Secondary Objectivity

Below from the Ritual, Symbol, Sacrament chapter of Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy:

If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith & devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds bathe & from which they have, so to speak, been crystallised out into more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent existence, possessing its own derived & secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith & devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something 'out there,' as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith & love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get people's prayers answered...

The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith & devotion lose their intensity, the devas(gods) sicken & die. Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints & Virgins & relics have lost the power & second-hand objectivity which they once possessed...but there are still certain churches in the West, cetain mosques & temples in the East, where even the most irreligious & un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely "numinous" presence...it is the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts & feelings of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime.

As a tangential offshoot of the above, I have personally found being at an art gallery looking at a masterpiece in the flesh to be a considerably deeper experience than looking at the same work in reproduction. A large part of the reason, I now believe, is that one isn't merely looking at the painting in a higher resloution, so to speak, or that one's heightened state of alertness has helped produce the more intensely satisfying experience, but that one also is, if one's attention is sufficient, able to lock into this secondary objectivity, or pathway of accumulated psychic force, arising from the gaze of preceding viewers of the piece, this including the gaze of the original artist who has created the work.