Embodying the Transcendental in Art

The Mystery of Music: Explaining the transcendental

To the above thinking:

Why not "both/AND"? (instead of either/or)
The nature of structures or patterns can be 'explained' or illuminated by mathematical or geometrical patterns and ratios. These in turn may correlate with patterns in consciousness and nature.
But the aesthetic appreciation and intuitive stirring of the Soul is creative act whose meaning expresses through the perceiver and embodies and reflects a Living quality that transcends any definition.
To call it anything is to attempt to 'translate it into form' and music is already bringing it into form whereas attempts to map out in models tends to serve a manipulative control that by nature is blind to wholeness - which is transcendent to the sum of its parts.
However, to BE a 'mystery' is not mysterious - but simply a direct abiding appreciation as. The sense of mystery to the mind of mapping is really just an inappropriate application of a tool. You do not require explanation to be all that you are.
However, story can use the idea of 'mystery' to indicate a special or superior state or power to which the listener is framed as in a process of attaining or becoming and this may have expediency to the role of parent or guide but becomes a manipulative exclusion of innate nature when such role becomes self-serving status.
The framing of any appreciation of music or sound patterning expression is a definitional structure of personal and cultural filters and conditionings in a unique moment or context.
The idea of taking something out of context and analyzing it, is not a musical communication so much as a focus on forms.
The reduction Living Reality to form-based meanings is the assertion of a separate mind context in which to exclude the wholeness appreciation in favour of a private agenda which can  of course find mutual reinforcement. This communicates a different foundational vibratory quality than a direct inspirational sharing. Art and artifice reflect different qualities BUT the meaning that anything has is truly the meaning one gives it. Hence there is not a unified FORM of music but there is a unified experience of joy that can be embodied musically.
Beneath the sophisticate definitions is our primitive nature of 'being moved' by the unseen and invoking or embodying it.

Cutting the support for the arts to only those that make money!

A forest fire allows new shoots to grow.

Art is part of being but has been separated off as if an 'add-on'. A meaningless existence then makes its meaning as acquisition of things including wealth and power or materialism, which curiously doesn't -value the material, but only what can be got out of it for private or personal gain.

To reconnect with our wholeness - with our Soul - might be served in part by the arts, but if they are themselves subverted by the economy stupid, then they become tools of medication for the suppression and control of symptoms, like a kind of lubricant to allows what shouldnt be tolerated, to be tolerable.

Economy needs radical change in its foundations - which are the ideas we have set in stone and yet are ideas none the less.

Art needs also to get in touch with its roots - so as to communicate something of a wholeness of being rather than merely reflect the disease of our times.

I hold that art is of the verb 'to be'. Thou art Creativity in Heaven - but in artifice you are indebted to the deceiver!

I don't see a shift coming that will restore the pockets of a Prodigal Wastrel - but in the turning towards truth and wholeness of being, we will find we are fulfilled and share in that fulfilment. This is the art of living; a shared sense of what it is to be truly alive - and it expresses in infinite ways that are organically alive and not as an engineered society.

Does it need money to tell a story, to share a poem, to sing a song, to paint a picture or create a sculpture? Yes, sometimes. But mostly it needs inspiration, and the willingness to hang in there with it to its fulfilment.

We live in a rather monocultured society where we are increasingly managed and conformed to the mentality of control. Even rebellion has been commoditized. Is it any wonder it is bankrupt?

Our Father,

Who ART in Heaven,

Holy and Whole is your Nature.

Let it come into our own for we would remember

what we always forget,

when we make a different mind our own.

As if to use a Living Inheritance

to line our personal pockets,

until the bubble bursts.

Let forgiveness replace grievance

Your creative freedom rises

in works that speak of Life

to Life.

Let us not worship a forged copy of a life

that promises much yet only robs our Soul,

but let rip - so to speak

the cat of curiosity from the bag

of 'Thou Shalt Not!'

For what love would have us be

needs not authority of dead gods,

but the wellspring of Life ever anew.

The investment needs to be in the truly Life-affirming, whether in the arts or in economic activity.

Because you love, are impassioned, are moved, and transformed in the giving - not for pieces of silver.

But because shared value is uncovering of what we are in a world that tends to cover it over or squelch it.


(Written into Culture secretary Maria Miller to make 'economic case' to stave off further arts cuts)

Art and artifice

This writing was prompted by reading an article at
http://www.nationofchange.org - How to tell good art from bad

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I feel to start with a root statement that may or may not communicate a tone:
Our Father, Who Art (in) Heaven.
Clearly in this statement, art is the verb to be; the movement or embodiment of that which is felt arising from a wholeness of being is a desire, inspiration, or project that is not other than our life.
The nature of what IS cannot be defined, but the Movement and Quality of its being can be honoured as it reveals itself as ... the embodiment of intuition, thought and feeling as the tangibility of life. If we are beholding of this then our lives express it.

Artifice is like the fig leaves in the Adam and Eve story. It is that capacity of mind to imagine its own reality or self along the lines of thought it wants to be true - and which it gives preference to, over and above the Current Flow of Being Itself. This sort of self-will seems to overlay a personal signature of achievement and possession on the Original and the True and subverts it innate meaning to its own self defined meanings. In the attempt to make itself real it seeks any and every kind of self validation at the level of form and appearance, and becomes forgetful and defended against the realm of the presence of life in which the tangibility and visibility is but the revealing and identifying of the communion and communication of Life Itself.

There is another thing I'd add; the self in its own illusion can only make copies of what is already real. There isn't a fake 11 dollar bill in circulation anywhere - though such could of course be a project for a conceptual artist to undertake!

The imitation of life necessarily uses something of life because there is nothing else to use. In this sense ,there is often something that can be felt as wheat among the tares in the attempts of man to make or communicate the good, the beautiful or the true. (To want to communicate the ugly or the dispiriting or the meaningless is an indicator that the mind involved has implicitly called such 'good' by the act of valuing it with his or her attention and intention).

The idea of a separate identity - endowing some kind of string-less puppet with autonomy - is itself the artifice of a thinking to which humankind has been asserting possession of and becoming possessed by. Yet this is act and not fact, and so there are all sorts of moments in its experience of itself that transcend its narrow self limitation as it stirs or is re-membered in a presence of being of which it is often hardly aware and yet IS the only Thing Going On - despite the overlay of imaginations which suggest otherwise.

To awaken to that life is moving all things one - in any moment or degree, is to be stirred by qualities of being that inspire, heal and harmonize, this naturally communicates or extends itself through  the agency of its recognition. Such expression my yet be distorted and filtered by the mind of that one - and by our expressions, we become aware of such obstacle or block. This provides the life of inspiration and expression as a process of releasing 'self will' as a willingness to be as an instrument to the movement of being itself.
That life often communicates in ways that do not fit the old wine bottles is testimony to that we become blinkered and stuck in our thinking and our masks of artificial presentation.
It may be that to awaken and honour the movement of life draws us out of the apparent comforts and connection of the group that would (often unknowingly) stifle it - but that is not about being special so much as being alive and willing.

Every one of us is a special kind of artist. Our lives brush out from pallets of experience and desire that are both unique in expression and yet universal in nature. Art as something outside and separate from the Artist is the notion of a mind that has tried to separate itself from the Life that lives it!

"The seeing that it is good" is the recognition of God in the 'Creation'. That is of being moved or feeling stirred… of a shift from thinking to feeling.

Communication and communion are shared by their very nature and guided by the very intelligence that they express. The forms of our communication can be usurped as an attempt at coercion or manipulation of life - but then the channel of true communication is lost while the mind engages self-wilfulness. (Until it neglects or forgets to do so - perhaps as a result of being stirred and troubled or transported by an experience for which it could not account nor control).