 One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness is through aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual consciousness where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and discern through this object, the object’s essence, archetype, or “Platonic Idea” that corresponds to the type of object in question. In this form of perception, we lose ourselves in the object, forget about our individuality, and become the clear mirror of the object. During the aesthetic perception of an individual apple tree, for example, we would perceive shining through the tree, the archetype of all apple trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe it) in an appreciation of every apple tree that was, is, or will be. The kind of perception involved compares, for example, to the traditional portrait artist who discerns the shapes that nature intended to realize in a face, but that were not ideally realized. The painter consequently removes in the artistic portrait, the little hairs, warts, wrinkles and such, to present a more idealized, angelic, timeless, and perfected facial presentation, as we might see in a wedding or religious portrait. 