Conversation

I’m gonna define “surreal” as “underflowing with life” Flow containers that signal more elan vital capacity than is actually flowing through them. That’s why “spaced out and disconnected” are good descriptions of the subjective state and why the paintings feel empty.
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Iirc think the art movement intended to express the individual/collective unconscious in a dream-like sense via juxtaposition if incongruous elements. This is consistent with my description in 3 ways.
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One: Dreams *are* an underflowing-with-life state since they occur in sleeping bodies capable of much higher flows when awake. Dreams hit conscious awareness but are not rich enough to fill it the way waking life is.
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Two: Incongruous juxtaposition is a sort of hoping-for-emergence thing. Maybe hidden unconscious significance will spark life? Similar logic to weird juxtaposition if ingredients in spells in witchcraft. Like Frankenstein monster assemblages but much less coherent.
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Three: collective unconscious hypotheses, from prehistory to Jung to Lovelock’s Gaia, are always “dark energy” hypotheses. That the world is more alive than we imagine or notice in everyday circumstances. So surrealism tries to make room in awareness to test this hypothesis.
Replying to
The idea that if you are able to inhabit scales different from your everyday human scale, via “connections” of some sort, you’ll tap into dark life energy. Whether the terminology is ley lines or vortices or homeostasis loops or autopiesis, the holographic aspiration is the same
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Surrealism connects feelings of occasional subjective “thinning” of the stream of consciousness, with an explicit yearning for deeper connections to larger wholes, and thence to emergence metaphysics.
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“There’s more life in the world than you think, and if you’re lucky, you occasionally you’ll feel this via emptiness and yearning states with a dream like quality, and if really lucky, you’ll connect to hidden life energy and experience more fullness than you thought possible”
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It’s the foundation of religion in some ways. Once had a Jesuit priest try to convince me god was real with such an argument. He used metaphor of feeling like a half-full glass, that something was missing, and that ‘god’ was what filled the glass.
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