Leonardo da Vinci's Seven Principles (Part 2)
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
Fourth Principle:
Sfumato. Seeing on just such a level, as though for the first time can be
confusing, but think of a child, trying to understand how moving a switch
on the wall makes a light overhead appear or disappear. Embrace ordinary
circumstances with curiosity. The more it makes no conscious sense, the
more interesting and vital it is to ponder. Guide yourself to be more at
home with this unsettled feeling, although most pop psychology preaches
it as unpractical. It isn’t practical. Our desire here isn’t
to be comfortable, but rather to be transformed. Creativity is not necessarily
comfortable, but it is fulfilling, rewarding. Like climbing a mountain,
it is hard work to get to the summit. Learn to enjoy the climb. To challenge
the expected and the accepted is to challenge yourself. Learn from mistakes.
Analyze experience. You can change conclusions at any time. It’s ok
to feel two ways about something, or even ambivalent, but know why you’re
feeling ambivalent.
As he learned more about everything Leonardo sunk deeper into ambiguity.
Remember it is only the conscious mind that demands organized and logical
answers that fit within the framework of current societal, economic, scientific,
familial and cultural situations. Current Science tackles problems now knowing
it needs to rely on that ambiguity and uncertainty, rather than stamping
an arbitrary rule on top of a Universe we know so little of. An example
of this is the Paradox that Light can be measured and defined as either
a Wave or a Particle.
Fifth Principle: Arte Scienza (Art and Science). Our lips pay service to
the balance of Arts and Science, the importance of Cultural Arts. The truth
is we value the “factual” or “practical” education
more. We gear our teaching and learning to the “right” answer.
We learn to deliver “what the boss likes.” Da Vinci intensely
believed in, and vividly illustrated in his life, that we should not limit
our pursuits to one course or the other, or even to one medium or the other.
Moreover, we should learn to think and see not “Art” or “Science;”
but “Arte Scienza,” an interconnectedness of things that draws
us into both worlds through the exploration of either. Even if we have no
real practical experience in one, the other or either, the pursuit and exploration
alone will make us more creative in our lives. Think about someone, maybe
in school or elsewhere in life, who had outrageous answers and “off-the-wall”
insights. Kids are like this. They will draw something that looks to us
like a duck and call it a fire engine. They’ll come up with outrageous
explanations for what makes thunder and lightning. They do not “know”
art and they do not “know” science. They see beauty where we
cannot, and rationalize processes that we leave up to science. The result
is an expanded openness that helps to break down our preconceptions of ourselves
and our own abilities as much as it does our view of the world.
Sixth Principle: Corporalite. One of da Vinci’s observations and peeves
about the world was the rather clumsy and oafish lack of awareness people
had for their own physical presence. “…They move through a
room without any notion of themselves in space or moving through a space…”
Imagine how he would feel today. To da Vinci, we are instruments of God.
He took that literally to mean that not only was our whole body a kind of
sense/awareness organ, but that we owed our maker an awareness at all levels
of our being. Why should we not cultivate a graceful gesture as we reach
for the salt instead of absently grabbing it. On some level, da Vinci is
promoting a living dance with the awareness of not just a dancer, but that
of a creative athlete. On top of feeling better, being more alert, which
would in turn make us more open and receptive to being creative, we would
begin to interact with others and our surroundings with an enhanced degree
of consciousness and appreciation.
Seventh Principle: Connessione. The Recognition of and appreciation for
the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. This principle is at
once defining of da Vinci and all that he accomplished and believed in.
We see this principle echoed as an underlying point in almost every great
creative thinker. It is a humility and acknowledgment of an Intelligence
governing the Universe. It is at once both a spiritual and a scientific
belief; a philosophy of Unity, where All is One and One is All. Leonardo
felt he could hardly be an artist without properly studying anatomy, botany,
architecture and such. While studying birds and beetles he would be inspired
to conceive airplanes, parachutes and siege engines. At a smaller level,
Leonardo felt one could hardly create a single element of something without
understanding that it was part of a larger organization. For instance, a
sculpture doesn’t exist on its own, it is going to be placed somewhere,
and that space affects the architecture and form of the sculpture, and vice
versa. Dr. Candace Pert, author of Molecules Of Emotion (1997),
says that the brain is so integrated with the rest of the body that every
second a massive information exchange is occurring within us. If we could
“…Imagine if each [exchange of information] had a tone, a signature
note, rising and falling…” we would instantly perceive ourselves
to be a massive concert within an even larger concert.”
In modern parlay, to inject a topical reference of larger proportions, Leonardo
couldn’t conceive of taking action on an issue such as healthcare,
social security, aid to a foreign country, etc., without considering the
whole of the interconnected action: both the parties involved and the affected
“systems” would be considered (i.e. treasury, taxes, benefits).
Again, as an analogy, a Universe is like a living organism. The earth or
a star may be like a fingernail on the whole, but it is still part of the
whole. Likewise, hemispheres, nations, states, and individuals are each
part of a greater organism as well as part of a smaller unit. A company
or corporation, or even a small business is in itself an organism that exists
independently but as part of a larger organism called society.