I am calling this blog, “Confessions of an Artistic Mystic.” A mystic, as I use the term, is someone who consciously decides to develop a relationship with those aspects of his or her experience that are beyond the boundaries of his or her conceptual understanding. Alternatively, a mystic is someone who seeks to understand the experience of being human by exploring it from the inside. I am choosing these terms to clarify that I am talking about artistic expression in terms other than the “success, fame and fortune, glamour and glory” perspective that pervades the mainstream artistic paradigm. I am choosing “confessions” in the sense that, if I quit pretending to be normal and actually talk about the way I see the world, this is what it looks like.
For most of my life, I have been drawn to the arts, primarily music, dance, and writing, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but feel deep and essential. I have become deeply interested in the question of what artistic expression is and how it relates to the experience of being human, both individually and collectively. In spite of—or perhaps because of—an almost total lack of artistic “success” in the ways that it is usually measured in this culture, I have had to closely examine the role of artistic practice in my life and to sink into the deeply personal question of, “Why am I doing this?” and the larger question of, “What role does art play in the functioning of our society as a whole?”
About thirty years ago, I made a conscious decision to let go of any goals of becoming “good” or “successful” as a musician and instead to structure my practice time to maximize the ways that music “feeds my soul.” One of the first obstacles that I encountered was the realization that I didn’t really know what I meant by “feeding my soul,” so that question became part of the practice. Out of this decision, and out of my exploration of this question, an approach to artistic practice has evolved that I can only describe as a spiritual practice. To borrow a phrase from Krishna Das, “We do this practice in order to be more alive while we’re alive.” I do this practice in order to become more intimate with all of life and with the experience of being human, which necessarily implies stepping beyond the limitations of the scientific objective perspective that is so endemic in our culture.
As my relationship with artistic practice grew deeper and deeper over the years, I found myself wanting to commit myself to it more deeply. I have experience with the power of commitment, and I wanted to bring that power into my artistic practice, to allow it to focus me and push me deeper into the mystery of the practice and the experience of being alive. This desire for commitment, however, immediately led to the question of, “If I’m going to commit to this practice, what am I committing to?” Reflecting on this, I realized that I had been thinking deeply about this question for decades, that I had a lot of interesting pieces to the puzzle, and it looked like they might be able to connect into a somewhat coherent whole.
I started writing a book. I wrote a hundred pages or so, but then got sidetracked by life and other projects. However, I still feel that these ideas are worth bringing together both for myself, in order to clarify what I am doing in my practice, and for humanity, which has allowed artistic expression to be turned into a commodity, cut off from its essential relationship to our human nature. So, I am deciding to start writing a blog.
Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman says that, when writing a book, the second draft is where you take the first draft and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along. As I have been working on this blog, I’m realizing that a blog like this is like writing your first draft in public. Although I have a vague sense of where I’m going, the best path to get there isn’t clear. Is it even a path? This is not going to be a logical development of ideas that builds to a conclusion. Rather, it feels more like a net or matrix of ideas that connect to other ideas in multiple ways. It’s not always clear where to start.
The focus of this blog will be artistic expression and how it relates to the experience of being human. This will require both an exploration of the nature of artistic expression and an exploration of what it means to be human, as well as an exploration of the dimensions along which these two relate. Our current culture tends to perceive artistic expression as entertainment or decoration, something trivial and non-essential. Most artists know in their guts that artistic expression is fundamental and essential to the human experience, but they often have a hard time articulating why. My goal is to present a clear framework with which to understand artistic expression as an essential part of the human experience. I find that as I get clearer about this, I can take my artistic practice more seriously, which allows me to give myself more whole-heartedly to the practice, which in turn opens me up to a more intimate relationship with all of life.
There are two distinct phases of conscious artistic practice. The first is the exploration of the lived experience of being human and the second is taking what you learned in the first phase and sharing it with the world. In our culture, we tend to see art only in terms of the second phase. That is were artists create a commodity, something that can be judged as good or bad, somethings that can be bought and sold, something that can be measured. One of the central assumptions of our culture is that, “If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.”
In general, as a culture, we have lost sight of the exploration part of the process. Honest artistic exploration inevitably involves opening up to experiences that are beyond the boundaries of our conceptual understanding, and this is scary to a culture based on concepts and ideas. These experiences do not have to be exotic or fantastical to be beyond our conceptual understanding. If we learn to let go of our concepts and ideas, even something as familiar as the experience of breathing can become deep, mysterious, and unfathomable. This is one of the insights of Zen practice, and probably other contemplative practices as well.
This exploration phase of the artistic process can be valuable in and of itself if it is undertaken honestly and seriously. The sharing phase, however, if undertaken without the exploration phase, tends toward triviality, entertainment, and the creation of pretty things. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, listen to what popular music says about the nature of human relationships. There’s nothing really wrong with this. I am not trying to say that the mainstream culture’s artistic paradigm is wrong, and I am not trying to criticize anyone who chooses to engage with the world from within that paradigm. I am rather saying that I am drawn to go deeper, to explore what happens when we step beyond that paradigm. Metaphorically, our current artistic paradigm is like the chatter of the mind in meditation practice. The chatter of the mind is not bad in and of itself, but when we allow it to fall away, we open ourselves to a whole different dimension of what it means to be human.
I see the exploration of consciousness as the new frontier and I know that I am not the only person currently saying that. By its nature, consciousness is something that is best explored from the inside, and conscious artistic practice is a meaningful way to undertake that exploration. The scientific objective perspective, which looks at everything from the outside, is fairly limited here. In recent years, neuroscientists using brain scans and other technologies have been making huge advances, often validating things that mystics have been saying for millennia. However, neuroscientist Nazareth Castellano points out that in recent years as neuroscientists make new discoveries, especially about the ways that our entire body is involved in our neurological processes, the current feeling within the discipline is that we don’t know anything (2021).
This is not a small topic. In exploring it, I will draw on my experience in four different traditions. The first the artistic tradition. I will primarily draw on my experience of my practice over the years as a musician, singer, writer, and dancer, but also on the work that I have done with a number of wonderful teachers. The second tradition that I will draw from is Zen. I have been practicing Zen for forty years and been a formal student for over twenty years. That experience has had a profound effect on me, my perspective on the world, and my perspective on artistic practice. I will, however, do my best to keep things in everyday language, both accessible and understandable to readers who have little or no experience with Zen.
The third tradition I will turn to is the western intellectual tradition. I have a doctorate in mathematics education and have been teaching mathematics for almost twenty-five years. Although I see mathematics and artistic expression as polar opposites in terms of how they relate to the human experience, some of the things I learned in grad school have turned out to be very useful pieces of the puzzle. And the fourth tradition from which I will draw is psychology, particularly the understanding that has developed over the last several decades of the value of the expression of what are often called “painful emotions” and how this expression can facilitate healing and growth. I will draw on both my experience with co-counselling (Re-evaluation Counselling) and my experience in therapy (which has primarily been with Somatic Experiencing).
Psychologist Claudio Naranjo says that he doesn’t start writing a book because he wants to say something, but rather because he wants to take a particular topic apart to examine what manner of thing it is. It is in that spirit that I am undertaking this blog. Already, as I have been writing new posts, I have been seeing new connections between different facets of the topic.
So, we’ll see how this goes. I am writing this for anyone who is interested in the use of artistic expression as a way to explore the experience of being human, as a way to explore human consciousness. I’m not looking to have a massive following, but I am hoping to have at least a few readers because it motivates me to write if I have a sense that someone is reading this. I’ll start out with a combination of new writing and writing that I’ve already done on the topic. I’m going to have to get into some fairly intellectually heavy material fairly early in order to break us out of the confines of the scientific objective paradigm. I’ll throw in some personal memories of experiences that shaped me artistically in order to keep it human. I’ll try to keep it in some kind of a coherent order. Hopefully this will be interesting and valuable to some of you.
In order to limit spam, I’m going to ask people to sign up in order to reply. I’d like people who are replying to my posts to have some experience either with artistic practice or a contemplative spiritual practice. Without some grounding in experience, this topic can get very abstract. But if you have some experience in either of these areas and would like to respond to what I am saying, I’d love to hear from you.
References:
Castellano, N. (2021) Cuerpo, Mente y cerebro: Un nuevo paradigma YouTube interview. https://youtu.be/cZOzzkvwCms at about 12:40. (In Spanish)
I am reading this, and it relates to my current experience. So glad I found your writing!
Yay! look forward to more.