“[Life] sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”
Albert Camus
What does it mean to embody freedom?
An interview with no self, for the sake of no self.
Dear self, you are hard to pin. When I think I’ve found you, I realize I’m entangled with an imposter. By the time I recognize this, you’re several moves ahead. (Are you a ghost?) This fruitless endeavor, if nothing else, has afforded time to hone a question:
What will you do with your life?
Why is “Art God”?
[…]
After finding zero, what’s left? Everything just is. Everything is one massive expression, including you. When you cease to project small wants and dreams upon the world… it is all one big work of art, isn’t it? Even wants and dreams- more art. You are a witness. Still a person – still engaged with the world. But beneath all contractions, a witness. As this, there are two essential tasks:
1) Marvel.
Life is a Rorschach. There is no right perception.
2) Express.
Expression is response. There is no right movement.
An alternative, unfortunate choice, is endlessly chasing wants and dreams, faintly believing them to be some gateway to ecstasy.
(Do you scoff? Surely YOUR wants and dreams are distinguished? Please… be shrewd in seeing ecstasy’s boundless costumes. Look closely and find its unmistakable residue.)
In chasing, you’ll discover, again and again, an ephemeral nature. More unfortunately, you’ll squander diminishing opportunity to appreciate what is, as is. To unite gracefully. Either with grace, or with force, unite with it we most certainly will. [Death]. Finally relinquishing illusions we believed would, somehow, satiate the insatiable.
After finding zero, you might affirm it, emphasize it, but then, what? … ?? You can say the same… over, and over, in tighter and tighter spirals of what feel like “precision” or “success”. You can amplify and modulate with varying intensity. But ultimately, this is no summit. A choice is being made, knowingly or not:
One, betray investigative evolution, seek an “audience” – knowing dimly (sometimes, vividly) this is delicacy for ego – another costume of ecstasy. Believing what you have to share is “important” and the world must have it.
Or, two, cross the event horizon. Let the mystery unfold through you, unencumbered by agenda. Embrace peace that this “knowing” is all it can be – never anointed as right or wrong or valuable by some authority – spiritual or otherwise… and there is little reason to wield it like a hammer. Offer it… and move on.
To where?
There is only art. The journey to express what is – through us. It needs no validation. Whatever comes, comes. It might be appreciated, ridiculed, or ignored. It makes no difference – the greatest fathomable recognition is tantamount to the worst possible ridicule or utter obscurity – in the cosmic sense. Art might be bizarre and peculiar and strange – not because it is contrived – simply because freedom is unconcerned with convention. The aim is to feel and express. Flow. Not meddled-with or coopted. Simply expressed as what feels “true”. This is art. The infinite horizon for the human spirit to unfurl itself.
Art is god.
Is this not just a magnificently decorated urge? A wild mental contortion to justify blatant contradiction of freedom? The hunger for identity, reifying itself?
Of all efforts, art threads many apparent needles of the human conundrum: curiosity, expression, sincerity, minimalism, play, evolution, devotion, precision, finitude, doing no harm, and perhaps, as a secondary consequence, stirring wonder. What better multidimensional celebration than this?
Art, is the bridge between part one and part two.
This, is where the compass of stillness points.
“But what about…”
Civilization? Service to fellow man and participation in society and so on and so forth? Yes yes – all of that. But… only so much. How much is essential? How much is superfluous? How many of us have deliberately and scrupulously examined this question? How many are happy to flow with outside stimulus unquestionably? … Happy to defer to some “other” motivation that absorbs us, and evade the unsettling call to discover what’s true?
How much of life is service? If 100%, then what are we actually serving toward? Service for more service? Feels quite circular. Beyond service, might we also demonstrate, in a way words alone cannot, exploration? To reach beyond conditioning and touch the incomprehensible?
They lead back…
Here.
