20120112
ARTISTIC SUCCESS
An Artist’s success is fundamentally based on his love for God. This begins as his love for Soul and the development of it through his creative work.
Society doesn’t speak much about this because they see Art as a mechanism that serves the social order, egos of both creator and recipient or the philosophy (values, ethics) of the ethos.
As soon as a child demonstrates talent, he is sure to be exploited; that is, unless his parents and mentors are ethical and conscious of spiritual cultivation. The child will be ushered into the social order for candidacy to become the next “great” something or other; rationalized by the idea that the child’s “Potential” cannot go wasted.
Yet wasting begins as soon as the child is brought out from his inner relationship to Soul and cultivation of the Divine gifts given to him to do God’s work: which is to become a channel for whatever Soul needs to translate—as the mouthpiece and flute of the sound of God. He is brought into the world to begin working at showing off his talents and then later in life, proving his worth to self and society.
When Society uses examples of artists such as Van Gogh as an example of how artists die “penniless” while their works fetch millions by many years to come, it is a form of mockery and idealizing of artists.
It states that, “artist must be poor therefore are geniuses,” and pivoting newer generations to be savvy in cashing in before the investors do.
It is a no-win situation.
Van Gogh and many other artists die poor having never collected anything for their work. Today’s modern artists truly do not “deserve” (yet truly deserve) their millions. The latter is easy explain: they do not work for God, they work for things they’ve been taught that they deserve. They work for Rockefeller and foundations that have their focus entirely on the material world while providing charity that funnels back into their cause: of producing more rich elite artists that must go through ranks of their systems to find worthiness and acclaim.
Firstly, I will clarify a problem with the expression of “working for God.” The moment that you declare yourself as working for anybody or anything: you have already stepped outside the inner world and have missed the point completely. When I address this attitude of working for God: I am referring to a higher state of consciousness: not a goal of attaining God, not any particular deity or religion, and not a desire to please anyone or anything.
When you are working for God, you are working from a very high state of beingness and become a clear channel. This channel has nothing to do with you, the world, society or even the thought of God.
In the purist form: Art moves through this channel (of the human being/artist) to do the work it needs to do.
The term Art, in the active sense means, to “Be.” That is what God does; to become means to “Create.” An Artist is a vehicle to create what is to Be. So the Artist’s job is about translating this higher state of beingness, allowing the forces to work out that is best for society, planets and universes: to be and to become what is to be come, or shall be done.
Every force in the world attempts to stop this process of becoming because it wants to claim Free Will and control over events. Since not everything or everybody is working from a high state of awareness—people often create the reverse result of Becoming—which is Bondage, to be held back and limited to a lower or lesser from of consciousness, and beingness.
Thus, it is the job of Art to output the highest form of beingness and to provide some sign or instruction on how to Be or to Become.
Pure Art is free from social engineering that try to adhere distortions and disorders onto the process of Art becoming. It is important that Art is allowed to become; rather than exploited, trained into submission of being something that it not (particularly by less aware people, like investors, who do not have the vision, foresight or let alone gifts to determine what is artistic or valuable, or are not).
The reason Van Gogh is considered a giant among artists is because his work was successful in terms of Becoming. It was pure. Absolutely pure. Because of this, it tapped into the present, the future and had an element of prophesy in it that took care of the worlds and societies by inspiring them to look into the eyes of God through his work.
Most people do not say that they have a religious experience when they look at (or are moved by) Art. They have learned that “religious” means “Jesus Christ,” the Church and what not.
But looking into the eyes of God is looking into an Artist’s Soul; and an Artist’s Soul, is constructed out of the heart of God because both Artist and God are one and the same: they serve the same function—which is creation of lower worlds, all worlds, higher above, everywhere and beyond.
The reason Van Gogh is often used to exemplify the poverty of artists (in the material sense) is the stock markets way of mocking the artist. It is the materialistic view of the world addicted to a power agenda that states, “good guys finish last.” In this statement is the idea that it doesn’t pay to be truthful. This is a trap of course because on the flipside, it states that true artists shouldn’t care about money. But they do.
Artists think more about money than Bankers do: because there are often not paid for the kind of work that they do.
So many artists fall into this trap of saying, “I do it for love, not for money” or “I do it all for money because I got to eat” (meanwhile their idea of eating involves owning an island, and houses all over the world).
That reminds me of the parable about how the Buddha—on his journey to enlightenment—rejected all the spiritual ideals of his time: the monks rejected the material world and claimed the body didn’t mean anything to them. They felt the body and senses were the source of all problems so they practiced self-mortification: by starving the body, astringent yoga postures and pushing the body to the limit of sacrifice. Buddha was smart and after trying this, he said, “enough of this” and drank a nice glass of milk. Nice healthy fat, because you have to keep your vehicle healthy, otherwise, you can’t do your art.
The modern artists today are caught in a game with the stock market. They are there to please numbers in order to get their nice healthy glass of milk but the glass is now out of proportion. Rather than a glass, they want a gallon and further, they want a whole manufacturing plant and total distribution rights.
This is the wave of fear that is moving among artistic minds and the people who suffer because Art does not really perform its true function today: which leads back to the purity of Van Gogh’s work.
Today, higher education and social programming has taught us that self-expression and creativity is what Art is all about. What they have forgotten and never learned is that Art has always been about Survival.
Because business and higher education owns our survival by dictating to us what Beauty is, what Creativity is, what Sells and in essence what “Art” or Knowledge is—we have stopped surviving as Artists.
To do the survival part for us, we are encouraged to buy the Van Gogh Starry Night coffee mug and posters replicated by the museum factories and industries that set examples for us what Art is. But once Van Gogh died, the world began to See, and that Seeing is a gift of survival.
We no longer have to see, because the print manufacturers, tourist industries of museums and our history teachers and their addiction to the Dead have made us numb and morbid.
We have developed an artistic diet of regurgitation, formulated by ideals of beauty, creativity are and what not that are not our own. That is why no one knows what is “new” anymore…because we are told that, “nothing is new under the sun.” It is form of control.
But I will not accept that nothing is new under that sun because it a false distorted premise to encourage us to give up on trying.
If nothing is new under the sun then we should all stop living. There would be no need to make babies because babies are already created everyday. Every donut on the factory tray looks the same, but they still have to pump new ones out everyday because nobody wants to eat a stale one.
Chocolate and our favorite coffee or tea should be the perfect mix and tastes the same every time. Yet each time it has to feel new and fresh, because it is New, it should always feel like it was invented for the first time.
Our addiction to sameness has been exploited to the advantage of businesses that know that we are addicted to habit. But Habit is not the same as Newness.
Although it is true that life is a process of replication what people forget is each item is created as New.
This rebirth of newness is the premise for why Truth is called such: because everything taught and invented always needs to make it new. God created flowers and certain creatures that only live for a short period time to show us—like the Lotus flower—that newness takes place and must take place constantly in the world for our physical and spiritual survival. It is the only premise for why we have Hope in anything to begin with.
Survival involves a constant search for Truth and Newness in everything, everyday.
Rebirth may be misinterpreted as replication of the same, yet is never the same. It is never the same thing twice even if one expression after another looks exactly alike.
Society (driven by a desire to control for profit and power) has found a way to exploit this ability for us to enjoy ceaseless replication of products, news, information, entertainment, art, philosophy and the works. The more that you are addicted to sameness, the less you are capable of survival—in a conscious sense.
You become increasingly unconscious.
In using Van Gogh as an example of survival, he created work out of a pure necessity to stay alive. Those who are not artists do not understand why an artist has to create in order to keep living. I do not mean materially or physically: I mean mentally, to keep from going insane.
Van Gogh DID go insane but that was because he was channel for many things. Firstly, he was a channel for all of society’s prejudices and ignorances [sic]: of their inability to See.
Scholars may argue to death about their understanding of Van Gogh but they are not artists. They don’t know what takes place within an artist’s soul. They can only assume that based on some technical logistics that the environment moved an artist to create X, Y, Z. Art and discussions should be left up to artistic minds, not to people who study it.
His success as you can see, is not based on market value. It was based on the idea that he rejected the environment and transformed it according to how he saw it as Soul. Because the vision of Soul is infinite and in a sense immortal—it carries forth whatever information it can that God has to express through it.
Uniqueness is tied into survival. Replication works against survival because sameness produces death while uniqueness brings forth newness and vice versa.
In a time where more and more artists are struggling with environment, more of them are going to work for industries in order to create. More than likely, every artist will have some how gone through formal education in order to enter a work force and industry that quantifies and qualifies their worth as an artist. This industry machine has become the controller of our vision. We as artist are forced into a condition to see through the lens of a social mechanism—rather than through the lens of God and Soul.
This is the social condition we are in. It will generate a new hybrid of expression; more convoluted, complex, harder to take apart yet overly simplified. To fight it means to resort to being the Van Gogh of our time. And my question is: is that so bad?
What we are fighting today, Van Gogh’s Soul knew about: which are systems of that work towards insanity. This is the same survival he and artists fought back then (before modern art became a Rockefeller enterprise).
Success as an artist on a spiritual level means this:
God allows an Artist material success in small degrees. If you are worthy of being a channel of pure higher consciousness—you are not given a lot of material successes.
The reason is that the material world blinds you, all the social things that come with it, the demands and the outer influence of society begins to cave in and affect and infect not only the work—but the mental vessel.
So you get a little bit of money or recognition but not too much. If you get a lot of money and recognition, you carry more responsibility. If you get too much money and recognition, you have to be extremely vigilant: you have to declare yourself a Master, not only of your own art—but of your own life.
This is because a pure artist always carries the weight of the world in this own hands, on his back. His work is never for the social order, creativity is never done to simply be creative, it is never only to pay bills with his services, and it most definitely not created for glories of riches and fame.
If the world tells you that riches and fame will solve the artist problem or justify talent, you are being fed a stock market ticker for the day. It is pulling you into a belief that you are going to gamble with your own children, with your own soul and your own precious commodities: to trade it in for fake Gold. And even if that Gold is real, they will tell you it is worth it.
I have no problem with wealth and money. Everybody wants it. There is nothing inherently wrong with it: but it can be a great corruptor and desensitizer. It kills the ability to survive in the world because everything comes with great ease and automation. For an artist to be extremely rich and successful is an oxymoron because success is not founded on social worth and wealth but on whether or not their work scores high on the “survival” index.
If an artist’s work does not help society survive or See anything New on any level, then artists are only being artistic cannibals (they eat and replicate the same work of other artists). And if they are trying to invent something New only in order to be “different,” then they are acting as Black Magician.
When artists feel that they fail in terms of social recognition: of not having their work manifest, distributed in the world—it is because the Artist has gotten out of focus. Literally, like a blurry image through the viewfinder. This is not the true focus of himself or the goal inside.
This desire for fame, acknowledgment or recognition is a spiritual dilemma because the only person that needs to see or experience one’s purity is Soul. True, if you are good, you should put your stuff out there. But the truth is, Society does not like anything new.
Man, since time immemorial, has a pattern and addiction to power and control; and in modern terms has manifested into sophisticated forms of social engineering/ mental programming and constructed belief systems that avoid cultivation of Individuality.
In fact, Society has given people a distorted view of Individuality by creating the “Me” generation (of selfish or narcissistic behavior).
Individuality is quite the opposite: Individuality is about being in perfect alignment with Truth. This comes from a state of being “Art” within oneself. It is about Soul being allowed to “Be.” If we let others be, then we have a world of individuals.
If you are true to yourself and things are not heading your way: it is probably for the better. Chances are, your “way” is really society’s way, and your true way is your “art’s way.” Art doesn’t care about what society (or social consciousness) wants. What it wants is to Survive.
To understand this survival means to know that Soul seeks to liberate itself and by default, also others. It means to understand that the bond between Art and God cannot be separated and when people are uncomfortable with the word “God,” let it be their own conflict.
It is clear to me that the two aspects function hand in hand. So to be God Realized means to become Art Realized. When you are Art Realized, you are truly doing great work…the successful kind.
by Ji Rising/ Blogasana.com 
