Before we see this, ‘the significance of the end product in the arts’, we need to first look at some teachings from the past to get some sort of a big picture, so we can get to see the place of the artist and his work in the universe.
There seems to be an obstacle to satisfaction in the process of making art. The difference between the mystic and the artist is that the mystic is quite happy to be standing still. For him, ‘stillness speaks’, but for the artist he has to keep feeling his way through his art until he realizes it is not going to come to an end. The process drives the artist through all the crevices and you come up with mainly dead ends. The manifestation of this process is the art work. The end product is only part of the process. The art work throws light on that journey. It shows the viewer, through its excavations, its mistakes, through the coming together of form, through the history of the works, something of the ‘Intelligence in nature.’
‘….Earth in its entirety is indeed a living, breathing organism with an intelligently (albeit instinctively) coordinated sense of its own existence and purpose.’ (J.S Gordon, ‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis.’)
The process of making art is but a mini replication of the greater. There is something of the way a work of art falls into place when it is completed that is similar to the way the universe has fallen into place amid the chaos into order. Only an artist struggling with form to make art can truly feel this when it happens. You know it by doing. And it is repeated with each work. He/she starts to feel a coming together and senses that ‘intelligence in nature’ at work. After a while you take the invisible forces at work for granted and make it part of the process. It becomes a way you finish off a work of art. You know it will naturally bring itself to completion. And you will instinctively know when it is not there yet.
Art is a valuable database for the natural Truths and the structure behind the intelligence. It comes through the personality of the artist and through the flavour of his own form in his mind.
Today, even the scientists are confused about what they know of the structure of the universe. So let us look at some ancient literature as to what they say about the invisible forces of the universe. This is relevant to the artist as he is working up against this in his process of the work that he is trying to manifest. The idea of his work comes of the form that is in his mind and his mind, whether he likes it or not, is connected to the structure of the intelligent universe, both visible and invisible.
‘In 1988, Professor James Lovelock, a fellow of Britain’s prestigious Royal Society, put forward the then apparently revolutionary idea that every part of the Earth, including its rocks, oceans and atmosphere, as well as all organic entities, was a part of one great living and intelligent organism.’ (‘The Rise and Fall of Atlantis.’)
If you open up the Sikh holy book, these are the first few lines you will read.
The one God
Whose name is Truth.
The Creator.
Who is present in all Creation
Who fears none.
Who hates none.
An immortal being beyond time.
Unborn
Self existent
attainable only through divine grace.
Meditate.
True in the Beginning.
True throughout the Ages.
True even Now.
says Nanak (Sikh Guru),Truth will always be here.
The truth comes from everywhere, so at times it is OK to just look over the edge of contemporary thinking, over the pages of cool contemporary magazines and art books, to see where the process is coming from. You must remember cool is yesterday and today, time rolls back to the days of Kandinsky at the turn of the last century. It was a time of the NEW in art with the advent of abstraction. Like Kandinsky did in his time: he looked at the Kalevala: Finish mythology, and he was fascinated by the life of the Shaman: a person who has been to the brink of death and then back again, now all knowing. He carried the book ‘Thought Forms’ from the Theosophical society with him at times. Then came, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, by Kandinsky. In today’s contemporary art schools: spirituality is not a valid reason for subject matter for the work. But as science and mysticism comes together we start to very rapidly see what our limitations are and what the work is all about and that the final product of the creative process is only part of a bigger happening. The Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, reminds us in the very first few lines, just how vast the process of the creative wave really is. It gives you an idea of an underlying intelligence that permeates all and will always be true.
The spark in ones own mind can come from many different places. This is also a component of how the Whole perhaps works. I was at a talk by J.S Gordon on his new book, ‘The Rise and Fall of Atlantis’, but more on some of the reasons for climate change by looking at the history of the formation of the universe, from chaos to order, and an underlying order that is cyclical, yet very precise. This explained the cataclysm that ended Atlantis. And it is here again today. It was by looking at this structure of the universe and its possibilities that the point was made, that perhaps within our galaxy, we live within a sphere of consciousness that is contained, because of the forces that hold the different parts of the universe together (see diagram below).
These forces interact, but can remain distinct. And this can also be reflected by our own group spheres we live by and hence the limitation. We cannot perceive outside this bubble. More importantly we have to create this circle of limitation for us to generate an idea, to think coherently. This is where the flavour in our work comes from. The personality that is created in this sphere comes through in the work. It was the fact that the conscious whole had to be capped for the mind to create, to work, was what fascinated me. Remember that the artist works within the limits created by his own mind and also within the limits of his medium: the painter limited by a flat two dimensional space and its edges. He first looks from outside the canvas, from the vast universe and all it holds, both the tangible and the intangible and then filters it down into the image that he creates. It implodes through the artist into his work. The vast forces of the universe was also organized in this way. From big to small. As above so is below. Our minds are limited to function. ‘That is why with each work of art, the process always leaves the artist with a taste of dissatisfaction in his mind.’ I am trying to recall what was said. That is perhaps why the looking never ends. But then if you see it as it is, then you have it. The transformation comes from accepting this fact: that we operate within limits and we will never see all. The process will allow you to see this.
‘Man was seen as being unable to make his escape from one cycle of existence (or state of being) to another – except subjectively and at the critical points of transition between one celestial cycle (or state of being) and another…..’ and also ‘ It was for this reason also that each new cycle was seen as producing its own ‘zeitgeist’……..We use the expression ‘zeitgeist’ to mean the influential ‘Spirit of the Age’, from its literal meaning in German, although the modern interpretation of that expression gives it the flavour of no more than some sort of unspoken communal human perception of, or instinctive urge towards, cultural change.’ (J.S Gordon, ‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis’)
And also there is ‘zeitgeist’ and there is ‘zeitgeist’. To the ancients, the ‘Spirit of the Age’ was an ‘avatar’. With us, what you see now is of the last 100 years. The ‘zeitgeist’ is what you are living in today: the flavour of the century. And I think today, it is now in transition again, with the recent banking failures, the population sees how vulnerable the man-made system is, and its group consciousness will see it make a change. Add to this a couple of volcanic eruptions because of the ‘compressional and expanding forces’ of the universe, an earthquake here then there and you are looking at change. People get bumped around in this process and they start to ask questions or rather they start to think. We don’t see it until we live through the process of the system, dismantling the system. It is not very dissimilar to what the artist feels as he follows the process of making art. But we, the group, consciously will do it ourselves. We are in the process of making something new for us to live in, because we see the Truth in the limitations of the past. ‘As they did historically in ancient Rome, Greece, communist Russia…..’ Nature allows us to make and break systems. Well the artist, he sits coolly among all this and also functions just like it, in his own bubble: and he wonders why he is not seeing it yet. As the greater process functions, so does the artist as he lives creatively making art. Though the artist deals with the material object, the devotion to his craft has attuned him to non-material concerns. He is a function of the greater process: a micro entity of the ‘intelligence’: contained in a sphere with his own limitations and trying to decipher the big picture with his art.
‘The ancients saw the universe as a concentrically organized sequence of fields of consciousness, this being to them a universal principle.’ (‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis’ J.S Gordon.) As you can see from the diagram earlier we sit smugly in the center, in our little worlds, with our limitations and think we are the biggest thing since sliced bread. You know what I mean. Now if this is the big picture and we are really enclosed in the sphere of limitations not being able to see the landscape of the structure we live in: then we have to accept this. Progress comes from accepting this. We see that everything we make is an illusion, every idea is not real, but it may be an indicator of the manifestation of the invisibility and vastness of the space we live in, then perhaps we can unfold and progress. It is to bring on a settlement so a new space can become.
History of the universe has been a cycle of chaos and order. The making of us and the destroying of us: order and chaos. Atlantis was an example of this. In this cataclysm the new is created. As in art, it is only the look for the NEW is relevant. It is a personal opinion. It is the driving force for the unfolding of the race and evolution. ‘…..The ancients saw consciousness unfolding and then evolving……’ (‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis’). To bring this to a close quickly it is sufficient to say, from looking at J.S Gordon’s work on Atlantis, that these cyclical nature of the universe would bring on a series of states or ‘planes’ of consciousness within our local solar universe, that little circle in the center of the diagram. We evolve through 7 planes of consciousness (The current race is 5 and on the 5th plane). The flavour of this evolving nature of the races is one of involution becoming more egocentric, with increasing amounts of mass desire and by the 3rd race more grounded increasingly in physical matter. By the 4th race the concept of Mind, desire and physical form is fully integrated. ‘From the middle point of this race (4th) the process of evolution commences, the desire principle now becoming increasingly personalized and dominant in each individual and each local group. Correspondingly, in the present Fifth Race, it is the mind principle which is becoming increasingly individualized and dominant in the integrated personality and the local group.’ The seventh race returns to the first race and both races are spiritual in nature and the cycle repeats itself. As it did in Atlantis, the catastrophe will bring an end to one form for it to evolve to another. Another diagram from the book on the different races, ‘The Rise and Fall of Atlantis’ by J.S Gordon ISBN: 978-1-905857-43-2)
We are now in the 5th race, though still tied up to the object, desire, materialistic in the way we live but we are in transition. In the 5th race (us) the mind principle becomes prominent in the individual. We have just been through a process where the illusion of the structure we made for ourselves to live in started to show its weak areas. We could at one time almost see the possibility of the illusion crumbling. It had changed the lives of some, where all of what they thought was secure they lost: their homes, money etc. The mind gets stuck on things like this. When a lot of minds get stuck on such matters we get change. The structure of the ether changes. You witness the ‘rise and fall’. There is an awakening of the ‘Intelligence’ in the mind. I like to finish with a quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti on how the intelligence is woken by the discovery of a fact behind the illusion.
‘You see, intelligence is not personal, is not the outcome of argument, belief, opinion or reason. Intelligence comes into being when the brain discovers its fallibility, when it discovers what it is capable of, and what not.’ I think what K is trying to say here is exactly what is going on now in all our minds. Does this structure we live in now: is it real. We saw glimpses that it may not be real, only an illusion. When you see a fact, and its relationship to a fallacy, there is something in you that alters. A new presence makes itself felt in you because of that experience. The presence is a kind of ‘intelligence’ that can now operate through you. ‘And only when that intelligence, is functioning can the new dimension operate through it.’ The new you, as a result of seeing a universal Truth, now continues the evolutionary process towards the 6th race. So, as for the artist, in a different way, when he gifts you with the NEW in his work, he changes you forever and invokes that ‘intelligence’ to function in the NEW you.