When I started this blog, one of the first things I wrote, was about the question: What is art good for? Today it became clear to me in a different way, with the morning writing. Art is a way to experience fully what is usually covered and obscured by our filters.
Why is it important to experience anything directly and without obscuration? Because this is what we are here for. When we do what we are here for, we become happy and our unhappiness ends. If you want, you can turn what I just said upside down. Then it will be: Experiencing directly is what makes us happy, and because it does, we may say that it is why we are here.
I’m going to describe this slowly, step by step.
When we become more and more aware, and our awareness becomes subtler, we start to be able to experience our thoughts as if they are something material, passing in space, and we can experience our imaginings as something that you can touch and feel. This is when we start to see what is going on with us. Before this we don’t know experientially how life works.
Here is an example. In the quiet of this space (inside of which we see the thoughts), which is really who we are, and you can call it consciousness and awareness and anything, inside of this an imagination movie appears. It is very fast and almost unnoticeable. The imagination movie is a wordless thought. Because we are in a deep state, we are aware to that degree of delicacy that we can detect what it is about. Let’s say it is about turning our head sideways and looking out through the open window. We can see all of this in the movie of our imagination that happens very fast. We can know how it feels too. And immediately with it, we turn our physical head and look out through the open window. The imagination was a creating moment. The turning of the physical head was the manifestation. (The world outside that I saw through the window was another part of the manifestation. Both my body-mind and the sight outside must be there for an experience to happen.)
You can say that when the imagined action happened, we have already experienced what it was and maybe we do not need to experience it physically? We have already had the experience. This is true, but not for most of the people. Being here in a physical form gives us the possibility to experience it in a different way. This time it has become denser and can be experienced as a physical experience.
And here comes the second part, for which we are here. With our body we experience looking out through the open window and seeing something there that we understand as happening outside of us. The way this experience makes us feel is seen by our inner self, that infinite space that we are. In this space a stir occurs and its waves go far to be shared with all that we are. This is very pleasant. If we experience ourselves as this space, we enjoy this tremendously. It is thrilling and beautiful. We love this. We don’t need anything else. And then we become ready for the next created adventure that will be returned to us so beautifully.
So there was a circle of action here. From our infinite self arose the creation of a physical experience. The physical experience in its turn gave our infinite self some excitement and pleasure. I as a human being, I am in the middle between my infinite self and the created world. I am here to enable this circle. I am the physical body who receives the physical event and gives it back to my infinite self.
Before we develop this sensitivity to the tiniest movements of energy, so that we can detect all of the above, we miss the direct experience. The act of looking out through the window and the experience of seeing something, immediately provokes many subconscious beliefs. These respond quickly, quicker than our conscious thinking. They tell us what we see and what it is connected to and many more stories, and the experience becomes blurred or totally covered. So we miss the direct experience.
Being able to experience directly brings happiness. This subtle response in the infinite space of our consciousness is happiness and playfulness and curiosity and caring. Not experiencing directly, we will always feel that something is lacking and we cannot make this feeling go.
But we have a compensation for what we miss. It is the arts. The arts are capable of going deep into the more subtle-sensitivity state, where the direct experience has been felt, and they can bring this experience out for us, to where we can experience it consciously, through a metaphor or a simile. It is not the thing itself but good enough so that we can experience the tiniest variations of movement of energy in a magnified way, usually. And this is the role of art in our life. We make art out of the longing to feel the real, un-obscured experience. It is like a guiding sign that points us toward the direct experience. Art shows us the way to happiness. When we walk toward happiness with the help of art, We already feel that we live meaningfully and we have deep satisfaction.
Does the satisfaction last? For a while it does, and then we feel the urge to make another work of art.
To say it in a very simple way: We make art so that we can be happy. We are happy when we experience deeply.
You see? we don’t need that much to be happy. Try it out.
intuitiveflow 