the part of the critic to hesitate to classify the art as "good" or "bad," because it is, after all, popular. Thus popular art is distinguished from "fine art" and judged on its own terms, as a reflection of the vision of the masses. But those who create popular art are not representative of the masses at all, and among the criteria for judging their output must be the motives for which they have created their work.

That which strikes us about the "great" works of art, aside from their tech­nique of execution, is almost always the existence of that art in a "third dimension." This is what has made some works "eternal," that they spring from the depth of symbolic vision, and somehow refer the viewer back to a higher (or "deeper") level of his own being. It "says more than it says," and reflects fundamental truth on the level of universal needs. In the past this vision was expressed by sacred art, which was the original basis for works of art as distinct from rituals which served the same purpose.

The Sufis were plainly aware of this function of ritual symbolism as Idries Shah says in The Sufis:

"Essentially all ritual, symbolism, and so on is a reflection of a truth. It may have been concocted, adapted, diverted to other ends, but it represents a truth -- the inner truth of what we call the Sufi Way."

This, Shah claims, was spoken by a dervish teacher in northern India, quite isolated from access to books on mythology, yet obviously quite in tune with his own "unconscious."

"Three-dimensional thought, the only mode of thought that can be considered intellectual, means taking nothing altogether at its face value, but always referring it back, along the third dimension, to some higher principle, Ethically speaking, for example, this means always valuing a human virtue as the reflection or symbol of a Divine Quality rather than merely for its own sake. It would be a true definition of sacred art, that is, art in the original conception of it, to say that its function is to reveal or to stress the third dimension in whatever it depicts. Along this dimension, in the light of vision of the spiritual archetypes, or in the lesser lights of various degrees of faith, the authoritative reason is able to interpret the universe to the rest of the soul and to give it its true meaning."(Lings)

In earlier cultures, sacred art was the only form of art, thus the people were constantly presented with these symbols, which worked on a variety of levels. Gradually, with the loss of balance between the parts of the psyche, it appears that the West grew more intellectual and the East more emotional, and popular art became entertainment and lost its symbolic content. However, even in the East today, the artificial separation of "religion" from the rest of life has not prevented the use of symbolic art, in the form of the great myths of the Mahabharata, Ramayana, etc. as popular art, in dance-drama, puppet-shows, painting, and so on.

The very fact that "religion" could be separated from the rest of life implies that it has ceased to function as a living interpreter of symbols, and when viewed purely on a rationalist plane, religion becomes an opiate, a collection of superstitions. The difficulty is that man is not merely a rational being, but carries within his consciousness a Divine heritage, another "dimension".

In our own time, there is no place, no institution, from which this third dimension can be acquired. Religion has come to mean empty ritual and ceremony, divorced from the living symbols upon which it was based, and public art has become flat and two-dimensional, serving either as an escape from life or a tran-