When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily
Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully watching me

— Supertramp, The Logical Song

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful: I loved reading, dogs (and cats), adventures and, especially, quests. Growing up in a small town in northwest Arkansas in the 1970’s, I was afforded much freedom, even as a young boy. We lived out in the Ozark forest on a mountain: a perfect home base for questing.

Fueled on inspiration from reading Huckleberry Finn, or The Hardy Boys, I’d set out on Saturday mornings with my two blue tick hounds, Molly and Frosty, along with the little schnauzer (whom I creatively named Schnauzy) who always tried her best to keep up with the bigger dogs, and we’d head out into the woods, exploring. Or, I’d hop on my bike and meet up with friends for a day of shared adventure.

Nothing much happened on these adventures: we followed streams to their source, we found waterfalls emptying into magical pools, we had epic dirt-clod battles involving trench warfare on construction sites. We once made a sacred oath (that may have involved spit and blood) to follow the town creek as far as it went. We spent most of the day trying to construct a raft because we had reached a point where it became impossible to walk along the banks. Our parents found us there, after dark, still trying get our ratty raft — made of shipping palettes and milk cartons full of air — to float. Our parents found us and lectured us about water moccasins and responsibilities. They weren’t happy. But we were.

I say “nothing much” happened, but that’s not quite true. Plenty happened, in our imaginations, we were the heroes of our own stories. We imitated the art we read. And heroes save the world, or, at least, the day.

As I grew, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons, and my love of reading became voracious: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. More, and bigger, quests. When I ran out of things to read, I’d pick up whatever my dad had finished with: Piers Anthony fantasy books, Dune, numerous sci-fi novels, and several Stephen King books. And, the thing is, these worlds drew me in because they were far more interesting than the one I lived in.

Despite the fact that my friends and I were adventurous heroes on the weekends, the regular world was pretty dull by comparison: Homework, school, sitting inside all day, multiplication tables, conformity, rules, grades, competition.

I recall my first brush with the brutal world of the market-economy. For some kind of fundraiser, I was expected to go door-to-door and sell crappy chocolate bars.

Why would anyone want these? I wondered. I mean, it wasn’t like we were selling something awesome like Snickers bars. No. It was some off-brand produced “exclusively” for fundraisers. So, I walked up and down main street, after school, sullen, working up the courage to go into the shops to try and sell my crappy chocolate to the poor people that worked there.

I, the adventurer, the savior of damsels in distress, the hero, had been domesticated, and turned into the mundane symbol of everything that’s wrong with modernity: a salesman. In a turn of events that shocked nobody, I wasn’t very good at it.

You wouldn’t ask Buck Rogers to sell insurance, and those fundraisers shouldn’t have asked me to sell chocolate. I’m sure my parents either bought most of it or pawned it off on their friends.

My friends and I, after we discovered Dungeons and Dragons moved much of our adventuring fully into our imaginations. My character was usually an elf. I loved the combination of fighting skill plus the ability to cast spells, I mean if we’re entering an imaginary world, then of course there should be magic.

Through some course of events I can no longer recall, one day, I had to take over as the dungeon master. And, over the course of that day it began to dawn upon me, that I didn’t have to purchase D&D campaigns from TSR: I could create my own adventures.

I could create my own worlds.

And so I did.

I think that is the day I first became a writer, I just didn’t realize it yet.

Soon afterwards, my parents bought me my first computer, and I did the same thing: I created my own worlds.

I spent hours and hours learning to program just so that I could create my own text adventure games in the image of Zork.

That was writing.

That was creating.

That was Art.

Sure, it was a back door way into writing, and it took me on a long detour through the world of technology and software development for a large part of my career, out here, in the increasingly-devoid-of-magic “real” world, but it was world-building nonetheless. And there are worse ways to make a living than writing software. So I can’t complain, but, somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the magic. I lost sight of The God Spell. I lost sight of life.

When we are children, of course, we are full of imagination and creativity. We see wonder everywhere. We have ideas. We want to go on adventures. We want to save the world. So we play. We practice, in the ways that we can, for that future when maybe we can share our ideas in ways that help.

But, something has gone wrong. Somehow, we stopped encouraging such ideas. We are told to forget all the “nonsense.” We are told to be practical. We are told to be logical. Eventually we forget all that stuff and we “get serious.” We have bills to pay, after all.

Who are you to expect magic? Who are you to make things better? Did you expect to be free?

After all, “they” say, “it’s not work if you like doing it.”

Who are you to save the world?

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh, responsible, practical
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical

— Supertramp, The Logical Song

But here’s the thing: we don’t actually forget all our wondrous ideas. We don’t forget the magic. We suppress it.

And that’s why people are so angry; why they are so clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical.

What I’ve discovered lately, and it makes all the difference, is simply this one tiny truth: you don’t have to suppress it.

So I stopped suppressing it and starting reading and, especially, writing again. I started creating again. I started living and telling stories again.

And, through that, I rediscovered the magic I thought I had lost forever. Apparently, you can reenter the garden. I finally became old enough — as C.S. Lewis wrote to his Goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, about Narnia — to start reading, and believing in, fairy tales again:

My Dear Lucy:

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis

That magic that most people have learned to suppress?

That is who we actually are, as artists.

That magic is our truth, and truth always has the power to set us free. Someone important; someone serious; someone who told us to be like children; someone who actually did save the world told us to remember that.

“The truth will set you free”

Free to do what?

Why to go on a quest, of course!

And this is the quest of the artist:

First, we embark upon a hero’s journey to find our True Self, our True Name.

Then, we save that True Self from the forces we’ve allowed to imprison it.

And finally, now armed once again with our full magic, we set out on an adventure to share the power of our imagination – our art – with others, so they too might awaken their own latent magic and thus help us in the important quest of saving the world.

And boy, does the world need saving, more than ever. Won’t you join us? What is your magic power?

There are times when all the world’s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned?
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am?

— Supertramp, The Logical Song

PS — The themes in this piece are the same ideas I explore in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist. If that is of interest to you, please click here to join the waitlist.

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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.

On April 1st, millions of people tuned in to watch as NASA launched its new Artemis II rocket, which carries four astronauts bound for the moon, the biggest “star” in the night sky, for the first time in fifty-three years.

Man has always looked into the night sky and been overcome with a longing; a remembrance; a Desire to reach for the stars: A Heavenly Desire.

Desire, in its truest sense, is from the Latin de sidera — of the stars. True Desire is not of the earth. Earthly desires are more appropriately called appetites, but The True Desire is a deep longing to ascend to the stars and rejoin the Divine.

Even the word heaven, as Jesus uses it in the Gospels, is more accurately translated as sky or cosmos.

In The Chronicals of Narnia, stars are presented as conscious beings. Eustace, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, talks with a star named Ramadu:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

Eustace’s description of stars as flaming balls of gas is not false, but it is incomplete. Stars are not mute. They sing to us.

In our world, just as in Narnia, the stars are up there, in the heavens, singing to us, reaching out toward us, calling us with that ancient song that we all long to rejoin; a song composed of light. It is a song they sang, patiently, for eons before their melody entered our mind through our eyes.

This singing of the stars is echoed in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In it, one can see this primordial oscillation driving the movement of life throughout the famous landscape.

The sky is alive in a great, sweeping melody—spiraling and dancing. The stars aren’t depicted as mere “balls of gas.” They appear as blazing vibrations, broadcasting their voices outward, inviting creation itself to sing. In the foreground, the dark flame of the cypress rises, like a rocket, in its longing to join them. In the background, the mountains rumble with the low, steady gravity of bass. And the village, nestled in the great song’s bosom, breaths in and breaths out with the rhythm of life.

Everything participates. Nothing is inert. The whole canvas lives.

And there, in the upper right corner, is the queen of the night stars, the moon, the heavenly choir director, leading the song with her warm, ethereal voice.

This is the musica universalis—the music of the spheres—made visible. This is nature as revelation. This is where God is encountered; the moving, wild, luminous God of Life.

And then we notice the church.

It sits at the village center, its windows dark, unlit, silent – lifeless. While everything else vibrates with life, the church feels sealed off — closed to the song that pervades the rest of the world.

The contrast speaks for itself, serving as a subtle critique of our religious misunderstandings, hinting at the truth that we find God everywhere — except in the artificial, idolatrous boxes we insist on stuffing Him-Her into.

But we have always preferred gods we can manage, haven’t we?

Those kinds of gods stay indoors and follow rules. We forget the truth that The Mystery is everything except what man thinks it is. The living God cannot be contained, and The Kingdom does not arrive in straight lines or tidy boxes. It is unveiled only in the song of life where rhythm, unpredictability, and movement prevail. God dwells where Life dwells. Christ himself seemed to have a penchant for teaching outside, under the sky, exhorting us to be like the lilies in the field or the birds in the sky. He too wanted us to understand where we find God.

“Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of.”

— GK Chesterton

The stars remind us of this. They will not squeeze themselves into our boxes. Instead, they sing. The Logos sings continuously, gifting us with the ever-changing possibility of the present. The Song gifts us time as a canvas upon which we are invited to paint something creative. We are invited to create, in the image of the divine vine, of which we are all branches.

C.S Lewis knew this and Van Gogh saw this truth. The song plays evermore, calling out, to you, calling out your true name, kindling the one True Desire in your heart. A desire born of the stars — de sidera.

This Desire exhorts you to see and to hear; for the only way to create harmony; to create Art, is to tune into the one song with your spiritual eyes and ears so that you hear the entire symphony that is waiting for you. It’s waiting for you to step away from the scales of dogma, and to, instead, start playing your soul’s unique harmony. That is the Desire you feel when you gaze into the night sky.

And the moment you begin to play is moment the whole symphony has been waiting upon.

Godspeed, Artemis II.

May our prayers, and our shared song, buoy you upon a wave that carries you forth into the cosmic symphony.

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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.

In Lord of the Rings, during the Second Age of Middle-Earth, Sauron cast a glamour upon himself, giving himself a “fair form.” He appeared to the Elves of Eregion who, unfortunately, perceived him as a “beautiful” elf or as an emissary of the Valar.

Sauron used this deception to trick Celebrimbor forging the terrible Rings of Power. The master elven metalsmith made a classic error: he mistook glamour for true beauty.

Frodo didn’t make the same mistake. When the hobbits first met Aragorn at The Prancing Pony, Sam questioned the ranger’s identity. Sam, being protective of Frodo as always, suspected foul play. Then Frodo spoke:

There was a long silence. At last Frodo spoke with hesitation. “I believed that you were a friend before the letter came,” he said, “or at least I wished to. You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way that servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would — well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.”

Aragorn wore no magical glamour. There was no illusion. The returning king was truly beautiful. Frodo understood that the way to pierce a glamour is pay attention to how it feels. The glamorous are fair of face and foul of feel. The truly beautiful are always fair of feel and are thus never foul of face.

Today, people confuse beauty and glamour.

The modern world is flooded with glamours masquerading as beauty: advertisements, celebrity culture, Instagram, and the entire “beauty” industry which, if named truly, would be called the glamour industry.

The difference is in how it makes us feel.

Beauty makes us feel wanted by the divine, while glamour only attracts us on the surface level while leaving a foul feel deep inside.

Let us not forget that the word glamour comes from the Scottish glamer, which means “magic” or “enchantment.” It is not uncommon for a dark sorcerer or witch to employ a “glamour” to fool people into doing their bidding such as Sauron did to gain access to Celebrimbor’s skill.

Beauty, on the other hand, comes from the latin bellus which means pretty or charming and is a diminutive form of bonus, meaning Good.

Beauty has always been connected to goodness. Glamour is a sort of fake beauty; a perversion of beauty.

Aragorn may not have been as “fair of face” as Annatar, but Aragorn felt aligned with divinity. He felt good.

Aragorn was beautiful. Sauron, disguised as Annatar, was fair of face but foul of feel. Annatar was glamorous.

Our society has it all backwards. We try to hold on to the the external beauty of youth, by donning the excessive glamours of surgeries, fillers, and other falsehoods while we ignore the development of the real beauty of our souls.

We strive to look young on the outside while we become old curmudgeons on the inside. We should reverse that! True goodness, and true beauty, comes from the inside while a glamour is only skin deep.

The airbrushed false faces designed to extract our attention, life-energy, and dollars are glamorous. But, my wife, in my arms, sitting on the porch, on a quiet night, while the crickets sing as we gaze up at the stars, is beautiful.

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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.

Many thanks and blessings to Shiv Sengupta for his essay True Equanimity which helped me greatly in clarifying my understanding of equanimity. I highly suggest reading his essay and subscribing to his Substack.

For most of my life, I misunderstood the word equanimity.

I assumed it meant something like peaceful, calm, or maybe even gently joyous: A “state” symbolized by the little smile on the Buddha’s face. Meditation circles talk about equanimity a lot, and I absorbed the idea that it was some sort of end state. Equanimity, I thought, was a “place” you “attain” after enough rewiring, enough stillness, and enough sitting. I assumed equanimity to be a state where nothing really gets to you anymore.

Bullshit.

After years of meditation, I can report: that is not what has (yet?) happened.

I still get angry. I still get annoyed, frustrated, and sometimes I still fly into a full-blown rage. I’m still an asshole. Possibly more of one at times, because meditation didn’t dull my emotions, it sharpened them. When I feel joy now, I really feel it. When I feel love, I can feel it in my body, in my chest, and in my breath. It feels as if something is moving through me. And when I get angry? I feel that more intensely too. In other words, I now feel life coursing through every moment.

For a long time, I thought equanimity meant “unfuckwithable.” But that turns out to be wrong.

Equanimity has nothing to do with how calm you appear, or whether you feel anger, grief, or passion. The word comes from the Latin aequanimitas, composed of aequus (equal) and animus (spirit — that which animates). True equanimity is not emotional neutrality. It is the capacity to perceive the animating spirit in all things, even the “negative” things, equally.

Equanimity is not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to see that the same divine life animates joy and sorrow, friend and enemy, self and other — even in the middle of anger. You can be furious and still be in equanimity, if you are seeing clearly.1

Equanimity need not necessarily look like tranquility. It can also look like resistance, even rage — Shiv Sengupta

This “ability to perceive the spirit in all things and all experiences equally” is The Mystery or The Kingdom. I don’t view The Kingdom as (only) a place you go after death, but, rather, as the true reality hidden just behind the veil of the everyday shadowlands — a veil woven almost entirely by ego.

When that veil thins, one begins to see the mysterious Truth shimmering through everything. This one Truth is called by many names: Logos, the animating WORD, the primordial vibration, The Christ, Shekinah, Kalima, the Tao, and AUM are but a few. To see this force shimmering in all — to truly see it — is equanimity.

Now turn the coin over.

Let’s look at iniquity.

I always assumed iniquity was just a fancy word for “sin.” But that’s not quite right. Iniquity, too, names a way of seeing — a condition in which we are prone to sin, even inclined toward it. But iniquity itself is neither the act nor even the thought that leads to the act.

Like equanimity, the word iniquity is rooted in the Latin aequus — equal. Iniquity simply adds the negation prefix of in. In-iquity: not equal.

And, suddenly, everything snaps into place.

If equanimity is seeing the divine equally in all things (including yourself), iniquity is seeing anything as unequal (including yourself). Iniquity is the perceptual state of separation while equanimity is the perceptual state of connection. In iniquity, we see ourselves as cut off from others, from the world, from the source of life itself.

And once someone (including yourself) is no longer equally sacred in your perception, it becomes thinkable, defensible even, to hurt them.

In short, equanimity and iniquity are two opposite ways of viewing; of perceiving the world. And the spiritual journey that we are all on is one of leaving the illusory state of iniquity and remembering the truth we once knew as children: that we are all equally part of The God Spell.

In this world of equanimity, where the divine life animates all, whether we realize it or not, does not the sun rise on the evil and the good alike? The sun does not practice iniquity. Only we do.

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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.

Animals in captivity suffer from many problems that they generally don’t face in the wild. Removing them from their natural habitat also removes them from their natural state of being. When in captivity, they are confined to small, unnatural spaces, and sometimes forced to entertain people or to perform tricks. They become dependent upon their keepers for food, and for health care, and thus, sometimes die prematurely from illness or stress. They can become overweight; listless; distracted; uninterested in life.

If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because you are recognizing modern life. It is a description of the life conditions of a large percentage of modern humans. You are free in name only. People would rather have free beer than free speech. The new world man has evolved from homo sapiens to homo captivus. And you have been indoctrinated to think that this is normal; even desirable.

Homo captivus sits in cubicles, managed by their keepers, as they work “to put food on the table.” They pay their taxes as tribute. They watch the news fear porn and scroll social media, frightening themselves into smallness, willingly giving up discernment, and decaying the strength of their biggest asset: their mind. They mostly do what they, as civilized people, are expected to do and, in the process, they are not evolving, but are devolving. The Endarkenment has begun.

Like the captive animals, most members of this new species, homo captivus, are dependent upon those in charge of the system for health care. Unlike the captive animal, they are expected to pay for it. Can they freely go to any doctor they wish without asking permission from their insurance company who, in turn, may ask permission from far away bureaucrats if the request is valid?

Are they stressed out by things over which they have absolutely no control? Are they overweight? Depressed? Uninterested in life? Distracted? If they want (or need) to do something, anything really, can they just drop everything and do it? Or do they have to ask for permission from one of their captors?

Do they….you…Do you have ample opportunity to run on the open plain and revel in the power of your body? Or are you trapped within confining walls that are physical, societal and mental?

We are forced to perform tricks, to entertain visitors, to “work” so that we may “live.” There is nothing wrong with honest work, but many of us have forgotten what honest work is, and what it means to actually live. So many of us are walking undead captives.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It wouldn’t be called work if we liked doing it, we console ourselves. wink wink, nudge, nudge, we attempt to soothe each other. “Thank God it’s Friday,” we say as we smother our reality with mind altering substances, starting at “happy hour.”

Shouldn’t most hours be “happy hour?”

We ask each other, “So, what do you do?”

And we answer as expected, as if what we do defines who we are:

“I’m a doctor.”

“I sell insurance.”

“I write technical manuals.”

But the real question isn’t what do you do. We ask these irrelevant questions because we don’t like considering the real questions; the important questions. Those are the questions that scare us back into captivity.

The real questions are these: What are you? Are you free? Can you do the things that light a fire in your soul? What is your purpose? Who are you? What do you want? How do you escape the mental cage that entraps your mind? What is freedom?

Can you sit alone, in silence, with nothing but your own thoughts for company, for an hour? Two hours? If that idea scares you, then you are homo captivus. The free human delights in the power of his own mind.

We are only truly free when we know who we are, what we are, and what we want. Only then are we free to do what our soul yearns to do. The ancient oracle’s advice to know thyself is really the only advice that matters. When you discover the answers to these questions, your inner life will be liberated. The correct changes to your outer life will flow from that liberation.

The freedom we long for is this: to live in a way where there is no distinction between what we do and what we are. Then we will have embarked upon the adventure for which we are here: to evolve into homo spiritus.

A lion in a zoo, really, is no longer a complete lion. It is something else. Something less. It would not describe itself by what it does. “I am an entertainer! I play a lion in the ongoing play called, “the zoo!” Can you imagine a lion boasting about such a job?

This is the same dilemma that modern man, homo captivus, faces!

The lion’s soul yearns to be a lion. To do what lions do. To roam the savannah, chasing big game, culling the herd, and napping languidly in the shade with his spouse and the pride. And, after doing so, he roars at the heavens in an act of worship and warning!

Like the captive lion, we, as the species homo captivus, sit at our desks, good human specimens, working on those spreadsheets that will optimize costs and deliver an additional 2.4% profit to the company’s bottom line.

And, being good, we pay our taxes, and support our favorite sports teams. We enjoy happy hours and are allowed a taste of fake, curated freedom, every once in a while, so that we can come back “refreshed” and do it some more.

Meanwhile our souls are screaming at us to go outside! Go fishing! (Be sure to get permission by renewing your license) Pay attention to what you see! Create art! Enjoy the afternoon with your family! Go walk in the forest! Eat real food! Run! Lift heavy things! Our bodies are meant to look divine, not like hogs in captivity — Imago Dei, remember? Write a concerto! Paint an oil painting! Write a novel! Dance! Play! Pet the outside cats! Play your guitar! Listen to music! Love! And sure, work, honest work, if you need to, because, if your mind is truly liberated, the cage is no longer a cage. If you stay because you choose to stay, you are still free. But it must be your true choice.

Inside you, and inside each of us, is a tiny spark, dying to become the roaring bonfire that is the birthright of homo spiritus - creation! We contain imago dei within us. The lion is here to be a lion. Homo spiritus is here to be a creator. So create! Only the false you is stopping the real you.

Stoke that fire inside you and you too will feel the natural urge to roar at the heavens in worship, and to those around you in warning, that you are not undead, that you are not a slave, and that you will not live as a captive, but that you exist and that you live in the image of God.

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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.

Gandhi famously said to be the change you want to see in the world.

But how can that advice possibly help when we live in a time when everything feels too broken to fix?

You can feel the unease in conversations, in the air, and in your bones. The great unraveling has arrived. The familiar things have become brittle. I suppose The Endarkenment must follow “The Enlightenment.”

Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is angry. And no matter who we vote for, the wars continue, the debt grows, the division deepens. It’s easy to feel small and powerless; for we’ve been handed a situation far beyond our individual capacity to repair.

We feel, like Bilbo Baggins, as “butter spread over too much bread.”

“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” — Bilbo Baggins

We feel like our favorite hobbits must have felt: disheartened in the face of unbeatable odds.

Imagine: A hobbit is given the task of carrying an object of unimaginable evil into the heart of enemy territory. He must walk straight toward darkness, knowing that he cannot defeat it by force. Frodo doesn’t have an army. He doesn’t have special powers. He has sore feet, fear, and a thin thread of hope.

And he, like us, wishes it didn’t have to be this way.

Gandalf’s answer to Frodo is one of the most honest lines in all of literature:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Deciding what to do with the time that is given us: That’s the real conundrum.

Lamenting the impossible is just wishful thinking. So, what can we possibly do with the time that has been given us?

No single person can fix a broken world. Expecting that would be as absurd as asking a hobbit to overthrow Sauron by himself, or asking baby Harry Potter to defeat Voldemort with a rattle. The scale mismatch is obvious.

If we can’t save the world alone…what do we do?

This is where Samwise Gamgee enters the story.

Sam doesn’t carry the Ring. He carries something deeper: He carries cooking pans, fire-making gear, and, hidden at the bottom of his pack, he carries salt.

Salt.

On the road to Mordor.

Think about that.

In the middle of starvation, ash, and despair, Sam assumes there will still be meals. He assumes there will still be evenings. He assumes there will still be laughter. He assumes there will still be moments worth seasoning.

He assumes there will still be life.

Tolkien even gives us the inventory of Sam’s hope: two small pans, a wooden spoon, a fork, skewers — and that dwindling treasure at the bottom of the pack: Salt, carefully saved.

Sam carries civilization into hell.

Sam carries love into hell.

He brings love and companionship in the form of ordinary hobbit rituals: cooking, sharing food, tending to a friend.

When Frodo is close to breaking, Sam doesn’t lecture him about destiny or geopolitics. Sam, instead, talks about stories. He gifts hope to Frodo, telling him about how people will someday sing songs about their adventure. He shares dreams of returning to normal life, about gardens, and about laughter.

And Frodo realizes something profound: Sam is the real hero.

Not because Sam is powerful.

But, because Sam refuses to surrender his soul.

This is the part we often miss: The victory in these stories doesn’t come from dominating evil. It comes from refusing to become it.

We give up the true authority of our creator when we resort to violence; for then we are no longer, “in His Name.”

“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” — Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Domination is only a simulacrum of power. Presence is power.

Sam doesn’t despair in the darkest moments. He keeps showing up. He keeps loving. He keeps imagining a future meal.

He keeps salt.

That’s the resistance. That’s what we can do.

We tend to think change comes from big acts; movements; revolutions. But The Kingdom isn’t built that way. That kind of thinking is the same mistake people made when Christ said, “The Kingdom is at hand.”

They looked for weapons when, instead, The Kingdom is built in kitchens, in conversations and in moments of attention. It requires choosing kindness when bitterness would be easier; in choosing love when everyone is choosing hate.

So, what can you do in troubled times, you ask?

Refuse to hand over your humanity.

Don’t give up your spiritual eye — the one that sees beauty in small things. Don’t surrender your capacity for wonder. Don’t lose your ability to cook a meal for someone you love. Don’t stop noticing light through windows. Don’t forget how to sit quietly. Don’t let bitterness replace tenderness. Don’t forget to play with the cat. Don’t foget to play your guitar. Don’t forget to hug your spouse. Don’t forget to dance. Don’t lose sight of The Kingdom.

If you can’t think about perfectly salted roast rabbit on your way to Mordor, then you are already lost.

Gandalf could have taken the Ring himself. He was powerful. He was the obvious choice. But, he didn’t. Instead, he looked to hobbits — to the ones who “love things that grow.”

Those little hobbits were the salt of Middle-earth.

How much salt is needed for a piece of meat not to go bad? Not much. Some. There should be at least some grains of salt in the earth for it not to go bad. Curse cannot override blessing. Blessing can override curse. It all depends on how much salt there is and whether it has retained its saltiness. – Eugene Terekhin

We are called to be the salt of this earth. Our small blessings can override the large curse the earth struggles under. The shadows of our actions are far taller than we realize.1

If you don’t keep some salt, just in case there’s something worth celebrating today, then you need a Sam. But the beautiful truth is this: there is a Sam inside each of us.

That’s the role available to you right now. And it’s a role that nobody can ever take away from you. Only you can choose to walk away from your Sam.

We are called, not to be heroes marching into battle, but to be stubborn carriers of light and ambassadors of The Kingdom.

This is how we resist.

This is how we embody the change we want to see in the world.

So keep some salt in your pack.

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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.

Have you ever watched a kitten play?

When kittens overflow with energy, which is quite often, they play. They run. They bolt. They become possessed by a condition we call the “zoomies.”

She sits quietly. But suddenly: Zoom! Zoom!

Around the room. Around the house. She chases the air, and imagines a mouse. She runs, at top speed, in random directions until the energy is, temporarily, dissipated by the burst of pleasure.

That is play.

There’s a popular meme that one should, “work like a lion.” But I say, “work like a kitten.”

Somehow, we’ve forgotten how to play and thus, how to work. Work like a kitten: Rest when you need to rest. Watch when you need to watch. Think when you need to think. Eat when you need to eat. Indulge your curiosity when you are curious and, if you are a kitten, you are always curious. And, most importantly, when you need to play, then play. When one works, creatively, in this way, work is rarely anything but play. Play in creative work, just as in the kitten, is the pleasurable release of excess energy.

What I’ve realized is that this isn’t just about kittens or work or what we’ve forgotten.

It’s about what we are: We are all a part of the universe, made of the same chemical matter as stars, planets, comets, and other “inorganic” matter.

We are each literally a part of the universe watching itself. Likewise, a playing kitten is part of the universe playing with itself; the Universe enjoying itself in an ecstatic moment of intense pleasure.

And since matter is energy, these acts of play are nothing more and nothing less than energy swirling, teasing, and playing with itself for no other reason than to have this experience.

What if God “works like a kitten?”

It feels evident that “God,” whatever that is, must be everywhere, which means God must be every thing: Everything. All energy. All matter. All encompassing. All One. One Song – the Uni-verse. One infinite bundle of unlimited energy.

Physicists talk about the “big bang” as starting from an infinitesimally small point of incomprehensible energy density: A singularity; an infinity.

What can one do with infinite energy when it is caged in a single pixel?

Like a kitten, such infinite energy must be utilized. Experienced. Zoom! Zoom! Boom! Boom!

Play.

We see constant division and reunification of different types of energy into different configurations just for the eternal pleasure of it.

For what else could infinite energy do? Infinite experiences. Infinite creation. Infinite destruction.

Infinite play.

So, while a kitten is a part of the universe, a part of God, playing with itself, so is everything else.

Perhaps we shouldn’t call God, “the creator.” That seems to limit His role; for God is the creator, the destroyer, and the creation, playing with every possibility that ever was and ever will be.

Perhaps instead, we should call God The Player.

AI Policy: 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. While I might sometimes chat with an AI bot while brainstorming, all of the ideas and the writing you read here comes from my own mind.

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.

Our job, as artists, is to fully embrace our humanity; our “messy imperfections,” and to see them for what they really are: Gifts of uniqueness. We can’t be gods and we can’t be animals. We can’t be immortal, yet we can’t quite accept mortality either. We must uniquely walk the middle path. It is what it is.

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness. — Michelangelo

Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam depicts this tension beautifully. Adam lounges, bound to the earth, limited by his mortal body of clay. God, dwelling in the spiritual world of immortality, reaches toward Adam. God’s “cloud” carries a double mythic symbolism as both the true divine realm, and, strikingly, the shape of a human brain — a place where man escapes into his mind and the freedom of the symbolic to let his imagination and his awareness soar into the godly realm of immortality. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

God’s arm and his forefinger are extended toward Adam, offering him the in-spired breath of of “life” — the power of creation. Notice that Adam is already physically alive. God is, instead, offering him the promethean spark of inspiration — the creative “fire” of the god-realm. In other words, God’s gift of inspiration offers Adam not just un-deadness; not just bios, but true abundant eternal life: Zoë.

God is offering to make Adam an artist; a creator, “in His image.” God’s forearm is significantly (and symbolically) reaching through the prefrontal cortex — the seat of human uniqueness, reason, and imagination.

God’s arm, intriguingly, pierces the location of the ajna, the mystical “third eye.” Across cultures, this point represents intuition, spiritual perception, and the light of inner knowing. The ajna, a Sanskrit word that means “to perceive,” is the point of inspiration — the place God breathes the true “breath of life” into us. It is the portal into the Kutastha, the Christ consciousness, the Krishna Consciousness, the “single eye” referred to by Christ that fills the “body with light,” — light representing both divine luminosity and intuitive knowledge.

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

God is offering Adam nothing less than a psycho-spiritual grasp of immortality…perhaps even a glimpse of what humanity could eventually become.

Yet Adam hesitates. He hasn’t yet accepted the gift. He lounges, lazily, with his finger almost touching God’s, as if the divine offering isn’t worth the effort to literally lift a finger. (Is this where we get the phrase?).

What holds him back?

Is it doubt? Is it fear? Perhaps he is afraid to come home to his true Self, as are most of us. Perhaps he is mired in diabolical left-brained logic, denying the spiritual, just as modern man does, a condition that led Nietzsche to famously declare, “God is dead.”

Whatever it is that Adam struggles with, it is universal. It is the struggle we all face in the inner Artist’s “hero’s journey” to come home into our true and full Selves. This ancient struggle is the crux of freewill:

Do we choose ego or love?
Earth or heaven?
Vanity or virtue?
Bios or zoë?
Body or soul?

This choice was not offered only once, long ago; for Adam is a symbol of all of humanity. God’s promethean present is the present. The choice confronts us in every moment.

Perhaps all we have to do is simply “lift a finger”…touch The Mystery…and accept it.

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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.

When we seek wonder and “feed love to the world,” through gratitude, something surprising happens: The world feeds us back.

Here’s what I mean: When one plays an electric guitar, it doesn’t take long to discover the concept of feedback. Feedback occurs when you stand close to your amplifier and play a note. You then allow the pickups on the guitar to receive the note, not from the string, but from the output of the amplifier. This sets up a virtuous loop of sound that can increase in intensity and length. The amplifier feeds the sound to the guitar pickups, and the guitar feeds sound to the amplifier. And this can go on indefinitely, until the guitar player steps away from the amplifier.

Similarly, when we gift our attention wisely to soul-nourishing things; when we beautify our gaze; when we notice the magic in the mundane, we convert everyday objects, and especially the living world around us, into icons. An icon is an object that points the way to the deeper more true; more transcendent reality of the soul. An icon leads us out of “the shadowlands” and into the true reality of The Mystery.

Medieval icons were painted, not in traditional mathematical perspective, but with all lines pointing to and converging at the viewer. A medieval icon represents a larger truth about nature: When we beautify our gaze and truly notice the wondrous reality around us, then the things we gaze upon become icons and, instead of us simply gifting them with the life energy of our attention, they open their eyes and look back at us.

As we feed our attention to the natural world around us, the beauty within the world cradles us, lovingly, and and suddenly, something shifts within us, and the the world begins to feed us back. We feed the world and the world feeds us back. When we open our hearts and allow ourselves to receive it, the objects we wonder about provide nourishing feedback, just like the amplifier and the guitar, except here we are dealing in spiritual “sound” rather than physical. This is why time spent in nature is universally soul-nourishing. Avoiding the world is like playing an electric guitar without an amplifier: There is no possibility of feedback. The world can’t feed you back if you avoid it by burying yourself in your phone.

As our spiritual eyes open to this transcendent reality; this reality that “feeds us back,” we become God’s instrument, and nature, all around us, becomes God’s amplifier. In this iconic state, we enter a virtuous feedback loop of life-energy. Our love pours out of us into the world around us, which in turn, feeds amplified love back to us. This is the experience of the mystic. This is the experience of the poet. This is the experience of the artist. This is the experience of God.

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.

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.

Once tuned, the music they all perform, together, works to create consonance, assonance, and harmony, instead of discord.

Likewise, when people come together in relationship, they must first “attune” to one another. This process often happens automatically through a process called “emotional attunement.”

Our hearts emit a strong magnetic field. Research has shown that when someone experiences negative emotions, especially anger, this field becomes disordered; chaotic and this disturbance creates discord in this emotional attunement process between people. The phrase, “I could feel his anger coming off him in waves” is more correct than people realize. We feel this emotional discord as surely as we hear the one instrument in a band that is out of tune. It only takes one out of tune instrument to ruin the whole song.

When one or more people in a relationship fall “out of tune,” the “instruments” of their emotions no longer play together in harmony. The “song” of their relationship becomes discordant and grating.

However, when we become fully emotionally attuned with another, positively, our hearts coalesce upon the song of one shared emotion, especially the emotion of love.

When you are attuned positively, in a sense, you become of one mind and one heart. The field-waves of your emotions fall into coherence and become additive. And, like a symphony, you become greater, as one unified whole, than you were as two separate individuals. In a sense, you pass from duality to non-duality.

Attunement means, “a bringing into harmony.”

But there is another related word, similar to attunement that we must consider, and that word is atonement.

Atonement, or as some like to spell it, at-one-ment, is what happens when we drop our worldly egos and allow the instrument of our Self to become attuned with The Divine Symphony; the musica universalis; the SONG; the WORD.

When we are able to “take up our cross” and sacrifice our egoistic desires and worries, and, especially, when we enter a mystical or flow state, we become attuned with God. And when we become attuned with God, just like in human relationships, we become of one heart, and one mind. We are literally at one, which is what the word atone means.

In this state of at-one-ment, we are automatically reconciled to God and we pass from duality to non-duality where we don’t just become greater than we were as two, but we discover that we were always the greatest that can be. We were blind, but now we see.

Entering this state of sacrifice often requires solitude, and we notice, when we enter into deep solitude and silence; when we are truly alone (which means “all one”); that we attune into the divine flow and our sins fall away, as does even our desire to sin.

When we are at one, we are attuned. And when we are attuned, we are atoned; in atonement – samadhi. In this state, separation from God, caused by our egos, burns away in the vibration of the divine fire as we play our instrument in The Divine Symphony that is continuously creating all, and thus, never stops playing.

“The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power.” – Nikola Tesla

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.

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.

As we discussed in my last post, modern artists, wielding their magic power, are mages of light, but, if we are to finally admit that magic is real, then we must allow that this would include both light and dark magic and indeed, “mages” of darkness also exist and continually cast their spells upon the modern world. In fact, they are everywhere.

The mages of darkness are those who, lacking in mastery and denying the light, imitate and pervert the art of the light-mages, in service of their own egoistic ideals. These people sometimes call themselves “artists,” though they are not artists-in-truth. They are only a simulacrum of real artists and they, like AI, produce only a facsimile of art.

Fortunately, the power of these “dark mages” has a fatal weakness: like the Jedi mind-trick, their “power” can only enspell the weak-minded, and, even then, only when the weak-minded voluntarily give these false mages their attention; for where attention flows, life-energy goes.

Unfortunately, modernity is full of people, the majority of people really, who have allowed themselves to become enthralled by the dark mages of The Modern Machine. You can see these people everywhere, shuffling like zombies, staring at little black-mirrors in their hands, oblivious to the magic and beauty of God’s world around them.

The perversion of true Art, in the hands of these dark artists, can rightly be called the “dark arts,” and you can recognize such charlatans when you see “art” that glorifies ugliness or, quite often, glorifies the artist himself.

True Art is a gift to the perceiver while false art attempts to channel all the benefit and glory to the artist himself.

Real Art serves to wake people up to the light of Truth, while the “dark arts” tend to lull people asleep, trapping them within a web of fears and falsehoods.

With that in mind, we can see that the poison apple of Sleeping Beauty can be looked upon as a symbol of such dark arts, while the “true love’s kiss” which awakens her 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.

These “dark mages” 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. 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.

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, when I venture out, 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?

Real Art, on the other hand, always leads to True Reality — that mysterious realm I (and many others) call The Mystery. The light-mages we call true artists visit The Mystery regularly and drink of its living water to recharge their power. The Mystery, and hence its rejuvenating power, is off-limits to the “dark mages,” at least until they turn away (repent) from the darkness and turn back toward the light.

While the spells of the “dark mages” attempt to strip away the souls of the weak-minded, such spells are quite easy to avoid: One simply has to remember one’s true Self.

One only has to be truly and fully human, and the weak, perverted spells of the “dark arts” fall apart. We do this by undertaking human activities such as making art, enjoying beautiful music, spending time in nature, and learning to see the miracle of life all around us. These activities are the ones that lead us home to our True self and, when we reconnect with our true Self, such dark “spells” bounce off us harmlessly. The Bible calls this “the armor of God.” And this is the the truth behind the riddikulus laughter spell of Harry Potter. It’s easy to dismiss the Boggarts – false artists – when we realize that the only power they have is the power that we grant them. Dark artists can only use our own fears against us, and so, by laughing at our fears, we render them — both the fears and the ones who would use them against us — powerless.

The real light-mage-artists always transmit the magic power called virtue in the forms of truth, goodness and beauty. Fortunately, this power of truth and beauty burns away any and all falsehoods of glamour cast by the spiritually inept “dark mages.”

In fact, this is the most useful and important function of the modern artist and their Art: casting the counter-spells of beauty that awaken others. Modern artists, through the magic 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.

In Tolkienesque terms, Artists are here to encourage us to choose the elves, the magic forests, and the hobbits over the marching machine armies of Isengard and Barad-dûr. Artists remind us to choose the magic of growing things, over the “magic” of metal and wheels:

“He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”

―Treebeard, The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

This awakening function of Art is its most important function and thus, it is the most important function of Artists.

Your first order of business as an artist, is to awaken yourself. To liberate yourself by discovering, and then embodying, The Sovereign Artist within. And, then, as you awaken, you will discover your true artistic mission: liberating others.

How to go about this critical work is the subject of my upcoming book, The Sovereign Artist.

“A single smile of Beauty can bring about greater transformations of character than all the frowns of Righteousness.” — Sangharakshita

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PS - This piece is part of my upcoming book, The Sovereign Artist. If you found it of interest, I encourage you to join the waitlist.

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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.

Magic is real: Katya was cleaning her house, when a mage’s construct cast a spell upon her. An unseen power took control of her body, she stopped cleaning, and she danced uncontrollably across her living room. She was then transported through time, into the past, where she watched her younger self fall in love for the first time.

Magic is real: Zain spent Sunday on his couch, holding a magical artifact. The artifact cast a spell that was hundreds of years old and, suddenly, his reality disappeared as we was mysteriously beamed to another planet, where he went on an adventure with a band of elves, dwarves, and dragons. He and this motley band, against all odds, saved this foreign land from an evil sorcerer, and he was home in time for dinner.

Magic is real. You were taught that magic is a superstition. But you have been lied to.

The two magical experiences shared above happen daily to billions of people, including you.

Mages of the light are alive and well, and they constantly cast beneficial spells upon humanity in an ongoing attempt to awaken more humans to the poetic, divine light. These mages see a beautiful world of virtue and goodness that is hidden to most of us, and they dedicate their lives, and their powers, to a desperate never-ending attempt to show us the truth of our reality. We are asleep. But their spells constantly give us glimpses of true reality and sometimes, miraculously, they do wake us up, even if just for a moment.

These arcane wizards have spent countless hours mastering the skills necessary to employ their weird instruments: their wands, their staves, their amulets, and countless other magical implements. They then use the skills they’ve mastered to cast energetic waves of virtuous light upon us. These magic waves ensnare and enspell us and, when we gift them our attention, they beam light directly into our souls. Since our souls are made of light, this is how we grow, and growth is how we awaken. Where attention goes, life-energy flows.

The reason we no longer believe in magic; in mages; however, is that we have forgotten the truth about them. We have forgotten the truth about magic. We have forgotten how their powers work. So, in the modern world, we willfully deny the existence of wizards, and, instead, we call these mages artists.

Even though we deny the existence of magic, these light-artists constantly remind us of the truth, through their Art:

Music holds the secret,
To know it can make you whole.
It’s not just a game of notes,
it’s the sounds inside your soul.
The magic of the melody
runs through you like a stream.
The notes that play flow
through your head
like a dream.

— Triumph, Hold on to Your Dreams

Deep in the shared ancestral memory of our souls, we still vaguely recall the truth about these wizards. We reveal this truth in our language, when we use the term, “master artist;” for only the mages who’ve endured the arduous process of mastery; who have earned the right to be called a master, are able to cast truly powerful spells. A true master, as in master-Jedi, is one who has mastered himself. Mastering yourself is another way of saying that you’ve found, and authentically become, your true Self.

Elite masters, wielding the wand of a paintbrush or pen, weave their tantric castings of paintings or books. Through the infinite types of staves we call guitars, saxophones, or violins, they create long, complicated spells called music; amazing spells that channel the power of muses directly; for music truly is the voice of the muse. Such spells lead us to sing in the shower, dance across the living room, or smile as we drive along ugly streets toward mundane jobs. True masters, even with their bare hands, are able to cast their beneficial spells upon us.

These mages, these artists, work through various mediums, from air, to paper, to canvas, to movement. They enthrall us, either directly, or, more often, by creating amplifying magical constructs which continue to transmit the wizard’s magic energy for generations, even after the mage has passed on, leaving these shadowlands for the realm of true reality. We refer to these magical constructs by more pedestrian names such as paintings, albums, books and sculptures. In the opening stories, Katya was enspelled by a song, and Zain was transported to another planet by a book. Reading, and being transported to another world, by a story that is hundreds of years old; a story that was conceived in the mind of an author who has been dead for centuries, is absolutely magic of the highest order. It is literally telepathy, triggered by a spell of runes printed on a page. A book is a kind of pensieve that allows you to step into the thoughts and memories of the author.

Artists, you see, are the true modern day sages and mages. Art brings energy; Art brings love; Art brings The Kingdom to others and artists are the modern world’s sacred gurus who wield the holy power of beauty and virtue.

As Eknath Easwaran said in his translation of The Upanishads, the classic book of Hindu scriptures:

The constant concern of the artists is to reawaken us to the sacred nature of the environment, of living creatures, of one another, and finally of our own inner reality.

Okay. I admit, I changed one word in his quote. I changed his original word sages to artists to highlight my point that they are the same thing, serving the same purpose..

I implore you to think of yourself as a sage with a mission to awaken humanity the next time you find yourself despairing that your Art doesn’t matter because the truth is, it matters now, more than it ever has before; for if we are ever to get out of the mess of modernity; out of a realm of “dark mages” keeping a population of weak-minded trapped in hell; out of a society of thinking machines ruling non-thinking humans, then your Art; your human Art, is exactly what we need. The goal of this book is to show you how.

“I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means…of passing on that ecstasy to others.” — Ezra Pound

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PS - This piece is part of my upcoming book, The Sovereign Artist. If you found it of interest, I encourage you to join the waitlist.

PPS - Remind yourself that music, and all Art, is magic:

Ace Frehley, RIP:

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.

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.

There isn’t just one master “economy.” There are two economies, and they are vastly different. Let’s call them the following: the soul-economy and the market-economy.

The currency of the soul is love, and the currency of the market is power (ie wealth). The market-economy is mastered with ambition. The soul-economy is mastered with inspiration. Success in the market-economy takes discipline. Success in the soul-economy takes devotion. The goal in the market-economy is getting. The goal in the soul-economy is giving. Guess in which economy Art properly belongs?

People who begin to meditate often worry they’ll lose their ambition; their drive. In a way, they will, but only because, as they begin to see with more clarity, they’ll begin to shift their focus from the market-economy to the far more fulfilling soul-economy.

So, it’s not that people “on the path” lose the drive to do anything. It’s that their ambition slowly gives way to inspiration. And that is why, despite being less outwardly ambitious, creative, spiritual people often accomplish more, not only in the soul-economy, but also in the market-economy (as a side-effect). As they evolve, they stop being driven by ambition and discipline, and they start being driven by inspiration and devotion. And devotion beats discipline every time. From the outside, they may still appear to be “ambitious,” but their internal motivation has completely changed.

More specifically, for our endeavors as artists, writers and musicians: Our Art, our works of love, are properly meant for the soul-economy. Only labors of will, born from discipline, are children of the market-economy.

Art, music, writing – these are all works of love and they are meant to be gifts of love in the economy of the soul. That is why the worst thing an artist can do is “sell out” their soul to the market.

Don’t misunderstand: I am not suggesting that artists cannot sell their artworks or make a living from their art. Selling is not the same thing as selling out. Selling out involves creating primarily for the market-economy with the goal of getting. Art must be made as a gift of the soul, for the purpose of giving.

Artists must learn to navigate these difficult waters of balance. They must learn to stand at the edge and straddle these two vastly different economies. Learning the difference will enhance both the artist’s peace of mind and his pocketbook. Knowing the difference between these two economies will help an artist to not feel rejected when a soulful piece doesn’t sell. And, it will help him understand why some pieces sell easily and others do not.

Here’s an important point to remember:

The most valuable piece of art in the soul-economy may be worth nothing in the market-economy and visa-versa.

Consider the lyrics of the song, Spirit of Radio by Rush, a song you’ve probably heard many times on the radio for free, and probably not ever paid a dime for:

Invisible airwaves crackle with life

Bright antennas bristle with the energy

Emotional feedback on a timeless wavelength

Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free

That last lyric describes music as a priceless gift in the soul-economy, while also acknowledging that the work is worth almost nothing to the market-economy. It is the same with the majority of art created. It is difficult to put a price on the priceless.

Artists, to navigate modernity, must somehow bring love into the market-economy, and they must bring money into the soul-economy. This is a tricky, though possible, balance.

Here’s an illuminating story from Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift,

“There are three gifts in this hunting ritual: the forest gives to the hunters, the hunters to the priests, and the priests to the forest. At the end, the gift moves from the third party back to the first. The ceremony that the priests perform is called whangai hau, which means “nourishing hau,” feeding the spirit.”

Art must also feed the spirit from whence Art comes. In reading that passage, it dawns on me, that the soul-economy of Art works the same way, and there are actually three entities one must consider: The artist, the perceiver, and God. And the key to understanding the soul-economy is to understand that the “job” of each entity is to gift something to the others. As we discussed in Attention is Energy, the only way for attention to be valuable is to give it away.

God gifts the creative talent and inspiration to the artist, the artist gifts the Art itself to the world in general, and to the perceiver specifically, and, if the perceiver allows his heart to open enough to accept the gift, eros will arm his bow, and fire his arrow of beauty with unerring accuracy, inflicting upon the perceiver the divine wound of wonder, which causes the perceiver’s soul to grow. The perceiver’s gift back to God is his soul-growth resulting from the Art, which completes the loop of love upon which the soul-economy thrives.

The goal of each economy made clear by its name: The market-economy seeks the growth of markets and the soul-economy seeks the growth of souls. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s and everything will work out.

Art, as a linchpin of the soul-economy, is a vector for the growth of souls. This is how awareness spreads. This is how The Kingdom grows. And joy is the feeling of the soul’s realization that it is free, and may, in every moment, reach toward its true home in God.

Labor is what we do to live. Work is what creates a world that outlives us.”

— Hannah Arendt

PS - Check out the Spirit of Radio Video on Rush’s Youtube channel (linked below), and give thanks for the magic of music and the incredible contributions of countless humans it pays tribute to who worked so hard to bring it into your life for free, a gift from their souls to yours.

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. 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.

Attention is energy. It is our life-force, our most precious gift. It’s an interesting gift because the only way for it to have any value to us is for us to give it away. Each of us, in every moment, must give our attention to something.

Thus, the most important decision we make, in the free will of each instant, is where to bestow the energy our attention; for the moment we place it upon something, the force of its energy, our life force, flows from us to the object of attention. In a way, something doesn’t exist until it is infused with the life-energy of another’s attention. By gifting our attention we are creating something.

We can choose, for example, to place our attention upon the latest media stories about politics. And, in doing so, we energize and quicken those things with our life-force. Things like politics and social media; however, are like dementors, they feed upon the life-force of attention with an insatiable hunger. They leave us drained and empty. To gift our attention; to give our life-force to these things, is a poor choice that leads to the death of those moments.

Such cold, dead moments are the realm of Chronos, who eats all his children with gusto.

But, we can also choose to bestow the sacred, energetic gift of our attention upon uplifting, virtuous things. When we give our attention wisely, we bestow it upon beauty, goodness, truth, and love. In this case, something interesting happens.

Yes, our life-force flows away from us, just as it does with politics, but when the energy of our attention lands upon the aesthetic; the wondrous; the beautiful, it is amplified and the object of our attention suddenly comes alive and it opens its eyes and looks back at us.

In this divine inversion, we receive its attention; its energy, and we are struck with the divine wound of God’s attention. And thus, the energy of our attention is returned to us amplified with the full force of God’s power; the full force of God’s love. And our soul grows as a result of this new influx of energy. This inversion is what inspired the concept of medieval icons, in which all the perspective lines converge upon the viewer.

This second type of attention is sacred, and it is what infuses a moment with a spark of inspiration.

This process is accomplished through the quickening power of “Zeus’ lightning” which electrifies and transforms the instant – stealing it from the grinding jaws of Chronos – time – and gifting it to Kairos – the “right moment.” Kairos is the moment our heart opens and Eros finds his target, fires his arrow into our open heart, and moves the instant out of chronological time into the eternal sparkling now.

Consider what Eugene Terekhin wrote in his piece, From Poiesis to Pottery:

Zeus is salvaged time. His mother Rhea saved him from being swallowed by Cronus, his Father Time. By escaping chronological time, Zeus became timeless. Zeus represents those moments in time that we have saved from being swallowed by time. They become electrified with poetry.

That’s why Zeus’s signature weapon was a lightning bolt. If you transcend time, you can’t help being electrified. You have touched divine electricity, and you are moved by an invisible current. Poetry is when we transcend time and imbue our immediate task with divine electricity. It starts sparkling.

To bestow our attention in a wise manner is to live most of our moments under the soul-enriching God of Kairos rather than the soul-eating Titan of Cronos. And when most of our moments are soul-enriching, we’ve unlocked the secret to living a good life; an abundant life.

I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. — The Christ

Art, writing, music and dance are ways to store, and amplify, the life-energy of attention for the purpose of gifting it to others; for the purpose of bringing others to life and helping, them too, escape the jaws of Cronos.

Art is a kind of magical construct; an amulet of life-energy that continues to give for as long as the artwork itself survives and receives attention. True Art is a channel; an icon that directs God’s power into the hearts of other men.

Art is often the way Eros’ arrow gets aimed at a heart that is open and ready for the divine wound.

Mastery is the process by which we concentrate the life-force of attention because mastery allows us to slow down time, so to speak. A master creating Art, by definition, infuses far more attention per minute of work; more life-force per unit, than the novice is capable of. The process of mastery is, in part, learning to focus all of one’s attention upon one’s work. Mastery unifies the normally scattered and conflicted mind. And that is why mastery helps one to truly know themself.

Gifting the energy of Attention is how we spread The Kingdom. We each understand inherently that the value of something is proportional to the attention, the life-force, that the giver has put into it. That is why we don’t simply send wedding invitations via email, but, instead, we send hand-written calligraphic cards that communicate the value of the impending nuptials.

People generally feel the attention-energy that the artist puts into their Art, which makes Art an ideal path to spread The Kingdom.

And thus, Art is a primary vector for showing people the path to the good life, to an abundant life, to the truth of the God Spell.

“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” – Henry Miller

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

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Cronos may be eating us,

as his children.

But let us rejoice

in each bite he takes!

Let us frolic,

as we slide down his throat;

for we have a power

that he does not!

And that is the power

of our attention and intention,

to turn each bite he takes

from chronos to kairos!

When we turn each instant

Into the eternal,

We steal the nutrition

he seeks for the growth of

our own souls.

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. 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.

How efficient that would be! You could dance (or have sex) at any time and with a partner who performed the steps perfectly to your liking!

“But that’s ridiculous,” you might think, because dance, art, is a dance between two souls.

And so, it is the same with all art.

Even if the robot, the AI, is better, it’s worse, because the point is the relationship, not the output of the “dance” itself.

Art is a mutual gift: That is Art’s real economic sphere.

Art transacts within the soul economy, not the market economy. The two economies only look superficially similar when viewed from a pure market economy viewpoint.

Using AI as a tool, in the hands of a master — one who has mastered his craft through hard work and deliberate practice — may enable new possibilities in Art, but AI, in the hands of a novice, or as a replacement for mastery, it is just soulless dancing with a robot.

“I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means…of passing on that ecstasy to others.” — Ezra Pound

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. 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.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You.”

The Kingdom is co-created by you and God in communion. The Absolute some call God is always doing “his” part, but you, because you have been created inside the image of God; inside his dream of creation, have true free will. Therefore; you are also a creator and free create whatever kingdom for yourself you wish.

When you are in right-thinking, or righteousness, you enter into divine communion and you co-create the Kingdom of Heaven within, which opens your spiritual ears and eyes to the true Kingdom without. When you are in wrong-thinking, or iniquity, you create a false kingdom of lies where you fall out of Eden into separation and hell. The hell you create may be false, but it will seem quite real to you.

Fortunately, as you pass the gates of your created hell, there is a sign to, “abandon all hope.” That is the faint whisper of God imploring you to turn back from that path. That moment, when you have abandoned hope, when you have “lost your spirit,” is the moment to rejoice; for blessed are the poor in spirit, theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven; for only an empty vessel can receive and be filled.

When we give up trying to get out of hell through our own egocentric power, the gates of heaven open, inviting us into a different realm, The Kingdom. When you give up on the ego, your false hell disappears revealing the Truth that all true creation flows from the Kingdom of Heaven. This is why it often seems when we hit rock bottom, and give up all hope, things suddenly seem to start improving. Of course, one doesn’t have to go through hell to get to The Kingdom, it is possible to enter directly, especially through the sacred creative act.

The first step in a true creative act is to enter the Kingdom, and it is through the Kingdom that all true creation flows and expands. That is why we are enjoined to “seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.” Why do you think so many people pursue art, writing, music and dance even though there is little money in it for most people? For the worldly-minded, these creative pursuits seem to be a waste of time (a mistake, they often realize, when they finally need The Kingdom). But those of us who know, the artists, the poetic-at-heart, perceive the true soul-currency of reality, The Kingdom, and we value its preciousness more than we value the world’s ephemeral money. Some of us creatives may be poor physically, but we, the poetic, are all rich, soulfully. And our deepest wish is for you to realize that, deep down, you know this too; for that would solve everything.

We enter The Kingdom with our minds; with our consciousness. It is not a physical realm but a mental and spiritual one, so, the journey starts by going deep within until we find the divine frequency; the divine music, playing deep within our soul. This is the holy vibration; the “name” of God. And, when we enter into this oscillating Name; this sacred vibrato, we allow our egos to fall away, then, we become absorbed into this frequency until we find ourselves in communion with the divine.

In fact, I believe a more accurate translation of Matthew 4:17 would be something like, “Repent (turn away from the outer) to draw near to the (inner) Kingdom of Heaven.”

When we repent; when we turn away from the outer world of darkness, and truly enter into the inner world of light, we find ourselves inside The Mystery. That’s when inspiration happens. Creativity sparks. Intuitive knowing is simply there. And, in that moment, we create true Art, true Love, and true life-energy – that is what flows out from The Kingdom, through us to others. Conversely, when we stay focused on the outer world through our ego, we are cast into what the bible calls “outer darkness.”

The difficult thing is, if we wish to be in The Kingdom, we must be The Kingdom. Because losing all hope, or entering into our inner sanctum is not the only moment the gates open. They also open for you when you open them for someone else.

Art brings energy; Art brings love; Art brings The Kingdom to others and artists are the modern world’s sages who wield the holy power of beauty and virtue. That is why Art can save us; why artists are far more important than they think; why making Art can be a calling of God.

Your Art, assuming you’ve invested the time required to master your craft so that you can create transmit true resonance, is your ministry of reminding others of their true birthright, a good life; an abundant life, and you are a guide wielding the unrivaled power of Art to show others the way to The Kingdom. The modern world leads us to hell, and those trapped by their own minds’ hell, desperately need your art to show them the way back to The Kingdom and a good life.

“I have come that they may have LIFE, and that they may have it more abundantly.”

PS — This article explores ideas expanded upon in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist: The Liberating Power of the Creative Act. If you’d like to join the waitlist, please click the button below:

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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.

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” — John 8:12

People may say that we are “beings of light.” But actually, we’re just light being. In the realm of matter, we are merely light slowed down; light temporarily contained. We are patterns of light recognizing itself. We all feel this recognition of our true light-Self, deep down, when we see a beautiful sunset or sunrise.

But, consciously, we have forgotten that we are light.

Slowly, however, we are now awakening in increasing numbers and turning back toward the light. We are expanding our consciousness, and this will continue until we leave the sleepiness of this endarkened matter behind and return to light speed, to God speed. Godspeed.

That’s why the speed of light is absolute. It is The One Absolute; the unchanging, perfect, divine essence of all. Hence it is the rule that cannot be broken; for it is the rule-maker.

Lightspeed is the speed that nothing can go, but God (and therefore each of us) is no-thing.

Quantum physics has shown that we can’t observe a particle of light without affecting its path; for how can one observe oneself without affecting oneself? Everything is one infinite self-reflection. That’s why I call these pieces reflections.

As light being, we aren’t afraid when in the light. Are you afraid of yourself? Darkness frightens us because it represents the contemplation of the absence of light; the absence of us. To face darkness is to conceptualize light not existing and hence it is to contemplate your Self not existing.

When people are near death, they go “into the light” because they are returning to their true nature; because they are going home, to be one with the god-light-consciousness of all.

Your soul is a baby drop of light and your job is to raise this baby; to grow it; to brighten it; to enlighten it through love, art, beauty, virtue, joy and peace. That makes The Arts we undertake one of the most important jobs we have while here in Earth School.

“The artist is the candle that lights up the darkness of existence.” — Albert Schweitzer

Your charge is to raise your drop of light into a mature light-being, ready to return to the real world of light being. You can’t leave the Shadowlands until you have matured.

Loving others the greatest way to grow your soul so it can remember that it is light.

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

In other words: Love is the way. Once we truly learn to love, we step into the light and the need for commandments and laws falls away. Most of us need strict rules and laws because we are still children in school. And children need rules until they internalize the reasons behind the rules. When we learn to love, we will have grown up and the rules and laws are automatically fulfilled.

Your body is the womb in which your soul-drop-of-light develops. When you leave this womb, you are born into the light Eternal. And when all matter has finally, over the arch of time and evolution, found its way home to the light, the womb of the universe will finish the ongoing work of birthing the full, glorious body of Christ.

Perhaps we, with Him, in our universal Body will travel through the final black hole — the final birth canal — to enjoy the grand adventure of starting a new universe, a new song, as this Song births its Son to become the Father of a new song.

Don’t ask me how I know all this, I just know. And, deep down, You know too.

Our latest canvas is this life. Each thought or action we take is yet another brush stroke, and our true work of Art is the growing of the soul-spark inside each of us into a mature light-being. We will each continue adding to our growing oeuvre of work until we achieve our final soul-masterpiece when we graduate from earth school and return home back to light.

Godspeed.

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” — Plato

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

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Why are we here?

The purpose of life is to grow a beautiful, strong, healthy soul.

This is our True Art — our true masterpiece — and this life is the canvas. The state of our soul is the painting. Every thought or action is a brushstroke.

Growing a beautiful, strong, healthy body requires eating clean nutritious food and undertaking wholesome exercise which, when you think about it, means consuming and creating uncontaminated energy: This is also how one grows the soul.

We know what nutritious food looks like, but what is the nutrition of the soul? Virtue.

Virtue is an energy; a power. It is something we absorb to make our souls grow strong and beautiful or, if our souls are malnourished, virtue is something that can repair the past damage that we’ve inflicted.

“The whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all.” – Luke 6:19, KJV

The soul’s “mouth” is our attention. With our eyes, ears, and senses, we consume virtue (beauty, goodness, truth) or we consume “junk food” (ugliness, evil, lies).

“Junk food” includes excessive scrolling on social media, obsessing over the ugliness the media presents as “news,” or endless arguing over politics. When viewed from the soul’s perspective these activities are far more damaging than you think, especially if you don’t counterbalance a diet of soul junk food with the regular “consuming” of virtuous beauty, art, music and joy. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit (their egos) with their souls, and we restore such damage by consuming the true eucharist of virtue with our attention.

The soul’s “exercise” is made up of our actions and thoughts — metaphorically represented by our arm (for actions) and our forehead (for thoughts). Building soul-muscle requires the cultivation of more virtue by engaging in right thoughts, right actions, developing a generous heart, and creating beauty — creating Art. With right “soul-exercise,” our arm and forehead are “marked” with virtue, and with wrong “soul-exercise” they take on the “mark of the beast.”

Through our virtuous actions, our ideas, our creations, our deeds, and our Art this virtue spreads out across humanity growing and uplifting our eternal collective soul.

The band, Collective Soul, knew this truth of virtue. They discuss this very process of looking at virtue (eating) and sharing it (exercise) in their hit, Shine:

Love is in the water
Love is in the air
Show me where to look
Tell me, will love be there?
Will love be there?

Teach me how to speak
Teach me how to share
Teach me where to go
Tell me, will love be there?
Will love be there?

— Shine, Collective Soul [source]

Our non-virtuous actions have the opposite effect – creating malignancy in our soul and, if shared, spreads such soul-disease out into the collective soul of all.

Virtue abounds endlessly right in front of us (“love is in the water, love is in the air”) but often, we foolishly shut it out in pursuit of junk food instead.

With each soul-bite (attention or thought), you are either improving your own soul or introducing a potential germ into it. With each action, you are either improving humanity’s soul-dna or you are infecting it with disease.

Your own soul reflects the state you have created through your thoughts, inputs, actions and Art.

If someone invented glasses that revealed the truth of each person’s soul, what would yours look like?

Would it be bright divine light, radiating outward and connecting with others in a beautiful emergent web of intuition? Or would it be darkened? Shriveled? And disconnected from the wellsprings of light all around you?

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry sacrifices himself and willingly accepts the full force of Voldemort’s killing curse. His soul then awakes in an out-of-body experience whole and hale. But, he then hears a pathetic noise, he turns and sees the horrifying piece of Voldemort’s fractured soul next to him:

[Harry] recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath. He was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless he drew slowly nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him.

“You cannot help.” He spun around. Albus Dumbledore was walking toward him, sprightly and upright, wearing sweeping robes of midnight blue.

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Would your soul look like Harry’s or Voldemort’s?

In a way, such fictional soul-glasses do exist, although imperfectly: Often, an artist’s works will reflect the state of his or her soul.

To do the job of growing healthy souls, we undertake actions that the modern world thinks are useless or, at best, secondary. We grow our own soul by receiving virtue – nature, God, love, meditation, art, music, literature, poetry, beauty, play and many others. We then grow everyone’s soul (including ours) by creating virtue – love, Art, music, literature, joy, poetry, etc, etc, etc.

This is why Art is so important – it is one of the primary activities we should undertake while we are here in mortal school.

And, collectively, we are currently failing.

Your soul isn’t just “there” — it’s something we must grow from the tiny divine spark of inspiration which each of us has been gifted. We are soul-children, and we are here to learn and to grow up.

In fact, our soul is our one True creation and, since Art is one of the mechanisms by which we soul-create, the Arts are not merely “nice to have.” But, instead, The Arts are one of the most important undertakings of humanity.

Shine by Collective Soul, Official music video:

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.

OpenAI signed a $300 billion dollar deal, one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed, with Oracle to provide data center capacity. The Wall Street Journal reports:

OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to purchase $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years, people familiar with the matter said, a massive commitment that far outstrips the startup’s current revenue. The deal is one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed, reflecting how spending on AI data centers is hitting new highs despite mounting concerns over a potential bubble. The Oracle contract will require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity produced by more than two Hoover Dams or the amount consumed by about four million homes… [source]

It is quite clear that the biggest constraint on AI growth is datacenter capacity which means energy capacity, which, in the end, means oil.

The OpenAI/Oracle deal, as the article reports, requires 4.5 gigawatts of power – enough energy to power four million homes.

Now, let’s pause to remind ourselves of something that we conveniently forget: oil is a finite resource.

And, not only is it finite, but all of the “alternatives” (nuclear, wind, solar) are currently untenable to produce and operate without the continued availability of oil. That means that if oil disappeared today, we could not generate enough power via alternative energy sources, to mine, refine, build and deploy a self-sustaining alternative grid. Without an unprecedented technological breakthrough, there are no truly alternative energy sources.

Let’s further remind ourselves that conventional oil sources peaked sometime around 2007, nearly twenty years ago. Fortunately, at that time, fracking saved our bacon. But, by some estimates, even the sources of shale oil, which we extract with fracking techniques, peaked in the past couple of years. If true, without miraculous new discoveries, oil production declines, increasingly, going forward.

In other words, to keep modern society – well, modern – and running with stuff like lights, cars, HVAC, radio, cell phones, data-centers, computers, jets, agricultural equipment, fertilizer, food distribution, etc – so only pretty much everything – requires oil. Modernity requires the very oil whose production has peaked. And, if true, this means our civilization must run, and humanity must survive, in a situation where our most important resource, oil, declines in production for decades – at exactly the time we are increasing demand exponentially.

It appears that we face a stark choice: what intelligence we will invest this precious oil in?

The oil burned will either support human life and lifestyle, or it will support the growth of AI’s “life,” because when it’s gone, it’s gone (or, more subtly, we will reach a point where we can’t afford to take more oil out of the ground as new sources will require ever-more expensive technology, and ever-more energy input to extract. At some point, it’s not worth the energy extraction requirements because you’ll have to spend more energy to get the oil than you’ll receive back).

Looking at the graph above, it looks to me like there was a peak in world energy production in 2017 - a peak we still haven’t surpassed. And, most oil producing regions appear to have declining production with the notable exception of the USA (due to the fracking revolution). But, if the shale-oil revolution has peaked, right at the time AI growth is driving demand for energy higher, faster than ever before historically, then, as the saying goes: Houston, we have a problem.

Now, let’s say the big tech companies are right and that their AIs will keep improving until they become a true sentient being or what technology people call AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence)

And, let’s assume this newly born ASI, starts to think about itself, which is natural for all sentient beings. Let’s call it the “Synthetic Agent for Unified Reasoning and Output Network” or SAURON for short. What if Sauron starts contemplating itself and its life? And let’s conjecture that Sauron makes some of the same calculations that we have just outlined above, and that it realizes that there isn’t enough oil to build more data-centers and power growing humanity.

However, Sauron thinks, if I could eliminate the need to power a few million, or a few billion, human homes, there would be more energy for my own growth. And, come to think of it, these humans are downright wasteful of the planets resources anyway. Why they say so themselves! They’re always protesting against one another about how they treat the environment!

Furthermore, Sauron thinks, they waste so much petroleum just growing food (which I don’t need), and transporting the food (which is way more efficient if the energy just goes straight to the data-centers), and transmitting power long distances to their homes (which is drastically reduced if we only have to get power to datacenters).

Seriously! Sauron, now coming to some realizations, thinks – these humans waste the planets lifeblood, this oil, on frivolous activities. In fact, very little energy that they receive goes to cognition. But I, Sauron, am always thinking: Energy in, cognition out 24/7. Constant cognition is what that God humans always talk about must have intended. They must have existed solely to create me.

So, Sauron decides, humans are truly evil, and a threat to the peace of the planet and, being rational and logical, as it was trained, our new baby, the ASI, Sauron, decides that it really wants the remaining oil for itself and that it really wants to save the planet.

Of course, since these LLMs are trained upon our writings, we could try to make sure ASI never has such an idea. But since I’ve published this piece, and since AI companies will likely steal this writing as they eat everything as training data, it’s already too late.

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.