Symbolic Art and Cultural Understanding
The emotions he experienced when painting the picture: whether there was snow, the flowers, the surrounding environment, the people who laughed... These emotional impressions appear in your mind because you can tune into the artist's mind at the moment he had the experience and created the painting. This depends on each person's sensitivity and also on the affinity you have with the artist's mentality because (...) It's clear that, for example, a symbol: if I make a symbol, if I create a symbol (...) I, for example, can take a photograph and when I look at the photograph I remember the emotions I had when I took it. The same thing can happen with the symbol. I can have a state, I can, for example, see the sun rising on a special day and synthesize this experience in the graphic symbol, and every time I see this symbol, this force arises again in me because this is something that reminds me of that situation. Clearly, if you look at the symbol I made, it will hardly tell you anything because your mentality is not the same, your experience is not the same as mine. But, for example, if you look at Venus made in the Neolithic, by a people very far from our mentality, it will very hardly awaken in you the same thing it awakened for them. For example, just to give an idea: in the case of Tibetans in the 15th century, if you look at a woman who had flames behind her, with severed heads, making a necklace of heads around her, with a curved knife and a skull full of blood, this for a 15th-century Tibetan was the Goddess of Wisdom, because she had the flames of wisdom that burned ignorance; all the heads that were the offering were the thoughts that were cut, so all the cut forms, the knife the ability to cut thoughts and forms; and the skull was the symbol of the cup like the Holy Grail with blood was transcendent gnosis. So, for a 15th-century Tibetan, this image was the symbol of the Holy Grail, it was the symbol of the Virgin Mary with the Holy Grail. For us, if we had to meditate on this woman, for us the effect on our subconscious would be very different. Therefore, the mentality factor should not be underestimated. It's important to have a mentality similar to the one who created this symbol and how can we have a similar mentality? It's easier to leave our culture, but even easier, for example, if whoever had created this symbol was my father - because, in any case, I would have a connection, although I'm not the same person, but more or less, I would have an ease in accessing his thought, his mental form. In antiquity, in the case of Tibet, they had this aspect of initiation. That is, there was nothing, nothing was possible in the meditation of symbols, if there was no initiation. Someone established a connection between the disciple and the master, essentially. Someone who established a connection with this central point, the origin of symbols. For example, when you look at mandalas they are a construction of symbols similar to icons of the Western tradition, similar to a Gothic cathedral. It's the same. That is, a perfect temple. But we can, for example, mandalas could not be used if there was no initiation, that is, someone who established a connection between the consciousness of the meditator and the origin of symbols. This is very, very important. Thus, we must choose symbols that are in our traditional line, with which we have a connection. If we didn't have a seed, a connection with these symbols, it would be useless. Why am I saying this? Because, clearly, we have a meditation, a way to improve this ascending aspect. But symbols are not all equal. That is, we can distinguish three very, very different typologies of symbols. First, there are subjective symbols, that is, I create a symbol, I can be a great poet. William Blake, I don't know if you know him: he was a great symbolist in the 18th century in England. He built cosmogony, but something subjective. Therefore, it was something useful for him, but it's not useful for us. This