History and Art

Last week, I had the chance to go and visit some places in Worms that I had been to before.  The difference this time is that I feel I've matured enough to start appreciating the art and history that such an old town can offer.  While there, I had two changes in how I'd like to start thinking.

Before I get into the changes, I have to dote a bit on how much I love Europe simply for its history.  Living in the United States, the oldest things I typically see are old, rundown houses.  While some can have some cool stories, they usually look pretty ugly.  Over in Germany, however, the history just permeates into everything.  The first thing we saw in Worms was a museum in an old Monastery.  Even before the tour that you could take through the Monastery, there were many old gravestones and monuments dating back to the first century.  Even more impressive was the fact that these gravestones weren't behind glass or out of the way so people couldn't touch them.  Despite this, they were still in pretty good condition

Then, while looking at the old architecture at Der Dom (The Cathedral), I had my first big realization.  I realized that I've been approaching art the wrong way.  Before, I would look at the art and try to understand and relate to what the artist wanted me to feel and see.  Inside the huge church, I started viewing the art and seeing what I felt and took away from it.  The change was drastic.  Where I was previously using a lot of analytical mind usage, my emotions had a chance to take over.  I wasn't even trying to restrain them before.  It was interesting how something as simple as the way I viewed art would hide myself from my emotional responses to them.

This led me to my second realization, while I was walking around appreciating the art (And how difficult it would have been for them to do it back then, but that they still did it).  For the longest time, I had been devoting many resources to finding my consciousness.  I was under the belief that it was something I didn't know much about and that I needed to search in order to discover it.  Like a baseball, it hit me in my face.  I never needed to find my consciousness.  Right now, I will simply explore it.