The experience of being creative as a spiritual practice: a hermeneutic-phenomenological study

The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice

Revisioning Philosophy

David Appelbaum General Editor

Vol. 27

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Peggy Thayer

The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice A Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Study

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thayer, Peggy. The experience of being creative as a spiritual practice: a hermeneutic-phenomenological study / Peggy Thayer. p. cm. — (Revisioning philosophy: v. 27) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Spiritual life. 2. Creative ability—Religious aspects. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title. II. Series: Revisioning philosophy; vol. 27. BL624. T45 153.3’5—dc20 96-26143 ISBN 0-8204-3454-X ISSN 0899-9937

Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Thayer, Peggy: The experience of being creative as a spiritual practice: a hermeneuticphenomenological study / Peggy Thayer −New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Brussels; Vienna; Oxford: Lang. ISBN 0-8204-3454-X

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2003 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 275 Seventh Avenue, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10001 www.peterlangusa.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

The power of creativity cannot be named. It remains mysterious to the end. But what does not shake us to our Foundations is no mystery. We ourselves, down to the smallest part of us, are charged with this power. We cannot state its essence but we can, in certain measure, move towards its source . . . (Paul Klee, 1961:17)

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Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi Part One: Introduction Chapter One: Personal Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Chapter Two: The Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 Chapter Three: The Method of Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Part Two: The Context Chapter Four: Creativity Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 Chapter Five: Creativity as Spiritual Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 Chapter Six: ContemporaryArt History: The Re-emergence of the Spiritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 Part Three: The Artists Speak Chapter Seven: The Historical Context: Hermeneutic-Phenomenology . .83 Chapter Eight: Experiential Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89 Chapter Nine: Thematic Amplification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101 Part Four: In Conclusion Chapter Ten: In Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121 Chapter Eleven: A Personal Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137

viii The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Appendix One: Participant’s Experiential Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 Appendix Two: Affinitive Grouping of Experiential Expressions . . . . . . .149 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157

Preface

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reative process involves bringing into form an unseen feeling, idea, insight. The way in which the unseen will manifest is not always known ahead of time. It is in the process of forming that this ‘something’ takes shape. In painting it is an interplay between myself and the object I am portraying. As I look at the object, I begin to find the colors I see in the paints I will use. Sometimes I even talk to the colors, calling for them when I need a little more blue in the gray I’m using or a little more white. Gradually, as the process continues, I begin to become the object, begin to feel what the object feels like, being itself. If I am painting the rocks of a cliff overhanging the ocean, I am solid, yet flowing in the shapes and colors of the clay and sand as they form rock. I, in a sense, go through, or echo the original creation of that cliff by the ocean as it takes shape on the white page, through colors on my paintbrush. Each stroke reforms what I see. I feel my whole body is involved, I am the brush, the paint, the stroke, the cliff. Through this interplay between canvas and object and my self, comes a deep sense of connection. I am connected to my work, connected to my self, connected to the earth, connected to the unseen, which is greater than I am, the Source. At times I feel it is this source, this creative force that forms and maintains all life, that is speaking through me. I feel suddenly alive, tingling with excitement, my body electrified. At other times I feel a deep sense of calm, an at-home-ness, a peace. This is it, all there is, a simple moment and I am content. It is these feelings of connection and revitalized life that motivate me to paint. The product is just a means, though it can bring me great joy when I look

x The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice at it and feel satisfied with what I see. The product itself is just a temporary manifestation of this process of connection. When it is complete, I let it go. What stays with me is the new aliveness the world has taken on; colors are brighter, shimmering; shadow and light dances. I feel renewed in wonder, content to be part of this creative dance we call life. San Francisco, June 1993

Acknowledgments

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would like to express my appreciation to the members of my dissertation committee, my family and friends, the participants in this research, the artists who have come before, and the ‘methodology of the marvelous,’ for all the inspiration and guidance I have received in the completion of this project.

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PA RT O N E

Introduction

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CHAPTER ONE

Personal Roots

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y interest in the creative process and my curiosity about the nature of creativity has been a life long pursuit, fueled by my personal practice as a painter and writer. Over the years I have begun to realize that my creative work not only brings a deep sense of inner healing, of integration, but that it has often brought deep shifts in my ordinary awareness. Not only does the world appear differently after a painting session, colors brighter, forms clearer, but I feel at times a deep connection to something greater than myself. I have come to see the importance of my creative practice not only in making visible that which is taking place within, not only as a way to know myself and make myself known but as a way to connect with a deeper, sacred, lifegiving force. These experiences, elucidated by my studies in East-West Psychology, have allowed me to see the creative act as a spiritual practice. I was first drawn to the field of East-West Psychology in response to the limits I felt in traditional Western psychology. I felt that it gave voice to the missing spiritual elements vital to human experience. My interest in creative process as a spiritual practice grows out of these studies. Looking over the collage of my life, I see that as a child, growing up between the scientific perspective of my father and the psychoanalytic one of mother, I found creative pursuits were a way to hear my own voice. They were spontaneous, inwardly motivated activities that seemed to defy the understanding of either psychology or science. In later years, being an artist became an identity, a name for my rebellious individual nature. I began to hold on to the contemporary Western view of the tragic artist, intent on breaking convention, struggling to survive. In my late

4 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice twenties this identity no longer seemed to work for me. I began a process of recovery and deep psycho-therapy work. During these years my creative practice became a literal lifeline, the loadstone rock that saw me through. After years of psychological healing I began to realize that my creative work not only brought a deep sense of inner integration, of well-being, but that it often brought shifts in my everyday awareness. Not only did the world look visually alive after a painting session, as if my vision had been renewed, but I felt at times a deep connection to something greater than myself. The act of painting itself, of attending to the subject portrayed as well as to the brush and paint, seemed to provide an opening in the veil of mundane reality, revealing that which lay below. I began to look at creative activity as a meditative practice. The attention to paint and canvas seemed to parallel attention to the breath in meditation. I even began to sit before my canvases on a zafu. The products of my creative activity have taken different forms throughout the years, paralleling my own personal growth. I have worked abstractly with acrylic and watercolor as well as from nature with pastels and oils. More recently, I have begun to work with my writing voice, composing short stories as well as poems. Perhaps because writing is not as familiar a medium to me, I feel an even stronger sense of shift when I write, a feeling that something greater is speaking through me. In a recent piece I try to capture this experience: The creative being inside is the voice that brings the next word to mind, the next image to sight. It seems there is a vast well inside whose bottom leads downward and eventually outward to touch the universe, itself. A universe that actually can never truly be touched, just known through the images that come forward, that fall into my own personal well . . . Sometimes it seems that this creative being is a force, a connective energy, that keeps the invisible thread of image-making continuous. It is a playful, seeking force. It takes no effort for it to continue. This force is not the images themselves, the teachings themselves, the content, the expression, or even the well. This force is the stream that would keep streaming whether there were words to hear, pictures to visualize, myself as a vehicle, or others as recipients. To contact this force, I just start here, with the surface, what comes to me right now, in whatever form or content, just following the string of words, the stream of visions. Just following seems to give it life. Beyond each word is another word, beyond each image, another image. Into the well, deeper, to get to the source. Beyond my personal creative being, I feel something Greater. As I follow, I listen, and as I receive, more follows; this is the creative being in action. I can feel its power, but never really know its form. It seems chameleon-like, becoming words and images as it moves. Always pointing towards something more than these words and images . . .

Throughout my years of experience with creative practice I have continued to seek an understanding of creativity itself. What are the attributes of the creative state or the components of the creative process? These questions have

PERSONAL ROOTS

5

led me to the writings of various creativity theorists, which have influenced my understanding of the creative process. I see creative activity as transforming the random into the meaningful, making beauty and order out of chaos. Sometimes it can be experienced as rediscovering something already latently extant, sometimes as facilitating the emergence of something entirely new. Creative practice can be seen as synthesizing the oppositional or disconnected, making a new whole. It often involves a breakdown of the usual ways of seeing, allowing the emergence of something new, an underlying unity, previously hidden or unknown. In a sense, everyday perception is a creative act. From my own experience it seems that creative practice often includes periods of focused attention followed by periods of letting go, relaxation and illumination. A sense of surrender or loss of conscious control is often part of the creative process. Creative activity can open the artist, as well as the participant or observer, to an experience of connection with a greater source. This can be seen as echoing or identifying with creation in a universal sense. In essence, I feel that creative process echoes the original creation, bringing into form the unseen or unmanifest. There is an element of surprise in this process, a journey into the unknown. Creative experience involves an interplay between the artist and the creative project which brings a new sense of deep connection which can be experienced physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. This process brings with it feelings of contentment, peace, and renewal. My understanding of creativity has been influenced as well by my experience with meditation and readings from various spiritual traditions. I feel that descriptions of spiritual practice echo, in many ways, the description I have given of creative experience. The essence of spiritual practice can be seen as the search for a connection with something greater than the personal self. With this shift in awareness can come feelings of unity, of oneness, stillness, emptiness, ecstasy or bliss. As Lipsey writes in his exploration of the spiritual essence in 20th century art, the spiritual Is an incursion from above or deep within to which the ordinary human being in each of us can only surrender . . . The spiritual is a dramatic shift in experience and an undoing of what we take to be ourselves. (1989: 10)

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C H A P T E R T WO

The Question

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nderstanding the creative act as a spiritual practice is not new in the history of art. In traditional cultures the act of creating has been associated with ritual, bringing into form that which is formless, making order out of chaos, echoing the original cosmos, the original creation. Creativity was understood as a sacred journey into the unknown, an encounter with the greater spiritual ground. Created works were seen as divine inspirations, messages from the Gods, spiritual gifts. The created objects themselves were thought to contain sacred power. They were capable of healing the viewer as well as their world. Art accepted a special mission in virtually every pre-industrial culture: to depict the sacred . . . the realm of the larger truths surrounding and conditioning our lives or dwelling within . . . the realm of the hidden, and therefore of revelation. (Lipsey, 1989: 12)

Marie Louise Von Franz has written of the importance the indigenous people, the Fijians, place on the ritual retelling of their myth of creation. Each time that life is threatened, and the cosmos, in their eyes, is exhausted and empty, the Fijians feel a need for a return ‘in principio’ . . . they expect the regeneration of cosmic life not from its restoration but from its recreation.” [Von Franz, 1972:16]

For these people, the original creation, the act of creating or retelling through ritual, and cultural renewal, are integrally connected. There is a vital bridge seen between art and life, a valuing of the spiritual sources of the creative and an understanding of art as an agent of healing and renewal.

8 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice With this kind of understanding, the artist is seen, not simply as an individual practitioner voicing a personal concern or bringing a vision of beauty into the world for purely esthetic enjoyment, but as a healer, a voice whose song is essential to the renewal and evolution of the world. Understanding the spiritual essence of creativity is not foreign even to Western cultures. Artists of the Romantic era have spoken openly of creativity as emanating from divine inspiration or meditative practice. Even Michelangelo wrote, The best of artists never makes creation That is not hid already in the stone, In marble fixed and yet the work is done By hand, which follows mind and meditation. (Van der Leuw, 1963: 265)

This understanding has also been articulated by many mystical traditions. Sufi psychology, in particular, speaks of imagination as the intermediary between man and God. The images one receives are seen as messengers from God that, when received, become manifestations veiling the Beloved on earth, drawing one towards union with the Divine. As Chittick states, The imagination does not create the images and ideas it sees, nor does it derive them from within itself, the memory or the mind. Rather, it receives them from a separate world of imagination, which exists independently of the mind. (1983: 248)

In contemporary time this understanding of creativity seems to have gone underground, hidden from view. As Mircea Eliade writes, It is not to say that the ‘sacred’ has completely disappeared in modern art. But it has become unrecognizable; it is camouflaged in forms, purposes and meanings which are apparently ‘profane.’ (1984: 180)

Even though the spiritual essence of creativity is not recognized by contemporary culture as a whole, individual artists have periodically continued to emerge, acknowledging some understanding of the spiritual nature of their work. The poet Emerson, for example, articulates his creative experiences as those of a surrender that may be seen as spiritual. When I watch that flowing river, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner, not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. (Krippner, 1972: 203–208)

There have been two waves in 20th century visual arts in which an essential spiritual role has been acknowledged. The first wave welled up at the turn

THE QUESTION

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of the century, involving such artists as Kandinsky and Mondrian. These artists were deeply influenced by the principles of theosophy and anthroposophy. Kandinsky writes, Painting is an art, and art is not a vague production transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul . . . to, in fact, the raising of the spiritual triangle. (Regier, 1987: 63)

The second wave arose in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States and was known as the Abstract Expressionist or New York School. These artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, did not turn to theosophy or anthroposophy for inspiration but instead turned towards Native American traditions, Zen Buddhism, and Jungian psychology. Barnett Newman expressed the philosophy of this school, The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extent his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art, which, through symbols, will catch the basic truth of life. The artist tries to wrest truth from the void. (Hess, 1969: 36)

Given this background, which will be further explored in Part Two, it can be seen that the spiritual dimension is essential to many artist’s creative experience. This understanding, along with my personal experience as a practicing painter have brought me to the central question I explore in this book. What is the felt-sense of creative experience for contemporary painters who consider their work a spiritual practice? What is the experience of being creative for these artists and how is it understood as spiritual practice? How does it play a part in their personal meaning and self-understanding?

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CHAPTER THREE

The Method of Inquiry

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hen I first began to think about exploring creativity and spiritual experience, I considered studying the similarities and differences between meditative and creative states through an experimental method. I soon came to feel that while such a study may have been interesting, it wouldn’t have tapped the essential felt-nature of creative practice as spiritual experience that I am most interested in exploring. The field of creativity research has been dominated by traditional experimental methods. Physiological correlates of creativity have been found to include an increase in alpha-wave activity and brain synchrony. There have been numerous studies delineating the attributes of the ‘creative personality.’ Some studies have even correlated scores on Hood’s Mysticism Scale with those on Yonge’s adjective checklist, pointing towards a relationship between mystical personalities and creative personalities. Many studies have shown that meditation, hypnosis or psychotropic drugs can enhance creativity. Yet, the experimental method itself limits the nature of research findings by it’s assumptions of objectivity, causality, and distance from everyday life. The essential felt-sense of the creative process has not been thoroughly explored. As opposed to asking what causes creativity, what attributes the creative person may possess or what characteristics an object of creativity may have, it is important to ask how creativity is experienced, and how it makes sense as a lived experience. Because the field of psychology has sought validation for itself by grounding its tradition in science, the predominant mode of psychological research has been the experimental, behaviorist method. While this may have been

12 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice appropriate for the fields of physics and mathematics, it does not address the true nature of human experience, which is not a fixed object to be tested and quantified but an ever-changing phenomenon. Even in the field of physics the concept of a separate fixed ‘object’ is collapsing with the acceptance of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty, that the observer influences the object observed. It seems unavoidable that research in a field must be done with a method that shares the qualities of that which one is observing and describing. Can a method of research address human experience on its own terms, as a lived phenomenon? I believe the hermeneutic- phenomenological method is an attempt to do this. As Rollo May writes, The phenomenologists hold that we must cut through the tendency in the West to believe we understand things if we only know their causes, and to find out and describe instead what the thing is as a phenomenon—the experience, as it is given to us, in its ‘giveness.’ [cited in Kidd, 1993]

This approach attempts to reveal the nature, quality and meaning of experience from within the changing nature of experience itself, furthering understanding through a reflective dialogue. As Mary-Rose Barral writes, No longer do we stop, so to speak, human life and action in order to investigate their essence and reality. Instead we stand in readiness to catch life in the act, in the experiential moment . . . to come to know the subject from within. (1990: xv)

The underlying question for the phenomenologist is not why but what and how and by whom. The search is for understanding for its own sake. What is experience? How does it present itself? As Husserl states, ‘Back to the things themselves.’ This is a discovery oriented approach, a method without preconceptions about where the research itself may lead. Experience is not an object to be controlled or predicted but a living, fluid, phenomenon that one can only describe from within its lived sense. This method does not seek to impose structure on experience but to observe and describe it as it is. Experience is not seen as a neutral phenomenon but as a dynamic and meaningful one. How can there be psychological reality without meaning? The hermeneutic-phenomenological method seeks to reveal the underlying prereflective essence of experience that manifests as meaning on a reflective level. As Husserl has written, we can only describe experience as embedded in the stream of time and the lifeworld. There is no subject separate from the object of experience; we are always in relationship to the lifeworld in co-constituting our experience of it. The hermeneutic-phenomenological method differs from classic phenomenology in that one’s presuppositions are not set aside or bracketed but are taken, instead, as the starting point from which one’s inquiry begins. In the

THE METHOD OF INQUIRY

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hermeneutic arc there is dialogue between one’s self-understanding and the understanding of the text. As Von Eckartsberg writes, The attitude of a hermeneutical-phenomenological approach is forever cognizant of the relativity of its own perspective and of its role as a researcher’s vision and understanding based on tacitly accepted presuppositions and situational circumstances. (1986: 54)

In hermeneutic-phenomenology all human expression can be seen as lifetexts, art works, literary forms, rituals, as well as descriptions of experience. These texts themselves can be looked at as “a world, a cumulative and holistic process, the structure of which . . . cannot be derived from or reduced to the linguistic structure of the sentence.” (Titleman, 1975: 186) Rather than distilling and breaking the descriptions into meaning units or core constituents as one might do in a purely phenomenological study, one can dialogue with the meaning of the piece as a whole. The hermeneutic-phenomenological approach thus becomes one of dialogue that spirals outward and at the same time inward rather than the more linear atomistic approach of empirical phenomenology. The particular hermeneutic-phenomenological method I have chosen to use in this exploration of creativity and spiritual practice is the Experiential Method developed by James and Sunnie Kidd. The Experiential Method displays how a person, through personal action, participates in the constitution of self-meaning . . . To locate an appropriate access to meaning as it is being constituted through personal action, one turns to experience. For it is in experience that the irreducible nature of personal meaning is disclosed and can be described. (Kidd, 1990: 1)

This method is a way of investigating a phenomenon that echoes our ordinary way of understanding. It is a process of interplay between the reflexive and reflective modes of knowing. It is “A reliving of an already existing understanding of self and world . . . heart is the reflexive, mind is the reflective.” (Kidd: 1990,10–11) I see this method as itself a creative process, using an interplay of intuition and reflection, seeking to elucidate the underlying meaning of experience. It feels particularly appropriate to use this method for research in creativity. How did I carry out my inquiry? What did it entail? To begin, through preliminary informal interviews I asked ten painters if they considered their practice of painting to be a spiritual one. These artists were referred to me by several sources, by professors and students at the California Institute for Integral Studies, the San Francisco Zen Center, Artist-Therapists of Northern California, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and The New Thought Journal.

14 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice While I had intended to have ten participants, an equal number of male and female artists, the final group actually includes eight women and two men. All are practicing painters, six professionally, making at least part of their living through their artwork. While a few of the artists had not previously identified their painting as a spiritual practice, all of the participants felt they could answer a question concerning their art and spiritual experience. The ten participants were sent a consent form and a question by mail. The question read, “Describe Your Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice.” The participants were asked to pick a time when they were relaxed and focused and to write spontaneously for twenty to thirty minutes on the question. They were asked to write whatever came up without editing or revising. Each artist’s description may be found in full in Chapter Eight. Before I began to work with each individual’s description I did a short clearing, vipassana meditation. I then read each participant’s experiential description straight through without stopping, to gain an initial grasp of the whole. A second reading was then done, further reflecting on the meaning of the text as a whole. These initial readings were done with an open awareness, as Van Eckartsberg writes, “making room for it to reveal itself to (my) gaze and ears, to speak its own story into (my) understanding.” [1986: 138] After this initial grasp of the whole I returned again to the text and began looking for those statements that stood out as particularly meaningful parts of the text. These became the experiential expressions and were underlined. This process was repeated for each individual participant’s description, staying with the experience described through reading and rereading the individual experiential expressions and returning always to the text as a whole. This act of staying with each experiential description allows an immediate and intuitive understanding of the experience described. As Watson has written in his description of approaching the work of Chuang Tzu, The best way . . . I believe, is not to attempt to subject his thought to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving the words, and the world in which it moves. (cited in Kidd, 1990: 7)

This is the divinatory method as described by Schleirmacher, “By leading the interpreter to transform himself, so to speak, into the author, the divinatory method seeks to gain an immediate comprehension of the author as an individual.” [cited in Mueller-Vollmer, 1989: 96] I returned once again to read all the experiential expressions themselves, looking this time for the meaning that began to form around them. Several experiential expressions often seemed to point towards a particular emergent

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theme, which I then began to name. I returned once again to the text as a whole with these themes in mind. (see appendix II for full text of emergent themes) Out of this reading and rereading, meaning begins to emerge as one identifies the experiential expressions and emergent experiential themes. The relationship between the whole of the description and the part, each experiential expression, is amplified as one moves continually from the text as a whole to the experiential expressions and back again. This is the hermeneutic dialogue. The part is understood in relation to the whole and the whole is understood in relation to the part. As the process continued it became clear that some of the emergent themes identified were actually different aspects of larger emergent themes. I then came to identify four major emergent themes with sub-themes, which will be described in full in Chapter Nine. The Experiential Method is one of interplay between the participant’s lived experience, the expression of this experience, and an expanding understanding of this experience for both the participant and the researcher. The purpose of my inquiry was three-fold. First, the spiritual aspects of the creative process are described, explored, and validated. Second, the very looking at how spiritual experience and understanding arise in the lived experience of creativity deepens, enhances and enriches our present knowledge of creativity. Finally, the importance of this inquiry goes beyond the immediate field of creativity research to enrich the growing field of hermeneuticphenomenological inquiry in the human sciences, particularly in the exploration of consciousness and spiritual experience.

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PA RT T WO

The Context

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THE CONTEXT

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here is a vast body of literature on creativity. In this section, I focus on just some of the themes that I have found in the literature, giving special attention to those that seem particularly significant to an exploration of the creative activity of painting as a spiritual practice. I look at how theoreticians, art historians, artists, and writers from various spiritual traditions have described creative experience as spiritual practice, and how the understanding of this experience can be further illuminated by my research. In the first part of this section, I look at the field of creativity theory in general, pointing out the ways creativity theorists have attempted to understand creativity conceptually. In the second part, I focus more specifically on creativity and spiritual practice, touching on some of the themes arising out of the field of consciousness studies as well as the spiritual traditions. In the third part, I turn to contemporary art history and look at some of the writings from painters who have understood their creative process as essentially spiritual in nature.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Creativity Theory

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reativity can be seen as encompassing a broad range of experience from simply ‘doing one’s own thing’ to acts of divine grace. As Carl Rogers writes,

The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the house wife devising a new sauce for the meat; a young author writing his first novel; all of these are, in terms of our definition creative. [1961]

The Oxford English Dictionary defines creativity as, “said of the Divine agent; to bring into being, cause to exist; especially to produce where nothing was before, to form out of nothing.” [1989] These descriptions point towards the divine as well as the mundane nature of creative experience. Creativity in art and science echoes not only the original creation of the universe, but the everyday creation of life, moment to moment. In an effort to understand creative activity, theorists have asked several basic questions. What is the source of creativity? What is the purpose of creativity; why does one create? What are the phases or movements of the creative process? What are the traits of the creative state, of the creative person? What techniques can facilitate creativity? What are the products or outcomes of creative activity? As the question one asks leads to the answer one receives, these questions have, in a sense, shaped the understandings found by creativity theorists. Is creativity an emergence of something new, out of nothing, ex nihilo, as divine creation has been seen to be, or is it the rearrangement of the already extant, or the revelation of something previously unseen? Arieti writes,

22 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice The truth that is discovered and seems new was actually either hidden in our mind, our unconscious, or in a part of the universe that is unknown to us. Any form of creativity would thus be the transformation of a piece of transcendence into a piece of immanence. [1976: 406]

In order to uncover the essential mystery of creative experience, many have looked for its source in divine emanation. Others have seen it as an aspect of human consciousness, an irruption from the unconscious, an inspiration from the collective unconscious. Some theorists have described creativity as simply a unique mode of thought, one that may bring increased access to the intuitive or metaphoric. D.H. Lawrence describes his experience of painting as a kind of instinctual intuition. The knowing eye watches sharp as a needle; but the picture comes clean out of instinct, intuition and sheer physical action. Once the instinct and intuition gets into the brush-tip, the picture happens, if it is to be a picture at all. [Ghiselin, 1952: 63]

Henri Poincare, speaking of his breakthroughs in mathematics, writes of “having divined by a delicate intuition that these combinations would be useful.” [Ghiselin, 1952: 29] J.P. Guilford speaks of creativity as a particular kind of cognitive function, which he names divergent thinking. Essentially divergent thinking is a nonlinear mode of thought characterized by flexibility, originality, and fluency. [1959: 142–161] Schneier speaks of bimodal consciousness or the concept that there are ‘two minds’ within us, the linear, rational, digital, mind and the metaphoric, intuitive, or analog mind. The digital mind is ‘world sustaining’ while the analog mind is ‘world breaking’ and ‘world making.’ [1984: 69] Creative activity is seen as a process, which brings together these two modes. Other theorists have also spoken of the creative as a process of synthesis, of bringing together two previously unrelated ideas or experiences. Among these are Arthur Koestler, Albert Rothenberg, and Silvano Arieti. Arthur Koestler first termed the concept Janusian thinking. This idea comes from Janus, the two-faced Roman God, and implies the creative capacity to synthesize two opposite or contradictory ideas or forms. In Janusian thinking two oppositional forms are not merely seen together, side by side, but they are simultaneously conceived. Integral to Koestler’s concept of Janusian thinking is the process of dissociation and bisociation. For the artist this is the act of unlearning and relearning, of breaking down one’s usual way of organizing the world and reorganizing it through new associations, new syntheses. This remaking is bisociation, the

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process of “perceiving a situation or event in two mutually exclusive associative contexts. The result is an abrupt transfer of the train of consciousness to a different track, governed by a different logic or ‘rule of the game.’” [Koestler, 1978: 406] This process of simultaneity or shifting tracks of mind described by Janusian thinking and bisociation are fundamental concepts to a deeper understanding of creativity. As Koestler writes, “By living on both planes at once, the creative artist or scientist is able to catch an occasional glimpse of eternity looking through the window of time.” [1978: 406] Rothenberg expands the understanding of Janusian thinking by conceptualizing the oppositional and homospatial aspects of the creative process. Rothenberg distinguishes between oppositional thinking, the process of conceiving opposites one after another, sequentially, and Janusian thinking in which opposites are seen simultaneously, all at once. An artist can use the conceptual movement between opposites as a way to leave behind that which is familiar and venture into that which is new. “Oppositional thoughts are important to the creative process in setting limits against which the artist can move into the unknown while anchored in the known. Opposition provides the end points, in a sense, for leaps of thought.” [1979: 239–240] In homospatial thinking, which is the visual counterpart to Janusian thinking, two opposites are conceived simultaneously, superimposed on one another in space. This can be seen when looking at the Gestalt image of Rubin’s double profiles. Instead of seeing each profile successively, one after the other, one can see both profiles at once, homospatially, which creates a new, integrated whole. Janusian thinking transcends time, antitheses are conceived all at once, in a single moment, rather than sequentially. Homospatial thinking transcends space, as two or more entities are seen as occupying the same location. Rothenberg sees the timelessness and spacelessness inherent in the creative process as due only in part to the subjective experience brought on by intense concentration and seclusion. It is also an outgrowth of these new modes of thinking, Janusian and homospatial, which is found in creative processing. The loss of the sense of time’s passage is only one aspect of the timelessness involved in the creative process . . . There is a unique suspension of time . . . an abrogation and a transcendence of the intrinsic elements of time, sequence and repetition . . . When the creator conceives of opposites and antitheses operating simultaneously, he brings complex sequences into a single moment and a single conception. Through simultaneity time stands still; in standing still, it is transcended. [Rothenberg, 1979: 408]

As Koestler speaks of the Janusian process of conceiving a dialectic and Rothenberg speaks of the Janusian and homospatial processes of simultaneously conceived time and space, Arieti speaks of the tertiary process or the com-

24 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice bination of two modes of knowing, creating a new mode. In creativity, the primary mode, the archaic, unconscious mind, and the secondary mode, the rational mind in its waking state, give way to the tertiary mode, the integration or new ‘magic’ synthesis. “The creative or tertiary process generates unities never experienced before and segments the world in new ways.” For Arieti, this creative ability to discover unities or similarities is central. “Similarity indicates that there is some kind of recurrence and, therefore, regularity in the universe. It is from these segments of regularity that the human mind plunges into the understanding of the cosmos and into the making of its own inner reality.” [Arieti, 1976: 4] While these three theorists speak of creativity as a human experience brought on by new modes of thought, they each imply in different ways that there is something beyond the personal that is important to the experience of creativity. In general, contemporary theorists have been more comfortable attributing the source of creativity to an aspect of human consciousness, as coming from the unconscious, the supraconscious, or the preconscious. The unconscious was first seen by Freud as a kind of repository for repressed, forbidden or hidden aspects of the mind, ruled by primitive or irrational forces. This understanding led to a belief that creativity, arising from the unconscious, acted similarly to neurosis, as an attempt to resolve conflicts, particularly from early childhood trauma. Myers, a contemporary of Freud’s, also saw the unconscious as the source for creativity. He, however, saw it as “a gold mine as well as a rubbish heap,” as the source of art, science, and religion as well as the container for personal memories, dreams, and fantasies. [Harmon, 1984: 11] Carl Jung also spoke of the unconscious as the creative source, distinguishing between the personal unconscious, parallel to Freud’s understanding, and the collective unconscious, the transpersonal domain of myth, archetype, and universal cultural memory. He saw creative experience as having a twofold nature, as either psychological or visionary. In the visionary mode the creative person is at the mercy of the reemerging content. He is in a passive situation. “The work begins with its own form, what he (the author) would add to it is declined; what he does not wish to admit is forced upon him.” In the visionary mode, the creative person is more conscious of an ‘alien’ will or intention beyond his comprehension. [Arieti, 1976: 27]

This understanding of creativity as visionary echoes the experiences described by those who attribute creative inspiration to the Divine. However, it seems that Jung saw the Divine as an archetype of the collective unconscious, rather than as a Deity or Being separate from the human psyche.

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Creativity has also been conceived as coming from the supraconscious. This can include such concepts as the Higher Mind, OverSoul, or even Aurobindo’s Supermind. The supraconscious is beyond ordinary consciousness, with access to the same universal knowledge as the collective unconscious holds yet with an all-knowing evolutionary force. There is the sense that, while the supraconscious is still a human potential or spiritual force, as opposed to a Divine Entity, it serves to guide the personal self towards evolving higher consciousness. Increased creativity is seen as part of this evolution. As Pitrim Sorokin writes, It is not the subconscious or unconscious, but the supraconscious energies that are beginning to be considered as the real source of all great human creations, discoveries and inventions in all fields of culture . . . such phenomena as extrasensory perception . . . religious experiences of the great mystics, cognitive and creative intuition are neither subconscious nor unconscious but supraconscious, and as such are not reducible to the lower forms of vital and mental energy. [Harmon & Rheingold, 1984: 19]

J.C. Gowan has used the term preconscious to refer to his understanding of the source of creativity. He sees the preconscious as the realm of forces emanating from the numinous, which he sees as the Deity, the Spirit of Man. He writes, The numinous is not personal, not individual, not finite, not mortal, not rational, not human, not limited in power or intelligence, not time or space bound. It is perhaps best regarded as a primal vis or force, like electricity. [1975: 3]

Through creative experience the preconscious is accessed and the numinous is experienced in a veiled manner, which allows the personal self to remain intact. Creative experience brings openness to the collective preconscious, an effect of the numinous element which is shared by all. It can be considered as an ever-filling well wherein all creative men have learned to dip their bucket. [1975: 300]

The sense that creative inspiration has its origin beyond personal consciousness was integral to ancient cosmologies. As J.C. Gowan writes, “the ancients ascribed divine origin, inspiration or direction to any great creative work so that the poet became the prophet.” [1975: 28] Creativity was attributed to the Muse, the Daemon, or the Divine. While contemporary theorists have been reluctant to call this other worldly source the Divine, the sense that creativity comes from beyond the personal self has been spoken of by some. In 1946, G. N. M. Tyrell wrote of this phenomenon in The Personality of Man,

26 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice It is a highly significant, though generally neglected, fact that these creations of the human mind which have borne preeminently the stamp of originality and greatness, have not come from within the region of consciousness. They have come from beyond consciousness, knocking at its door for admittance. They have flowed into it, sometimes slowly as if by seepage, but often with a burst of overwhelming power. [cited in Harmon, 1984: xxii]

The psychologist, Otto Rank, speaks of creative experience as coming from beyond the personal self, from the universal creative source. He writes, When one begins the creative process, one leaves the ordinary world behind. One steps into the unknown and comes into contact not only with the material from one’s personal, deeper self, but from the universal creative source. The ‘creative experience’ takes place at a psychic level deeper than rationality, and its result is a sense of connection to life that extends beyond the present moment in all directions of time . . . a sense of more than personal participation in everlasting life. [cited in Progoff, 1956: 250]

This description of the universal creative source echos Gowan’s description of the ‘everfilling well.’ Connected to the search for the source of creativity is the question of motivation or purpose; why does one create? Answers to this question have ranged from the Freudian vision that creativity is compensation or wish-fulfillment to Kandinsky’s understanding that art is an agent of spiritual life. Freud believed that creativity arose from an essential place of discontent, serving as a means to correct an unsatisfying reality. Creativity was seen as fantasy production or day-dreaming, as well as a defense mechanism that served to sublimate primitive drives or to moderate pathological states. Anthony Storr, in his critique of the Freudian view, maintains that creativity is not merely an escape from reality but that “phantasy might serve the purpose of enhancing man’s grasp of reality . . . to make some sense out of it.” [1972: 45–46] Jung, too, spoke of creativity as compensatory; but he spoke of it as compensation for a lack of spiritual connection. He saw creative process as an unconscious animation of the archetype serving to balance the spiritual deficiencies both individually and culturally. Many have spoken of the instinct or drive to create. Lowenfeld and Britain write, Creativity is an instinct all people possess, an instinct with which we are born . . . Recent psychological studies reveal that creativity, the ability to explore and investigate, belongs to one of the basic drives and is a drive without which man cannot exist. [1966: 69–70]

This drive can be seen as echoing the drive towards procreation, towards evolution, or as a quest for knowledge, for meaning, or spiritual connection.

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Ghiselin speaks of creativity as a drive towards manifestation, an experience of being “drawn by the unrealized toward realization.” [1952: 8] Arieti speaks of creativity as a longing, an indefinite search for the new. The creative process is a way of fulfilling the longing or search for a new object or state of experience or existence . . . This longing can be observed not only during the creative process but also in the creative product. [1976: 6]

Sumita Roy sees this indefinite quest as a quest for knowledge “which lies at the root of all human activity . . . (and is) probably the first rung in the ladder of creativity.” [1991: 5] The creative longing can also be seen as an urge towards discovery. In creative process one seeks to discover the previously unknown, to uncover the hidden, to recognize a latent harmony or order. As Kate Simmons writes in Creative Consciousness, the artist discovers the harmony which he creates. Whether we call it inspiration, talent, or divine grace, this faculty of discovery is at the root of all creation. [cited in Roy 1991: 57]

Briggs speaks of this creative urge towards discovery as one of omnivalence, a feeling that there is something more. Omnivalence involves the sensation that at any moment one may fall through a crack in this world experiencing another reality. This crack is the ‘space between’ wherein lies a new sense of meaning, a new order. [1990: 114] Arieti, too, speaks of the meaning-making aspect of creativity, which is connected to the discovery of order. He writes, The creative person is able to transform the sea of irrelevancy in which he finds himself into a vision of order and beauty, or he sees how a tiny fragment of seeming cosmic futility collides and coincides with a piece of obviousness. He is provided with the capacity to transform randomness and disparity into organized structure. [1976: 405]

Arieti sees this as tied in with the recognition of similarity or unity, which leads to an understanding that there is some kind of inherent order in the universe. This guiding principle is a tremulous little light with which to search and attain, with which to break the secret of the universal night and make a piece of understanding a piece of ourselves. [1976: 410]

The search for order can be seen as parallel to the ancient use of ritual to mediate between the human and the natural or supernatural worlds, allowing one to participate in, as well as control, the forces around one. It can be seen

28 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice as a search for meaning, personal truth, understanding or spiritual awareness of an underlying unity. As Roy writes, The need, indeed the rage, for order and its achievement through creativity is very vital. The artist’s quest for universal order seems to be closely linked with the religious dimensions of the human consciousness in which a world beyond the sensate one is realized. Thus, the link of all arts with religion is unmistakable. [1991: 55]

Creativity is one mode through which a universal order can manifest. As Cyril Burt writes, I am convinced that there is only one basic Order—which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous. [Gowan, 1975: 174]

One aspect of this manifestation of order can be seen in the artist’s work of bringing together the microcosm and the macrocosm. This is reflected in making large the everyday, mirroring the greater whole in the particular and small, echoing universal creation in individual artistic activity. As Briggs writes, The creator’s task is very large. It is nothing less than the re-creation of the universe or, more precisely, finding or constructing a whole, integrated, microcosm in order to reflect the whole macrocosm. [1990: 83]

The act of creating can be seen as a movement between two modes, or two worlds. The artist, herself, can be seen as a messenger, serving as a bridge between the formed and the formless, the particular and the whole, the personal and the universal, the mundane and the divine. Gowan speaks of creativity as the “bridging between the conscious ego and the numinous element.” [1975: 312] Jane Roberts speaks of the artist as being at the threshold between the physical and the non-physical worlds. Creativity is a unique state of existence by itself, in which you combine the elements of physical and non-physical reality. It is almost like a threshold between the two realities, and you learn to hold your physical intent long enough at that threshold so that you have a kind of brief attention span there, and use it to draw from non-physical reality precisely those creative elements that you need. [1974: 324]

Arthur Koestler speaks of creativity as bringing together the finite and the infinite, or the trivial and the absolute. The scientist discovers the working of eternal laws in the ephemeral grain of sand, or in the contraction of a dead frog’s leg hanging on a washing line. The artist carves out the image of the god which he saw hidden in a piece of wood. [1964: 365]

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Many have spoken of the spiritual purpose of creativity as one of contacting a hidden reality beyond the everyday. J. C. Gowan speaks of creativity as a parataxic mode. Parataxic refers to the veiling of the awesome numinous as it reveals itself in creativity through images which reflect the higher order, discharging the intensity of this contact through the making of art forms. Creativity in this sense is seen as one way contemporary thinkers can have religious experience within the context of our secular world. Gowan writes, If there is one entrance for Western scientific man into the arcana of developmental progress and self-actualization, that entrance is creativity. For it allows him, while still retaining his respectability as a cognitive thinker to have intuitive brushes with the numinous element through creative outpourings from the preconscious. [1975: 277]

Einstein speaks of the importance of communicating a cosmic religious feeling through creative artistic and scientific expression, “to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive.” [Briggs, 1991: 121] Many have spoken of creativity, not only as a way to access the spiritual, but as an evolutionary step in the journey towards higher consciousness. Gowan speaks of it as preliminary in a heirarchy of experience, which includes meditation as well as eventual union with the Divine. Creativity is a preparatory experience, opening one to spiritual experience which leads ultimately to the joining of individual mind with Greater Mind. Man’s mind is a device for bringing infinite mind into manifestation in time; creativity is the commencement of this actualization. [1975: 313]

Sumita Roy also speaks of creativity as “a manifestation of the higher level of conscious evolution.” [1991: 40] Creativity not only leads one individually to higher states of awareness, or self-actualization as Maslow names it, but the act of creating also leads civilization as a whole towards higher evolution. This can be seen not only culturally, bringing meaning, order, and beauty, into the world, but spiritually, leading us towards connection with the Greater, the ‘raising of the spiritual triangle,’ as Kandinsky describes it. Many theorists have sought to understand creativity by looking at the process itself, attempting to delineate the particular stages or movements involved. One of the classic theorists who delineated four stages of creativity, was Wallas. [1926] He speaks of creativity as involving preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. In preparation, the ground is laid and the mind is focused consciously on the problem or subject. In incubation, the mind is withdrawn from attention, allowing internal or underground processes to con-

30 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice tinue in a period of gestation. In illumination, a sudden intuition or insight breaks through in a moment of inspiration. In the final stage of verification, the creator returns again to rational thought looking at the creation critically, in a period of evaluation and refinement. The period of incubation is particularly important in terms of looking at creativity as a spiritual practice. It is in this period that the artist surrenders personal, conscious involvement, allowing something more to appear. Laura Rose writes of this period of incubation as the foundation of creativity . . . the unification of the creative thinker, the process of creation, and the creative idea . . . transpiring in a field of all possibilities, infinite correlation, self-sufficiency, pure knowledge, unboundedness and self-referral. [1988: 139–153]

Henry James writes of consciously aligning himself with this process of gestation, turning his idea over to the unconscious forces. I was charmed by my idea . . . I have dropped it for the time into the deep well of unconscious cerebration; not without the hope, doubtless, that it might eventually emerge from that reservoir, as one had already known the buried treasure to come to light, with a firm iridescent surface and a notable increase of weight. [Ghiselin, 1952: 16]

Creativity is spoken of as a state of becoming, a state of change. Essential to this is the experience of allowing, or letting go. This is the receptive experience of change reflected in Lao Tze’s description of Nature in the Tao Te Ching. Just as nature changes and yet remains the same, so nature acts without acting or without executing itself. Nature’s action is spontaneous. It cannot be imposed upon from the outside, for there is nothing prior to it, other than, or outside of, nature to influence it. It can neither be persuaded nor dissuaded. [Chung-yuan, 1975, Chapter 56]

Ghiselin describes change as facilitated by this unfocused or unconscious state of being. In the unconscious psyche and on the fringes of consciousness, change is easier because there the compulsive and inhibiting effect of the system sustained by will and attention is decreased or ceases altogether. [1952: 12]

Fischer-Hamilton speaks of this process as one of de-automization, based on the concept used by Deikman in early meditation research. De-automization involves “disrupting behavior patterns . . . allowing response to stimuli in new ways—-and an increase in sensitivity.” [1985: 37–46] Laura Rose distinguishes between two styles of creativity which she names the irrational and the rational. The first is a process of openness and surrender,

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expanding the mind to take in all stimuli, eventually transcending the manifest form and directly reaching the field of consciousness. The second, or rational mode is one of alternating periods of focused concentration with periods of expansion. [1988: 139–153] This rational mode of creativity has been described by many theorists as a movement between two modes of thought, the deliberate and the spontaneous, the active and the passive, the conscious and the unconscious, the digital and the analog. The movement from preparation to incubation to verification described by Wallas can also be seen as such a movement, one of withdrawal and return, withdrawing from an externally focused mode to an internally focused mode. Helmholtz describes this process, After a period of lengthy investigation, in many directions, of some particular problem . . . happy ideas come unexpectedly, without effort, like an inspiration . . . they come particularly readily during the slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day. [Bogen & Bogen, 1988: 293]

Cooperstein speaks of this rhythm of concentration and relaxation as one of regression and accession. Regression is a process of “de-differentiation, dissolution of existing schematized or automated behavior patterns and activation of primitive levels of behavior from which un-differentiated phenomena emerge.” This facilitates accession or “access to realms of awareness other than what is collectively adopted.” [1985: 28–36] The three theorists mentioned earlier, Koestler, Arieti, and Rothenberg also speak of this opposition or movement between two modes of thought. Koestler speaks of bringing together two previously unrelated ideas or forms in Janusian thinking or bisociation. Arieti speaks of the movement between primary and secondary thought giving way to tertiary or creative thought. Rothenberg speaks of oppositional thinking, moving between opposites, and homospatial thinking in which opposites are conceived simultaneously. In this interplay of opposites, this movement between two modes, creativity can lead to the experience of synthesis or unity, as well as to the experience of the in-between, accessing what lies below, the greater unity. While these descriptions of the various stages or movements in the creative process are valid aspects of creative activity, it is important to keep in mind that the creative process is fluid rather than linear or sequential. These stages, in reality, may come and go throughout the process, sometimes overlapping or even occurring simultaneously. As Rothenberg states, The temporal distinction made between inspiration and elaboration in the creative process is an incorrect one; the phases or functions alternate—sometimes extremely rapidly—from start to finish. [1979: 346]

32 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Edgar Vinacke writes, too, of the importance of viewing creativity holistically, as a total pattern of behavior in which various processes overlap and interweave . . . the four aspects of creativity overlap and intermingle . . . the creator is really preparing, verifying, having illumination and incubations all at the same time. [1952: 248–250]

Many researchers have looked at the attributes of the state of creative inspiration in an attempt to describe creative experience. This creative state has been described as a non-ordinary or altered state of awareness characterized by a changed sense of space, time, and self. As Gowan writes, in the aesthetic ASC . . . the artist sheds the three great illusions . . . 1) He is no longer bound by the sensory percepts of the physical world. 2) He transcends time and 3) He loses a sense of separateness and moving beyond self becomes at one with the universal forces of the cosmos. [1975: 241]

S. Miedzinski writes similarly of the metaphoric mode, which would include the creative state of inspiration. This mode is characterized by imaginal thought, holistic understanding, a relaxed yet energized physical state, and intensified emotional experience. Will is often experienced as passive as if one were carried by some deeper force within . . . Attention is focused and deeply absorbed . . . and boundaries between self and other and self and the world are less clear. [1993: 5b]

In metaphoric mode one can also access spiritual experience. The creative state has been described as a turning inward, away from the boundaries and dualities that rule the physical world. With this turning comes increased states of concentration or ‘absorption,’ as Rollo May describes it, being caught up in, wholly involved. [1975: 41] M. Csikszentmihalyi calls this process of total involvement the experience of ‘flow.’ He writes It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. [1990: 3]

This state of involvement is described by Ghiselin as one-ness with the object. “Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement—meaning at-oneness, the state of being one with the object.” [1952: 65–66] The creative state seems to involve an increased capacity for openness in relationship, or connection between the observer and the observed. Fromm calls this full awareness.

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If we are fully aware of a tree at which we look . . . then we have a kind of experience which is the premise for painting the tree . . . In full awareness there is no abstraction; the tree returns its full concreteness, and that means also its uniqueness. There is only one tree in the world and to this tree I relate myself. I see it. I respond to it. The tree becomes my own creation. [1959: 54–56]

This state of absorption involves not only increased attention or being caught up in the work but a change in the ordinary sense of self and other. As Fromm writes, the artist has to give up holding onto himself, as a thing and begin to experience himself only in the process of creative response; paradoxically enough, if he can experience himself in this process, he loses himself. He transcends the boundaries of his own person, and at the very moment when he feels “I am,” he also feels “I am you,” “I am one with the world.” [1959: 51]

Rollo May speaks of this experience as one of ‘encounter’ or ‘engagement.’ He writes that this leads to ‘ex-stasis’—that is, literally ‘to stand out from,’ to be freed from the usual split between subject and object which is a perpetual dichotomy in most human activity. Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. [1975: 48]

Many have spoken of the creative state as one of delicate balance, a dance between worlds. The artist J. Arp writes, “the creator must maintain a state in ‘the fire of balance’ in a movement between Above and Below, light and darkness, eternity and transitoriness.” [1971: 53–54] In this movement between, the ordinary limits of consciousness are opened; duality, space, time, and the separate sense of self are suspended, allowing the revelation of what lies below, the infinite, the eternal, the One. Another question that has been asked in explorations of creativity is, what are the characteristics of the creative personality? These characteristics seem to include the capacity to experience and cultivate many of the attributes of the creative state of inspiration described above. The creative personality is said to be one of psychological openness, spontaneity, with a tolerance of the unknown and of ambiguity, the capacity to abstract and synthesize. Creative people have also been seen as “interpreting their experience in terms of ‘flow’ . . . there is an emphasis on process . . . an ability to tolerate an awareness of chaos and ambiguity.” [Fischer-Hamilton, 1985: 37–46] Creativity is one of the attributes of Maslow’s self- actualized man. (1968) As Frank Barron writes, the creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but courts the most promising source of novelty in his own thought . . . the creative person is both more

34 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice primitive and more cultured, crazier and saner, than the average person. [Douglas, 1977: 268–285]

Rosner adds to these attributes the “willingness to trust hunches . . . as well as a questioning nature and sense of intellectual independence.” [1970: 382–383] MacKinnon’s research in personality at the University of California, Berkeley, has verified these characteristics, as well as pointing out some other traits, which echo the attributes of the creative state already discussed. Creative individuals are sensitive both to their inner states and to the outer world. Such individuals are open to and receptive of experience and seek to know as much as possible about life. Creative persons are intuitive . . . capable of going well beyond sense perception and are alert and responsive to deeper meanings. [Douglas, 1977: 389]

S. Miedzinski writes that the great creative person is not just comfortable in the intuitive, metaphoric realm but also has facility in the rational, linear realm. Those who engage both modes are the people of genius. They have at their disposal the full richness and power of the metaphoric mind which is the source of all creative inspiration. They also have at their disposal the ability to articulate, organize, communicate and use these insights, which are the special talents of the linear mind. [1993: 3]

There has also been research that points towards a correlation between spiritual or mystical capacity and the creative person. Creativity is seen as a personality characteristic of mystically inclined people in a study done by Cowling [1985]. The relationship between mystical experience (experiences of unity and transcendence), differentiation (self/ non-self segregation), and creativity was explored. Mysticism, as measured by Hoods Mysticism Scale, was found to be highly correlated with creativity, as scored by Yonge’s adjective check list. Thus “a high degree of mystical capacity” was seen as “accounting for creativity.” [Cowling, 1985] In Hunt and Poham’s study, “Metaphors and States of Consciousness” [1987], subjects who had the most capacity for metaphoric thinking were also found to have the most profound meditation experiences. This infers that creativity, as metaphoric thinking, and mystic capacity are linked as personality characteristics. Given the attributes of the creative state and the creative personality, many theorists have sought to discern what facilitates creativity. S. Miedzinski has outlined several conditions prevalent in daily life, which can facilitate the shift to metaphoric mode, thereby accessing creativity. These include, being motivated by a problem that needs resolution, falling into a state of physical relaxation, turning one’s consciousness towards imagery, turning inward, being

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overwhelmed by intense emotion, and experiencing a breakdown in one’s belief system. [1993: 16b] Others have written about various methods that have been found to open consciousness, allowing the shift that accesses the creative state. Among these methods are hypnosis, meditation, and drug use. There has been much research pointing towards meditation as a facilitator of creativity. Of note is the OrmeJohnson and Haynes study done in 1981, comparing two groups of regular Transcendental Meditation meditators. One group had regular ‘clear experience’ of pure consciousness and advanced sidhi experience and the other group had ‘unclear experience.’ The ‘clear experience’ group had higher alpha coherence and higher creativity scores on the Torrance Ideational Fluency Scale. Both creativity and high level sidhi capacities were positively correlated, inferring that deep meditative capacity increases creative capacity. [1981] Fischer-Hamilton speaks of enhancing creativity “by developing techniques for disrupting all levels and dimensions of automatic patterning.” Meditation, either as a concentration practice of single attention or as a practice of expanding attention is seen as just such a tool of ‘de-automization.’ [1985] Krippner et al have asked, “Can meditation enhance one’s creative process?” Here again, meditation is seen as a process of shifting or refocusing attention, bringing about a new experience of unity and universal reality. In answer to his question, Krippner cites the TM work with creative intelligence, Gopi Krishna’s belief in the enhancement of creativity through awakening Kundalini, as well as Aurobindo’s understanding of his own creative writing ability as coming from Above. [1978] In reference to meditation, Gowan writes, TM quiets the internal dialogue and produce(s) a state of pure conscious awareness without precepts. Such a state is analogous to the hypnopompic state . . . There seems to be a connection between the individual and the general mind at this juncture, and surprising effects are facilitated. One of these effects appears to be creativity. [1978]

Another way creativity has been explored is through its products. The product of creativity, or the artwork produced, has been looked at through the modes of aesthetic theory, which seeks to identify a works value in terms of certain agreed upon criteria. For visual art or painting these would include, form, color, perspective, harmony, and beauty. The artwork can also be seen as primarily a manifestation of the inner experience of the artist. Through participating in observation of an artwork, one can glimpse this inner experience. As Wilber writes in Eye to Eye, “Art is not just a way of doing, it is fundamentally a way of knowing.” [1990: 201] For those who see the making of art as a spiritual practice, art becomes “not just techni-

36 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice cal skill, not just observation and execution, not even just creativity, but a method of spiritual growth and development on the part of the artists themselves.” [Wilber, 1990:207] Creativity, in this sense, not only leads to personal transformation, but to the spiritualization of the world. Artists become messengers, pointing towards a sacred reality through expression in artworks. As C. Miedzinski writes, These artists . . . have come to recognize certain eternal and universal roots of all creative expressions. They create with an awareness that there exists an enduring, unseen, yet living reality which nurtures all creation. This is the spirit abiding at the heart of all sacred expressions . . . Through sacred art, architecture and rituals, we, like our ancestors, can still participate in the great mysteries of creation, existence, death, and the beyond. [1993: 22]

While the field of creativity theory has provided valuable information leading towards a conceptual, theoretical understanding, the lived experience of being creative itself has not been thoroughly explored. As S. Conrad writes, Rather than ask what causes creativity, we need to ask how creativity makes sense as a human experience . . . to examine the experience of creating itself as it appears to us in immediate awareness. [1990: 107]

This research is an effort to contribute to the field through a hermeneuticphenomenological study of artists’ own experiences of being creative. In addition, Franicevich, in his study “The Hermeneutics of Creative Poetic Inspiration,” writes, To study the creative process in poetry or in any other field through interviewing individuals who practice meditation, chanting, or any other spiritual discipline would be challenging and rewarding research. [1988: 238]

My research is an attempt to answer his challenge, to look at the spiritual aspects of creative experience. Reviewing the literature in the field of creativity theory, it can be seen that, while most theorists do not refer directly to the spiritual nature of creativity, many themes have begun to emerge which can be seen as pointing towards a spiritual understanding. These themes will become threads that will reappear again and again as they begin to define themselves more clearly throughout this book.

CHAPTER FIVE

Creativity as Spiritual Practice

I

n this chapter, I look more specifically at creativity or artistic practice and its relationship to spiritual experience. I will begin by exploring the connection between creative and spiritual experience, between the mystic and the artist, between art and religion, as well as an introduction to the understanding of creativity as a spiritual practice. I will end this section by looking at creativity as seen within the spiritual traditions, focusing particularly on creative activity as a spiritual practice.

Creative Experience and Spiritual Experience

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hat is spiritual experience? My own understanding is that the spiritual is an experience of connection with a power greater than one’s personal self, which brings a shift in ordinary awareness. With this shift can come feelings of unity, of oneness, stillness, ecstasy, or bliss. This understanding is echoed by Deikman when he writes, spiritual experience is “an intuitive perception of oneness with the universe, often accompanied by feelings of reverence and awe.” [cited in Starker, 1985: 134] Understanding the spiritual as an experience rather than as a religious or metaphysical belief system, is explored by Rudolf Otto in his 1923 classic, The Idea of the Holy. Otto states that throughout various religious traditions personal accounts of spiritual experience share common features; these experiences are the reflection in human feeling of this awareness, as it changes and grows richer and more unmistakable; a response . . . to the impact upon the human mind of the divine

38 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice . . . the confrontation of the human mind with a Something . . . which is first felt as a transcendent presence the beyond, even where it is also felt as the within. [Otto, 1923: xv]

Otto refers to this awareness as contact with the Holy or the Numinous. William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, describes four qualities that are common to spiritual or mystical experience: ineffability, the noetic, transiency, and passivity. Spiritual experience is seen as difficult to describe; it must be directly experienced to really be known. There is a certain feeling of insight, the understanding of a deeper meaning or significance of things, contact with the Higher Self, the Unseen, or the presence of God. It can be sudden, spontaneous, even fleeting. The experience of passivity is described as one of surrender. Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing of the attention, or going through certain bodily performances . . . Yet the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. [James, 1958: 293]

These qualities of spiritual experience echo the descriptions of creative experience mentioned previously. As Starker writes, in reference to James’ qualities, “These qualities, of course, could as well be ascribed to creative inspiration.” [1985: 133] Evelyn Underhill has listed the phases of the mystic or spiritual path as Awakening, Purgation, Illumination, Dark Night, Union, and, in Oriental Mysticism, Annihilation and Reabsorption. The first phase is an initial awakening, an experience of the possibility of Divine reality. The second is an experience of great distance between oneself and the Divine, leading one to the work of self-purification. The stage of Illumination is a contemplative one, a direct intuition of the Divine presence. The Dark Night of the Soul is an experience of Divine absence and the surrender of self and will. In Union, comes the experience of oneness with the Divine. In Reabsorption, one returns to the Void. [Underhill: 1974] It is interesting to note that the third phase of Underhill’s path parallels the third phase of the creative process outlined by Wallas, that of Illumination. Ken Wilber has attempted to map the phases of spiritual experience across traditions in a developmental hierarchy. He speaks of spiritual experience as one of consciousness moving into the transpersonal realm. The first phase, which he names the psychic or low subtle, is the initial “opening of the eye of contemplation.” One begins to have spontaneous experiences of the transpersonal, which can include the paranormal as well as imaginal journeys. In the next phase, the high subtle, one experiences “illumination, intuition, and beginning

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gnosis.” [Wilber, 1990: 92] One begins to experience the Divine through its many cultural or religious forms, the faces of God. This can be felt as ecstatic connection, the beginnings of union with the Divine. The psychiatrist Dean writes of his experience of this phase, In an intuitive flash, one has an awareness of the meaning and drift of the universe, an identification and merging with creation, infinity, and immortality, a depth beyond depth of revealed meaning. [Wilber, 1990: 93]

In the third phase, or low causal, one experiences the dissolution of form into formlessness, becoming one with the Deity, or Final God. This phase would parallel Underhill’s understanding of Union. In the final phase, or high causal, one experiences the ultimate recognition of what is, consciousness as such, form as formlessness, and formlessness as form. Different spiritual traditions can be seen as rooted in particular phases of Wilber’s system; the shamanic in the psychic or low subtle, the Christian and Sufi in the high subtle, the Buddhist and Hindu in the causal. These are only a few of the writers who have attempted to describe spiritual experience. Yet, it seems that there is a shared understanding that the initial stages of spiritual experience are marked by psychic and paranormal openings, glimpses of Divine contact or the presence of God, feelings of oneness with the universe, and a new sense of meaning or wonder. While different artists may work from within different levels of spiritual experience, it seems that these initial stages are most relevant when looking at the spiritual nature of creative experience. As I have previously noted, while most theorists do not refer directly to the spiritual nature of creativity, many qualities of the creative experience can be seen as spiritual in nature. Creative experience involves a shift in awareness that can bring changes in one’s sense of space, time, and self. It can involve experiences of absorption that bring a new sense of at-oneness or unity. The creative urge often grows out of a search for ‘something more,’ bringing a new sense of meaning or order. Perkins writes, When . . . the individual opens the way in a manner unique to him, the arrival of the mystic dweller, the Soul, is characterized by an ease and direct knowing that fires an artist’s effort with the edge of perceptive energy and power that can result in a work of art. [1974: 156]

It seems clear that creative practice can evoke experiences of the spiritual. As mentioned, Rollo May refers to these experiences as ‘ecstasy.’ This experience of ecstasy or spiritual joy seems to be a gift many artists, as well as viewers, receive even when they do not perceive themselves to be on a spiritual path. H. Lee writes,

40 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice There is a unanimity of testimony offered by artists and other artistically sensitive persons that the making or appreciating of art yields a spiritual delight. [1948: 507–523]

While these experiences may be fleeting for some artists, for others the process of creating is seen as having an ongoing spiritual importance. Hasumi writes of the practice of zen painting, “Only when the painter stands brush in hand in front of the canvas does the way to a unique eternal idea open before him . . . Creative art has a profound operation on the soul.” [1962: 19] While creative activity has been seen to facilitate spiritual experience, for many artists spiritual experiences, themselves, give rise to creative expression. Thoreau writes of this, Perhaps it is at this relaxed hour of recovery from an experience beyond words that the yeast of creative activity begins its work . . . Our ecstatic states, which appear to yield so little fruit, have this value at least: though in the season when our genius reigns we may be powerless for expression, yet in calmer seasons, when our talent is active, the memory of these rarer moods comes to color our picture and is the permanent paintpot as it were into which we dip our brush. [cited in Schlosser, 1974: 136]

For the artist, creative activity can serve both as a reminder of, as well as a monument to, the ineffable. It is this urge to give spiritual experience form that marks the difference between the artist and the mystic. Many writers have written about the similarities as well as the differences between the way of the artist and the way of the mystic. Evelyn Underhill writes, All real artists, as well as pure mystics, are sharers to some degree in the Illuminated life. They have drunk, with Blake from that cup of intellectual vision which is the chalice of the Spirit of Life; and know something of its divine inebriation whenever Beauty inspires them to create. [1974: 236]

The artist and the mystic may share similar experiences of spiritual connection. Yet, for the mystic the pull is toward divine Union, while for the artist, the urge is toward expression. As Starker writes, the qualities shared by mystical, creative, peak and religious experiences is the relative loss of ego or identity . . . to “transcend” the self . . . For the mystic, the loss of selfhood is interpreted as a union with some supernatural power, leading to illumination and joy; for the poet, it is interpreted as creative inspiration. [1985: 133]

For artists, expression in form can be as important as the experience of the spiritual. There is a belief, as Briggs writes that “transcendental experience can be manifested in physical form—in an artwork.” [1990: 122] While the mystic moves towards the world of the unformed, the artist moves between the formless and the formed.

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For those artists who see themselves as being on a spiritual path, art-making will always be seen as a spiritual activity. “Creativity in the God seeker is a manifestation of the spiritual quest.” [Knight, 1987: 366] In this activity of creating as a spiritual practice, “The artist is the mystic with an instrument, the language of art.” [Fox, audiotape] The expression of spiritual experience in form, as artwork is, in fact, an essential way of transmission. As Underhill writes, It is only by the oblique methods of the artist, by the use of aesthetic suggestion and musical rhythm, the wonder of that vision can be expressed. When essential goodness, truth, and beauty—Light, Life, and Love—are apprehended by the heart whether the heart be that of poet, painter, lover, or saint, that apprehension can only be communicated in a living, that is to say, an artistic form. [1974: 239]

The spiritual experience, itself, gives rise to art as well as religion. Roy writes, The artist’s quest for universal order seems closely linked with the religious dimensions of the human consciousness in which a world beyond the sensate one is realized. Thus, the link of all arts with religion is unmistakable; in fact, in almost all religions, music, song, and dance, the reading of scriptures and other related activities are associated with the ultimate surrender to a power, which cannot be fathomed by our limited faculties. [1991: 55]

Many of the world’s religions have grown out of an attempt to capture a teacher’s initial experience of awakening. The forms of religious or spiritual practice grow out of a desire to perpetuate, transmit, or make available this possibility of awakening. On a smaller, individual scale, the work of many artists emerges from a similar desire to transmit spiritual experience. Coomaraswamy writes about Indian culture, “Art, then, as religion, is meant to cause the same experience of intuition of reality and identity, and as such, art and religion in India are synonymous.” [1969: 41] Indian culture is not unique in this understanding. In many other traditional cultures there was no separation between art and religion. As Van der Leeuw writes, There was a period . . . when art and religion stood so close to each other that they could almost be equated. Song was prayer; drama was divine performance, dance was cult. [1963: 11]

In contemporary culture this sympathy has been forgotten. As Schleiermacher writes, “Religion and art stand beside each other like two friendly souls whose inner relationship, if they suspect it, is still unknown to them.” [Van der Leeuw, 1963: 338]

42 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice For the modern world the beautiful is holy only for those who remember this essential connection. Religion and art spring from the depths of life; both strive for the distance, which separates from life; both construct a new world. But the new world of art is only ‘other’; that of religion, on the contrary, wholly other. The means of bringing the holy to expression through the beautiful are only of use when beauty and holiness have grown strong in the same soul. [Van der Leeuw, 1963: 283]

Art can be seen as a spiritual practice and spiritual practice can be seen as creative. Roy writes, If religious, meditative practices provide actualizing modes, then religion is . . . one of the most creative and constructive activities in which human beings can engage themselves . . . the religious disciplines help manifest the innate creativity of every individual and thus assist the evolution of consciousness . . . for cosmic harmony. [1991: 56]

As art and religion are seen to spring from the same creative source, the practice of each can lead to a return to that source. “In silence, religion and art interpenetrate. Religion and art are parallel lines which intersect only in infinity and meet in God.” [Van der Leeuw, 1963: 333] Spiritual practice is the conscious cultivation of spiritual experience through activities, which may be called contemplative or meditative. Wilber writes, “meditation (is) . . . a way to break conceptual translating in order to open the way to subtle-level transformation.” He sees meditation as a set of special conditions . . . (which) simply embody a set of activities or functions characteristic of the next higher or sought after level . . . Since some of the major characteristics of the higher realms include trans-temporal timelessness, love, no avoidances or attachments, total acceptance, subject-object unity, these are most often the special conditions of meditation. [1990: 117–118]

Krippner and Maliszewski speak of meditation as a shifting or refocusing of attention and a means of liberation or freedom from attachment, leading to “the experience of unity with all things, or contact with universal reality—whether that reality be God, the ‘ground of being,’ the ‘essence of the universal,’ or ‘the oneness of all things.’ [1978: 41] Van der Leeuw writes that spiritual practice is one of surrender, “the surrender of oneself to a stronger power, the unification of one’s own movements with the movement of the whole . . . a service to God.” [1963: 155] As previously mentioned, creative or artistic activity often brings a shift in attention, a sense of timelessness, absorption, or subject/ object unity. Creative activity, too, involves a certain experience of surrender that seems to echo that encountered in spiritual practice. As J. Bennett writes,

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In the presence of creativity, life is humbled. For one whose very being is centered in the processes of life, creativity is terrifying. To create, one must die—that is one must give up the illusion of doing, at the moment when mind abdicates, creativity is enthroned. The surrender of mind may come by exhaustion of effort, by an accidental withdrawal of attention, by a powerful shock or stimulus, by various ascetic practices, or by a conscious act of will. [1974: 128]

While many artists may unconsciously engage in creative activity, which could be considered meditative, it is conscious practice that is truly spiritual. As Vivekananda writes, Man is like an infinite spring, coiled up in a small box, and that spring is trying to unfold itself. All struggles, individual or social, are the result of this attempt to unfold. When the struggle becomes a conscious effort, it is spiritual. [cited in Isherwood, 1964: 15]

Several writers have compared meditative practice with creative process. Among these are Kubose and Umemoto who compare Zen koan study and creative problem solving. They see both practices as tools to break habitual patterns of thought. Both rely on the satiation effect in which increased concentration gives way to breakthroughs in experience. They draw parallels between Wallas’s four stages of creative process and the stages of Zen koan study. The initial stages of Zen practice begin with many years of preparation/ concentration. This is followed by a period of letting go or incubation. This period is described as one of “no active grasping for the answer . . . the koan consumed him and was not just the object of thought. There was a non-duality, that is, no experiential distinction between the problem and the problem solver.” [1980: 8] This period is followed by a spontaneous flash of illumination or enlightenment. In the final phase, the practitioner returns to every day life for a period of verificaton. As mentioned previously, Laura Rose has defined two modes of creative process, the rational and the irrational. The rational mode, which consists of alternations between concentrative activity and rest, is associated with concentrative forms of meditation like Zen koan study or mantra meditation. The irrational mode is associated with receptive forms of meditation such as mindfulness practice which take “the individual’s awareness directly to the unified field of consciousness . . . the source of all creativity.” [Rose, 1988: 150] Wilber speaks of these two types of meditation as well. He distinguishes between them as methods of spiritual practice, writing, “the concentrative or absorptive mode of meditation . . . breaks the lower and egoic translation by halting it, the receptive, defocal by watching it.” [1990: 200] Underhill has compared the meditative state of introversion or contemplation, the “withdrawal of attention from the external world,” with the withdraw-

44 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice al of the artist which “conditions the creative activity of musician, painter, and poet: releasing the faculty by which he can apprehend the Good and Beautiful, enter into communion with the Real.” [1974: 299] Some contemporary artists have stated that their practice of art is a spiritual or meditative one. For these artists it is the process of spiritual transformation that is important, rather than the product of art for art’s sake. F. Franck writes of seeing/ drawing as a meditation . . . an alert single-minded focusing of the attention on that which is not-I, whether branch or bird or human body. It is an undivided wakefulness, a being wholly in touch with this not-I . . . By seeing into nature, I am seeing at the same time into my Self-Nature . . . I am . . . granted a sense perception of the relationship of each of the Many to all the others, and how all that is, is totally interdependent, interpenetrates one another. [1981: 96–108]

Piet Mondrian speaks of the transformative nature of creative activity for both the artist as well as the world. Art, although an end in itself, like religion, is the means through which we can know the universal (spiritual) and contemplate it in plastic form . . . genuine art is seen as the subjectivization of the universal, bringing the universal downward on the one hand, while on the other it helps raise the individual toward the universal. [Wilber, 1990: 208]

Creative activity practiced as a spiritual or meditative process is the essential purpose of art for some artists. Kandinsky states, “artists are to be servants of Spirit . . . Artists must grow and develop their own souls until they are capable of directly intuiting the spiritual dimensions.” [Wilber, 1990: 207] For contemporary Western artists, the practice of art as meditation has been a primarily individual pursuit without the support of a culture. This is not so for many artists in other traditions. Many of the great Oriental works of art, from Tibetan Thangkas to Zen landscapes— to Hindu iconography . . . stem directly from the meditative mind. The artist/ master enters samadhi or contemplative union, and from the union of the subject and object, the ‘subject’ then ‘paints’ the ‘object.’ [Wilber, 1990: 211]

In cultures where creativity as a meditative practice has a long tradition, the making of forms is always accompanied by a meditative state. One must first discover Spirit; then see spirit in the wildflower; then paint the wildflower and heaven will flow through it. The art work regardless of the object represented becomes transparent to the Divine and a direct expression of Spirit. [Wilber, 1990: 212]

In 1978, Krippner and Maliszewski wrote, in reference to the relationship between meditation and creativity, “It is apparent that future research will be

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critical in explaining the interface between the two topics.” [1978: 40] My research is a partial answer to this call.

Creative Practice Within Spiritual Traditions

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here are commonalities between spiritual experience and creative experience. Creativity has been given special importance within many of the spiritual traditions where it is seen both as a universal principle and as a day-to-day activity or practice. I will explore the understanding of creativity within some of the spiritual traditions, looking first at creativity as a universal principle and then as an artistic activity. I will conclude with an exploration of several spiritual traditions in which artistic activity is seen as a spiritual practice. Within many of the spiritual traditions the understanding that creativity is essentially spiritual is made explicit. Creativity is often seen as a universal principle of manifestation. Art objects are seen as emanations from the divine or spiritual. The making of art is seen as having an essentially spiritual purpose, which can bring heightened awareness to the artist as well as to the viewer. Many Western philosophers have spoken of creativity as a universal energy or force. J. B. Bennett describes the four universal energies as being the conscious, the creative, the unitive, and the transcendent. Creative energy is seen as the bridge between ordinary waking consciousness and the unitive and transcendent energies. It is a hidden quality that connects with the creative activity by which the universe is incessantly renewed . . . the all important Creative Energy is the source of all human creativity of which procreation is no more than the vital manifestation. [1975: 19]

Thus, creative energy is the source of life’s regeneration as well as an opening through which the unitive and transcendent energies can manifest. “The creative point . . . is the point of entry for the influence that is beyond consciousness and sensitivity.” [Bennett, 1975: 97] Whitehead, too, speaks of creativity as the essential energy of realization by which the world continues its process of becoming. “The ultimate character pervading the universe is a drive towards the endless production of new syntheses . . . creativity.” He also sees that “creativity in the individual must have its correlative in the cosmos.” [Houghton, 1974: 128–134] Laura Rose speaks similarly of the Vedic understanding of creativity, which is seen as the manifesting energy of the universe and is echoed in individual creative activity. Vedic science informs us that human potential is capable of creating from the unmanifest field of consciousness all that we are capable of desiring . . . The unfoldment of

46 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice the creative process within us mirrors the creative process in the universe. [1988: 151]

In contrast, Van der Leuw writes that individual creativity is not parallel to God’s creation but is a mere reflection of it. “The creation of the artist is by no means parallel to the creation of God. It is its dullest reflection, and is completely overwhelmed by the light of the life of God.” [1963: 334] Creativity is seen as essential to the divine cosmology within many spiritual traditions. In the Sufi tradition, creation, or the bringing into form of God’s attributes is the source of the world’s existence, the manifestation of spirit. Chittick writes, “God created the universe to make the Hidden Treasure manifest. Hence he wants the world to exist in order for it to display the unlimited creative potentialities of His Attributes.” [1983: 47] The Sufi concept of Imagination is seen as the intermediary between the world of the spirit and the world of form. This can be seen as parallel to the understanding of creativity as a bridge between the unformed and the formed. The world of Imagination is integral to original divine creation as well as to individual creative activity. The Godhead possesses the power of the imagination, and . . . by imagining the universe, God created it . . . there exists between the universe of pure spirit and the sensible world an intermediate world which is the world of Idea Images as the Sufi’s put it. [Corbin, 1969: 182]

This world of images or Imagination is not only the place from which divine creation evolves but also the source of individual creativity. The imagination does not create the images and ideas it sees, nor does it derive them from within itself, the memory, or the mind. Rather, it receives them from a separate world of Imagination, which exists independently of the mind. [Chittick, 1983: 248]

Not only are all forms in the Sufi world theophanies, creations or manifestations of the Divine Imagination, but individual creative activity and the contemplation of the image created becomes an encounter with the Divine, leading towards union with the Beloved. The esoteric Christian cosmology parallels the Sufi understanding of creativity, seeing it as essential to the world’s existence. Matthew Fox, a contemporary creation-centered Christian, follower of the 12th century mystic Meister Eckhart, speaks of creativity as “the habit of the universe.” He writes, “Since we, too, are God’s children, it follows that we, too, are God’s works of art.” Individual creativity is seen, not only as echoing God’s creation, but as itself a gift to God in return for this gift of life. “Our act of creativity must flow from our act of being. The culmination of the birth of God and us will be a creativity that is itself, born of being and action, the way God’s is.” [Fox, 1980: 405–407]

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Creativity in the Hindu tradition is seen as the force behind perpetuation of this world as maya, or illusion. This play, or dance of life, is both illusion and essence, the Divine. Creation veils the true reality or eternal principle of existence, which is Brahman. Art as individual expression in the Hindu tradition “portrays the abundance of forms that is maya, or illusion, and the source of all these forms in the Divine.” [Opper, 1970: 25] In the Taoist tradition, the creative spirit, the Mother of all things, is Tao. The Taoist says, “this ultimate is creativity, that creativity is Tao.” [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 56] As the 42nd Chapter of the Tao Te Ching states, From the Tao, the One is created; From the One, two; From the Two, Three; From the Three, Ten Thousand Things. [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 56]

In the Taoist sense, creativity, both as a universal principle of realization and as an act of individual art-making, is a process of reflection. “Spontaneous reflection is the creativity of Tao. But always Tao itself remains invisible and unfathomable.” [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 66] This process of reflection is described in a Chinese verse from the eighth century. The wild geese fly across the long sky above. Their image is reflected upon the chilly water Below. The geese do not mean to cast their image on the water; Nor does the water mean to hold the image of the geese. [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 57]

In the Japanese Zen tradition, growing out of Buddhism and Taoism, the creative source is the Ground of Being, the Nothingness, the spiritual essence within all things. For the Zen practitioner, individual creativity is not just the activity of making art, it enters into the entire process of living. “In Zen, life itself is an art, and the Zen man aims for concentration and involvement in whatever he is doing.” [Opper, 1970:18] The Taoist speaks of creativity as reflection; the Zen artist speaks of it as penetration or absorption. To apprehend the essential immediately and then render it with economy of form . . . His art appears to be nothing other than the expression of the psychic absorption attained by means of Zen. [Hasumi, 1962: 52]

The creative source in the Native American tradition gives form to the natural world as well as to objects of art. All things are imbued with spirit. As in the Zen tradition, creative activity is integral to everyday life. “There is no separation between art and life, or between what is beautiful and what is function-

48 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice al. Art, beauty, and spirituality are so firmly intertwined in the routine of living.” [Walters, 1989: 17] All life is sacred, all creation is sacred. Infinite life is beauty. This is the call I hear chanted throughout the universe. The birds sing it and the animals recognize it. Everything the eye can see is in accord with it. [Walters, 1989: 29]

Within the spiritual traditions, the practice of creativity, or art-making, is seen primarily as a manifestation of spirit, an expression of spiritual experience. As Van der Leuw has written, “Every true art is experienced as the incarnation of what is further distant from us, and different.” [1963: 337] In a world that centers around the spiritual, each art form has its own particular way of expressing the act of worship. The dance reflects the movement of God, which also moves upon the earth. The drama presupposes the holy play between God and man. Verbal art is the hymn of praise in which the Eternal and his works are represented. Architecture reveals to us the lines of the well-built city of God’s creation. Music is the echo of the eternal Gloria. [Van der Leuw, 1963: 265]

As previously mentioned, in the Sufi tradition all creative activity is theophany, a simultaneous revelation as well as veiling, of the Divine. The artist’s image is imbued with himma or ‘spiritual creativity.’ He creates “through his himma, through the creativity of his heart . . . and causes to appear, in the Hadra of the sensible world . . . something which already exists in actu in a higher Hadra.” [Corbin, 1969: 226] In the esoteric Christian tradition of Meister Eckhart, creative work is seen as prayer. The act of creating is essential to one’s life in both praising God, echoing his own work, and in giving birth, to be born again. As Fox writes, For Eckhart, work is an absolutely essential ingredient to the living expression of spirituality. Our work is noble, it is spiritual; it is divine. For it is the bringing about of the kingdom of God and the new creation . . . from the depths of our being. Our work is such an activity of giving birth. [Fox, 1980: 487]

For Meister Eckhart, the practice of art is more than just one path towards spiritual realization. As Coomeraswamy writes, Eckhart’s whole conception of human life in operation and attainment is aesthetic; it runs through all his thought that man is an artist . . . Art is religion, religion art, not related, but the same. [1956: 62]

In the Hindu tradition, art is seen as having a divine origin, as having been revealed. “The humble pot becomes a vessel of the Divine just as much as a sculpture of a deity, and thus the reality of the body as a container is expand-

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ed.” [Opper, 1970: 49] As the Sufis speak of art expressing himma, the Hindu speaks of art as eliciting rasa or spiritual essence. Rasa is thought of simply as the manifestation of an inherent and already existing intuitive condition of the spirit, in the same sense that Enlightenment is virtually ever present though not always realized. [Coomaraswamy, 1956: 53]

In the Hindu tradition art is valued for its expression of rasa, a reflection of the artist’s spiritual awareness rather than her technique. Aurobindo writes, Art in India expresses inner spiritual truth, the deeper not obvious reality of things, the joy of God in the world; and its beauty and desirableness and the manifestation of divine force and energy in phenomenal creation. [1953: 50]

For the Taoist, the practice of art is a process of revealing the inner Nature, the spirit of all things. As the painter Ku K’ai-chi has written, “The purpose of painting is chu-an shen, or the revelation of spirit . . . Forms are used to reveal the spirit.” [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 210] The inner spirit in the Taoist tradition is called chi, the breath, ether, or primal quality of existence. For the Taoist artist The true thing is not the actual object, it is that within it which remains unnamed . . . The immortal art object must have chi, a vitality of spirit that is the essence of life itself. [Opper, 1970: 55]

Once again the creation of art is viewed as an expression of the artist’s spiritual experience. The work of art is, indeed, the by-product of a state of high-functioning. This state of spiritual exaltation is fundamental to creative activity, while skills and measurements are secondary. [Chung-yuan, 1975: 208]

In the Zen tradition the artist is actualizing the realization of the Ground of Being. Art in the Japanese sense is the endeavor to carry over into ordinary existence the infinitely deep, inexpressible, and unknowable ground of living: it is in Japan the way to the Absolute. [Hasumi, 1962: 4]

As in the Taoist tradition the essential spiritual energy is ki. It is the sound of ki that one hears through the bamboo flute, ki that one sees in a sumi painting or work of calligraphy. Through penetration into the experience of ‘suchness,’ the Zen artist is able to portray the spirit of life in an object. This means to keep the mind in unison with the ‘Emptiness’ or ‘Suchness’ whereby one who stands against the object ceases to be the one outside that object but transforms

50 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice himself into the object itself. The identification enables the painter to feel the pulsation of the one and the same life animating both him and the object. [Opper, 1970:19]

In the Native American tradition, art is an integral part of the daily process of living. Every person is considered, in a sense, an artist. Creative activity is seen as a gift from the Spirits. “Like the shaman, the tribal artist communicates with the spirit world, not just through the finished product, but during the creation of it.” [Katz, 1989: 36] As in the other traditions mentioned, artistic activity is seen as a process of spiritual connection for the artist. For artists working within a spiritual tradition, the art of creating is not simply a matter of copying nature or the expression of emotion, it is a process of spiritual awakening. It is not the expression of form and appearance that is important, but the expression of spiritual experience. Thus, what Opper has written about the Eastern artist in particular, can be said of all artists working within spiritual traditions. The Eastern artists’ main purpose is to reveal inner truths, to lift the veil of Maya, to make known in visual forms realities; they are not concerned with producing a likeness. [1970: 8]

The creation of art within spiritual traditions has an essentially spiritual purpose, not just in making manifest the Divine, in bringing spiritual realization to the artist, but in eliciting a spiritual response from the art viewer. Rudolf Steiner has written, The arts point in every case to the supersensible. Painting becomes, for anyone able to apprehend it correctly, a revelation of the spiritual world, which surrounds us in space and thence permeates us. [1970: 69]

Because the arts can reveal the spiritual, creative activity is seen as essential to the awakening of human kind. Matthew Fox has written, “Because our salvation lies in our making contact with our divine origins, and it pertains to divinity to create, therefore our salvation lies in creativity.” [1980: 412] Coomaraswamy describes the importance of eliciting a spiritual response in the viewer. “To the Indian artist it is very important that his work does not become a ‘cause’ or an ‘imitation’; it’s main function is to evoke rasa, a spiritual awakening within the viewer.” [1969: 41] Artistic expression may be uniquely capable of fulfilling this spiritual purpose. Bergson writes, The intellect is man’s tool for rational action, but art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils real-

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ity from us in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. [cited in Spencer, 1969: 310–311]

As will be further explored in the next chapter, several contemporary artists have spoken of the spiritual purpose of art, though they have not actually worked within a culture of spiritual tradition. Morris Graves writes, I have attained to the conviction that it is my purpose through creative painting to convey to man that he has the ability for instantaneous as well as for his usual evolutionary knowledge of his cosmic significance. I seek for painting that miraculous union where seer and the seen are one. The image language of creative art can reveal the illumination from within the world-soul, a language free from the barriers of natural tongues. [Phillips, 1947: 308]

I conclude this chapter, by looking in depth at the Hindu, Taoist, Zen, Native American and Creation-Centered Christian traditions. I have chosen these particular traditions for two reasons. First, as mentioned, they each see creative practice as important to spiritual experience. Second, many contemporary artists have turned to these traditions in search of spiritual roots.

The Hindu Tradition

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rt within the Hindu tradition seeks to express the paradoxical understanding that all things are at the same time manifestations of the illusory nature of maya and of the Divine or Absolute, Brahman. Artwork becomes a synthesis of the illusory and the spiritual, an embodiment of the never ending stream and the absolute Essence. As Opper writes, “Form is given to spirit, as the artist experiences the vital act of creation and it becomes a vital expression of life (rasa).” [1970: 22] Art is valued not for its technique or ability to portray likeness but for its capacity to express rasa, to elicit spiritual realization. This understanding of spiritual experience is deeply connected to the Hindu aim of lifting the veil of ignorance, (to) find the true reality . . . the true nature of the self (Atman) and the true nature of the undifferentiated eternal principle of existence which is Brahman. [Opper, 1970: 24]

The practice of creativity parallels yogic practice. The artist must attain a particular state of mind in order to portray a particular spiritual vision. “Yoga (is) part of the creative process in which an ideal vision is evoked, the self fuses with the vision and then recreates it.” [Hallman, 1970: 368–76] This vision of the object or icon comes not from copying the realm of the actual but from contact with the realm of the ideal or spiritual. Coomaraswamy writes,

52 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice The mind ‘produces’ or ‘draws’ this form to itself, as though from a great distance. Ultimately, that is, from Heaven, where the types of art exist in formal operation; immediately, from the immanent space in the heart . . . The imager must realize a complete self-identification with it . . . the form thus known in an act of non-differentiation . . . is the model from which he proceeds to execution in stone, pigment, or other material. [1956: 5]

Thus, the practice of art grows out of an immediate experience of the spiritual. It is an experience of ‘singleness of heart,’ ‘aversion of attention from external phenomena,’ ‘ideal sensibility,’ and ‘self-identification with the forms depicted.’ [Coomeraswamy, 1956: 50] As the practice of yoga follows very specific instructions, the creation of artwork follows standardized rules of form, color, and placement. The canon of rules of art, the Citvalaksana, is seen as a transmission from the Divine. Art is not an individual expression as it has come to be viewed in the West, but parallels the understanding of mathematical formula; it is an ideal image. Artwork becomes a spiritual entry point for the viewer or worshiper as well as the artist. The process of worshiping the image is one part of the rapturous unfolding of purely spiritual energy (sakti) before itself, from which energy plunges back into the state of enfolded Being when the image and the beholding consciousness unite. At this point the goal of the sacred ritual is reached: the believer experiences himself as divine. [Zimmer, 1984: 33]

Often the image or yantra is discarded after its creation or use in meditation. This is testament to the understanding that art is simply a vehicle towards the realization of something more. Maritain writes, Indian art, like Indian philosophy is permeated with spiritual, practical purpose. What is done by the artist is less a work of art than an instrument for some invisible result to be produced within the mind. [1953: 12]

The Taoist Tradition

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he practice of art in the Taoist tradition is also the expression of an essential spiritual nature. In Taoism, this is seen as the sympathy of all things, the identification of the particular and the universal, unity in diversity, the changeless within the everchanging, the Tao. “The Tao, (is) the way nature is ordered . . . to convey an insight into this Order of Nature is the primary purpose of each painter.” [Opper, 1970: 76] Unlike the Hindu artist, the Taoist artist is grounded in the natural world, in the depiction of the essence of Tao, the primordial unity within Nature. As mentioned, the Taoist understands creativity as a process of reflection, of non-

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interference, of wu-wei, or non-action. It is important that the artist paint from a place of receptivity in order to reflect Tao. Like Taoist meditation, creative activity involves the suspension of all action and thought in order to allow the inner spirit to act on its own . . . One ‘stills the heart’ of all disturbing thoughts and emotionalism, for when empty it allows a state of receptivity and quiescence, the ideal state in which to reflect the Tao. [Sze, 1956: 17]

Essential to this state of receptivity is the state of non-differentiation or identification between self and non-self. Chung-Yuan writes, This is the source of all potentialities, all possibilities . . . It is a pure, true, immediate reflection of ultimate reality. We call it the process of creativity. When man is in this creative process he is truly egoless: as egoless as the Moon and the Stars. [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 76–77]

Painting is a particularly appropriate way to reflect Tao. Since Tao cannot be conveyed by either words or silence. In that state which is neither speech nor silence its transcendental nature may be apprehended . . . painting could be described as that state which is neither speech nor silence. [Sze, 1959:3]

Essential to the practice of Chinese painting is the vital force of life or chi. “In painting, chi is both the creative resource of the painter and the essential vitality—spiritual, divine and creative—that can be transmitted to a painting and perceived by the spectator.” [Sze, 1959: 62] The Canons of Hsieh Ho, 550 A.D., described the standards for Chinese painting. The first canon speaks of chi ; “If a work has chi it inevitably reflects a vitality of spirit that is the essence of life itself.” [Sze, 1959: 37] The second canon describes the action of the brush. The Chinese painter Ching Hao states “Chi is produced when the artist’s mind does not interfere with the free movement of the brush and thus spontaneously produces the picture without fear.” [Chung-yuan, 1975: 213] The three final canons describe the standards of color and composition, i.e. vacant versus solid space, darkness versus light, dryness versus wetness. An important element in the composition of Chinese painting is empty space. This reflects the Taoist understanding of the value of non-being, or emptiness. From Chapter XI of the Tao Te Ching, Thirty spokes joined at the hub. From their non-being Comes the function of the wheel. Shape clay into a vessel. From its nonbeing

54 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Comes the function of the vessel. [Chung-Yuan, 1975: 35]

As in Hindu art, Taoist art is not seen as self-expression. It is the expression of spiritual essence, the harmony of Tao. It is transformative for the artist as well as for the art viewer. As the calligraphist Chang Huai-huan writes, When one’s intuition identifies with spiritual reality and his brush-stroke conveys the depth of the unconscious, he will be transformed and merge with the Divine, and his creation will be limitless. [cited in Chung-yuan, 1975: 237]

The Zen Tradition

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he Japanese Zen tradition, from the Cha’an school in China, shares many of the same understandings as the Taoist tradition, being an outgrowth of the interface between Buddhism and Taoism. The Zen arts are an integral part of the Zen way of life. As in Zen meditation, the practice of art is a means to realization of the Ground of Being, the Nothing, that which one has been from the beginning. Hasumi writes, “The way of art helps us to penetrate deep into the inner structure of the cosmos . . . Art gives form to the relation of man with the Nothing, with the nature of the Absolute.” [1962: viii-ix] As in the Taoist tradition, the practice of art is an intuitive one, a practice of intimacy with the object being portrayed. Zen painting is characterized by immediacy, simplicity, harmony, and love of Nature. We see the pure form of the world as it was in the beginning. In the context of such an experience painters employ sparing but sure brush-strokes to create a picture of the landscape full of profound meaning in which the very stones come alive on the canvas. [Hasumi, 1962: 18]

In the Zen tradition, do is the way. Do is not to be described, but to be walked. It is infinite, undetermined, and unlimited. Yet, it is the constant goal of spiritual yearning and striving. Penetration into do and transformation into do constitute the ultimate goal of Japanese art and Zen in the art of living. [Hasumi, 1962: 79]

As the Zen meditator understands enlightenment as a sudden, spontaneous experience, the Zen painter paints quickly, spontaneously. This immediate rendering comes, however, after long periods of preparation and practice, cultivating stillness or emptiness of mind. Munsterberg wrote, “To make such a painting pulsate with life, the Cha’an artist studied the subject inwardly with his mind thoroughly purified by its subjective, self-centered contents.” [1969: 81] The artist, in a sense, becomes the object before attempting to spontaneously portray it. Suzuki writes,

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Draw a bamboo for ten years, become a bamboo, then forget all about bamboos when you are drawing . . . To become a bamboo and to forget that you are one with it while drawing it, this is the Zen of bamboo, this is the moving with the ‘rhythmic movement’ of the spirit, which resides in the bamboo as well as in the artist himself. [1959: 31]

As in the Taoist tradition, empty space is also very important in Zen painting. It points towards the unseen, the underlying reality that lies below all things, the Nothing. Space in Zen painting is forever unmoved and yet in motion, it seems to live and breathe; it is formless and empty and yet is the source of all form; it is nameless and yet the reason why everything has a name. Because of it things have an absolute value, are equally important and meaningful exponents of the universal life that flows through them. [Munsterberg, 1969: 36]

In the Zen tradition, the way of art is the way of life, a process of spontaneous presence. Life delineates itself on the canvas called time; and time never repeats, once gone, forever gone; and so is an act; once done, it is never undone. Life is a Sumi-e painting, which must be executed once and for all time and without hesitation . . . With a Sumie painting, any brush stroke painted over a second time results in a smudge; the life has left it. All corrections show when the ink dries. So is life. [William, 1956: 130]

The Native American Tradition

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s in the Zen and Taoist traditions, the practice of art is part of daily life in the Native American tradition. It is interesting to note that there is no word for art or for religion in the Native American languages. Neither of these concepts is seen as a separate or isolated activity. All life is sacred and all life is creative. The practice of art is part of an ongoing process of ritual that is the “people’s way of communicating with cosmic forces, insuring the growth of crops, the perpetuation of all life, and their continued harmony with the earth and sky.” [Katz, 1989: 2] Creativity is part of the ongoing process of renewal through contact with the ancestors, the spirit world, and the cycles of Nature. When an object of art is created, it “is an act, not an object, a ritual, not a possession.” [Katz, 1989: 12] The creation of artwork is often seen as integral to the maintenance of the natural rhythms of life. A drawing might depict the germ of the corn plant or the life of the entire field might be concentrated in a dot within a rectangular enclosure. The increase of the herd might be ensured by clearly drawing the breath-of-life line on a schematic form indicating the body of the deer. [Katz, 1989: 72]

The artwork is often destroyed after its ritual purpose has been realized.

56 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice For the Native American the spiritual is a realm of power that can be contacted through the creative use of symbol, dream, ritual, and art. As one Native American writes, Born of Spirit beings we are compelled to do as the spirit bids—to produce symbols of You, to bring ceremony to You, to heal our bodies and minds, to renew the power of the nations whenever it wanes and flows away. [Walters, 1989: 88]

The Creation-Centered Christian Tradition

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n the Creation-Centered tradition, based on the teachings of the mystic Meister Eckhart, the practice of art takes on a central role. Meister Eckhart’s understandings grew out of esoteric Christianity but he was also deeply influenced by the Celtic tradition, which “identified salvation with being an artist, a healer, and whole-maker.” [Fox, 1980: 32] For Eckhart, creativity is the origin of the universe. Artists, as they practice, become co-workers with God. Art is created for the sake of Creation, for the sake of the universe. In this way Creation Spirituality echoes the Native American tradition in which acts of creativity are connected with the perpetuation of life itself. Eckhart sees spiritual practice or meditation as an extrovert activity, “a centering through giving birth. It is the flowing out that all creative people must discipline themselves to do in order that beauty and blessing be shared.” [Fox, 1980: 46] This birth is not just an individual act but a communal one. “The artist who is truly birthing from the depths of the inside is birthing from the depths of commonality. Such a person is giving birth to the ‘we’ and not just the ‘I.’” [Fox, 1980: 410] Creating is seen as an enchantment, the ecstatic experience of God within. Every artist has experienced the ecstasy of ‘enchantment’ that Eckhart speaks of, for those who become instruments of the divine creativity. In the creative state the soul now no longer accomplishes things with grace but divinely in God. Thus the soul is in a wonderful way enchanted and loses itself. [Fox, 1980: 408]

This experience of being totally ‘given’ to one’s work grows out of the love of God and trust in one’s images. “So committed must the artist be to trusting his or her images that the artist must actually become one being with the image and live for the image.” [Fox, 1980: 408] This echoes the stance of the Taoist and Zen artists, though their state of mind may be different from the state Eckhart describes. For Eckhart this stance is the essence of spiritual practice and should be followed by all practitioners, turning one’s will to God in preparation for our return. Because our salvation lies in our making contact with our divine origins, and it pertains to divinity to create, therefore our salvation lies in creativity. For in the work of

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the artist, subject/ object distinctions are broken through and we experience the unity of creation once again, the unity of the circle of being that resides in the Godhead. [Fox, 1980: 412]

Each of these spiritual traditions has a particular view of the essence of spiritual experience which shapes their understanding of creativity as a spiritual practice. Yet, there are some important common themes shared by each of them. The potential for individual acts of creation to echo or reflect the Universal Creation has been acknowledged in each tradition. As Phillipon writes, Prepared by reflection, meditation, and yoga, human beings can be as creative as God, which is not conceived dualistically as separate from humanity but as the ultimate identity itself—the One that is the All. [1982: 45]

In each of the traditions, creativity is seen as primarily a manifestation of the spiritual. Creative practice has a uniquely spiritual purpose, eliciting realization in the artist as well as the art viewer. Unlike the contemporary Western view, which places the value of an artwork on the product, art within spiritual traditions evolves out of a special state of mind within the artist and is valued for its capacity to express that state of mind to its audience. The act of creating is an ongoing process of spiritual realization not simply a technique that ends in the production of an art object. The artwork itself is not seen as the expression of individuality. It is often a standardized form, which seeks to express the invisible, the spiritual. Creative practice and meditation are parallel paths within these traditions. Phillipon writes, Art and meditation appear to be different because the former manifests itself through a formal concretization, the latter through a subjective state. Yet, both are manifestations of an attunement to the creative processes which are at work in the universe, both are creative states of mind, both proceed along a similar path of mindfulness, insight and receptivity. [1982: 40]

The creative experience described by these various traditions share certain common features. Creative practice arises out of a state of singleness of heart, purity of mind, or freedom from distraction. It is a state of receptivity or reflection. It is also described as a state of egolessness, a state of oneness or fusion with the object being portrayed. This is called absorption, penetration, sympathy, or non- differentiation. The descriptions of creative practice within spiritual traditions parallel many of the attributes of the creative state delineated by creativity theorists. Whereas contemporary artists often describe these states as simply unconscious byproducts of their creative activity, within the spiritual traditions these states are consciously cultivated as part of the creative process.

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CHAPTER SIX

Contemporary Art History THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL

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n this chapter, I look at contemporary art history, focusing on the emergence of the spiritual within the tradition of 20th century Western painting. Because my research considers the experience of painters specifically, I begin with a short discussion of painting as a unique language of art and expression of the spiritual. Next, I look at the de-spiritualization of art in the Western tradition. This is followed by a discussion of the hidden spiritual history of contemporary art as expressed by European and American painters of the 19th and 20th century. Painting itself is a language, the artist’s expression of experience beyond words. Maritain writes, It is the object created, the poem, the painting, the symphony in its own existence as a world of its own, which plays the part played in ordinary knowledge by the concepts and judgments produced by the mind. [1953: 118]

Painting is a language that goes beyond the intellectual; it is a language of intuition. At the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are grasped together by means of a kind of experience or knowledge, which has no conceptual expression and is expressed only in the artist’s work. [Maritain, 1953: 33]

The painter, Delacroix, has “observed that comprehension by means of grasping spoken or written words is replaced in painting with apprehension ‘at a single glance.’” [cited in Huyghe, 1962: 118] Because of its ability to communicate

60 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice so directly, painting has been seen as “more vital than intellectual . . . a return to the most direct form of human language.” [Croce cited in Huyghe, 1962: 30] Many writers have spoken of painting as uniquely capable of expressing the spiritual. Ouspensky writes, The phenomenal world is merely a means for the artist—just as colors are for the painter, and sounds for the musician—a means for the understanding of the noumenal and the expression of that understanding. At the present stage of our development we possess nothing so powerful, as an instrument of knowledge of the world of causes, as art. [cited in Lipsey, 1989: 143]

Katherine Dreier, an American art critic of the 1920s, writes of painting as the art of ‘seeing.’ It is because the artist is uniquely sensitive to looking and thus to ‘seeing’ that she is “more capable than others of perceiving the spiritual underpinnings of the universe.” [cited in Regier, 1987: 61] Rudolf Steiner speaks of painting as an expression of a particular spiritual awareness, the astral, a reflection of the spiritual world experienced between going to sleep and waking. There is a spiritual world, which lies behind the world of our senses . . . the world through which we pass between going to sleep and waking up. It is this world, which we bring with us out of sleep, which really inspires us when we paint, so that we are able to depict on canvas or wall the spiritual world which bounds us in space. [1970: 68]

Painting is a uniquely visual medium; it emerges out of the artist’s vision, translated through the artwork and experienced again by the viewer. The artwork serves as a link between the world of the artist and the world of the viewer. On a physical level, painting is a two dimensional expression in color and form. Kandinsky describes painting as consisting of three elements, the impression of color, of form, and of color and form combined. [1977: 31] Form can stand alone, portraying either the likeness of an object or, in abstraction, describing space through lines separating surfaces. This is its outward meaning. Kandinsky writes that form has an inner meaning, as well, which grows out of the artists ‘inner need,’ having symbolic or spiritual purpose. While our understanding of form comes out of the forms found in nature, Kandinsky sees the importance of looking for elements of form in the “inner and not the outer qualities of nature,” of finding “that subtle construction . . . that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul.” [1977: 49–52] Mondrian, too, speaks of the universal principles of form found veiled in nature but revealed by the visionary artist. He sees these as represented by the vertical line, which is masculine and the horizontal line which is feminine. Through the interplay of these two elements all formal oppositions and unities

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can be portrayed. Govinda writes, Even the simplest form or color is a symbol revealing the nature of the primordial reality of the universe and the structure of the human psyche in which this universal reality is mirrored. [1976: 102]

He sees the three essential forms as the cube, the cylinder, and the sphere. These are to be conceived not simply as external forms but as inner principles of forming, organizing forces of consciousness. While form is experienced perceptually or mentally, color is experienced emotionally. Many writers have spoken of this unique quality of color; it cannot be understood intellectually but must be felt intuitively. Color is one of the most active emotional elements by which the viewer’s soul can be affected, brought into direct contact with the artist’s feelings, and made to share them. [Huyghe, 1962: 120]

Kandinsky speaks of color as having not only a physical impression, but a psychic effect, or spiritual vibration. Color is a power, which directly influences the Soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand, which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the Soul. [1977: 25]

For Paul Klee it is his relationship with color itself that makes him a painter. My experiences press into me so deeply and so gently; I can feel it, and thus am assured, without effort. Color has taken possession of me. I don’t have to strain after it any more. Color has conquered me for always, I know that. That is the meaning of this fortunate hour: I and color are one. I am a painter. [cited in Norbert, 1964: 19]

Steiner writes that, “A true painter does not create in space, but on the plane, in color, and it is nonsense for him to strive for the spatial.” [1964: 31] He sees the importance of the development of spatial perspective but states that it is more important for contemporary artists to work with ‘color-perspective,’ that power of movement that color itself has, to pull one into and out of the canvas. For Steiner, color is the key to spiritual expression. “If we are to paint with a consciousness that extends across into the world of spirit, we must paint what comes out of color.” [1970: 68] In his work, Eye to Eye, Wilber speaks of art as a way of knowing. He delineates three different modes of knowing, the ‘eye of the flesh,’ ‘the eye of the mind,’ and the ‘eye of contemplation.’ Each of these ‘eyes’ reveals different aspects of the world. The ‘eye of the flesh’ reveals the material world, that which is externally visible to our senses. The ‘eye of the mind’ reveals the conceptual cognitive world, that which is expressed in language or symbols. The

62 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice ‘eye of contemplation’ reveals the spiritual, that which is experienced through the transpersonal or transcendent. [1990: 201] Each artist’s expression can then be seen as a revelation through one or more of the ‘eyes’ or modes of knowing. Throughout history each of the schools of art can be seen as developing a particular ‘eye.’ As will be discussed in the following sections, the Renaissance artists developed ‘the eye of the flesh,’ the Cubists developed the ‘eye of the mind,’ and artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian began the work of developing the ‘eye of contemplation.’ Western art of the Middle Ages was dedicated to the world of spirit, imbued with the Christian experience of light as spirit, as God. Art was not a specialized activity, a particular expression of an individual artist, but a collective act of participation. The making of crafts, tapestries, and religious monuments were daily practices, expressions of worship. With the coming of the Renaissance, the age of reason, man, not God, was seen as the center of the universe. Rendering physical reality realistically became more important than evoking the spiritual. The act of painting became one of individual expression; the art object began to bear the mark of a particular artist. The implementation of a linear, one-point perspective, and the invention of the printing press, emphasized a growing technological view that the physical world could be manipulated and that there could be a standardized way of seeing. Renaissance artists painted with ‘the eye of the flesh.’ This emphasis on the material, rather than the spiritual or transcendent, led to the de-spiritualization of art. Arguelles speaks of the “Renaissance artist (as) a precursor of the egotism which became the glorified cultural ideal of 19th century European and American laissez-faire individualism.” [1975: 20] The modern idea of ‘the artist’ and the practice of art for art’s sake grew out of this emphasis on the material and on the individual. Art became a specialization practiced only by artists. The image of the Great Artist is a particularly modern phenomenon as is the experience of the artist as somehow separate from society, an outsider. In addition to this change in the role of the artist, the object of art, itself, has become over-valued while the importance of the process or experience of being creative has been lost. As Arguelles writes, Art is degraded in the educative process and looked upon as an essentially noncontributive social nicety; imagination, the intuitive function of the right hemisphere, is denied and condemned as being irrational [1975: 19]

The practice of art is no longer seen as a part of daily life. C. Miedzinski writes, To the extent that art becomes alienated from the sacred and from everyday life, it is, increasingly in danger of becoming a decadent and stagnant remnant of its once

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meaningful role, and hence, an insignificant cultural frill. [1993: 5]

Even the post-modern movement in art can be seen as a current statement of this ongoing de-spiritualization of art. While the post-modern philosophers question the modern values that have led to the devaluing of the creative, individualism, the possibility for social change, hope in progress, the creation of the ever new and meaningful, they see deconstruction, itself, as an end. As Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, Adopt the perspective of active nihilism, exceed the mere recognition—be it depressive or admiring—of the deconstruction of all values. Become more and more incredulous. Push decadence further still and accept, for instance, to destroy the belief in truth under all its forms. [cited in Gablik, 1991: 16]

Putting these ideas into visual form, the post-modern artist engages in parody and surrogate art, copying gallery advertisements out of art magazines and selling them as paintings, purchasing articles from department stores and presenting them as art pieces. For the post-modern artist the very ideas of originality, creativity, or individual expression are seen as false. As Kearney writes, “The post-modern artist does not claim to express anything because he does not have anything to express.” [1988: 5] This is seen as the end of art. The devaluing of the creative on a collective level has paralleled the devaluing of the spiritual. Gablik writes, The unifying presence of a belief in a transcendental cosmic order no longer exists in our culture . . . One of the peculiar developments in our Western world is that we are losing our sense of the divine side of life, of the power of the imagination, myth, dream, and vision . . . The visionary function, which fulfills the soul’s need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things, has been suppressed, with the result that, as a culture, we have lost the gift of vision. [1991: 30–46]

As a consequence of this, many artists in the Western world who have felt glimpses of a spiritual awareness have been reluctant to speak of them. Picasso writes of his fear of being misunderstood, of breaking a taboo, by speaking of his art as spiritual. We ought to be able to say that word, or something like it, but people would take it the wrong way, and give it a meaning it hasn’t got. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is ‘touched by God,’ but people would put a wrong interpretation on it. And yet it’s the nearest we can get to the truth. [cited in Paremlin, 1969: 32]

Given this bleak picture of the spiritual decline in Western Art, it is important to note that this is not the complete story. Since the 1800’s there have been voices of spiritual expression emerging in the world of Western

64 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice painting. As Arguelles writes, there has been Historically on the one hand, a tendency toward greater multiplicity and individualism—the separation of the arts from the Art-whole, and on the other hand, a tendency, beginning with the Romantics, toward unity. [1975: 232]

This ongoing expression of the spiritual could be considered an esoteric one within the larger world of Western art. As Lipsey has written, there is a spiritual history of modern art that has not been fully acknowledged. Many of the universally respected artists whose works are altogether familiar and whom we feel we understand have in fact escaped understanding because we haven’t yet penetrated the spiritual history of modern art. [1988: 2]

This spiritual history can be seen as a movement away from the realistic rendering of external form, the Renaissance ‘eye of the flesh.’ The artists of the 19th century questioned the traditional ways of seeing, becoming interested in the relativity of vision and the depiction of internal states, the concerns of the ‘eye of the mind.’ These concerns lead eventually to efforts to portray the spiritual through the ‘eye of contemplation.’ The German Romantics of the 1800’s can be seen as pioneers in this movement. They were rebels in the art world, turning away from the rational intellectual climate of their time in favor of the intuitive and emotional. They looked to nature and to the imagination in search of an expression of the unseen, the spiritual. Levy writes, The German Romantic painters realized the metamorphosis of the artist into a new role, that of a holy seer who has the ability to apprehend and communicate the spiritual in sublime land and seascapes. [1993: 23]

This tradition has been the inspiration for many contemporary artists who have turned to nature for spiritual inspiration. The Impressionists continued this revolution. Unlike the Romantics, who broke their adherence to Renaissance views of depicting reality by expressing the intuitive or symbolic, the Impressionists began to question the way visual reality had been portrayed. They became involved in capturing the object as an ever-changing impression of light and color. Huyghe writes, “Impressionism . . . made color the very incarnation of luminous energy . . . freeing color.” [1962: 113] While the Impressionists may not have had strictly spiritual concerns, being still very involved in the world of sensation, ‘the eye of the flesh,’ their work serves as a beginning on the road away from realism towards the abstraction, which emerged in the 20th century.

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Many have written of the Impressionists’ fascination with the Oriental way of rendering color and perspective, as found in Japanese prints. Opper writes, Artists attempted to free themselves from the Renaissance concept of painting as an imitation of visual reality, challenging the ‘fixed perspective’ point by using the moving perspective of Oriental art. This brought a new understanding of the relativity of the structure of the world. [1970: 150]

This Eastern influence on Western artists can be seen as part of an ongoing East/West movement that would continue into the 20th century. With Post-Impressionism, artists began to move away from a concern with surface appearances and began to work more with the communication of inner states, the ‘eye of the mind.’ As Opper writes, The end of the 19th century found attempts on the part of the Post Impressionists to find a spiritual ground. Many of the Masters realized that there was a subtle relationship between the viewer and the art object that went far beyond its visible reality. They discerned an uncharted realm of spiritual reality that was waiting to be tapped. [1970: 266]

Three artists of this group stand out as pioneers of the movement away from the realistic rendering of natural forms, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Cezanne believed painting had its own laws, that one was not bound to follow the laws of Nature. He rendered form as it changed continuously through altered perspectives of space and time. His painting took on a metaphysical nature as he depicted his changing perception of things. As Kandinsky later wrote, Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. His color and form are alike suitable to the spiritual harmony. [1977: 17]

As Cezanne was concerned with liberating form, Gauguin was concerned with liberating color from conforming to Nature. He turned for inspiration to the world of Primitive cultures, seeking the expression of inner feeling rather than simply external representation. This search for a deeper truth in Primitive culture is echoed again by later artists. Kandinsky speaks of this movement as . . . a sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the Primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form. [1977: 1]

Van Gogh also sought to reveal the emotional and spiritual through his

66 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice painting. Color became expressive, for him, of internal, subjective states. Levy speaks of Van Gogh’s work as radiating an inner ‘suchness.’ In his painting of a pair of old peasant shoes . . . he appeared to have uncovered the essence of ‘shoeness’ . . . The painted shoes radiate with an energy which the Chinese would call chi—the particular underlying force. [1993: 14]

Van Gogh himself speaks of being influenced by the Eastern practice of ‘seeing’ It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding. If we study Japanese art, we see an artist who is wise, philosophic, and intelligent, who spends his time—how? . . . He studies a single blade of grass . . . Come, now, isn’t it almost an actual religion which these simple Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers? [cited in Levy, 1993: 11]

The Cubist artists of the turn of the century furthered the breakdown of Renaissance perspective begun by the Post-Impressionists. They depicted objects as seen from many sides simultaneously, in many moments of time. Space and time were seen as relative. As the Cubists expressed it, We are looking at ordinary things—objects from any dining table—undergoing a transfiguration as light streams across them. The ordinary is caught up in a larger movement of change. [Lipsey, 1989: 61]

This revolution in Western painting began as a rebellion against the traditional rules of painting and continued as a practice of questioning the ordinary notions of space, time, and color. The deconstruction of material representation lead to an interest not only in the depiction of internal, subjective, emotional and intellectual states, painting with the ‘eye of the mind,’ but to the revelation of spiritual concerns as well, painting from the ‘eye of contemplation.’ For the Post-Impressionists and the Cubists, painting became more than an imitation of nature; it became the revelation of the inner state of the artist and of the essence of the object portrayed. As Wilber writes, painting was becoming An act of attention to the inner subject as well as the outer object, and a conveying of the inter-relationship between the two. [1990: 205]

20th Century European Art: Emergence of the Spiritual

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t the turn of the century an understanding of the spiritual importance of painting began to become openly acknowledged by some Western artists. These artists began to paint through ‘the eye of contemplation.’ The art critic Aurier writes in 1890,

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The aim of the aesthetic experience is to be an intimate and mystical communication between the soul of the viewer and the soul of the work of art. One must submit passively to the work in order to receive the ‘sympathetic radiance’ of its being, emanating from the ideas, emotions, and sentiments it contains . . . the role of art is to reveal and express this realm of universal significance, through the individual artist’s response to it. [cited in Regier, 1987: 16]

In 1911, Kandinsky published his classic work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which was to be the guiding vision for many future artists. Kandinsky, as well as many of the other artists of the early 1900s, was deeply influenced by the principles of theosophy and anthroposophy. H.P. Blavatsky, the founder of the theosophical school, believed that Western culture had become impoverished by an over-emphasis on materialism. She believed that renewal could be found in turning towards the spiritual wisdom of the East in search of the ‘eternal truth.’ Inherent in theosophy was an understanding of the inevitable spiritual evolution of the human being and the possibility of revitalization through the arts. As Kandinsky later wrote, “When the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. Literature, music, and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt.” [1977: 14] A circle of artists, the Nabi, meaning ‘Prophet’ or ‘brotherhood,’ grew up in Paris around the time of the early theosophists. They, too, spoke out against materialism, seeing spiritual enlightenment as a valid function of art. In the early 1920s, Katherine Dreier, an outspoken theosophist, founded the Societe´ Anonyme in an attempt to bring a spiritual understanding of modern art to America. She wrote, It is the task of the theosophists to reunite the separated colors, each claiming to be one true light, into the original white light of truth . . . with the return of man’s former state, peace and harmony would reign in the world, and there would be a greater brotherhood among men. [cited in Regier, 1987: 55]

Joining Blavatsky as proponents of theosophy were Leadbeater and Besant who first spoke of the existence of thought forms, visual images of emotional and spiritual states. “In theospohical aesthetics the work of art is in its own way a thought form, shaped by the artist’s vibration and itself transmitting these vibrations to the beholder.” [Tuchman, 1986: 137] The theosophist’s illustrations of thought forms can be seen as the first abstract representations. Their ideas became a major influence on Kandinsky’s understanding of color as emanating from spiritual vibration. Rudolf Steiner, influenced by the theosophical tradition, founded his own school of anthroposophy, a Christian based esoteric tradition. He believed that art, science, and religion were all vital paths to spirit. He, too, spoke of the prin-

68 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice ciple function of art being an instrument of spiritual evolution. “When the artist penetrated to the spiritual basis of color and form with thought and feeling then art was capable of exerting a tremendous influence on all human evolution.” [cited in Regier, 1987: 61] Like the Theosophists, Kandinsky believed that the task of the 20th century was to balance the materialism of the 19th century, by turning towards the spiritual. He believed that artists would be the first to hear this call. Kandinsky believed that the practice of creative activity was intrinsically spiritual and that mystical experience was itself a means of realizing artistic ends. He was the proponent of a new art, “born of the artist’s awareness of his or her own depths and of the resonant universe . . . the invisible universe of spiritual energies.” [Lipsey, 1989: 1] Influenced by Socrates’ understanding of the guiding ‘daimon’ and the Chinese principle of ch’i-yun or spirit resonance, Kandinsky saw art as coming from an inner necessity that echoed the inner sound or vibration within all things. For each artist this inner need or inner necessity reflected three essential aspects, the personal need for expression, the spirit of the age, and the eternal expression of the collective ‘spirit of art.’ The artwork, too, was seen as having an inner correspondence that resonated with the inner sound of the viewer. In his search for an authentic expression of inner sight, Kandinsky turned away from representational forms, towards abstraction. He believed that only through abstraction could one express the mystery by means of mystery. Is that not the content? Is that not the conscious or unconscious purpose of the compulsive urge to create? Man expresses the superhuman to man—this is the language of art. [cited in Duchting,1990: 54]

In his work with abstraction, Kandinsky sought to liberate color from form, believing that color existed in its own reality deeper than form. Another outspoken artist of this time was Piet Mondrian. He, too, was deeply influenced by the theosophical movement. Finding roots in the ideal forms of Plato and Pythagoras, he sought to create a visual language, a sacred geometry that could express theosophical concepts. He believed that the universal spoke through the individual artist, revealing itself in art. This interplay worked both to bring the universal downward into manifestation as well as to bring the individual upwards towards the spiritual. Like Kandinsky, he believed in the transformational power of art for the artist, as well as for the greater spiritual evolution of the human being. He saw the path of art as a path to spirit, writing, “Art can be a discipline of the whole being—this struggle and communion with oneself . . . how could this not be a learning.” [cited in Lipsey, 1989: 470]

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In his work, Mondrian sought to express a dynamic equilibrium, a moving balance between the masculine and feminine. The vertical line represented active masculine forces, the receptive horizontal line, feminine forces, their meeting came in perpendicular forms. He used the primary colors red, yellow, and blue, believing these to be the essential colors, black and gray being the essential elements of space. For him, the oval, a form he often used in his later work, was a form of the circle, the world egg, echoing the principles of cosmic birth and evolution. Paul Klee, another artist of this time, was also intimately involved with the inner world, giving birth to childlike images that emerged from a mystic center or cosmic root. He saw into the ‘in between world,’ working with the archetypal forces that shape form. He writes, It is the artist’s mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret place where primal power nurtures all evolution . . . in the womb of nature in the primal ground of creation where the secret key to all things lies hidden. [cited in Regier, 1987: 130]

In Paris in the 1920s–40s, another group of artists, the Surrealists, began to explore the inner world through such techniques for accessing the unconscious as free association, trance, psychic automatism, and dream work. A current art historian, C. Rabinovitch, writes, The Surrealist mythos is a mythology of the imagination, in which the imaginative process, expressed in dreams and creativity, is exalted as the medium through which an experience of the surreal is gained . . . the imagination is deified as a non-rational, sacred power. [cited in Regier, 1987: 145]

By emptying the mind of preconceived notions of reality and utilizing spontaneous methods of automatism, the Surrealists believed that the structures of thought, the origins of consciousness beyond the rational, would be revealed. As Andre Breton writes, psychic automatism involved a fracturing of the traditional patterns of imagery and metaphor to find the next order, deeper down . . . the spontaneity of the unconscious mind (is) revealed and recorded—and respected for the new kind of order it suggested. [cited in Lipsey, 1989: 122]

For the Surrealists, surrendering to ‘chance’ was key to breaking the rational constructs of mind and allowing the revelation of a deeper order. Arp writes, Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions and colors seem to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged ‘according to the laws of chance’ as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order. [cited in Lipsey, 1989: 119]

For the Surrealist artist, the interior world of the personal unconscious

70 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice became the entry point to the world of the collective unconscious. This tradition is furthered today in the work of Gordon Onslow Ford who writes, Things happen which you couldn’t do by yourself without the collaboration of nature. Inner-stars come in, and inner-trees come in, and inner-grasses grow. You feel something that is much greater than yourself being expressed . . . one may start out by painting what lies before you in the outer-world, but the direction lies in making a leap into your inner landscape and then exploring the inner world. The final stage along the way is in becoming one’s own universe, which is the Universe shared by all. [cited in C. Miedzinski, 1991: 20]

For these artists of the early 1900s, painting was no longer a dialogue between themselves and the environment, but a dialogue with the inner world. It was no longer a process of reproducing the visible but of revealing the invisible. The journey that had begun with the Impressionists, the deconstruction of the physical, culminated in the birth of abstraction. As space and time were made relative, form and color were left in their essence to reveal that which lay beneath the purely physical, the internal world, the spiritual. Sri Aurobindo writes of the abstract in modern art, The idea is to get rid of all over-expression, of language for the sake of language, of form for the sake of form because all that veils the thing in itself, dresses it up, prevents it from coming out in the seizing nudity of its truth, the power of its intrinsic appeal. There is a sort of mysticism here that wants to express the inexpressible, the concealed, the invisible; reduce expression to its barest bareness and you get nearer the inexpressible. [cited in Purani, 1955: 24]

Abstraction seemed uniquely suitable to portray the spiritual world or the emergence of spirit over matter. As Lipsey writes, Abstract art was born a religious and metaphysical art. It was first, and has secretly remained, a means of exploring several interwoven realities, the psyche . . . Nature . . . and beyond these, their common origin in a greater reality. [1989: 2]

For Kandinsky the spiritual was synonymous with the non-objective or abstract. He writes, “The more obvious is the separation from nature, the more likely is the inner meaning to be pure and unhampered.” [1977: 50] For Mondrian the abstract was seen as the meeting place of the universal within and the universal without. “The abstract in art is established by the most profound interiorization of the outward and by the purest (most determinate) exteriorization of the inward.” [Mondrian, cited in Lipsey, 1989: 70] Mondrian saw that it was through intuition that the artist contacted the universal, through abstraction that the order of the universe was revealed. “Through our intuition, the universal in us can become so active . . . that . . . it pushes aside

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our individuality. Then art can reveal itself.” [Mondrian, cited in Lipsey, 1989, 67] Another important understanding that emerged with these artists was the belief in the power of art itself to transform the artist as well as the viewer. The practice of art itself was seen as having a spiritual power and purpose. As Kandinsky writes, the essential spirit or stimmung of a picture can deepen and purify that of the spectator. Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they ‘key it up,’ so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning key, the strings of a musical instrument. [1977: 2]

These understandings of the spiritual in art echo those of the artists working within spiritual traditions explored previously.

20th Century American Art: Re-emergence of the Spiritual

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n America in the 1940s-50s another group of artists took up the thread of reclaiming the spiritual in art. These were the painters of the New York School or the Abstract Expressionists. Instead of turning to the traditions of theosophy and anthroposophy as had their European forerunners, these artists turned to the Native American traditions, the philosophies of the East, Zen Buddhism in particular, and Jungian psychology. These artists turned away from representational form, as well, in search of the essential in art. They worked with abstraction, pure color, line, and form, devoid of traditional content. This brought them face to face with what lay beyond form, the spiritual world. The practice of abstraction can be seen as a meditative one, dismantling the ways we construct our world, returning to the unformed ground of being. It seems appropriate that these artists would turn to the Buddhist tradition for an understanding of the practice they were engaged in. As Staebler writes, Zen is always off center, askew, so that the human being is not at the center any more. It is a dynamic participation of events occurring and you being there. That is what abstract expressionism was really capturing. People did not realize how Eastern it was, since it was happening in New York City. But it was Zen awareness. [cited in Apostolos-Cappadona, 1984: 32]

Many of the Abstract Expressionists were influenced by the Surrealists who preceded them, calling for a return to the non-rational and spontaneous for inspiration. The Abstract Expressionists went beyond the Surrealists who sought a translation of the real into the surreal, to touch the place where symbols were a living essence. As the critic Harold Rosenberg writes,

72 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice What the new American artist sought was not a richer or more contemporary fiction, but the formal sign language of the inner kingdom—equivalents in paint of a flash, no matter how transitory, of what had been known throughout the centuries as spiritual enlightenment. [cited in Lipsey, 1989: 300]

One of the artists of this group, Jackson Pollock, utilized the Surrealist method of spontaneous automatism to execute his drip paintings of energy and motion. He was deeply influenced by the shamanic tradition, Jungian psychology, and alchemy. Instead of drawing from nature he believed he was nature, capturing the essential wonder of creation, the universal energy. For Pollock, the work of the artist paralleled the work of the alchemist. Many of his paintings utilize black, white, red, and yellow, symbolizing the four stages of transmutation. “Through the act of imagining . . . the alchemist related himself not only to the unconscious, but also directly to matter.” [Regier, 1987: 198] For Pollock, the painting itself became a living being, taking on a life of it’s own. Like Pollock, Rothko, another artist of this group, did not follow a particular religious or philosophical path, but his art was deeply, intuitively, spiritual. He spoke of his art not as an expression of ‘his self,’ but of ‘his not-self.’ He, too, was influenced by Surrealism as well as by the mythic nature of primitive art. While the Surrealists referred to their art as a tool to awakening, to disrupting the ordinary ways of seeing, Rothko saw art as a tool of healing and meditation. He found inspiration in the work of the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest as well as in the Western mythic past of Greek tragedy. He spoke of the loss in contemporary culture of imagined beings, mythic gods and goddesses, that lived as intermediaries between humans and the transcendent realm. He believed that painting itself was myth-making. Rothko sought to restore the miraculous to painting. [Chave, 1989: 103] His works became portraits of feelings, icons of the tragic and timeless. They were not simply color fields or depictions of an experience, they were experience itself. Like Kandinsky, Rothko believed strongly in a connection with his viewers, a bridging of the separation, the creation of an immediate encounter. He writes, “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.” [cited in Chave, 1989: 104] His clouds of color live as experiences of contemplation, absorbing the viewer. “In creating shapes that were almost but not quite focused, almost but not quite solid, he found a way to describe the brink or border between being and not-being, presence and absence.” [Chave, 1989: 184] Another group of American painters emerged at about the same time as the New York school. Among this group were Hartley, Dove, Ryder, and O’Keefe who found their inspiration in nature. These artists were influenced by the philosophers of American mysticism, the New England Transcendentalists,

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Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, for whom union with nature was the opening to spiritual experience. As Emerson has written, In the woods, we return to reason and faith . . . Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space . . . I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. [1987: 6]

For these artists the inner spirit of Nature was portrayed through an intuitive spiritual connection. Charles Eldredge writes, O’Keefe and Dove transported themselves from the mundane plane to a God’s eye view, witnessing the world wheeling in the infinite. Through their abstractions they sought to capture the vital essences of nature, a unity of micro and macro, of man and universal spirit. In this endeavor they were part of America’s spiritual tradition. [cited in Tuchman, 1986: 124]

Two other American artists, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, members of the Pacific Northwest school, turned to the traditions of Eastern philosophy and art for inspiration, incorporating elements of Chinese calligraphy and meditative practice in their work. Tobey writes that his painting is an attempt “to discover and reveal in visual form the belief of ultimate oneness, the indivisibility of all reality.” [cited in Opper, 1970: 420] Graves writes, I paint to evolve a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our own mysterious capacities, which direct us towards ultimate reality. [Opper, 1970: 420]

These two artists exemplify an East/ West dialogue within Western art that had been developing since the Impressionists first began looking at Japanese prints. Living on the West coast of America, the border between the Eastern world and the Western European world, Tobey and Graves were aware of America’s unique position as the meeting place of traditions. C. Roberts writes, America has become the crossroads where the most profound problems, expressed in the inevitable interaction of the Oriental and Occidental, confront each other. [1960: 8–9]

As their 20th Century European predecessors looked for spiritual renewal in the teachings of theosophy and anthroposophy, these American artists looked to Eastern philosophies to fill a void left by Western tradition. Graves writes, My family was religious, we were members of a church barren of beauty, and I could not sustain an interest in their affiliation. Taoism, Buddhism, East Indian religious sys-

74 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice tems, all seemed to me immeasurably superior—lifting me beyond my family’s spiritual rewards. [Wight, 1956: 1]

Many writers speak of this unique tradition in America. Opper writes, It is in America that painting is able to fully dispel the ancient Western traditions, and a true synthesis of East and West occurs. [1970: 417]

This East/ West synthesis in art, which began with the Impressionist’s, grew to include interests in the philosophical and spiritual essence of Eastern thought. The Eastern world of space, time, and cosmic order has made a consequential impression on the artist of the West, and the inward vision of the relation and truth of things he has discovered is reflected in his resultant communicative art forms. [Opper, 1970: 515]

The Eastern understandings of creative practice as process rather than product, as inherently spiritual and transformative for artist and viewer, have provided ongoing inspiration for Western artists looking for spiritual roots. Other American artists have turned to the Native American tradition for roots. As C. Miedzinski writes, American artists have turned to Native traditions, “to find an American cultural and mythic heritage which contained the seeds of regeneration.” [1993: 16] As the artist Richard Pousette-Dart describes it, “I feel close to the spirit of Indian art. My work came from some spirit or force in America, not Europe.” [cited in Tuchman, 1986: 277] Gordon OnslowFord writes of the importance of his time spent with the Tarascan Indians in Mexico, The Tarascan Indians see in a different way than we and have a communion with nature that we have lost. They seem to comprehend objects rather than see them . . . I sat for hours, as they did, in contemplation of objects and scenes before me. [cited in Levy, 1993: 66]

This movement towards Native traditions has brought an interest in shamanic techniques, in art as healing and as ritual. Levy writes that, while many modern artists may not be consciously aware of it, they have, in fact, been using shamanic practices in their artwork to access altered states. He outlines the elements of these techniques as solitude, the practice of non-doing, the use of psychotropic drugs, the seeing practice of concentration, the seeing practice of non-focused attention, and dreamwork. Levy states, Shamanism does not rely on belief or adherence to any doctrine. In the hands of creative and technically capable artists, shamanism can become an effective tool in affirming other realities. In shifting attention from common sense or ‘consensus reality,’ artists as shamans succeed in expanding their consciousness and the consciousness

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of their communities and offer blueprints for spiritual development. [Levy, 1993: 304]

The interest in the Native American tradition has also been important to several current movements in American art: Performance Art, Earth Art, and Feminist Art. In Performance Art, artists are working to move beyond the understanding of art as a static product towards an understanding of art as a process. These artists are seeking to create a living experience, which actively includes the audience. As Levy writes, performance artists are “Searching for a form that has the capacity to transform themselves and their audience, like sacred rituals did in the past.” [1993: 296] Breaking the understanding that art is essentially a passive one-way medium, Performance Art is a participatory, ongoing, creative event. Interaction is the key that moves art beyond the aesthetic mode: letting the audience intersect with, and even form part of, the process, recognizing that when observer and observed merge, the vision of static autonomy is undermined. [Gablik, 1991: 151]

In Earth Art, the erroneous understanding that art is an entertaining and meaningless work, somehow outside of life, is challenged by artists who are actively working to heal our separation from the Earth, to revitalize the planet. They are creating an “ecological subtext for art . . . a recognition of the reality that all things are linked together in a cyclical process of nature.” [Gablik, 1991: 91] Through Feminist Art, principles of co-operation, renewal, compassion, and interrelationship are honored rather than the patriarchal vision of the artist as alienated, separated, and distant from life. As Gablik writes, The cultural recovery of the feminine principle is the key to recovery from the institutional oppressiveness of patriarchy . . . the emerging new myth in our time would seem to be the myth of empathy—the capacity to share what another is feeling, to live in the consciousness of our interconnectedness. This is the fundamental ecological vision. [1991: 123]

In Feminist Art, the dark underworld is honored as well as the light above. The spiritual is felt as imminent, embodied, rather than transcendent. These groups of artists represent the most recent movements of spiritual re-emergence in contemporary American art. Gablik sees these movements as part of what she calls a reconstructivist post-modernism, an answer to the same act of questioning that de-constructivists speak of, a questioning of the modern era’s values of individualism, separatism, and lack of social responsibility. She writes that

76 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Reconstructivists are trying to make the transition from Eurocentric, patriarchal thinking and the ‘dominator’ model of culture toward an aesthetics of interconnectedness, social responsibility and ecological attunement. [1991: 22]

The bridge between art and life, art and spirit, is being rebuilt; its place as an expression of revelation is being remembered. C. Miedzinski writes, A growing number of artists from the 1960’s to the present, have tried to find their way back to art’s original regenerative and sacred function . . . by shifting their emphasis away from the object as an end product/commodity to the content and process of the creative act itself. By recognizing that arts outer form is finite and limited by nature, they have come to embrace the infinite possibilities of the creative process and content of art. [1993: 20]

The spiritual has been largely unacknowledged by the mainstream contemporary Western art world. As Lipsey recalls “The spiritual has been a stowaway . . . Lodged secretly in works admired for other reasons, sensed but not well understood.” [1989: 446] It is clear, however, that there has been an ongoing, underground tradition that continues to grow. It is important that this tradition be acknowledged and honored for its role in answering the call for spiritual renewal. As Wilber has written, It was the great artists of the modern era who kept alive the quest for the sacred, the search for the spirit, while all about them the cultural world was succumbing to scientific materialism. [1990: 214]

Gablik makes it clear that ‘the re-enchantment of art’ is integrally connected to the re-enchantment of our world. [1991] Contemporary Western artists have not had the benefit of a cultural tradition to support their work. They have not expressed formally established theologies or spiritual views shared by large communities . . . They have represented search under conditions of uncertainty rather than confident consensus views. Each artist’s search has been largely individual, although aesthetic and spiritual ideas were shared by friends . . . and certainly passed from one generation to the next. [Lipsey, 1991: 461]

For many contemporary artists it has been the practice of art, itself, that has been turned to, instead of spiritual practices. There has been an understanding that art itself is a way. Do artists need a spiritual way or do they need art? You can say that one is the same as the other. Everything tends toward awakening and I would rather use the word awakening than a word derived from a system . . . If religion dies as dogma, it is reborn as a direct personal expression in the arts. I do not refer to work done in churches . . . but to the almost religious quality of ecstasy and anguish found emerging here and there

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in so called abstract art. Using the ever more perceptive truths of nature’s structure, the invocation is still God. [Noguchi cited in Lipsey, 1990: 306]

Some writers have spoken of the lack of spiritual tradition or disciplined practice as a hindrance to the full expression of the spiritual for contemporary artists. Wilber writes, It is the general lack of a contemplative method or technique that seems to have so handicapped Western modern artists in their desire to transcend individuality . . . to find a universal and nondual Spirit. [1990: 214]

Arguelles agrees that, What separates the art of most modern Western visionaries from the kind of integral achievement that characterizes the archaic, however, is an intense inner discipline— the development of an internal technology. [1975: 279]

Yet, the artist Nancy Holt writes, Good art is intrinsically spiritual so you don’t have to be consciously on a spiritual path or trying to be spiritual in your art to do ‘spiritual’ art. On the other hand, a spiritual discipline clarifies the cloudy areas of existence and makes one more open to receive the world as it is, and that can’t help but influence the making of art. [cited in Miedzinski, 1993]

Perhaps, while the first challenge for contemporary artists is to acknowledge the importance of the spiritual in their work, the next challenge is to consciously ally with that intention through spiritual practice. What Dane Rudyhar wrote in the early years of this century still feels relevant today. We believe the deepest duty confronting artists today is to bring forth symbolical utterances emanating this really human spirituality. This can be accomplished only if the artists themselves are tuned to their own spiritual centers, only if they themselves become to some extent, actually if not necessarily in full mental consciousness, incarnations of the God within. [cited in Arguelles, 1975: 232]

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PA RT T H R E E

The Artists Speak

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THE ARTISTS SPEAK

P

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art Three begins with a short discussion of hermeneutic phenomenology and its historical development, placing the Experiential Method in context. This is followed by the words of the artists who participated in this research, describing their own experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. The remainder of Part Three focuses on the themes emerging from these descriptions and a discussion of how the experiences described can be understood as a whole.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Historical Context HERMENEUTIC-PHENOMENOLOGY

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ermeneutic-phenomenology has grown out of the 20th century phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger as well as the hermeneutic tradition itself, which began with the Protestant Reformation as a method of interpreting scriptures, and later became a 20th century philosophy concerned with the issues of understanding itself. The word hermeneutics, is derived from Hermes, the Greek deity who was seen as the messenger between man and the Gods. In order to deliver the messages of the Gods, Hermes had to be conversant in their idiom as well as in that of the mortals for whom the message was destined. He had to understand and interpret for himself what the Gods wanted to convey before he could proceed to translate. [Mueller-Vollmer, 1985: 1]

Hermeneutics began as the practice of interpreting Biblical texts, once again bringing the ‘message of the Gods’ to mortal man. With the 18th century Enlightenment, hermeneutics became a philosophy as well, the study of the principles of understanding. At this time there was an underlying belief that there was a correct way of understanding; that there were principles and methods for interpretation. Once again the hermeneutic philosopher became a messenger between the author of a text and the reader. With Schleirmacher and the 19th century Romantic movement, hermeneutics moved away from a concern with the correct interpretation and became “concerned with illuminating the conditions for the possibility of understanding and its modes of interpretation.” [Mueller-Vollmer,1985: 9] For Schleirmacher and Humboldt this art of understanding was integrally rooted in language.

84 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice In contrast, Dilthey, another prominent hermeneutic philosopher, believed understanding was not as much a function of language as of human life experience itself, an existential principle. Distinguishing psychology from the natural sciences, Dilthey developed hermeneutics as a method of investigation for the human sciences. For him, human behavior itself was seen as reflective of lived understanding. Out of lived experience came life-expressions, a class of hermeneutic objects that carry a meaning independent from the individuals who produced them and whose life-expressions they once were. These may be meaning-complexes such as legal or economic systems, which result from human interactions, or works of art which Dilthey believed to be the highest form of expression. [Mueller-Vollmer, 1985: 271]

Ricoeur later expanded this understanding by including any action or behavior as a life expression that could be explored through hermeneutics. With the work of Gadamer, hermeneutics focused on historical texts. He believed one’s own prejudices were seen as valuable and essential to the process of understanding. Gadamer writes, The hermeneutical conversation begins when the interpreter genuinely opens himself to the text by listening to it and allowing it to assert its viewpoint . . . In confronting the otherness of the text . . . the readers own prejudices . . . are thrown into relief and thus come to critical self-consciousness. [Gadamer, 1976: xiv-xxi]

In the hermeneutic understanding the author and the interpreter can both be transformed in this act of understanding and dialogue. A text is always open to further interpretation and understanding. Hermeneutics becomes an opening and ongoing experience. The classic ideas of phenomenology emerged from the work of the philosopher, Husserl. These ideas differ from traditional hermeneutic methods. Essential to Husserl’s phenomenological tradition is the understanding that one must break down one’s ordinary way of seeing, the ‘natural attitude,’ in order to really see things as they are. Integral to this process is the ‘phenomenological reduction’ or ‘bracketing.’ In order to be with things as they are, one must set aside all preconceived notions, value judgments, and knowledge about experience. One must wake up, out of one’s taken for granted habits of thought by bringing these habits into awareness. Husserl speaks of this new stance as the “transcendental attitude.” One starts with one’s taken for granted way of experiencing and returns, step by step, through observation, towards the act of consciousness itself that constitutes one’s experience. Through bracketing and rebracketing one moves from the ‘natural attitude’ to the ‘transcendental attitude’ thereby reaching the experience of pure phenomena. [Valle, King & Halling, 1989: 10–11]

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For example, if one is investigating the experience of a table, one begins by bracketing one’s own presuppositions about ‘tableness.’ The object one is looking at may then become no longer a ‘table’ but perhaps four legs and a rectangular top, made of wood. As one continues the process of bracketing, further levels of presupposition appear. “In the silence of primary consciousness can be seen appearing not only what words mean, but also what things mean, the core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape.” [Merleau-Ponty,1962: xv] Husserl seems to imply that this process of continuous bracketing brings one eventually to the ground of knowledge, the pre-reflective lifeworld which is “both independent of knowledge derived from reflective thought processes and yet, being pre-reflective, it also is the independent ground or starting point for all knowledge.” [Valle, King, & Halling, 1989: 10] It seems, however, that this process could be an infinite one. Merleau Ponty questions whether it “is possible to put into abeyance all of one’s presuppositions about an apple (or any other item of reflection) . . . According to him, a totally presuppositionless vantage point cannot be secured, because as we put one presupposition out of action, we uncover beneath it, more hidden ones . . .” [cited in Von Eckartsberg, 1986: 5] In any case, this process of bracketing is seen as essential in making the return to pure descriptive experience. As such it is a core element of the phenomenological method. Working with the descriptions of experience collected from participants, the classic phenomenological researcher divides each description into units, sentences or groups of words, which seem to speak on one theme. The researcher then rewords or renames these units in their own language. These meaning units are then put into a final synthesis or general description of the experience being explored. The work of the classic phenomenologist becomes, then, primarily a cognitive one of analysis. With the work of Heidegger, phenomenology becomes an existential philosophy. Existence is seen as “being-in-the-world,” the individual and the world are always interrelated. The idea of a presuppositionless understanding is seen as unrealistic. With “being-and-time,” phenomenology becomes more than a process of describing the lived world and becomes a hermeneutic concern. As Gadamer later writes, “even in being-and-time the real question is not in what way being can be understood but in what way understanding is being.” [cited in Mueller-Vollmer,1985: 32] In contrast to classic phenomenology, the hermeneutic-phenomenologist does not set aside or bracket their presuppositions. These are taken, instead, as the starting point from which the inquiry begins. The hermeneutic arc becomes a dialogue between the researcher’s self-understanding and an under-

86 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice standing of the participant’s experience. As phenomenology describes lived experience, hermeneutics describes how one understands lived experience. Hermeneutics brings the art of understanding to phenomenology. The phenomenological ‘facts’ of lived experience are always meaningfully (hermeneutically) experienced, even the ‘facts’ of lived experience need to be captured in language and this is inevitably an interpretive process. [Van Manen, 1990: 181]

In hermeneutic-phenomenology all human expressions can be seen as lifetexts—art works, literary forms, rituals, as well as descriptions of experience. These texts themselves can be looked at as “a world, a cumulative and holistic process, the structure of which . . . cannot be derived from or reduced to the linguistic structure of the sentence.” (Titleman, 1975: 186) Rather than distilling and breaking the descriptions of the research participants into meaning units or core constituents as one might do in a purely phenomenological study, the researcher dialogues with the meaning of the piece as a whole. This approach thus becomes one of dialogue that spirals outward and at the same time inward rather than the more linear atomistic approach of classic phenomenology. Hermeneutic-phenomenology can be seen as a method of research, which is not primarily a mode of interpretation with certain rules of practice, but a practice of clarifying or aligning with the act of understanding itself. It is the art of bringing to light that which has previously remained hidden, a process of revealing meaning. This art involves intuition. As Irina Tweedie writes, intuition is the perceptive sense that seems to exist apart from the personality. It is the way in which we instinctively know a thing, perhaps, and it is certainly true that when we let go of some of our will-power, of our determination to rule our circumstances, many underlying perceptions become available to us. [cited in Bancroft, 1989: 134]

Intuition gives form to the unformed. Intuition requires psychic engagement in a problem or relationship and seems to be enriched by a store of previous experiences. Attunement then follows. [Chinen et al, 1985: 195]

This experience of engagement itself is integral to the practice of hermeneutics. The researcher must, in a sense, become one with the text, the author, the question, she is exploring. As Dilthey writes, Understanding is essentially a self-transposition or imaginative projection whereby the knower negates the temporal distance that separates him from his object and becomes contemporaneous with it. [cited in Gadamer, 1976: xiv]

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The practice of hermeneutics involves returning again and again to that which one is exploring. This movement is part of the ongoing hermeneutic circle in which one moves from the part, the particular, to the whole, and back again. In this movement between, intuition is accessed, meaning is revealed, and the author, the interpreter, and the text are all opened to further understanding.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Experiential Descriptions

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n this chapter I present the words of the artists who participated in this research as they describe their own experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. The descriptions are presented in their entirety, with the experiential expressions, or those statements, which seem to have particular importance, highlighted in italics. A breakdown of each artist participant’s experiential expressions and the affinitive grouping of emergent themes can be found in the Appendix.

Maria R.

I

n many ways, when I am drawing or painting, it feels like meditation. It has a similar variety of moods. What I mean to say is that sometimes I feel like I’m really getting it, I’m there, connected to the Source, being fully in the experience, and sometimes I struggle trying to get connected, I might judge my state of mind or the work that I’m doing. I guess my point is that being creative as a spiritual practice has less to do with how I happen to be working or feeling and more to do with the context within which I am working. It is the intention that my process of painting be a spiritual practice that makes it so. Again, to compare it to meditation . . . You sit on the floor with the intention of meditating and it will be a spiritual practice, or you can sit on the floor and space-out with no intention at all. The latter may indeed be spiritual, but not necessarily. But in art as in meditation, sometimes you ‘get it’ and sometimes you don’t. Given the understanding that to me creativity as a spiritual practice doesn’t mean always being in touch with the spirit, I will comment on how it feels when I experience this connection with my higher self, or God.

90 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Basically, it feels like allowing. Just allowing myself to do what occurs to me to do. This allowing occurs within the context of my intention to be connected to God. This allowing exists where there is no judgment of myself or the work that I am doing. This allowing occurs when I trust what is coming to me to do. Words such as non-judgment and trust only point to my experience of being connected to spirit while being creative. I say this because when I am there, issues around judgment and trust don’t really exist. So these words might be more appropriately used in describing the experience of approaching connection to spirit. Judgments slip away and trust increases until the point where the concepts are no longer necessary. When I look at a drawing or painting when it’s finished, I feel that my satisfaction is proportional to my extent of authenticity while creating it. I would like to point out here that, for me, being connected to spirit doesn’t mean being high and joyful all the time. Being connected means being fully who I am in the moment, which may be sad, or lonely, or what have you. I find that if I allow this fullness of who I am, in a way I become empty to receive the light of spirit. For me right now this fullness and emptiness are both equally important. Just as I grow personally and spiritually I believe my experience of creativity as spiritual practice changes. What remains is intention and desire.

Spencer

M

y first awakening to the fact that creative expression had a spiritual component was in a creative expression class at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. It never dawned on me that personal growth had anything to do w/Spirit at all. I thought it was all psychological. When ideas along with tears came pouring out of me those 10 weeks I was taken aback. I did a collage of all my who’s who invitations and a Barbie doll and called it ‘who am I.’ Another piece was a woman drowning in a sea of numbers. All these numbers had meaning for me in my life: Social Security, Real Estate Mortgage Loans, Enneagram #, shoe sizes, Visa, drivers license, on and on it went. Being a business woman was putting me under. I needed air—the same air I needed as an asthmatic child. All the childhood illnesses welled up. The bronchitis, asthma, bronchial pneumonia, it was all there. Then my mind wandered to the times I used to drop my daughter off at Mom’s for a few days in a row. (They lived 1 hour away.) These were the only times in her entire life she ever got sick. My mind flooded again—Did Mom need a patient to prove herself. She was a nurturer and we had all moved out—was Lori her new patient in need of help? I got her out of there immediately and began to look at what my relationship was to my Mother. It was sick—Oh God I’d never realized it. The art was getting me in touch with it. From Sept to March I painted 11 large paintings—All about

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Mother, mothering, being a daughter, the shame of an unwanted pregnancy, the fears of not being married, the repulsion of ‘having to’ marry the boy. My shame was coming out my arm onto the canvas. I could see it. It validated my memories. Memories I thought were wrong. I worked hard to understand it all, read books on narcissism, etc. I learned she screwed me up but wasn’t trying to. She did the best she could. It didn’t matter. I was shaken and angry. Finally w/therapy and bodywork I sat one day in J.P.’s office and all of a sudden this wall of water washed down over me and washed away the anger I had toward Mom. I couldn’t believe it. Was it something J. said—Yes. We got to the fact that as the youngest of 10 children she’d probably not bonded to her own Mom and therefore never learned how to bond w/me. I in turn most likely didn’t bond to my daughter (although I’m not sure about this part yet, I’m still in process.) When I was two weeks old Mom took me to see the Dr. While I was on the exam table he slapped his hands down hard on the table to show her I had good reflexes. I screamed and went into a fetal position. She yelled at him for doing that but of course it was too late. A week later I pushed her away when she tried to nurse me. Mistrust was set up. She didn’t protect me from him. Since I was pushing her away, no bond was formed. As a result she tried to do everything perfect. She always tried so hard to do things right that she was like a helicopter Mom. She hovered over me that way. I’m left with fears of both engulfment and/or abandonment. I’ve never really figured it out. Anyway, I’ve been very calm since the water wall. At least in comparison to my usual self. I just finished “Perfect Woman” by C. Dowling. It was me all the way. My paintings have opened my life up and since I’m in the midst of this discovery soup, I can’t say what the end result will be. My latest two pictures are delving into my own shadow issues so a new chapter has begun. There are many more stories connected to my art but I’m honoring the time. The other themes are: birth mandala, two Cupids honoring themselves in a mirror. A door w/a sign on it that reads “Your daughter is alive and well in NY w/her father.” This is what I found on my door coming home from work when Lori was 13 yrs old. My latest work is a mermaid holding her arm outstretched, head back and screaming “I won’t give up my voice in exchange for love.” As women we give up our voices too easily in return for a little security and a few kisses. The most powerful part of that painting for me is the realization that I’ve done and am doing just that. 30 min is up.

Connie

I

began to work outside in the mid-sixties, finding a renewed meaning in life walking in the winter fields of Colorado. Since then I have traveled, finding rare islands in Maine, Canada and Scotland, following the brilliance of fall in

92 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Colorado, the Sierras, and the red canyons of Utah. Closer to home I watch the subtle changes in the coast and hills of Marin. Each of these places in the different seasons and times of day becomes metaphor for aspects of myself I need to experience more deeply. I never get enough of being in nature; it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality, at once austere, radiant and gentle. Waking up in this last decade to the vulnerability of the earth, I adapted my work for use in the peace and environment community. The urgent concern for the earth remains, but under all and most enduring is the deep satisfaction I feel simply being in natural places. This has led me to work even more outside; the once preliminary studies begun in the field for larger paintings in the studio are now more often completed on location. I have come to see this way of working as another way of healing the earth—being there, seeing it, and loving it. The intimate connection inherent in the process of drawing and painting becomes more intense as I stay longer in a place. Distinctions in natural forms become clearer—the changing shape of the creek in fall and spring, the gradual emergence of buds on rare branches, the poignancy and privilege, day after day, of watching the last rays of sun give way to twilight. Painting outside is as exciting and demanding as any other intimate relationship— the joy of connection, the pain when this connection is lost, and the search for new ways to communicate. Communication involves not only being there, but finding the equivalent in paint for forms and light conditions in each place; the silvery light on the bay has different requirements than the dense light in the redwood forests. Relative to each place and time of year I alternate between oil on canvas and mixed media: acrylic and crayon on paper. Finding the appropriate media, while staying true to my own necessities of form in the midst of unexpected conditions and overwhelming choices is constantly challenging, a continuing and vital engagement.

Mark

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ow does one describe the indescribable? You ‘see,’ right off in the beginning one is faced with a paradox. Describing an experience is different than the experience, especially in the realm of art and spirit, which often elude a logical verbal time based experience. I suspect the key here to your question really lies in the word practice. A repetition, an act that relates to a previous one and continues with a similar one. Creation as a spiritual practice is indeed an interesting experience. How does one practice throwing oneself into the void? How does one prepare to abandon all rational thoughts and dare to trespass into and across the boundaries of reason. I sense this act happens to all of us to certain degrees and especially to artists. Many aren’t aware of the process. They perhaps are hunting different

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things, but when one is aware of the hunting of oneself through the creative act then life becomes a spiritual practice. This is an artist who uses everything to their (and their art’s) benefit. Even not practicing then becomes practicing. The creative act is a transformation of the soul, spirit, and ego. The mind and the ego have to, in a sense, move over. One could use the word channel, but it is more like a back seat, a witness, This is a spiritual practice. The ability to almost be half present, to be half blind, to forget most of what you know and think you know. And again a paradox is present, one is more present than ever—a hyper awareness of extremely subtle realms of sight, textures, compositions, movement, and memories. The most coveted thing in the artworld is not talent, it is discipline! Back to practice. The creative practice which can’t help be spiritual by the very nature that creation is the greatest mystery of all—because it contains everything that there is and is not. From birth to death, for an artist from black to white, light to shadow, all the secrets of the universe are present. Some extremely simple, others a little bit more complicated. Each piece of art I do is only a try, trying to do the impossible—to create beauty? To organize chaos? To transform the world? I know it is a futile attempt. But I know this, and that is where the practice comes in. I am practicing the impossible. That is where the mystic and the artist connect, the shaman and the artist understand the same language—use the same images and metaphors, recycle the old into something present that works. Then this practice becomes a life long journey, an unraveling of the great mystery. And each time the artist sits down or stands up in their studio, they are at the beginning and end of time, the axis mundi and world tree stems out of the center of their studio and their head and their hearts. And when they step out, they are back here, sometimes describing what it is like on the other side, sometimes paying the rent and watching ‘nature feed upon itself and live gloriously.’ My experience is that it is usually difficult in the beginning. The transition from standing to flying, sitting to diving, walking to dreaming is full of rocky roads, tight muscles, uncompromising thoughts, and just plain old bad habits. Happens to the best and worst of us. Especially if we haven’t ‘practiced’ in awhile, be it days, weeks, or God forgiving, months. It is the same with athletes and musicians. And this is what I teach—how do we warm up, what do we practice for practice sake? Not always the masterpiece—it’s extremely difficult to just jump in on a major painting that has already begun. There is too much at stake—the inner critic still talks too loud. One must do the landscapes, draw the nude, paint the still lives as a practice—and yes, like a zen spiritual practice. Now it’s different if you are painting all the time—then you’re ‘honed,’ you’re a wellmaintained machine—clean oil, strong heart, soft eyes, and a lightening quick

94 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice mind. Because once you’re ‘in,’ shit happens and if you don’t catch it in the moment, it goes. I practice ‘seeing’ differently, using mirrors, crossing my eyes, blurring them. Looking at things upside down, in the dark, with binoculars, from a mountaintop. This helps me get out of a habit of seeing a certain way and becoming practically blind. I also have my studio set up as an altar, as a sacred place. I have declared that and so it is. The cardinal directions are noted on the floor—prayers are hung to keep the space safe and inviting to the muse to live there with me. I always burn one candle, I feel naked without it, the studio feels lifeless without it. It is the eternal spirit, it is power, light, transformation of energy. It is alive and very old. I also burn incense and alot of cedar and sage. These are helper plants to keep the space clear, keep the subtle energies clean. At best one breathes, aware of both worlds, and continues to dance, to paint, sing, and live.

Dorothy

C

reativity is for me, the natural flow outward of an inner experience of being human. It can be expressed in myriad ways and is always original. I have come to believe that my life is a creative act a lot of the time. I think of it that way more often, within relationships, within my work and within some of the ordinary tasks of life. In the same way spiritual practice has become a more all encompassing part or way of life. Increasingly, I see my life, just as an on-going spiritual practice, finding it hard to call one part more spiritual than another. Words are hard to come by, not because I consider my experience ‘indescribable’ or unusual; but simply because most vocabulary still projects such a dualistic, compartmentalized approach to life. Therefore I struggle with finding an adequate way to share what it is like for me. Nevertheless, it is important to try, for I find in the sharing, I often reveal my own inconsistencies and struggle to myself as well as to others. Now that I have said that spiritual practice can’t seem to be assigned to a particular time or activity, I must say that I also believe that certain exercises are necessary for me to sustain that way of life which I feel called to and desire to cultivate. These exercises are times of greater concentration and attention to inner awareness and my journey within. They may be times of meditation, contemplation or quiet. They are primarily times of stillness and receptivity. Creative expression is often for me, an important part of these reflective or meditative times. I sometimes find myself drawn to sketching, to painting or to creative movement as a natural flow from my inner reflection.

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The outward expression seems to enable me to integrate more deeply and more concretely the inner awareness, which I am pondering or experiencing. At those times, the expression seems more meaningful than words, either spoken or written. The intuitive push to simply draw or play with colors or with movement doesn’t have a rational base or direction. It simply comes from within, without judgment or criticism. It solidifies something within, even though what it touches or integrates may not be able to be explained or even articulated at the moment. Thus creativity feels like, for me, a participation in the ongoing creation of the world. I assume the intention of all creation is to bring to fullness what it is to be. So therefore, every act of my creativity brings a bit more of that potential of being into existence. Thus it is essential for me to encourage and release my own creative capability. Consequently, I see the creativity of others as something also to be fostered, facilitated and affirmed for the same reason. To be creative, is to allow one’s essential self to be seen and to grow. It provides a profound means of connection and communication with others. It is a participation in the creative act of the Divine Spirit of which we are all a part.

Sophie

I

never considered my painting ‘a spiritual practice’ but it is spiritual. That is to say a practice brings to mind something that is scheduled and I find that being creative is not something I can predictably schedule. It is however spiritual in that when I am in my best creative mode I am in a different form of consciousness. Ideas, connections and techniques for expression of this come from thought processes that are very different than normal day to day. Since I can feel the process as different I sometimes label it as automatic or spontaneous but this is not quite true as there are decisions by me involved in this process and I am aware of making these decisions. It is just that some things happen very fast—connections, ideas, new relationships of thought, new techniques to relate this through painting and the speed is much greater than I am acquainted with in other areas of my life. I am also physically quite clumsy at times with all my physical movements except for the acts of painting, finding the colors, mixing, etc. i.e. I trip over chairs, the cat, run into furniture as I step back to look. I think part of this is just the intense focus—part is almost like all motor control has been directed by my brain to only those functions that are absolutely needed to paint and part is a partial out of body experience. I find that after painting for hours I must have a ‘coming down’ period similar to coming off a drug so to speak. I frequently find it difficult to talk to someone on the phone or in person and find I have to make a conscious effort of withdrawal from the creative process or space to (normal?)

96 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice everyday functioning. A simple task such as preparing a meal, sweeping, walking (sometimes), etc. can help this process. Time takes on a different dimension as well. I am usually totally unaware and often surprised at how much time has passed (similar to time passed in meditation.) Because of this fact I always like creative time to be open-ended with no immediate deadlines of where I have to be, etc., etc. I also always experience a feeling of gratitude, well-being and peace after such a time! I am always in the moment when I paint, all of my senses are heightened when I paint, sometimes even sexual energy. The ‘practice’ is a source of great joy.

Ann

W

hen I was a child in the sixth grade, I remember very clearly an easel that was set up in the back right corner of the classroom. One by one, each member of the class was assigned to go to the back of the room and paint for a couple of hours, without having to do class work or be involved with the class in any other way. When it was my turn to paint I remember the tremendous joy I felt at being able to do nothing but paint. I didn’t have to be involved with what was, at that young age, an awakening sense of social interaction and hierarchy, which was very confusing to me and which I felt very inept at. At that easel I could escape into a self-made world that was joyous and complete. I loved the feeling of moving the paint around on the paper with the brush, the sensual quality of the colors and the texture and smell of the tempera paint. Even at the age of ten, the process was so all involving that the rest of the world fell away. I think that this was my first conscious or self-conscious experience of the process of painting as a spiritual and healing experience. I do many kinds of painting, but one type that I do has been formulated over time to produce a meditative state. The very process of moving the brush over the paper trains awareness of the present. The longer I do this kind of painting, the deeper the sense of the present becomes. At first it starts with simple concentration— not thinking of anything else. Then it moves to a sense of mastery—being able to think about doing something, and my hand actually carrying it out. It deepens to a total involvement with what is happening at the tip of the brush—the point where the hairs of the brush and the ink touch the paper. At that point time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases to take notice of things I would not usually see or feel. The process of creating and the slight critical distance of watching happen simultaneously. My breathing is calm, my attention is focused, and I can step aside and let the painting happen through me. What happens at the tip of the brush, as the painting appears on the paper is like magic. This happens to some extent in any painting process when it is ‘working,’ but this particular kind of painting directs one to this kind of experience systematically. The experience,

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at the tip of the brush, deepens and deepens in time. I become more relaxed, feel a sense of well-being, alertness, smoothness, beauty and an overwhelming sense of the rightness of things. Everything comes together at that instant. What I am talking about is not some large enlightenment experience that changes my life forever, but an experience that happens moment by moment and is very gentle, but is not there, say, when I am balancing my checkbook. It does, however, give me hope. I also do a kind of painting which uses as a subject matter imagery from the deepest state of dreaming in which there is still visual imagery but before one goes into a dreamless, imageless sleep. I have been watching my dreams since I was about four years old and have found that different qualities of consciousness produce different kinds of imagery: different colors, forms, light quality, speed of action and subject matter. This imagery is sometimes only part of a dream, but when I experience it there is a feeling of profound peace and clarity. Because the experience is so wonderful, I have worked hard to reproduce the feeling of those images in my paintings. I do this both so that I can experience the feeling again, and with the profound hope of communicating this experience to the person looking at the painting. I also look for images in the ‘waking’ world that evoke the same quality of experience, thus linking the sleeping and waking world. The images serve as a source of nourishment for me. These images are my personal and ‘western’ spiritual iconography, representing what I experience as a spiritual state, much in the same way that, say, Buddhist art has codified the use of images of the Buddha, the wheel, the lotus throne, etc. to evoke certain spiritual states in the viewers of Buddhist art. However, I find that in reality, I can be working in any form of painting, and when it is flowing well, it becomes a spiritual experience. The very process of painting for me involves the stopping of thinking, an expansion of awareness and a broadening and deepening of consciousness. When I am painting, I return to a state of wonder, where the slightest movement of the brush stroke can become enjoyable, and the minute change of color from blue to purple becomes a miracle. Again, these feelings are not large bolts of enlightenment, but small, gentle delicate feelings of perfection, where the world at once shrinks to involvement with the smallest detail and at the same time enlarges to something much bigger than myself. The process of painting itself is for me healing. When I do it, I feel good. It acts as a balance. It is like clear, cool water. Something I knew in the sixth grade, and something I must remember daily. The difficulty is in the remembering.

Maria H.

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or me spirituality is a sense of aliveness and an experience of oneness—participation in the oneness of all of creation with God—the Divine. To the extent that

98 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice my experience in creativity leads me to these, it is a spiritual practice. Chinese painting begins with a meditation, I go deeper than the distractions of the day, let them go and get to that place of peace. In that place, I am more aware of the rhythm of my body and the connection of that rhythm to other organisms. Those rhythms are alive and silent. I begin to move my arms from my energy center as I breathe—the body, mind, movement connection. This movement from the tan-tien is coming from a connection of my energy center to other energy centers in the Universe—the Universal Rhythm. The attunement of creatures with each other and with the Divine. As I open my eyes, I look at a landscape I will be working on today. High mountain cliffs—a little village—houses and trees—tucked away in a crevice. A waterfall and a stream. Rocks jagged. Rocks smooth at the waters edge—a worn path. Pines at the precipice edge. A willow over the stream. I am one with the spectacular scene of nature before me. I am in the scene—absorbed. I paint a piece here a piece there as I repeat the forms in nature created by a God force so many years ago, the creative energy of the universe pulses in me. I am one with that creative energy. There are no boundaries of time and space. Time flies by—an hour is a minute. I am at peace. As I put down my brushes to resume my daily affairs, I feel a profound peace. I can more easily discern what is important from what is not. I feel more centered and more able to stay in my center. Boundaries are more clear. That sense of eternal, of serenity can move to work, to play, to relationships. Recreating forms of nature puts me in touch with nature. Beauty, peace, simplicity, strength. As these forms are repeated over and over, through years, these qualities are stronger in my every day experience.

Deborah

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have explored many different spiritual practices through the years, but my artwork has been the one continuity in this time. It has been a process through which I look inward without the self-consciousness that for me often accompanies a meditation technique. When I am ‘touch drawing,’ I let go of the verbal mind and respond to more subtle inner impulses. Although I would not think of myself as one who has visionary experiences in dreams, in meditation, drawing allows me to focus my attention and make manifest deeply spiritual images. In recent years, I have come to be aware that, upon completion of an hour or so of drawing, I have been in a state that I only recognize as I disengage from drawing and have a sense of ‘leaving’ a communion. When I work with another individual in an ‘inner portrait’ session, I have a sense of presences or beings making themselves available to my drawing hands as fast as I can manifest them. There is a sense of something other than myself

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forming the images. When I sing in a prayerful, improvisational mode, I feel as if I am standing in a threshold between worlds. I feel very at home in this space. In contrast to all this, my attempts at ‘spiritual practices’ have been relatively flat, self-conscious and frustrating. Maybe I should take a message from what I am writing here!

Vadim

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found myself an immigrant in a distressed spiritual state. I began to think: HOW to express MYSELF, HOW to find a new language, one that is international so it could be understood by everyone. I prayed, and one night I had a dream. It was unusually colorful and I was fascinated by it. Suddenly, a kindred and gentle voice, in a fatherly and concerned way, said to me, “Begin to create colorful designs . . .” And I picked up my scissors and with the help of magazines, colored paper, and glue began to make these designs. I saw many dreams and they provided the subjects and themes of my work. In this way I became the sovereign of a new language, a ‘new’ speech arose, one that existed before the Tower of Babel. I gave up writing poetry and stories and began to create small paintings. Soon thereafter, I became interested in pastels, working only with the tips of my fingers, as if I could feel an electrical charge running through them. A whole new line of paintings developed. I never thought of my subjects ahead of time. It was as if I was the executor of an unearthly power. More than once I heard a man’s voice and saw the outline of a face. The voice told me, “I died, not having finished my creative plans, which are infinite. It is now up to you to continue.” My spiritualistic contact continues. My artist-mentor demands that I sit at my desk with color pens and paint, paint . . . This type of dictated artistic work doesn’t really wear me down, but afterwards I am eager only to sleep, to gaze again upon the splendid visions, mysterious combinations of color. After I awake, I lay my dreams down on paper as if unsystematically, ultimately giving birth to something marvelously pure and good in its essence. The paintings, sent down from Heaven, are always romantic, enigmatic, extraordinary. And most important is the fact that I can no longer NOT create them. I am as if in bondage or captivity. This feeling, though akin to inspiration, is a different experience altogether. A feeling stemming from a collaboration with a supernatural civilization. It is a celestial spiritualistic contact, as if the continuation of someone’s departed earthly life desires to prolong its tangible existence. I must admit that before having the initial dream, I was not at all interested in painting, having an almost sluggish attitude towards the creation of artists. My work is not in any way tied to imitation. It did not arise in connection to tireless efforts and study of methods of various masters.

100 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice My creative plans for the future are to write a book about my life, mainly about my VISION of life. I believe in the existence of supernatural civilizations. I believe that they live in the beautiful reverie, in the celestial magnificent world. Today, one of the master artists sends his voice from that wonderful star and passes down his subjects, topics, and themes. Contact with this being is difficult to describe in words. I feel it through my body, my blood, my spiritualistic center—my soul. It is as if this unearthly spirit is boarding within me. I don’t know how to qualify or prove this contact, what to call this artistic expression, but I cannot avoid to acknowledge HIS EXISTENCE. I get somewhat tired from the work, my hands grow heavy, my entire body becomes wooden. But this exhaustion passes. I lie down to sleep, once again see the colorful dreams, as if being sated, fed, and nurtured by them. I am in constant contact with the supernatural through my dream-visions. I think that my experience can represent an interest for art critics who study the artistic process, method, and character of expression on canvas and paper. I did not study in art schools. Creativity came to me from the other world. It is in this way that my creativity is INTERESTING. This creativity abundantly endows me with inspiration to work. It commands my human will, dictates to me, “You MUST, you MUST work each day.” This brings me great happiness. The people who see my work are warmed in their hearts, are filled by a plentiful bright optimism. They contemplate the eternity of their souls, which exist only partially here on Earth and only later leap into a new distance and adopt a new form of existence in the world.

CHAPTER NINE

Thematic Amplification

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s each artist describes the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice, several universal themes begin to emerge. These themes elucidate how creative activity is experienced, how it is felt as spiritual, and how it is seen as practice. In this chapter these emergent themes are amplified through dialogue as the experiential expressions from each participant artist are affinitively grouped with the experiential expressions of the same emergent theme from the other participant’s descriptions. This is a process of unitive intuition in which the commonalities among experiential expressions point towards particular universal emergent themes. This creates a movement between the parts that amplifies the meaning of the whole. “There is disclosed an understanding of the personal in the universal and the universal in the personal.” [Kidd: 1990,19] Amplifying themes means that the researcher brings into focused attention details, which contribute to the self-meaning constitution in action and experience. Amplifying is a way to bring to the forefront meaning, which is in experience and which is at the same time the ground for possibility. [Kidd: 1990, 27]

Four major themes have emerged from my work with these artists: the interplay of intention/reception, the experience of being in relationship, the experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world, and the experience of a journey. ( Italics indicate the participants’ original words.)

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The Interplay of Intention/Reception

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any of the artists express an understanding that the experience of intention, desire, volitional discipline, or self-awareness, is what makes their experience of being creative a spiritual one. Others describe it as an experience of allowing or receptivity. For others it seems to be more of an interplay between intention and receptivity.

The Experience of Intention Maria R., one of the artist participants, writes being creative as a spiritual practice has more to do with the context within which I am working. It is the intention that my process of painting be a spiritual practice that makes it so. There is an understanding that being creative becomes spiritual within the context of spiritual discipline. This context can involve simply a spiritual perspective or inner awareness that creative experience, as well as life itself, is a spiritual practice. As Mark writes, when one is aware of the hunting of oneself through the creative act then life itself becomes a spiritual practice. This context can also involve the cultivation of particular practices of self-awareness or concentration. Dorothy writes, certain exercises are necessary for me to sustain that way of life, which I feel called to and desire to cultivate. These exercises may be meditative, contemplative, or creative. For Dorothy they involve times of greater concentration and attention to inner awareness and my journey within. Ann writes that one of her creative practices, itself, is intentionally designed to bring her to a meditative awareness. One type I do has been formulated over time to produce a meditative state. In contrast to experiencing creative practice as meditative, Deborah writes that her creative practice is a process through which I look inward without the selfconsciousness that for me often accompanies a meditation technique. While her experience is an intentional one of looking inward she does not see it as meditative or self-conscious. Mark speaks of his experience of intention as a paradox. How can one practice throwing oneself into the void, or prepare to abandon all rational thoughts? For him, there is an acknowledgement of the intentional. Yet, at the same time, he realizes a certain irony in this attempt. How can one try to do the impossible— to create beauty? To organize chaos? To transform the world? Maybe it is the intention, the will, the awareness itself that is spiritual. As Maria R. writes, even though her experience of creativity and spiritual practice changes as she grows, what remains is the intention and the desire. While many participants speak of the spiritual as emerging out of their own sense of intention, some express an understanding that creative experience is, itself, inherently and spontaneously spiritual and this is beyond intention. Mark writes, creative practice . . . can’t help be spiritual by the very nature that cre-

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ation is the greatest mystery of all. Ann writes, I find that in reality, I can be working in any form of painting, and when it is flowing well it becomes a spiritual experience. There is a sense that in aligning oneself with the process of creating one can access spiritual awareness; since creative activity is by nature spiritual.

The Experience of Allowing: Receptivity While the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice seems to involve a certain volitional awareness or intention, it can also involve an experience of allowing, of letting go of will. For Maria R., this experience of allowing is one of increased trust, of moving beyond judgment. I trust what is coming to me to do . . . Judgments slip away and trust increases until the point where the concepts are no longer necessary. Dorothy writes that the spontaneous experience of being creative is beyond judgment. The intuitive push . . . simply comes from within, without judgment or criticism. Dorothy’s experience of allowing is one of letting her expression simply come. The experience of being receptive allows creative expression to emerge. Dorothy writes that her creative expression arises primarily out of times of stillness and receptivity. For Vadim, the experience of being receptive comes out of the dream state in which he allows images to appear. I saw many dreams and they provided the subjects and themes of my work. The experience of allowing seems to bring a spiritual awareness to creative activity. As Ann writes, when it is flowing well, it becomes a spiritual experience. Maria R. writes, If I allow this fullness of who I am . . . I become empty to receive the light of Spirit. For her, the experience of spiritual connection is, itself, one of receptivity. When I experience this connection with my Higher Self, or God . . . it feels like allowing. The experience of receptivity is even described as an experience of allowing a force other than oneself to act as the creator of one’s images. Deborah writes, there is a sense of something other than myself forming the images. Vadim speaks of himself as the executor of an unearthly power. More than once I heard a man’s voice and saw the outline of a face. The voice told me, “I died, not having finished my creative plans, which are infinite. It is now up to you to continue.” . . . It commands my human will, dictates to me, you MUST, you MUST work each day. For him, the experience of allowing becomes the sense of another’s will coming through him. On one level, receptivity can be the experience of simply letting go of the conscious or intentional mind, of moving into a deeper sense of trusting one’s creative expression. On another level, receptivity allows one to feel a deeper sense of spiritual connection, allowing becomes an opening to experience something greater than one’s personal self. Creative expression is then felt as essentially spiritual.

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The Experience of Intention/Reception The experience of allowing may also involve a preliminary sense of intention, of deciding to let go. Maria H. writes, I go deeper than the distractions of the day, let them go and get to that place of peace. Mark’s statements, as mentioned previously, speak of this process of intention/ reception as preparing to abandon all rational thought and practicing to throw oneself into the void. Vadim speaks of his creative experience as stemming from intentionally turning to prayer and receiving inspiration in a dream. I prayed, and one night I had a dream . . . A voice . . . said to me, “Begin to create colorful designs.” For many of the participants an interplay between increased intention and simultaneous receptivity is described. Ann writes my breathing is calm, my attention is focused and I can step aside and let the painting happen through me. For her, there is a certain intentional meditative stance that precedes the receptivity that allows the painting to happen. It is as if occupying the conscious mind with meditative practice allows her to step aside so that creative expression can emerge. Sophie speaks of the fact that her creative experience involves simultaneous spontaneity or receptivity as well as decision making or intention. I sometimes label it as automatic or spontaneous but this is not quite true as there are decisions by me involved in this process. An interplay between intention and reception is central to the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice.

The Experience of Being in Relationship

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any of the artists describe their experience of being creative as an experience of being in relationship. This experience of relationship is described in three different ways: as relationship with self, relationship with other, and relationship with universal creation. I see these experiences as three aspects of the larger emergent theme, the experience of being in relationship. I have named these aspects, internal/ external dialectic: the self, the experience of connection: the other, and participation in universal creation: the Divine.

Internal/External Dialectic: The Self Many of the participants speak of their practice as a deepening relationship with themselves. The feeling of connection Maria R. experiences through creative practice is one of being fully who I am in the moment. The practice of painting gives form to internal states, makes them visible. It becomes a mode of communication between the internal and external self. Spencer writes that creative expression helps get her in touch with her feelings and memories, validating them by making them visible. The art was getting me in touch with it . . . my shame was coming out my arm onto the canvas. I could see it. It validated my memories.

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Dorothy writes, creativity is . . . the natural flow outward of an inner experience of being human. It is a natural flow from my inner expression. This flowing outward of one’s internal state, allows a deeper integration of oneself. As Dorothy writes, the outward expression seems to enable me to integrate more deeply and more concretely the inner awareness. Allowing one’s inner self to be seen through creative expression opens communication and understanding with oneself. As Dorothy writes, to be creative, is to allow one’s essential self to be seen and to grow. Some speak of their practice as one of spiritual communication, of making visible the inner spiritual experience. Deborah writes, drawing allows me to focus my attention and make manifest deeply spiritual images. Ann speaks of her images as being a spiritual language that communicates her spiritual state. These images are my personal and ‘western’ spiritual iconography, representing what I experience as a spiritual state. The experience of internal/ external dialectic can also be one of allowing one’s relationship with external forms to mirror one’s internal state, deepening the relationship with one’s inner world. Connie writes of painting in nature, each of these places in the different seasons and times of the day becomes a metaphor for aspects of myself I need to experience more deeply. The practice becomes a dialogue, as the external calls forth the internal, and the internal responds through expression and deepening awareness. The practice of bringing forth images can serve as a bridge between the internal and external self as well as a way to communicate one’s inner state to others. As Ann writes, because the experience is so wonderful, I have worked hard to reproduce the feeling of those images in my paintings . . . I do this both so I can experience the feeling again and with the profound hope of communicating this experience to the person looking at the painting. The experience of being creative as a spiritual practice deepens one’s relationship with one’s internal self by becoming a means of dialogue and communication between the internal and external world. It serves as a way to make visible one’s internal state, one’s own experience, as well as making that experience knowable for others. Deepening one’s relationship with oneself can lead to a connection with a larger sense of self, or Self.

The Experience of Connection: the Other For many of the participants, being creative as a spiritual practice is seen as a pathway to relationship with that which is experienced as other than oneself. This can be relationship with the Source, one’s Higher Self, or God; this can be relationship with nature, a painting, or the tip of the brush. Essential to this experience of relationship is the feeling of connection. For Maria R., it is an experience of allowing connection to her Higher self, or God. When I experi-

106 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice ence this connection with my Higher Self, or God . . . it feels like allowing. Her relationship with God is opened and made deeper through an authentic connection with herself. Vadim describes his experience as celestial spiritualistic contact, a feeling stemming from a collaboration with a supernatural civilization. He writes, contact with this being is difficult to describe in words. I feel it through my body, my blood, my spiritualistic center—my soul. It is as if this unearthly spirit is boarding within me. For Vadim, the experience of relationship with the Other becomes one of being taken over. He feels as if in bondage or captivity, the paintings themselves begin to have a hold over him. He writes, I can no longer NOT create them. For Connie, her practice of painting outside involves a deep relationship with nature. She writes, being in nature; it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality. Maria H. describes her connection with nature as a feeling of oneness. I am one with the spectacular scene of Nature before me. For Connie, this relationship with nature is not always an experience of connection or oneness, but an experience of coming to terms with the unexpected elements, the changes nature can bring. She writes, staying true to my own necessities of form in the midst of unexpected conditions and overwhelming choices is constantly challenging, a continuing and vital engagement. Her relationship is felt as an ongoing interplay between her self, nature, and her painting that deepens with time. The intimate connection inherent in the process of drawing and painting becomes more intense as I stay longer. Deborah writes that the process of painting itself is one of deep connection. I have been in a state that I only recognize as I disengage from drawing and have a sense of ‘leaving’ a communion. Ann writes that her practice is one of deepening relationship with the paintbrush itself. It starts with simple concentration . . . moves to a sense of mastery . . . deepens to a total involvement with what is happening at the tip of the brush. Several of the participants describe their experience of being creative as one of connection to other people. Dorothy writes that her practice provides a profound means of connection and communication with others. Vadim writes that his experience of being creative arose out of a desire to communicate, to be in relationship with others. It began with the question, How to express MYSELF, HOW to find a new language, one that is international so it could be understood by everyone. Ann, too, describes the profound hope of communicating this experience to the person looking at the painting. Sophie experiences a deepening awareness of her physical self and a connection with other physical beings. I am more aware of the rhythm of my body and the connection of that rhythm to other organisms. In describing their experiences of relationship, several of the participants speak of an ongoing dynamic of feeling connected and then feeling the loss of that connection. Connie writes, painting outside is as exciting and demanding as

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any other intimate relationship . . . the joy of connection, the pain when the connection is lost, and the search for new ways to communicate. The experience of connection is something elusive that one tries to hold on to and struggles to regain. Mark writes, once you’re in, shit happens and if you don’t catch it in the moment, it goes. Maria R. writes, sometimes I feel like I’m really getting it, I’m there, connected to the Source being fully in the experience and sometimes I struggle trying to get connected. The practice of being creative can be a way to experience relationship, to bring one into a deeper sense of connection, of relatedness. It is an ongoing practice of coming into contact with the paints, the brushes, nature, others, as well as the Divine. The experience of connection, of being one with the other, is often spoken of as an essentially spiritual experience. A smaller sense of self or reality is made larger through this connection. The ongoing sense of relationship, the experience of moving towards and away, of losing connection and regaining it, of experiencing the unexpected, makes creative practice a spiritual one.

Participation In Universal Creation/The Divine Many of the artists speak of their experience of being creative as an ongoing relationship or participation in Universal Creation. As Maria H writes, for me, spirituality is a sense of aliveness and an experience of oneness—participation in the oneness of creation with God—the Divine. She writes, as I repeat the forms in nature created by a God force so many years ago, the creative energy of the universe pulses in me. I am one with the creative energy. There is a sense that, as the artist creates moment to moment in her studio, she is a part of the greater process of ongoing creation. Mark writes, each time the artist sits down or stands up in their studio, they are at the beginning and end of time. Dorothy writes, creativity feels like . . . a participation in the ongoing creation of the world. For her the essential nature of this creation is to bring to fullness what it is to be, as well as to participate in the creative act of the Divine Spirit of which we are all a part. This aspect of the experience of being in relationship is felt as one of ongoing participation in the spiritual process that is Divine Creation. Each participant describes their experience of being in relationship differently. It can be felt as an internal/ external dialectic, a deepening of one’s relationship with one’s self. It can be felt as an experience of connection or oneness with the other that expands one’s sense of self or world. This connection can grow to become an ongoing experience of participation in the Divine. With each experience of relationship there is the understanding that through creative practice one can experience a larger sense of self, world or spirit.

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The Experience of a Shift In One’s Sense of Self/ Life/ World

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any of the participants write that their experience of being creative as a spiritual practice involves shifts in their ordinary awareness of things. This is described both as momentary changes in one’s mental, emotional, physical state, and sense of time and space, as well as long term changes in one’s on-going sense of self/ life/ world/. I see each particular kind of shift as an aspect of the larger emergent theme, the experience of a shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world.

Mental Shift Many of the artists write that when they are experiencing being creative they are in a different state of consciousness than the everyday. This new state can be experienced spontaneously as an outgrowth of being creative or it can be cultivated consciously in order to deepen one’s practice. Spencer describes a subtle shift that happens spontaneously as an extension of ordinary consciousness. She writes, my mind wandered and my mind flooded. For some the shift involves a more total experience of letting go of one’s usual way of thinking. Deborah writes, I let go of the verbal mind and respond to more subtle inner impulses. The process becomes one of being less aware in ordinary ways in order to allow the possibility of becoming more aware in other ways. For Ann, it is the practice of creating itself that allows this shift. She writes, the very process of painting for me involves the stopping of thinking, an expansion of awareness, and a broadening and deepening of consciousness. Mark writes it is to almost be half present, to be half blind, to forget most of what you know and think you know. For him, the shift is cultivated by coaxing the ordinary mind to let go. He writes, the mind and ego have to . . . move over . . . like a back seat, a witness. Ann, too, writes that her mind is aware as a witness while she is absorbed, participating in the practice. She writes, the process of creating and the slight critical distance of watching happen simultaneously. In contrast, Maria H. writes that when she paints in nature she is in the scene—absorbed. For her, there is not a sense of witnessing consciousness but a sense of absorbed awareness. Many of the participants believe that it is the experience of an altered mental state that gives rise to their creative expression. Sophie writes, ideas, connections, and techniques for expression of this come from thought processes that are very different than normal day to day. For some, it is this experience of a shift in consciousness that is perceived as being spiritual. Sophie writes, it is . . . spiritual in that when I am in my best creative mode I am in a different form of consciousness.

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Emotional Shift Several of the participants write that their practice brings an experience of shift on an emotional level. Spencer writes of being taken aback when ideas along with tears come pouring out of me. Many of the artists speak of a new sense of wellbeing, peace, or joy that comes with their practice. Sophie writes, I always experience a feeling of gratitude, well-being, and peace. Maria H. writes, I feel more centered and I am at peace. Vadim writes that his practice brings me great happiness. Deborah writes I feel very at home in this space. Ann remembers, even as a child, the tremendous joy I felt at being able to do nothing but paint.

Physical Shift Several of the artists describe a change in their sense of physical being. Sophie describes being less physically aware, almost out of her body at times. I am also physically quite clumsy at times . . . part of this is the intense focus . . . and part is a partial out of body experience. At other times she feels a sharpening of physical sensation. All of my senses are heightened . . . sometimes even sexual energy. Vadim also describes alternating periods of physical exhaustion and exhilaration. He writes, I get somewhat tired from work, my hands grow heavy, my entire body becomes wooden. Yet, at other times, working only with the tips of my fingers . . . I could feel an electrical charge running through them. Ann describes a simultaneous relaxing of physical sensation and an increase in awareness. Time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. Once again there is the sense that as one becomes less aware of ordinary physical sensations, one becomes more aware on other levels. Maria H. writes that her deepening physical awareness brings her a sense of connection with other beings. I am more aware of the rhythm of my body and the connection of that rhythm to other organisms. The shift on a physical level allows her to move beyond her own body to connect with a larger world.

Shift in Seeing One aspect of the shift in physical sensation is described by some of the participants as a change in their way of ‘seeing.’ Connie writes that with her practice of painting distinctions in natural forms become clearer. Maria H. writes as well that boundaries are more clear after a painting session. In order to open to new ways of seeing, Mark practices altering his ordinary habits through various exercises. I practice ‘seeing’ differently . . . This helps me get out of a habit of seeing a certain way. He describes his shift as bringing him into a state of hyper awareness of extremely subtle realms of sight, textures, compositions, movement, and memories. Changes in one’s way of seeing that can come spontaneously with the experience of being creative can be cultivated in order to facilitate the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice.

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Shift in Time/ Space Many participants describe a shift in their sense of time or space. Sophie writes, time takes on a different dimension. Maria H. describes the shift as being beyond boundaries; there are no boundaries of time and space. For some, time is experienced as slowing down. Ann writes, time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. For others, time seems to speed up. Sophie writes some things happen very fast—connections, ideas, new relationships of thought, new techniques. For some there is an increasing sense of being in the present. Sophie writes, I am always in the moment when I paint. Ann writes that her practice itself increases her sense of the present. The very process of moving the brush over the paper trains awareness of the present.

Shift in World Ann describes a shifting sense of the world as an element of her practice. The ordinary world falls away, she enters another world of her own. She writes, the process was so involving that the rest of the world fell away. At that easel I could escape into a self-made world that was joyous and complete. This new sense of world is experienced simultaneously as increased involvement with a smaller world at the tip of the brush and connection with a much larger world. She writes, these feelings are . . . small, gentle, delicate feelings of perfection, where the world at once shrinks to involvement with the smallest detail and at the same time enlarges to something much bigger than myself. Connie, too, speaks of this sense of a larger world, being in nature, it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality. Vadim speaks of his practice as a collaboration with a supernatural civilization. His world expands to include a celestial spiritualistic contact.

Beyond Duality: Paradox Many of the descriptions point to an understanding that the shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world brings one beyond duality to a simultaneous experience of opposites. Maria writes that fullness and emptiness are both equally important. Ann describes being simultaneously more relaxed and more aware. Time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. My breathing is calm, my attention is focused. She states that the world at once shrinks to involvement with the tiniest detail and at the same time enlarges to something much bigger than myself. Sophie speaks of her experience as being simultaneously spontaneous and consciously controlled. I sometimes label it as automatic or spontaneous but this is not quite true as there are decisions by me involved in this process. As mentioned previously, Mark speaks of his practice as a paradox, of prepar(ing) to abandon all rational thoughts, practice(ing) throwing oneself into the void, trying to do the impossible—-to create beauty, to organize chaos, to transform the world. He writes, too, that his experience of being creative involves being simultaneously less present and more pre-

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sent. A paradox is present, one is more present than ever at the same time one is half present.

Shift in Meaning Many of the artists describe experiencing a shift in their sense of meaning. Dorothy writes, the expression seems more meaningful than words. Sophie describes an increased sense of new connections, new ideas. Some things happen very fast—connections, ideas, new relationships of thought, new techniques. Vadim experiences himself as the sovereign of a new language, a ‘new’ speech arose. Maria H. feels that her practice deepens her sense of what is meaningful. I can more easily discern what is important from what is not. Connie writes that, when she began to work outside, she found a renewed meaning in life. For Ann, this renewed sense of meaning or connection brings with it feelings of well-being and wonder. She writes, I become more relaxed, feel a sense of well-being, alertness, smoothness, beauty and an overwhelming sense of the rightness of things . . . everything comes together at that instant . . . I return to a state of wonder.

An Enduring Shift in One’s Sense of Self/ Life/ World Many artists state that the momentary shifts in their sense of self/ life/ world can become on-going, long-term, changes in their lives. Ann writes that while her practice is an experience that happens moment to moment, it has an enduring effect. It does, however, give me hope. Spencer writes that her usual sense of her self has changed. I’ve been very calm since the waterwall. At least in comparison to my usual self. Dorothy says that her practice solidifies something within. Several participants speak of their experience as healing. The process of painting itself is for me healing. When I do it, I feel good. Vadim describes being sated, fed and nurtured by the colorful dreams. Sophie writes, the practice is a source of great joy. This sense of healing or well-being is described by several participants as an enduring sense that affects their on-going lives. Connie writes, most enduring is the deep satisfaction I feel simply being in natural places. Maria H. writes, beauty, peace, simplicity, strength . . . these qualities are stronger in my everyday experience. The sense that the practice of being creative brings on-going personal growth and spiritual renewal is spoken of by several participants. Spencer writes, it never dawned on me that personal growth had anything to do with Spirit. Mark speaks of being creative as inherently transformative. The creative act is a transformation of the soul, spirit, ego. One’s life is changed through on-going creative practice. Spencer writes, my paintings have opened my life up. Several of the artists mention, not only a personal sense of renewal but an understanding that their practice brings healing to others. Vadim writes, the

112 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice people who see my work are warmed in their hearts, are filled by a plentiful bright optimism. Connie speaks of her practice as being healing not only for her self, her own sense of her life, but as bringing a change to the world. I have come to see this way of working, as another way of healing the earth. In essence, the experience of momentary shifts in awareness are described by many of the artist participants. On one hand, these changes in awareness are seen as spontaneous results of the experience of being creative. On the other hand, they are seen as the ground of experience out of which creative expression arises. For some, the experience of a shift is what makes creative expression a spiritual experience. Several of the artists describe the cultivation of shifts in awareness as enhancing their experience of being creative. The ongoing cultivation of these shifts, both as preliminary to creative expression and as outgrowths of creative experience, is seen as important to an ongoing and enduring experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. Whether these shifts are experienced mentally, emotionally, or physically, the artists seem to experience being less aware in ordinary ways, less bounded by the usual constructs of self/ life/ world and more open to connections with a larger world. The practice of being creative seems to break the boundaries of ordinary awareness, heightening one’s perceptions and bringing one an experience of spiritual connection. Out of this practice can come enduring changes in one’s sense of self/ life/ world.

The Experience of A Journey

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or several of the artists, the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice is described as a journey. This sense of journeying is described both as a movement between worlds, between states of mind, and as part of the ongoing process of life.

The Experience of Bridging Worlds For some of the artists the practice of being creative is described as a movement between two worlds. This can be seen as an outgrowth of the ongoing experience of shifts in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. As the journey between states of mind continues with practice, one begins to experience oneself, the artist, as a bridger of worlds. Deborah writes, I feel as if I am standing in a threshold between worlds. Mark describes the process as one of trespass(ing) into and across the boundaries. He writes that this transition between worlds, between states of mind, is not always an easy one; It is usually difficult in the beginning, the transition from standing to flying, sitting to diving, walking to dreaming. Vadim describes his creativity as coming from the other world. He sees himself as giving birth to something marvelously pure and good in its essence, the paintings sent down from

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Heaven. Mark speaks of his creative activity as a process of communicating what he experiences in the other world, describing what it is like on the other side, bringing back what he has found. He sees his practice as one of bridging both worlds. At best one breathes, aware of both worlds and continues to dance, to paint, sing and live.

The Experience of the Ongoing Process of Life Out of the sense that the experience of being creative brings enduring shifts in one’s sense of self/ life/ world, several of the artists describe their practice as an ongoing process that is life itself. This is described by Spencer as an involvement with personal growth, the discovery of her self. I’m in the midst of this discovery soup, I can’t say what the end result will be . . . I’m still in process. Dorothy writes that her experience of being creative and her spiritual practice are more than isolated activities, parts of her life. She writes, I see my life . . . as an ongoing spiritual practice. My life is a creative act. That which underlies her creative activity, underlies the creation of her life itself. Mark describes his practice as an ongoing journey of spiritual discovery. The practice becomes a life long journey, an unraveling of the great mystery. For him it is part of the ultimate spiritual journey as well as the daily journey of life. In the end, one continues to practice each moment as one continues to live each day. At best one breathes, aware of both worlds, and continues to dance, to paint, to sing, and live.

Reflective Synthesis Many participants describe experiences that seem to arise spontaneously out of the act of creating. These are the experience of receptivity or allowing, the experience of relationship, and the experience of shifts in ordinary awareness. The experience of receptivity is described as one of allowing or trust, trust(ing) what is coming to do, allow(ing) this fullness of who I am. It is this experience of spontaneous allowing, of letting be, that is felt as spiritual. When I experience this connection with my Higher Self or God . . . it feels like allowing. When it is flowing well, it becomes a spiritual experience. There is a sense that, in letting go of one’s will or judgment, one can experience another guiding force, or spirit. This can even be experienced as a sense of something other than myself forming the images. The spontaneous experience of relationship is experienced initially as the artist begins to relate to the brush, the paints, the canvas, the image. This brings an experience of connection that can expand to include a relationship with one’s self, nature, others, the Source, or Divine Creation itself. It is the experience of connection that brings one to know a larger more abundant reality, to

114 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice have a sense of communion, to be connected to the Source. It is this experience of connection, of oneness with a larger world, that is seen as spiritual. The experience of being creative can bring spontaneous shifts in awareness. These shifts can be felt mentally, emotionally, or physically. They can be sensed as shifts in time, space, or meaning. It is this sense of altered awareness that is seen as spiritual. It is spiritual in that when I am in my best creative mode I am in a different form of consciousness. Many of the participants describe the intention to cultivate these spontaneous aspects of the experience of being creative. It is this act of intention that makes being creative a spiritual practice. Being creative as a spiritual practice has less to do with the context within which I am working. It is the intention that my process of painting be a spiritual practice that makes it so. One can cultivate the experience of receptivity by stepping aside and let(ting) the painting happen through me, or go(ing) deeper than the distractions of the day, let(ting) them go and get(ting) to that place of peace. One can cultivate the experience of relationship, by catching it in the moment, by struggl(ing) trying to get connected, by staying with the joy of connection, the pain when the connection is lost, and the search for new ways to communicate. One can cultivate shifts in consciousness by let(ting) go of the verbal mind and respond (ing) to more subtle inner impulses, by practic(ing)’seeing’ differently. While intention is described as important to the practice of being creative as spiritual practice, there is also an understanding that being creative is inherently spiritual; creative practice . . . can’t help be spiritual by the very nature that creation is the greatest mystery of all. There is an understanding that the act of painting itself brings one spiritual connection; the very process of painting for me involves the stopping of thinking, an expansion of awareness, and a broadening and deepening of consciousness. Through the ongoing practice of being creative, one begins to have an enduring sense of these experiences of intention/ reception, relationship, and shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. Intention and receptivity endure. As I grow personally and spiritually I believe my experience of creativity as spiritual practice changes. What remains is intention and desire. Ongoing practice brings an enduring sense of relationship. Staying true to my own necessities of form in the midst of unexpected conditions and overwhelming choices is constantly challenging, a continuing and vital engagement. Out of the momentary shifts in awareness that come with practice, an enduring sense of personal change emerges. The creative act is a transformation of the soul, spirit, and ego. This experience of the enduring is seen as spiritual. Out of this sense of the ongoing, one begins to experience one’s life as a creative and spiritual journey. One begins to see oneself as artist/ messenger, the bridger of worlds, one who is willing to trespass into and across the boundaries.

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When one is aware of the hunting of oneself through the creative act, then life itself becomes a spiritual practice. One begins to experience one’s creative acts, one’s life itself as a participation in the creative act of the Divine spirit of which we are all a part. The experience of being creative leads to spontaneous experiences of receptivity, relationship, and shifts in awareness, which are identified by these artists as aspects of the spiritual. With continuing creative practice and spiritual intention, these spontaneous experiences can become more than momentary; they can become ongoing. Out of this sense of the ongoing, the experience of being creative becomes a spiritual practice. Out of the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice comes an enduring sense of the journey of life as both creative and spiritual.

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PA RT F O U R

In Conclusion

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IN CONCLUSION

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n Part Four, the conclusion, I will dialogue with my own presuppositions about creativity as spiritual practice, the literature on creativity, and the Experiential Method itself in light of the themes emerging from my research with the ten artists. I will end this part with a personal reflection on my own experience with this research experience as a whole.

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CHAPTER TEN

In Dialogue

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n this chapter I return to my own presuppositions about creativity as spiritual practice, the literature from the field of creativity theory, creative practice within spiritual traditions, cotemporary art history as well as the practice of the Experiential Method itself, in light of the insights gained from my inquiry with the ten artists who participated in this research.

In Dialogue With Presuppositions on Creativity as Spiritual Practice

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s I return to my own description of creative practice as found in the Preface, I find intimations of many of the themes that later emerged from the artists who participated in this research. Like many of them, speaking of my creative practice, I refer to an experience of allowing. There is an element of surprise, of not knowing. I write, the way in which the unseen will manifest is not always known ahead of time. This involves a letting go of will, an attitude of trust. This experience of being receptive can feel as if a force other than myself is coming through. I write, it is this Source, this creative force that forms and maintains all life, that is speaking through me. Like many of the participants, I associate this experience of receptivity with one of spiritual connection, a connection with the creative force that forms and maintains all life. I speak several times of my experience as a relationship between myself and the other. It is an interplay between myself and the object. I begin to become the object, begin to feel what the object feels like, being itself. For me, the experience of relationship becomes one of deep connection. I write, through this interplay between canvas and object and myself comes a deep sense of connection. I am the

122 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice brush, the paint, the stroke, the cliff. It is this experience of connection that is of primary importance, more so than the outcome of my creative practice, the object of art. The product itself is just a temporary manifestation of this process of connection. I feel this experience of connection is integral to the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. It is this experience that leads to connection with the Source or participation in universal creation. I write, I am connected to my work, connected to myself, connected to the earth, connected to the unseen, which is greater than I am, the Source. The experience becomes one echo(ing) the original creation, as I bring into manifestation the unseen. Creative process involves bringing into form an unseen feeling, idea, insight. I describe, as well, an experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. I speak of feel(ing ) suddenly alive, tingling with excitement, my body electrified. At other times, I describe feel(ing) a deep sense of calm, an at-homeness, a peace. Out of these experiences of momentary shift, I experience an enduring sense of change. I feel renewed in wonder, content to be part of this creative dance we call life. This sense of being part of this creative dance becomes an experience of the ongoing process of life. While many of the themes later emerging from this research are present in my original description, there are a few themes that are not expressed. Unlike several of the artists, I do not describe the experience of intention. While I do experience intention in my initial efforts to sit down to paint, I am more aware of allowing the painting to happen and of spiritual experience as a spontaneous one of allowing. Also, while I do describe the experience of being in relationship as an involvement with the other or with the Divine, I do not focus on the experience of relationship as internal/ external dialectic. In my practice of painting, my experience of relationship with self is felt only as part of the relationship with the other or with the Divine. It is deepening my relationship with the other, feel(ing) what the object feels like, being itself, and deepening my relationship with the Divine, the unseen, which is greater than I am, the Source, that I am most aware of. While I do describe an experience of the ongoing process of life, I don’t mention the experience of bridging worlds. While I am familiar with the concept of a spiritual world that parallels, lies above or below this world, my lived experience of the spiritual is within this world. The experience of bridging is not familiar to me, while the experience of the ongoing is. In conclusion, my spontaneous statement points intuitively to many of the themes that are later clarified by my work with the participants in this research. Only in returning to my statement is it clear that these themes were originally present. Through reflection, I see how my personal sense of meaning is a par-

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ticular expression of the universal phenomenon of the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. The understanding of my own experience is clarified as well as expanded through my work with this research. Through contact with the other expressions of this experience I come to a greater understanding of the universal experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. When I return to my practice of painting I become more aware of the experience of intention, of internal/ external dialectic, and of the possibility of bridging worlds.

In Dialogue with the Literature on Creativity Theory

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he literature on creativity theory, as discussed in Chapter Four, focuses on several major questions, looking at how these questions have been answered by theoreticians in the field. Returning to these questions, many of them are answered by statements or ideas that are reflective of one or more of the themes expressed by the participants in this research. The interplay of intention/ reception is mentioned by several creativity theorists, particularly those that look at creativity as a process, delineating the stages or movements involved. Laura Rose describes the rational creative mode in which periods of focused concentration alternate with periods of expansion. Cooperstein speaks of this as regression/ accession, Wallas as preparation and incubation. These descriptions all reflect the experience of intention/reception described by the artist participants. Laura Rose writes, as well, of the irrational creative mode, the experience of expanding the mind to take in all stimuli. This can be seen as an experience of allowing. This is what Lao Tze refers to as the receptive aspect of Nature, “act(ing) without acting or without executing itself.” [Tao Te Ching, Chapter 56] Ghiselin speaks of this experience of allowing as a decrease in will or attention. Some theorists write of consciously intending to allow. Henry James describes “drop(ping) it (an idea) for the time into the deep well of unconscious cerebration.” [cited in Ghiselin, 1952: 16] Creativity theorists also speak of the interplay of intention/ reception when they describe facilitating creativity. Techniques such as meditation or hypnosis are seen as practices of intention/ reception that enhance creativity. The source of creativity is often described as a unique experience of being in relationship. Freud, Jung, Sorokin, and others speak of the relationship with one’s self as the source of creative practice. Each speaks of this self differently; Freud refers to a relationship with the unconscious, Jung to the collective unconscious as well as the personal unconscious, Sorokin to the supraconscious. Yet, they all describe creativity as arising out of a deepened sense of self. Several other writers state that it is an experience of relationship

124 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice with the Divine that gives rise to creative expression. These include J. C. Gowan, who speaks of the Divine as the preconscious or numinous, and Otto Rank, who speaks of the universal creative source. The purpose of creativity is often seen as an effort to deepen the internal/ external dialectic, or relationship with one’s self. While Freud speaks of creativity as a compensatory or sublimating activity, Storr speaks of it as enhancing the self. Several theorists attribute the uniqueness of the creative state to an intensified experience of being in relationship. M. Csikszentmihalyi refers to this as ‘flow,’ the state of total involvement. Fromm calls this ‘full awareness’; Rollo May names it ‘the creative encounter.’ These are all expressions of the experience of connection: the other. Theorists often describe the experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world when they look at the source, purpose, attributes or products of creativity. Koestler, Rothenberg, and Arieti all speak of the source of creativity as arising out of this sense of shift. Koestler’s concept of Janusian thinking can be seen as a mental shift, going beyond duality, to conceive two opposite or contradictory ideas or forms simultaneously. Rothenberg’s understanding of homospatial thinking, two opposites superimposed on one another in space, can be seen as a shift in time/ space which is again, beyond duality. He speaks of this shift in the ordinary sense of time as a “unique suspension of time . . . an abrogation and transcendence of the intrinsic elements of time.” [1979: 408] Arieti, too, speaks of a shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world describing creativity as the ‘magic synthesis.’ Once again this is seen as being beyond duality, “generat(ing) unities never experienced before and segment(ing) the world in new ways.” [1976: 4] Other theorists speak of creative activity as giving rise to a shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. This is seen by some as the purpose of creativity. Arieti writes that creative activity answers a search for order, bringing a shift in meaning, a “transform(ation of) randomness and disparity into organized structure.” [1976: 405] Roy, too, writes of the shift in meaning that grows out of the “artist’s quest for universal order.” [1991: 55] Several authors write that creativity’s ultimate purpose is not just to bring momentary shifts in one’s personal experience but to facilitate an enduring shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. Roy speaks of this as a “higher level of conscious evolution.” [1991: 40] Gowan refers to this as preparatory to a joining of individual mind and Greater Mind. Kandinsky describes this enduring shift as “rais(ing) the spiritual triangle.” [cited in Regier, 1987: 63] When theorists have looked at the attributes of the creative state, they also refer to the experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. Gowan speaks

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of shedding the three great illusions, the sensory physical world, time, and self, bringing a physical shift, a shift in time/space, as well as an enduring shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. The artist, J. Arp, writes that the creative state is an experience of paradox, beyond duality, a delicate balance of “above and below, light and darkness, eternity and transitoriness.” [1971: 53–54] While the outcome of creative activity is usually thought of as the product or object of art, it can also be seen as the transformation of the artist as a person. As Wilber writes, art becomes “a method of spiritual growth and development on the part of the artists themselves.” [1990: 207] This experience of growth is what the participants in this research speak of as an enduring shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. Several of the theorists speak of the purpose of creative activity as being the experience of a journey. Arieti speaks of this journey as a longing for the new, part of the ongoing process of life. Roy speaks of a quest for knowledge, Briggs of an urge towards discovery. Some write of creativity as an act of bridging worlds. Briggs writes of finding “a microcosm in order to reflect the whole macrocosm.” [1990: 83] Ghiselin speaks of the bridging of the unrealized and the realized, Koestler of the finite and the infinite. In conclusion, theorists have written about creativity in answer to certain causal questions such as what is the source or purpose of creative activity. They have written from a conceptual understanding rather than from within the experience itself. Nevertheless, their statements do reflect some of the themes expressed by the participants in this research, writing from within their experience. Returning to the literature on creativity with the understanding that has emerged through work with these participants deepens the conceptual ideas described by the creativity theorists. While most theorists do not focus on the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice, they do refer to the interplay of intention/ reception, the experience of relationship, the experience of shifts in one’s sense of self/ life/ world and the experience of a journey, all of which are considered spiritual experiences by the artist participants. It would seem then, that there are certain core experiences of being creative that can also be called spiritual.

In Dialogue With the Literature on Creativity As A Spiritual Practice

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hen the artists who participated in this research write of the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice they are, in fact, describing spiritual experience. Many of the themes they describe can be found reflected in the literature on spiritual experience.

126 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Many philosophers speak of the interplay of intention/ reception when they describe the spiritual. An experience of allowing or surrender is common to these descriptions. As William James writes, “The mystic feels as if his own will is in abeyance.” This is often more than simply letting go, it involves a feeling of surrender to a will or power greater than one’s own. As James writes, it feels “indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” [1958: 293] Van der Leuw, too, writes of “the surrender of oneself to a stronger power . . . a service to God.” [1963: 155] Thus, for the spiritual practitioner, the experience of receptivity becomes an experience of relationship with the Divine. This receptive stance is often intentionally cultivated by spiritual practitioners. As J. Bennett writes, “The surrender of mind may come by exhaustion of effort, by an accidental withdrawal of attention, by a powerful shock or stimulus, by various ascetic practices, or by a conscious act of will.” [1975: 128] Kubose and Umemoto describe the practice of intention/ reception as integral to zen koan study, beginning with years of preparation/ concentration followed by the cultivation of “no-active grasping.” [1980: 8] It is the practice of intention/ reception, as well as the experience of a relationship with the Divine, that is seen as spiritual. As Vivekananda writes, “When the struggle becomes a conscious effort, it is spiritual.” [cited in Isherwood 1964: 15] The experience of relationship is a core aspect of spiritual experience. This is often described as an experience of connection to the other, which may be the Universe, Nature, an object, or a problem. This relationship moves from an experience of duality, between subject and object, the practitioner and the other, to one of union or oneness. Deikman describes this as “an intuitive perception of oneness with the universe.” [cited in Starker, 1985: 124] Kubose and Umemoto describe this as “a non-duality, that is, no experiential distinction between the problem and the problem solver.” [1980: 8] This experience of oneness, arising out of the relationship with other, is “often accompanied by feelings of reverence and awe,” and is felt as spiritual. [Deikman, cited in Starker, 1985:134] The experience of connection with the other can become an experience of participation in universal creation or the Divine. At first, the Divine can be felt as a power separate from oneself, a presence that is intuited, then cultivated, then known directly. Otto describes this as an experience of the holy, “the confrontation of the human mind with a Something . . . which is first felt as a transcendent presence the beyond even where it is also felt as the within.” [1923: xv] An ongoing relationship with the Divine becomes a spiritual practice. Spiritual experience has also been described as an experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. This includes experiences of shift in time, space,

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and sense of self. Spiritual practices such as meditation are cultivated in order to bring about these shifts. Wilber describes the special conditions of meditation as “trans-temporal timelessness, love, no avoidances or attachments, total acceptance, subject-object unity.” [1990: 117–118] Spiritual experience can bring a shift in meaning, feelings of insight, “an identification and merging with creation, infinity and immortality, a depth beyond depth of revealed meaning.” [Dean cited in Wilber, 1990: 93] For the spiritual practitioner, shifts in one’s awareness lead to an experience of participation in universal creation or the Divine. As Krippner and Maliszewski describe, meditation can lead to “the experience of unity with all things, or contact with Universal reality.” [1978: 41] As has been mentioned, spiritual practice and creative practice share similarities; these can be described as an experience of the interplay of intention/ reception, the experience of relationship, and the Experience of shifts in one’s sense of self/life/world. As I return to the literature on creative activity as spiritual practice, I come to see how the themes expressed by the artists are reflected there. A core experience for the artist working with a spiritual understanding is the experience of participation in universal creation, the Divine. As Roy writes, “In almost all religions, music, song, and dance, the reading of scriptures and other related activities are associated with the ultimate surrender to a power which cannot be fathomed by our limited faculties.” [1991: 55] For some, it is the experience of relationship with the Divine that gives rise to creative expression; the artwork is an expression of this experience. For others it is the experience of connection with the other that is central to their practice. F. Franck writes that his practice of seeing/drawing is an “alert singleminded focusing of the attention on that which is not-I.” Through this practice of relationship with the other, he is “granted a sense perception of the relationship of each of the Many to all the others, and how all that is, is totally interdependent, interpenetrates one another.” [1981: 96–108] His practice becomes then, an experience of participation in universal creation, the Divine. For many artists practicing within a spiritual context, the experience of connection with the other involves a desire to communicate their spiritual experience to others through their artwork. As Coomeraswamy writes, “Art, then, as religion, is meant to cause the same intuition of reality and identity.” [1969: 4] This process of communication or transmission of spiritual experience through artwork can be seen as an experience of bridging worlds, of bringing the formless into the formed. As Briggs writes, “transcendental experience can be manifested in physical form—in an artwork.” [1990: 122] This manifestation is an expression of the experience of connection with the other.

128 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice Many artists who consider their work a spiritual practice speak of the experience of an enduring shift in their sense of self/ life/ world. Hasumi writes, “Creative art has a profound operation on the soul.” [1962: 19] This is the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. For these artists, creative expression becomes an experience of the ongoing process of life, a spiritual journey. As Knight writes, “Creativity in the God seeker is a manifestation of the spiritual quest.” [1987: 366] Returning now to the literature on creative practice within spiritual traditions, I look at how the themes emerging from my research can be seen reflected there as well. Many spiritual traditions speak of an underlying creative principle. In the Hindu tradition this is seen as the force behind perpetuation of this world as illusion as well as its true source in the Divine. The creative is seen as the Ground of Being in the Zen tradition and as the Tao in Taoism. It is the process whereby God is brought into form in the Sufi tradition. CreationCentered Spirituality speaks of the creative as the origin of the Universe. For Native Americans it is that which gives form to the natural world. When creative activity is pursued within these traditions it is seen as an aspect of this creative principle, an act of participation in universal creation, the Divine. Each creative act is the manifestation of the Divine, a bridge between the world of Spirit and the world of form. While each tradition may envision the Divine differently or describe its practices differently, creative activity is always seen as participation in universal creation, the Divine. In the Hindu tradition, creative practice involves a relationship through an immediate experience of, or identification with, Ideal form. Through an experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world, the artist is able to contact the spiritual or ideal realm and give it form. Through this process of bridging worlds, the ideal spiritual and the ordinary world of illusion, the artist is able to elicit spiritual realization in the viewer. A relationship with the other as viewer becomes an important part of the work, creating an enduring sense of shift through communication of the spiritual. In the Taoist tradition, participation in universal creation is seen as a relationship with Nature, as the Tao. Creative practice in Taoism is seen as arising out of the experience of allowing, of wu-wei or non-interfering. Out of this receptive state the Tao can more perfectly be reflected. Essential to the practice is the cultivation of shifts in one’s sense of self/ life/ world, an egoless mind, a still heart. The practice of creative activity is seen to provide an enduring shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world for the viewer as well as the artist. In the Zen tradition, the practice of art is seen as participation in universal creation or the Ground of Being. Central to creative practice is the cultivation of the experience of connection to the other. The artwork arises out of

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a spiritual realization of penetration or absorption in the object being portrayed. As Suzuki writes, “To become a bamboo and to forget that you are one with it while drawing it, this is the Zen of bamboo, this is the moving with the ‘rhythmic movement’ of the spirit which resides in the bamboo as well as in the artist himself.” [1959: 3] An important aspect of creative practice in the Zen tradition is an experience of the ongoing process of life. The way of art is the way of life. In the Native American tradition, creative activity is also seen as an experience of the ongoing process of life. There is no separation between art and life. In creating, as in living, the artist enters into an experience of participation in universal creation, the Divine, or Spirit world. The artwork is seen not only as an expression of this experience of connection but as a direct gift from the world of spirit. The artworks, too, become a way of communicating with the Divine, of ensuring harmony in daily life. The experience of relationship with the Divine in the Creation-Centered tradition also involves an understanding that the practice of art is a communication from God as well as a gift to God. The artwork arises out of an experience of enchantment in relationship to God. As in the Taoist and Zen traditions this involves an experience of connection with the other, of being ‘given to’ the image. Fox writes, “So committed must the artist be to trusting his or her images that the artist must actually become one being with the image and live for the image.” [1980: 408] This union with the image becomes “The unity of the circle of being that resides in the Godhead.” [Fox, 1980: 412] In conclusion, while my research does not focus solely on an exploration of spiritual experience, many of the themes described by the artists who participated in this research are descriptive of spiritual as well as creative experience. These artists speak from within their experience, giving depth and meaning to the literature on spiritual experience as well as to the literature on creative activity as spiritual practice. While the participants in this research are artists practicing within a secular society, many of the themes arising from their descriptions can be seen as aspects of the understanding of creative practice described within spiritual traditions. These artists can find roots for their experience, a context for their understanding, in turning to the literature on creative practice from the spiritual traditions. It is clear, however, that creative activity is a deeply rooted, structured practice within these traditions. This is not so for the artists practicing on their own in today’s society. Within the spiritual traditions, creative practice is always explicitly described as an experience of relationship with the Divine. Yet, while these artists describe each of the themes as an aspect of spiritual experience, there are relatively few references to the Divine. This may be

130 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice a reflection of the depth of spiritual experience or a result of the fact that these artists are not practicing within a spiritual tradition. Also, while eliciting a spiritual response in the viewer is an essential aspect of creative practice within the spiritual traditions, there are relatively few references to this by the artist participants. Again, this may be a result of the fact that these artists are practicing without the benefit of a spiritual, cultural context. Within a spiritual tradition, the practitioner is not only given the support to deepen their practice, a map of the territory, but a language with which to communicate their experience.

In Dialogue With Contemporary Art History

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n Chapter Six, I discussed the re-emergence of the spiritual in the world of contemporary Western painting since the 1800s. As contemporary artists can turn towards the spiritual traditions in search of roots or a context for their understanding of creative activity as spiritual practice, they can turn as well to the hidden spiritual history of contemporary art. Returning to this literature, I look at how the themes described by the participants in this research are reflected in the writings from the schools of art as well as in the voices of individual painters from this era. Beginning with the German Romantics, a revolution was experienced in the art world. Artists began to feel that the communication of their internal state was more important than the realistic rendering of subject matter. This can be seen as an understanding of the importance of internal/ external dialectic. The Romantics believed the artist was “a holy seer who has the ability to apprehend and communicate the spiritual in sublime land and seascapes.” [Levy, 1993: 23] Through an experience of participation in universal creation the Romantics were able to give form to experiences of the unseen or spiritual in nature. In this way the artist was seen as a bridger of worlds. The Impressionists furthered the breakdown of the traditional adherence to realism in painting. Through the observation of changes in color and light, they explored the relativity of one’s perspective of the natural world. Their concern was with rendering this experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. The Cubists continued this concern by looking at the relativity of space and time. They depicted their subjects as seen from many sides and many moments simultaneously, portraying their experience of shift in one’s sense of time/ space. The Post-Impressionist painters became less concerned with rendering shifts in form and more concerned with the internal/ external dialectic. Like the Romantics, it became important for them to express their internal state and to communicate it to others. Many of the Post-Impressionists “realized that

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there was a subtle relationship between the viewer and the art object that went far beyond its visible reality.” [Opper, 1970: 266] They also became deeply engaged with the subject they were portraying, an experience of connection with the other. Cezanne “was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything.” [Kandinsky, 1977: 17] Van Gogh “uncovered the essence of ‘shoeness’” when he painted a simple pair of shoes. [Levy, 1993:14] In reference to this relationship with the other, Van Gogh writes, “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding.” [cited in Levy, 1993: 11] At the turn of the 20th century, artists began to speak more openly of the spiritual. A work of art was seen not only as a result of a deepened relationship with one’s self, but as a result of an experience of participation in universal creation. The communication of this spiritual experience through the artwork, in relationship to the other, as the viewer, was seen as creating a transformative, enduring shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world for all of human evolution. Kandinsky describes this relationship with the Divine as a connection with the “invisible universe of spiritual energies.” [Lipsey, 1989: 1] Klee speaks of this relationship as “penetrat(ing) as far as may be toward that secret place where primal power nurtures all evolution.” [cited in Regier, 1987: 61] Mondrian describes the artist’s practice as one of bringing the Universal down and the individual up. He is describing the artist’s role as a bridger of worlds, which again is seen as ongoing or enduring. The birth of abstract art deepened the experience of internal/ external dialectic. For some, the exploration of this internal world became an experience of relationship with the Divine as well. Lipsey writes, “Abstract art . . . was . . . a means of exploring several interwoven realities, the psyche . . . Nature . . . and beyond these, their common origin in a greater reality.” [1989: 2] For the Surrealists, the practice of painting involved a deepening of the relationship with one’s self through the cultivation of practices such as automatic writing that facilitated shifts in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. Through contact with the deeper layers of unconscious mind, the Surrealists came to experience a participation in universal creation. As Gordon Onslow Ford writes, out of the exploration of one’s inner world, one begins to “become one’s own universe, which is the Universe shared by all.” [cited in Miedzinski, 1991: 20] In America, the work begun by the Europeans was continued by the Abstract Expressionists of the New York school. These artists saw the practice of abstraction, itself, as a meditative one that facilitated the experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. Like the European artists that came before, they saw their work not only as the cultivation of an internal/ external dialec-

132 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice tic but as an encounter with the viewer, an experience of connection with the other. Rothko writes, “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.” [cited in Chave, 1989: 104] The artist is seen as an agent of healing for these artists as well. They were capable of creating an enduring shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world for themselves as well as for the viewer. Another school of American artists, the Transcendentalists, pursued the experience of connection with the other, as Nature. They sought to “capture the vital essences of nature, a unity of micro and macro, of man and universal spirit.” [Eldridge cited in Tuchman, 1986: 124] The members of the Pacific Northwest School, another group of artists, incorporated Eastern meditative practices in their work, cultivating an experience of participation in universal creation, the Divine. As Tobey writes, his painting is an attempt to “reveal in visual form the belief of ultimate oneness, the indivisibility of all reality.” [cited in Opper,1970: 420] This concern with the spiritual is continued today in the contemporary movements of Performance Art, Earth Art, and Feminist Art. Performance artists seek to create a living ritual experience that facilitates an enduring sense of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. An experience of connection with the other, as the audience, is cultivated as an immediate ongoing event. In Earth Art, the revitalization of the Earth is seen as part of the ongoing process of life. In Feminist Art, the experience of relationship with the other is cultivated as integral to the recovery of the feminine principle. As contemporary artists became involved with spiritual concerns their practice of painting evolved. They moved away from traditional ways of rendering form, began questioning the ordinary notions of reality, space, and time, and began valuing the expression of internal states. All of these concerns can be seen as aspects of a growing spiritual awareness. Many of the themes described by the participants in this research are reflected in the writings of these artists. While the artist participants describe their experience of being creative rather than the visual elements of their artforms, their words and the themes that emerged from this research bring further understanding to how spiritual experience manifests in the practice of painting. This research gives voice to the felt-experience of being creative as a spiritual practice, which is central to the re-emergence of the spiritual in the history of art.

In Dialogue With the Experiential Method

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hrough my work with the Experiential Method I have come to see it as process, a creative arc, that echoes the hermeneutic arc in which there is an interplay between an intuitive sense of the whole and a cognitive

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sense of the part. I see creative experience as involving a similar interplay of the whole and the part, the intuitive and the cognitive. Through dialogue with the experiential expressions of others, finding roots in the common emergent themes discovered, amplifying these themes and returning continually to the original descriptions, it becomes clear that this method of return, dialogue, and deepening actually echoes the experience of being creative, itself. I feel that the Experiential Method is, itself, both a creative and a spiritual practice. Many of the statements made about creative activity can also be made about this hermeneutic-phenomenological method. Creative practice has been seen as a quest for knowledge. Ghiselin writes, it is a process of being “drawn by the unrealized toward realization.” [1952: 8] It can be seen as a revelation of the previously unseen or unknown. Arieti writes, in creativity “the truth that is discovered and seems new was actually either hidden in our mind, our unconscious or in a part of the universe that is unknown to us.” [1976: 406] These descriptions are reflective of the practice of the Experiential Method as well. It is a quest for understanding in which that which is experienced is revealed or given further meaning. In this process there is a sense that one is being drawn by the unknown, made known through intuition. Creative activity is also described as a process of revealing meaning. Arieti describes this meaning making as the recognition of unities or similarities. “Similarity indicates that there is some kind of recurrence and, therefore, regularity in the universe. It is from these segments of regularity that the human mind plunges into the understanding of the cosmos and into the making of its own reality.” [Arieti, 1976: 4] This ‘making’ of meaning through the recognition of unities is integral to the process of the Experiential Method. It is part of the affinitive grouping of experiential expressions, the discovery of emergent themes, as well as the forming of a reflective synthesis. The creative process has also been described as a search for order, the “tremulous little light with which to search and attain, with which to break the secret of the universal night and make a piece of understanding a piece of ourselves.” [Arieti, 1976: 410] In the practice of the Experiential Method, one discovers order as meaning. There is a sense that one is discovering both the particular as self-understanding and the universal as the understanding of a greater order. The order discovered through creative activity is described by Cyril Burt as the Universal or Numinous. “I am convinced that there is only one basic Order which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous.” [Gowan, 1975: 174] In the practice of the Experiential Method, as one lets the intuitive guide one towards meaning,

134 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice towards order, there is at times the sense that one has crossed over, out of the territory of the personal intuitive, into the Universal. At these moments there is a feeling that a greater guiding force is leading one to greater understanding. This can only be named the Spiritual. Thus, as with the artists who have come to call their creative activity a spiritual practice, one can begin to call the activity of the Experiential Method a spiritual practice. In essence, I feel that working with the Experiential Method reflects many of the themes described by artists who consider their practice a spiritual one. Throughout the practice one experiences the interplay of intention/ reception. To begin, one clearly delineates the question one is exploring. This is an experience of intention. Next, in writing down one’s presuppositions one simply writes, spontaneously, what comes. This is an experience of allowing. This interplay of intention/ reception continues throughout the practice, with alternating periods of intuition and reflection. The recognition of experiential expressions, emergent themes, and their amplification may be primarily an intuitive process, while the reflective synthesis is a reflective one. The writing of one’s own presuppositions also begins the process of internal/ external dialectic or deepening of the relationship with one’s self. This is further developed as one is given to further self-understanding. After one gathers the participant’s experiential descriptions the experience of connection with the other begins. Through reading and rereading the descriptions, the researcher begins to become one with the other’s experience. This is integral to understanding. As Dilthey writes, “understanding is essentially a self-transposition or imaginative projection whereby the knower negates the temporal distance that separates him from his object and becomes contemporaneous with it.” [cited in Gadamer, 1976: xiv] This relationship with the other continues as one identifies the experiential expressions, the affinitive groupings, and the emergent themes. This is an ongoing process of deepening the experience of being in relationship. This experience of understanding from within can be seen as contemplative or meditative. As one deepens the engagement or experience of connection with the other one can even begin to experience a participation in universal creation or relationship with the Divine. The practice of the Experiential Method may facilitate shifts in one’s sense of self/ life/ world. The process involves a mental shift as one alternates between the intuitive and the reflective. The deepening of understanding results in a shift in meaning as one moves between the particular and the Universal. This experience of the Universal can lead to an experience of participation in universal creation, the Divine.

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The researcher, too, can experience the bridging of worlds, bringing together the Universal and the particular, the part and the whole, the unknown and the known, bringing to light through the revelation of meaning that which has been hidden. The practice of the Experiential Method is an ongoing one in which one engages in dialogue and return, always opening to further understanding. This echoes the experience of the ongoing process of life. Essentially the Experiential Method is the practice of the art of understanding, an experience of being creative that can be seen as a spiritual practice.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Personal Reflection

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hen I began this research project almost ten years ago, the question I was concerned with was, is there a spiritual nature to creative activity? As I have written in my introduction, I had personally experienced contact with what I have come to call a spiritual guiding force both in my writing and in my painting practice. In a pilot study I worked with five artists exploring the question “Describe Your Experience of Being Creative.” Though I did not directly ask these artists about their spiritual experiences, I found that many of their descriptions reflected glimpses of such an understanding. These glimpses then became my motivating focus as I asked myself, do others experience their creative work as essentially spiritual? If so, how is this experienced? This is what brought me to the research presented here. As I explored the literature in the field, I came upon the voices of many writers, theoreticians, spiritual practitioners, and artists, all of whom described experiences of the spiritual in their creative work. The question was no longer whether creative activity is spiritual but how it is experienced as spiritual. This led me to the question I asked this group of artist participants, “Describe Your Experience of Being Creative As A Spiritual Practice.” The next phase of my work definitely brought with it some surprises. Many of the descriptions I received felt uncannily like my own voice. It was as if I had flung a question out into the universe and received back my own voice, an echo off the canyon wall. Some of these Experiential Expressions were: Being in Nature; it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality . . . Most enduring is the deep satisfaction I feel simply being in natural places. As I repeat

138 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice the forms in nature created by a God force so many years ago, the creative energy of the universe pulses in me. I am one with the creative energy. The very process of painting for me involves the stopping of thinking, an expansion of awareness and a broadening and deepening of consciousness. Creativity feels like . . . a participation in the ongoing creation of the world. I always experience a feeling of gratitude, well being and peace. These descriptions became a validation of my own experience of being creative. Other descriptions I received, though not at first as familiar, served to further open my understanding of the universal experience of being creative as a spiritual practice. On the one hand, reading the experiential descriptions was an exhilarating and validating experience; on another hand, I found it a humbling one. In my review of the literature on creativity I had read the poetic descriptions of such writers as Emerson speaking of being “a pensioner, not a cause . . . a surprised spectator of this ethereal water.” [cited in Krippner, 1972: 203–208]. I had shared Kandinsky’s passionate belief in the primary evolutionary power and mission of creative activity to “raise the spiritual triangle.” I was entranced by Gowan’s illumined understanding that creativity is the entrance to religious experience, allowing one “intuitive brushes with the numinous element through creative outpourings from the preconscious.” [1975: 277] I found then that I expected my participant’s descriptions to be as full of direct references to spiritual inspiration, to the Divine. I remember receiving one description that I was not sure, at first, answered the question. I soon realized, however, that while many of the descriptions may not have mentioned the Divine in ways that I had expected, these descriptions actually expressed quite clearly how the spiritual is experienced. The abstract concepts from my previous review of the literature found roots in the concrete expressions of personal experience. I even realized that the description I was not sure had at first answered the question, was, in fact, a description of the spiritual experience described as emotional healing for this artist. This phase of the research process became my own experience of receptivity, of allowing. As I began to work with the experiential expressions, I realized that I had received descriptions of creative experience, of spiritual experience, as well as descriptions of spiritual practice. I had been asking not only, is creative activity spiritual?, what is spiritual?, but also what is creative activity as a spiritual practice? This third question actually brought some surprises. I realized that creative activity as spiritual practice involved, not only moments of shift or illumination that might be called spiritual experiences, but that it involved a certain intention and cultivation of these shifts. It is the ongoing conscious alignment with spiritual experience or intention that makes it a spiritual practice. This was a growing edge for me personally, as I came to validate the act

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of intention in creative activity as a spiritual practice. Another exciting aspect of this research was the opportunity to watch my own process of creating as I worked both with the literature and the Experiential Method. Often, I found ideas would come to me, spontaneously, from someplace outside my mind as I was seemingly engaged in something else. This felt like intuition in that it was beyond my conscious mind. Yet, I began to feel that there were times when this intuition felt like something other than my own, that it began to feel like a spiritual connection. The intuitive pull became a link to the spiritual. As I felt a gradual deepening of the experience of a greater guiding force, I seemed to be led to the right books, the right people, at just the right time. This is described in Gablik’s book, The Reenchantment of Art, as “the ‘methodology of the marvelous’—inexplicable synchronistic processes by which one attracts, as if by magnetism, the next piece of vital information.” [1991: 1] One moment stands out in my memory. As I had just completed my work with the experiential descriptions and thematic amplification I came upon a book, A Walk Between Heaven and Earth, by B. Nina Holzer. While this was a description of the author’s experience of journal writing, I found that the same themes were reflected there as I had found in the painter’s descriptions. She speaks of the interplay of intention/ reception. “Sometimes this state comes about through a willful creative leap, sometimes it arrives as a gift of grace.” [1994: 28] She writes of the experience of allowing. “It has to do with not imposing yourself on the thing. Letting it look at you, letting it reveal itself in its otherness, different from your assumptions. It has to do with being receptive to the unknown language of things, learning little by little from the way they show themselves to us.” [1994: 59] She describes her experience of relationship with the Divine, “Talking to paper is talking to the Divine. It is talking to an ear that will understand even the most difficult things.” [1994: 55] She writes that the creative is the experience of a journey, which “seemed to be very much like life—unpredictable, mysterious, full of sudden miracles, but yet with a very persistent structure to it. This structure did not live in my conscious will, but rather in some unconscious field of knowledge.” [1994: ix] She describes the experience of the ongoing process of life. “What we call the creative process is in no way limited to art or to individual acts of creating something. It is in fact a large ongoing movement in our lives, a force that has its own will and its own purpose.” [1994: x] As my relationship with the question grew, the answers I received grew. The question was my intention, the answers my reception. This became an ongoing dialogue that still continues. Out of this dialogue I began to feel an alignment with a certain universal order. The question became a thread of

140 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice understanding that revealed an underlying web of connection as I continued to pull. I began to realize that this understanding or acquaintance with order, is called God by some. When I first began this research I felt my own painting was primarily a way to access certain states, to facilitate shifts in my sense of self/ life/ world that could be called spiritual. It was a way to feel suddenly alive, tingling with excitement, my body electrified. It brought me a deep sense of calm, an at-home-ness, a peace. After working with the participants in this research, I began to realize how important the experience of being in relationship is to the practice of painting. There is something in the encounter with the paints, the canvas, the subject one is portraying, that enlarges one, connects one with a greater world. When I return to my presuppositions I see that this experience of being in relationship is quite clearly apparent in my description, though I was not conscious of it at the time. I wrote, In painting it is an interplay between myself and the object I am portraying . . . through this interplay between canvas and object and my self comes a deep sense of connection. I am connected to my work, connected to my self, connected to the earth, connected to the unseen, which is greater than I am, the Source. Working with the Experiential Method as a creative activity, deepens the experience of relationship. Through an internal/ external dialectic, my self understanding grows. Through a connection with the other, as the question, the literature, the participant’s experiential descriptions, my experience of relationship grows. The deepening of this experience reveals our participation in universal creation. This brings us into relationship with the Divine. The process is an ongoing one of discovery. Every question is an opening, a thread that when followed can reveal a universal creative fabric. In this way it becomes a continuing journey, an experience of the ongoing process of life.

APPENDIX ONE

Participants’ Experiential Expressions Participant I: Maria R. EEI 1. Sometimes I feel like I’m really getting it, I’m there, connected to the Source, being fully in the experience, and sometimes I struggle trying to get connected. EEI 2. Being creative as a spiritual practice has . . . more to do with the context within which I am working. It is the intention that my process of painting be a spiritual practice that makes it so. EEI 3. When I experience this connection with my higher self, or God . . . it feels like allowing. EEI 4. I trust what is coming to me to do. EEI 5. Judgments slip away and trust increases until the point where the concepts are no longer necessary. EEI 6. Being connected means being fully who I am in the moment. EEI 7. If I allow this fullness of who I am . . . I become empty to receive the light of spirit. EEI 8. Fullness and emptiness are both equally important. EEI 9. What remains is intention and desire.

Participant II: Spencer EEII 1. It never dawned on me that personal growth had anything to do with Spirit. EEII 2. When ideas along with tears came pouring out of me . . . I was taken aback.

142 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice EEII 3. My mind wandered. EEII 4. My mind flooded. EEII 5. The art was getting me in touch with it. EEII 6. My shame was coming out my arm onto the canvas. I could see it. It validated my memories. EEII 7. I’m still in process. EEII 8. I’ve been very calm since the water wall. At least in comparison to my usual self. EEII 9. My paintings have opened my life up. EEII 10. I’m in the midst of this discovery soup, I can’t say what the end result will be.

Participant III: Connie EEIII 1. I began to work outside . . . finding a renewed meaning in life. EEIII 2. Each of these places in the different seasons and times of day becomes a metaphor for aspects of myself I need to experience more deeply. EEIII 3. Being in nature; it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality. EEIII 4. Most enduring is the deep satisfaction I feel simply being in natural places. EEIII 5. I have come to see this way of working as another way of healing the earth. EEIII 6. The intimate connection inherent in the process of drawing and painting becomes more intense as I stay longer. EEIII 7. Distinctions in natural forms become clearer. EEIII 8. Painting outside is as exciting and demanding as any other intimate relationship—the joy of connection, the pain when this connection is lost, and the search for new ways to communicate. EEIII 9. Staying true to my own necessities of form in the midst of unexpected conditions and overwhelming choices is constantly challenging, a continuing and vital engagement.

Participant IV: Mark EEIV 1. How does one practice throwing oneself into the void? EEIV 2. How does one prepare to abandon all rational thoughts? EEIV 3. Dare to trespass into and across the boundaries of reason. EEIV 4. When one is aware of the hunting of oneself through the creative act then life becomes a spiritual practice. EEIV 5. The creative act is a transformation of the soul, spirit, and ego.

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EEIV 6. The mind and ego have to . . . move over . . . like a back seat, a witness. EEIV 7. To almost be half present, to be half blind, to forget most of what you know and think you know. EEIV 8. A paradox is present, one is more present than ever—a hyper awareness of extremely subtle realms of sight, textures, compositions, movement, and memories. EEIV 9. Creative practice . . . can’t help be spiritual by the very nature that creation is the greatest mystery of all. EEIV 10. Trying to do the impossible—to create beauty? To organize chaos? To transform the world? EEIV 11. This practice becomes a life long journey, an unraveling of the great mystery. EEIV 12. Each time the artist sits down or stands up in their studio, they are at the beginning and end of time. EEIV 13. Sometimes describing what it is like on the other side. EEIV 14. It is usually difficult in the beginning. The transition from standing to lying, sitting to diving, walking to dreaming. EEIV 15. Once you’re in shit happens and if you don’t catch it in the moment, it goes. EEIV 16. I practice ‘seeing’ differently . . . This helps me get out of a habit of seeing a certain way. EEIV 17. At best one breathes, aware of both worlds, and continues to dance, to paint, sing, and live.

Participant V: Dorothy EEV 1. Creativity is . . . the natural flow outward of an inner experience of being human. EEV 2. My life is a creative act. EEV 3. I see my life . . . as an on-going spiritual practice. EEV 4. Certain exercises are necessary for me to sustain that way of life which I feel called to and desire to cultivate. EEV 5. Times of greater concentration and attention to inner awareness and my journey within. EEV 6. Times of stillness and receptivity. EEV 7. Creative expression is . . . A natural flow from my inner reflection. EEV 8. The outward expression seems to enable me to integrate more deeply and more concretely the inner awareness. EEV 9. The expression seems more meaningful than words.

144 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice EEV 10. The intuitive push . . . simply comes from within, without judgment or criticism. EEV 11. It (the expression) solidifies something within. EEV 12. Creativity feels like . . . a participation in the ongoing creation of the world. EEV 13. The intention of all creation is to bring to fullness what it is to be. EEV 14. To be creative, is to allow one’s essential self to be seen and to grow. EEV 15. It provides a profound means of connection and communication with others. EEV 16. It is a participation in the creative act of the Divine Spirit of which we are all a part.

Participant VI: Sophie EEVI 1. It is . . . spiritual in that when I am in my best creative mode. I am in a different form of consciousness. EEVI 2. Ideas, connections and techniques for expression of this come from thought processes that are very different than normal day to day. EEVI 3. I sometimes label it as automatic or spontaneous but this is not quite true as there are decisions by me involved in this process. EEVI 4. Some things happen very fast—connections, ideas, new relationships of thought, new techniques. EEVI 5. I am also physically quite clumsy at times. Part of this is the intense focus . . . and part is a partial out of body experience. EEVI 6. Time takes on a different dimension. EEVI 7. I always experience a feeling of gratitude, well being, and peace. EEVI 8. I am always in the moment when I paint. EEVI 9. All of my senses are heightened . . . sometimes even sexual energy. EEVI 10. The practice is a source of great joy.

Participant VII: Ann EEVII 1. I remember the tremendous joy I felt at being able to do nothing but paint. EEVII 2. At that easel I could escape into a self-made world that was joyous and complete. EEVII 3. The process was so all involving that the rest of the world fell away. EEVII 4. One type (of painting) I do has been formulated over time to produce a meditative state. EEVII 5. The very process of moving the brush over the paper trains awareness

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of the present. EEVII 6. It starts with simple concentration . . . moves to a sense of mastery. deepens to a total involvement with what is happening at the tip of the brush. EEVII 7. Time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. EEVII 8. The process of creating and the slight critical distance of watching happens simultaneously. EEVII 9. My breathing is calm, my attention is focused, and I can step aside and let the painting happen through me. EEVII 10. I become more relaxed, feel a sense of well being, alertness, smoothness, beauty and an overwhelming sense of the rightness of things. EEVII 11. Everything comes together at that instant. EEVII 12. An experience that happens moment to moment . . . it does, however, give me hope. EEVII 13. Because the experience is so wonderful, I have worked hard to reproduce the feeling of those images in my paintings . . . I do this both so that I can experience the feeling again, and with the profound hope of communicating this experience to the person looking at the painting. These images are my personal and ‘western’ spiritual iconography, representing what I experience as a spiritual state. EEVII 14. I find that in reality, I can be working in any form of painting, and when it is flowing well, it becomes a spiritual experience. EEVII 15. The very process of painting for me involves the stopping of thinking, an expansion of awareness and a broadening and deepening of consciousness. EEVII 16. I return to a state of wonder. EEVII 17. These feelings are . . . small, gentle, delicate feelings of perfection, where the world at once shrinks to involvement with the smallest detail and at the same time enlarges to something much bigger than myself. EEVII 18. The process of painting itself is for me healing. When I do it, I feel good.

Participant VIII: Maria H. EEVIII 1. For me, spirituality is a sense of aliveness and an experience of oneness-participation in the oneness of all of creation with God—the Divine. EEVIII 2. I go deeper than the distractions of the day, let them go and get to that place of peace.

146 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice EEVIII 3. I am more aware of the rhythm of my body and the connection of that rhythm to other organisms. EEVIII 4. A connection of my energy center to other energy centers in the Universe—the Universal Rhythm. EEVIII 5. I am one with the spectacular scene of nature before me. EEVIII 6. I am in the scene—absorbed. EEVIII 7. As I repeat the forms in nature created by a God force so many years ago, the creative energy of the universe pulses in me. I am one with the creative energy. EEVIII 8. There are no boundaries of time and space. EEVIII 9. I am at peace. EEVIII 10. I can more easily discern what is important from what is not. EEVIII 11. I feel more centered. EEVIII 12. Boundaries are more clear. EEVIII 13. Beauty, peace, simplicity, strength . . . These qualities are stronger in my every day experience.

Participant IX: Deborah EEIX 1. A process through which I look inward without the self-consciousness that for me often accompanies a meditation technique. EEIX 2. I let go of the verbal mind and respond to more subtle inner impulses. EEIX 3. Drawing allows me to focus my attention and make manifest deeply spiritual images. EEIX 4. I have been in a state that I only recognize as I disengage from drawing and have a sense of ‘leaving’ a communion. EEIX 5. There is a sense of something other than myself forming the images. EEIX 6. I feel as if I am standing in a threshold between worlds. EEIX 7. I feel very at home in this space.

Participant X: Vadim EEX 1. How to express MYSELF, HOW to find a new language, one that is international so it could be understood by everyone. EEX 2. I prayed, and one night I had a dream . . . a voice . . . said to me, “Begin to create colorful designs.” EEX 3. I saw many dreams and they provided the subjects and themes of my work. EEX 4. I became the sovereign of a new language, a ‘new’ speech arose. EEX 5. Working only with the tips of my fingers . . . I could feel an electrical

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charge running through them. EEX 6. It was as if I was the executor of an unearthly power. More than once I heard a man’s voice and saw the outline of a face. The voice told me, “I died, not having finished my creative plans, which are infinite. It is now up to you to continue.” EEX 7. Giving birth to something marvelously pure and good in its essence. The paintings sent down from Heaven. EEX 8. I can no longer NOT create them. I am as if in bondage or captivity. EEX 9. A feeling stemming from a collaboration with supernatural civilization. EEX 10. Contact with this being is difficult to describe in words. I feel it through my body, my blood, my spiritualistic center—my soul. It is as if this unearthly spirit is boarding within me. EEX 11. I get somewhat tired from the work, my hands grow heavy, my entire body becomes wooden. EEX 12. I . . . see the colorful dreams, as if being sated, fed, and nurtured by them. EEX 13. Creativity came to me from the other world. EEX 14. It commands my human will, dictates to me, you MUST, you MUST work each day. EEX 15. This brings me great happiness. EEX 16. The people who see my work are warmed in their hearts, are filled by a plentiful bright optimism.

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A P P E N D I X T WO

Affinitive Grouping of Emergent Themes Theme I. The Interplay of Intention/Reception The Experience of Intention EEI 2. Being creative as a spiritual practice . . . has more to do with the context within which I am working. It is the intention that my process of painting be a spiritual practice that makes it so. EEI 9. What remains is the intention and the desire. EEIV 1. How does one practice throwing oneself into the void? EEIV 2. How does one prepare to abandon all rational thoughts? EEIV 4. When one is aware of the hunting of oneself through the creative act then life becomes a spiritual practice. EEIV 10. Trying to do the impossible—to create beauty? To organize chaos? To transform the world? EEV 4. Certain exercises are necessary for me to sustain that way of life which I feel called to and desire to cultivate. EEV 5. Times of greater concentration and attention to inner awareness and my journey within. EEVII 4. One type (of painting) I do has been formulated over time to produce a meditative state. EEIX 1. A process through which I look inward without the self-consciousness that for me often accompanies a meditative technique.

Beyond Intention EEVII 14. I find that in reality, I can be working in any form of painting, and

150 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice when it is flowing well it becomes a spiritual experience. EEIV 9. Creative practice . . . can’t help be spiritual by the very nature that creation is the greatest mystery of all.

The Experience of Allowing: Receptivity EEI 3. When I experience this connection with my Higher self, or God . . . it feels like allowing. EEI 4. I trust what is coming to me to do. EEI 5. Judgments slip away and trust increases until the point where the concepts are no longer necessary. EEI 7. If I allow this fullness of who I am . . . I become empty to receive the light of Spirit. EEV 6. Times of stillness and receptivity. EEV 10. The intuitive push . . . simply comes from within, without judgment or criticism. EEVII 15. I find that in reality, I can be working in any form of painting, and when it is flowing well it becomes a spiritual experience. EEVIII 2. I go deeper than the distractions of the day, let them go and get to that place of peace. EEIX 5. There is a sense of something other than myself forming the images. EEX 3. I saw many dreams and they provided the subjects and themes of my work. EEX 6. It was as if I was the executor of an unearthly power. More than once I heard a man’s voice and saw the outline of a face. The voice told me, “I died, not having finished my creative plans, which are infinite. It is now up to you to continue.” EEX 14. It commands my human will, dictates to me, you MUST, you MUST work each day.

Intention/Reception EEIV 1. How does one practice throwing oneself into the void. EEIV 2. How does one prepare to abandon all rational thoughts. EEVI 3. I sometimes label it as automatic or spontaneous but this is not quite true as there are decisions by me involved in this process. EEVII 9. My breathing is calm, my attention is focused, and I can step aside and let the painting happen through me. EEX 2. I prayed, and one night I had a dream . . . a voice . . . said to me, “Begin to create colorful designs.”

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Theme II. The Experience of Being in Relationship Internal/External Communication: The Self EEI 6. Being connected means being fully who I am in the moment. EEII 5. The art was getting me in touch with it. EEII 6. My shame was coming out my arm onto the canvas. I could see it. It validated my memories. EEIII 2. Each of these places in the different seasons and times of day becomes metaphor for aspects of myself I need to experience more deeply. EEV 1. Creativity is . . . the natural flow outward of an inner experience of being human. EEV 7. Creative expression is . . . a natural flow from my inner reflection. EEV 8. The outward expression seems to enable me to integrate more deeply and more concretely the inner awareness. EEV 14. To be creative, is to allow one’s essential self to be seen and to grow. EEVII 13. Because the experience is so wonderful, I have worked hard to reproduce the feeling of those images in my paintings. I do this both so that I can experience the feeling again and with the profound hope of communicating this experience to the person looking at the painting. These images are my personal and ‘western’ spiritual iconography, representing what I experience as a spiritual state. EEIX 3. Drawing allows me to focus my attention and make manifest deeply spiritual images.

The Experience of Connection: The Other EEI 1. Sometimes I feel like I’m really getting it, I’m there, connected to the Source being fully in the experience and sometimes I struggle trying to get connected. EEI 3. When I experience this connection with my higher self, or God . . . it feels like allowing. EEIII 3. Being in nature; it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality. EEIII 6. The intimate connection inherent in the process of drawing and painting becomes more intense as I stay longer. EEIII 8. Painting outside is as exciting and demanding as any other intimate relationship . . . the joy of connection, the pain when the connection is lost, and the search for new ways to communicate. EEIII 9. Staying true to my own necessities of form in the midst of unexpected conditions and overwhelming choices is constantly challenging, a con-

152 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice tinuing and vital engagement. EEIV 15. Once you’re in shit happens and if you don’t catch it in the moment, it goes. EEV 15. It provides a profound means of connection and communication with others. EEVII 6. It starts with simple concentration . . . moves to a sense of mastery . . . deepens to a total involvement with what is happening at the tip of the brush. EEVII 13. Because the experience is so wonderful, I have worked hard to reproduce the feeling of those images in my paintings. I do this both so that I can experience the feeling again and with the profound hope of communicating this experience to the person looking at the painting. These images are my personal and ‘western’ spiritual iconography, representing what I experience as a spiritual state. EEVIII 3. I am more aware of the rhythm of my body and the connection of that rhythm to other organisms. EEVIII 5. I am one with the spectacular scene of nature before me. EEIX 4. I have been in a state that I only recognize as I disengage from drawing and have a sense of ‘leaving’ a communion. EEX 1. How to express MYSELF, HOW to find a new language, one that is international so it could be understood by everyone. EEX 8. I can no longer NOT create them. I am as if in bondage or captivity. EEX 9. A feeling stemming from a collaboration with a supernatural civilization. It is a celestial spiritualistic contact. EEX 10. Contact with this being is difficult to describe in words. I feel it through my body, my blood, my spiritualistic center—my soul. It is as if this unearthly spirit is boarding within me.

Participation in Universal Creation: The Divine EEIV 12. Each time the artist sits down or stands up in their studio, they are at the beginning and end of time. EEV 12. Creativity feels like . . . a participation in the ongoing creation of the world. EEV 13. The intention of all creation is to bring to fullness what it is to be. EEV 16. It is a participation in the creative act of the Divine Spirit of which we are all a part. EEVIII 1. For me, spirituality is a sense of aliveness and an experience of oneness—participation in the oneness of creation with God—the Divine. EEVIII 7. As I repeat the forms in nature created by a God force so many years

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ago, the creative energy of the universe pulses in me. I am one with the creative energy. EEVIII 4. A connection of my energy center to other energy centers in the Universe—the Universal Rhythm.

Theme III. The Experience of a Shift In One’s Sense of Life/Self/World Mental Shift EEII 3. My mind wandered. EEII 4. My mind flooded. EEIV 6. The mind and ego have to . . . move over . . . like a back seat, a witness. EEIV 7. To be almost half present, to be half blind, to forget most of what you know and think you know. EEVI 1. It is . . . spiritual in that when I am in my best creative mode I am in a different form of consciousness. EEVI 2. Ideas, connections and techniques for expression of this come from thought processes that are very different than normal day to day. EEVII 8. The process of creating and the slight critical distance of watching happen simultaneously. EEVII 15. The very process of painting for me involves the stopping of thinking, an expansion of awareness and a broadening and deepening of consciousness. EEVIII 6. I am in the scene—absorbed. EEIX 2. I let go of the verbal mind and respond to more subtle inner impulses.

Emotional Shift EEII 2. When ideas along with tears come pouring out of me . . . I was taken aback. EEVI 7. I always experience a feeling of gratitude, well-being, and peace. EEVII 1. I remember the tremendous joy I felt at being able to do nothing but paint. EEVIII 9. I am at peace. EEVIII 11. I feel more centered. EEIX 7. I feel very at home in this space. EEX 15. It brings me great happiness.

Physical Shift EEVI 5. I am also physically quite clumsy at times . . . part of this is the intense focus . . . and part is a partial out of body experience.

154 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice EEVI 9. All of my senses are heightened . . . sometimes even sexual energy. EEVII 7. Time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. EEVIII 3. I am more aware of the rhythm of my body and the connection of that rhythm to other organisms. EEX 5. Working with the tips of my fingers . . . I could feel an electrical charge running through them. EEX 11. I get somewhat tired from the work, my hands grow heavy, my entire body becomes wooden.

Shift in Seeing EEIII 7. Distinctions in Natural forms become clearer. EEIV 8. A paradox is present, one is more present than ever—a hyper awareness of extremely subtle realms of sight, texture, compositions, movement, and memories. EEIV 16. I practice ‘seeing’ differently . . . This helps me get out of a habit of seeing a certain way. EEVIII 12. Boundaries are more clear.

Shift in Time/Space EEVI 4. Some things happen very fast—connections, ideas, new relationships of thought, new techniques. EEVI 6. Time takes on a different dimension. EEVI 8. I am always in the moment when I paint. EEVII 5. The very process of moving the brush over the paper trains the awareness of the present. EEVII 7. Time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. EEVIII 8. There are no boundaries of time and space.

Shift in World EEIII 3. Being in nature; it is a connection with a larger, more abundant reality. EEVII 2. At that easel I could escape into a self-made world that was joyous and complete. EEVII 3. The process was so involving that the rest of the world fell away. EEVII 17. These feelings are . . . small, gentle, delicate feelings of perfection, where the world at once shrinks to involvement with the smallest detail and at the same time enlarges to something much bigger than myself. EEX 9. A feeling stemming from a collaboration with a supernatural civilization. It is a celestial spiritualistic contact.

Beyond Duality: Paradox EEI 8. Fullness and emptiness are both equally important.

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EEIV 1. How does one practice throwing oneself into the void. EEIV 2. How does one prepare to abandon all rational thoughts. EEIV 8. A paradox is present, one is more present than ever. EEIV 10. Trying to do the impossible—to create beauty? To organize chaos? To transform the world? EEVI 3. I sometimes label it as automatic or spontaneous but this is not quite true as there are decisions by me involved in this process. EEVII 7. Time slows down, my body relaxes, my awareness increases. EEVII 9. My breathing is calm, my attention is focused, and I can step aside and let the painting happen through me. EEVII 17. These feelings are . . . small, gentle, delicate feelings of perfection, where the world at once shrinks to involvement with the smallest detail and at the same time enlarges to something much bigger than myself.

Shift in Meaning EEIII 1. I began to work outside . . . finding a renewed meaning in life. EEV 9. The expression seems more meaningful than words. EEVI 4. Some things happen very fast—connections, ideas, new relationships of thought, new techniques. EEVII 10. I become more relaxed, feel a sense of well-being, alertness, smoothness, beauty and an overwhelming sense of the rightness of things. EEVII 11. Everything comes together at that instant. EEVII 16. I return to a state of wonder. EEVIII 10. I can more easily discern what is important from what is not. EEX 4. I became the sovereign of a new language, a ‘new’ speech arose

An Enduring Shift in One’s Sense of Self/Life/World EEII 1. It never dawned on me that personal growth had anything to do with Spirit. EEII 8. I’ve been very calm since the waterwall. At least in comparison to my usual self. EEII 9. My paintings have opened my life up. EEIII 4. Most enduring is the deep satisfaction I feel simply being in natural places. EEIV 5. The creative act is a transformation of the soul, spirit, ego. EEV 11. It (the expression) solidifies something within. EEVI 10. The practice is a source of great joy. EEVII 12. An experience that happens moment to moment . . . it does, however, give me hope. EEVIII 13. Beauty, peace, simplicity, strength . . . these qualities are stronger

156 The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice in my everyday experience. EEX 12. I . . . see the colorful dreams, as if being sated, fed and nurtured by them. EEX 16. The people who see my work are warmed in their hearts, are filled by a plentiful bright optimism.

Theme IV. The Experience of A Journey The Experience of Bridging Worlds EEIV 3. Trespass into and across the boundaries. EEIV 13. Sometimes describing what it is like on the other side. EEIV 14. It is usually difficult in the beginning. The transition from standing to flying, sitting to diving, walking to dreaming. EEIV 17. At best one breathes, aware of both worlds, and continues to dance, to paint, sing, and live. EEIX 6. I feel as if I am standing in a threshold between worlds. EEX 7. Giving birth to something marvelously pure and good in its essence. The paintings sent down from Heaven. EEX 13. Creativity came to me from the other world.

The Experience of the Ongoing Process of Life EEII 7. I’m still in process. EEII 10. I’m in the midst of this discovery soup, I can’t say what the end result will be. EEIV 11. This practice becomes a life long journey, an unraveling of the great mystery. EEIV 17. At best one breathes, aware of both worlds, and continues to dance, to paint, to sing, and live. EEV 2. My life is a creative act. EEV 3. I see my life . . . as an on-going spiritual practice.

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