One thing I can tell you is that if you band a ragtag group of artists, writers, poets, thinkers and flaneurs together you are going to end up with people banging on drums and writing manifestos. It’s only natural, it’s inevitable even.
Fortunately for us at the STSC, one of our clear-eyed visionary rabble-rousers is the provocative, courageous, never-dull-for-a-second
who has penned a corker for us today. What an excellent way to start the weekend.Enjoy.
TJB.
“The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other…if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
— Terrence McKenna
I feel that we might be at the point that only Art can save humanity. Only art can unite us. Religions have failed. Politics has failed. Western culture has failed. Materialism has failed. Technology has failed.
While all of those institutions have brought great advancements, they certainly have not united us — that is what I mean when I say they have failed. Not only have they not united us, instead, they’ve deeply divided us. Just look at the violence, envy, greed and tribalism of modernity — trends that are leading us down a depressing and dangerous path.
As Terrence McKenna said in the epigraph quote above, Rome is burning and our institutions are dithering.
Western culture has, for quite some time, denied The Mysterious, the spiritual, and the sacred. As The Enlightenment and the march of Science progressed, organized religions, at least in the west, seemed to have followed suit, and have focused on a kind of logical, knowledge-based sort of approach, rather than guiding seekers to the actual experience of the divine.
As a child, church felt like homework. Indeed, I was required to attend Sunday school. By then, it seems, many denominations had turned away from, and often discouraged members from following any of their more mystic traditions or sects. However, those mystic sects are the very places where the sacred act of entering The Mystery is still pursued and revered.
I was never taught any form of communion with The Mystery. Prayer seemed to be asking for the divine to grant boons and favors — more talking than listening. Mostly, I was taught, that all the answers to any questions I have are “in the good book.” We even got a sort of “book report” each Sunday from the pastor, in the form of a sermon.
I love books, and reading is my favorite pastime, and what I found in the book was a deity who talked about providing “living water.” A living experience and communion with the divine. A deity that spoke of The Mystery. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I longed for, and what, I think, we all long for.
My experience was obviously a christian-based one; I’ve had little exposure to how other religions conduct worship. And, I’m sure there are plenty of counter-examples which would reflect a different experience. But, in any case, despite the good and necessary functions churches provide, we can’t deny that we are more divided than ever, and organized religion hasn’t (yet) united us in peace and love.
In fact, some have done quite the opposite in various times and places. The very term “holy war” is an oxymoron. It has not been those who worship at the altar of art and creativity who have started wars and burned heretics.
Church attendance has fallen to all time lows and disastrously, people have turned away from the spiritual and, mankind, apparently needing something to worship, has made politics into the new religion. We are a tribal species after all, and transcending our tribal roots in unity appears to be an almost insurmountable problem.
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” — Voltaire
Having, collectively, abandoned religion, and, having invented our new God of Politics, we appear to have started a different kind of “holy war.” And it is raging between our two biggest “religions,” our political parties.
I, personally, know families, parents and children, who have disowned each other, who hate each other, over political beliefs. How can something as pedestrian and petty as politics divide one from the people they love? How can it divide any of us? Is this extreme division by design? As long as we are this divided, we will refuse to look for real solutions.
How can we come together, though, when the two subjects we are not allowed to even speak to one another about are religion and politics?
The two certainties in life are death (our biggest fear) and taxes (one of our biggest expenses) and these two important subjects are the purview of, you guessed it, religion and politics.
We are indoctrinated into the belief that these two institutions contain the keys to saving our souls and bettering our civilization, yet we are taught from childhood to never discuss either topic (and, by extension, to avoid discussing death or taxes) in polite company.
Do you see the giant elephant-sized problem in the corner of the proverbial room staring us in the face?
Outside of religion and politics, some people in the west have rediscovered eastern traditions. Traditions such as meditation, new age experiences, spiritual practices, and seeking enlightenment. These pursuits often do allow one a chance to experience The Mystery (and some of these practices, in earlier times, were also a part of western religions).
While meditation is usually secularized or dismissed, I admit that I’ve felt closer to what might be called the “living energy of the divine” in meditation than I have anywhere else. I think of it this way: if prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening to Him. Perhaps we all need to listen just a little bit more. I’m not sure why this practice has been so diminished in the western tradition. Maybe in our western, market-driven thinking, some would prefer we get our answers from the organization rather than “dialing direct,” so to speak.
Whatever the case, I’m not here to sell you on meditation, it has, after all, already been “sold,” and has become, over the past few decades, increasingly popular in the west. My point, in this writing, is to highlight the fact that, meditation, and its new age cousins, have also failed to united us.
The ideas of meditation, spirituality, new age, and similar practices are marginalized by the mainstream. They are slightly taboo. They are allowed in the west, but those who follow any of them are often joked about. We are accepting of them, as long as people stick to the “lite” versions for “stress relief.”
But, if you get too serious, you will simply be dismissed as too “woo-woo” or too “hippie.” Materialism has a firm grip on our minds. And thus, these experiences, despite the intensity with which they may be felt within the practitioner, aren’t taken seriously, they aren’t utilized to unite us, and are usually dismissed as fictions of the mind, or perhaps attributed to some sort of placebo effect.
Let’s turn to neuroscience: Dr. Iain McGilchrist, in his book book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, has explored detailed studies of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
In the western world, the left hemisphere dominates most of our thinking. The left brain focus has allowed everything we’ve built in The Enlightenment — Science, technology, rational discourse, philosophy, public health, liberal (in the classic sense) democracy, individual rights.
Those are indeed glorious achievements and triumphs of humanity. However, the left brain’s style of analysis tends to “cut things up,” and study the parts. This is how most mainstream science to date has been done.
We keep cutting the world up into smaller and smaller parts and studying those parts - molecules got cut up into atoms, which were cut up into subatomic particles. Cutting them up further we found they are made up of quantum particles. In biology we cut species up into organs, cells, proteins, DNA.
We have, by delving into smaller and smaller parts, made amazing discoveries about the nature of reality. This left hemisphere cutting up tendency has led to human achievements that our forefathers, of just a few generations ago, would not have thought possible.
It’s hardly been a century since mankind unlocked the secrets of flight, and yet we have already sent space vessels to the furthest reaches of the solar system, and we now have the technology, in astrophysics, to look back in time approximately 13.8 billion years.
Our left brained society has built technology that borders upon magic. Perhaps humanity needed to go through just such a left-brained, logical era in order to not stagnate as we did in the dark ages.
However, all magic has a price, and our price is a costly one. It is the division of humanity that we have been discussing.
The left brain tendency to cut things into pieces, to divide things, doesn’t apply only to science. It applies to everything, including other people.
When patients have their brain’s right hemisphere temporarily disabled (thus perceiving the world only with the left hemisphere), they often can’t even register that another human in the room is alive.
The left hemisphere sees everything as dead parts, as if one is taking a watch apart and studying the gears. These patients can identify the parts of other people in the room: an arm here, a leg there. When asked to sketch the person in front of them, these patients usually sketch a bunch of disjoined and separate body parts.
It turns out, that the right hemisphere is responsible for expanding outward, and viewing things holistically. The right hemisphere sees connections between parts; it sees living beings and systems; it has flashes of inspiration. It has intuition. And it perceives our connection to other humans and intuits how we might all be part of something larger.
The right hemisphere is the home of empathy, the home of the non-verbal, and, most relevant to our discussion, the home of Art. It is the home of the spiritual — the home of The Mystery.
But, since The Enlightenment, western culture has valued left hemisphere style thinking, over the right, and, in a nutshell, McGilchrist believes that, to correct our wrongs, we need to reverse our values, and thus our thinking, and make the right hemisphere “The Master”, and the left hemisphere “The Emissary” (that carries out The Master’s orders). In short, we need to learn to value right brained, holistic, creative, intuitive, inspired thinking.
Some will claim that the left-brained, right-brained split is pseudoscience. It matters not if our divisions are truly based in the left brain or right brain. We can simply admit that humans have two kinds of thinking, the symbolic, which is a greek word that literally means to bring things together. And the diabolic, which means “to throw things apart,” or to separate. While much of our society engages in the “diabolic”, the symbolic is the realm of art.
What matters is that we can’t deny that these two styles of thinking do exist, and, collectively, we lean toward the dividing kind of thinking — the diabolic — over the unifying type — the symbolic. And dividing is the very essence of tribalism. It’s “us” against “them.” And everything bad in the world is “their” fault.
Whatever we call it, it’s obvious that our need to return to more unifying, a more symbolic, way thinking has never been greater, and yet, the institutions that should be looking at our situation holistically, with an eye toward increased unity — religion, politics, and spiritual practices — as we have seen, are either “left-brain” dominated — they are dividing us - are the institutions that are cutting our society up into pieces, or, at best, they are marginalized.
Perhaps it is not their fault. After all, these institutions are us. They were created by and are supported by us. They are a reflection of who we are, collectively. And we are, mostly, left brained new world men who value our materialist logic based order and, as a group, we tend to dismiss anything that falls outside of that order. We have to admit that our society, at present, is diabolical.
So, how, given these challenges, can we re-unite?
How do more of us learn to enter The Mystery and share in its ability to help each human find his or her true self?
How do we lead people to integrate their spiritual, mental and physical sides healthily?
How do we encourage more people to be “reborn” as transcended humans with mature psyches that have discovered the inner freedom and peace that can ripple outward to external freedom and peace?
How do we learn to love again?
This idea of finding one’s “true self” is an important one. I asked how we can encourage more people to come home into themselves. I believe that finding one’s true self and successfully integrating the material and the spiritual, the left brain and the right brain, the diabolic and the symbolic. It requires creativity. You are, after all, creating yourself.
The reason it’s important is that we humans seem to have a tendency, when we aren’t quite sure who we really are, to mimetically follow others. To adopt our values from our tribes, rather than from the truths we find when our soul searches for them. And, until we mature in this way, we aren’t quite centered and fully making our own decisions. Our bodies look like adults, but inside, most of us, psycho-spiritually, are children. This becomes dangerous, especially when the childish tribes decide to go to war.
However, there is hope.
When I talk with people about what I do — that it involves art — almost invariably, they share that they do some sort of art or creative act as a hobby. Or that they want to pursue some creative undertaking. Most people seem to have this innate creative drive, though it doesn’t always manifest as a drive to make art, per se. And, if any “good” came out of the pandemic, perhaps it is that so many people took the time to re-evaluate their lives. They became introspective and wondered if that latent creativity could be brought to the forefront. In other words, many people started the journey to find their true self.
Why does this give me hope? Because true societal salvation must start with individual salvation.
As long as we remain fragmented, divided in our internal nature, so too will external civilization reflect that internal state, and, in such a state, people of all societies and ultimately humanity itself will remain as fragmented and divided as individuals are internally.
But, with more people finally awakening to their powers of creation, those internal states may be starting to change, because the act of creation leads one to The Mystery. And The Mystery awakens the soul to deep truth. The Mystery activates the “right brain.”
We saw an explosion, during after after the pandemic, in the online “creator economy.” I hate that the term “creator” has been hijacked to refer to people who mostly sell courses (a huge percentage of which are about “making money online”), because that’s not what a true creator does.
Making and selling courses is a left-brained activity. It cuts up; It divides “creation” into steps (Step 1 - do this. Step 2 - do that. Step 3 - make money!), and true creators work in a holistic right-brained way. True creators trust The Muse. True creators enter The Mystery. True creators can’t reduce what they do down to a course or an ebook.
True creators are Artists.
And, if you’re reading this, the term “true creator” probably means you.
So, yes there is hope.
The process has already started, we just need to awaken the artists, because each person who awakens to their true self and unlocks their potential affects others around them. And that can start a wave of awakening that ripples through humanity.
In other words, the more true artists we awaken, the more hope there is for humanity.
And so, after we dismiss the organized institutions that have , so far, failed to unite us, if you think about it, in modern culture, the last acceptable bastion of right-brain dominance, of sharing The Mystery, and of exploring the Truth that can possibly unite us, is Art.
Perhaps Art, perhaps only Art, can spark enough of our souls to start this “ripple of unity.”
Perhaps only Art can ignite those dormant right-hemispheres, and help to make the holistic and the spiritual acceptable again.
In short, it appears that it is up to the artists to save us.
No pressure.
“A single smile of Beauty can bring about greater transformations of character than all the frowns of Righteousness.”
— Sangharakshita
This was gorgeous and inspirational, start to finish. Well said, and solid. Thank you so much.
On point!
Re: “Perhaps only Art can ignite those dormant right-hemispheres, and help to make the holistic and the spiritual acceptable again. In short, it appears that it is up to the artists to save us”:
The mission of a lifetime.
Challenge accepted.