Values that can transform our lives.

[PDF] We have seen that art is the organisation of sensuous impressions that express the artist's sensibility, whether higher or lower. And now for the second half of the definition: 'communicate to his audience a sense of values that can transform their lives'. Now very much could be said on art as communication but this had better wait for the time being. It is not directly concerned with our main topic. I want to deal with the concluding part of the definition, that is with 'a sense of values that can transform our lives'. What does one mean by this? We have seen that the artist experiences a higher level of awareness than ordinary people. And out of this level of awareness, this higher insight, this experience, this more comprehensive, more powerful experience, he expresses in the form of the work of art, not only expresses but communicates. This word communicate means that when we enjoy the work of art, we experience for the time being, even though in a lesser degree, the state of consciousness in which the artist produced it. And this is what we mean by communication. He experiences, he expresses, in the work of art. We enjoy the work of art, and we too experience what he experienced when he produced the work. Temporarily at least, we are raised to his level. Temporarily we become, as it were, artist and share his sense of values, his insight, his experience, and this transforms our lives. Transformation is evolution. It is not a change of place but a change of level. So we see that the artist is not only himself more highly evolved but through works of art, in which he expresses, through which he communicates to other people, his own experience of himself, he contributes to the higher evolution of other people, of the human race.

Enjoyment of great works of art, we may say, enlarges our own consciousness. When we listen to a great piece of music or when we see a great painting, read a great poem, really experience it, really allow it to soak into us, we go beyond our ordinary or normal consciousness, we become bigger, greater, our whole life is modified, our whole experience is transformed and, if we persist in interests of this sort, this gradually affects the whole of our being, and eventually, as I have said, even our lives may be transformed.

Now this is very much the case at the present time, especially in the West, this sort of recourse to art, great works of art, whether paintings, musical compositions, or works of literature. Because in the West, traditional religion, conventional religion - that is to say Christianity - has lost its hold. As someone once remarked, we are already living in the post-Christian age. The monuments to Christianity, some of them very great and glorious, are still around us but they are dead and they are empty, they are only shells. Orthodox traditional religion, for the vast majority of people, for the unchurched, is no longer a means of grace. We don't get anything from it. It means nothing to us. It doesn't uplift us, doesn't move us, doesn't transform us, much less still transfigure us any more. Maybe ages ago, maybe hundreds of years ago, maybe in the last century, but not now. It is done with, it is finished, it is often completely irrelevant. People aren't even against it any more. So what has happened? For many people, the place of religion has been taken by art, and this was the point of the title of my little work which I quoted from, The Religion of Art. The place of religion, the function of religion, has been taken over by art, by the Fine Arts.

This is one of the reasons, I think, for the immense popularity today of all the fine arts. We sometimes grumble and complain of the decay of culture and that sort of thing, but actually we find there has been a great improvement. Formerly, the enjoyment of works of art was the privilege of a few. Five hundred years ago, if you lived in this country, you would be living in a miserable hovel, probably, of wattle and daub, and you would not have seen any pictures, or paintings, except, maybe, one or two in the church. You would not have heard much music. You certainly would not have read very much, if anything at all. These things, enjoyment of culture, works of art, were the privilege of the few, of the wealthy, of the noble, of the high and mighty in the world. But nowadays, we find that all the artistic heritage of the ages even is within the reach of practically all people. If you think of the past, if you think in terms of the great classical musicians of the 18th century, how many people heard their works performed in their own day? While Mozart was alive, how many people heard his symphonies and so on? Maybe a few tens of thousands at the very most. Sometimes only hundreds of people heard them. But now, over the air, through radio, we find these same works are being enjoyed over and over again, by tens and even hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. So one finds a great dissemination of culture going on at present which we should not overlook, and these great works of art made more and more available to more and more people, with the result that they are exerting a slow and steady influence and gradually refining and raising the level of consciousness and awareness, practically we may say, if not of the whole population, of a very considerable and influential section of it; and in this way, are contributing to the whole process of the Higher Evolution, contributing through these cultural, artistic channels, to the production of the New Man.

Art and the spiritual life:

1. Art and the Spirtual life.
2. The Artist as more Aware or Self-Conscious.
3. The Artist as Creative.
4. What is Art?
5. The Artist as wicked, immoral and selfish?
6. Nabokov and the word Genius.
7. Values that can transform our lives.
8. * When an Artist creates he objectifies.

By Urgyen Sangharakshita.

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Dernière mise à jour:
20 juillet, 2008.