Art and Spirit: The Artistic Brain, the Navajo Concept of Hozho, and Kandinsky’s “Inner Necessity ”
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most traditional art forms around the planet are an expression of the spiritual dimension of a culture’s\ncosmology and the spiritual experiences of individuals. Religious art and iconography often\nreveal the hidden aspects of spirit as glimpsed through the filter of cultural significance. Moreover,\ntraditional art, although often highly abstract, may actually describe sensory experiences derived\nin alternative states of consciousness (ASC). This article analyzes the often fuzzy concepts of “art”\nand “spirit” and then operationalizes them in a way that makes them useful for cross-cultural\ntranspersonal research. The fact of the universally abstract nature of traditional art is analyzed and\nused as a clue to the function of art in expressing and penetrating to the spiritual domain. A “continuum\nof representational-associational abstraction” model is introduced and described. These\nconcepts are then applied to the author’s experiences with Navajo art and the relation between art\nand the important Navajo philosophical concept of hozho (which may be understood as “beauty,”\n“harmony,” “unity”). A perspective on art and spirit is developed that essentially supports\nWassily Kandinsky’s contention that abstract art is the expression of an “inner necessity” of spirit.\nThe article argues for a greater sensitivity among researchers and theorists for the sublime\nnature of spiritual art.be induced by very different means, including contemplative practices and\nchemical substances, and yet have different after-effects. Taken together, these ideas lead to the\ncautious conclusion that some psychedelics can induce genuine mystical experiences sometimes\nin some people, and that the current tendency to label these chemicals as entheogens may be\nappropriate.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it