The Mystery

Essay: Our attempts to express The Mystery are what we call Art.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, The BoldBrush Way (The Sovereign Artist’s Guide to Making and Marketing Art). If you wish to be notified when the book is available, please join the waitlist by clicking here.

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The Mystery

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

There are no words.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is a lie.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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