Art Sangha
group begins this Thursday online at 9:30 am
If I were to invent a religion, it would be a religion of beauty. The core edict would be to invoke the practitioner to find their muse. Beauty would be defined as the clarity of the individual’s inner voice; the marks on paper or sounds in the air would hardly matter-detritus of the journey. The premise of my religion would be that every person is an artist, and it is every artist’s moral mandate to represent, as faithfully as possible, the images that come through him or her. Those are the images that demand to be born through the artistic process. The highest attainment would be the artist him or herself. As Sartre suggested, you are your own artwork.
Another edict of my religion would be the writer’s guideline, show, don’t tell. The practitioner would be encouraged to emanate their truth wordlessly. Every cell of their being would proclaim the beauty of their truth from the deepest inner regions of themselves. Actions would demonstrate their abundance, compassion and the artistry of listening to silence. We would be silent teachers to one another, acting with economy of purpose, and kindness to the light of others around us.
But I am not religious, as important as the spiritual journey is to me, and I would not want followers. It fact, another premise of my fictive religion would be that the leaders would function only as midwives. They would assist the practitioner in his/her discovery of their own inner truths. The following, in as much as it is such, is the following of insight. The practices, in as much as they exist, are the practices of bringing insight into daily lived life. The role of the leader is only to help the individual distinguish their true voice from what Socrates called wind eggs. And you can imagine what those are!
In other words, artistic vision comes with responsibility, and even if you do not consider yourself creative, you, too, share the same responsibility. That responsibility is to birth your own true self.
There are things that can help you with this, of course, but perhaps I will lay those out in a future post. For example, how do you distinguish between your true voice and instinct? Instinct can be based on trauma, history and culture. Your true self dwells in free awareness, unfettered by mere circumstance. But for the time being I simply want to remind you that if anyone else would like to sign up for the Art Sangha group, please reach out to me.
Namaste,
Leslie