The Spiritual in Art-a few thoughts from a mystic's perspective.

This topic maybe you’d think is something I ponder a lot, but it isn’t.  Instead, I witness - like most topics that people grapple with while aligning with the meaning according to their understanding of spirituality.

I have some thoughts however that sit very comfortably with me that I’d like to share.

Not so long ago, I bought a book that was essentially a long essay on the spiritual in art by Kandinsky.  This was a most eagerly awaited book since my re-emergence on the art scene as the new me, a mystic and an artist.

What I started reading was the introduction, which was what felt like an old-school debate with each speaker trying to elegantly prove the others wrong with their verbal prowess and intellectual brilliance. Oh god, not that.  Maybe he was trying too intensely to justify something to the academics, to be plausible I don't know, but it was agitating.

No one loves a debate more than me and I am an old state champion debater yet alas, I have found it more a tendency to love the cut and thrust of throwing ideas around whether I believe them or not and taking a position just for the sheer intellectual joy of it.  If it gets too serious, I start to glaze over, particularly if people are trying to flex their egoic academic muscle

When it came to reading this introduction, I witnessed some of that glazing over and felt a little perturbed.

Going back to the time of its creation and where art was, of course, it is easy to see the delight and joy one must have had in shoving it up the more conservative art establishment under the guise of spiritual art. 

For me now arguing a point or proving oneself is more an energy of the past, it doesn’t matter much these days but helping share my innermost experience I hope contributes to the contemplation of spiritual art for others.  All the proving and arguing is the mind, in the mind so somewhat limited. The Self or God or the Divine cannot be expressed in words let alone an image, however, the arts come the closest to it. Creativity is a God-given gift, a power even, a ‘siddhi’. If I wanted to be pedantic and truly paint something spiritual, I would paint nothing at all. I would have a canvas frame with nothing stretched over it hanging on a wall. 

Let me start here. The Self is formless. God is formless.  Take aside religion then we have a better shot at getting this out.

If you are dogmatic and insecure and therefore bogged down and attached to a religion, then you will automatically react.  Try and be of a broad and open and universal mind.  Do that everyone and watch the world heal….

There is no God figure sitting in the sky.  There is a God source that is the underlying truth of all the variations of truths we have in humanity. Making it into a figure can be helpful for some but it is not the full story.  That cosmic or God source creates everything you believe and experience through the senses.

When you start to do good spiritual practice you can finally get past the mind and senses to where the source is good news.  No one does this, not-so-good news, so instead, they choose not to believe and stay within the limitations of thought and senses.  It’s what’s so and can make it difficult to find like beings to hang out with; if you are one hit me up for a chat! Whatever form you witness comes from the formless.

Hail the abstract artists. Breaking down what we know and are attached to is a form of freedom. Rebellion.  I'm so grateful to those who have had to butt their heads up against what must have seemed like an implacable attitude and dogma to a recognisable form in art.  When in the company of great abstract art which for me is Rothko, I can feel the same bliss one would have as a whirling dervish. Abstract art is like a whirling dervish with a paintbrush and paint in hand.  Free, vulnerably open and devotional, in the wordless, formless state.

When I meditate daily or have inner experiences, they sometimes manage to find a kind of form or representation in my mind.  These can be nothing but colour or can be a symbol of some kind I have never seen before or have come across in my travels.  It can often be the vision of everything from flowers and puja and watching me meditate from astral travel.  I don’t do channelling because I don’t need it.  That comes through an entity and my experience comes purely from my inner world.  I’m not looking for truth or to be told from an entity.  I’m simply expressing it in the way it wants to come through.

What we have seen in art, spiritually, is a kind of evolution of consciousness- please remember we are talking here about western art.  In some ways, modern art is breathtakingly breaking new ground and in other ways only finally catching up to and recognising what has been ancient knowledge and expression in other art like tantric art. This is a wonderful thing because what has been held deep down and sacred and only for the few is now able to reach the many.  Rudolf Steiner was quite rightly onto that with Hilma af Klint. 

Back to the mystical and looking at it through that lens.

Consciousness is everything.

Awareness is everything.

There is nothing that is not the Self, God, Shiva, whatever your thing is.

The movement of consciousness is free and independent.

Consciousness at its core is formless as previously stated.  If everything is consciousness, then absolutely everything that is created is the same.

Please hang in there with me, this is my spin on it.  I know religious people may struggle here, it requires a universal mind, and that is what is mystical. All the different systems of meaning and belief stem from one awareness, one Self. I’ll keep repeating myself in the hopes the penny drops from a few.

When it comes to representation of the spiritual in art, it doesn’t matter if triangles come, if swirling colour comes, if scenes of people in prayer come, if sunsets over your favourite beach come as it is all the same thing.  It is all the Self and they are all equally spiritual expressions.  Those artists destined to change the history of art will do so and it has nothing to do with whether your art is spiritual or not.

You see it is about the artist and their connection to the divine and the state of their being during the art process and then it is about the audience, the recipient and their motivation and place in their own awareness and spiritual journey.

From a tantric perspective, art has the power of transmission of grace called 'shaktipat'.  An onlooker can literally become awakened through art, any art form where the creator is in harmony with creative energy and its source.

Remove the timeline of art history. Consciousness is not linear.  Development of artistic representation maybe but again, not really when taking on a global perspective. Linear isn’t important, only for documenting the development of thought in art. We are talking here about the spiritual in art. It has always been there.

What is the spiritual? It is all about awareness itself. 

Some artists may go into great states of meditation and see other dimensions.  Some may find the divinity in the exquisiteness of a rose and then the execution of that rose with colour and line to express their divine experience.

The deal is what then do we as the audience do with what we see before us? What does it mean for us?

Some love the symbols.  I do. Discovering the Symbolist art movement for me in my early twenties as a young spiritually awakened artist gave me something, an insight I couldn’t put into words.  I found it exciting and inspiring and personal, it was like a dog getting a bone to chew on until I finally came across my spiritual teacher and classical tantra.

I loved looking for the clues that Symbolism was giving.

Honourable mentions here of great influential loves were William Blake, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.  Thank you to the NGV for exposing me to those artists as I was growing up and letting me hang around for many hours in astonishment at their genius.

For the mind still in a dual state, which is 99.99% of the population, ie there is spirit somewhere around here in the matter and there is a world of opposites - then you will need to be directed. Art will be a potential map, a guide.  Whether that be the unbelievable exquisite light in a Rembrandt painting or some specular canvas of miraculous colour by Rothko they serve the same purpose.  The activation of something in the onlooker and the expression of something wordless in the artist.

You can hear my tantric background here.  Yet it is all there is, simple and possibly frustrating for some. 

Man is ready to see more hence art can break more boundaries.  The formless is what it is to some artists and the form is what inevitably occurs the second we pick up a brush to give it expression, a voice.

What fascinates me the most is the unravelling of the rational which is why artists are here on earth in a way, to go beyond convention, fashion, concepts, dogma, and rules.  To go beyond into places that are unknown territory and to give that place representation.  Without this, then we are never challenged.  Art makes us grow and expand. 

Consciousness as grace, when it is ready, in its own time, will come through the artist that is spiritually awake.  I mean this, there has to be some spiritual sensibility to the artist for it to be spiritual art.  That is fundamental.  Grace will reveal itself in the way the artist can comprehend, in time.  Sometimes it takes a while to work out how to best represent what you experienced with the skill level present.  This by the way is all due to karma.  Karma is the most exquisite explanation of universal law that very few people, again, understand.

Note to artists,  allow this divine will or ‘iccha’ through from an open space and mind. Let what wants to come through, through.  Get the mind right out of it, all concepts.  Routinely create what you need to get yourself into a devotional or cosmic space first and trust what is expressed and never, ever compare to what others are doing.  Simple ink lines from the heart and deep contemplation are as beautiful and expressive as a dancing digital cloud. I’ll share my process in time and I’d love to hear yours.

This will do for now. 

Maybe I’ll get back to the Kandinsky book and finish it now.

Jai Maa. 🌺🌺🌺

©MataKamaleshwari