The Church of Art

Essay: On the importance of art — Is it up to the artists to save us?

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

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

— Terrence McKenna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What went wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do we learn to love again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Church of Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True creators are Artists.

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

So, yes there is hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No pressure.

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