Art and the Spiritual Life.

[PDF] By ‘Art' we mean all the Fine Arts. We take the term to cover painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, and so on. And by 'Spiritual Life', the other half of our title, we mean the whole process of the Higher Evolution of Man. Incidentally, I must confess that I am not very happy with this word spiritual. When I was drawing up the list of the titles I hesitated very much before putting down this word spiritual and speaking of Art and the Spiritual Life because for some people, this word has all sorts of wrong connotations. When one speaks of spiritual life, they start thinking of spirits and spiritualism and table rapping and ghostly messages and ghostly voices and shapes and apparitions. So I couldn't help feeling the word spiritual is best avoided. It's almost as bad, one might say, as the word religion, which has for many people similar unpleasant connotations. But unfortunately, there are really no generally current equivalents.

Now when we speak of Art and the Spiritual Life, or Art and the Higher Evolution, we are not suggesting that they are really two different things. Not that you have Art and the Spiritual Life, art here and spiritual life there, joined merely externally by that little word and. It is not that Art and Religion are related in a manner merely external. One might even go so far as to say that Art is included in the spiritual life, that the fine arts are just one particular type of aspect or manifestation of the Higher Evolution itself. This does not, of course, mean that one cannot lead the spiritual life, cannot participate in the higher evolution of humanity, without being an artist. It doesn't mean that; but it does mean that one cannot be an artist without at the same time participating in the spiritual life, in the higher evolution. To the extent that one is an artist, a true artist, authentically an artist of any kind, one is participating in the Higher Evolution of Man.

Now this sort of idea, I am sure, is unfamiliar to most people. They would regard it perhaps as an unnecessary glorification of the artist and they might even strongly disagree. We know that most people's evaluation of art and of artists is usually a rather low one. They don't think very highly of them really, not in comparison with other really important things, other really important activities. Only too many people tend to look down upon the arts and the artist and to think of the artist as occupying himself with rather trivial things, not with a real man's work as it were. I remember in this connection a little story, I believe - as far as I recollect - from the autobiography of Sir Osbert Sitwell, which is a many-volumed work written at great length, great prolixity but it contains some very good stories very well told. Perhaps you know that the Sitwells belonged to one of those very very brilliant families in which everybody seems to be practically a genius; all your brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, uncles and so on are geniuses - this must be a wonderful way of growing up. So you had apparently Osbert and Sacheverell and the famous Edith, all living together when they were young in this vast old rambling family mansion, and one of them used to live in one wing, and another in another wing, with half a mile of corridors in between, there were lots of servants (this was 90 years ago). So the story goes, as related by Osbert Sitwell, that one morning he wanted to communicate with sister Edith in her wing. So he rang the bell to call a maidservant and gave the maidservant a little note, and he said, 'Give this note to my sister, if she isn't busy. But if she is doing something, if she's busy, don't give it to her, don't disturb her. Just come straight back, bring the note and tell me'. So about 15 minutes later, having traversed all those corridors, in both directions, the maidservant returned. And Sir Osbert asked her, 'Have you delivered the note?' She said, 'Oh, yes..' 'Was my sister doing anything, then?' 'Oh no, she wasn't doing anything at all, she was just writing'. So this is the attitude only too often; if you are writing or painting, or if you are doing anything else of that sort, you're 'not doing anything really'.

So in view of this sort of popular misunderstanding of the subject of the arts in general, let's just try to go a little more deeply into this whole subject and try to see in what way, or in what sense, art is part of the spiritual life, part of the Higher Evolution of Man. Now this will involve a consideration of a question of what is Art. But we'll put that aside for a moment and we will first consider the artist as New Man, consider the artist as sharing the characteristics 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.

[in French] [Introduction] [Buddha] [Buddhism] [Meditation] [Sangharakshita] [FWBO] [the Centre]

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Dernière mise à jour:
04 avril, 2007.