The aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object-such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor-rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through.

The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being .

The aesthetic experience transcends the ethics and didactics.

“It is my belief that there is a very strong movement today to find – or at least for the individual to find in himself – that center, that centered and centering Eye. And perhaps if enough people discover it in themselves, it may be put to work in the government as well. But unless there are people who have come to the realization in themselves of the point at the center, beyond pairs of opposites, and the way of thinking in such terms, the principle of evenhandedness is not going to operate in public life. It has to be found first in private life. I would say that whatever is about to occur in the way of transformation of consciousness will have had to have occurred, first, in the hearts of individual human beings, who will then have had – as a result of their very presence – an influence in the larger community.”

That’s the radiance of the god’s dance. Shiva’s dance is the universe. In his hair is a skull and a new moon, death and rebirth at the same moment, the moment of becoming. In one hand he has a little drum that goes tick-tick-tick. That is the drum of time, the tick of time which shuts out the knowl- edge of eternity. We are enclosed in time. But in Shiva’s opposite hand there is a flame which burns away the veil of time and opens our minds to eternity.

Shiva is a very ancient deity, perhaps the most ancient wor- shiped in the world today. There are images from 2000 or 2500 B.C., little stamp seals showing figures that clearly suggest Shiva. In some of his manifestations he is a really horrendous god, representing the terrific aspects of the nature of being. He is the archetypal yogi, canceling the illusion of life, but he is also the creator of life, its generator, as well as illuminator.