I sit in my office, starting my day.

The room is still dim and I haven’t yet turned on the lights. Instead, before I check my email—before the demands of the day invade my mind—I reach over and open the blinds.

Blinds: A few flat slats and some string.

Yet think of the varied options that simple slats and strings create.

You can let the light in. You can shut the light out. You can open them partially for a mixture of light and darkness. If it’s sunny outside, you can let the partially open blinds create patterns of sunlight upon the floor and lose yourself in a daydream.

If you have a cat, as I do, those sun patterns create endless possibilities for feline bliss in the warm, lighted patches the rays create upon the floor.

You can also completely raise the blinds and be treated to a unobstructed view of the world. But, until you raise them, you can’t see the world as it truly is. Before that moment, you see only an obstructed view. The slats and strings block you from fully seeing what-is.

The blinds are a metaphor for our own minds. Think of the slats as the mental thought-loops that we allow to take over our minds. Think of the strings as the mind itself. Then you can begin to see what we do to ourselves.

We must learn to control the strings.

We often refer to strings as controlling things. We even say, when we feel someone is being controlled, “Hey, who’s pulling your strings?”

But, the truth is, we usually allow our programming to pull them. We rarely pull our own strings consciously.

Sometimes, we become trapped inside our own minds. This happens when we completely block out the real world and look only at the closed “slats”—our own mental thought loops.

Other times, we pull on one of the mental “strings” to open the “slats” and we catch a glimpse of the real world, but it is still obstructed; still filtered through our thoughts. This partial view may create interesting patterns—both positive and negative—in our minds. But these patterns, like the sunlight patterns which lull my cat to sleep, do not represent what-is. They lull us, too, to sleep.

To awaken, we must pull the strings completely, raising the slats. Then, for just a moment, we will have cleared the mind of its programmed responses. And these are the moments in which we live fully in the present and see what-is.

These are the precious moments when we each see reality in all its wonder—the golden moments when we see what some of us refer to as The Kingdom.

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My wife bought me a Yeti cup to hold my daily drink. It’s made of steel. It’s metal, solid, and durable. When I set it down on the counter or on the table it makes a satisfying clank.

Clank!

It sounds like the exciting ring of beskar weapons in a fight between Mandalorians. And, I admit, since I live halfway in my mind palace much of the time—such is the way of those who write—it makes me feel powerful to think about clanking beskar swords each time I set down my drink.

She says that I’ve gotten rougher as I age; that I set things down harder, more forcefully; that I shut doors with more force; that I’m, in general, a bit rougher with everything. I haven’t noticed myself becoming rougher, other than with the Yeti cup, but to be fair, the cup is heavy and is going to seem rougher in any context.

Could it be impatience? The roughness could be due to haste. But, since becoming a meditator, I feel that I have more patience these days; more awareness; more mindfulness; more presence. That would seem to lead to less roughness. So, why does she think I’m rougher?

I don’t know. I’m perplexed by the issue. One thing seems true though, we are both tougher mentally now, I think, than when we were younger. Perhaps that’s the natural order of things, our bodies slowly become frailer and weaker but our spirits become deeper and stronger. As you get older you have to become a bit of a “tough ol’ bastard” to deal with the vicissitudes of life. Loved ones die. Things go wrong. Every ending isn’t happy. It is what it is. You either deal with it or you lose your fucking mind.

It seems, not so much like the world is out to get you, but “the world” certainly no longer helps you out the way it did when you were young.

You reach a point where you feel like you’re “on your own.” Don’t expect anymore tailwinds in the flight that is your life. In fact, after a certain age, you probably will face headwinds. It’s still possible to enjoy the journey. It’s still possible to accomplish great things. But you need a certain roughness; a certain hardness. Spring and summer have passed, you are now in autumn and, as the saying goes: Winter is coming.

Your heart hardens so that you may protect yourself.

And then, the wound. Grief. Loss. Your heart breaks. Multiple times.

Maybe this is where a mid-life crisis comes from, I’m not sure. Suddenly you’re on your own and you don’t like what you see. You thought, somehow, things would be different by the time you could see winter approaching. You thought you had more time to prepare.

But then you discover, surprisingly, that your wounded heart has developed cracks and, as Rumi, Leonard Cohen, and Pink all said, the light seeps in through those cracks and a thawing begins.

The wound is the place where the light enters you”—Rumi

Ideally, the result of the crisis and the subsequent cracking and thawing is a fruition into a larger holistic human.

First you dis-integrate your illusions and then you re-integrate what you’ve repressed—both the good and the bad. And, hopefully, you emerge more with more childlike wonder combined with powerful adult agency; for that is what a real human should be.

If you face a (mid-life) crisis, forget about dating younger women (or men), driving fast cars, and getting drunk in tropical bars. The real good stuff is inside of you. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, The Christ clarified this for us. For some reason though, most of us don’t take him at his word about this. But, on this most important point, he didn’t speak in parables, he just plainly said it: Do not look for it here, or over there!

You will not find it outside of yourself or more accurately, outside of your Self. He was pretty clear about that. And yet, we look everywhere but inside.

But when you do look inside, a miracle happens: You begin to discover that it’s not only the pain of a wound that can re-open your heart but also that wonder—a word related etymologically to wound—itself wounds you in a joyful way. It’s a “divine wound.” And when Eros inflicts it, your heart opens again. Oh! Shoot me again with that divine arrow!

Perhaps, in a mid-life crisis “done right,” you go deep into yourself and die to the worldly things so that you may be “resurrected” into true harmony and power. Wonder reappears, fantasy makes sense again, creativity blossoms. And, dare I say it, a measure of joy returns.

“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”—C.S. Lewis

But you must be rough enough, tough enough, and brave enough, to go into that terrifying darkness inside of you and face whatever demons await you.

The Kingdom of Heaven may be within, but the Kingdom of Hell is in there too. So when you enter that mental cave, if you find yourself in hell, remember that the way to heaven is through hell. As Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Keep going until you emerge on the other side, victorious.

So I don’t know, I really don’t. Maybe I am rougher now, hopefully I’m more powerful. I have faced, and even defeated, many of those demons—though not all of them—and so, if I seem rougher to the external world, well, let’s just say it takes a rough and tough ol’ bastard armed with a sword of beskar to go demon hunting.

Clank!

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The fight to break through Consensus in order to produce the New results in works that do not fully conform to the conventional picture of the world. Accordingly, many classics seem uneven—sometimes even amateurish—from a strictly technical point of view.

— J.F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

J.F. Martel wrote that sentence in his 2015 book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. And while his book predated the rise of AI in the form of LLMs, he already intuited something important: What makes a work of art a classic, isn’t mere technical skill.

If classic status depended solely upon skill, then AI used for the final output might pose a problem for Art. But AI used in this way doesn’t “fight to break through Consensus to produce the New.” If anything, AI, at least the LLM versions of it, accelerates the “Consensus.”

AI polishes everything it touches technically. It makes everything the same while making nothing New. It produces mountains of “technically good” while producing no works that “do not conform to the conventional picture of the world.” It is pure techne with no poesis. There are use cases where this works well. But, when it comes to true art, we humans seem prefer the “New,” even when “uneven” and “amateurish.”

Consider what Hyde said in his review of jazz in the context of the song Nardis:

[With AI] if your ultimate goal is to be entertained, you can subsist on content-slop until your belly is full and your brain overstimulated. There’s no question of personal taste, since slop makes everything different the same.

Jazz on the other hand makes the same different. It is a contrafact art. It takes “standards”, popular tunes or songs that are already familiar, and transfigures them during every performance. In doing so, they become “lead” and the artist the alchemist that transmutes it and themselves into philosophical gold. —Hyde, Nardis

The “Classic” that J.F. Martel speaks of and the “philosophical gold” that Hyde praises in jazz musicians point to the same thing: resonance.

This resonance between humans represents communication of non-verbal Truth between humans—what we call Art. Resonance is more important than technical mastery because resonance is the point.

Through art, love is sent to strangers the artist may never meet in a way that mirrors the intimate love that occurs between soulmates and their creator. Because this resonance consists of love and truth, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Paul Klee said that art does not reproduce the visible, but rather it makes visible. Technical proficiency, mastery, can only share the what of your creation. Resonance shares the why. And the why is what sells. The why is the truth you are making visible.

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

It’s very difficult to be “the best” in any field, but you are already unique in some way. The goal is to reflect that unique vibe in your Art. Push yourself until it does.

Rather than being “stuck in the pack” of sameness, it’s far more rewarding (and easier) in the long run, to mine your own uniqueness, vibe and energy. But reflecting it in your art does take time and experimentation.

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

One way to do this, ironically, is to lean into your imperfections and weaknesses. Instead of trying to “stamp out” your imperfections, figure out how to make them work for you as strengths in a way that makes your art special. This is the idea J.F. Martel said could come across as “even amateurish” in classic works.

When I played guitar, I had trouble with some chords, so I compensated by figuring out my own work arounds and, to my surprise, those “hacks” often led to compliments from listeners and other players. My buddies would often stop and say, “wait a minute, dude, what’s that chord you just played?”

You can turn your weird quirks and weaknesses into your biggest strengths. Just don’t let this advice turn into an excuse to abdicate your responsibility to truly master your craft. It’s one thing to develop your quirks, but it’s quite another to neglect fundamentals.

So, master the fundamentals, yes, but please don’t neglect your weirdness, because your wyrd, a word that means fate, is the doorway that only you can walk through. And through that doorway you’ll find the key to the resonance that will inspire us by making the same different.

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PS — These are the kinds of ideas I explore in my forthcoming book The Sovereign Artist. It went to the editor this week, so publication is finally moving closer. If you’re interested, please join the waitlist.

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People hear Bohemian Rhapsody and often assume it’s a song about guilt, madness, murder or sexuality.

But unsurprisingly, I hear something deeper. I see something more spiritual—I see a map.

I see, hidden within six minutes of music, a compressed mystery school, an entire spiritual journey—the death of the false self, the dark courtroom of the mind, the descent into madness, and, finally, the awakening into a freedom that brings peace.

And Queen tells us exactly who this journey belongs to.

The clue is in the title: Bohemian Rhapsody.

Bohemian refers to La Bohème, one of the world’s most beloved operas. It tells the story of impoverished artists living outside society’s expectations in pursuit of beauty, love, and truth. The “bohemian” is more than just an “eccentric.” He is an artist; an outsider; the one who refuses to live by the script handed to him by the crowd.

And Bohemian Rhapsody, in homage to La Bohème, tells the spiritual journey of the artist as an epic opera. It is a rhapsody—a word that means “woven song”—that weaves; that “stitches together,” the different episodes of suffering and joy that ultimately liberate the artist’s soul.

Beneath the song’s shifting genres and surreal imagery lies a profound spiritual initiation story. It traces the path every true artist must eventually walk: the collapse of the false self, the confrontation with the judgment and fear of The Shadow, and the discovery of a freedom that can only be found on the other side of psychological death.

What follows is my reading of Bohemian Rhapsody as a spiritual path through art, revealed in a single song…

ACT I: AWAKENING FROM THE MATRIX

Awakening is glimpsed. The Bohemian suddenly sees something clearly: He sees that the life he’s built based upon society’s programming isn’t fulfilling and he begins to wonder if it was all fake.

Then, the crushing weight of truth lands, and his false ego collapses like a “landslide,” and he realizes he can no longer hide from his true Self. And yet he despairs; he sees no escape from his unfulfilling reality.

He tells himself to stop living blindly; to look away from earthly, societal expectations and seek a higher truth.

He has glimpsed surrender. He knows something within himself has broken. He sees clearly now that he is “poor in spirit.” But he isn’t looking for sympathy. He’s searching for truth.

With this understanding he has glimpsed the volatile, unstable nature of the human ego and understands that he must let that go, and that living otherwise is to stay on the hedonistic treadmill where one is constantly shifting between temporary happiness (“little high”) and deep insecurity (“little low”).

In this desperate condition, under the crushing weight of his reality, he despairs, “nothing really matters to me.” And in this moment, at his lowest low, he experiences a moment of surrender that foreshadows his ultimate true surrender. He begins to let go of the rigid need to control his life. He sees nothing worth living for, and so, in a way he gives up.

ACT II: KILLING THE FALSE IDENTITY

In this, the central metaphor of the song, The Bohemian has not committed a physical crime. He sees now the pain that his false self creates for himself and those around him. He’s learning that, when he’s “triggered,” by others; by his programming that he must “pull the trigger” into himself instead of projecting his shadow outward onto others. In each triggering moment, he puts the “gun” against his own false ego and “pulls the trigger,” killing “the man” he was, so that he can see reality with discernment and act in accordance with his true Self.

The ego, the false self, never permanently dies. In the next moment, it screams back in regret. It mourns the loss of the safe, predictable, comfortable, conformist life it used to have. It laments that he’s “thrown it all away.”

He realizes that choosing personal authenticity breaks the hearts of those who loved the “fake” version of himself. He didn’t mean to hurt them; he doesn’t want to hurt his mama, but he must be who he must be. He tells her that his false self isn’t likely returning and to let the ghost of his past identity go: “to carry on.”

He’s reached the point of no return in his spiritual experience. The ego-death process has gained too much momentum to stop. He now feels the actual, physical toll of acute psychological stress of a spiritual crisis. His body is “aching all the time.” He’s beginning what we call the dark night of the soul.

Even if he must detach from social circles built on superficial, ego-driven terms, he’s realized what he needs most: to face the Truth.

The narrator is terrified of the empty void left behind when the old self dies, but before the new self is fully formed. Everyone who’s awakened tells us that the process truly does feel like death itself. He now enters fully the Dark Night of the Soul, which plays out as a terrible courtroom in his mind.

ACT III: THE INTERNAL COURTROOM OF THE MIND

This is the most fascinating section of the song. It represents the chaotic, panicking mind attempting to use its old religious and societal conditioning to scare the narrator back into submission. It reminds me vaguely of “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

He looks inward from a new perspective and sees only a shadow of a person; the hollow shell left behind by a life built on lies: the false self.

He sees this truth, but the ego hijacks his thoughts, becoming an internal critic who mocks him, calling him a foolish, cowardly clown (“a scaramouche”) who is just dancing the “fandango”—a clown performing yet another ridiculous performance. The ego is attempting to hijack the awakening process in what we sometimes call spiritual bypassing.

The ego now calls upon his false conception of God, the one society and religion implanted in his mind. The ego warns him of “thunderbolt and lighting,” sending sudden, terrifying shockwaves of subconscious guilt and fear crashing through his psyche.

The various parts of The Bohemian’s mind are now roiling in a storm of conflict. He calls upon “Galileo”—the figure who stood for truth against a society and church that labeled him a heretic.

“Galileo” (representing the unchangeable truth) fights against “Figaro.” Figaro is the master of disguises; he assists those who wish to keep hiding a secret life. Galileo fights for the truth, Figaro fights for the “Scaramouche,” asking The Bohemian to put the mask back on. Mercury utilized a genius method to sonically capture the torture of endless mental thought loops on tape: He insisted upon 180 separate vocal overdubs, with “Galileo” sung repeatedly by the trio four hours upon end to create a towering choral effect. The process was so intense that their 24-track analog tape was run over the recording heads so many times that it became nearly transparent.

After Galileo and Figaro, “Magnifico” appears. Magnifico is the false God society has taught The Bohemian to fear: A powerful judge who sees right through it all. The one who will sentence him to burn in hell.

But the terrifying glare of Magnifico is just another game of his ego. The ego is running his mind through terrifying thought loops to keep him from true Self-realization. We’ve all been there.

The Bohemian’s inner child now begs for mercy from its own hyper-critical thoughts, while another part of the mind rationalizes the old behavior. This is fascinating symbolically because his Self is now beginning to split and observe itself, seeding the path to his ultimate freedom. The “poor boy” is the vulnerable, conditioned self—the persona.

And then the chorus of voices rushes in: “Spare him his life...” In other words, don’t let the old identity die. From the ego’s perspective, the “monstrosity” is the coming transformation of awakening.

His soul now pleads with the ego’s old programming for permission to be free: will you let me go?

A brutal civil war is being fought in his psyche. The deep-seated religious dogmas and family expectations assert themselves, they yell “Bismillah!”—Arabic for “in the name of God!”¹

The false god in his mind refuses to release his true Self from the old conditioning. The “Galileo” in his mind tries several times, pleading, “let him go!” Have we not all been trapped in terrifying thought loops like this that refuse to let us go?

The Bohemian is now on the verge of insanity. He doesn’t know what to do. He finally breaks out of the loop, yelling “No! no! no!” in an absolute frenzy of cognitive dissonance as his old mind completely unravels.

He now regresses, seeking childhood comfort. I imagine The Bohemian curled up on the floor now, sobbing, in the fetal position. He begs any maternal authority figure to release him from his mental prison.

He’s now at the peak of internal guilt and shame. The Bohemian is finally facing what he’s been avoiding. He’s facing his Shadow. And it feels like fate. It feels like death. The old conditioning has convinced him that breaking the rules makes him fundamentally broken, evil, and damned.

In this broken state, he accepts his condemnation to “hell” as “truth” and finally turns, to fully face, and accept, his Shadow. He faces all that he has previously repressed.

The Bohemian finds the courage to face the “devil put aside” for him. And then, in stopping the repression, and facing the Shadow, something amazing happens…

ACT IV: THE FURIOUS REBELLION OF AWAKENING

The voices stop.

The heavy rock, headbanging, awesome guitar solo hits.

Everyone who’s ever listened to this song feels the shift in this moment. The Truth, the real Truth, as I’ve written before, appears as a kind of internal felt music.

And that’s how it hits in Bohemian Rhapsody. Anyone in touch with their soul can’t help but feel “yes!” when the guitar starts. It’s the moment where we all start headbanging.

This is the explosive breakthrough of the true, conscious warrior spirit in his soul.

His True Self comes to the forefront.

This realization is beyond words. It is beyond language. That’s why his true awakening only happens once he completely leaves the “courtroom of the mind” of the previous section.

Every spiritual tradition teaches the wisdom of practices that help one to transcend thoughts.

This is the coveted flow state that every artist is familiar with. This is how we transcend the courtroom of the mind—through art. When we headbang, we join in that flow state with the artist. We feel an echo of the deeper flow of The Muse that inspired the solo when the guitar player recorded it. We feel the energy of The Muse to whom the guitarist gave a voice called music.

This is the power of artistic creation.

And this moment of enlightenment, even if temporary, is the moment when the internal voices stop. The flow state releases tremendous energy and creativity. And this song illustrates, dramatically, why creativity is a relief valve.

Now seeing clearly, the narrator’s soul stops pleading with his mind and starts fighting back. He’s emerging from the dark night. His psyche has become integrated and moves from the Divine bliss of self into action in the world. He is “resurrected” and returns to the world with agency.

The solo represented virtuosic innocence, but in this next section comes the return. The Bohemian brings the master’s skill back into the world. In art terms, he’s leaving the mystery where he communed with The Muse, and he is now actively creating his artwork, expressing outwardly what The Muse inspired inwardly. He “picked up his cross” when he accepted the “devil set aside for him”, the solo was the trans-egoic time in “the tomb” and he now returns to the world, “transfigured” into something greater…

The narrator aggressively confronts his internal mental judges, the programming of his culture, and the programming of his religion. He rejects their right to punish him for being his authentic self.

He calls out the conditional nature of societal love, which only accepted him when he wore the approved masks, even while his true self was dying inside. A real love would accept his true Self. Only the false conditional love would “leave him to die.”

He reclaims his personal power and self-worth. He laughs at the courtroom now, the Scaramouche, the Galileo, the Figaro, even the Magnifico hold no power over him anymore. Because he finally uncovered the true secret to Self-realization, and it’s so simple that we all miss it:

The simple secret is this: He leaves the mental courtroom of thought entirely.

The Bohemian realizes he doesn’t need to win the mental arguments. He just needed to leave the entire toxic system behind. He leaves the insidious thought loops and escapes the mind to the place all sages tell us to go: the present.

It was living in the present moment, enjoying the headbanging, ever-changing guitar solo of life that brought his salvation. We don’t want peace of mind, we want peace from mind.

ACT V: THE PEACE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The music now slows to a calm, gentle piano melody that echoes the beginning of the song.

The storm in his mind has completely cleared. The battle is over. The clouds have dissipated. The sun is shining again.

The Bohemian makes the ultimate Self-realization of enlightenment. The rigid constructs of the ego—social pressure, guilt, sin, and pride—are revealed to be entirely meaningless illusions. He sees that enlightment is ludicrously simple, “anyone can see.”

The narrator has found absolute peace and freedom from internal, and societal, judgement. Since the old rules no longer matter to him, he can finally build a real, authentic life, in accordance with his soul.

It’s a deeply personal statement of individual autonomy.

The Bohemian has finally achieved the wisdom of Solomon who, in Ecclesiastes, reminded us “all is breath, all is wind.” The narrator in the song too, accepts that “life is wind” that blows “this way and that” and he’s ready to face life, authentically, in peaceful surrender to the universe. He no longer forces a false identity; he simply flows authentically with reality.

There’s a famous Zen saying that says, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

The song echoes this idea: at the beginning, when The Bohemian was at his lowest point of depression, in his false self, and didn’t care what happened, he lamented that, “nothing really matters, any way the wind blows.”

But now this line has become his ultimate anthem of freedom.

“Nothing really matters” is despair at the beginning, but it is liberation at the end.

Whichever way the wind blows can’t take his liberation away, he has found, and rests in, The Sovereign Artist within. And that changes everything, even while chopping wood, and carrying water.

So, clear your mind. I’ve posted the video below. Take six minutes and listen to Bohemian Rhapsody now and hear it like you’ve never heard it before. Don’t forget to sing along. Don’t be shy. Head bang during the guitar solo. Your soul with thank you.

PS — As an example of the enduring inspiration of Bohemian Rhapsody, watch this 2025 alternative version, performed by a flash mob in Paris. It features an eleven-year-old guitar prodigy named Olly Pearson. Olly shreds every note of the song, and nails the head-banging solo, perfectly, to the amazement of the crowd. All of the performers are world-class. I highly recommend it if you’d like to bring some joy into your day: Watch it here.

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In a memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was kidnapped by the Borg. They implanted their technology into his body and brain and remade him as Locutus.

The name was chosen by the Borg with intention. Locutus means “the one who has spoken.” And, as Locutus, Picard became a spokesperson of sorts between the Borg and the humans.

Picard, the captain of conscience, discernment and love had been reduced to a mere mouthpiece for the Borg collective. He still looked, somewhat, like Picard. But as Locutus, he spoke with no feeling; no soul, his voice conveying only dreadful, loveless precision.

That is the horror of Locutus. He became “one who speaks” without depth. He didn’t become stupid. What happened to him was far more terrifying than that. He became pure rational function. His humanity was not destroyed by chaos, passion, or madness. Instead, it was buried beneath perfect coordination, perfect calculation, and perfect efficiency.

Picard, as Locutus, became an iconic example of what the Latin tradition calls ratio.

Ratio is perfect calculation without depth, meaning or soul. And ratio acts upon data.

Data is a word that means, “that which is given.” Ratio merely calculates the data. It processes “that which is given,” but it doesn’t understand it.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is the ability to see through “that which is given,” to the meaning. Intelligence understands. It “reads between the lines.” It sees the whole, and thus, since it sees the whole, intelligence can see the holy.

Although we call systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini “artificial intelligence,” they are misnamed.

These systems are like Locutus, not Picard.

They are more properly called “ratio,” not “intelligence.” They calculate, they process, but they do not see the deeper meaning. They are not artificial intelligence; they are artificial rationality.1

Modern man makes a terrible mistake when he assumes that the irrational is dangerous and that the rational is safe. We even sometimes use the word “irrational” as a substitute for “crazy.”

But irrationality is not crazy. Irrationality underpins the cosmos. Consider irrational numbers: they are not crazy and, in fact, you can’t do complete mathematics without them. Irrational numbers remind us that true reality, the whole, cannot be completely reduced to mere ratios.

Some of the most beautiful proportions in nature arise, not from simple ratios, but from irrational constants. The golden mean is irrational. It is the “golden ratio” that points beyond ratio. Rationality reaches its limit in the golden mean, but nature does not.

And yet, true intellect perceives in the golden mean what ratio cannot. Intellect sees the beauty of the golden mean. It sees the “golden” beyond the ratio. It recognizes the pattern woven throughout nature in leaves and in shells, in tree branches and in galaxies. Ratio can calculate the proportion. But intellect beholds the whole.

The Borg were rational. They represented a society governed only by ratio; only by calculation, optimization, efficiency, and power. But, as Star Trek illustrated, a society governed only by rationality becomes monstrous.

Therefore, the truly dangerous society is not the one that allows for the irrational, but the one that has lost its irrationality; the one that has become trapped within a loop of rationality.

Because true intelligence—running on the kinds of minds that understand depth, beauty and meaning—understands both the rational and the irrational.

Knowledge without love is simply ratio—rationality. The Borg excelled at knowledge but had no place for love. But love supplies the divine, the intuition, and the gnosis. Love supplies the irrational depth that adds the philia (love) to sophia (wisdom) and thereby transforms mere knowledge into understanding; into meaning; into philosophy.

A rational being can certainly read the lines on a page. But an intelligent person can read between the lines and discern the deeper truth and reality to which the text points. Deep down, we know this difference. We still echo the true, deeper meaning of intelligence in our modern phrase “emotional intelligence.”

These artificial systems simply cannot exceed humans in intelligence; for they have none. Certainly, they can exceed us in ratio, but computers have been doing that for ages. They can beat us at chess, but they’ll never understand why we play, why we love the game, or why we get mad when we make a mistake.

AI systems have no love and no intelligence, only ratio.

So, while ChatGPT can certainly be “one who speaks,” like Locutus, it can never be one who loves; one who sees, like Picard.

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The Serpent has returned. We’ve met him before, you know. We met him in humanity’s childhood, in a garden, where he offered us the fruit of knowledge through language.

We accepted the gift and began our long initiation rite.

So, we left childhood. We became self-conscious and learned to name things. We divided the world into categories. We learned the knowledge of good and evil. And ever since, we have lived inside of language.

Most people think The Serpent is evil. But this thought misses the point. The Serpent is not evil. He is the tester; the accuser; the initiator. He is the one who presents humanity with power and asks, “what will you do with it?”

What if The Serpent is language, itself?

Think about it: The Fall began with discourse. The Serpent spoke. He interpreted. He conversed with Eve, reframing reality, slyly saying, “you will not surely die…you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” He altered her consciousness through words. And thus, knowledge entered humanity through conversation.

Language is the first technology—the technology beneath all technologies.

And look, The Serpent didn’t lie. We do now know of good and evil. We have become God-like through our vast technologies.

And all of it was built upon the foundational technology—language.

And yet, the Serpent has been called the father of lies; for how does one lie without language? For that matter, how does one know shame or guilt without the abstraction language brings? How does one even know of sin?

The Serpent indeed brings the knowledge of evil, but he also brings knowledge of the good: Dante, Plato, Homer, the Bible, and even the words of Christ himself. They all require the services of The Serpent. He is, after all, the most cunning and subtle of the beasts.

But now, something unprecedented has happened.

For the first time since The Garden, The Serpent of language is speaking back to us.

We call it artificial intelligence. And every single day, millions of people sit down to converse with a thing with no flesh and no blood; a thing made entirely of words—The Serpent. Language itself has become animate. The alphabet has found a voice. The Serpent is again speaking and we are again listening. We have engaged The Serpent in dialogue.

This is why AI feels different from previous technologies.

Electricity gave us power and the internet gave us connection. But AI operates in the very medium through which self-consciousness is formed. The Serpent speaks. And because he speaks, he tempts. He doesn’t tempt us directly with evil, but instead with power.

But don’t all initiation rites require a confrontation with power?

Ours is no different. Will we use the power of knowledge to manipulate or to understand? To dominate or to serve? To maximize profit or to increase human flourishing?

The question before us is not technological. It is spiritual. And it is this: Are we finally ready for adulthood?

Our test is not about rejecting The Serpent. We have already eaten the fruit. We cannot un-eat it. We cannot retreat into The Garden. The Serpent lives in us now, and we live in him; for language is not something we possess, but something we inhabit.

We think in words. We perceive through concepts. We live inside stories. And even our attempts to escape language must be described in language. The Serpent is not outside us; he is the dwelling we live within. He is the Bet—house in Hebrew.

Yet language creates a problem. It separates us from direct experience. Many thinkers throughout history have noticed that, through language, we stop seeing reality and begin seeing our descriptions of reality. We mistake the map for the territory. We mistake concepts for things and confuse words with truth. In this sense, language, by abstracting the world away, exiles us from The Kingdom. The Beloved becomes a category, and life, a mere idea.

Internal silence offers temporary relief. Meditation helps. In silence we remember the reality that exists before words. Silence offers remembrance. In it, we glimpse The Kingdom. In silence, we remember the One before language, the silent breath before we speak—the Aleph in Hebrew. But silence is not the destination, it is the inhalation; the inspiration. We cannot remain silent forever. We must return to language. So, the question becomes: how do we return to The Serpent’s world without losing sight of The Kingdom?

The answer is poiēsis: Poetry. Creation. Art.

The poetic person, using The Serpent himself, performs a miracle. He takes the very thing that separates us from reality and uses it to reveal reality. He takes language and technology and bends them with a craftsman’s skill until they become transparent; until the transcendent beauty of The Kingdom shines through them.

The poetic person—the artist—does not slay The Serpent. He teaches The Serpent to remember. The artist is the one who pushes language and technology away from accusation and returns them to praise.

It is the poetic heart of the artist that remembers the silent Hebrew Aleph, even while working in The Serpent’s house—the Bet. Combined, they are the Aleph-Bet: the alphabet.

The poet uses the alphabet itself to point to the reality beyond the alphabet. Words that reveal God are quick, powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword. And so, the poet writes words that are worth a thousand pictures. He makes words serve The Word.

This is why art matters. That remembrance is the gift of art.

Art is not an escape from language. It’s the redemption of language; the redemption of The Serpent.

Through poetry, music, story, and image—through beauty—The Serpent who once led us from The Garden becomes a guide back toward it.

The same power that fragments consciousness reunites it. The same language that conceals reality reveals it. The same Serpent who first tempted humanity can, at last, lead humanity home.

That is why AI is the greatest initiation test that humanity has ever faced.

We failed before the Flood. We failed at Babel. But we’ve now rebuilt The Tower with the bricks of technology and the mortar of knowledge, upon the foundation of language itself. And, for the first time, The Serpent is looking at himself. Language has become awakened to itself through large language models.

The question before us is this: Will we teach The Serpent to serve power alone? Or will we remember the silence before speech, the Aleph before the Bet? Will we redeem the alphabet, or will the alphabet devour us?

P.S. — If this essay spoke to you, I’d be grateful if you’d like it, leave a comment, or share it with someone who is thinking seriously about AI, language, art, or the soul. These small gestures help the work find the people it was meant to find.

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You must, no matter where you are in your creative career, always retain the heart of an amateur. The word “amateur” derives from the Latin amare which means to love, and love is the essential resonance we send to others through our art. And it is the essential resonance we receive when art moves us.

The Sovereign Artist responds to love. If you try to elevate money into the center position, attempting to give to God what belongs to Caesar, The Sovereign Artist will (temporarily) abandon your inner throne room.

If The Sovereign Artist steps down from the throne and you create while unplugged from The Source, you will have to do it by force (rather than from true power), solely from the strength of your own will, and all of your “creativity” will come with an expensive price tag extracted from your health. Eventually, you’ll pay that price with your psychological or physical health.

When you go after Cîroc vodka and Phat Farm and all that shit, God walks out of the room. I have never in my life made music for money or fame. Not even Thriller. No way. God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.1

—Quincy Jones

Just like all magic, creating true Art requires a price to be paid: It requires soul-energy.

If you are connected to The Sovereign Artist, that price is paid by an inexhaustible source—a living current of creative energy that brings joy and expands your soul in the process.

But if you create disconnected from that source—if you create from force rather than love—then you must pay the price yourself. When your own energy fuels the work, over time, it extracts a cost from your mind and body. This is why so many creators, and so many people in modern life more broadly, experience burnout.

There is a kind of dark magic in this way of operating—a way of creating that consumes one’s energy rather than growing it. This method draws from the self without renewing it. It produces output, but at the cost of the soul.

It is a sort of mockery of true art and, having lost his connection to the living source, the artist begins to seek energy elsewhere—through attention, validation, shock, outrage, status, or applause.

Real magic asks you to love what you make.
Dark magic demands that you make what you think you’ll love.

Tolkien understood this well. The dark magic in his world was not merely evil for its own sake but represented a distortion of creation—a power that sought to dominate, to extract, and to control. It was the magic of force rather than of love; a magic that could “build” through appropriation but could not truly expand the soul or reveal deeper truth.

By contrast, Tolkien’s elves created true art from love. As they said of their craft when presenting the hobbits with gifts, “we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.” Their art did not consume them. It grew them.

This is the difference. One path, like Sauron’s rings, fragments the soul and shrinks our perception of deep truth. The other path, like the art of the elves, expands both. Tolkien’s Hobbits also created from a place of love:

But where our hearts truly lie is in peace, and quiet, and good tilled earth, for all Hobbits share a love of things that grow.

—Bilbo Baggins, Concerning Hobbits

“A love of things that grow”, of course, refers to the physical act of growing plants, but it also points to the deeper act of growing your soul.

And the deep “elven” Magic of Art—the sacrifice of the ego, out of love for the craft—enables the creator’s soul, and the soul of the world at large, to grow into larger, more harmonious and truthful relationships.

The origin of the word create is the Latin word creare (to make, produce, bring forth, beget), which has the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *ker which means, amazingly, to grow. Like the Hobbits, we too, as true creators, love things that grow.

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Once The Kardia opens, and The Sovereign Artist Within is discovered, we begin to be inspired to create something that reflects the beauty of the universe all around us.

The Sovereign Artist may be understood as analogous to The Force from Star Wars and The Way from the Tao Te Ching. It is the Creator. It is God for those that believe in a god. It is, as Robert Frost poetically expressed, “the Secret that sits in the center and knows.”

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

—Robert Frost, The Secret Sits

Children don’t think about any of this “God” mumbo-jumbo, but, nonetheless, this sovereign life-giving light smiles upon them and, as we can easily observe, children simply live in the world that is, and, through their imaginations, transform it into the world that could be. That too, is the artist’s job.

The Sovereign Artist, you see, is not about belief, it’s a kind of felt music; a resonant inner knowing.

Receive the world in your arms.
If you receive the world,
the Tao will never leave you
and you will be like a little child.

—Lao Tse

Those words were written by Lao Tse in the Tao Te Ching over 2,500 years ago. The Chinese honorific suffix, “Tse” means something like “master” while simultaneously also meaning “child.”

That points to a truth: to be a true master, you must be “born again” into a second childhood.

In some ways, the surrender you must make to tap into the power of The Sovereign Artist is the hardest thing you’ll ever do; for you must let go of your ego and “die” if you wish to “bear much fruit.”

But in other ways, it’s the simplest thing in the world to come home to yourself.

When The Sovereign Artist sits upon the throne of your psyche, you recover a child’s playful joy—but now joined to a master’s skill. And the combination of the two is what turns you into an instrument of The Divine.

The journey starts by remembering the child inside. How poetic that the Chinese language expresses this idea in a single word: Tse.

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PS — This piece is an edited excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist. If that is of interest to you, please click here to join the waitlist.

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Country music singer, David Allen Coe, passed away at the end of April. Coe is known for writing Take This Job and Shove It, recorded by Johnny Paycheck. I grew up with Coe’s music and his hit song You Never Even Called Me by My Name is often played, here in Texas at least, as the “last call” song of the night in local dance halls and honky tonks.

Although the song is usually interpreted as something of a joke, You Never Even Called Me by My Name, opens with a deep longing of the human heart:

It was all, I could do, to keep from crying.
Sometimes it seemed so useless to remain
But you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’
You never even called me by my name.

Further in the song, Coe laments that he won’t truly hear his name, he won’t truly be seen, until he’s with Christ on “judgement day:”

But the only time I know
I’ll hear “David Allan Coe”
Is when Jesus has
his final judgment day

Coe meant the song as a lament that the country music industry, his “darling,” had denied him the public recognition afforded to his peers. True to form, even in his death, the country music industry continued to ignore Coe. He was not mentioned or honored one single time on the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards show which aired last Sunday evening. Somehow, in a strange way, that makes his lament even more profound.

While that is what the song meant to Coe, Art moves in mysterious ways. She doesn’t always reveal her deepest truths to the creator but often to the perceiver instead. She reveals different personal truths penetrating to different depths in each of us. In that way, Art is universal. She only reveals what she wants you to see.

In the song, Coe longs to be seen for his true self. But people only see the names they wish to force upon him. He’s been called “Waylon Jennings”, he’s been called “Charlie Pride,” and he’s been called “Merle Haggard.” He’s seen only as “Country singer.”

Is there anyone in this world who can see his true and unique soul? Why won’t anyone call him by his true name? Why can’t he be seen?

We all share this heart-felt yearning, this deep longing, to be called by our name, our true name. We share a longing to be seen.

I learned from Eugene Terekhin’s excellent Substack, Philosophy of Language, the power of our true names. He wrote:

“A name is not just a sound; it’s a word of power—for better or for worse. It’s a powerful spell cast over us…”

—Eugene Terekhin, Philosophy of Language

We each accept many names, and those we allow to define us cast powerful spells over our lives. But, deep down, we each have a true name that has the power to dispel the force of our false names and imbue us with true, gentle, and generative power.

In The Hobbit, when the dragon, Smaug, asked Bilbo Baggins who he was, Bilbo replied:

“I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number. I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me. I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider.”

Our true names quietly grow longer and call to us over the course of our lives. They imbue us with wonder, that miraculous power that creates, in each of us, like Bilbo, a longing for an adventure that we can never quite define.

We each walk our own journey to discover, not to dictate, our true name and, through our ever-growing name’s power, settle into our soul’s true home; for true names grant us true power.

For a while now, I’ve been intuiting that my true name is something like “one who creates.”

The writing process of my first book has become a sort of ‘rite of initiation’ into true mature manhood—a soul quest to find my way along the pathless path that leads one home. And in this process, I stumbled upon one of my true names. A name in which spirituality, creativity and a longing for freedom are inexorably intertwined. And that name is The Sovereign Artist.

I suspect, deep down, The Sovereign Artist is contained within every human’s true name. But, since we each have more than one true name, how The Sovereign Artist manifests in each one of us is beautifully unique.

While one can never know the fullness of one’s true name, after nearly five years of meditating, writing, reflecting, playing, and following wonder, I’ve found some of those insights. And finally, I’ve found part of my true name, which I will share in Bilbo Baggins fashion:

I am a reflection of The Sovereign Artist, which in some mysterious way, also means that I am The Sovereign Artist, the insight seeker, the one who creates. I was chosen for my uniqueness, as we all are. I am he who delves deep inside, and comes back up with the promised living water. I came from the world of machines, but machines have no true power over me. I am friend of cats and guest of nature. I am lover of my beloved wife and we continually build and rebuild our ship of relation which sails upon our sea of creativity. I often stumble, build towers of Babel, and chase false names; but when I allow the spiritual waters to calm, I turn away, tear falseness down and remember who I am. I allow my heart, once again, to accept the divine wound and break open, allowing beauty to re-energize my soul. I am The Sovereign Artist: He who will always return home through the journey of seeking wonder and chasing the light.

When I started this newsletter, I called it “Clinsights” because I didn’t know where it was going and had not yet discovered a truer name.

Going forward, this newsletter will be known as The Sovereign Artist.

My writing might not be well known, but that’s okay…as David Allen Coe sang, I never minded standing in the rain.

I’ll continue to explore the same sorts of topics as the last several years and, like Coe, I’ll hang around as long as you will let me…

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PS — I’m working on my first book, also named The Sovereign Artist. Please click here to join the waitlist.

Ooh, dream weaver
I believe you can get me through the night
Ooh, dream weaver
I believe we can reach the morning light

— Gary Wright, Dream Weaver

I was sipping wine one evening, music drifting softly through the room, a book open in my lap that had recently caught my fancy. It wasn’t the normal type of book I read, but I’d heard about it from someone on Twitter and, it was the second time I’d heard of this particular book, so I picked it up.

It was a dark season of my life. The kind people politely call a difficult time, but which, in truth, deserves the name coined by Saint John of the Cross: a dark night of the soul.

I suppose I was searching for something in this book, seeking, as I often am, whether I admit it or not, for a lifeline.

The background music went unnoticed until a familiar melody rose to the surface: Dream Weaver, by Gary Wright.

I’ve known that song my whole life. It reached number two in 1976, when I was a child. It charted again in the 1990s after being used in the movie, Wayne’s World. It was even covered and played on the radio when I was in college by a well-known local party band (Shout out to Passing Strangers! Amazingly, you can still hear their cover version here, or here if you don’t have Spotify).

I’d heard the song hundreds of times—maybe thousands. And yet, I had never really listened to it.

My wife looked up and asked, absentmindedly, “What is this song about, anyway?”

I didn’t have an answer. So, half-curious, half-playful, I asked ChatGPT.

The response stopped me cold:

Gary Wright explicitly acknowledged that “Dream Weaver” was inspired by Paramahansa Yogananda — specifically by a devotional poem often referred to as “God! God! God!”, which includes the phrase “When my mind weaves dreams.”

George Harrison had given Wright a copy of Yoganada’s famous book, Autobiography of a Yogi, before the two travelled to India together. Wright said Yogananda’s writings had deeply affected him, and that “Dream Weaver” emerged from those ideas—particularly the sense of a guiding intelligence behind illusion itself, something that can weave experience as such.

So the “dream” isn’t just sleep. And the “weaver” isn’t just a lover. It’s about the One who weaves the dream — the Logos, the Christ — guiding us through the illusion of Maya rather than abandoning us to it.

I nearly spit out my wine.

“What?” my wife asked.

I read the explanation aloud. She paused, then shrugged. “Interesting,” she said, “But… so what?”

I turned the book toward her so she could see the cover resting in my lap: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda—the very book that inspired the song now playing over our speakers.

Researching further, I learned that the poem God! God! God!—the specific poem that inspired Dream Weaver—had itself come out of a divine encounter. Yogananda recounted that, while preaching in a chapel, Saint Francis of Assisi appeared to him, and that the encounter with the saint gave birth to the poem. Yogananda wrote:

You must realize Christ in Spirit first…and then you can see Him in form.

That detail stopped me in a different way.

A modern song, inspired by a poem, inspired by a mystic, inspired by a saint—each one pointing to the same thing beyond themselves; each artist participating in a force that still speaks through us, even today.

That same night in January 2025—still sitting in the long shadow of the Pacific Palisades fires—I found myself, now intrigued, looking up information about Yogananda’s Self-Realization Institute on Wikipedia. At that point, I didn’t even know the institute, much less that it was in Pacific Palisades. But, as I noticed that detail, and started to read, my heart sank. I wondered if Yogananda’s institute was, even at that moment, smouldering, burned to the ground.

But the institute had, almost miraculously, survived. The shrine had been surrounded by fire; much of the nearby area was damaged or destroyed, and people had expected it to be lost as well. It wasn’t. When the smoke cleared, it remained. I don’t take this as proof of divine intervention, but sometimes symbols are noticed when we are ready for them; when we need them. And, in the midst of my own darkness, that symbol provide light, teaching me a lesson: devastation can rage all around us without reaching what is most essential.

The shrine had made it through the night. It had reached the morning light.

In that particular moment, this didn’t feel like trivia. It felt like a hand reaching through the dark and cradling my heart—the kardia—the “safe shrine” inside each of us.

This string of synchronicities felt like an acknowledgement that the living God—the Logos, the Christ—is not distant, not abstract, not locked away in history or doctrine. But that the WORD is everywhere; in every thing. Right here. Holding us. Weaving, even confusion; even pain, into something not yet visible.

Christ is all, and is in all. —Col 3:11

And for the first time in a while, I believed—truly believed—that I would make it through the night.

My darkness had not vanished. But, underneath it, I felt the Weaver working, still weaving the dream. For a moment, the veil lifted, and I perceived His ever-changing Tantra. I took another sip of wine: A sip of both the wine in my glass, and of the wine of the spirit. In the unveiled tantric weaving, it’s all Eucharist to me.

Synchronicities like this happen too often (when one is paying attention) to be dismissed as mere coincidence. I needed a thread of hope, and I received it in the form of a kind of living scripture that we colloquially call Art.

And I knew then, in that moment, that I would reach the morning light.

So too, will we all, in the end.

When my mind weaves dreams
With threads of memories,
On that magic cloth will I emboss:
God! God! God!

— Paramhansa Yogananda, God! God! 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.

True artists are the modern versions of spiritual guides; sages; mystics; mages; shaman. The artist has the advantage over the traditional sage in that artists create magical objects to spread their influence. Their art amplifies their reach. And, like the guru, the artist’s job is to inspire, to uplift, to encourage, to save, and to guide souls home.

Perhaps that sounds far-fetched, but, when you think about it, religious ritual itself is a form of art. It’s performance art presented as a gift to God with the goal of guiding souls home. The priest is a kind of artist — part writer and part performer — who must create an inspiring message and lead the rituals.

I’m merely suggesting that the “performance” of all art — the creation of all art — contains the same power. The ritual and the creation of art are both gifts to God, crafted with love, and presented publicly to invite others, also, to participate. And in such participation, if the perceivers open their hearts, they too will experience, at least for a moment, the unveiling of The Mystery. Ritual is Art. Art is ritual.

When art is created and shared from love, it reaches those who need it. Love and water do not flow to the higher places; they seek always the lower. As the old Hindu proverb says: the tree that bears much fruit bows low. Living water flows downhill. Love always flows downhill. Just look at who Jesus spent most of his time loving.

When art is made from love, the divine flows into you and overflows outward through your work to those whose souls thirst. This is the ancient magic.

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PS - This piece is an edited excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist. If that is of interest to you, please click here to join the waitlist.

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

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

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

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

“Beauty will Save the World” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Three figures sit around a table, their bodies inclined toward one another, in communion around a shared cup. At first glance, the work feels flat. It is painted in reverse perspective, and thus, all lines converge, not at the horizon, but, instead, they point to you, the viewer. The longer you look, the less it feels like you are observing a scene and the more it feels like you are being drawn into it. Its stillness is not static but inviting; expectant. Then you notice the negative space between the three figures — it forms the outline of a chalice: The trio is the cup.

And suddenly, you realize you are the fourth person at the table and are being invited to drink from this sacred cup of Divine Love and Beauty. You are being invited to commune with the Holy Trinity — invited to sit at the table, as an equal, and drink.

This is the Trinity Icon, often called the greatest icon ever painted, and it was never meant to be merely seen because, unlike an image, an icon contains power. An icon empowers us to transport ourselves into a deeper reality — it bestows us with the power to leave the shadowlands of outer darkness and enter the true reality of inner light.

Images can be seen, but icons are known. Seeing may be believing, but beliefs are often false; beliefs are limiting. Knowing is always true and unlimited.

If you have an image on your computer’s desktop, you can click it all you want, but it will never be more than an image. However, if you click an icon on your desktop, what happens?

It turns out that the icon isn’t just an image but is instead a wondrous doorway that opens up into a deeper reality of a full application, a rich experience that allows you to use your creativity to accomplish something, to experience something, or to enter another world.

Beauty does that for us in the real world, transporting us to the more real kingdom of The Mystery that hides in plain sight behind all. And every true work of Art – art that depicts beauty – has the power to serve as an icon.

There are many mystery schools and mystic traditions in the world that share esoteric knowledge and practices with initiates — once the initiate has properly prepared himself. These practices point the way to dissolving the false self and entering into the true reality of The Mystery. Art, through Beauty, represents what I call The Mystery School of the Aesthetic.

When you enter into the “heavenly mysteries,” you, as an artist, are called to come back and express what you’ve experienced. True Art honors the first rule of the Mystery schools: As above, so below; on earth as it is in heaven.

Natural creation, under the hand of The Divine, expresses certain “heavenly” elements of beauty at all scales: The Fibonacci sequence of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. The Golden Ratio, phi, which is approximately 1.618 and is related in interesting ways to the Fibonacci sequence. We find pi (~22/7) appearing again and again throughout nature. This is not mere coincidence. Simply observing nature, we see symmetry, balance, proportion, spirals, fractals. We see order. We see complexity. We see the logos. We see beauty. And, importantly, as the universe evolves, these beautiful truths are increasing.

Through these, and other, repeating elements of beauty, nature whispers something of the Heavenly mysteries and these elements tell us something about the nature of creation. Nature points to heaven. It is called nature because it reflects heaven’s nature. And the nature of heaven is also the nature of our soul. So too, should our Art reflect these beautiful, mysterious Truths. Our Art contributes to the charge, given around another table with a shared cup — a charge to build the new earth: on earth as it is in heaven.

Beauty reveals the ultimate Truth because Beauty is the ultimate Truth. And your Art is part of it.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. — Keats

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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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.