"If You Depict a Bird, Give it Space to Fly": Eastern Psychologies, the Arts, and Self-Knowledge

Contrary to most of the papers in this volume, I argue that humans have a mode of knowing themselves and their world that is more basic and deeply rooted than the habits of mind that are studied by evolutionary theory and, in fact, by most of Western psychology. The nature of such self- knowledge and how it is the special genius of the arts to evoke it, is elaborated in the various categories of this paper.