‘Awakening the Aesthetic Awareness’, a retreat was held at Nilambur from 16th Feb to 20th Feb 2011.
This workshop is in a way the culmination of my work related to recovering authenticity, originality in terms of aesthetic sensibility and cognitive process.
This has been developed from my past 20 years of working with and learning from artisans and children. (www.kumbham.org, www.rediscoveringchildhood.org, http://www.my.opera.com/jinankb )
Two parallel explorationswith which I have been engaged are to understand how we have been damaged – homogenized, cloned, de skilled, fragmented, alienated- by the modern education and other conditioning institutions and tools– market, hospitals, TV, news etc. and how as a biological organism born with tools to make sense of its world understands it and inhabits it.
School prepares us for processing and storing information by excessive importance given to memorization and development of conscious and instrumentalist reasoning. These two skills seems to be incapable of perception, creativity which is what is required in the realm of the unknown.
Some time ago, in 1996 or so I had done a workshop called Against the Tyranny of Reason. An year later I did another workshop called De textualising Experience. All these issues seem to me very much connected to loss of our connection with the core of our being which is biological, sensorial, experiential, autonomous etc.
My work with the non literate artisans due to its paradigm of respect for their creativity and cultural rooted ness gave insight in to a very different way of knowing and being- humble, innocent, respectful of nature and at the same time original and creative. The modern notion of creativity is very much centered around commerce and market driven which stems from greed and not need)
This 5 day workshop does not claim to solve any of that but would probably initiate a journey towards that end.
A w a k e n I n g A e s t h e t I c A w a r e n e s s
The wholistic way of being in the world.
're integrating art, science and language' ‘re integrating work, play and learn’
‘re integrating intuition and reasoning’ ‘re integrating the mind and body’
‘re integrating the feminine and masculine’ ‘becoming PRESENT to the moment’
Why we should awaken the sense of beauty within ourselves?
The retreat/workshop is an attempt to repair the psychological, physiological and cognitive damages done by modern institutions (schools, market and hospital) and culture.
Schools makes us in to rigid, mechanical and second hand beings, ready to serve or to order as we learn 'authority' at schools. Authority of teacher, authority of knowledge.
Another damage is the inability for creativity as we loose our intuitive ability because of over use of logic and dependency on memorized knowledge. The reasoning ability is often used to reason away, to maintain status quo of our rigid and static mind.
Since our link to the world is through text our experience is textualised.
HOW
Beauty is the most fundamental of human existence. Beauty is what truly makes one authentic. Beauty is what binds us to the external world.
Senses are our doors to knowledge and beauty.
Consciously learning to experience the beauty of the world by seeing, touching, feeling.
PROCESS
Engaging with nature, Habit breaking, Dialogues, silence, reflection, sharing,
Sensitizing senses, Awakening of aesthetic sense is brought in as a central issue. making, drawing, seeing, listening This helps them to move away from ‘rational’ mind to some extent.
FOR WHOM
Anyone who wants to reclaim the authentic natural learning process and creativity. This could help Parents and teachers to enable them to see children’s real potential and to enable them to let children be.
Beauty is the most fundamental of human existence. Beauty is what truly makes one authentic. Beauty is what binds us to the external world. Beauty is what creates culture-the architecture, the music, the artifacts, various dance forms and agriculture and off course knowledge. Senses are our doors to knowledge and beauty.
what is fundamental to any culture is its sense of beauty. This is what creates all the elements of any culture. The beautiful architecture, various functional products, songs and dances, women and men etc.
