Technology has become our art

“When children draw objects, they are successfully, then, turning the shapes of the exterior world into their personal mental experiences – possessing them mentally, so to speak, through physically rendering the forms.  The art of drawing or painting to one extent or another always involves those two processes. An astute understanding of inner energy and outer energy is required, and for great art an intensification and magnification of both elements.

“The species chooses the best conditions in which to display and develop such a capacity to the utmost, taking into consideration all its other needs and purposes.  The particular, brilliant, intensified flowering of painting and sculpture that took place, say, in the time of Michelangelo could not, in your probability, have occurred after the birth of technology, for example, and certainly not in your own era, where images are flashed constantly before your eyes on television and in the movies, where they are rambunctiously present in your magazines and advertisements.  You are everywhere surrounded by photography of all kinds, but in those days, images outside of those provided by nature’s objects were highly rare.”

“[Da Vinci] combined the forces of highly original strong imagination with very calculated preciseness, a kind of preciseness that would lead to detailed sketches of flowers, trees, the action of water – all of nature’s phenomena.

“Now: Drawing of that nature flourishes in your times in an entirely different fashion, divorced to some extent from its beginnings – in, for example, the highly complicated plans of engineers; the unity of, say, precise sketching and mathematics, necessary in certain sciences, [with] the sketching [being] required for all of the inventions that are now a part of your world.  In your world, technology is your art.  It is through the use of technology and science that you have sought to understand your relationship with the universe.

“Science has until recently provided you with a unified belief system that is only now eroding – and if you will forgive me, your space voyages have simply been physical attempts to probe into that same unknown that other peoples in other times have tried to explore through other means.”

(Dreams, “Evolution” and Value Fulfillment Vol 2, Session 913)