The journey of the Ego and form in art
One can propose that there is a correlation between what your place is in the universe and form in art and between the fragmented ego-self and the unified-self. If you paint from the ego-self and am ignorant of the unseen-intangible-self then you are likely to be a docu-artist: you only make art of what you can see and know, of memory which is of time and hence a lie. Anything of memory is a lie. Look at it this way: there are facts which are true, unaltered by the mind and others which are altered by the mind and hence false. False in the sense that it has been altered from the fact by the mind, manipulated, changed, top side down, upside down and then stored in memory as real. To you it is real. You live with it thinking it is real. You make all your future decisions using this altered fact in memory, hence creating more illusions.
How did it happen again? You mean I am surrounded by everything that is not real, false, an illusion? The whole of society a playground of make up things, the mind which cannot give out anything that is real, has made this world I live in? So what is real in the mind and what makes it unreal. First remain with the facts. The mind: you get an insight in silence and it downloads itself into your mind. This insight (the fact) is then manipulated with time. One second later, in mind, the insight is turned over, two seconds later turned over even more, and a minute later, an hour later, it does not quiet look like the fact that it was when your mind ‘saw’ it: and finally the altered fact stored in memory. Then you use this to make other things. In memory with time, nothing is stored that looks like the original true thing. The tree outside your window is more true that anything in your memory. The tree is a fact: it always has been what it is, unmanipulated. Hence in your mind what is real: if insight is real when it comes to you, still untouched by time, in its first instance , then one has to ask: how do I keep time out of my mind and from changing what is true and making it unreal. To keep time out of your mind you have to always live in the present: from now to now again, and now and now. TIME has no time to change things and if you are always in the now, then you don’t become because of the Ego-self memory. You don’t fill your memory with all things false and keep it only for everyday technical no nonsense facts.
Then there is something about Ego. An unreal memory sits on your shoulders and the I-Ego drives the illusion forward. More trouble ahead. You can take time out of your mind by living in the now. But then the Ego, still there, waiting, I must, me only, that is only me and I only Ego. The Ego that J.D. Salinger talked about.
“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.” (Copyright 2010 The Associated Press)
— J.D. Salinger
But I gather he never stopped writing, just never published his works. Rumours that neighbors have observed a safe being lowered into his home after the roof was removed temporarily.
‘So what about the safe? The death this week of J.D. Salinger ends one of literature’s most mysterious lives and intensifies one of its greatest mysteries: Was the author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ keeping a stack of finished, unpublished manuscripts in a safe in his house in Cornish, N.H.? Are they masterpieces, curiosities or random scribbles?”(Copyright 2010 The Associated Press)
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” J.D. Salinger told The New York Times in 1974.
“Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” ( Copyright 2010 The Associated Press).
In the present, NOW, I do for now, not tomorrow or for some mischief in the future. So the Ego, how do you put it under your foot: squisss (my website, I-make-any-word-I-want to-Ego, OK)? So how do you diminish the influence of the Ego? Summary up to now: everything about you is externalized; you live by your senses only; your memory is of time and hence factually incorrect; with your Ego holding you upright: you think you are the coolest thing on the planet with your hair dyed all blue: yet nothing about you is real. You are living in an environment created by a memory made of time and hence a fragile idea of a playground and you go on thinking it is real. You can deal with time-based memory, by living in the now: “this is a table, and that is a cup, and this is a chair and that is it, and when I am thinking I know I am thinking” a typical comment by Jiddu Krishnamurti when friends ask him of the process. You have to know when you are thinking, because thinking is a lie-creator. You got to know when you are creating lies and not be ignorant of it. And you got to know how to do without it (psychological thinking as to technical thinking) when you are living in the present. One present to the next with no judgment: choiceless awareness, call it what you want but you only observe with no judgment.
Now what happens when you take out the Ego, or at least squisss him down to when he is no trouble anymore and then put it all back together: living in the present, observation with no judgment, and the Ego under control. But how does one get the Ego into control. One knows how to sideline time based memory but the Ego how do we control it.
The process of controlling the Ego had brought about one of the main transformations to society during the turn of the last century in the Arts. What brought about the advent of abstraction was when artist dissatisfied by realism then started to internalize their search for the Truth. They started to look inwards. So now the Ego previously only satisfied by making sense of the external world (and hence form in art only depicted what they understood externally) now travelled inwards into a spiritual quest of the self. So now the new question arises when the Ego is internalised: really ‘who am I’. The internal language now is completely different and the artist and spiritual seeker had to create their own inner language. Now, thinking is of no use. Insight, perception, spontaneity, chance becomes better tools for understanding the self and as more of the Truth is revealed there comes an understanding of the place in the universe of the seeker. And this brings about the demise of the Ego to ego. And also can you PERHAPS see why the Truth of things might lie only in Abstract art. The seeker seeks a new language to understand his new environment and only the ‘new’ can come out of this. Abstract art is the manifestation of the Truth that is realized by the artist and the spiritual seeker as he internalize his search of ‘who am I’ and where is his place in the universe. The whole person is now complete. The seeker who seeks now ‘looks’ differently. A transformation has come about in him. He is hardwired differently in the process. The seeker himself is ‘new’ and only the ‘new’ can come from him/her/her/him. The ego now under control he does things only for the sake of doing it, as it helps him look better at the self and its place in the happenings of things. The external world and its workings he now sees it for what it is: a game out of playstation made of memory and of the Truth modified by time. The artist lives and works as the universe is for itself, as he is part of it, and not for himself. He/she puts the work out there if she/he wishes too, or not: it is not a priority for her/him. With this can come only the ‘new’ and not just an interpretation of the past: as she/he is free do what he/she wishes. The frontline of the arts goes in leaps and bounds, rather than a slow progression of what has gone before. Big Ego’s won’t see this as they only know the external world and hence true form in art comes from first knowing your place in the universe. If there is such a thing as ‘Higher Art’ in today’s accepted art language, then there can also be such words as, ‘True Form’. The Ego not internalized is blind to the Truth. And so it is all.
But I must finish with this, a poem by Geetha Subramanium, a writer in Chennai:
“Let me share my anthem with you. You can sing to the nice and easy style of the singers of the 50’s and 60’s.
It’sallaboutME,
Whatelsecanitbe,
Meismymiddlename,
bornbeforeme,
It’sallaboutME,
Whoelsecanitbe,
NoticethenumberonMycar,
ItproclaimsME,
Mylifeissowondrouslyfull,
..ofMe,ofcourse,
NoplaceforanyonebutMe,ofcourse!
NobaggageforMe,
Notmine,noranyoneelse’s!
It’sallaboutMe,
Whoelsecantherebe!
It’sallaboutMe,Me,MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
“Hope you get the picture.”
I like to thank Swami Ramanananda for a lecture on the journey of the Ego when I had visited Tiruvannamalai in southern India.
And Dr Ravi Ravindra whose lectures I had attended in Chennai in January/February 2011 and from his book, ‘Whispers from the Other Shore. Spiritual Search – East and West’
