Leda and the Swan, Leonardo da Vinci

Images are emotional Viagra.

For some reason at four am in the morning the Powers That Be decided to wake me and tell me so. It wasn’t a dream. Just woke with the idea, quite suddenly and clearly formed and the laughter of the Gods echoing in my ears.

See what you can make of that, They seemed to be chuckling.

So I wandered around the garden for a while in the dark, thinking about it. Then, being fully awake by now and curious, sat down to write with a coffee. Mainly because I could feel this pool of meaning behind the words but not quite grasp it, and writing often seems to be the catalyst that brings things to the forefront of understanding.

Amid the intense discussions yesterday the difference between Knowledge and Understanding loomed large. I make no pretence at a depth of scholarship in this area, though I have read and learned, but Understanding is a different kettle of fish and comes of its own accord, based not necessarily on what we know, or think we know, but on how we see the effects of that knowledge waltzing through our lives and minds in application and experience.

It is a different kind of Knowing.

It was discussed yesterday that while knowledge is two dimensional, understanding is 3D. Now that made sense, somehow. And as this is so then it belongs to the Self and is therefore both real and sacred. Long story…

Understanding both evokes and demands an emotional response to knowledge. Facts alone hold nothing… they are dry, useful bits of information, but until we add emotion to the equation, they will not serve us. We simply observe them. However, once we engage with them, bringing our feelings to them, we can make them real, make them work for us… bring them to life, if you will.

This takes us to the original train of thought that dragged me from a nice warm bed at four am in the morning and into the soggy darkness of the garden. Images are emotional Viagra. What had been meant by throwing this out at me?

In some respects it seems self evident. We respond emotionally to images, especially to colour. We can engage with the subject and content at a purely emotional level and derive understanding directly, bypassing the need for knowledge. Images ignore our surfaces and reach for the gut with an immediacy that words alone cannot achieve.

Yet those four words managed to paint a mental picture that not only shot me out of bed like a cork from a bottle, looking accusingly over my shoulder at my invisble informants, but which brought with it a sense of understanding that somhow preceded knowledge.

This is the force of image and imagination we are building into the School, this cross fertilisation of intellect and emotion, this seeding of fertile ground and its sustained maintenance of stimulation.

So, I guess Viagra wasn’t too bad an analogy after all.