other file sharing site will be permitted for these sessions.

    Here's how this works:

    At the beginning of each session, the designated "taskmaster" uploads a photo of their chosen target with 2 sets of four numbers for the coordinates inserted in a corner of that image into their "Dropbox" folder. This can be a photo from the internet or a photo that they captured of an object or scene with their cellphone or cam.

    Here's a good random number generator: http://www.random.org/integers/

    Example showing the 2 sets of coordinates inserted in a corner of a "target" image:


    Then they notify the group that the target is ready where they also post those coordinates for that run too in that same post. They should also post their local time in that post too.

    Viewers then have 24 hrs to conduct their own RV session for that target. Once that's completed, the viewer then posts their sketches and/or descriptions of the target here in this thread.

    After the viewing period has ended, the taskmaster then will:
    -- post their local time to indicate that the 24 hr. viewing period is up.
    -- post the target photo in this thread
    -- include a screenshot showing the date and time that file was saved in their "Dropbox" folder. That information is shown in their dropbox folder when one clicks on that image when in that folder.
    -- include a link to that Dropbox file for participants to access.
    Here's an example of a screenshot of that dolphin image that I just uploaded to a folder I created at Dropbox entitled with todays date:


    Then, after that's done, a new person is designated as "taskmaster" and we start all over again.
    Last edited by Roisin; 6th March 2014 at 11:36.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Roisin, I already have drop box but I am not comfortable allowing access to a lot of people I don't know. Not to my private dropbox. I will be fine with the screenshot of the time the file was posted, without having access to the dropbox.

    It sounds like we need a new thread? To do this separately.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Hi, if you are not comfortable with providing a Dropbox link here to that image for others to access then you do not have to do that.

    But it is important that you post the image here when the 24 hr viewing period is up and post a screenshot from the folder that you created in dropbox showing the the image and the time it was first uploaded to that site.


    ----
    Yes, we should start up a new thread on this. I'll do that in a few minutes.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Here's the link to that Remote Viewing Practice thread I just created for our sessions:
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...364#post805364

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    I’m glad to see an RV practice thread has been started, and hope participants have great fun with that. Practice and theory go hand in hand, and how they do so is an important area to explore in connection both with any particular practice and any given theory. However, in this thread the emphasis is on theory.

    Some posters here have notices similarities with other phenomena. Some such often takes place on the Here and Now thread when posts strike readers of them as somehow knowing what they are up to. When this happens to my posts, there is no visual element whatsoever, so for me the effect is sufficiently different from RV to be kept apart in any analysis. For me personally, it is more to do with creative writing, for others it may be something else. Many of us on this forum are practiced in something of this sort, so we may have enough practical experience without having tried a given protocol.

    The purpose of theory is not necessarily to establish something’s existence: we can theorize about language. Nor is it necessarily to explain how something works, although this is part of it, and there can be a lot of explaining to do, but you eventually move on to research into how the technique can be developed beyond what is known. Theory has another function however: it serves to evaluate, in other words to keep people honest. We do this all the time on the forum, finding out what people can legitimately state, and when (and why) their material starts becoming dodgy. When the crunch comes, the honest ones will back off and accept there is a problem, while the dishonest ones are shown up for what they are.

    As someone stated above, quantum physics and such things can indeed be applied to RV. However, these are tools used by the Farsight Institute itself, and I imagine Courtney Brown could run rings round someone like myself in such areas. Hence for an independent evaluation of SRV, I have to bring my own toolbox. I feel more comfortable in my own area of expertise, which is language. Semiotics as the science of sign systems is notably concerned with language, it being the major sign system, and can also be applied to SRV to the extent that it involves communication through signs.

    Spoken language is one area that everyone will find fairly easy, and many will say the same for written language. However, much of your schooling was in the theory of language: grammar and syntax, later perhaps poetry and rhetoric, and for specialists, semantics, logic, phonology, etymology and various other disciplines known collectively as linguistics. Hence any proficiency one may have is the result of some talent and not a little hard work. Most people have only a working knowledge of their language, which means that they can unwittingly create problems, while others possibly more skilled can create problems deliberately as well. You sometimes need language theory to avoid these pitfalls, in addition to specialist theory in the given field. That is what I can bring to the table.

    Why is this important in addition, of course, to the need to verify, if necessary debunk or qualify, or blow the whistle? Since a website is exclusively tied, in its physical dimension, to the written word, then a more proficient, and more creative use of that medium can only be beneficial to the site and its users. By creative I mean here poetry – for an exploratory purpose – as opposed to rhetoric – serving an agenda.

    Which brings me back to Courtney Brown. His big announcement, preceded by numerous Implications postings, relies heavily on the rhetorical device called suspense, just as Agatha Christie will only reveal the culprit in the final chapter, after leaving a string of clues. And likewise, I see his protocols as being rhetorical: serving an agenda in the sense of seeking corroboration, setting a target and achieving it, with the background goal of establishing RV as being for real. This is basic to the scientific method, I know. But the scientific method requires falsifiability, and this is possibly being lost when the quality of RVers is assessed in terms of their concordance with a determined task. The better they are, the closer we come to circular logic, and the farther we get from the notion of RV as a grassroots fun activity that immediately stirred the creation of a practice thread.

    Theory itself is scientifically rhetorical, when it seeks to explain what already exists, but only up to a point, when it branches off into exploration; it then becomes poetical, or creative. Creativity always needs this serious technical basis. A poet can write soulful sonnets, but only once he has learnt how to make a poem scan. But creativity is not necessarily fiction, make-believe or pure poetry. On the contrary, when Here and Nowers are being creative, they are reaching others’ 3D reality. My analysis at the start of this thread is probably limited to the rhetorical side of Courtney Brown’s work; if anything is to come of his announcement, it will be the outcome of a creative process. In other words, I might imagine the RV technique being used to predict a 3D reality for which hard evidence is subsequently discovered. If this is what is going on, we need to verify that process; it could after all be serving an agenda, meaning that the evidence was planted and the ‘prediction’ was actually an after-the-event description.

    Here is another approach to what I am trying to say about theory and practice, from the Here and Now thread.

    Quote Posted by araucaria (here)
    Hi Christine
    I see this thread as an incredible experiment in collective writing. I remember back in the eighties, long before the Internet, when this was a theoretical subject for intellectuals – what you had was heavyweight theory with lightweight practice. Of course back then, there were huge issues of leadership, exacerbated by material concerns such as who got to wield the piece of chalk, and it involved a highly structured discourse which I would call architectural in the sense that it called for planning and engineering to hold things together. Ego issues were theorized in terms of Mallarmé’s ‘disparition élocutoire’, whereby the writer as speaker disappears, leaving the initiative to the words themselves, but these issues were never resolved in practice, for you cannot leave your individuality at the door, precisely because it is your personal creative power that you need to bring to the table.

    What we have here and now is a more relaxed stream-of-consciousness format which I would describe as organic rather than architectural. Individuals branch out wherever they see an opening, ideas grow, and structural unity is effortless because of the shared DNA; it is not hidebound by any predefined ideal shape. If it were a tree, it would be a hybrid, like a citrus, with oranges and lemons, tangerines and clementines all growing off the same trunk. Here we can achieve that community of individualities where the writer as speaker truly does disappear, leaving the initiative to the words themselves, in the sense that you are what you say, but you are also more than that, you have your secrets too, things not to be spoken and things simply left unsaid because not everything is possible or timely and appropriate. At least not yet: we have come 1818 pages to be told that Ulli is a great greeter


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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    I think all super-sensible activities involve the practitioner's ability to tap into the vastly uncharted ocean of the primordial unconscious mind (Paul Tillich); an information stream that is the unconscious collective mind of humanity and those intelligences that reside in those realms outside of the physical.

    But RVing, being an uniquely American invention, naturally chose to sanitize and package the ability of clairvoyance in such a way to appeal to the rational and scientific mind-set of of people who wouldn't dream of engaging in practices to develop their psychic skills outside of a paradigm that was not infused with scientific jargon. So yes, linguistics DOES play a significant role in all of this.

    For this reason I've always found Remote Viewing rather amusing in that regard and I think Ingo Swann was an absolute genius to come up with . lol

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    This is fascinating. I didn't have any interest in remote viewing before reading this. And I have to admit, I'm barely able to skim the surface of what you're saying. At least so far.

    But I'm really enjoying this.

    It strikes me that this topic is an entry-point for understanding something even more important about the nature of reality, perception and meaning.

    It takes us past language and hints at a universe created through a giant and endless string of analogies, where each thing refers to something 'else'.

    It suggests that everything 'is' metaphor.

    And the idea that signs are not random, cannot be purely random is something that makes intuitive sense to me.

    Words aren't random signifiers. Poetry wouldn't exist if they were.

    I may be way off the mark here.

    But wow, this has tickled my imagination.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Thank you Curtis for that insightful post. Metaphor is everywhere: it is oneness experiencing twoness, and at the same time twoness experiencing oneness (one thing seen in terms of another and hence their commonality). What seemed random in the singular becomes meaningful in the dual by virtue of the connection thus made.

    Here’s an example. One day I was stuck at a traffic light with cars on either side. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what were the chances of having two cars displaying the same four-figure number. Almost immediately, I saw two such cars. Evidently my unconscious perceptions had been working faster than my conscious thought. The point here being that a meaningful thought was almost literally sparked by two randomly numbered vehicles randomly coming together. And by another metaphor today, those four-figure numbers are being linked to Courtney Brown’s target coordinates and spawning another meaningful thought. Metaphor within metaphor.

    Randomness has no plural, but it has a dual: two random events are a coincidence, but beyond two you are supposed to freak out. Or you call them synchronicities, another manifestation of metaphor.


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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    I like the way you've described metaphor here, as 'seeing one thing in terms of another'.

    And I also like your explanation of synchronicity as yet another expression of metaphor. That's an insight I plan on taking directly to the bank.

    But, without taking the thread too far afield, I have a quick question re: the arbitrariness of signs.

    ...'Smaller segments than words can also lose their arbitrariness. For instance, the letter (sound) ‘j’ beginning a word, although seemingly meaningless, tends far more often than it should to designate some kind of sharp, direct action – as in jab, jangle, jam, jar, jeer, jerk, jiggle, jilt, jive, jolt, jump etc.'

    In the example you gave above, the 'J' sound has come to be associated with sharp action.

    It seems easy to see where, once the ball had gotten rolling on 'J' being used for this purpose, it might easily continue, gathering more and more steam until it becomes the go-to sound for expressing a certain type of action.

    But my question is this: was the first utterance of the 'J' sound in expressing this type of direct action arbitrary at all?

    Or was it uttered in that first instance because it was some sort of Platonic ideal naturally suited to expressing sharp, direct action?
    Last edited by Curt; 7th March 2014 at 16:27.

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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    @Curtis:
    I think many basic meanings have their origins in sounds - for various reasons. J is in itself quite a sharp, harsh sound. But take a word like mama: you will find the M in many languages, no doubt because it is the sound you obtain naturally by activating your vocal cords when your mouth is shut: the air comes through the nose until you open your mouth, and the lip position then determines the sound. Then you learn to open your mouth quicker, and you end up saying papa (again a sound used in many languages) But then you have disengaged the vocal cords. Meanwhile, your mother, whom you have been studying, has been doing both, and her words comes out as baba, baby, bébé or whatever.

    So, arbitrary sounds? Probably not. Sounds are more or less difficult, so I suspect there is a learning curve, starting with easy words using easy sounds. Some sounds are so difficult that even a few native speakers may never master them (lisp etc.).


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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    In my above opening posts of March 5th I drew three triangles, or 2D pyramids. Since Courtney’s announcement was about the pyramids, I claim an RV hit

    And since Courtney’s announcement was about SRV itself, and my pyramids refer to SRV itself, I claim a second hit

    And since my conclusion regarding the collapsing pyramid also appears to have been correct:
    Quote ‘Hence, whatever the merits of remote viewing – including if it is effective as advertised – it is unlikely to lead to any major breakthrough of the kind claimed for the Announcement.’
    I claim a triple whammy

    Regarding the crumbling pyramid – which, remember, is the infamous hierarchical basis for the all-seeing eye – I want to return to material I have already quoted elsewhere:
    Quote Posted by araucaria (here)
    In books like Ishmael or Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn describes the killer meme of ‘civilization’ in various terms, such as Takers, Hierarchalism, Pyramid builders etc. ‘Lost’ civilizations like the Maya, he says, did not disappear but simply walked away from this model, just as we now need to walk away into what he calls a New Tribal Revolution.

    Quote Daniel Quinn teaches that no single person is going to save the world. Rather (if it’s saved at all), it will be saved by millions (and ultimately billions) of us living a new way. A thousand living a new way won’t cause the dominant world order to topple. But that thousand will inspire a hundred thousand, who will inspire a million, who will inspire a billion – and then that world order will begin to look shaky! (p.152)
    What Quinn describes as the killer meme is that ‘civilization must continue at ANY cost and not be abandoned under ANY circumstance’. The cure is dead simple: the Maya for example, who are supposed to have simply vanished, actually just walked away from what they were building when they no longer liked it. They had been building new pyramids over old pyramids for thousands of years.
    Quote The worker hordes who built the pyramids of Mesoamerica were not more miserable than the ones who the pyramids of Egypt. The workers of Mesoamerica merely perceived themselves as having an alternative to misery, which they eventually exercised (by walking away). We didn’t, so we slogged on, building a ziggurat here, a Great Wall there, a bastille here, a Maginot Line there–and on and on and on–to the present moment, when our pyramids are not being built at Giza or Saqqara but rather at Exxon and Du Pont and Coca Cola and Proctor & Gamble and McDonald’s.
    I visit many classrooms, and the students one way or another always bring me round to a point where I ask how many of them are champing at the bit to get out there and start working on the pyramids their parents worked on throughout their lives and their parents before them. The question makes them uneasy, because they know they’re supposed to be absolutely thrilled at the prospect of going out there to flip burgers and pump gas and stock shelves in the real world. Everyone’s told them they’re the luckiest kids on earth–parents, teachers, textbooks–and they feel disloyal not waving their hands at me. But they don’t. (p.51)
    Walking away from the pyramid is not that easy because it involves leaving behind things we consider most sacred, including heritage that we invest heavily in preserving at all costs. Stay tuned.
    Last edited by araucaria; 16th March 2014 at 09:38.


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    Default Re: The principle behind remote viewing: a critical analysis

    Life is about moving on, and the well-nigh indestructible pyramids are the ultimate in jamming on the brakes. That they have spawned a myriad theories and remain hypnotically fascinating merely serves to mask the fact that life is about moving on.

    We find the same thing with MH370: a moving object has been stopped in its tracks, and this too has spawned a myriad theories and has become hypnotically fascinating.

    Our museums are full of this sort of stuff: indeed that is what they are for. No sooner was the Berlin War pulled down than museums were seeking to purchase pieces for display. The most interesting bits had artwork on the western side.
    http://www.memorial-caen.fr/mur_de_b...expocybu06.htm

    So when the concrete starts crumbling, they will have to think about preserving it somehow. Sounds crazy? Well, it doesn’t sound quite so crazy when you consider that the same is happening with our art treasures; but maybe that’s a mistake. These artistic chunks of wall are highly paradoxical items, signifying freedom on a support that seen from the other side stood for an end to freedom. We cannot separate the one from the other, so for the sake of the one we keep the other as well. Much great art, being likewise a contestation of the wall on which it is mounted, bears similarities to a window, letting in light and air and the otherwise invisible. But it still marks the boundary between an inside and an outside. Total freedom means walking through a door and being outside, rather than depicting the outside from inside. Hence less art is more art.

    Take Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest artist of the last millennium and whose tiny output makes his works even more precious. And yet paradoxically, much of his work was unfinished. Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, tries to explain:
    Quote Clearly, it was because of his profound knowledge of painting that Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination. Among his many interests was included the study of nature; he investigated the properties of plants and then observed the motions of the heavens, the path of the moon, and the course of the sun.
    This segment contains a paradox and an apparent non sequitur. It is paradoxical for a ‘profound knowledge of painting’ to lead to unfinished work; and what has his imagination to do with nature after close examination? Answer: nature is profoundly unfinished and painting in its adequate relationship to nature will also be so.

    Take a work that has spawned a myriad theories and remains hypnotically fascinating (it cropped up again only the other day on this forum): The Last Supper. I am going to offer one of my own: you read it here first. Here is Vasari:

    Quote Leonardo also executed in Milan, for the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a marvelous and beautiful painting of the Last Supper. Having depicted the heads of the Apostles full of splendour and majesty, he deliberately left the head of Christ unfinished, convinced he would fail to give it the divine spirituality it demands. This all but finished work has ever since been held in the greatest veneration by the Milanese and others. In it Leonardo brilliantly succeeded in envisaging and reproducing the tormented anxiety of the Apostles to know who had betrayed their master; so in their faces one can read the emotions of love, dismay, and anger, or rather sorrow, at their failure to grasp the meaning of Christ. And this excites no less admiration than the contrasted spectacle of the obstinacy, hatred, and treachery in the face of Judas or, indeed, than the incredible diligence with which every detail of the work was executed. The texture of the very cloth on the table is counterfeited so cunningly that the linen itself could not look more realistic.
    It is said that the prior used to keep pressing Leonardo, in the most importune way, to hurry up and finish the work, because he was puzzled by Leonardo’s habit of sometimes spending half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if the prior had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the labourers hoeing in the garden and never put his brush down for a moment. Not satisfied with this, the duke was constrained to send for Leonardo and very tactfully, question him about the painting, although he showed perfectly well that he was only doing so because of the prior’s insistence. Leonardo, knowing he was dealing with a prince of acute and discerning intelligence, was willing (as he never had been with the prior) to explain his mind at length; and so he talked to the duke for a long time about the art of painting. He explained that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least; for, he added, they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands. Leonardo then said that he still had two heads to paint: the head of Christ was one, and for this he was unwilling to look for any human model, nor did he dare suppose that his imagination could conceive the beauty and divine grace that properly belonged to the incarnate Deity. Then, he said, he had yet to do the head of Judas, and this troubled him since he did not think he could imagine all the features that would form the countenance of a man who, despite all the blessings he had been given, could so cruelly steel his will to betray his own master and the Creator of the world. However, added Leonardo, he would try to find a model for Judas, and if he did not succeed in doing so, why then he was not without the head of that tactless and importunate prior. The duke roared with laughter at this and said that Leonardo had every reason in the world for saying so. The unfortunate prior retired in confusion to worry the labourers working in his garden, and he left off worrying Leonardo, who skilfully finished the head of Judas and made it seem the very embodiment of treachery and inhumanity. The head of Christ remained, as was said, unfinished.
    This story suggests a number of observations:
    · The usual ‘love & light’ approach to the subject is the Last Supper as the institution of the Eucharist, which may be seen as an approximation of the immaterial Christ presence in the physical. Instead of this, Leonardo seems to be focussing on the dark conspiracy side: the moment of betrayal. No one ever seems to comment on this strange fact.
    · The unfinished in this painting denotes the spiritual, invisible aspect of nature: Christ’s features; while the finished denotes the physical, and especially in its betrayal of the spiritual. At the instant captured in the picture, everyone has a conscience to examine as a possible or partial traitor. The only fully clear conscience belongs to one whose head is only sketched in.
    · The spiritual applied to the art of painting involves lengthy meditation, studying what has been done so far. The physical viewing of this process leads to impatience at seeing a man watching paint dry!
    · This physical view of the process is the ultimate betrayal, hence the viewer might lend his features to a passable portrayal of Judas. In other words, betrayal and portrayal do not just sound similar, they are almost synonymous.
    At this point, we may factor in what we know from elsewhere, namely the fact that the painting started deteriorating almost immediately upon completion and why. Fresco painting like this requires a special technique. To adhere properly, the paint must be applied to wet plaster, and as plaster dries very quickly, the painting is divided up into squares, and the painter still has to work very fast to finish one square before it dries. Clearly the prior was upset because even he could see that Leonardo was going about it in the wrong way and asking for trouble by deliberately taking his time.

    Since it is hard to imagine one of the greatest artists the world has seen guilty of such gross incompetence, and in a sense betraying his art, we need to find another explanation that takes into account the presence of a genius at work. This explanation follows fairly logically from all the above, and would be more obvious if it didn’t sound quite so crazy. Simply this: the painting was designed not to last. Christ’s unpainted other-worldly features would disappear first; his followers’ would naturally take a little longer, but possibly no longer than their real-life counterparts. We need to remember this was the monks’ refectory (dining hall), and the scene would be like adding on a table at the end of the room. In other words, the monks would feel they were themselves apostles participating in that last supper, especially if they saw their own features in them. Eventually the painted bread and wine would disappear too, leaving just the real bread and wine in the here and now. There is something slightly heretical about showing the effacement of the betrayal in the dining-room rather than the chapel, sending a very different message from the love & light version of the Eucharist celebrated there. And yet, the whole point of experiencing Christ, his presence, death and ascension, may be said to be learning to see his physical absence as an abiding presence.

    That is exactly what Leonardo’s ephemeral pigments were designed to show, and that is why all subsequent restorations were dreadfully botched and ultimately a betrayal in principle. The painting was intended to reenact that mystery by itself fading away, and for all the subsequent daubs, it has largely succeeded in that intention.

    What then should be done with The Last Supper? Let it fade into nothingness at last. No more betrayal. [Sacrilege!]

    And the pyramids? Letting them crumble has taken too long, and so has quarrying building materials. Maybe a few tons of TNT? Nah, no violence. Let’s just forget the whole thing and move on shall we? [Coverup!]

    Some day we may get better at disappearing unwanted items. We are not very good at garbage disposal generally and have a word for stuff that is altogether beyond us at this time: ultimate waste. The pyramids are the ultimate cultural waste we don’t want to throw out; instead we are piling up more and drowning under it all. We need to learn to do the opposite. So far we seem capable of shifting a Boeing, which was quite impressive, except that it was by no means garbage. We can do better than that.


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