Question (SURREALISM NOW!): Phil, in your book, “DRINKING LIGHTNING”, you discuss the artist being, “plunged into paradox” (from page 143), what comes to mind is, at what point does the transformation of the artist take place? Does the transformation of the artist take place while he/she is in the depths of the abyss or when they are resurrected from it, if resurrected is the proper word to use in this question?
Answer (PROF.PHIL): “A transformation of consciousness via an integral life practice and art is a mysterious process. It can be sparked by an event through any life-passage, or even during some ordinary non-dramatic activity. Fears, ignorance and the shadowy archetypal characteristics dwelling in all the realms associated to the office of ego-central enamels over the fine jewel of illumination inherent in everyone. A profound experience can shake the jewel free of its limited and false identifications revealing a new light of awareness. It may involve a painful event, the unknown, or paradoxically, an extremely pleasant or ecstatic experience, or both. The specific event I referred to in my first book, "DL" 1, is an example of 'the dark night of the soul', and is one of many experiences that can initiate a spiritual transformation or shift in awareness.
In the case of the ’dark night’, a shift in consciousness is attained after one has moved through the deepest and darkest corners of the psyche. In this instance the modern term ‘psyche’ is used in exchange of ‘soul’. It is a period of utter emptiness, abandonment and desolation in which all false identities, fear of death; even faith and hope is ripped and stripped away. A positive outcome from this arid and desolate experience is not guaranteed. We know of many artists and mystics that have experienced the dark night, total soul-loss, and great and lofty states as well, only to suffer a total psychic collapse and fall into unendurable insanity or a life-threatening illness. This is also the way of the once-wounded now-healed shaman. For this reason, it becomes important for the visionary-types to incorporate a contemplative practice along with artistic production. A positive result would be, to use your term, a kind of ‘resurrection‘, but perhaps more aptly described as a 're-integration' of the psyche, soul or consciousness. Having passed through the fire of opposites at the bottom of the abyss, one arrives at a new place of non-dual existence. The ego has been redirected, reconstructed as a force of the will to execute a higher creative and inclusive mission as opposed to its former misdirected and selfish function of grasping at personal gratification and acknowledgement. The personality becomes more inclusive instead of exclusive.
Out of a transformative experience, the ego, of which we are unconsciously and semi-consciously adhered too, even a puppet of; becomes recognized as not the true self. The soul-shaking event awakens an awareness that the former self was conscious only through dualities and false identifications that the ego attached itself to. It is bound up with bodily organizations and mental happenings that are subject to change and decay; it is, therefore, only an ephemeral, phenomenal self locked into an image generated by the duality of mind. This plays itself out as: I am an ‘artist’, or I am a “doctor”, or I am “important’, “I am greater than“, “I am separate and unique from everything“, "I am this – or I am that . . .", I am “_______ (fill in the blank)”. We can change our vocation, our jobs, our actions, and today - even our gender. We are not our actions; not the body, nor the actions, thoughts and the associations of ‘mind’, we only mistakenly identify our 'egocentric self’ with them. In truth, we are only the “I AM” part of the equation, of which the ‘thought-free’ state of pure consciousness gives us a glimpse of. So who are you when you are not ‘thinking’ and simply ‘aware’ ?
In summation, we can say that the word ‘resurrection’ in this case is better defined as an initial act of ‘slumber’ toward a full ‘awakening’. That the path for the creative mystic is at first a diminishing and afterwards of an increasing realization of all the possibilities intrinsic to the human being through a ‘re-integration’ of consciousness. It is the reunion of essence with Essence, and must be done by himself within himself. It is a return to the source and well-spring of life, from which all life, and therefore art, originates.”
Question (SURREALISM NOW!): Phil, do you agree that in essence the artist is a scientist?
Answer (PROF. PHIL): “Some of the finest achievements of Western European civilization have been in the domain of science. Since analysis and logic have proved themselves to be such sufficient tools in the advance of scientific knowledge, there has been a tendency among the heirs of Western European culture, more and more, to regard them as the only valid tools of knowledge. They are, however, not the only tools of knowledge. As the West built increasingly refined instruments to penetrate deeper into the world of matter, with the same intensity the spiritual elite of the Far East practiced to become themselves refined instruments. By following a strict daily routine, and the hard training laid down by the schools of yoga and the many mystery schools and wisdom traditions, they became highly sensitive tools. Because of this they were able to penetrate beyond the veil of matter to what is, for the ordinary man, an invisible and unknown cause.
Our Western medieval ancestors acknowledged two valid ways of attaining knowledge. The first was through ratio, i.e., discursive reason, the second through intellectus. The word ‘intellectus’ is not easy to define exactly. It carried something of the meaning of intuition or creative insight, looking within, or imagination, in the sense Blake used the words, reality of the imagination. Intellectus was considered a higher faculty of the mind than ratio; one capable of bringing human beings to a more profound knowledge than could be gained through discursive reason. This is the vivifying force of a spiritual imagination working with interpretation grounded in faith; this is the supernal dimension in an art of the spirit.
Science, Art, Philosophy and Religion each dwell in their own parallel domains and at times each discover something the other did not, due to their unique qualities. For example, in Leonard Schlain's book: ART & PHYSICS - Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, Shlain proposes that the visionary artist is the first member of a culture to see the world in a new way. Then, nearly simultaneously, a revolutionary physicist discovers a new way to perceive the world. Escorting the reader through the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern eras, Shlain shows how the artists' images when superimposed on the physicists' concepts create a compelling fit, not only a match, but that art often came in advance of scientific discovery through a unique psychic-like navigation, and expressed through an aesthetic visual language.
In a conversation on art and science with my friend Ken Wilber, he said to me; ".... Science cannot change the eye of flesh, only Art can do that". Indeed, the problem in the contemporary art world today is that when Science married Industry, Art became lost and absorbed in the ceremony. The guiding lights of truth, beauty and goodness in Art are being strangled in the wilderness of a contemporary art that often seeks the approval of science and industry. In actuality, both the artist and the scientist seek after Truth, but through different modes of exploration and by way of entirely different domains, and one does not rule over the other. Schopenhauer gives a clear and poetic understanding in describing the differences between the scientific and artistic natures when engaged in the search for truth.
“While science, following the unresting and inconstant stream of the fourfold forms of reason and consequent, with each end attained sees farther, and can never reach a final goal nor attain full satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the place where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and has it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in that stream was a small perishing part, becomes to art the representative of the whole, an equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; the course of time stops; the relations vanish for it; only the essential, the Idea, is its object. We may, therefore, accurately define it as the ‘way of viewing things independent of the principle of sufficient reason’, in opposition to the way of viewing them which proceeds in accordance with that principle, and which method of experience is of science. This last method of considering things may be compared to a line infinitely extended in a horizontal direction, and the former to a vertical line, which cuts it at any point. The method of viewing things which proceeds in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason is the rational method, and it alone is valid and of use in practical life and in science. The method, which looks away from the content of this principle, is the method of genius, which is only valid and of use in art.”
Schopenhauer goes on and describes the eyes of science as looking out through Aristotelian spectacles while Platonic lenses enhance the eyes of art:
“The first is the method of Aristotle; the second is, on the whole, that of Plato. The first is like the mighty storm, that rushes along without beginning and without aim, bending, agitating, and carrying away everything before it; the second is like the silent sunbeam, that pierces through the storm quite unaffected by it. The first is like the innumerable showering drops of the waterfall, which, constantly changing, never rest for an instant; the second is like the rainbow, quietly resting on this raging torrent. Only through the pure contemplation described above, which ends entirely in the object, can Ideas be comprehended; and the nature of ‘‘genius’ consists in the pre-eminent capacity for such contemplation.” 2
In light of that, referring to an artist as a kind of scientist does not elevate the nobility of an artist for h/she is already ennobled. We have been so saturated with science as 'savior'; science as the only valid form of truth, that all else has taken a back seat or even an irrelevant or inconsequential position to a new Scientism that has crossed-over its domain. We do not need to crown an artist as ‘scientific’, as the coronation does not bestow a higher station or role for the artist than they already have, for science is not above art, and the artist already rests upon a noble seat.
Nonetheless, the artist, having engaged and accomplished a psychological and spiritual transformation, we can make the analogy and consider some artists to be pioneering 'scientists', in the sense that he or she can choose to use their art in the manner of a consciousness cartographer and psychic navigator for humankind. We can see evidence of that in the works of Blake, Jules Verne, the pointillistic marks of the Impressionists before instruments enabled the visibility of atoms, the early Dadaists and Surrealists, and even in some of our contemporary visionaries. But in the end we must never forget that Art is itself, already a royal domain, and the artist a noble servant and messenger of truth. Maimonides, James, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Arietti, Schiller, Hegel, Heidegger, Huxley, Coomaraswamy, Einstein and a host of others treat the aesthetic journey and spiritual imagination as a genuine and legitimate faculty in perceiving ultimate Reality. Every domain of human endeavor can potentially be a unique contributing agent to an integral life.”
Question (SURREALISM NOW!): Phil, do you agree with HEGEL, that “instinct-like productiveness” and its “unconscious operation” cannot be explained by the artist to the non-artist on how he/she achieved his/her results?
Answer (PROF.PHIL): “While it is true that many creative productions have come about through unconscious forces that seem unexplainable, there have been a number of testimonials by artists, scientists and mystics as to their personal sources of inspiration and their process of invention, but this has been a rarity. Hegel may be accurate in suggesting that artists, in general, lack the ability to articulate their aesthetic experience and creative process to the non-artist. That is understandable given that the artists’ experience is grounded in a visual language and begins where words end and can often fail us.
In my travels and encounters with creative workers I have also found Hegel‘s stance to be generally true. In addition, I found many creative workers to be proud of their inability to articulate their creative process, believing that to be a rather romantic place to be in; an ideal stance that proved how mysterious and exotic their personal artistic journey is. After all, if it cannot be explained, it must be an extremely transcendent experience. I refer to such artists as Promethean, for they bring fire to the earth from a source beyond themselves. With Promethean artists, it is not always knowledge but the quest for it, which they find exciting, and it would seem for them to be something trite and obvious about a universe which permitted itself to be wholly known. And the unknown is also the obscure, the ineffable, and the mysterious, which can only be exquisitely expressed through art. Integral creative workers play with the clay of illusion, but an illusion that is porous and where reality peeks through and contains some element of beauty, truth or goodness that penetrates the grossest and thickest camouflaging agent of the Absolute, the veritable tapestry of life. This kind of art serves as a pausing agent that suspends the mind and worldly illusions, which even seconds ago appeared so very real, enhancing our awareness that the world as we know it is a simulated play, printed out by Universal Mind in cooperation with our Personal Blue-Print, if you will. If an artist cannot articulate their personal blue-print, their own schematic connection to the grand scheme of things, their art will still serve its purpose. We are also fortunate to have insightful beings from many areas of study to help artists and non-artists alike to begin to understand the marvelous mechanisms of art and creative invention on multidimensional levels.”
Question (SURREALISM NOW!): Can you elaborate on KANT and his, “CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT” in this matter relative to the above question, and also how the artist’s results come into being?
Answer (PROF.PHIL): “I admire Kant's accomplished awareness in relating his perspective on cosmology, but at times, in the realm of aesthetics and art and the relationship between the creative worker's experience and the universe, I believe he falls short and his perception breaks down and becomes rather confined. In my opinion, this failing is due to Kant’s heavy-weighted reliance on a fundamental religious dogma that fragments his otherwise integral approach.
An atomistic theory in philosophy in which experience is composed of distinct sensations between which the mind interposes connections is common to such English philosophers as Locke, Berkeley and Hume but denied by William James and other pragmatists. William James retorted by asserting that experience comes to us as a continuous whole in which the mind interposes distinctions, not connective associations. Consciousness, in James’s words, ‘does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. On the contrary, it is a ‘continuum,’ in which the relations between the different elements are experienced just as truly and directly as the elements related.' 3
Kant, like James, in his Critique of Judgement, as well as in his Principles of Understanding, and as an Objective Idealist insisted upon the fact that our experience is given to us not as a mosaic of little bits, but as a connected whole. In this perception, and many others, Kant exhibits profound insights but the very same perception loses its continuity when expounding on the cause and effects of artistic production. When philosophers tread upon aesthetic ground they inevitably rub up against the questions of the human artist versus divine creative power and manifestation, moral character and separation or inherent connection to divine forces. It is here that I relate more strongly to other philosophers like James, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Coomaraswamy, Arietti, Wilber, Feurstein and others.
In my opinion, for an artist to become a genuine vessel of higher vision; a greater realization of h/her creative process eventually becomes more emphasized. That is, accuracy in identifying with one's true source of creative power will effect the rate and expansion of growth for the artist and therefore their art as greater attunement unveils. When an artist becomes intimately acquainted with their creative process they can work with it, know when to infuse it or surrender to it - as called for. Hegel's view on the marriage of art, matter and spirit as a source of original knowledge is especially insightful in this regard.
I believe Kant's view on the realm of spirit-art-matter, ultimately falls prey to a moralistic hierarchy of dualism. If we compare Kant's "Critique” with Hegel's "Logic, Notion and Idea" we find a number of examples that illustrate a more sublime awareness with Hegel. For example: we enter an incredibly radical passageway constructed by Hegel on the spiritual supremacy of man’s creativity over nature. Something that would, in Kant's view, be extremely blasphemous and outrageous. Hegel's theory certainly disturbs many, particularly artists who embrace a patriarchal dogma and experience Nature as not only their source of inspiration but as the supreme manifestation of divine art by the hand of God, over and above any human creative worker. But Hegel’s point is powerful and is more about transmission of awareness than fundamental hierarchy.
Granting that Hegel has proved the necessity of beauty, has he proved the supernatural necessity of art? For nature has a beauty too, as he concedes, and Kant, for example, gives natural beauty the commanding place in his moralistic theory. But Hegel----is quite clear that “the beauty of art stands higher than Nature”. 4 Hegel states that the beauty of Nature bears an imprint of the Idea, but a dimmer and lower one than is borne by the works that directly proceed from the human spirit, making Spirit and the Absolute more comprehensible from man to man, than from Nature to man.
“The hard rind of Nature and the everyday world of man’s artistic creations seize upon spiritual values and capture them with “greater” purity and clarity. And for this reason they offer more difficulty to the mind in breaking through to the Idea than do the products of art”.
“A work of art is of higher rank than any product of Nature whatsoever.” 5
These statements are perhaps disturbing, but also fascinating, logical and incisive, in that Hegel’s view stems from the fact that a human being can relate in a more direct manner from man to man than Nature to Man, or from a Patriarchal God to man, in awakening the forces that illuminate the perennial questions, answers, awareness and meaning of life. Hegel does not place man above God, but man above the manifestation of Nature as a mode of communication and spiritual knowledge. A tree does not awaken consciousness in man, although it may stir a sense of beauty and awe within us. If all of us could easily claim enlightenment sitting by a river, as told in Hesse’s story of Siddhartha, then Hegel would have no ground to stand on, but such is not the case. Hegel’s point is simple, in that man communicates to other men in an artistic language more directly then the experience that can be had through the appreciation of Nature’s beauty alone. In addition, while Nature may conceal the great secrets of the Mystery of Creation, it does not communicate those secrets by way of an intentional language, scientific inquiry aside. Nature does not take action to fuse her beauty with the experience of man, for that is left for man to do with Nature, and such activity is more potently communicated when held in the hands of the integral artist.
In summary, Kant, would likely say, in few words, that due to man’s separation from God, one cannot articulate the creative substance, power, source and process of artistic production, whereas Hegel affords the possibility through man’s inherent connection to divine forces and innate potential to attain illuminated states of awareness and artistic activity.”
Question (SURREALISM NOW!): Phil, can you elaborate further in how, “mind in essence” and “mind in form” are “one and the same thing” as you discuss in your book? Also, is not matter the byproduct of energy, an intrinsic part of energy and not, “an expression of energy” as you stated in your book? What I am getting at here is that the artist, who uses his mind as the conduit for visions, etc, taps into the energies that are already part of his mind, or shall I say awareness, which I argue is mind?
Answer (PROF.PHIL): “By use of the word ‘expression’ in my book, I also a mean ‘a part of’ energy or spirit, in the same way a painting is vivified matter. That is, for visionary artists, a painting begins in the realm of spirit, or on the mental plane and as a work of art it has condensed into matter from a 'thought-form', with a kind of life of its own. Heidegger would go so far as to say that a work of art is a 'living entity'. He proposes, that the art derives its life from a more subtle source, the realm of Ideas and the mental plane of energy and becomes further enlivened by responders to the art. The responders’ own energies and thought-forms could be said to stick like Velcrotm to the object of art, adding mental and etheric energies to the art object itself.
Indeed, all gross forms are an 'expression' of subtle energies, and all matter a print-out of divine mind. In this limited space here, we cannot get into the workings of the Uncreated behind the Created, or the Invisible behind the Visible, how Energy = Mass/matter in physics, or the many wisdom traditions and the metaphysical explanations at hand, but we can answer your question as it relates to the artist as a vessel for greater vision. By the term ‘expression‘, I also do not mean that matter is separate from energy (or spirit), or like a dead movie we are watching. Matter is the gross form of Spirit, (or energy). Hegel elegantly sums up the whole aesthetic domain by describing the artistic act and resulting object-form, literally, as 'the fusion of spirit and matter.' Not only does he do that, but also describes the artist’s inner experience of elevated states by way of artistic production.
The important thing here as it relates to art is to understand that Mind in essence and Mind in form come together as a realization through artistic production. The illusion of 'separateness' is temporarily dissolved. Whether we define Mind from the Buddhist's, neuroscientist's, or physicist’s point of view, or from any other, when speaking of consciousness, art, spirit and matter as a re-integrating process of unfolding awareness - we also need to realize that we are concerned with the dissolving of limited and false identifications in favor of recognizing our inherent connection to the greater-but-not-different than self, indeed, to Everything. In this manner we become plugged into a cosmic socket that was already and always available through a living, pulsating creative act that fuses spirit and matter into one unique form. Hegel describes this process of self-realization for the artist in this way:
“The universal demand for artistic expression is based on the rational impulse in man’s nature to exalt both the world of his soul experience and that of Nature into the conscious embrace of mind as an object in which he rediscovers himself. He satisfies the demand of this spiritual freedom by making explicit to his inner life all that exists, no less than from the furthest point of view giving a realized external embodiment to the self made explicit. And by this reduplication of what is his own he places before the vision and within the cognition of himself and others what is within him. This is the free rationality of man, in which art as also action and knowledge originates.” 6
Hegel tells us that art is a source of an original knowledge that is both personal and collective through an introspective creative action that fuses ‘mind in essence‘ and ‘mind in form‘. He is saying that artistic creation is a rational act and a fertile soil from which a unique form of knowledge and self-actualization can take birth through the fusion between the artist with the empirically created object of art; the self made explicit in the world. Hegel’s aesthetic sense of life is intimately connected with his whole system of philosophy, an unusual thing, for many other philosophers do not integrate the realm of art into their philosophical systems at all. In my opinion, any philosophy that neglects art as an inherent and imperative element in their system is not noteworthy as it neglects the very heart of the journey - which is the arts, the expression of the human spirit with Spirit.
How does art fulfill this collective function in the life of Spirit and of man? I am in agreement with Hegel that art is not for purely sensuous or emotional satisfaction, but for “higher and more spiritual interests.” Visionary works of art – “. . . summon and echo a response in the human spirit evoked from all depths of its conscious life. In this way the sensuous is spiritualized in art, or, in other words, the life of spirit comes to dwell in it under sensuous guise“. 7
The basic and essential function of art, then, to which all other possible uses are subordinate, is “to reveal truth under the mode of arts sensuous or material configuration”. 8 This is a vivid statement on the knowledge and truth offered in art by the fusion of spirit and matter, of mind in essence and mind in form. Each work of art, then, when it achieves beauty, involves a reconciliation of matter and content, of sensuous show and the embodied Idea. Thus the excellence of the work. . . “will depend upon the degree of intimacy and union with which idea and configuration appear together in elaborated fusion”. 9 The idea that finds in this way its adequate sensuous realization, the artistically embodied idea, Hegel calls the “Ideal.” “An object which is beautiful,” says Hegel, is a peculiarly perfect paradigm of freedom, the essence of Spirit, because it “suffers its own notion to appear as realized in its objective presence, and presents itself as independent of other things, as self-determined, self-complete, and infinite.” 10 Hence the perceiving self is caught in a rapture that becomes grounded in the object created, mind in essence and mind in form have become one.
Finally, it is important to note that self-realization through art is not only isolated to the ‘personal’ mind and its self-contained, isolated experience within the creative worker, but that the creative worker has indeed become a conduit to universal mind, to collective consciousness and to the larger life beyond h/her own personal content and empirical consciousness. He or she becomes the Deep calling unto the Deeper.”
To be continued…
Footnotes
1. Rubinov Jacobson, Philip, DRINKING LIGHTNING - Art, Creativity and Transformation, 2000, Shambhala, Boston,2004 Marja Publications, Dallas, p143. 143.
2. Schopenhauer, “The World of Will and Idea”, THIRD BOOK, “The World as Idea - Second Aspect”, pp.38-39, The Great Books Foundation, © 1966, Chicago
3. Hofstadter, Albert, and Kuhns, Richard, Edited, Philosophies of ART & BEAUTY - Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, The Unniversity of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, c. 1976, page 556.
4 See HEGEL's shorter Logic, trans. William Wallace, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1892) p.157.
5. Ibid, 157-158.
6. Ibid, p.213, p. 352.
7. Ibid, 157-159.
8. Ibid, 158.
9. Ibid, 2.
10. Ibid, 11.
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