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By Prof. Philip Rubinov Jacobson, MFA
All of my life I have been traveling the path of what some, particularly familiar with the writings of my friend, Ken Wilber, might call an Integral Art, which was a rather isolated journey for several decades along the way. However, over the years I have found so many other creative workers from around the world doing the very same thing; that in fact, I have come to refer to them as the Visionary Tribe. But are only the so-called, ‘visionaries’, integral artists? The list of questions has only grown longer, deeper and more raging in discovering and defining what is, or may not be an Integral Art. Some of the questions are; what is an integral artist? What is integral art? Is the term ‘integral’ as applied to art a valid one, or simply a kind of oxymoron, a definition assigned to that which is, by its very nature, already ‘integral’? And if indeed the term is valid in application hasn’t there already been many historical schools, styles of art, or individual artists that already embody the term? Does integral art have an historical baseline? Has it existed before, or is this something utterly new? If all other fields can be termed integral, why and how can the fine arts also be described as such? And this last question is most certainly a key one. I am in complete agreement with Ken Wilber regarding the need to lay a groundwork for delineating an Integral Art and that in so doing, the essential thing to recognize is that the art and creative worker’s character, and use of art as an integral part of their transpersonal-practice, are all inextricably combined. In addition, as I see it, the apex of immersion in the fine arts is in that artists, potentially, discover that they serve nothing but Love and Beauty.
Love is justly called the Ruler of the Arts, for a man fashions works of art carefully and completes them thoroughly, who esteems highly both the works themselves and the people for whom they are made. There is, then, this fact, that artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.
- Marsilio Facino1
I believe the elements that make up an art that ‘spiritualizes’ and ‘transforms’ both artist and responder, even if measured in microns, as Ken has suggested, is an art that is, in my opinion, potentially if not inherently, integral and maintains certain common characteristics, of which I will later describe. I also agree with Ken’s observations in relating the potentialities and personal character of an integral artist to the creation of an integral work of art, and that this ‘potent seed’ is entirely associated to the states and stages of consciousness being experienced and expressed. I do, however, have a slightly different perspective then Ken does on certain aspects of the creative process itself, its potential for transformation, and the spectrum of the aesthetic experience in its cause and effect on consciousness. This is thoroughly laid out and delineated in my forthcoming book, EYES OF THE SOUL – Exploring Inspiration in Art. Ken has also contributed a FOREWORD to this forthcoming book with, perhaps, his most updated and extensive view on the subject to date. Given the limited space we have here I will try and convey some of the essential points relating to the initial questions being raised here in this article.
A good place to begin in discussing an integral art and artist is in the inspiration and more essentially, the urge behind creative production. This urge has its origin, if one accepts the thesis on which a case for the validity of an integral art, perhaps, can truly be based, in the fact that man and woman is ‘already’, in some way, participants in ‘everything’, indeed, even in the divine life. These creative workers therefore long to return to that from which they feel they have come, to be more closely and consciously linked with it. They feel like pilgrims of eternity, creatures in time but citizens of a timeless world. Perhaps a perfect integral art can only be executed by a perfected human being, but that is rather hard-lined and dismisses the essential quality of the creative process as an extremely powerful tool, and especially when combined with an integral transformative practice. This becomes visually apparent and obvious in both the artists and their art when the power of visualization actually invokes and expresses a state of awareness that is strong enough to transform and in some instances, actually breakthrough to establish yet a more subtle stage of awareness.
We can consider integral art as falling into two main types: that of love and union, and that of knowledge and understanding. Approached from yet a different angle, it is also possible to consider Integral Art in three aspects: nature-art, soul-art, and God-art. Ken, in my aforementioned book, elaborated on my idea of a soul-art and offered a comprehensible perspective to consider. These areas alone would take up too much space here but it is important to mention that the aspects of nature-soul-God in art are not necessarily mutually exclusive; they may and often do, intermix. Suffice to say, that art is, in its highest use and form, part of the path of transformation toward living an illuminated life toward enlightenment. An art of Nature – leading to an art of the Soul – connecting to a God-art, could all be referred to the Practice of an Integral Art. The experience of Art is of a different quality, light, sound and tonation in the coloring of the spectrum of consciousness, to say that of the sciences, which is but another potential form of connecting to the highest Truth. But Schopenhauer gives a more clear and poetic understanding of what I am trying to say here by describing the differences between the scientific and artistic natures in the search for truth.
While science, following the unresting and inconstant stream of the fourfold forms of reason and consequent, with each end attained sees farther, and can never reach a final goal nor attain full satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the place where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and has it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in that stream was a small perishing part, becomes to art the representative of the whole, an equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; the course of time stops; the relations vanish for it; only the essential, the Idea, is its object. We may, therefore, accurately define it as the way of viewing things independent of the’ principle of sufficient reason’, in opposition to the way of viewing them which proceeds in accordance with that principle, and which method of experience is science. This last method of considering things may be compared to a line infinitely extended in a horizontal direction, and the former to a vertical line, which cuts in at any point. The method of viewing things which proceeds in accordance with sufficient reason is the rational method, and it alone is valid and of use in practical life and in science. The method, which looks away from the content of this principle, is the method of genius, which is only valid and of use in art.
That is simply brilliant. Schopenhauer goes on and describes the eyes of science as looking through Aristotelian spectacles while Platonic lenses enhance the eyes of art:
The first is the method of Aristotle; the second is, on the whole, that of Plato. The first is like the mighty storm, that rushes along without beginning and without aim, bending, agitating, and carrying away everything before it; the second is like the silent sunbeam, that pierces through the storm quite unaffected by it. The first is like the innumerable showering drops of the waterfall, which, constantly changing, never rest for an instant; the second is like the rainbow, quietly resting on this raging torrent. Only through the pure contemplation described above, which ends entirely in the object, can Ideas be comprehended; and for the nature of ‘genius’ consists in the pre-eminent capacity for such contemplation. 2
Art, creativity and inspiration should be subjects of a unified scientific and philosophical research on many levels and from many angles. It has always been felt that religious illumination, highest artistic vision, scientific mega-discovery and mystical ecstasy are sacred subjects that are often beyond the province of reason and intellect. Science too, has its genius, and with the development of subtle instrumentation – such an investigation would be additionally blessed. For now, as initially stated, the essential thing to recognize is that in an Integral Art, the art and creative worker’s character, the creative process and one’s transpersonal-practice are all inextricably combined. All this can be further understood by examining the empirical experience of the integral artist, or what I sometimes refer to as an artistic mystic.
Integral Characteristics Leading to Inspirational States and Stages of Creatuitive Consciousness
This word that I have coined, creatuitive, simply combines two aspects, creativity and intuition, two integrating forces that can range from the limited to the infinite. As art is the language of the soul, it allows for a broad expansion of mystical and inspired states that can, potentially, lead to the grounding of higher stages of consciousness. Inspirational and intuitive states do have certain marked characteristics in common.
1. First, and foremost, a high and subtle state of inspiration, particularly when colored with an ecstatic vibration, has the quality of ineffability, that is, it defies expression in verbal terms that are fully intelligible to one who has not known some analogous experience. It thus resembles a state of feeling rather than a state of intellect. Even art, the language of the soul, can only depict a shadowy reflection of such experiences.
2. Nevertheless, while inspirational and creatuitive states are akin to states of sublime feeling, they are also states of knowledge. As Hegel stated: Art is a source of original knowledge. Although I have initially described such highly charged aesthetic states as ineffable, when blessed with such an experience a drop of truth falls from the absolute, (or one connects to absolute truth) and into the receiver (or vessel), or it springs forth from the inner ocean of spirit. There is a noetic quality to such events. The result is an insight into the invisible behind the visible, unveiling depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. Insights and knowledge becomes, in Heidegger’s term; unconcealed. One who has undergone such an integrating experience is convinced with absolute certainty of its reality and significance.
3. Subtle creatuitive states can seldom be sustained for long; they rarely last for long periods of time, it is a ‘state’ of experience. This ‘temporary’ feeling can however be paradoxically experienced as timeless and they can and do mark a person so that they will never be the same again. It is a temporary state that may, or may not, lead or feed into the grounding of a higher stage of consciousness. This event has the quality of transience.
4. It is possible to prepare for the reception of such states, which can range from creative flow to a creatuitive consciousness to subtle mystical states. Although some element of control may evolve, and in the writings of the mystics from many traditions much space is given to instructions in this regard. When such experiences happen they have the feeling of something being given and not the result of an act of the will. Therefore they have the quality of passivity. The integral artist feels as if h/her own will were in abeyance, as if h/she were grasped and held by a gentle, or even awesome power not their own, yet in time, the experience grounds itself and increases personal power, compassion and confidence.
5. A common characteristic of many inspirational states is in experiencing a consciousness of the Oneness of everything. The human being feels trapped in an apparent realm of polar opposites as if imprisoned. He is conscious, therefore, of a division in his soul (or psyche in the modern term). His deepest spiritual instinct is to break through the polar opposites and find again the Primal Meaning, so that he may once again be restored to the Undivided Unity that he ‘seems’ to have lost, but is always and already available and present. God or Enlightenment is to be found behind the lattice of contradictions that makes up the matrix of phenomena. There can, however, be no escape from duality through sense perception, for sense perception is conditioned by the presence of polar opposites, nor through discursive thought, which is bound by the same dualism. Through a contemplative practice, meditation and creative experience, the dilemma of duality can be resolved. For the integral artist the gift of a unifying vision of the One in the All and the All in the One is given in the fusion of spirit and matter, with the artist merging with the object of art. In addition, painting, or the flow of concentration from the artist toward the object of making, can be of the same quality as sitting in formal meditation.
6. A further characteristic in an integral art experience is a sense of timelessness. Inspirational experiences are not bound by clock time. Whatever time may be, and it is still a deep mystery, as the creative worker approaches similar states to that of illumined souls, he or she feels to be in a dimension where time is not, ‘where all is always now’.
7. Finally, and at the very core of an Integral Art Practice, which is bound up with the sense of timelessness and oneness, is the experience and conviction that the familiar phenomenal ego is not the real “I”. The true self, or what the Hindus call the Atman, is immortal, constant, unchanging, deathless and not bound by space-time. This awareness also sets the creatuitive worker on a trajectory through interpersonal, moral, emotional and psychosexual states and stages that are integrative. An artist may be stationed at a high stage of consciousness and paint images representative of a lower state of experience. Inversely, an artist stationed in a lower stage of consciousness, who may even be a drunkard, scoundrel or profligate, may paint an image representative of a higher stage of consciousness of which h/she had caught a glimpse of. Ultimately, that is all rather inconsequential anyways, as all states and stages reflect the great work when an integral intention is behind the active practicing mechanism in the creative worker, process and product.
The Integral Spiritual Dimension of Art
In an integral art then, some or all of the above characteristics contribute to the growth and outcome of a creative work; they literally become embodied in a material that has served as a medium of their expression. In an integral work of art, Spirit, literally becomes embedded in matter; there is a fusion of spirit and matter. What the work of art does is to concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience and magnifies that experience to attract an even wider receptacle of respondent-experiencers. The spirit summoned in the object interacts with the self and all selves that experience the art. So art is not only a means of free expression; art is also a means of spiritual satisfaction and a catalyst for growth, otherwise it is not a living evolutionary force in the expansion of consciousness. Although, in general, I may assign a greater force to this transformative power in art than my dear friend Ken Wilber does, and particularly at the most mature stages of consciousness attained, I may also have a surprising perspective on the final results one can achieve via an integral art practice. I believe a quote from Samuel Palmer will further help to express my perspective.
Genius is the unreserved devotion of the whole soul to the divine, poetic arts, and through them to God; deeming all else, even to our daily bread, only valuable as it helps us to unveil the heavenly face of Beauty.3
In my personal experience as a creative worker, or an ‘integral artist’, if you will, and in that of only a few of my peers, I see that gradually, oh so very slowly, art as a spiritual path, or transpersonal tool becomes arid in its content and in its transformative powers in the final stages envisioned and attained. Even though we truly become what we envision, vision is eventually given over to that which invisibly illuminates the images; that great blank white screen upon which the movie of matter is being symbolically displayed. Art, unlike many other means of intellectual production, is an activity that is essentially and dynamically of the spirit, or of our enlightened nature. It is not that the artist runs out of ideas, or that he or she becomes a being so detached, or non-feeling. Nor is it that they ‘give up’ and turn away from the grand vistas. The soul is not exactly out of matter, rather it transcends all attraction and identification to matter, and in this case - as an aesthetic agent, and forms alone become heavy and flat, too literal and dense, even the most beautiful and sublime. A kind of knowing and even a kind of bliss, or at the very least, a kind of contentment with what is already beautiful eventually replaces the feeling of separately watching, witnessing and making - the artistic appreciation of forms.
The compelling nature and need to create forms, to experience the fusion of matter and spirit in an object dissolves into the experience of becoming all forms in the states and stage of formless-consciousness. The artist who has worshipped God as Beauty, in time becomes what he or she has been meditating on all along, seemingly for eons, and so Beauty also becomes God. The soul realizes what it was all along. The artistic soul in its constant attempt to fuse self, spirit and matter in a single object called ‘art’, finally fuses self with all objects, sees beauty everywhere all at once, in all matter, in all spirit, in all forms. The artist becomes Beauty. From created object to object, which may number in the hundreds, even the thousands, a path of Beauty is forged and widened, it transcends and includes the objects that went before. Each object of art builds and scales, love and knowledge expands, spreads out on the esthetic planes of God the Beautiful and all forms lead the creative worker to the brilliant face of the formless.
On the most rare of occasions, I have seen something in the eyes of only a few other artists I have met, among a countless number I have encountered in my life. In those few integral artists I have seen that disinterested liberation emerging in their soul, but also that final sweet-sadness of leaving that great lover, Beauty, behind. They have seen that point in the road just ahead, in that bend behind the path of vision. Finally the integral artist gives it all up to Godhead, as he or she has fulfilled their service. It was God’s art to begin with. The Beauty is, all those sacrifices, all those challenges and often the suffering that the soul artist endured through their creation of a multitude of forms, finally leads them to the formless, but how can that be? Well, in the end, through the devotion of the soul-artist to the divine, finally, really, art actually does unveil what Samuel Palmer called ‘the heavenly face of Beauty’, and what the artist sees…. is his, or her own face, and with heavenly eyes finally look out through the eyes of the many, seeing Everything, seeing blissfully, seeing Forever and in that moment the bitter-sweet tears of the Beautiful dries their watery eyes, their vision clean, crystalline clear and True, and bathed in the Good.
1. Astrid Fitzgerald, An Artist’s Book of Inspiration: A collection of thoughts on art, artists, and creativity (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1996), 30.
2. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, THIRD BOOK, The World as Idea-Second Aspect, p.38, 39, The great Books Foundation, c.1966, Chicago, Illinois.
3. David Cecil, “Visionary & Dreamers –Two Poetic Painters, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones”, p.5, (c.1969) by the Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
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