Dark Matter Mind

While reading a book centered on the rebuilding of a society after a great tragedy, one of the characters emphasizes the importance of injecting art and creation back into the world. In a separate interview, the interviewee notes that regardless of the perceived state of the world, creation persists, and with it, the beauty of what it means to exist. Despite the inherent tragedies of being human, there remains this refuge of creation.

I have been so deeply entrenched in an entirely different area of philosophy that I didn’t notice this idea seeping in through the cracks, and yet, finally, I feel inspired to write again.

This led me to consider what it is to create and what it is to experience creation. Art, in all its forms, becomes a throughway to access the Collective. We become so engulfed in the monotony of our day-to-day lives, the horror of the news, the anxiety of our careers, and the exhaustion of our responsibilities. What, then, has the ability to break through the never-ending reel? A song you listen to on the train into the city. The beauty of a film you watch on the couch after a long day. A painting you pass by in a coffee shop. The way a book can pull you into another thread of existence altogether. These moments are often small and almost incidental, yet they land with surprising weight. The emotions tied to those experiences are precisely where I find the inspiration for new inquiry and discovery regarding the Collective Consciousness.

Music and film have always been integral to my relationship with philosophy, and more specifically, to my curiosity around the implications and meaning behind consciousness. I could create a list of countless films that have changed the way I understand existence, and I simply cannot write without music creating a room for me to slip into when I need to scratch the itch of my unrelenting mind. This sensitivity, I suspect, is tied to the gift of frisson. The French term describes a surge of emotion in response to aesthetic stimuli, music, art, film, and literature, often marked by chills or a tingling sensation. I have always been “a crier,” but almost exclusively in response to art, rarely in response to my own life. I am easily overtaken by chills or tears through art, and I have come to see this not as excess, but as a signal. Those who experience this tether may simply be more attuned to the collective, their internal radios tuned to the same frequency.

If the ability to perceive art in a way that evokes a reaction or a connection to the depths of consciousness points to a deeper intuition of the collective, then what does it mean to be able to create that? To possess the ability to build a bridge that connects human minds to something fundamental to being human, and to our ongoing effort to understand the nature and purpose of our existence. An artist reaches into the collective and shapes an experience from that ancient knowledge. In doing so, they are given the remarkable power to inflict an emotion or line of thought upon other human beings without ever speaking to them directly. It is a form of communication that bypasses explanation entirely, and that is truly profound.

The effects of experiencing art rarely leave me quickly. A line of poetry or a particular depiction of love in a film or book can occupy my mind for months, sometimes years. That obsession burrows in my mind, pressing against the ever-demanding forces of curiosity and intuition, and what emerges are fragments of puzzle pieces that refuse to settle. From them comes greater wisdom, deeper empathy, and new ways of thinking about consciousness, about our experience of time, about what it means to age, to grow, to absorb, all from an encounter with art.

How else does one ever begin to wake up to the depth of consciousness if not through art? Interaction with the arts is what cracks us open for the first time, allowing the wonder of our experiences to seep in and alter the perception of our lives.

Each encounter with art does not end at the moment of observation. The meaning of a work is shaped in the space between what is created and what is received. When an individual is moved by an encounter with art, they carry that experience forward into their thoughts, their language, their relationships, and their decisions. In this way, art does not simply reflect the collective, it reshapes it. The collective evolves not through singular moments, but through the accumulation of these experiences.

Because of this, I find that both the character in the book and the interviewee were correct in emphasizing the importance of art. To cultivate a meaningful existence and to reshape our consciousness, we must continue to create and to absorb creation.