Seascapes as meditations

My 1.1 format (Square) seascapes as meditations 

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The Square as the most abstract composition, aside from the circle or perhaps an oval shape perhaps the most suitable space to represent a meditation space, a center of agentic focus and a concentration of focus on the energy moving at the center would be the square, it's interesting Instagram chose this as their format, it's not self evident as a choice, traditionally the window shape has been the choice of artists, vertical for portraits, horizontal for landscape, loosely speaking.

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The Square is a court yard, a campfire, it is an arena of sorts, it must have balance.

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There is something to rolling with the storm sometimes w meditation, to let it pass through, let the waves crash through.

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The wave is the motion and the animated shape of the spirit cascading though space & time.

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the transformative potential of "serious play" and "dialogos" in reconstructing a coherent engagement with reality.

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At the heart of this crisis is the erosion of "Religio"—the fundamental sense of connectedness that allows individuals to feel "at home" in the world.

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This relationship is defined by "structural coupling," a state in which the internal organization of the agent and the external organization of the environment are mutually fitted to one another.

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In this ancient framework, everything was composed of elements—earth, water, air, and fire—each possessing a natural motion toward its proper place. Earth moved down, fire moved up, and this purpose-driven physical world mirrored the purpose-driven nature of human life. This created an "arena": a place organized such that an individual knew how to act within it meaningfully.

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In the Aristotelian arena, to be an agent was to have the capacity to conform one's cognition and behavior to the intelligible patterns of the world. This "Conformity Theory of Knowing" suggested that by rational reflection, an agent could "become" the pattern of the object known, creating a deep bond of plausibility between the self and the cosmos.

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Perspectival knowing is the "view from here". It is the knowing of what it is like to be in a specific state of consciousness, situated in a specific environment. It involves the "salience landscape"—the process by which certain features of the world "stand out" to the agent as relevant to their goals. 

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Participatory knowing is the most fundamental level, described as "knowing by being". It is the result of the structural coupling between the agent and the arena. This level of knowing is where the identities of the self and the world are co-created through "fittedness". Participatory knowing is the domain of "Religio," and when it is healthy, it results in a sense of belonging and the experience of "flow". 

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The meaning crisis is characterized by "nihilism," which Vervaeke defines as the spirit of the age because we have disconnected our knowledge (propositional) from our being (participatory). To find truth, individuals must often undergo "Aporia"—a state of "not knowing" that forces a re-examination of these foundational layers.

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Optimal Grip and the Transjective Nature of Meaning

Meaning is described as "transjective"—it is neither purely subjective (in the head) nor purely objective (in the world). It is the bridge between the two. This is illustrated by the concept of "optimal grip," which is analogous to a photographer focusing a lens. An agent is constantly trying to find the "optimal grip" on reality—a balance where they are neither too close to the details to see the pattern nor too far away to see the specifics. 

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To have an optimal grip on reality is to be simultaneously "gripping" the world and being "gripped" by it. This mutual interaction is the essence of relevance realization. Meaning is the structural relationship of connectedness that emerges when an agent successfully maintains this optimal grip. 

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Shamanism and Participatory Enactment

The origins of serious play can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic Transition (circa 40,000 BCE) and the emergence of shamanism. Shamanism involved "disruptive intentional practices" designed to break through standard frames of perception. A shaman would engage in "participatory knowing" by "becoming" another creature—such as a deer—enacting its movements and perspectives to gain insight into the environment that other people might miss. 

By "becoming" the other, the shaman could "decenter" their own identity, allowing them to see patterns and affordances that were previously invisible. This is the essence of "serious play": it is not a retreat into fantasy, but a "prototyping" of new ways of being. 

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The Imaginal vs. The Imaginary

Vervaeke distinguishes between the "imaginary" (using the imagination for illusion or escapism) and the "imaginal" (using the imagination to enhance perception and encounter deeper patterns of being).

The Imaginary: A "pretend" world that leads away from reality.

The Imaginal: A "bridge" world that uses role-play and symbolism to train the agent's salience landscape. 

Cosplay and LARPing function as modern imaginal practices. When an individual "cosplays" as a hero or a sage, they are not just engaging in "fantasizing." They are engaging in a "serious" form of play that allows them to "internalize" the virtues and perspectives of that character. By acting "as if" they are the character, they train their participatory knowing to respond to the world with the courage or wisdom associated with that identity. This process facilitates "reciprocal reconstruction"—the individual transforms themselves to fit the character, and the character transforms the individual's way of being in the real world. 

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The Ecology of Practices

Because the machinery of "Religio" that makes humans adaptive also makes them vulnerable to self-deception, cultures have historically cultivated "ecologies of practices"—typically in the form of religions—to address these "perennial problems". In the absence of established traditions, modern individuals must "cobble together" their own practices in an autodidactic fashion. 

A modern ecology of practices might include:

Mindfulness/Meditation: To train the salience landscape and break through "locked" framing.

*Dialectic and Dialogos*: To transform "nothingness" (nihilism) into "no-thingness" (the generative ground of being). 

Serious Play: To prototypically enact virtues and "internalize the sage". 

Fellowship and Communitas: To move from individual intelligence to collective wisdom.

Conclusion: Reconstructing the Arena

The meaning crisis is a structural disconnection that can only be solved by the reciprocal reconstruction of the agent and the arena. By moving from a "having mode" to a "being mode," and from "propositional certainty" to "participatory faithfulness," human beings can re-establish the "nomological order" lost in the scientific revolution. The "zombie" of modern culture—a being that consumes without purpose or agency—can be transformed back into a "self-organizing process" in constant dialogue with the universe. Through the cultivation of wisdom, the practice of Dialogos, and the transformative power of serious play, we may finally "re-home" ourselves in a world that is not only intelligible but profoundly sacred. 

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I think for me painting the sea always happened at transition points, particularly when I moved somewhere new, I can cite numerous examples in hindsight of when I painted or photographed the sea shortly upon or after shifting house.

I seem to have always come and gone subject wise to and from the sea depending on some internal metric of stability and growing acquaintance with the newness of my surroundings then I'd drift off to other things.

My practice of yoga & meditation also reinforced a growing idea or set of of concerning depicting the internal ocean of which the real thing generally serves as effective metaphor.

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Use of the ocean as a subject of metaphoric participatory knowing in the Socratic sense of a learned manners of engagement with ones surroundings in my case I see it more through a psychological and spiritual lenses whereupon painting the ocean is for me and I assume others because it is the learning of patterns and movements that we also experience internally in how our thoughts and thoughts forms seemingly alive and moving though the lands of our inner selves, our internal emotional and spiritual landscapes appear to have structures and even shapes as we imagine them, via a type of perception we possess and I do think the ocean in many ways is a running analogy for our internal story.

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Every painting perhaps is like a microcosm of life - or should be?- a microcosm using allegory or metaphor to explain the lived experience/ I think a good story is this/a myth/a movie eta, a good painting makes us experience the experience of life/of living, in a condensed and microcosmic manner. As above, so below in a sense.

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While I'm painting, which I do in bursts, I follow with sometimes just sitting and contemplating the picture/The Sea seems to reveal it's character to me in these moments, again the similarity with meditation practice, and again the mutual interaction with the canvas, it seems to be a feedback loop, as the ocean is created I merge with it, coming and going sometimes for days, walking away and letting the picture emerge in my mind, letting the waves move into position, letting the sea tell me what to do, or sometimes all at once, crashing out and exploding all at once in a rapid series of brush strokes forcefully forming a sense of direction.

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