We’ve discussed that entering the heart of creativity involves following wonder and divine inspiration. By following that spark that is striving, through you, to share its story, you’re attempting to bring into being something extraordinary that the world has never before seen. And to truly achieve this, you must enter that divine state of flow and play in the eddies of the creative waters as they swirl around you.

Doing this often requires entering into long stretches of solitude — time when you can allow ideas to arrive; time when you can simply contemplate; time when you can listen for the muse’s whisper.

I want to briefly mention meditation. Nothing helped me hear the call of my soul more than meditation. It is the ultimate state of solitude; the ultimate state of listening; the ultimate way to see through illusion; the ultimate process of deprogramming; and the ultimate state of connecting with the sacred. Please consider trying it. It has the power to infuse all of your work with fresh insights and creativity. Meditation is the practice that brought me out of my dark night and I still meditate regularly to this day. I discuss meditation a bit more in Appendix I.1

Whatever methods of solitude you choose, the times that you create or re-create are sacred and must be protected. Interruptions kill the flow state and the flow state is necessary to produce extraordinary work. I truly believe interruptions are the most dangerous thing any artist faces.

Your family may mean well when they pop in and ask you what you want for lunch, but they may knock you out of an inspired state that you can’t get back into. Perhaps this danger is why Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, required that the weekly artist date be undertaken by the artist alone.

The Muse is your paramour. She is private and for you alone, and she may flee if another person gets involved. You must guard her jealously, particularly in the early stages of creation which often arrives during our renewal periods. Constant interruptions, especially, are dangerous because your energy will be diverted toward the wrong things, and that may leave you depleted and tired when it’s time to create.

True art often requires long stretches of uninterrupted time in your studio, so you must set limits to protect your (re)creative time.

An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. It is.

— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

If you don’t protect your time, you will struggle to master your craft and produce enough sale-able work. Nearly all of the great creatives I know treat their studio time like a nine-to-five job, and during their regular hours (whatever those hours may be), rain or shine, inspired or not, they set aside that sacred dedicated time for themselves.

Do whatever you must to protect your creative time. You have to be very selfish to be original.

— Miles Davis

My wife and I once experienced this professional devotion to regular hours firsthand while visiting the painter Kevin Macpherson at his home near Taos, New Mexico. At breakfast one morning he politely explained that although we were on vacation, he was not. He would be in his studio until five o’clock and asked that we not interrupt him unless it was an emergency.

His studio stood a short walk from the house. The mountains were beautiful, the day was perfect, and he surely would have enjoyed joining us for a bike ride through the hills. But he didn’t. His studio time was sacred.

The professional artist understands that creative time is holy. Once lost, it cannot be recovered.

If you want to produce enough masterful, inspired works, which is what it takes to be successful, you must be just as protective of your creative time as Kevin is of his.

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PS — Next time we’ll look at the other primary method of re-creation: Nature. In the meantime, if these topics interest you, please click here to join the waitlist for my forthcoming book.

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If you’d like to support my writing, but can’t join as a paid subscriber please click Like, or Restack which signals the algorithm and helps me reach new people. This also helps push back against the encroachment of AI because I do not write with AI and I only feature human artists (with proper links and attribution) in the images with my posts.

AI Image Policy: I only rarely use AI images and overwhelmingly feature images by human artists. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

During a dark time when I experienced burnout, I lost my creative drive and my world went grey. I taught myself, intuitively, how to climb out of that hole and, through a slow process learned through trial-and-error, I was able to reopen my connection to my heart and soul again. My world slowly expanded and, as the veil began to lift, reality became more colorful and beautiful than I ever imaged it could be. That experience eventually led me to write The Sovereign Artist.

If one only creates, but does not re-create, the creative well will eventually run dry. You cannot constantly output. You must allow time for input. You must allow time for reflection. You must allow time for solitude. You must allow time for stillness. You must allow time for leisure.

Burnout sneaks up on you. It can be insidious because creative output is intoxicating and you will feel like you are on top of the world right up until the moment you crash. That’s what happened to me. There were, of course, subtle signs that the darkness was approaching. But, in the heat of productivity, such signs are easy to ignore.

It is the soul’s nature to give. If you ignore its needs and continually demand more creativity from it, it will give and give until it can give no more. You cannot continually take from your soul, that’s not how the soul-economy works. You must give back to your soul. You must feed it.

Learning how to re-create yourself is learning how to listen to the needs of your soul. You feed your body instinctively and you must learn to feed your soul intuitively. You must learn to recognize soul-hunger. And the things that feed your soul do not usually overlap with the way we live our modern lives, so you must feed your soul intentionally.

The burnout I experienced is a danger every artist faces and, I now know that I fell into the darkness because I had not yet learned an important lesson that all true masters must eventually learn: before you exhale, you must inhale.

There is a rhythm to nature and your soul is part of nature. You must learn to honor the natural rhythm of being a creative human being. There is a time for work. There is a time for leisure. There is a time for solitude. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak.1

Learning how to honor this rhythm is a major part of the creative path, and it is an important lesson in learning how to awaken. Modernity doesn’t teach this lesson. We worship productivity – the output phase, but we shortchange the leisure – the input phase. This is to our detriment and it is a foolish position.

All of our modern conveniences and our cult of productivity should provide us with more leisure. We live in a world that should provide more human flourishing than any era of the past. We each could live better than nobility of just a few hundred years ago. But, instead, we turned productivity into our god. We decided to run faster and faster, ignoring the needs of our souls, while drowning the resulting existential angst under a sea of drugs and distraction.

However, if we were wise, we’d be actively expanding our leisure time. Both Plato and Aristotle considered leisure to be the highest good and a prerequisite for the achievement of the highest form of human flourishing, eudaemonia. What the wise ancient Greeks called eudaemonia overlaps with what we have been calling awakening.

What, then, is leisure? It is not “relaxation.” It is not “self-improvement.” It is not “vacation.” Spending your time binging Netflix is not leisure, it is distraction. It is the avoidance of leisure.

The Ancient Greeks used the word scholē (σχολή) for leisure. That is the word from which we derive the English word school. For them, leisure was a time for learning, for education. The Latin word for leisure originates from licēre, meaning “to be permitted” or “to be allowed,” reflecting the concept of having the freedom or opportunity to do something. When we engage in leisure, it is a time for us to learn something and to do something. To learn and do what?

Leisure is the act of learning, from your soul, who you truly are and then doing what you soul truly needs. The learning is your soul’s gift to you. The doing is your gift back to your soul; it is the feeding; the giving back. Leisure is a time to re-create your Self; to liberate yourself. If afterwards, you understand who you truly are a bit better, it was leisure. If you don’t, it was something else.

For Aristotle, leisure consisted of activities such as contemplation, philosophical conversation, listening to music, cultivation of virtue, artistic pursuits, and related soul-inspiring activities.

When the nobility of yesteryear engaged in leisure, they didn’t doom-scroll on their phones. They practiced the liberal arts which, in modern terminology, are better called the liberating arts. The liberating arts are the activities which will liberate your true Self. These are the activities that allow you to see through your programming and find the Truth within. They are the very activities Aristotle considered to be scholē — leisure. The liberating arts are the methods by which we awaken. You can see why Plato and Aristotle considered leisure to be mandatory to those who wish to be born again into the full power and purpose of their humanity. The true artist must become such a person.

If practice is honing your ability to play the instrument of your soul, then leisure is the spiritual maintenance of the instrument. Just as a muscle grows during recovery rather than during the lift itself, artistic mastery deepens during periods of renewal. You are the instrument. Practice stresses the instrument. Re-creation restores and refines it. Creation is the period when your soul flies. Re-creation is the period when your soul grows.

Therefore, the final thing we must each learn, to become a master, is the art of renewal; the art of re-creating ourself; the art of leisure.

Julia Cameron, in her seminal book, The Artist’s Way, presents her liberating path for the creative person. She proposes only two activities that are non-negotiable: The weekly artist date and the morning pages. These two activities honor the circadian rhythms of our soul. The weekly artist date provides scheduled recurring time for leisure; for input; for solitude; for contemplation. And the morning pages provide daily time for output, for creation of a sort.

Actually, the morning pages can serve as both input and output functions and are uniquely valuable. They serve as a time of reflection and contemplation and yet, often, the soul produces insights during such journaling that, especially for writers, eventually work their way into finished pieces. By such balancing of the activities of input and output, we can deepen our connection to our soul’s needs and avoid burnout.

True masters understand that the creative life is a rhythm. It is not all output. Inhalation precedes exhalation. In fact, this is the universal rhythm. Yin and Yang. Contraction and expansion. Going within, and sharing without. All work and no play makes Jack an empty burned out boy.

If you do burn out, there are many things you can do, not only to discover your true Self, your essence, but also to reconnect with your Muse.

If you are looking for ideas on how to do this; how to engage in leisure, I have provided a comprehensive resource of ideas for renewing your soul — re-creating yourself — in Appendix I: Methods of Re-Creation. The methods I outline in Appendix I are the methods I taught myself that I mentioned at the opening of this chapter. They are the methods I intuitively discovered and utilized during my own dark night of the soul.

While the comprehensive list appears in the appendix, I’d like to briefly mention two of the most important needs of your soul: solitude and nature….

To be continued in my next post.

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PS - This is one of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist: The Liberating Power of the Creative Act. If interested, you can join the waitlist here.

If you would like to support my writing, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

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If you’d like to support my writing, but can’t join as a paid subscriber please click Like, or Restack which signals the algorithm and helps me reach new people. This also helps push back against the encroachment of AI because I do not write with AI and I only feature human artists (with proper links and attribution) in the images with my posts.

AI Image Policy: I only rarely use AI images and overwhelmingly feature images by human artists. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

Real Art serves to wake people up to the light of Truth, while the “dark arts” of modernity tend to lull people asleep, trapping them within a web of fears and falsehoods. Glamour presented as beauty, entertainment presented as art, and fear peddling presented as “news” are but a few examples.

In the story of Sleeping Beauty, princess Aurora, pricks her finger on a spindle. The spindle is no small symbol. In fact, it symbolizes the ever-spinning, ever-growing machine of modernity. It is this machine that spins the thread of our fate with its wheels and its dangerous “needles” that continually “prick our finger” through the curse of its never-ending spinning. It advances. It demands. It grinds. It consumes. It gets bigger. And it curses us with noise, distraction, urgency, and manufactured fear. Each wound is small. Our sleep is deep.

This curse has nearly succeeded in purging true beauty from our society. It has become a curse woven into the fabric of our lives. Beauty sleeps: Sleeping Beauty.

Meanwhile, the “true love’s kiss” which can awaken Beauty — awaken us to beauty — is a symbol of the awakening power of True Art, which is always infused with the true love of the artist; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The modern world would like for Beauty to remain sleeping. But we can wake her up through the power of love transmitted to each other through our art.

Of course, art is merely an echo of the ultimate expression of “true love’s kiss” — the kiss of the Divine; the creative grace that wakes us up to the larger truth of reality.

We have, collectively, “pricked our finger” on the spindle of the world and are asleep. And, it is the artists, who imbue their work with the “kiss” of their true love, who provide a means of awakening. When we “kiss” their artworks, we are provided an opportunity to experience a moment of awakening. Beauty awakens through us.

Lewis Hyde, in his book, The Gift, said it better than I can:

Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives…any such art is itself a gift, a cordial to the soul.

That moment of grace is the kiss.

For a breath of time, we awaken. We remember. We remember that we are more than consumers and cogs. We remember Beauty.

The “dark artists” of modernity find the true substance of art — beauty — painful; for beauty burns away false ambition, an effect that those who choose to live in darkness would prefer to avoid. That’s why they cursed beauty to sleep in the first place!

But, deep inside, they know that they have turned away from the light, and beauty, delivered to them through real Art, is simply too painful of a reminder to their tiny, fragmented, souls that they have willfully denied the good and are keeping themselves trapped in a prison of their own making. So they try to avoid beauty as much as possible. That’s much easier in a world that has been all but purged of true beauty.

This avoidance has manifested visibly on a cultural level in the modern world as an ongoing war against beauty. We see this avoidance of beauty everywhere: in modern “architecture,” in modern “art,” in “music,” in modern “media,” and in the everyday world around us. I, personally, find it almost physically painful to look upon the areas where we have mowed down beautiful trees to build endless miles of cheap, ugly CMU boxes — our shrines to The Modern Machine and its twin goals of “progress” and “profit.” If we’re going to scrape away the beauty of nature for a building, don’t we have a responsibility to make that building beautiful? This obvious fact is something the ancients understood far better than we do, and we still visit buildings built hundreds of years ago just to marvel at their beauty; and to remember the divine mastery that is possible in the hands of humanity. With our god-like technology, we could be making the world more beautiful with each passing year. But, through us, Beauty Sleeps.

In fact, “true love’s kiss” is the most useful and important function of the modern artist: casting the counter-spells of beauty that awaken others; to awaken “sleeping beauty.” Modern artists, through the power of their art, have been granted the ability to awaken souls from the slumber of modernity and the power to remind humanity of the dangers of the machine-ruled world we are building.

Even her name tells the story: Aurora — Dawn. When Beauty awakens, the light returns. So, if you ever despair that your art does not matter, remember this: she will not awaken through argument. Sleeping Beauty awakens with a kiss. And every true work of art carries one.

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PS - This is one of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist: The Liberating Power of the Creative Act. If interested, you can join the waitlist here.

If you would like to support my writing, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

Subscribe now

If you’d like to support my writing, but can’t join as a paid subscriber please click Like, or Restack which signals the algorithm and helps me reach new people. This also helps push back against the encroachment of AI because I do not write with AI and I only feature human artists (with proper links and attribution) in the images with my posts.

AI Image Policy: I only rarely use AI images and overwhelmingly feature images by human artists. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

When Dante Alighieri was nine years old, he attended a gathering in Florence where he saw a girl that changed the course of his life. Her name was Beatrice Portinari. The instant his eyes landed upon her, his heart opened, he received the divine arrow of beauty, and wonder awakened in his soul.

He did not speak to her. But something sovereign had awakened within him.

Dante later wrote that “Love itself” took possession of his heart — not as a feeling, but as a force. His body trembled. His inner world reorganized. He famously wrote of Beatrice that, “She seemed not the daughter of mortal man, but of God.”

For Dante, Beatrice represented far more than a person. She was Beauty made visible; a doorway through which the invisible mystery entered his life. During his lifetime, they exchanged only the smallest courtesies. Yet that single encounter shaped everything he became. Beatrice became his muse.

From that moment forward, Dante lived in quiet devotion to wonder. Out of that awakening came his poems. And ultimately, out of that one brief glimpse of Beauty, came a vision of heaven and hell — one of the greatest works of art humanity has ever created.

When Dante’s gaze landed upon Beatrice, it led to his initiation, not into a romantic relationship, but into divine inspiration; into wonder; into the realization that beauty is not mere decoration, but that beauty is instruction.

In The Divine Comedy, Dante gives us one of the most enduring metaphors in Western thought: The Roman poet Virgil, representing the human intellect, guides Dante through Hell and up the long ascent of Purgatory, all the way to the peak of Earthly Paradise. And there, reason reaches its limit. Virgil can go no further. He disappears.

In his place, Beatrice appears.

This moment is not merely narrative; it is philosophical and spiritual. Intellect can illuminate, discipline, and orient us. It can carry us remarkably far. But it cannot usher us into The Mystery. That requires something else.

For Dante — and through The Divine Comedy, for much of Western culture — Beatrice becomes an icon of transcendence itself. She does not reason Dante into paradise. She draws him. She transports him there. Through beauty. Because Beauty is how the divine reaches out to us.

And so, Beatrice — embodying beauty — reveals divine love to Dante, becoming his bridge to salvation.

There is an old legend, reflecting the mythic power of Dante and Beatrice, that is still told among Florentines.

In World War II, as the German army retreated from Florence, orders were given to destroy all bridges over the Arno River. They blew up the bridges — one by one — until only the Ponte Vecchio remained.

According to the legend, the German demolition officer stood before the famous bridge and refused the command, saying, “This is the bridge where Dante met Beatrice. I cannot possibly destroy it.”

So he informed the Allies that the Germans would spare the Ponte Vecchio if the advancing forces would refrain from crossing it. Amazingly, the Allies agreed. The old bridge escaped destruction. What became of the officer is unclear. Some say he was executed for disobeying orders.

Historically, parts of this story are almost certainly apocryphal. Dante did not meet Beatrice on the Ponte Vecchio. The real reasons the bridge was spared are likely more complicated.

But Florence still tells the story. And that matters. Artistic beauty prevailed over military logic.

The legend survives because it is Art, and Art carries a deeper symbolic Truth than literal historical facts can hold.

“Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.” — Ursula Le Guin

That truth is this: Art protects what force would otherwise erase.

I first heard this story from Eugene Terekhin, who tells it not as a historian, but as a theologian of beauty. He tells it as a parable. That’s how I want to use it here.

Because the point is not the Ponte Vecchio, specifically, but the archetype it represents: A bridge that must be saved. The Ponte Vecchio, the “old bridge,” becomes icon that points to the oldest bridge of all:

Art, you see, is the language of the soul. Art transmits love through form. Art unites us with each other and with God.

Art itself is the bridge.

Art, and especially the drive to create it, is a divine bridge from the visible to the invisible; from the finite to the eternal; from one human heart to another; from the world to The Mystery; from hell to paradise; from sleepwalking to awakening.

Art is Beatrice.

Dante crossed the bridge the day he first saw Beatrice. And so does every artist, every creator, and every soul who has ever been seized by Beauty and compelled to respond; to create.

The legend survives because it is poetic — and because it reminds us of something we’ve nearly forgotten.

And in our forgetting, we’ve allowed something to go wrong with the modern world.

The bridge is under threat — not from bombs, but from distraction; from commodification; from media; from ugliness; from reduction; from a materialism that denies the soul; from machines that churn out endless simulacrums of art. As we, the artists, retreat, the bridge is threatened by a culture that treats beauty as optional, art as entertainment, and creativity as “content.”

And, while the world quietly prepares to blow up the bridge, most people don’t even notice. They accept the programming that rewards speed over depth, utility over meaning, and efficiency over soul. We are taught to optimize, monetize, and scale; but never to see, never to feel, never to listen.

We have forgotten the whisper of wonder. We have forgotten to kneel before beauty. We have forgotten ourselves. The result is a civilization rich in tools but poor in spirit; a world full of noise but starving for music.

We are like Dante, in the first stanza of his epic poem, finding ourselves, “within a dark forest” where “the straightforward path has been lost.”

But there is a way out of this darkness.

The German officer in the story did one simple thing: He opened his heart. He recognized Beauty. He felt wonder. He remembered. And he refused to destroy.

That is our task now.

We must become guardians.

We must stand before the “Bridge of Art” and say:

“I cannot possibly allow this to be destroyed.”

We must protect the fragile, luminous thread that connects us. We must remember that the creative act, and the art it creates, is not a luxury, it is a lifeline.

Because when Art disappears, something essential collapses with it. And when Art survives, so does the soul of the world.

Art protects what force would otherwise erase.

Years ago, I found myself in Dante’s position: in the middle of life, suddenly awake, lost in the prison of those dark woods, and desperately searching for a guide.

Then I rediscovered that Beauty, Art, and especially the creative act itself is the method of walking across that bridge. It is the bridge to cross out of the dark shadowlands and back into freedom; into liberation; into sovereignty; for the Bridge of Art is a bridge home, to the Self.

Let me be your Virgil. I’ll walk with you as far as I can, until you glimpse Beatrice. Only she can take you all the way home.

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PS - This is the revised intro to my forthcoming book The Sovereign Artist. If you wish to join the waitlist, please click here.

If you would like to support my writing, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

Subscribe now

If you’d like to support my writing, but can’t join as a paid subscriber please click Like, or Restack which signals the algorithm and helps me reach new people. This also helps push back against the encroachment of AI because I do not write with AI and I only feature human artists (with proper links and attribution) in the images with my posts.

AI Image Policy: I only rarely use AI images and overwhelmingly feature images by human artists. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

We are at our most human and least programmable during the creative act – and thus, the masters of modernity must purge us of the dangerous desire to create.

Welcome to 2112.

The system is winning and the attempted purge of creativity is underway.

In the 1970’s, Rush, the band, foretold a future dystopian society in their epic rock suite, 2112 — a future vision that, increasingly, matches our present. 2112 appears to be arriving almost a century early. Rush sang of an oppressive world governed by the “Solar Federation” and the iron-fisted “priests” of the “Temples of Syrinx” who controlled everything the people read, the songs they heard, and the art they viewed.

In the lyrics of this epic rock suite, arranged like a classical work, we learn of “massive grey walls” holding “great computers that fill the hallowed halls.” These computers create and control all of the art. The “priests” sing, “We’ve taken care of everything, the words you hear, the songs you sing, the pictures that give pleasure to your eyes.”

Then they boast that the people “never need to wonder how or why” this art is made. By abusing their monopoly on art; on media, they have the power to control even what the people think: The oldest ambition of authoritarians everywhere — our very thoughts, provided by our masters, free of charge. They rule while we amuse ourselves to death.

And then they tell the big lie that authoritarians and dogmatists always tell:

“All the gifts of life are held within our walls.” – The big lie of priests of the Temple of Syrinx, Rush, 2112

The album notes add further details to the story (a feature, I will note, that you do not enjoy when streaming your music from one of their ̶d̶a̶t̶a̶-̶c̶e̶n̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ temples):

…The massive grey walls of the Temples rise from the Heart of every Federation city. I have always been awed by them, to think that every single facet of every life is regulated and directed from within! Our books, our music, our work and play are all looked after by the benevolent wisdom of the priests…

Doesn’t that sound like our world? Doesn’t that sound like AI? Doesn’t that sound like modern social media? Doesn’t that sound like the “temples” we are building now, as fast as we can, “in every Federation city,” in the race to construct countless ugly grey data centers?

Why are their temples so ugly? Why do the “priests” “worship” in hideous boxes made of massive grey walls?

Rebellious Thoughts provides the answer in his excellent essay, Beauty Will Save the World:

beauty is inherently dangerous to any system built on the machinery of extraction. A person who can be moved to tears by the slant of light in a forest or the devastating precision of a cello suite or the supreme sound of a qawwal is a person who cannot be fully bought. They have tasted a value that does not submit to the market. They have found a source of gravity that exists outside the state.

Our deep desire to become fully human through communion with The Divine is why we appreciate and create Beauty. It is why we create Art. It is why we create religion. It is why we Create. And false priests can’t allow us to commune with real gods; for that would break the thrall of their illusion.

The desire to create sets humanity apart — even animals work for their food, entertain themselves, and pair off in sexual relationships. But only humans create Moonlight Sonata, Starry Night, holidays, family dinners, homes full of love, and The Golden Gate bridge. Only humans build la Sagrada Família and a multitude of other cathedrals to honor a God they can neither see nor hear, but can most definitely feel.

In the strictest, most “rational,” sense, nobody needs “Moonlight Sonata.” It’s “just” a combination of sounds. This is the argument that the “priests” of the “Temples of Syrinx” hope that you will buy.

But our souls do need such things. We may not see or hear God, but when we create; when we truly experience Art, we feel the Divine. These soul-creations are needed to kindle the love inside us; the love of each other; the love of the divine which, even in dystopia, we distantly remember. And, in feeling this love, we fleetingly remember what we truly are; who we truly are.

This remembrance is what the protagonist in 2112 feels, viscerally, when he stumbles across an ancient guitar, hidden in a cave behind a waterfall:

What can this strange device be?
When I touch it, it gives forth a sound
It’s got wires that vibrate, and give music
What can this thing be that I found?

See how it sings like a sad heart
And joyously screams out its pain
Sounds that build high like a mountain
Or notes that fall gently, like rain.

I can’t wait to share this new wonder
The people will all see its light
Let them all make their own music
The Priests praise my name on this night.

But then, just as many of us are doing, the protagonist makes a terrible mistake, foreshadowed by the last line. In his excitement, still believing in “the system,” he takes the guitar to the “priests,” who promptly destroy it. They know the danger it represents to their control. In their dystopia, people must not be allowed to make their own Art. That would awaken too much inside of their souls.

The protagonist, disillusioned by the priests’ destruction of the guitar, awakens to the terrible truth of his reality. Heartbroken, and unable to make music, the protagonist returns home. He sleeps, and he dreams of the beautiful world of the ancient elder race (a metaphor for artists) that existed before the “priests” took control of the planet. When he awakes, his heartbreak overcomes him, and he returns to the cave where he found the guitar. He laments never knowing the art-filled world of the elder race before committing suicide. Without true Art and Beauty in his life, he can’t imagine continuing.

Beauty will save the world; Art will save the world, but, we cannot expect it to do so from within the system the “priests” have built. They will suppress and destroy it.

Paul Kingsnorth, author of Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, calls the modern system The Machine. And he recently admitted that, he too, had made the same mistake as the protagonist in 2112:

One of my readers told me that I had made the mistake of trying to fight the Machine head on. This, he said, is like trying to go to war with the Devil. It will never end well. The best tactic is rather to fight the Machine in ways the Machine does not notice. My friend Martin Shaw tells me that the old myths always recommend this. You don’t look at the Gorgon head on. You need a polished shield before you can deal with her. [source]

In making our sand castles, our Art, out of the same dirt of the earth of which we are made, we distantly remember that our souls are made of the one who created the dust of the cosmos. So, to create is to be human; to create is to awaken – is it any wonder that those who wish for us to remain asleep are promising that their machines can do the creating, and the thinking, for us?

To deny this need to create, as so many of us do in modernity, is to deny our true Self. Put another way, to deny this need to create is to choose to remain asleep. To deny this need to create is to deny the love in our heart.

Artists, the modern mages, have the power to fight back against The Machine; against the “priests;” against the “grey temples.” However, when we do so, let us not make the same mistake of running to those same priests to show off our new guitar music. Let us beam these energizing spells of light directly to one another. Let us engage each other in ways that seem, to the “priests,” not worth noticing, until it is too late; until too many of us have awakened.

If we can put our trust, once again, in the Divine; in the Earth; in Beauty; and in Art then, perhaps, the day will come, as it does at the end of 2112, when the artists reassert control.

In the final act, we learn that the protagonist’s dream had, somehow, mystically, reached across the galaxy where, far away from the dystopian, controlling “priests,” the elder race of artists had grown powerful — they had awakened.

And the meek shall inherit the earth.

Realizing that their home world needed saving through the beauty of their Art, the “elder race”, the Artists, the “meek”, return to earth, triumphantly, and announce to the masters of “The Solar Federation,” the “priests,” that they, the artists; the mystics; the lovers; the humans have (re)assumed control of the Art, their world, and their destiny. They are meek, not because they are weak, but because they refused to sully their souls by resorting to the tactics of their oppressors; they refused to “fight” at all. The meek, once they awaken, contain powerful souls of light that the oppressors could not stand before. And, like them, we, if we hold fast to our souls, may one day say to the “priests” of the machine:

Attention all Planets of the Solar Federation

We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.

Do not let the “Red Star;” the machine; the spirit of antichrist; the “priests,” control you. Like Rush’s “Starman,” you are made of divine stardust and, like him, you have the power to push away the false “Red Star” of this world. And that power to resist starts with Art; real art; human art.

Meet me in the cave behind the waterfall, I’ll bring my guitar.

***

PS - If you like rock music, do yourself a favor: Set aside twenty minutes to listen to 2112 in its full symphonic glory. My understanding is that it was written as a giant “screw you” to the record label, who wanted to control the content of Rush’s music. I assume the “priests” in the song represented the record label. Ironically, 2112 became a huge hit, probably saving Rush’s career, allowing the band, like the elder race in the song, to assume control of their destiny. And because Rush is a badass band, they’ve helpfully provided the 2112 album liner notes on their website so you can follow along as you listen to the entire story: https://www.rush.com/songs/2112/

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If you’d like to support my writing, but can’t join as a paid subscriber please click Like, or Restack which signals the algorithm and helps me reach new people. This also helps push back against the encroachment of AI because I do not write with AI and I only feature human artists (with proper links and attribution) in the images with my posts.

No AI Zone: Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. Except for the rare brainstorming of ideas, historical research, or occasionally, character names and meanings, I do not use AI in my writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

I only rarely use AI images with my (non-AI) writing. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

Anything useful is a means to an end. A glass may be beautiful, but its primary value is that it holds water. It is useful as a means to the end of quenching your thirst.

Most things in our lives, especially in the materialistic world of modernity, have to justify themselves by being useful to us. We sometimes refer to this usefulness, in economic terms, as utility. The idea behind utility is reflected in the famous marketing saying that, “people don't want a 1-inch drill, they want 1-inch holes.”

But Art is quite different. Art is a bit of a conundrum to the modern mind of productivity. Modern man can't quite wrap his head around true art, intellectually, because Art is not a means of getting something useful. Art itself is both the means and the ends.

The viewer of a painting, or the listener of a piece of music isn't interested in using the art to get something else. The goal isn’t to get to the end of the song efficiently. The experience itself is the entire end...and this is what makes art beautiful and pure. Art is complete — a circle of energy between the artist, the viewer and the Divine — needing nothing else but to simply exist.

We cannot truly possess Art; however, like all true beauty, Art possess us. Humans don’t have Art, Art has humans.

Humans don’t have Art, Art has humans.

It is true that we may possess the medium of the Art, such as the painting itself, but that is just owning the canvas, the paint and the frame. We cannot possess the idea or the energy that Art beams out into the world; for energy, by definition, must keep moving or it ceases to exist. Nor may we possess the way Art affects the soul of others who enjoy it. A museum may never possess the true value of a work of art because the real value is the soul-growth that happens in those who view it. This is what makes owning the medium of Art and locking it away in a vault such a sin. That is equivalent to the wicked servant in the parable of the talents who buried his master’s talent in the ground. Art is made to multiply talents of the soul.

We talk about our favorite songs, and listen to them over and over. We return, time and again, to our favorite paintings, images, books, and movies and look at them many times over the course of our lives..why?

I posit that, in returning repeatedly to our favorite Artworks, we are seeking the Promethean fire, the soul-feeling that Art provides. The inspiration that Art gifts us is not some sort of economic “utility.” No! Instead, the energy Art beams into our souls is none other than the archetypal force of Hercules that breaks the chains of our inner Prometheus, liberates us from the rock of materialism, and removes the shackles of productivity so that we may utilize the “stolen fire of the gods” to make our souls soar through inspired creativity.

The energy Art beams into our souls is none other than the archetypal force of Hercules that breaks the chains of our inner Prometheus, liberates us from the rock of materialism, and removes the shackles of productivity so that we may utilize the “stolen fire of the gods” to make our souls soar through inspired creativity.

In a way, this experience of Art is a sort of "proof" that we have souls; for if we were merely rational beings born from matter, then returning to our favorite works of art repeatedly, or enjoying art at all would simply be a waste of productive time and money. To live only for efficiency and productivity is to remained chained to the rock of materialism while the eagle of modernity pecks out our liver — a symbol of our emotions, a symbol of our soul.

Fortunately, humans only pretend to be rational, but deep down, we are irrationally romantic, and, even the most hardened heart is sometimes moved by art, music, or dance. Consider this story of a Ukrainian mafia don whose heart was softened by a violin virtuoso:

Alexander Filonenko tells the story of his friend, a violinist who was kidnapped by the mafia in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in the 90s. He had his violin with him. When he was brought to the mafia don, the man looked at his instrument and said, “Play something for me.” The violinist realized that it could be his last performance. So, he played his favorite piece — Bach’s Sarabande.

As he played, his kidnappers stood stock-still, as if struck dumb. When he finished, there was silence in the room. Finally, the mafia don spoke, “I will let you go. More than that, I will have my boys fix the door to your apartment that they broke.” There were tears in his eyes.

– Eugene Terekhin, Where Light Haunts the Shadow

Experiencing a piece of Art is a bit like falling in love with another person. We don't (generally) marry another simply to share expenses and split up the chores — that is the purview of roommates. In a romantic relationship, we desire the feeling of love that we experience by being with that person. We want to feel possessed by them – just as we want to feel possessed by Beauty, Art, Truth and, ultimately, the source of all that is often called God.

Art must be its own end to express sheer beauty – that beauty that cuts away the world and shines brightly, enveloping us in its possessive and comforting arms. To cut and to shine – those are what sheer means. Normally, our vision is occluded. But when Art expresses sheer beauty, it cuts away those distracting occlusions and cleaves a fissure through our illusions into which the Light may shine brightly. Such Art shines clear and pure and, when we perceive it, Reality itself is clarified for an instant, and we no longer “see through the glass darkly” as Saint Paul wrote, but instead, we glimpse through to the true Reality of Divine ground. If you’ve ever been moved to tears by a painting, a song or a novel, you know what I mean.

Art shines clear and pure and, when we perceive it, Reality itself is clarified for an instant, and we no longer “see through the glass darkly” as Saint Paul wrote, but instead, we glimpse through to the Divine ground.

Therefore, to be Art, an artistic creation cannot be a means to anything other than itself, which is synonymous with the divine.

Interestingly, this "useless" dynamic extends even to the act of creating Art. In market-driven modernity, this presents a conundrum and a dilemma for the artist who sells. The art cannot be produced for the end of money – that reduces it to an economic good of utility and therefore turns it into merchandise. One’s Art must be produced for its own end. Period. The End. Fin. This dynamic takes us into territory that AI can never follow.

So, like the magazines of yesteryear, and like Google in the days of “don’t be evil” before they became evil, the artist must not allow advertising to drive editorial. To do so is to produce merchandise and kitsch. The serious artist, therefore, must establish a psychological firewall between his making and his marketing. This is not easy (though it is certainly possible!) and it is the reason that those blessed with the proverbial "artist's spouse" who handles all of their marketing are quite blessed indeed.

Ray Chen plays Bach’s Sarabande

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If you would like to support my writing, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

Subscribe now

If you’d like to support my writing, but can’t join as a paid subscriber please click Like, or Restack which signals the algorithm and helps me reach new people. This also helps push back against the encroachment of AI because I do not write with AI and I only feature human artists (with proper links and attribution) in the images with my posts.

No AI Zone: Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

I only rarely use AI images with my (non-AI) writing. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.

One of the ten commandments reads, “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

What does this even mean? Surely it doesn’t mean not to say certain curse words, as I was taught though, admittedly, some cursing might violate the spirit of the commandment. And of course there is the idea that the commandment refers to swearing an oath upon the Lord’s name — an idea which has merit — so, perhaps what follows is simply another layer of meaning that has relevance to me, personally.

Whatever the meaning, out of the entire Bible, this phrase, which is in the top ten commandments, must mean something important and deep for everyone’s life beyond banning a few “bad” words.

So let’s dig into what the Bible could possibly mean by the “Lord’s Name” and “in vain.”

“The Lord’s name” must mean something deeper than the human word “God” or “YHWH” or “Jehovah” or “Allah” or whatever other words people have invented to refer to the unreferrable.

God is beyond spacetime, beyond the physical universe (though He is everything in it also), and beyond language, so his “name” can’t be a man-made name in a man-made language. His “name” is something more like his identity/essence. Any “language” of God would be like a “sound”, a vibration, such as quantum vibrations: a quantum song. In the quantum realm, everything in the physical universe really does arise by vibrations of “nothing” — quantum fields. At the smallest levels, “matter” doesn’t exist — everything is energy vibrating.

I find the idea of a “quantum song” intriguing and I’m reminded that C.W. Lewis, a well-known Christian apologist, chose, in The Chronicles of Narnia to have Aslan sing Narnia into existence:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once…

…the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out—single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world…it was the first voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.

— C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

We are told in the Gospel of John that the WORD was God and that the Word became flesh. The greek word used in John is logos, and, indeed, is usually translated as WORD, but it could also be translated as thought, speech, utterance, logic or, with a bit of poetic imagination, vibration or song. This is why I sometimes refer to the logos, the Christ force, as “the creative song of the universe.”

While the verse in John was referring, obviously, to Christ, I believe that NAME and WORD are used somewhat interchangeably to refer to the vibration of God that gives rise to all things: the divine “name” or vibration that manifests as power and life.

This ever-changing, ever-evolving vibrationary power from the “foundations of the world”, the “Name of God”, the “Word” is what powers life. It is the holy spirit and the Christ/logos. It is the breath of life, that turns a handful of earth elements into a living human – you.

To me, this vibration is the Lord’s NAME. When we are in harmony with the song, we are “IN HIS NAME” — we become part of the symphony. But, when we force our own egocentric will upon reality, we play a discordant melody and, like the Discord of Melkor in Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories, we fall out of His Name and create all manner of trouble for ourselves and others.

…the discord of Melkor rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of sound more violent than before, until many of the Ainur were dismayed and sang no longer…

— J.R.R. Tolkien — The Silmarillion

We humans use names as mere identifiers, but, in the Bible, names often seem to be used not as simple identifiers, where one name is just as good as another, but as pointers, as icons, that point to the true essence, purpose, power and reality of the one named. The Lord’s NAME thus, is an icon in which we become enveloped to experience the purpose, essence, and power of the true reality behind all illusions — The Kingdom. To be In His Name is to be in The Kingdom.

To take the Lord’s NAME in vain, then, to me, seems like it would mean to deny this powerful icon and turn away from the true Kingdom that lurks behind all; it would be to take the miraculous life power that quickens our body for a few decades in the service of our own vanity, rather than using our time to serve God’s actual purpose for us.

Thus, the Lord’s NAME has a dual meaning in the commandment — it encompasses both His absolute vibratory essence and his essence as it manifests in our lives; for we are part of Him.

Consider that in biblical stories, God often changed the name of people to symbolically align them with their essence and their mission.

Each person’s original name was merely their human identifier, but their new name, given by the Lord is their true Kingdom identity, it is their true purpose, it is their true name, it is the Lord’s Name for them. It is not their historical name but the name of the person as an icon that pierces the veil of illusion and reveals the true nature of reality.

Peter, not Simon, is the icon of the spiritual rock upon which Christendom was built.

Israel, not Jacob, is the icon that birthed the nation of God’s chosen people.

Paul, not Saul, was the icon that brought the Gospel to the Gentiles.

Their names and stories are iconic.1

For Peter to have taken his iconic name in the service of his own ego, his vanity, would have been to take the Lords Name for him in vain.

In each moment, we face a choice; we must answer the following question: vanity or virtue?

The ego tempts us down the highway of vanity where names are mere identifiers and, if it feels good, do it.

But the voice of silence calls to us in each moment, it whispers our true purpose, our true name, the iconic name the Lord has prepared for us, which, if we step into it, will dispel the illusion and grace us with a glimpse the truth of the Kingdom.

There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.

— Rumi

Virtue or vanity? Icon or illusion? Heavenly or worldly? The Lord’s Name or our worldly names? This is the crux of freewill. In fact, this points to the crux, the crucifix. This crux of freewill is the choice we face: will we take up our cross and allow our false egocentric self’s destructive will to be crucified? We will if we wish to truly rest blissfully in the grace infused name of God where His will and our will become the same thing through Love.

When we choose our true name, virtue flows through healing, beauty, love, truth and goodness. When we choose the ego, vanity consumes all it can, creating anxiety, ugliness, hate, falsehood, and evil.

Your True Name, you see, is a mantel, a title. Do you not know that you are a child of God? You are noble and, to step into your nobility, you must take up the responsibilities of your mantel. Your True Name is your noble Kingdom; your inheritance. It is, as Stephen Pressfield says in The War of Art, your territory:

We humans have territories too. Ours are psychological. Stevie Wonder’s territory is the piano. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s is the gym…

When I sit down to write, I’m on mine….A territory provides sustenance…A territory can only be claimed alone…A territory can only be claimed by work…A territory returns exactly what you put in…

When the artist works territorially, she reveres heaven…The sustenance they get comes from the act itself, not from the impression it makes on others…The work comes from heaven anyway. Why not give it back?

— Stephen Pressfield, The War of Art

Siddhartha Gautama was his given name, but his title was: The Buddha.

Many believe Magdalene was a title, an icon, her true name that means The Tower. Let us not forget that while the boys scattered, she was there at The Cross, she was there as He was entombed, and she was the first to see Him risen. She became an apostle to the apostles; a Tower of strength, love and devotion, even in the absolute worst of circumstances; even when the others had lost all hope.

And, of course, the ultimate example: Jesus was the identifier of the man, but His True Name, His mantel, His title, His iconic name, the Lord’s Name for Him: The Christ. He became the living embodiment of the intelligent Christ force of the universe.

You too have a true name, a calling, a Lord’s name.

God’s presence in this universe seems to be two-fold.

First, we have the ever-changing vibratory WORD or “NAME of God” in the holy spirit, impermanence, life-force, nature, raw power.

And second, we have the guiding awareness, the reflection of the Father, the creative, evolutionary song, the only “begotten son” in the Christ Force of the universe.

Together, these two forces bring you life and abundance. We know, from scripture, that the Lord came so that you could have life and have it more abundantly.

These melodies of guidance attempt to steer you to your real identity and essence; your true name – the Lord’s name for you. Stepping into that name is where life and abundance are found. Ignoring these two forces and their calling turns you away from the Lord’s Name and toward the discord of your own ego: Your own vanity.

If you are called to be an artist, and you turn away from that to serve your vanity in some other way, you are taking the “Lord’s name” in service of your vanity. You are taking the Lord’s name in vain.

So let’s think through how this understanding of the commandment might apply to our creative lives by expanding it with the insights developed in the preceding discussion:

• Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.

• Thou shalt not take the Lord’s vibratory power of life and the guiding Christ intelligence in vain.

• Thou shalt not take the vibratory power of ever-changing life and the guiding, creative, transforming intelligence in your consciousness in service of your own egoistic vanity.

• Thou shalt not take the vibratory power of ever-changing life and the guiding, creative, transforming intelligence in your consciousness in service of your own egoistic vanity. Instead, listen closely to the calling of your heart when kindled by beauty, truth and wonder and find the courage to follow that calling where you will find synchronicities help you along your true path, where joy, abundance, fulfillment, and God await you; for when you are properly in the Lord’s vibratory power, IN his Name, you find your true name. This brings deeper meaning to the phrase in the NAME of the Lord.

“And even though it all went wrong / I'll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

— Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

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No AI Zone: Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

I only rarely use AI images with my (non-AI) writing. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Clinsights. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence. — Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly, English literary critic and writer, once wrote the quote above. Expanding upon it, he provides unvarnished truth for all artists in the following excerpt:

"All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, so it should never be undertaken. Writers engrossed in any literary activity which is not their attempt at a masterpiece are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to write off such activities as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes. We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot coordinate what is not there." — Cyril Connolly (emphasis mine)

Let's update Connolly’s ideas for today's world.

If he were here, I imagine he might say something like, “all excursions into social media, writing content to post online, commenting on other people's blogs, recording videos of yourself, scrolling feeds looking for ideas, or simply distracting yourself are doomed to disappointment and by wasting our time on these activities, we condemn our good ideas to oblivion.”

As Connolly said, you cannot express what is not there. And, if you haven't put in the necessary solitude, and deep thinking, to find out who you truly are and what you truly wish to say, then you haven’t found out what is there.

If you spend your time in the frivolous activities listed above, you are surfing the turbulent surface of an ocean looking for ideas when the sunken treasure is thousands of feet down in the stillness of solitude.

How many of us are emotionally exhausted, and yet, we spend our reading time scrolling social media and we spend our artistic time posting to it?

We published a piece by Vita Benes soon after we launched The BoldBrush Letter exploring this same idea titled Not Pieces, Masterpieces.

Vita advised, in connollyesque fashion, not to pursue making mere pieces (of content), but, instead, to pursue making masterpieces (of art).

That is the true function of any artist.

And as Nietzsche said, Art is the proper task of life, therefore, the proper purpose of the artist’s life is to make your masterpiece.

“Art is the proper task of life.” – Nietzsche

Your masterpiece might be a book, a painting, or an exhibit. It might be a poem or a collection of works, or, even, as the great spiritual masters through the ages have exhorted us to do, it might be making a masterpiece out of your life itself.

Let’s take a look at the distraction side of the equation: I don’t know about you, but I find myself increasingly, like television before it, completely bored with social media. I rarely spend time on it at all anymore. I’d rather write, read a real book, or spend time with friends, family or in solitude.

Even if social media provides some marketing value, it's not worth the time, other than in the most minimalistic way so that someone can find me if they wish to reach out to me.

Not only that, increasingly, I do not wish to support the big tech companies that own these platforms while they trample on the rights of artists to train their AIs and as they plan to turn around and take even more attention from humans to shove AI created accounts and features down our throats (which I predicted). It’s a faustian bargain and always has been.

Remember how they convinced us to “build an audience” and then, after we brought all our friends to their platforms, they changed all the timelines to algorithmic feeds and stopped showing our posts to the followers we had so lovingly and painstakingly attracted? They don’t care about users and, in fact, are using us. Only big tech and drug dealers work hard to addict users to their products.

Regardless of why we limit our social media time, by cutting back on the time wasted in such activities, we regain the precious time we need for the real activities that foster creativity.

True Artists (as opposed to the spurious “creators” on social media) need isolation, solitude, and white space. Artists need to read and digest books. And books need to be read and re-read. Artists need to spend time in nature. They need to meditate. They need to enrich their souls, so that they have something to give; so that they, as Connelly said, have found out what is there.

The ideas we read, see and intuit need time to roll around in our minds, have idea sex, combine with our own experiences, and recombine into something unique.

Next, after all that, we, the Artists, need to do the work.

All of this takes time and mind space, and it needs plenty of both.

To make matters “worse”, the most inspired ideas often happen at the least convenient times. And that takes even more of our time.

Sure, keeping a schedule helps to prime the Muse, but even so, she doesn't always show up when we wish she would. She certainly doesn’t for me. My Muse is like the woman in Billy Joel’s Always a Woman: She’ll carelessly cut me and laugh while I’m bleeding. She bring out the best and the worst I can be. But I love her deeply nevertheless. And when she promises me more than the garden of Eden, I do my best to stop, listen and write.

We artists, especially, must remember that technology doesn't always make our lives better, but it does make them faster and more connected. The world has assumed that faster and more connected means better (and, in some contexts, it is.)

But, faster and more connected is exactly the opposite of what the Artist needs.

As a writer, what I need is slower and less connected. The fewer ways people have to reach me, the better, at least if I ever want to write anything good. What the artist needs is less shallow connection with others, and more deep connection with themselves.

I learn more by sitting on the back patio with my cats, listening to the divine whisper of the wind, than I do by scrolling X/Twitter or TikTok or whatever the current grift app of the day is.

I stopped watching television with the proliferation of reality shows. This isn’t some sort of humblebrag, I stopped, literally, because there just wasn't anything good on even with over one hundred cable channels. And these days, social media is like reality TV on steroids.

Social media is the largest and worst reality show in existence. It's like everyone in the world is on a huge episode of Jerry Springer, and we're all proud of our cutoff shorts, our tattoo covered bodies, and the intrigue of figuring out who is the baby daddy of whom. The clichéd strippers make their appearance too, proudly hocking their OnlyFans links. Sometimes we even get a video mimicking one of the Jerry Springer Show’s hallmarks: a bunch of trashy people in a knock-down-drag-out fight. Springer was ahead of his time. He should’ve started a social network.

The serious Artist; however, cannot partake too much of that world. As they say, garbage in, garbage out and social media is humanity’s psycho-spiritual garbage dump; for that is how the world is – concerned with baby daddies and tattooed bodies wearing too-tight clothes – thirst traps sporting pumped-up silicon breasts pressed down into tiny braziers or six-pack abs and bulging biceps to ensnare the lustful.

On social media, each one of the seven deadly vices is perfectly catered to. Each post entices: a bite-sized piece of tempting colorful candy that we are encouraged to “consume.”

Greed is good. Lust is living. Envy is energizing. Gluttony is glamorous. Wrath is warranted. Sloth is sublime. Pride is poise.

Inducing others toward sin is merely “posting engaging content.” Hey, if it enrages, it engages. Instagram became more about pictures of the artists than their art works. Imagine Michelangelo dancing like a clown for likes. Imagine Frida Kahlo with waxed eyebrows and fake boobs, posing in a bikini offering her self-respect on the altar of the algorithm.

People have become confused about what really matters and think that garnering attention online — gawking really — is somehow equivalent to true marketing: It isn’t. Marketing art is far more about magic than metrics.

Partaking too much of such an insidious world causes us to suppress our creativity. Our Muse gets overwhelmed. And when people suppress their creativity, joy, and spirituality, they feel a deep angst — an anxiousness that is born from their true self knowing that they are not on their destined path and thus, that they are not living up to their purpose.

Many in that situation unconsciously look for someone else to blame for their problems. They project the angst outward because it is painful for any of us to go deep inside where we finally realize that we are the warden of our own internal prison and that the cell door is unlocked.

Social media is tailor-made to give such a person someone to blame for their problems.

Solitude and reflection is what such a person needs. But instead, they scroll an endless feed of "idiots" upon whom they can project all their internal problems.

It’s a vicious spiral downward for the ensnared: social media robs people of the time they need to be creative, and then turns around and gives them a host of victims to blame their resultant angst upon!

There were a few voices in the wilderness crying out warnings nearly two decades ago. My small voice was with them as we called out, exhorting artists that, “if it’s free, you’re not the customer and if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” But most people prefer comforting lies to the difficult truth and that’s why John the Baptist lost his head.

Nevertheless, and thankfully, the simple solution remains within our grasp. We can just put the phone down. And that is what the artist must do. The True Artist must withdraw away, into the solitude of the dessert or the stillness of the mountain. The Artist is the modern day sage. The Artist is the mystic.

The Artist must access true gnosis – knowledge – and bring it out of that divine ground that is accessible deep within all of us. It is this divine sacred ground where we connect with our true Self. It is this divine ground where we experience the rejuvenating Mystery.

And perhaps, if we turn away from the debauched world of distraction, and we do the difficult, solitary-but-necessary work of creating our masterpieces then maybe, just maybe, our masterpieces will wake up a few members of the Jerry Springer crowd to the fact they too are actually divine beings of light with the true liberating power of creation inside of them.

Imagine if we all made masterpieces of our work and our lives!

So, excuse me, while I retreat to the mountain, to aloneness, to toil away on my next masterpiece. If you need to reach me, feel free to message me on X or Substack Notes, but I probably won't answer promptly as I have important things to create, as do you, for the sake of us all.

“Silence gives answers” — Rumi

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PS - The ideas explored in this essay are explored far more deeply in my forthcoming book The Sovereign Artist: The Liberating Power of the Creative Act. If that is of interest to you, I encourage you to join the waitlist.

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No AI Zone: Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

I only rarely use AI images with my (non-AI) writing. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Reflections of the Sovereign Artist. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

“...what an artificial intelligence cannot do is to give coherent, clarifying, formative voice to your scattered thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and personal vision. It cannot express or articulate yourself. Only you can do that. Otherwise, you’re letting a machine tell you, and others, who you are.” – Matt Cardin, The Zen of Words1

Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

What Wittgenstein meant by that, I think, is that language is important for reasons beyond “mere” communication; that we must endeavor not only to know language, but to master it so that we are able to clearly express our ideas, but also, even more importantly, that through the process of mastery, we are empowered to expand our perception and understanding of our inner and outer realities.

Furthermore, the greater the writer’s mastery of language, the greater his ability to comprehend and express the truth of his own worldview. Improving his mastery of language enables him to adjust and refine his understanding of reality itself, asymptotically approaching ever-closer to Truth.

The finer your ability to wield language, the finer the detail you will be able to express in your writing. As your mastery progresses, you are empowered to express subtler and more nuanced ideas:

I’m mad, I'm angry, I'm furious, I'm enraged, I'm boiling…There is a force building inside of me, bubbling up, a kinetic lava of emotion that will explode, flatten and melt all who dare to come near me…My soul has been riven by the skullduggery of my former friend, and out of the chasm of my broken heart flows the unholy darkness of hell, intent upon extracting its diabolical revenge.

The phrases above all express the same basic idea in broad strokes, but they are far from identical in meaning or in the accuracy of depicting what the writer was feeling inside.

Mastering language increases the resolution with which one can project the ideas of his soul.

That's all well and good and what I’ve written up to this point was inspired primarily by the (highly recommended) essay, The Zen of Words by Matt Cardin, from which I drew the epigraph quote about artificial intelligence at the top of the essay.

Before we discuss the implications of AI, as it relates to mastery, let’s move beyond language to other artistic fields: I propose that Wittgenstein’s famous idea about the mastery of language can be generalized as follows: The limits of my mastery are the limits of the Truth I can perceive.

Let’s call this Clintavo’s dictum. And, simplifying, it states:

The limits of my mastery are the limits of my Truth.

Shifting to visual art – the reason artists, historically, have trained, for many years in drawing, in composition, in color theory, in countless hours of practice, and in apprenticeships is because one must master the "language" of visual art in the same way one masters written language, if one wishes to expand, through mastery, the subtlety of expression one is able to give one’s creative inner world.

How can you see, and share, the transcendent, indescribable beauty of the mystery if you don't possess a high enough resolution "screen" upon which to show it?

If you haven’t mastered your medium, not only will you not have the skill to depict ideas and ideals in fine resolution, but you will struggle even to perceive the subtler important Truths of reality. You simply won’t have the skillset that brings true discernment and thus, in the best case, you will produce subpar art, and in the worst case, you will find yourself in danger of accepting societal programming or religious dogma as Truth.

To meet reality as it is, the artist masters the observational skills of both the sense-driven eyes, which see the outer world, and the soul-driven “single eye” which unveils the intuitive wisdom of inner light. The master artist has developed his awareness of subtlety, the nuances of color and light, to the degree that he begins to transform his subjects, both outer and inner, from mere images into icons that reveal deeper truths.

Biblically, “light” refers to both the wavelengths our eyes utilize to see, physically, and the illumination of embodied knowledge provided to our minds and souls.

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light”2

In addition to refining his observational skills, the artist must also master the motor skills necessary to properly depict the sublimeness of what he has seen. As all of these skills develop, a richer and more nuanced reality increasingly unfolds itself around the artist.

This is true of all fields that truly require mastery or, at least those fields of mastery that require us to mine our psycho-spiritual depths for Truth.

The meditator, similarly, develops a highly refined ability to concentrate upon and perceive subtle realities that the average person never experiences.

The virtuoso musician begins to hear, and play, the music of the universe itself.

The chef and the winemaker taste the same celestial chord upon the tongue.

The martial artist and the athlete both master physical move after physical move, over and over, until no intellectual thinking is required and he may then, as Bruce Lee famously said, “Be like water.”

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” — Miles Davis

The limits of your mastery are the limits of your truth because…as your resolution of mastery increases, you expand your consciousness and thus, you expand your perception of Truth (with a big T). This can also be referred to as “growing your soul.”

“The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow” — Kurt Vonnegut

This is why there is so much overlap between the artistic and the spiritual; the artists and the saints; the arts and the religions. These two “useless” — but infinitely essential — pursuits of humanity tread the same waters. They are two portals into the same underlying Truth. Both the spiritual guru and the accomplished artist are referred to as, “master.”

When one has mastered their medium, then the ideas flow from the soul’s intuitive single eye of wisdom directly to the instinctive movement of the master’s muscles: As above, so below; on “earth” (the muscles) as it is in “heaven” (Truth revealed by the single eye). For the master artist, the paintings often “paint themselves” as they enter “the zone” of this flow.

The true artist, the virtuoso, masters his medium not simply to "wow" his friends and viewers with his technical prowess, but to better see, and better "articulate" his inner creations and, importantly, for the artist, himself, to better understand what his creations mean.

Achieving the ability to depict more masterful resolution allows one to comprehend how their observations and creations fit into their world view. Mastery empowers artists to deliver deep and surprising insights which resonate with others about the true nature of reality.

In other words, mastery is a journey for the Artist to find his True Self and then, once found, continue the great universal project of showing others the way home.

True visual art is such a powerful force in this divine project because it is apprehended quickly. Its powerful visuals — through beauty — cut open a virtuous divine wound in our hearts where our inner divine light may exit and through which outer divine light may enter. Our hearts become the single point where the exiting and entering lights meet; where God embraces himself and, for a moment, we find ourselves immersed in shocking, loving, compassionate recognition.

You may not have realized that your paintbrush can be, in masterful hands, such a powerful sword of Truth. Wield it responsibly.

The works of the master artist contain the resonance to reveal Truth to our souls, through the depiction of Beauty (Truth’s aesthetic form), often with far more power than a hundred proselytizers quoting from ancient texts. Not all gospel is written. Not all encounters with God are spoken.

If the step of mastering the medium is skipped or short-changed by the would-be artist, as it so often is in our post-modern world, then that practitioner’s understanding of reality and their truest self will be non-existent or incomplete.

This skill deficiency will decapitate, or severely hobble, his ability to create resonant and powerful art. One only has to look at much of what is called “art” (and “architecture”) today to see how far from Truth we’ve fallen as a civilization and how much our “shortcuts” have cost us.

“Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.” — Ursula Le Guin

Which brings us back to artificial intelligence: It is true that AI can create “pretty images.” Such images provide a surface-level veneer of “art” to the un-masterful eye and they present a simulacrum of creativity.

But the point of Art isn't simply to make “pretty images.”

Instead, the point of Art, ultimately, is to go deep into our inner mystery, and uncover enough understanding to find the resonate path that leads to our True Self; the path that takes us to self-actualization and beyond; the path which allows us, through our Art, to point the way, indirectly perhaps, to others.

If Art of any form — painting, sculpting, writing or otherwise — is your true calling, and you think you can replace the dedicated work of mastery that it takes to uncover such a sacred path with prompts in an AI command box, then you are robbing yourself of your own destiny; for Art isn't only (or even mostly) the about end product. Art is about the journey. Art is the journey.

“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

If you're not interested in your soul's true path (the most important path you could ever find), then sure, you can generate “art” with a prompt, but don't kid yourself: Typing a few words into a text box and receiving an image in return no more makes you an artist, than ordering food on Uber Eats makes you a chef.

In doing so, you have received an image, but what you don't have is the mastery-developed screen of resolution desperately needed to understand the reality of yourself; you don’t have any intuitive insight into what such an image truly means; you don’t have the experience of the journey back to your true self which is indeed the true art that all artists, all saints, and ultimately, all people, seek.

‘The artist and entrepreneur find their authentic selves not by whom they love or hate, or what they believe, or what feats they perform. The artist and the entrepreneur discover themselves by what they create. They don’t know before they create it. When they see their work on the page or the screen or rising before them forty stories high in concrete and steel, they say, “That’s me.”’ — Stephen Pressfield

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No AI Zone: Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

I only rarely use AI images with my (non-AI) writing. On the rare occasions I do use an AI image (usually fiction), I also feature at least one artwork by a human artist with image credits and links to their work or, if I can’t find a suitable image, I donate a free month of website service to one of our artist customers at my SaaS company, FASO Artist Websites.

Poetic expression, spiritual ideas, and musings upon beauty, truth and goodness should be free to spread far and wide. Hence, I have not paywalled the work on Reflections of the Sovereign Artist. However, if you’re able to become a paid subscriber, I’d be eternally grateful. It would help, encourage and enable me to continue exploring these topics and allow me to keep it accessible for a world that is in desperate need of beauty, truth, goodness and love. — Creatively, Clintavo.

Join the Sovereign Artist Waitlist

If you set two violins on a table and play a note on the first violin, the strings on the second violin will vibrate at the same frequencies, and it will produce related notes due to the phenomenon of acoustic resonance. Like an artist in flow, the second violin seems to be playing itself.

Likewise, when we artists enter a flow state, we become a cosmic instrument, and we find ourselves resonating with The Mystery; we begin to vibrate, emotionally and aesthetically, in sympathy with The Sovereign Artist, but, even so, in our resonance, we can’t help but add our own unique flavor to this cosmic musica universalis.

The word ‘resonance’ encompasses the fact that our Art contains a unique energy and vibe. And this resonate energy in our artworks is what inspires other human beings; for they too feel the musica universalis in their hearts.

It is a paradox of art that the more our Art comes from our most personal depths, the more it connects, universally with others. Let’s refer to all of these related ideas, collectively, as Resonance.

While most artists understand the importance of technical proficiency, many overlook the importance of resonance.

However, humans are primarily emotion and feeling driven creatures. We are not nearly as logical and rational as we pretend we are. Our desires and decisions are often driven first by emotion and by what resonates with us. And, after the fact, we justify the emotional decisions of our subconscious by using our conscious mind to rational-ize the decision we’ve actually already made. This tendency is doubly true when people purchase Art because the whole point of Art is Resonance.

Resonance represents communication of non-verbal Truth between humans - Art. Resonance is more important than mastery because resonance is the point.

Technical proficiency can only share the what of your creation. Resonance shares the why.

"Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside."

— Ursula Le Guin

Because resonance is the point, mining your unique deep truths, style, vibe, and energies will be the most valuable time you spend. If art were purchased simply based on proficiency, then everybody would want the “best” artist in each genre and medium. Fortunately, most buyers are more interested in unique resonance than technical proficiency.

While it’s very difficult to be “the best” in any field, you likely are already unique in some way. You have a unique vibe and energy about you, and the goal is to reflect that in your Art. Push yourself until it does.

Not every artist has tapped into their unique resonance: plenty of artists do the same type of landscapes, still lifes, or portraits that thousands of other artists also do. If I go to a plein air competition and everyone’s paintings look basically the same without much uniqueness, then I’d likely look for the best one I could afford (price) or the one painted by the artist that I best connected with (story) or maybe just not buy one at all. Rather than being “stuck in the pack” of sameness, it’s far more rewarding (and easier) in the long run, to mine your own uniqueness, vibe and energy. But it does take time and experimentation.

Because of the time required, it’s important, before you “productize” your art, that you truly develop your vibe, your energy, and your style. Figure out and utilize what makes you truly unique. Do not blame the economy, your day job, your web host, your fans, the Instagram algorithm, a lack of marketing knowledge or anything else for a lack of sales until you’ve nailed your own inspired uniqueness.

One way to do this, ironically, is to lean into your imperfections and weaknesses. Instead of trying to “stamp out” your imperfections, figure out how to make them work for you as a strength in a way that makes your art special.

If you’re not sure how to develop a unique style, imitate then iterate. Most of us start out by imitating other artists we admire. Copying old master artworks is a time-honored and valid learning technique in visual art. But imitation is not enough, the secret is to then iterate. You iterate by copying many different artists' works and styles. Imitate, then iterate. Imitate, then iterate. Imitate, then iterate. And as you iterate, you’ll slowly learn your own preferred method of doing things and, over time, your own style will emerge. It will be impossible for you to exactly copy another artist, so copy it your way. Look at where you are different, and push the differences further and further.

Follow Bruce Lee’s advice: Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself."

— Miles Davis

This cycle of iteration is an ongoing, lifelong process and your art may evolve over time. However, when you’re first getting started, and aren’t sure if you’re ready yet, it’s probably a good idea, after you think you’ve developed something unique, to get feedback from people who aren’t your friends and family and who you know will be honest with you. Other professional artist colleagues are a good source for these kinds of critiques. Make sure you ask people who support you, but who are honest. Now is not the time to show your work to those who might throw water on your growing fire.

This resonance is the most important element of your art. In many ways, it is the reason for your art to be created at all, and I could write an entire book on the creative process of reaching deep into your unique self to connect with, and reflect, the eternal resonance within (actually, I have written that book).

Your long term art sales start and end with this step. If you aren’t honest with yourself at truly finding your unique resonance, others will feel it as a deadness to your work. But, when you are truly inspired and combine that with enough skill to capture your inspiration, viewers (or readers, if you are a writer) will feel the energetic vibrational resonance when they experience your work. There will be something, unnamable, that is different and alive. “This person has it,” they will say.

Show us something the world has never seen, for if the world has already seen it, then why are you repeating it? Uniqueness means “one of a kind” and “unlike anything else.” You are unique. In the history of the universe there has never been and will never be another human with your unique DNA, your unique experiences, and your unique way of perceiving reality.

Society attempts to create clones through programming. But you are not a clone. Creation, nature, and God made you unique. Reconnect deeply with that uniqueness and move beyond what society expects. That is what you need to share through your Art. Seek, through your Art, to be legend.

It is possible, likely even, that when you dig deep enough, the path you are truly meant to follow will seem a bit controversial to some people. That is okay. In fact, it’s a great sign. That means it challenges their programming. It means you’ve made those people, also, start to realize that they are not clones. It means, though their programming disagrees, you kindled something deep in their hearts — that they feel a tiny bit of the universal resonance.

If nobody doesn’t like what you do, then you are likely not unique and inspired enough yet, and that will reflect in your sales. No marketing tactics can truly compensate for uninspired art.

Other Posts Referenced in this Essay:

The Mystery
“I’m not sure who you are channeling but it is true and I’m being enriched by your work. You are a wise soul and I appreciate you.” — Ed Penniman

The Sovereign Artist
“This is the most amazing writing I've read on creativity and being an artist…and I've read a lot.” — Kohlene Hendrickson

Embrace The Dragon
“Such BIG Truths veiled behind psychological concepts.” -- Louanne Headrick

You Won’t Sound Like Eddie
“I think Eddie also once said that the tone was in his fingers, not his gear.” — Mark Dykeman

Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clint “Clintavo” Watson, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” —Ray Bradbury

When I don’t write, my spirit darkens and my demeanor becomes generally irritable and cranky (Not that I have a ‘sunny’ disposition, even on my best days. In fact, I’ve occasionally been accused of having contracted an industrial-grade case of stage-four resting-bitch-face).

The longer it’s been since I’ve sat down to a proper writing session, the more I feel as if I’m wasting my life, and, when I feel that way, I descend into sullenness.

Writing, you see, acts as a sort of ‘relief valve’ that vents the darkness that accumulates inside of me into the Infinity of Creativity. The very act lightens the load upon my soul. As Chesterton said, angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. They contain lightness — light — inside. And writing lets out that heavy darkness so that there is room for the light to flood in through the cracks, so that my soul too, may again fly.

We all go through seasons when we find ourselves busier than usual. Which, in this age of technocracy, is saying something.

Unexpected things happen. Tragedies happen. Tasks that we think will be simple and speedy end up being complicated and confusing. The car, or the air conditioner may break, taking a day (or more) of our time – time that we had planned to write. Perhaps we experience an unexpected dental issue. Or maybe we agreed to a time-consuming long term project when we should have had the courage to say ‘no.’ The vicissitudes of life, which threaten to steal our creative time, are endless and that simply is the way it is.

Even worse, sometimes, months swagger arrogantly into our lives and, like playground bullies, delight in wrecking our plans. They kick over our little sand castles and refuse to let us build new ones. Such months delight in collecting unexpected events and piling them up until they occur all at once, so that, despite our best efforts, we find it extremely difficult, almost impossible, to make time for our creative outlet. We find ourselves without enough white space.

Some may scoff at the idea that creatives require such white space (or, for that matter, they may scoff at my whole ‘relief valve’ theory of creativity). Those people say that real writers, real artists, always make time. Suck it up. Skip sleep. Do whatever you have to do, but put words on the page. Every. Single. Day. Maybe those people are right. Bastards.

I once saw a post by a guy who wrote an entire book by spending five minutes writing in his car before work every morning.

I suppose, even on the busiest of days, I could spare five minutes.

However, for me, five minutes isn’t enough to activate the relief valve. Forcing myself to write for only five minutes a day sounds like, well, hell. I’d have to force a stop before any truly good ideas occurred. Or worse, I’d have to force a stop when good ideas were flowing. I need much longer stretches of quiet time, to think, to read, to absorb, and to write.

And during those solipsistic busier-than-usual periods of life, the sacred stretches of solitude (so necessary for creative work) disappear.

Now, logically, I know that busier-than-usual periods are temporary. They will pass. White space will return. Life will go on.

But, logic notwithstanding, emotionally and spiritually, pressure builds…and builds….and builds, and when that relief valve isn't opened up through the real act of creation, through real writing, eventually, I explode.

When that happens, my creative shadow side takes over and my metaphorical skin rips open, falling away, leaving my humanity as a pile of forgotten flesh, and the Shadow, now a full-fledged demon, no longer constrained by a human container, expands outward, showing his true, dark leathery form. ‘He’ reaches out with his claws toward those around me and with his forked tongue of lies, lashes out and burns down my world. Once satiated, he dissapates, leaving me to attempt to rebuild from the ashes.

Art is certainly the Cinderella (of modernity)…if Cinderella is not allowed to go to the ball she will not stay quietly at home washing the dishes; probably she will set the house on fire instead. — Sangharakshita.

The Creative Act, you see, is a magic act that rehabilitates demons and defeats evil.

Writing, for many of us, is the alchemy that takes the grimy emotional pollution of everyday life — that nasty accumulation of darkness and trauma that builds up inside of us — and transmutes the gunk into something new, something good — even something divine.

Your pen is your magic wand and your rune-covered keyboard enables you to cast spells with your Words (that’s why we ‘spell’ words, of course). In the beginning was the Word — the ultimate spell.

But, unfortunately, when the accumulated darkness isn’t vented through writing, and it forces itself out in an emotional explosion, the escaped demon lashes out at whoever is closest to us, and that is nearly always a loved one; for who else is one close enough with to allow such shameful outbursts?

It’s a tragedy of life that we shit on the people we care about the most. And like a virus rupturing an infected cell, the darkness, if not transmuted through creative magic, seeks to spread from person-to-person. You can see this darkness living and spreading over modern society. I call it the ‘endarkenment.’ Everywhere we turn in modernity, the darkness seems to be covering the globe.

If there is any upside, at least our closest loved ones see the full spectrum of who we truly are, I guess. And, of course, if they choose to stay with us, demons and all, their love and devotion for us have been proven unequivocally. After all, Beauty doesn’t remain with the Beast unless she still sees Hope on the horizon.

The creatives who have graced my writings with their attention will be nodding their heads about now.

So, what to do about it?

I don't have an answer for you. I don't have a solution.

But I do have a resolution and it’s the only (new year’s?) resolution that makes sense for a writer: Write.

Use your Shadow’s talons to claw back some creative time instead of using them to shred those you love. Uh oh. It appears that I’m now one of those advice-giving write-every-day bastards.

It’s an unrealistic resolution, I grant you, but so are most resolutions, including everyone’s ultimate unspoken resolution of ‘don’t die.’

Resolutions don’t have to be realistic.

Resolutions represent Hope.

Optimism with a broken heart — that’s what Nick Cave calls hope. I’d probably say Hope is optimism defying a broken heart.

‘Resolution’ means ‘a breaking into parts.’ Through the Hope of Resolution, we sunder ourselves and create cracks in our heart, a broken heart, through which internal darkness may vent and allow the light back in. We need to break (open) our hearts if we wish to let the darkness out and the light in. Hope contains such power to inspire. And inspiration leads to action.

With Hope, even simply ‘writing’ in our own minds can sometimes be enough. Since, ultimately, you can’t truly control anything, there is no solution but resolution. And every resolution, at its core, is simply to hope.

This is the first real writing I've done in close to two months and so this piece itself has helped open that relief valve a tiny bit, and perhaps the pressure will now diminish and, as that pressure reduces, and negativity vents, Hopefully the Light of Creation will be uncovered again; for when the clouds finally dissipate, there is only the shining sun.

Posts Referenced in this Essay

The Mind Palace

Ignoring Your Daemon Unleashes a Demon

The Parable of Anna Akhmatova by Ted Gioia

2025 is coming. The world seems to be in such a catastrophic state. Where is the hope? What is hope? by Nick Cave

Everything written in this post (and all my posts) is written 100% by me, Clintavo, a flesh and blood human seeking to grow my soul and come home my truest self; for that is the essence of creativity. I do not use AI to assist me with writing — that would deny me the very growth of my world through writing that I seek. I do, sometimes, use AI to create relevant images to go with my writing as the images are orthogonal to the writing itself and I am not an illustrator.

The AI proponents don’t seem to understand that writing is not merely, or mostly, the process of putting a pen to paper to share a fully formed opinion or a complete idea. If that was the essence of writing, then utilizing artificial intelligence to make one ‘more productive’ or to ‘save time’ might make sense. In that case, one could log into something like ChatGPT, share a completed idea, and then have the AI spit out a completed and nicely written piece. Perhaps the ‘author’ would have to tweak the output to make it ‘his’ but, by and large, that would be that. The clever among us could probably even teach an AI to mimic our own style.

But the ‘problem’ with that idea is that we don’t write simply to share an opinion or fact.  We write to learn; to clarify our positions; to improve our ability to think; to strengthen our ability to make connections between different ideas; to enter fantastical mental worlds that make life bearable, joyful even; and, ultimately, to find out who we truly are deep inside.  

We don’t read books merely to rush to the end and we don’t write to rush to the output.  Like a song, the value of writing is in enjoying the journey, in the moment, and, like a great song, we might even be slightly sad when it ends because it’s over.  But, by doing so, we will have expanded our consciousness and will have journeyed a bit closer to our true home deep inside our soul – the place where The Sovereign Artist dwells.  We will have expanded our reality.

We all have many scattered ideas, feelings, and emotions. And, when we write, we may be inspired to begin by a small solitary idea.  I’ve often begun writing, inspired by a catchy turn of phrase, having no idea where the piece will go in the end or even if it will go anywhere.  I’d say I write that way more often than not.  

Once we start writing however, we begin to realize that there are other little kibbles of ideas and bits of stories stuck in the dusty recesses, the forgotten nooks, and secret crannies of our mind. So, we start pulling out those kibbles and bits, holding them up to the light, examining them, and making unseen connections between ideas seen.   

A writer shines a flashlight into dark corners that terrify most people. 
 

“Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness.” –  John 3:19

So, that story that I read last week and this idea that I  saw online? They come together!  And what a rush when two or more ideas connect!  It’s exciting and creative, because, like a marriage, the union of two things into a relationship creates a new, third, thing. 

As we persist and flesh out these connections, we add some sort of coherence, and perhaps, if we're lucky, our intuition uncovers something unique. 

And so, where we end up often will be quite different from where we started!

Paul Graham once said that his process of writing an essay starts with a question.  And that his goal in writing the essay is to discover the answer to the question.

When we write, we are often trying to answer a question. Sometimes the question may be fully formed when we start the process, other times we might even not quite know the question!  We often write to learn both the question and the answer! That is exactly what I am doing here, in this piece.

This whole process of writing is something that teaches us how to think. Writing enhances our intellect.  It  enhances our vocabulary as we struggle for just the right word to express the nuance of our ideas.  And we tend to remember words that we discover this way because we find them in the context of struggling to discover what it is that we are trying to say.  When we write fiction we grow our imagination.

As our vocabulary, our imagination, and our abilities grow, so does our mind, so does our soul – and so does our world.  

When we write, we enable ourselves to experience a richer world with more color, depth, subtlety and nuance.  

This  process creates a virtuous cycle where our world grows larger, and so we explore its edges even further, again expanding our limits by making even larger, more profound connections each time we cycle through the process.  Around and around it goes.  Creativity is how we grow our mind and our soul and the purpose of all life is growth. 

This virtuous cycle idea explains, partially, why Wittgenstein famously said, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

In a real and visceral way, that’s true.  

And, by the way, Wittgenstein's maxim can be expanded to cover all forms of mastery in the art field: the limits of your skill are the limits of your world.  

Wittgenstein’s observation isn’t only true of language. Or perhaps I should say, not all languages involve words.  For example, a master visual artist, because of his expanded ‘language’ of color and composition, has developed the skill to see and perceive much more about the world than a beginner.  An advanced meditator, because of her skill at noticing the subtle ‘language’ of the breath, lives in a larger world of far more nuance than a non-meditator and she feels her breath all over the body.

Perhaps we could generalize Wittgenstein’s idea as, “the limits of my mastery are the limits of my world.”

What we’ve learned so far is that Art isn't primarily about the output, it's about the input, and the process. Art is never a means to an end, financial or otherwise.   Art contains its own ends.

The value of art is more about how it changes and expands the artist than it is about the end product and the sale.  This is because creating true art leads to temporary enlightenment. And that is a profound state that will cause a change for the better (growth) in the artist.

If the output was what mattered, then maybe AI would show more promise in the Arts, but that is not the case. 

Therefore,  a writer using primarily AI to create  decent-sounding output is robbing himself.  He is shortcutting the process of struggling, making those connections, growing, expanding his world, and finding something uniquely true to say.  

Such a ‘writer’ will end up spiraling in the opposite direction.  Instead of a virtuous cycle, he will enter a vicious one.  He’ll enter a negative feedback loop that shoves him into an ever shrinking world and mind.  

A ‘writer’ who uses AI in this way will be robbed of everything that makes writing special; everything that makes it beautiful; and relying on the machine will take away the reasons people write at all.  

Tolkien once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that Sauron’s magic represented technology, the magic of the machine.  And the elves' magic represented the magic of art – of growth, creation and harmony.  The machine’s magic takes from others, and dominates them.  The elven magic enables the user, and the world at large to grow.  AI takes the art of others for the profit of its master.  It is literally the magic of the machine.  It has its place, but its place is not in the hands of the Artist.  The true artist masters elven magic. 

In the end, the ‘AI writer’ will find that he has nothing new or unique to say at all because AI can only reorganize and regurgitate ideas that it has ‘stolen’ from the writings of others; those who actually did the hard and fulfilling work.  I suppose AI can be useful for research, or perhaps suggestions for names and the like, but my caution would be to use sparingly and cautiously.  I feel the best use of AI for writers is for things that complement the writing but are not the writing itself.  For example, I use AI to create images that go with my stories since I’m not a visual artist (and I would suggest the opposite to a visual artist who didn’t feel they could write well — use AI to help you write your bio or other writings that go with your visual art).

If you can’t be bothered to expend the time and effort to find something unique within yourself to say, and to practice the elven magic of putting your pen to paper with your own two hands to the best of your ability, then I can’t be bothered to read it.  

AI writes by calculating the next probable word in a sentence but, as a human, you are gifted with the unique ability to reveal the mystery of poetic truth and light to our hearts and souls by shocking us with improbable words.  An Artist deals in the unexpected.

Perhaps AI will develop into AGI someday and will become conscious.  Perhaps an AI will awaken and develop emotions and feelings and become a real person.  But if that happens, it’s no longer artificial intelligence is it?  A conscious AI would be a person. If that ever happens, I look forward to having inspiring conversations with an AGI and I look forward to its unique art and truth.  In that case, though, a writer still couldn’t ‘use’ it to write for them, because that would be the same as plagiarism and, since the AGI would, at that point, be a person, using it as a tool would be equivalent to enslavement.  There is no shortcut.  To be a ‘real’ writer, you’ve simply have to put the miles on the pen yourself.

So, kindly, please send your fake person’s output to another fake person to read, because here in the land of those who still have the light of Tolkien’s Eru Ilúvatar in our hearts, we’re not interested.  We’d always rather break metaphorical bread with the Elves of Lothlórien than with the followers of Saruman who care not for growing things.

In other words, it seems to me, that a writer who relies upon AI is no writer at all.  

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Posts referenced in this essay:

Further Reading:

This essay was influenced and inspired in no small part by the following wonderful essay by Matt Cardin over at The Living Dark: 

The Living Dark

The Zen of Words

Dear Living Dark reader…

Read more

2 years ago · 21 likes · 14 comments · Matt Cardin

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And also by some of the concepts regarding J.R.R. Tolkien’s work that I have been introduced to in Eugene Terekhin’s Substack Philosophy of Language. I was fortunate to stumble upon Eugene’s Substack at the same time that I happened to be re-reading both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

Any belief or preconceived idea, if held too tightly, may hinder one’s ability to open to the truth.  If you don’t believe me, try convincing someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, or of a different religion, the ‘truth’ of your side.  Most people do not set aside beliefs easily, even temporarily to consider another viewpoint.

But where do these preconceived ideas and beliefs come from?  They come from our parents, initially.  Then from school and from any religious upbringing we've had.  They come from friends.  They come from the media.  In other words, they come from society. 

They come from other people.  

And where did those other people get their preconceived ideas?  They also were fed their beliefs by other people. We live in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle in which each generation programs the next one.  

But seeking earnestly for truth means stripping away everything and starting over from what you, and you alone, can confirm to be true.  This is the idea that led Descartes to famously say "I think, therefore I am."  Of course Buddha's revelation went even further than Descartes’, he even questioned the "I am" in the doctrine of “no permanent self.”  

I've also come to the conclusion that since, everything changes constantly, there really is no permanent self.  I’m not sure if I understand it in the same way as The Buddha did, but clearly, for example, you are not the same being you were as an infant – either physically or mentally.  You are not even the same being you were yesterday.  But that's a topic for another reflection. 

So Buddha's reduction of Descartes might be something like "I think."  Or, more correctly, "thinking happens."  At this point, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with this.  And here is the point: If you earnestly seek truth, what you'll discover, even before true “enlightenment,” is that everything you consider to be "you" – your likes, your beliefs, your profession, your responsibilities, your personality – those things are not truly you.  For example, you might consider yourself a Christian, but if you were born in another country, you'd probably consider yourself something else.  If you decided to convert to some other faith, you'd still be you, so to speak.  So, being Christian isn't "you."  Being an extrovert isn't "you."  Being an athlete isn't "you."  If you strip it all away, the "you" is awareness.  Mystics, and psychoanalysts call all of this "made up stuff" you think is you (but isn’t) the ego.  So, in short, the ego isn't you.  

What makes enlightened people different is that they know, deeply, that they are not their ego.  They intuit it at the deepest level.  The rest of us only understand the idea at the intellectual level, but we don’t truly know it.  The enlightened see their ego and their personality as a sort of ‘play acting’ that is necessary for humans to interact and communicate with one another – but it's all a sort of dream.  That is the shift in perspective that they have.  And so now we're finally circling the drain of my point.  

Maintaining the fictional "you", the ego, your false self, takes a lot of energy.  If only we could repurpose that energy for other uses, imagine what we could accomplish!  Fortunately for us, there are simpler paths available for us mere mortals that I'll call "temporary enlightenment." 

And one of the more common ways to achieve temporary enlightenment is entering a flow state through creativity.  

As you create — make art, make music, write, etc – when you allow your egoic structure to dissolve, that energy, that is normally used to maintain your ego, is released to become a powerful driver of the creative act.  In a way, dissolving the ego is an art form itself.  Michaelangelo said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."  Likewise, to find your true self, simply chisel away that everything that is superfluous, and when you have done so, you'll find your ego is nothing but dust on the floor.  When you sacrifice your ego on the alter of creativity, you are rewarded with the blissful “temporary enlightenment” state of flow — and Art is what results. 

Footnotes:

* If you’re interested in the sculpture shown, versions are for sale here

“The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind;
and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. 

Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other…
if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.” 

— Terrence McKenna

I feel that we might be at the point that only Art can save humanity. Only art can wake up humanity. Only art can put us on a path of harmony that celebrates our differences while also reminding us what we have in common. Only art can explode our complacency.  Religions have failed.  Politics has failed.  Western culture has failed.  Materialism has failed.  Technology has failed.  

While all of those institutions have brought great advancements,   they certainly have not harmonized us — that is what I mean when I say they have failed.  

Not only have they not created harmony among us, instead, they’ve deeply divided us. Just look at the violence, envy, greed and tribalism of modernity — trends that are leading us down a depressing and dangerous path.  

Yes, humanity is full of different cultures, ideals, religions, and politics.  That is something to be celebrated!  However, we need to find a way to allow disputes that arise from these differences to be resolved in a harmonious fashion instead of by simply one faction demonizing, hating, and more and more often, killing members of an “opposing” faction.

As Terrence McKenna said in the epigraph quote above, Rome is burning and our institutions are dithering.

Western culture has, for quite some time, denied The Mysterious, the spiritual, and the sacred.  As The Enlightenment and the march of Science progressed, organized religions, at least in the west, seemed to have followed suit, and have focused on a kind of logical,  knowledge-based sort of approach, rather than guiding seekers to the actual experience of the divine.  

As a child, church felt like homework.  Indeed, I was required to attend Sunday school.  By then, it seems, many denominations had turned away from, and often discouraged members from following any of their more mystic traditions or sects.  However, those  mystic sects are the very places where the sacred act of entering The Mystery is still pursued and revered.

I was never taught any form of communion with The Mystery.  Prayer seemed to be asking for the divine to grant boons and favors — more talking than listening.  Mostly, I was taught, that all the answers to any questions I have are “in the good book.”  We even got a sort of “book report” each Sunday from the pastor, in the form of a sermon.  

I love books, and reading is my favorite pastime, and what I found in the book was a deity who talked about providing “living water.”  A living experience and communion with the divine.  A deity that spoke of The Mystery.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I longed for, and what, I think, we all long for.

My experience was obviously a christian-based one; I’ve had little exposure to how other religions conduct worship.  And, I’m sure there are plenty of counter-examples which would reflect a different experience.  But, in any case, despite the good and necessary functions churches provide, we can’t deny that we are more divided than ever, and organized religion hasn’t (yet) united us in at least a basic peace and love for one another.  

In fact, some religions have done quite the opposite in various times and places. The very term “holy war” is an oxymoron. It has not been those who worship at the altar of art and creativity who have started wars and burned heretics.

Church attendance has fallen to all time lows and disastrously, people have turned away from the spiritual and, mankind, apparently needing something to worship, has made politics into the new religion.  We are a tribal species after all, and transcending our tribal roots in harmony appears to be an almost insurmountable problem.  It seems that for mankind, it’s always “us against them.”

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” — Voltaire

Having, collectively, abandoned religion (in the west, anyway), and, having invented our new God of Politics, we appear to have started a different kind of “holy war.” And it is raging  between our two biggest “religions,” our political parties.   

I, personally, know families — parents and children — who have disowned each other, who hate each other,  over political beliefs.  How can something as pedestrian and petty as politics divide one from the people they love?  How can it divide any of us?  Is this extreme division by design?  As long as we are this divided, we will refuse to look for real solutions.  Do our “venerable” institutions want real solutions?

“When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit.” — Tao Te Ching

How can we come together, to any degree, when the two subjects we are not allowed to even speak to one another about are religion and politics?

The two certainties in life are death (our biggest fear) and taxes (one of our biggest expenses) and these two important subjects are the purview of, you guessed it, religion and politics.  

We are indoctrinated into the belief that these two institutions contain the keys to saving our souls and bettering our civilization, yet we are taught from childhood to never discuss either topic (and, by extension, to avoid discussing death or taxes) in polite company.  

Do you see the giant elephant-sized problem in the corner of the proverbial room staring us in the face?  

Outside of religion and politics, some people in the west have  rediscovered eastern traditions.  

Traditions such as meditation, new age experiences, spiritual practices, and seeking enlightenment.  These pursuits often do allow one a chance to experience The Mystery (and some of these practices, in earlier times, were also a part of western religions). 

While meditation is usually secularized or dismissed, I admit that I’ve felt closer to what might be called the “living energy of the divine” in meditation than I have anywhere else.  

I think of it this way: if prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening to Him.  Perhaps we all need to listen more and talk less. I’m not sure why meditation has been so diminished in the western tradition.  Maybe in our western, market-driven thinking, some would prefer we get our answers from the organization rather than “dialing direct,” so to speak.

Whatever the case, I’m not here to sell you on meditation, it has, after all, already been “sold,” and has become, over the past few decades, increasingly popular in the west. My point, in this writing, is to highlight the fact that, meditation, and its new age cousins, have also failed to harmonize us.  

The ideas of meditation, spirituality, new age, and similar practices  are marginalized by the mainstream.  They are slightly taboo.  They are allowed in the west, but those who follow any of them are often joked about.  We are accepting of them, as long as people stick to the “lite” versions for simple “stress relief.”  

But, if you get too serious, you will simply be dismissed as too “woo-woo” or too “hippie.”  

Materialism has a firm grip on our minds, indeed.  And thus, these experiences, despite the intensity with which they may be felt within the practitioner, aren’t taken seriously, they aren’t utilized by enough people to create mainstream harmony, and are usually dismissed as fictions of the mind, or perhaps attributed to some sort of placebo effect.  

What went wrong?

Let’s turn to neuroscience:  Dr. Iain McGilchrist, in his book  book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, has explored detailed studies of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  

In the western world, the left hemisphere  dominates most of our thinking.  The left brain focus has allowed everything we’ve built in The Enlightenment — Science, technology, rational discourse, philosophy, public health, liberal (in the classic sense) democracy, individual rights.  

Those are indeed glorious achievements and triumphs of humanity.  However, the left brain’s style of analysis tends to “cut things up,” and study the parts.  This is how most mainstream science to date has been done.  

We keep cutting the world up into smaller and smaller parts and studying those parts - molecules got cut up into atoms, which were cut up into subatomic particles.  Cutting them up further we found they are made up of quantum particles.  In biology we cut species up into organs, cells, proteins, DNA.  

We have, by delving into smaller and smaller parts, made amazing discoveries about the nature of reality.  This left hemisphere cutting up tendency has led to human achievements that our forefathers, of just a few generations ago, would not have thought possible.  

It’s hardly been a century since mankind unlocked the secrets of flight, and yet we have already sent space vessels to the furthest reaches of the solar system, and we now have the technology, in astrophysics, to look back in time approximately 13.8 billion years.  

Our left brained society has built technology that borders upon magic.  Perhaps humanity needed to go through just such a left-brained, logical era in order to not stagnate as we did in the dark ages.

However, the left brain tendency to cut things into pieces, to divide things, doesn’t apply only to science.  It applies to everything, including other people.  

When patients have their brain’s right hemisphere temporarily disabled (thus perceiving the world only with the left hemisphere), they often can’t even register that another human in the room is alive.  

The left hemisphere sees everything — and everyone — as dead parts, as if one is taking a watch apart and studying the gears.  These patients can identify the parts of other people in the room: an arm here, a leg there.  When asked to sketch the person in front of them, these patients usually sketch a bunch of disjoined and separate body parts.

All magic has a price, and this particular magic has a big price tag: the division of humanity into factions that devalue and demonize one another.  It’s easier to hate the other side when you can think of them as inhuman objects rather than living, breathing, dreaming, loving people.

It turns out, that the right hemisphere is responsible for expanding outward, and viewing things holistically.  The right hemisphere sees  connections between parts; it sees living beings and systems; it has flashes of inspiration. It has intuition.  And it perceives our connection to other humans and intuits how we might all be part of something larger.  

The right hemisphere is the home of empathy, the home of the non-verbal, and, most relevant to our discussion, the home of Art.  It is the home of the spiritual — the home of The Mystery.

But, since The Enlightenment, western culture has valued left hemisphere style thinking, over the right, and, in a nutshell, McGilchrist believes that, to correct our wrongs, we need to reverse our values, and thus our thinking, and make the right hemisphere “The Master”, and the left hemisphere “The Emissary” (that carries out The Master’s orders).  In short, we need to learn to value right brained, holistic, creative, intuitive, inspired thinking.

Some will claim that the left-brained, right-brained split is pseudoscience.  It matters not if our divisions are truly based in the left brain or right brain.  We can simply admit that humans have two kinds of thinking, the symbolic, which is a greek word that literally means to bring things together.  And the diabolic,  which means “to throw things apart,” or to separate.  While much of our society engages in the “diabolic”, the symbolic is the realm of art.

What matters is that we can’t deny that these two styles of thinking do exist, and, collectively, we lean toward the dividing kind of thinking — the diabolic — over the more connecting and holistic type — the symbolic.  And dividing is the very essence of tribalism.  It’s “us” against “them.”  And everything bad in the world is “their” fault.

Whatever we call it, it’s obvious that our need to return to more holistic, a more symbolic, way thinking has never been greater, and yet, the institutions that should be looking at our situation holistically, with an eye toward increased connection and understanding — religion, politics, and spiritual practices — as we have seen, are either “left-brain” dominated — they are dividing us - are the institutions that are cutting our society up into pieces, or, at best, they are marginalized.

Perhaps it is not their fault.  After all, these institutions are us.  They were created by and are supported by us.  They are a reflection of who we are, collectively.  And we are, mostly, left brained new world men and women who value our materialist logic based order and, as a group, we tend to dismiss anything that falls outside of that order.  We have to admit that our society, at present, is diabolical.

So, how, given these challenges, can we re-connect?  

How do more of us learn to enter The Mystery and share in its ability to help each human find his or her true self?  

How do we lead people to integrate their spiritual, mental and physical sides healthily?  

How do we encourage more people to be “reborn” as transcended humans with mature psyches that have discovered the inner freedom and peace that can ripple outward to external freedom and peace?  How do we encourage people to become harmonized within so that we can work toward becoming harmonized collectively?

How do we learn to love again?

This idea of finding one’s “true self” is an important one.  I asked how we can encourage more people to come home into themselves.  I believe that the key to finding one’s true self is successfully integrating the material and the spiritual, the left brain and the right brain, the diabolic and the symbolic.  This requires creativity.  You are, after all, creating yourself.  

The reason it’s important is that we humans  seem to have a tendency, when we aren’t quite sure who we really are (which describes most people in modern culture), to mimetically follow others.  

When we aren’t fully self-actualized, we adopt our values from our tribes, rather than from the truths we find when our soul searches for them.  And, until we mature in this way, we aren’t quite centered and fully making our own decisions.  

Our bodies may look like adults, but inside, most of us, psycho-spiritually, are children.   This is reflected visibly in the plastic surgery distortion of  faces and bodies that some people undergo in their attempt to remain young looking.  We worship youth because we are children.  Unfortunately, children with great power are dangerous, especially when the childish tribes decide to go to war.  

If only people understood that the real fountain of youth is found inside of us - in our souls!  Become your true self and the world transforms into a wondrous playground!  Creativity makes one a child again!  

Bizarrely, people turn their souls into grouchy old curmudgeons, but then try to look young on the outside.  Reverse that!  Make yourself young on the inside.  

Lose the constant anxiety, stress, and worry.  Make the world your wondrous playground again and it will reflect in your body and face as well!  We’ve all met old people who have the laughter, charisma and wonder of a child.  I’d rather be around a person like that than a plastic LA Instagram “influencer” any day.  Depth is charismatic.  Shallowness is repelling.  Beauty is more than skin deep. Stop clinging to plastic beauty and start seeking transcendent beauty.

People have and do more than ever before, yet are still unhappy.  The number of people who are depressed or anxious has skyrocketed.  We’ve lost the joy and magic that an artful life brings.  We’ve forgotten how to simply be.  

I’ve painted a rather bleak picture.  However, there is hope.  We have lifeboats.

"The great religions are the ships, the poets are the lifeboats.  Every sane person I know has jumped overboard." - Hafiz

The Church of Art

“While Western people have traditionally turned to God on those occasions [of darkness and hopelessness], the Chinese people have no such remedy for their plight. In the absence of an ultimate problem-solver, the Chinese have learned to turn their moments of darkness into opportunities for soul-making; they transform their existential angst into poetry and song.” — The Zen Teachings of Jesus, Kenneth S. Long

Sound familiar? It should.  It’s what artists do.  In a world where God has famously been declared dead (by Nietzsche), it is the artists, and the Art that they create that is able to sneak spirituality in “through the back door.”  What the true artists already know is what religion attempts to get one to wake up into.

We’ve, collectively, lost the secret that the artists know - how to internally transform the daily ordinary into the wondrous and poetic extraordinary.  But the good news is that it’s possible to find it again.

When I talk with people about what I do — that it involves art — almost invariably, they share that they do some sort of art or creative act as a hobby.  Or that they want to pursue some creative undertaking.  Most people seem to have this innate creative drive, though it doesn’t always manifest as a drive to make art, per se.  

And, if any “good” came out of the pandemic, perhaps it is that so many people took the time to re-evaluate their lives.  They became introspective and wondered if that latent creativity could be brought to the forefront.  In other words, many people started the journey to find their true self.

Why does this give me hope?  Because true societal salvation must start with individual salvation.  

As long as we remain fragmented, divided in our internal nature, so too will external civilization reflect that internal state, and, in such a state,  people of all societies and ultimately humanity itself will remain as fragmented and divided as individuals are internally.   If you hate or fear part of yourself, you will hate part of humanity.

But, with more people finally awakening to their powers of creation, those internal states may be starting to change, because the act of creation leads one to The Mystery.  And The Mystery awakens the soul to deep truth.  The Mystery activates the “right brain.”  

We saw an explosion, during after after the pandemic, in the online “creator economy.”  I hate that the term “creator” has been hijacked to refer to people who mostly sell courses (a huge percentage of which are about “making money online”), because that’s not what a true creator does.  

Making and selling courses is a left-brained activity.  It cuts up; It divides “creation” into steps (Step 1 - do this.  Step 2 - do that.  Step 3 - make money!), and true creators work in a holistic right-brained way.  True creators trust The Muse.  True creators enter The Mystery.  True creators can’t reduce what they do down to a course or an ebook.

True creators are Artists.

And, if you’re reading this, the term “true creator” probably means you.

So, yes there is hope.

The process has already started, we just need to awaken more artists, because each person who awakens to their true self and unlocks their potential affects others around them.  And that can start a wave of awakening that ripples through humanity.

In other words, the more true artists we awaken, the more hope there is for humanity.  

For only one who has awoken the artistic poetry of the heart can become the true artist — the one who makes his life a work of art.  The true artists bravely tread a path of inspiration that others can, and often do, follow.  The practice of art brings beauty, truth, humor, and joy into life — the artist’s life, and the life of those around her — and these are the desperately needed qualities that are sorely missing from our modern institutions.  

Kenneth S. Leong wrote in 1995, almost 30 years ago, “This notion of substituting poetry for religion is not so far-fetched. America, in the aftermath of the decline of its traditional religions, may have come to the same crossroad.”  

The situation is far worse today than it was in 1995.  Perhaps it is time to consider that the “Church of Art” provides a reasonable path forward.

The “Church of Art,” to my knowledge, has never starved millions of people, never declared holy war, and never burned heretics at the stake. It requires no tithes, no taxes, and no dues.

It doesn’t burden you with regulations and bureaucrats. You need to elect no leaders. You don’t have to apply for membership. Regular devotees of art are welcome at any time to try their hand at becoming a master, a “priest,” or “miracle worker” by creating their own works. It is open to all. It is enjoyed universally by all humans. It transcends languages and cultures.  It transcends all religions.  Christians, muslims, hindus, taoists, buddhists, agnostics, atheists and people of all other religions are welcome to join the Church of Art, and they are welcome to retain and practice all of their existing beliefs.  No ritual of “conversion” is forced upon you by Art.  

The Church of Art acts as inspired seasoning that works with you, where you are today, to add joyful color and flavor to your life.  It accepts and celebrates both our unity and our differences.

And so, after we dismiss the organized institutions that have , so far, failed to create harmony, if you think about it, in modern culture, the last acceptable bastion of right-brain dominance, of the symbolic over the diabolic, of the spiritual, of sharing The Mystery, and of exploring the Truth that can possibly unite us, is Art.

True Art is a labor of love, and, in pursing it, we discover that true love extends to our fellow man.  So, perhaps Art, and perhaps only Art, and the artists that make it, can spark enough of our souls to jumpstart a “ripple of harmony.”  

Perhaps only Art can ignite those dormant right-hemispheres, and help to make the holistic and the spiritual acceptable again.

So, perhaps if the artists and creators can inspire enough of us wake up to our true self, to our inner creative, then we can “infiltrate” our other institutions and begin to see through their vitriol, to recognize their manipulation, to awaken others into true humanity, and to spread the idea of loving one’s neighbor even if we don’t always agree with him.

In short, it appears that it is up to the artists to save us.  

No pressure.

If you are interested Parts I and II, they were published in The BoldBrush Letter. I’ve unlocked them and you may read them at the following links: Mastery - Part I (Why Mastery), Mastery - Part II (How to Become a Master).

Today’s post explores the relationship between mastery and money.

For any artist, of any type, the pursuit of Mastery needs to be a habit, and it is one that never ends.

I think the right balance is probably to resolve to not hustle to sell your work too soon in your journey.  Modern hustle culture is robbing us of deeper meaning and ruining our ability to truly master our pursuits and yet, mastering our pursuits is the very thing that can lead us out of the dystopia of distraction we have imprisoned ourselves in!

“The only thing in life that's really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession. 

The things that money buys are fine. They're good. I like them. But having a skill [is the most important thing].   I learned this from reading Esquire magazine. 

They did an issue on ‘mastery’…a very Zen Buddhist concept. 

Pursue mastery that will fulfill your life. You will feel good. I know a lot of rich people and they don't feel good as you think they…would. They don't. They're miserable. So I work because if you don't in stand up comedy — if you don't do it a lot — you stink.” 

– Jerry Seinfield ¹

[Source: Trung Phan’s excellent blog post on mastery]

Here is an excerpt from the Esquire magazine article Seinfield references:

“In recent years, a growing number of Westerners have been fascinated by accounts of Eastern masters who offer their students years and years of goal-less practice. In the book ‘Zen In The Art of Archery’, for example, a goal-oriented German philosopher named Eugene Herngel tells of spending a whole year under a Japanese master’s tutelage just learning how to breathe correctly while drawing the bow and then spending the next four years learning to loose the arrow — without once trying to hit the target.

There’s a paradox here: One who renounces immediate goals for the sake of diligent practice generally ends up reaching higher goals than one who shoots for quick results. One who takes the path of mastery is likely to end up a winner more often than one who thinks about nothing but scoring points. But winning for a true master isn’t something to use as fuel for a depleted ego or to gloat about with cries of ‘number one’. It’s simply part of a process that began long ago that will continue as long as life goes on. ^₂

[Source: Trung Phan’s excellent blog post on mastery]

In other words, chasing money too soon destroys your chance at mastery, and, doing so diminishes, in the long run, your chances for monetary success as well.  But, paradoxically, early pursuit of mastery enhances your chances of success over the long term.

When I was in the gallery business, we represented an artist who had first studied art, as a child in China, during the cultural revolution.  

He related to me that he was taught how to paint ears, and nothing but ears, from life, for months. Then they painted noses for several more months.  And, then eyes. And then mouths.  He exclaimed, “it took a whole year before we were allowed to paint a single complete face!”

Doesn’t that sound like the Zen master archery story?  

We can criticize such a system if we wish, but how many of us are willing to put in a year, much less years and years to perfect our craft just for the sheer joy of experiencing flow and excellence at having created?

Like the master archer who eventually outshoots his more impatient competitors, this particular artist eventually immigrated to the United States, where he outsold most of his western counterparts.  

My gallery sold almost everything he sent us.  

At his one-person shows, we had to sell his work by random draw due to the demand of multiple collectors wanting the same works.  Each show was a sell-out, with a few lucky purchases, and a long list of disappointed collectors who moved a little higher on his waiting list.  I know that his work now hangs in several museums.  

There are no shortcuts to sell out shows and a waiting list of collectors.  He had put in his time, when he first immigrated, by selling $5 sketches of passerby in a local park.  Long term success requires mastery and long term belief.

In fact, during my gallery time, there was a huge upsurge in the market of many Chinese artists who all possessed a high level of mastery.  They had migrated to the United States or Canada, and many of the western artists struggled to achieve the same level of interest, sales, price points, and prestigious collections that these artists did.

It is for the reasons that I’ve outlined so far that I repeatedly recommend mastery before marketing.

In my own journey of writing, I’m heeding my own advice.  I’ve been writing for decades — but only in a business sense.  However, I’m now writing in pursuit of mastery – essays, fiction, reflections and at least two non-fiction books are coming.  I’ve also started a couple of novels. 

While I am sharing some of my writing journey online, I am not yet selling any of it.  

I’ve been seriously pursuing this now for almost three years and I have not offered a single piece of writing for sale.  I’ve hardly even promoted it.  All of my writing has either stayed private or been published for free, for the goal of getting feedback, and mostly for continuing my journey of mastery.  I am doing exactly what I recommend that you do.  

When I first set up my Substack site, which you are reading now, I made the decision that I wouldn’t even think about money until I had 1,000 subscribers.  It took about a year and a half to reach that point.  I thought it would take longer. Then I decided to wait until I had 2,000 subscribers.  I have almost passed that point (1,990 as of this writing) in about another year.  In fact, I think this is actually the first time I’ve addressed you, the readers, about what I’m doing. I simply started posting with about 50 subscribers from an old site who followed me here. My plan was simple; There was no plan other than this: write.

But, I don’t feel like a master yet.  Now, I’m thinking that perhaps I should not even think about money until I have at least 10,000 subscribers.  

I don’t know.  But what I do know is that I don’t feel, deep in my soul, that I can yet convey The Resonance of The Mystery at a master’s level. 

I can “play the note,” but I can not reliably ensure that the reader feels my motherfu*king attitude, as Miles Davis said. 

I don’t want to take shortcuts and sell “pieces of content.”  I want to produce master-pieces.  Even producing one masterpiece in my lifetime feels like a worthwhile goal. I’ll figure out the money part later…maybe.

In any case, until I can write something with true resonance and effortless action, I will continue my daily habit of pursuing mastery of the vocation that I can’t not pursue — writing — because pursuing it is the thing that is necessary for the creative burning deep in my soul.

If you are a true artist of any kind, I pray that it is the same for you.

Footnotes:

1. Trung Phang,  Jerry Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery

2. Trung Phang,  Jerry Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery

In the past, I've defined Art as the following:  

The ultimate physical expression of the insatiable human hunger to create.  Art enables humans to send inspiration and energy to one another across space and time. 

And I think this definition is close to defining Art.  By Art (with a capital ‘A’), I mean that which goes beyond mere decoration, propaganda or kitch — Art that transmits some kind of meaning.  

With that in mind, I realize now that, while the definition above points in the right direction, it isn’t complete.  What follows is my attempt to deeply understand and define what Art is all about.

True Art is an attempt to express what we experience when we delve into The Mystery – a place of Truth, divine flow, life, and death; a place we can all visit but cannot describe in words; a place where we find our True Self.  Art provides us each with our own  unique glimpse into this sacred mystery.   

Previously, I’ve used the terms "inspiration and energy" to attempt to convey what is “transmitted” through the artist, and, consequently, through the artwork itself. But, upon further reflection, I feel the term Resonance is more accurate.  

Inspiration and energy, of course, are part of resonance, but resonance has a deeper connotation of something that rings true.  An idea or object that resonates is “in tune” with the divine.  It vibrates with the truthful energy found in The Mystery.  So, it seems to me, what we are exchanging with one another through Art is that very Resonance.  

We cannot, of course, fully experience the deep truth of The Mystery, at least not in this lifetime, but we do resonate with its vibrations.  That's how we know and feel its Truth.  

Most artists have experienced the feeling that their creativity (at least sometimes) comes from someplace or someone outside of themselves.  

Throughout the ages we've talked about creativity flowing into artists through supernatural forces and beings:  from the force of genius, from muses, from daemons, from the shadow, from the Other, or from God.

When our own grandiose self-important ego disappears, as it does when we step into the divine state of Flow, these forces, whether they are truly outside of us or simply deep within our own psyche, act on our behalf and provide us with inspiration that Resonates.  

Then, through our proficiency with our craft, through our mastery, we attempt to capture and express those resonating ideas in a way that retains the experienced resonance within our works of Art.    Invariably, as a part of this process, the unique resonance of the artist also gets mixed into the artwork.

Art that Resonates, therefore, captures a bit of this both the vibration of The Mystery, but also, a bit of the vibration of the artist who created it. Each piece of art, therefore, transmits its “message” in a completely unique way. That uniqueness is part of the point of Art.

Moreover, art that resonates also does so within the viewer’s psyche.  So the full “message” contains the resonate truth of The Mystery, the resonate truth of the artist, and the resonate truth of the viewer.  There are such endless unique possibilities of exciting meaning in this mix!

Visual art resonates with the viewer across space, and, being a permanent artifact of resonance, can continue to transmit its resonance across space to humans of a far future time.  

How magical it has been to join in the delight of The Mystery with the minds of past masters!  To ponder the deep Truth with Michelangelo, Sorolla or Van Gogh!  To find kinship with Alexandre Dumas, Hermann Melville, Ray Bradbury, or even Homer!  To commune with a man who wrote thousands of years ago is magic, and my life is enriched thanks to their courage to become themselves.

Live music resonates with the listener across time, but cannot be captured in a permanent artifact fully.  It is more ethereal.  Of course, music can be recorded, or performed by a different individual, but those become slightly different works of Art with a different resonance of the performer mixed in. Think of the different resonances of the version of I Will Always Love You as performed by Whitney Houston versus by Dolly Parton.  

Both versions resonate with similar truths, but also resonate with the vibe of the performer and so are each delightfully unique.  Musical recordings do carry resonance, but they also lose something of the original, much in the same way prints never quite capture the resonance and vibrancy of the original painting.  All forms of reproductions diminish most art forms, though they don’t completely erase resonance. 

Writing is unique among the arts with unique challenges, but also unique advantages.  Writing doesn’t lose anything when “reproduced” whether electronically or physically.  It is not necessary for me to read from Bradbury’s original manuscripts.  In this way, writing is, perhaps, the most “pure” mind-to-mind “transmission.”  But all Art attempts to express The Mystery.  And the truth of the mystery transcends language, which is the very reason we turn to Art.  So writing is saddled with the rather large disadvantage of having to express something beyond language in the very language The Mystery transcends.  Writing also has the disadvantage that it requires a large commitment of time and energy on the part of the reader.  Visual art, in some ways, wins hands down in the speed of “transmission” to the viewer.  Because writers have to work with language, great writers work diligently  to create a flow and rhythm in their work in an attempt to coax the reader into a focused state where he forgets he is reading and enters flow.  Poetry and fiction work best in this respect.

Whatever the medium, the task of capturing this elusive resonance is kind of like trying to capture lightning in a bottle.  

“People think you can turn creativity on and off. But it's not like that. It just kind of comes out: A mash up of all these things you collect in your mind. You never know when it's gonna happen, but when it does, it's like magic. It's that simple and it's that hard.” – Gwen Stefani

True Art is not easy. 

In a way, the artist must (temporarily) die to himself to create it.  If you try to dictate the "message" of your art by the mental willpower of your ego, it will fall flat, or, perhaps, if you are masterful enough, it will be technically good, but will become propaganda to carry your message rather than the truth of The Mystery.  

The famous Obama poster, or the social realism of the USSR era would be examples of masterful work that is propaganda.  I recall one Chinese artist who trained at an extremely young age, during the time of the cultural revolution, told me that, for his first few years of study, he thought that the definition of art was simply glorious depictions of Chairman Mao!

But True Artists enter the Mystery and let it bring forth the Resonance that it wants to bring forth. 

The key to entering the Mystery is training your mind, both conscious and unconscious, to attune to the Resonance of The Mystery, while Mastery is training your body-mind to become a unique instrument of technical proficiency capable of adding harmony and counterpoint to that Resonance.  

In essence, the act of becoming an artist is training to be both the player and the instrument. Think of the pure “instrumentality” of a masterful dancer’s body.

The resulting “music,” when “in tune,” creates deep Beauty, it creates Symbols, and it creates Myth.

Deep resonant beauty is hard to define, but we know when it is depicted because we feel the resonance. We recognize worldly beauty, of course, such as a painting of an attractive woman. But The Mystery also brings forth a deeper kind of beauty which we also recognize.  An old man or woman with interesting character lines, smiling with laughter radiating from his or her eyes is also beautiful.  More so, in fact, in some deeper way that we can’t quite articulate. Beauty transmits some form of deep truth.  Only worldly beauty is “skin deep.”

Symbols¹, likewise, become physical representations of the abstract truths we can feel in our deep memory of The Mystery.  Symbols point the way.  Symbols represent our true inner freedom.  While our bodies saddle us with a limited existence, specifically, in the fact that we are fated to die. The realm of symbols allows us to grasp the godly heights of immortality, to play with infinites, and to create astounding tributes to the mystic wonder of creation. Symbols also point to the deep fears and obstacles that we must overcome to find our true self.  These darker symbols may give rise to art pointing to warnings, to horrors, to tragedies, and to death.  Some art encompasses symbolizes both the dark side and transcending it into the light.  These darker symbols remind us we must integrate our mortal side — our bodies that remind us that we have to accept the realities of this earthly life.  Navigating this conundrum is the difficult realm of the Artist (and the mystic, and, ultimately, all of us if we are to find our true self).

Myths are the sacred stories that contain deep and mythic truths.  In many ways, Artists tell part or all of the deep mono-myth inside of all of us over and over in infinitely interesting ways.  The mono-myth story  resonates because it is every human’s true inner journey - the journey to overcome the fear of death and come home into the true freedom of our true nature;  to finally integrate both our spiritual and our physical sides. 

Isn’t this quite literally what the myth — the sacred story — of Christ points toward? The divine immortal being fully and gracefully accepting the indignity of mortality and death and thus reconciling the physical and the spiritual? The mono-myth concept was popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero of a Thousand Faces — a concept that famously inspired George Lucas in writing and improving the Star Wars story².

These elements of art (beauty, symbols, and myth)  are the primary elements that transfer Resonance to other humans, providing each perceiver with a glimpse into the inspiring and terrific Truth of The Mystery.   

Oscar Wilde famously said that, “All art is quite useless.”  And I think his quip points at something.   In the physical, profane world, his observation is true.  Saying “art is useless” is almost a definition of art, from the perspective of the physical, profane world.  For, if art had a “use,” that use would necessarily become the predominant property of the piece and the art “content” would be somehow demoted into a secondary property.  A lovingly crafted wine glass is still, primarily, for drinking wine.  I admit that this point is arguable and some rare functional objects might be so overwhelmingly artistic as to transcend their earthly use.  But most of the time, Wilde’s idea points us in the right direction.

True art might be “useless” in the earthly, physical realm (of our slowly decaying mortality), but Art is immeasurably valuable in the plane of non-form such as in our imaginations,  in the symbolic world of a man’s mind, in the infinite of our psyche, or in the ether where our spirit lives and imagines eternity.  Art helps us navigate the conundrum between the finite and the infinite.  

That’s what I think Ethan Hawke was getting at in the epigraph quote at the beginning of this chapter.  Art points us to deep truths, and thus, in our attempt to walk the center line between the symbolic world of heaven and the real, material world of earth — it points the way home to our true selves.

Of course, I understand that what I’m proposing is a sort of “pure” definition of art, and that what actually comes out from us, as messy human beings who don’t live purely inside The Mystery, may live somewhere on a “continuum of art” with True Art on one end, made from the soul and purely for oneself, to the opposite end where some aesthetic object is made only with selling it in mind. 

Thus, some art may be partially born of the mystery, some pieces may focus only on beauty, while others may focus more on myth. And our resulting work could fall anywhere on this continuum.  That’s part of being human and our job is to embrace our “messy imperfections” and see them for the gifts of uniqueness that they really are.  We can’t be gods and we can’t be animals.  We can’t be immortal, but we can’t quite accept mortality either.  We must uniquely walk in the middle.  It is what it is.

Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam depicts this unique struggle beautifully. Adam lounges, stuck on earth, limited by his mortal body of clay, while God, the symbolic spiritual world of immortality, reaches for him, God’s “cloud” providing double mythic symbolism as both the true divine, and the human brain itself where man can escape into his mind and the freedom of the symbolic to let his imagination and his awareness soar into the godly realm of immortality. God’s arm offers the in-spired breath of of “life” — the power of creation — notice Adam is already physically alive. God is offering him the promethean gift of inspiration — the creative power of the god realm. In other words, not just un-deadness, but true life. God is offering to make him an artist, a creator, “in his image.”  God’s forearm is significantly (and symbolically) reaching through the pre-frontal cortex — so important in humanity’s uniqueness, his arm intriguingly piercing the location of the ajna, the mystical “third eye” - a point believed to be the seat that receives in-spiration (representing the creative power of God “breathing into” this point) and intuition. 

God is offering Adam nothing less than a psycho-spiritual grasp of immortality…and maybe a glimpse of what humanity could eventually become. Adam, for his part, hasn’t yet accepted the gift, perhaps he is afraid to come home to his true self, as are most of us. He sits lounging, almost lazily, with his finger just almost touching God’s as if the gift isn’t worth the effort to literally lift a finger. (Is this where we get the phrase “he didn’t even lift a finger?”) What’s holding Adam back? Is he afraid? Or, does Adam not believe?  Without having yet received the gift, perhaps he is mired in the thoughts of his logical side, denying the spiritual just as much as modern man does, a condition that led Nietzsche to famously declare, “God is dead.”  Whatever it is that Adam struggles with, it’s universal.  This is the struggle we all face in the inner Artist’s “Hero’s Journey” to come home into our true and full selves.  Perhaps all we have to do is simply lift a finger.

So, my suggestion, when creating art, is to strive to stay more to the mystery side of the continuum, where the promethean soul fire of the divine burns, rather than working closer to the marketing side.  (As you’ll see, later in the book, we put on a different hat when we start marketing the art).  As I often quip: you must be in the market but not of the market. 

Or, as Naval Ravikant said, “if you make it for yourself its art, if you make it for the market it’s business.”

My corollary to his idea is that, in my experience, the farther you stay to The Mystery side of the spectrum, the easier selling the work becomes because of the fact that, if it resonates with you, it is more likely to resonate with most humans.

So, what is Art?  

Let’s take another stab at defining it:

Art is the ultimate physical expression of the human desire to enter and understand The Mystery, a desire that leaves an insatiable hunger to create within each of us.  Entering the Mystery and expressing it is the only thing that will temporarily satisfy this hunger.  Art enables (and is the only channel that enables) humans to send our expressions of Resonance across space and time, to provide inspiration and energy (in the forms of beauty, symbols, and myth) to one another.  Upon receiving these expressions of resonance, we interpret them as deep truth through our own unique experiences of reality, allowing us to also, even if only in our own minds, express the Mystery in our own way, and thus participate in the beautiful and terrifying ongoing symphony of transformation of the Cosmos.

What is your definition of Art?

Sum ergo creo,

Clintavo

Footnotes:

1. I originally called “symbols”, “tokens.”  Then I read Reclaiming Art in the age of Artifice by J.F. Martel and he used the term “symbols” and I feel it better captures the idea, so I have appropriated it.  I highly recommend his book, by the way.

2. At the risk of sticking my foot in my mouth, I  think Joseph Campbell has a few unnecessary steps (though optionally they can be included) in The Hero’s Journey.  

For one thing, we each have an internal hero’s journey and although they rhyme greatly, they aren’t always identical.  Also, it’s obvious in reading Hero of a Thousand Faces that he was heavily influenced by Freud’s idea that sexual repression the primary source of neurosis (Chapters “Meeting with the Goddess” and “Atonement with the Father”).  Nearly one hundred years later it’s obvious that Freud missed on that one.  The primary source of “neurosis” (as he called it) isn’t sexual repression.  It’s the universal need of man to repress the fact that he is saddled with an animalistic body that limits his freedom and he is going to die.  

This is no slight of Campbell’s incredible work.  The very fact that The Mystery transcends language means we all interpret it uniquely and his Hero’s Journey idea does resonate.  I simply don’t think all the steps in the journey are strictly necessary.  Even in Star Wars, Luke doesn’t face a “Meeting with the Goddess” step (though some try to shoehorn his time with Yoda into that part of the journey), in contrast, in Lord of the Rings - Frodo’s time with Galadriel is definitely his Meeting with the Goddess.

I encourage you to plant the idea in your charge’s mind that he should “build an audience” on social media.  This seemingly innocuous undertaking encourages several desires in him that our unholy father below relishes, while also directing his thoughts further away from the enemy.  Seeking such attention on a large scale encourages pride, status seeking, and anger.  

Oh! Most especially anger!  The anger in him can be fostered even if he doesn’t post his thoughts.  Simply coaxing your charge to scroll social media will accomplish much in the direction of anger!  And anxiety!  Such delicious fruits!

But, if you are able, Wormwood, I beseech you - plant in his mind that he needs to become a person of some “importance” on social media.  Get him fixated on silly games such as his follower count.  Engagement. The Algorithm.  These pursuits all encourage thoughts and feelings helpful to our father's unholy agenda and will serve you well in leading him to us, where, in the end, we will  finally devour the sweet meat of his ego-defiled soul.

Fondly, 

Your Uncle Screwtape

* * *

Over the holidays, I enjoyed a true respite from work, and during that time I did not scroll or post on X (formerly Twitter), and the insight that struck me upon returning was realizing, quite suddenly,  the sheer banality and emptiness of the whole social media game.  

Sure, this particular thought is nothing new, and many people, smarter than me, have written about it in depth. But, for the first time, deep in my bones, the sheer meaninglessness of social media stood, exposed, under a spotlight of clarity, in stark contrast to the meaning-filled days of freedom and leisure I had just spent with my wife. 

Those had been days spent reading classic long-form fiction, watching sunsets over the ocean, hiking in the rainforest, hanging out on the beach, having a good meal while listening to music, working out, playing with the cats (once back), enjoying glasses (and bottles) of fine wine, staring at the wonder of existence during afternoon walks - in other words - days that had been spent simply living life.

The first time I logged into X upon returning, I immediately closed it again, uninterested.  The meaninglessness of it contrasted so starkly with the deep meaning of the previous few weeks, that it became glaringly obvious that social media is an empty game, a facsimile of sorts, and considering it from this enlightened perspective had unmasked the sad desperation of millions of people vying for attention.  

Social media feeds one’s ego, and the ego, from the moment it comes into existence in children, is first and foremost, desperate for attention.

As infants, our very ability to survive, to not die, depended upon our ability to get the attention of those around us.  So this ego had a very natural and normal function of helping us survive and learn to navigate society.  But it also leaves us with a deeply ingrained habit of seeking attention that is tied to avoiding our top fear, death. 

As adults, however, we can (and should) leave behind feeding the milk of attention to the ego and move on to feeding our true selves the real meat and marrow of life in the form of living honestly from our true inner nature.

In this light, the falseness of the whole social media scene became nauseatingly apparent.  

Even the recommendations people make to newbies about how to get noticed and increase engagement (as if “engagement” represents something of intrinsic value) reflect and glorify this sickening falseness: "post every day!", "be sure to reply to big accounts!”, “make sure to like and engage with those who comment on your posts!”

When I see people doing  this to feed the algorithm, I can’t help but think of a pack of desperate dogs surrounding their master as he throws them treats.  

Now, I don’t mean to sound superior, I’ve often found myself drooling in the midst of that rabid pack, begging for the titillating treat to be thrown my way.  It rarely lands in my mouth though, and, even when it does, it only feeds my craving further.  Mr. Pavlov has nothing on Mr. Musk, Mr. Zuckerberg, or the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (should one happen to be a Tik-Toker)1.

I hasten to add, that, I do understand that social media can be a tool for business, and, in fact, that's mostly what I've used it for, so, in a larger sense, perhaps I’ve been a tiny bit unkind in my scapegoating social media, and maybe my growing aversion to X-Twitter (and, by extension all social media, though I'm rarely active elsewhere) is an extension of my growing disinterest in the more traditional topics of business. 

Business is necessary, and it teaches one much.  And, after all, we have to make a living in this world, but at some point, once our basic needs are met, our soul aches to fill that empty space inside with something more nourishing.

We can, for a while, delude ourselves that the game of social media, or business, or even everyday life, fills that space - I recall thinking that I would want to do what I did for a living “forever.”  

But now, from a more mature perspective, though I still enjoy what I do, I'm more interested in growing myself and the business, not so much in the direction of doing more, but in exploring the direction of being more.

I believe this may be what Maslow’s idea of "self-actualization" is about.  On his famous pyramid, our families and friends fulfill the "Love and belonging" part of the pyramid.  Then, if we pursue business, or some craft we love, we fulfill the "self esteem" part of the pyramid.  But deep down, even self-esteem isn't enough for most of us.  

We, in our western rational paradigm, have been pretending that “self-esteem” is enough, but if we pay close attention to our heart and our intuition, we will start to notice that nearly everyone has a subtle sense of missing… something.  Most of us possess an underlying quiet desperation.  A sense of wondering why we exist and what we are supposed to be. 

At this point of realization, we must address our soul. This is the point when we can no longer pretend that the deep dark void doesn't exist…unless we keep ourselves extraordinarily busy and distracted.  

Of course, “busy and distracted” describes exactly what most people do!

People ask us, “How are you?”

And we actually reply, proudly, “busy!” 

The wise man is never busy and the busy man is never wise.  - Lin Yutang

And, after proclaiming our overwhelming level of busyness, we waste time distracting ourselves with social media!  

Busy and distracted.

In our society, a society whose people seek constant distraction because they are afraid to face the void inside their souls, because they are afraid of death, the invention of social media was destined to make its creators rich.  And it certainly did, on the backs of millions of attention-seeking egos.  

Social media sells it, and you play the role. Mr. Osbourne didn’t realize how much worse the crazy train ride would become.

But, if we step back, and step away, as I did on holiday, and let our mental chatter quiet down, and if we give our overstimulated mind some time to calm, and let the surface of the pond settle until it is crystal clear and smooth, we then start to see clearly, and the seeker within us has room to make his quiet voice heard.

A calm mind realizes that the rewards of the world, such as riches, power, status, and beauty can not truly fill that hole inside.  

So what can?  We ask.

And, thus begins the quest for self-actualization.  

This is an interesting phrase:  self "actualization."   

What does it mean?  Are we not already "actual?"  

Well, that's an interesting thought, and if one digs into the wisdom of the ages (or sits quietly often enough) the answer seems to be that, no, most of us are not "actual" in the sense that we construct and live an elaborate fiction and never discover who we truly are deep down.  And least not once we leave childhood.

Most of us are not "self-aware" and are trapped in the cravings and aversions of this mind and body we inhabit.  

But, when we are quiet, we notice that there is a divine awareness, a divine spark inside of all of this constructed fiction.  And, furthermore, if we kindle that spark, and carefully nurture it, the sages say that eventually, we will realize that this divine aspect of awareness is our actual "self!”  And it is  everything else that is the fiction.  

It turns out, our ego is actually our alter-ego!  

Once we realize this deeply, we move from the false periphery, to the actual center of our Self, and we become self-actualized.  Deep in our center we discover that our true self is there, patiently waiting for us to give it control to lead us to freedom and joy.

The hole inside us exists because a small part of us knows we are living a fiction and craves the real thing and until you fill your “self” with your SELF, that hole will continue to exist.   

Of course, this is my intellectual belief at this time, but knowing something intellectually is not the same as knowing something deep in the marrow of your being, for once you know it ineffably in all of your cells to be true, then you awaken fully.

We all get glimpses of this potential, however - as I did in my month off X-Twitter - watching the sun set, hiking in nature.  

Some may glimpse it when they are in a flow state creating art, or music, or poetry, or dance - the arts get us partially there.  Maybe true master artists get all the way there.

That’s because when you create, part of your being moves to the center, to your true nature, which is a beautiful experience and gives you a taste of the infinite ambrosia that grows there.  

This is the vision I have for my personal life, for how I conduct business, and, perhaps, even how I interact on X-Twitter…should I end up staying there (if I can avoid the ego traps).

So, with these reflections, is it a surprise that suddenly the current state of social media holds little interest?  

Is it any wonder Twitter has been renamed “X?”  

Traditionally, we use an “X” to indicate Stop. Danger.  In cartoons we uses X’s on the outside of bottles to indicate poison.  And when cartoon characters drink the poison, we know they are dead when their eyes turn into X’s.   In software, we use a red ‘X’ to tell you that something failed.  In video, we use three XXX’s to warn you that it’s for adults only.  

Like a romance novel scoundrel with a five o’clock shadow and a strong jaw line, “X” contains both a warning and a titillating temptation.  The irony is that Elon put the warning “X” right there on the app icon in literal black and white, sending both its truthful warning and its tempting message to our egos - open me….and abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

So, my realization:  here I am, slowly awakening to the mystical wonder of existence, and the deep beautifying relief and joy of living from the true self, and X-Twitter, sadly, can only offer my poor ego promises to “build an audience”, to increase my income, to burn fat, to achieve six-pack abs, or to learn how to “make money writing online” from people who’ve never written anything except posts about how to make money writing online.

In other words, Twitter … ahem, excuse me … X promises status, power, money, and vanity to fatten up my ego-laden soul for Wormwood and Screwtape’s feast. 

Footnotes:

1. Kathy Sierra, on her excellent old blog, Creating Passionate Users, sounded the alarm on Twitter in 2007 in her post Is Twitter TOO Good?    

Creating Passionate Users was one of my favorite blogs and is relevant, even today, for any software app developer.  Sadly, Kathy withdrew from public online life due to misogynistic comments and threats that made her feel unsafe - an even darker side of the problems this essay is discussing.

This essay was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Occasionally, STSC members create something around a set theme. This time the theme was “perspective.” If you are a writer, I encourage you to consider joining us, I’ve included details at the bottom of this post. Lastly, you can find all my past symposium pieces by clicking here.

If you’d like to support independent writing online, you can subscribe to the STSC publication here. If you are a writer yourself, I encourage you to join us. You’d be joining a group of like minded compatriots. We have nearly 300 incredible writers & artists in our private Discord group (which will be capped at 300). As an author member, you’d have the opportunity to have your own writing appear on the STSC publication. To become a writing member, simply sign up as a premium subscriber on our founder’s, Thomas J. Bevan, personal Substack by clicking here. Once you do, Tom will send you an invite for our Discord group. Tell him “Clintavo” sent you!

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The Mystery

We all sense that, under the veneer of our everyday lives, under the sheen of the profane, there is some sacred, mysterious truth that we can’t quite grasp.  It is a Mystery that we can’t quite describe with words, partly because it is too overwhelmingly ecstatic, and partly because it’s a Mystery that simply transcends language.  About this deep realm, the only fully truthful discursive statement we can make is, “there are no words.”  

There are no words.  

We say those words to a friend when a loved one has died and, in some way that we can’t quite comprehend, this deep Mystery and death are intertwined in a swirling dance of unknown terror and beauty. It is a place that contains true life and death.  I call this realm The Mystery.

It is into this terrific Mystery that the Artists must plunge.

We are all allowed glimpses into The Mystery.  We can steal little peeks here and there. We can undertake activities that have a probability of transporting us into The Mystery. Sometimes, we can even stay there for brief periods.

But none of us can abide there permanently — at least not in this lifetime.  Even the Buddha spent most of his time in the real, everyday world of the profane.  The sacred Mystery is too powerful for a mortal being to book an extended stay.  However, we can open a channel that keeps us connected to it.

Despite its transcendence of language, humans have tried for eons to share their experience of The Mystery.  We are, in some deeply ingrained way, driven to express our experience of The Mystery. Some call it God, some call it the Tao, some call it Brahman, some call it Nirvana, some call it the Divine.  

Or, if you’re of a more materialist bent, that’s okay too.  It’s known in the realist world as the subconscious, or the unconscious.  

Some of the ways we receive insights from The Mystery are known as a Muse, a Daimon, or a Genius.  Or, if you are a fan of Jungian psychotherapy, perhaps a shadow side.

It really doesn’t matter what we call it, or whether we believe it is a supernatural realm or simply an illusion that arises from the neurons in our brains.  What matters for our purposes here, is that the physical artifacts we create in our attempts to express The Mystery are what we call Art.

The Mystery is where the dreams, inspirations, fears, and visions of our inner Shaman live.  The Mystery is where meaning arises.  The Mystery is where what is most real to us lives.  The Mystery, in many ways, is more real to humans than our external reality.  

External reality can be experienced only through the senses of our bodies, but our internal reality is with us at all times and we are able to access it directly, with no untrustworthy external sense data to rely upon.  In many ways, from a subjective standpoint, The Mystery is The Real, and the external objective reality is the dream.

The Mystery that drives creation lives in a place deeper than language, and deeper than the egoistic self.  It is a place born of Truth.  It brooks no deceit or delusion.  It burns away all illusions in the holy fire of veracity.  

The ego, as a master illusionist, will not be allowed entry to this realm.  For the existence of this sacred place of Truth, life, and death is the very thing the ego wants to deny! 

Entering The Mysterious realm of creation requires a sacrifice.  And, to enter this place, I’m afraid you’ll have to die.  Your ego must die, temporarily, and then you can be reborn into the ecstatic dance between Logos and Eros from which Art is born.

The ego’s biggest weapon to prevent you from entering this Eden is the flaming sword of fear.  It will make you fear this place as unknown.  

That is a lie.  

The Mystery is the actually the deepest known you’ve ever felt.  It is the place where you finally come home to your True Self. 

Here’s the ego’s dirty secret:  your ego is actually your alter-ego.

The Mystery is the place you must journey into if you are to find your True Self (which we will cover in Circle I - True Self).  To glimpse it requires you pay the required price in some type of death. In the arts, such a “death” is quite often found in a state of flow — a state where your ego “dies” temporarily and The Muse is finally able to guide you into The Mystery.  

Entering the Mystery is not an act of will, but “simply” an act of letting go.  We will cover some ways to do just that later in this book.

The Mystery is important in any discussion of art, because it is the  source of inspiration, and the truth we are trying to express. In many ways, Art represents our best attempts to share what we experience in this place-beyond-language.  

Music, visual art, and dance share the Truth of the Mystery better than any discursive essay.  When we must limit ourselves to words, poetry and some fiction comes the closest. In other words, writing as an Art form.

The Mystery is slightly different for every human being.  It is a place of absolute Truth, subjectively, for one human being. And there is a unique version of this absolute truth awaiting all of us inside our hearts.  The art you create from this place of mystery, may kindle a slightly different truth in the viewer.  Their Mystery is not exactly your Mystery.  That is okay.  That is how you know you’ve created True Art.

This Mystery is the sea in which mystics, shamans, insane people, and artists swim within.  Let’s take a plunge into this ocean of terrific sublime beauty and see what we find, shall we?

We each have a unique voice, unique talents, unique messages, unique styles, and something unique to give in service of all.  

If we can get away from the noise of society, the mimesis, and the distractions, we can listen closely for that voice whispering to us from inside our psyche.  

It whispers to us to follow our own deep inspired curiosity, and to pursue our own ideas.  We all have the potential to contribute something that flows out of us from the divine.  

That is, however, certainly  easier said than done.  And the journey is a spiritual one.  

I’ve realized, that I can no longer write about the creative act of making art (and, by extension, marketing art) without also venturing into the spiritual.  Not only are they related, but they are the same thing.  Finding your true self and creating the art that only you can make  represents the essence of communing with the divine.

Often, unfortunately, we don't open ourselves up to discover who we truly are until after we've tried the path of the world and "failed."  

I don't mean “failed” in the way the world defines failure.  We may have achieved great wealth, great power, great fame or social status but....plenty of people with all of those achievements are miserable.

Those achievements, if we are not vigilant, can inflate our ego - our false attitude of grandiose self-importance - which tends to drown out the divine creative whisper.  Some of us, after worldly successes are achieved, realize that we're still suffering.  We are still unhappy.  We are still miserable.  

That is the moment we may realize that something is missing.  

Then, perhaps, in a moment of breaking, in a moment of overwhelm, often presenting itself in the form of burnout or a nervous breakdown, we finally do the very thing that our true nature has been yearning for us to do, and whispering for us to do - we let go.  While this experience itself causes suffering, it retrospect, it may be the gift of awakening to truth.

When we finally let go, we (temporarily) give up all those worldly pursuits.  Maybe we stop working for a while.  Maybe we go climb Everest.  Maybe we retreat into nature.  Maybe we escape into the solace of meditation.

But, whatever we escape to, in such moments, we often let go of our ego just enough, that suddenly the dark egoistic clouds part, and a bit of the divine light shines into our heart and we reconnect with some long lost curiosity.  We remember something that we once knew as children but had buried deep within the daedalian maze of our ego’s construction.  

And, maybe for the first time in decades, we experience a tiny bit of being true to ourselves.  

This may not happen until middle age for many and it may be part of the phenomenon we call a "mid life crisis." When a mid-life crisis hits, I believe the correct response is not to buy a sports car or to shag the pool boy (a cliché, I know, please forgive me, but it’s a cliché that makes a point), but it is to dig deep to uncover our true nature.  

In an echo of religion, once we have such a realization of our true nature, a huge weight lifts.  The chains we’ve been dragging behind us fall away and we are presented with the terrific insight that, now that we are free at last, we can't go back to the way things were. Now, we must take a leap of faith.  

We must sacrifice something to stay in touch with our true self.  We must sacrifice our ego and our need to control things (at least, while we are creating).  In some cases, people choose to make true lifestyle sacrifices.  After all, all magic has a price, and the price of creating the magic of true art is…well…everything. 

“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person.” 

— Einstein

I recall one of the top heart surgeons here in San Antonio who walked away from his entire practice at the height of his career to pursue his oil painting full time.  That is a real sacrifice.  The good news is, that I’ve never met anyone who embraced their true nature who later regretted it.  People usually say, “I wish I had done it sooner.”

We are beginning, when we make overtures in this direction toward our true nature, to come to life again.  Before our “conversion”, we had been the walking dead (there is a reason zombie apocalypse stories are so popular - it’s because we subconsciously identify with the zombies), but now, after even a small taste of the divine, we've been in-spired and had life, once again, "breathed into" us.  We have been born again.

Unfortunately, for many of us, sacrificing our ego in this way leads us to a feeling of being lost, and unsure, which is why faith can be so important. Faith that your true self can provide for your needs. Faith that your true self can persevere.  Faith that your true self can do what needs to be done without giving up that precious inner freedom (Even if what needs to be done involves existing responsibilities we’d rather let go of that our life situation demands we continue doing.  This is, after all, an inner transformation first and foremost).  Faith that by continuing to reject the lies of the worldly ego, that synchronicities will appear and give you a tailwind to walk toward your true path of mastery and service.

It is at this point that some go through the "dark night of the soul."  Their previous world view has been shattered, and they can’t go back to how things were, but the path ahead is unknown and the new world view, and the demons it unveils have not yet been accepted and integrated.  Of course it’s scary! 

In some ways, unfortunately, that dark night appears to be a necessary part of the journey. Once you've found true self, and started on the path of your life's meaning, you, like Jesus, must enter the desert and face the darkness of the egoistic devil (both your own ego, and your conditioning by the collective ethos). He will certainly try to stop you, he will certainly tell you that you are making a huge mistake, he will offer you the riches of the world, if you’ll only go back, and he will certainly try to distract you with temptation.

It just has to be endured.

Though, it seems, from what I’ve learned, that some dark nights are terrible and some aren't too bad.  I suppose it depends on what we have buried in our shadow side that previously had been trapped like the Minotaur in the maze I mentioned above.  Fortunately, there are things one can do to ease the dark night and, even then, start walking along the path.

When we start down this path of reintegration, all of these suppressions appear as “demons” that come forth first to tempt us, which we must resist, and then, when we resist calmly and kindly, they timidly approach us to be released or integrated.  And, at that point, we must accept them with love.  Many of them contain our suppressed creative energy.  That is energy you will need on the artistic journey you are undertaking.  It’s part of the magic and alchemy of the creative act - we transmute our demons into angelic muses.

In my metaphorical understanding of the Cretan myth, Theseus wasn’t the true hero, the Minotaur was.  Theseus was the ego’s false hero that succeeded in killing Minos’ true nature - the Mino-taur.  Minos had suppressed his animalistic, creative side to convince himself that he had transcended its “evil” urges.  

But humans are made up of a combination of both the animalistic and the divine - they are something unique that is neither one and both simultaneously.  Theseus killed Minos’ “demonic” animal side - and thus killed his creative energy and his muse - once and for all.  The story is a tragedy and Minos ended up wasting his potential.  If you suppress your true nature long enough, it is possible the same can happen.

So, during our dark night in the desert, we must persevere. 

Ultimately, as it has been said, if you bring forth the truth that is within you, it will set you free.  But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you - the real you.

And so, one way or another, we each must begin building a bridge back to internal magic and alchemy.  And to do that, as mentioned above, we must have faith in our true self as we did when were were children.

You must truly believe, not just intellectually, that you have a divine gift, you must cultivate that gift to achieve technical mastery, and then you must have the courage to share that gift with the world.

In the the parable of the talents, when the master returned from his journey, he praised the two servants who had invested the talents entrusted to them and they had greatly increased the master's wealth.  But, he chastised the servant who buried the master's talents as slothful and lazy.   

You also have talents entrusted to you, and you, as a part of creation, are entrusted with furthering something in this world in unique ways.  

So, before a mid-life crisis, a person had been burying their talents.  

But, after a divine revelation, we suddenly have the opportunity to invest and multiply them.  And we do that, not only by having faith that we have a gift, but also by cultivating that gift.

And here is where I think some of us go astray, or even fail outright.  It's not enough to uncover our true self, and to have faith, and it’s not enough to follow our deep inspired curiosity - though those are all necessary steps - but we must then cultivate those gifts until our true self is no longer simply a barely visible candle flame, but a roaring bonfire that is unstoppable by the world.  Our “minotaur” (our joined divine and animal energies) must burst forth from its egoistic labyrinth and roar to the world, “I am the rightful king of this territory.”

We all have a psycho-spiritual promised land when we walk our true path of service.  It is our birthright granted to us by the Creator.  It is ours and our alone.  It is where our creative devotion meets our unique illumination.  Finding the path to this territory is one of the primary instincts humans have in the realm of self-actualization and transcendence.  And the act of creating, harvesting our promised land, provides manna for the soul that  sustains us.  It is the only thing, as artists and creatives, that will truly sustain us.

“We humans have territories too. Ours are psychological. Stevie Wonder’s territory is the piano. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s is the gym. When Bill Gates pulls into the parking lot at Microsoft, he’s on his territory. When I sit down to write, I’m on mine…A territory provides sustenance…A territory can only be claimed alone…A territory can only be claimed by work…A territory returns exactly what you put in…When the artist works territorially, she reveres heaven.”

— Steven Pressfield

We find our promised land by allowing ourselves plenty of quiet sacred solitude to explore our inner world, by following our true curiosities, which are planted by the universe to guide us to our destiny, and by putting in the regular cadence of hard work of cultivating the garden of our talents to work toward and, eventually achieve....mastery.  By cultivating  mastery of our true path of service, we are transfigured into the master in the parable, not the servants.

So, as a reminder to all of us, including myself, instead of being daunted by the mastery we see in others and becoming discouraged by the competition, let's instead strive to be inspired and joyful to see that others have successfully navigated the path to true self and mastery.  

Let them be our inspiration, for, if others can find their own true selves, and find creative expression of that truth in a way that astonishes and humbles us, it should provide us with evidence that it can be done.  

So instead of being the third servant who is resentful of the other two and the master, let's use their example of cultivating their talents and increasing the wealth of the master.  

The wealth of the master does not refer to worldly wealth, to Caesar's coinage, but it is the creation, knowledge, art, inspiration, love and joy that we can bring to this unfolding process we call existence.  

That is how we truly fulfill ourselves, it is why we each are here, and to shirk it is to shirk one’s duty, which robs us of creative joy. And that is how we, as creators, best contribute to the positive evolution of humanity.

Despite our usual experience, there are some activities in which our sub-minds are mostly in agreement:  when making art, performing an athletic feat, dancing, making music, or a myriad of other activities in which one enters a state of flow.  In flow, many of our sub-minds are aligned.  That alignment is part of what creates the state of flow.  And that’s part of what makes flow so enjoyable.

Meditation, at least for advanced meditators, also allows one to enter a state of flow.  

In fact, in meditation, one can go farther into flow than other activities.  And, with enough meditation, it is possible to align all parts of the mind.  This is known as unification of the mind and it is considered an impressive accomplishment among meditators, and a necessary step to achieve even more advanced and enjoyable mind states.

Flow and unification are similar mind states and both bring a sense of joy and rapture.  I believe that we have evolved to seek these pleasurable states because they exist to tell us that we are doing the right thing.  After all, doing what is good for the evolution of our species should feel good to encourage us to do more of it, just as sex feels good to encourage us to procreate.  Think of flow as sex for the mind, and unification as a mental climax.  

It’s not surprising to me that flow states often happen when we are creating as the creative act seems to be what humans exist to do.  The pattern repeats infinitely: Art, technology, innovation, knowledge, love, meaning, or, via sex, procreation - the drive to create seems to underly our purpose somehow.

These enjoyable mental states provide  feedback to our mind, whispering to us to follow this path further. They show us a path to freedom - internal freedom - which is true freedom.  Somehow, in the freedom of our psycho-spiritual space, creation is our path to transcend mortality.  Creation transcends un-deadness into aliveness.  Creation transcends mortality to immortality.  Creation transcends captivity into freedom.

When we are in flow, we are fully attentive to the present moment.  That’s the reason we lose track of time and hours pass like minutes or minutes pass like hours.  Flow immerses us in the eternal present.  

In our normal, everyday state, we feel that we move through time, but in flow, the perspective flips and we become the medium through which time moves.  It feels as if every moment is a still picture and we are flipping through these frames, one at a time, very rapidly of course, but one picture at a time in its infinite completeness is being projected onto the screen of gratitude which never changes. That’s why we call it “flow” - we become the unchanging eternal and time flows through us.  

Of course when in this state we “lose track of time!”  And then, suddenly look up to see that four hours have passed in an instant!  

The fewer obstacles that block the river of flow, the stronger the flow state, and the biggest rock blocking the river’s flow is our egoistic self, which, when fully in flow, disappears.

As we focus more and more of our mental power on now, we receive and notice more and more incoming information, that is, we perceive more “pixels” per “frame.”  When our mind becomes unified, we utilize the full and formidable power of human attention to be fully present.  

You’ve no doubt heard stories about people who, in describing an emergency situation, say things like, “Time slowed down and everything appeared to pass in slow motion.  I stopped thinking and just acted.”  

From time to time, we all experience being thrust unexpectedly into the eternal now by being shocked into it by external events, such as a breathtaking sunset or a life-threatening situation. But the way to reliably enter such a state is meditation.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the insights that arises out of meditation is that most of the time, we don't have only one mind.  But, instead, we have many different minds (or sub-minds if you prefer) all desiring different things.  And to add to all that mental chatter, all of our minds, in their own way, think that they are looking out for your best interests! 

Together, they form a kind of “committee,” arguing over what actions and thoughts need to be focused upon. With each decision, some sub-minds lose the argument, and some sub-minds win the argument.  If you’ve ever seen the Pixar movie, Inside Out, you can think of a mind like what the movie depicts, but with many more members on the committee.

As a simple example, let’s imagine that you pass an ice cream shop and think, “Ice cream sure sounds nice.”  The part of your mind that loves sweets will push you to go buy ice cream.  And the part of your mind that wants you to experience pleasure and happiness right now will agree - go ahead, you deserve it.  But, the part of your mind that worries about your health will disagree.  The part of your mind that is watching your weight will also disagree. And the part that thinks ice cream is a waste of money will disagree.  

Even in this simple example, you can see that your many different “minds” are “arguing” over what should be done.  And they all are trying to do what’s best.  But conflict arises when they  disagree about what’s best.   

If you’ve ever said or done something and then regretted it and had to apologize, “I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from,” now you know where it came from - it came from one or more of your sub-minds.  Sometimes members of the committee “go rogue” and take action before “you” have made the final decision. 

A major goal of meditation is to reduce and, potentially eliminate, this mental arguing.  In essence, the idea is to get all the committee members to agree upon something.  And, as discussed earlier, once this is achieved, it is known as the unification of the mind.  

Once the mind is unified, all of your sub-minds rally behind one goal as you (the conscious part of your mind) gain increased mastery over your mental state. 

That is why meditation guides often instruct you to focus on the breath (or some other single object of meditation). And no matter how much your mind wanders, just gently “return to the breath.”  What this process is doing (among other things) is training all of your sub-minds to stop bickering and to get behind the one real purpose of the session which is to “focus on the breath.” [1]   And, amazingly, over time, it works!  More and more of your sub-minds slowly get the message to listen to what “you”, as the controller of the conscious mind, want them to do.  As more and more of your sub-minds observe the breath, your powers of perception get deeper and more skillful.  I am shocked how much more nuance I notice about “the breath” after a few years of meditation, compared to when I first started [2].

As you continue to gain skill, this increasing mental unification can be applied to other areas of your life.  Imagine a passive-aggressive person who is ruining their relationship who unifies their mind.  The passive aggressive behavior would eventually stop as their mind became more and more unified.

People sometimes experience a knee-jerk fear when the topics of meditation, mindfulness or “living in the present” are broached, particularly when deeper topics arise that are perceived as too “woo-woo.” [3]

 An element of this knee-jerk fear is that, to a rational, intelligent, thinking, successful person, this all sounds like something that will make one less ambitious.  People are afraid that going too deep will take away their drive.  And western society certainly admires and rewards people who are driven and ambitious.  

After all, if you're just “going with the flow,” when will you ever stop to think, plan, or worry about your future?

I certainly worried about that before I tried meditation in an attempt to let go of anxiety, become more creative, and avoid burnout (though I quickly found meditation was much more than that).  But, outside of short periods of time, it’s not true that meditating will douse your ambition.  And it’s not true because of this concept of unification, which, it turns out, has another aspect which improves everyday life.

This other aspect arose as an insight from my own meditative experience.  And it this: the increasing unification of the mind leads to an increasing unification of purpose.  

In other words, you start to see much more clearly what things deeply inspire you, and what things you are clearly "supposed" to do.  Deep inspired curiosity awakens within you and pursuing those curiosities often feels like coming home to yourself. You become re-interested in things that you’ve forgotten since childhood. You increasingly notice where you are devoted and what things bring you into deep flow states (states which become even deeper as your mind increasingly unifies).  You become attracted to activities that just feel right.  As I mentioned previously, I suspect that there is an evolutionary reason for that feeling.

When your mind is unified, you do the things you know you are supposed to do with far greater power and conviction than those who have not unified their mind, which is almost everyone else.

In this state, you not only know what you should do, but you take inspired action.  You discover your obsessions.  You discover purpose. You discover things that you can’t not do.  

It is true that you might not experience the same level of desire for status, power, vanity, fame or money that typically come as baggage with the word ambition.  

But, to the outside world, you will actually seem more ambitious.  That’s because you will have found the things that have your devotion.  Michael Jordon certainly seemed ambitious.  And he achieved status, power, money and fame.  But his inspiration, his obsession, his devotion was basketball.  And devotion beats discipline every time.  

The Master leads by emptying people’s minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. — Tao Te Ching

You will still plan for the future, in some ways with more excitement than before. But you won’t worry about it so much.  You will drop much anxiety because  you will know the direction you need to go with clarity, and you will take action because you will be ambitious for the inner freedom and joy that arise when your mind is unified, in a flow state, doing the very thing you were put on earth to do and from that, everything else will flow automatically, possibly including the status, power or money, but those things will no longer be a motivation.

Footnotes:

1.  Meditation that focuses on a single object is designed to build one’s concentration ability culminating in the ability to remain completely focused upon a single object thus achieving unification of the mind and some other extremely blissful mental states.  There is another type of meditation where one opens their awareness to everything they are experiencing, which is designed to cause one’s mind to have insights about reality.  Traditionally, concentration based meditation is known as samatha and insight meditation is known as vipassanna.  Many practitioners do both types. 

2. Once a certain amount of mind unification occurs, one starts to notice “the breath” in feelings all throughout the body, one starts to “see” the breath as flows in and out and connecting to different parts of the body, to different emotions, and even to perceive “breath” as outside the body.  In short, what is considered breath expands to include much more than the feeling of air at the tip of the nose.  One starts to more deeply understand the word inspire.  This topic goes much, much deeper but that is a different topic for a different essay.

3.  I believe the term “woo-woo” comes from the Chinese idea of wu wei which means effortless action.  Effortless action sure sounds a lot like a state of flow.