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hey leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about what is art [Music] you I don't know about you but I'm a pretty big fan of art after all what is everything in our culture from entertainment and books and movies and all videogames and all this sort of stuff what is all that but art so it's interesting to look at this question of what art is both from the perspective of someone who consumes art and also from someone who creates art because one of the greatest enjoyment filled out of life is to create something beautiful but especially over the last year or so as my understanding of reality has deepened as I've been doing consciousness work as I've had various mystical experiences that has changed my perspective about what art is and I want to share that with you here so it's a much more profound way of looking at art what is the essence of art where does art come from why does art exist what makes for really good art these are all good questions to ask whether you're an artist or just a consumer the first thing we need to realize is that art is completely relative a lot of people get into these debates about well is this thing here art or what about this thing here that's this is a better higher form of art than this form of art quite obviously from an existential perspective this is nonsense all arts are completely relative there are no hard and fast categories for what is beautiful or what is ugly this depends on many factors from your physiology to your psychology to your environment to your education level to your culture to how you were brought up and even to the species that you are a part of because think about this art really exists only for human beings on this planet art does not exist for ants art does not exist for birds and it doesn't even exist for most higher mammals that we know of so it's a relative thing it's very much dependent on your physiology and how your brain works so for humans because we're very social species and we've developed the ability to conceptualize and to symbolize reality that opens up this domain called art but what really is art and where does it really come from well the first thing we have to see is we have to see that art has a lot to do with meaning and significance and attaching that to reality so some parts of reality we find beautiful and meaningful other parts of course relatively speaking are not as beautiful or is not as meaningful and therefore we tend to cherry-pick the beautiful and the most meaningful ones and then to display those as art but of course that whole process really is the process of projection you don't actually find meaning or significance in reality itself you project that onto it using your complicated sophisticated brain machinery that's what you do now what it means to say that art is completely relative is that ultimately no two beings have to agree on what is beautiful or what constitutes art so another way to put it is we could say that everything is art or we could say that nothing is art and then you can make finer distinctions for yourself based upon your personal preferences and your biology and your physiology and your psychology and all your environment and your culture all of that is going to strongly influence what you consider as art or not example of this would be if you take some some guy who's a very avant-garde artist maybe his idea of art would be walking down the sidewalk seeing a dead bird and then getting that dead bird scooping it up gluing it to a poster board and then displaying that in a museum or in his art gallery and of course most of us would look at that and we would say well that guy's clearly just being a douche he's just trying to be some edgy avant-garde artist he's not really doing art and the way we would back that up as we would say well the reason he's not doing art is because hey take a thousand people off the street let's put them in a survey room let's pull them and ask them some questions let's show them a painting of the Mona Lisa and ask them is this art is this good art and of course 99% of them will say yes of course that's art and yeah that's pretty good art but if we take this poster board of a dead bird that this guy made and we show that to them not only will they not say that it's good art they won't even say that it's art in 99% of cases so that's a counter-argument to what I'm saying and people could cite that counter-argument as evidence that art is actually not relative but that there are objective standards for good art now how do we deal with this well of course this doesn't tell us really anything it doesn't it doesn't remove the relativity of art because like I said art is relative to your species your culture and your era so a lot of people ignore these when they think about objective standards to them they call something an objective and absolute standard even though it's completely relative to their species which they completely ignore they don't even think about possibilities of other species like maybe some alien race might have a completely different notion of art and beauty than the human race does and that for many own creatures for most creatures on this planet art doesn't even exist so clearly it has to be created it has to be constructed by the mind but then of course they also discount culture and anything that well all cultures basically consider the same stuff beautiful no it varies it can vary quite a bit there are some similarities because our species is the same so the species is the bigger factor but then cultures are still very important big factor that sets these standards and then of course the time you're living in is also a huge factor so even though your culture might still be the same let's say you're living in Greece or you're living in Europe you know Europe has many thousands of years of history but their culture has changed a lot and what they consider beautiful today is varied from what they considered beautiful 500 years ago or 2,000 years ago or before that or what they will consider beautiful in 10,000 years should have this planet survived that long just try to imagine how different our standards of art will be ten thousand years from now it's virtually unimaginable given how technology is playing into it and how that's shaping our culture and everything is always changing everything is always evolving so you might say well Lea but this example with the dead bird it's a very silly example clearly that's not art but see what I'm saying here is that there's a deeper level at which you can look at art don't look at art just as something at human being constructs look at art as becoming conscious of the innate creativity and beauty of all of reality so with this example of a dead bird you might say of course it's not art but on another level you can see how it could be art because one person walking down a sidewalk sees a dead bird and there are reactions just discussed and they say you a dead bird and they try to run away from it as quickly as they can for another person they walk down the street for a more conscious person he sees that bird but to him that bird has some kind of meaning or significance which of course he's projecting onto it but he sees in that bird maybe the cycle of life and maybe it reminds him of his own death and when he sees the little bugs and ants eating the carcass of that dead bird it's rotting away he thinks about the interconnectedness of all life and how those ants are now going to go take that food back to their colony and they're all going to create more baby ants and so the cycle perpetuates and that dead bird might elicit various emotions in him sadness or compassion or a feeling of love or a feeling of fear of maybe his own death or maybe it'll remind him of something he did when he was younger maybe he used to hunt birds when he was a kid and that made him feel sad for killing these birds and now that memory is triggered in him and so it stirs up some emotion him and really that dead bird on the sidewalk could make this guy cry and for him it can be a very beautiful experience so see it all depends on the context that you're putting it into and what kind of meeting and significance you're projecting on to the situation now of course it's true that most people just walk by and they will just ignore this bird and they would never call it a work of art but that's where consciousness comes in see most people aren't very conscious so for them what they find beautiful or artistic is very very limited probably less than 1% of all of reality to them is beautiful and meaningful and they can see the artistry in it and the rest of it they just dismiss as mundane ordinary reality nothing too remarkable but the more your consciousness Rises the more you're able to see the beauty of everything all around you not just the beauty in a painting on a wall in a museum but on your drive over to the museum you see the beauty of the trees you see the beauty of the construction of the road of the buildings of your car of the design of your phone of the people you're interacting with as you're walking into the museum you're seeing the infinite beauty of all of that and that can have a deeply moving effect on you but that requires high levels of consciousness which few people develop so what is the purpose of art really if you want to get to the to the rock bottom of it in its essence the purpose of art is to delight in infinite creation this right here that you're experiencing all around you right now is infinite creation creation by I mean creation with a capital C I mean reality as a whole infinite creation that's what this is and this thing is infinitely beautiful it's so beautiful and so awesome that your mind actually has to block that off in order to maintain going through and just living ordinary life if you actually saw the infinite beauty of all of creation all at once you could not live your ordinary life you couldn't go take a crap you couldn't go eat your dinner you couldn't go to work because you would be in tears on your knees crying at the beauty of all of reality so what consciousness has to do what your brain had to evolve is it had to evolve a very pragmatic sort of mind state the ordinary level of consciousness that you're at it's so constricted it's really designed to just make you a little slave robot who wakes up on time goes to work and just fulfills the duties of life and reproduction and self survival so the purpose of art then is to actually widen your scope and to see the beauty of infinite creation and there's two ways in which this happens one is art highlights various facets of reality that people find beautiful and even though all of reality is equally beautiful there's no facet of reality which is more beautiful than the other from from God's perspective so to speak objectively speaking but of course from our own individual perspectives we all have preferences about what strikes an emotional chord within us and art is very much an emotional type of game it's all about what moves you emotionally so for one person he's moved by a certain type of movie a drama another person is moved by a comedy another person is not moved by movies at all they're moved by poetry and somebody else is moved by a performance art or ballet or whatever and so there you have the proliferation of all the different media's through which facets of reality can be highlighted so see I can take some facet of reality that just strikes me with awe whatever that is maybe it's a leaf a tree or a certain color that I could paint with a paintbrush or a certain animal that I can go photograph or shoot a video documentary of and make some sort of Discovery Channel National Geographic type of beautiful documentary whatever it is I can I can find some aspect of reality that really moves me and then I can try to capture it and then highlight it sort of put it on a pedestal glorify it for other human beings to see and also for myself to just kind of like have it on my display case so that's one way in which art functions is this this highlighting of facets of reality of course to do that you first have to see those facets yourself if you can't see it then how are you going to highlight it and then of course the process of highlighting that could be a quite involved process it could be something as simple as just plucking a flower from a flower bed and then putting it into a vaz and then just displaying it on a table it could be as simple as that or it could be very involved where you see some beautiful animal but then you want to actually paint it to paint this beautiful animal to really highlight its beauty now you don't want to depict it in a photorealistic way you want to depict those aspects of the animal that are really interesting to you so maybe you like the ferocity of the lie and that's something that you're fascinated by the fur ah the ferocity of lions as they hunt and so you wanted to pick that in your painting and so now you have to go study learn technical skills and then you have to make some new connections about how do I abstract that ferocity and depict it on this canvas and it might not look like a line at all that ferocity it might be completely abstract work of art most people look at it they don't even see a lion there but still they get a certain kind of residue the essence you've captured the essence of it and they get that sort of Farhat ferocity in the splashes of paint on the canvas and in that way what you did is you highlighted these facets of reality the second element is playing God yourself that's what art is really about if you're creating art and by God I mean infinite creation I mean reality itself reality itself all around us is constantly in a process of creation it never stops creating creation not something that happened 5,000 years ago like they say in the Bible creation is happening right this second right now everything is being constantly created and this has been going on for eternity and it will keep going on for eternity and it's infinite so we've got this infinite fractal expanding and and producing more forms out of formlessness form arises and this just is a constant process and this process though is not a random process the way that scientists like to think and in fact it really is the process of evolution see inside so we got the third limited notion of evolution we have the notion of evolution as happening through genes and genetics that is not really what evolution is about evolution is a much broader force which is something I'll talk about in a future episode but really at the heart of evolution is a creative force a very subtle and we still haven't figured out what it is exactly a subtle creative force is there it's not randomness and this evolution is not just happening at the level of genes it's happening at the level of everything everything is involving have you noticed this not only creatures as Darwin said but planets star systems reality as a whole human societies different works of art and mediums of art evolved culture evolves belief systems of all religions evolve economies evolve technology evolves you evolve personally throughout your life so this is the process that just doesn't stop because fundamentally what it is is it's a creative process new insights and combinations are happening which lead to new forms being created and that's fundamentally what all creation is all of existence is this is just constant process of form coming out of formlessness through spontaneous and sight not through randomness not through blind luck it's hard to articulate exactly what's there you need to have some mystical experiences to really appreciate this but what you see when you have mystical experiences you start to see that the fabric of reality itself namely nothingness is highly intelligent there's a deep intelligence there and that in fact it's not you as a human individual being who is intelligent that intelligence that you ascribe to yourself or that we as a species ascribe to ourselves actually that's just a tiny tiny tiny little hair a little filament of universal intelligence that's at work and it's not distinct or separate from that it is part of that it's just that your universal intelligence is just happening on an infinitely more massive scale because it involves all species all ecological systems entire planets and other solar since it's all happening simultaneously together so there's a very sort of holistic perspective that you're not really going to find in the sciences because this requires a lot of consciousness work to really grasp you can't have this perspective just by doing a bunch of analysis you need to actually zoom out and see what's going on at the bigger picture so the purpose of our innocence is for you to tap into that and to participate in this process of Maya Maya is the Hindu term which means the dream state that all of reality is this infinite Colusa nation this infinite dream this matrix that were in and it's constantly happening it's just one giant illusion so that's true that's the case but this illusion is also infinitely creative and so the illusion spawns more illusion and more illusions and illusions within allusions within delusions within illusions its dreams within dreams within dreams to infinity so this of course is happening at the at all levels and of course as a whole if we look at reality non-dualistic Li as a whole of course this is what God is this is consecration process but of course we as little individual egos think that we're separate from that and usually we act as though we are we just go about our lives doing it ordinary stuff but some people and these are the artists they wake up a little bit and they realize that hey I have that creative impulse within me that exact same impulse that exists within your genes within every organism within ecosystems within planets within societies that moves them forward that involves them that force exists within me and it's very enjoyable for me to participate and to add my little element to this process of Maya that's very enjoyable and when you realize that in yourself and then you become a vehicle for serving this evolutionary process of Maya you start to play God and you feel a little bit like God and that produces a sort of spiritual connection within you now for many artists they don't realize any of this they just follow their instincts and they just do their art and they probably don't understand anything I'm talking about right here unless they've really studied this stuff but it's I think it can be very valuable to start to see reality from this perspective to see your art from this perspective because it really takes a tool to a whole new level that maybe you hadn't realized was there and it also shows you the way for how to deepen your art and make it much more meaningful and much more enjoyable for you to do which I'll talk about a little bit later this episode so the more conscious you are the more beautiful reality gets until if your consciousness becomes very very high you actually start to see every piece of reality is beautiful arts job though is to put things on pedestals it's to glorify the beauty and then to also add to it so one of the most enjoyable experiences as an artist is to have that new creative insight where you take some element you saw over there and some element you saw over here that both struck a chord in you and then sort of combined them together and then to have some new epiphany of how you can combine these things in even more beautiful way and then produce something even newer and even more awesome through that process and that of course is not a rational logical process that's a highly intuitive process because this intelligence that pervades all of a reality it's not a cold rational sort of intelligence it's not like God is sitting up there in the clouds thinking of like oh yeah I think I'd like to create a new type of animal or I would like to invent a new type of technology like the internet or the smartphone it doesn't work that way it's a it's a much more subtle process it's almost like the force of gravity you know the force of gravity seems like a very simple force all it is is it's just two particles that are attracted to each other at infinite distances and the closer they are the more they're attracted that's all that force is but then you look at the entire cosmos and you see what that force has created it's created giant stars and beautiful planets and meteors and gas clouds and nebulas and and black holes - all this beautiful stuff and ultimately created everything on earth so just a simple process of gravity well likewise I want you to think that there's a simple force just like that which is what we might call the creative force which operates within you and within everything else which which is responsible for this sort of snowballing effect of Maya Maya starts little particle of illusion and the dream sort of builds on itself and builds on itself and builds on itself until eventually you start to get these very remarkable things you get human beings you get technologies you get societies and and all that stuff so art puts things on a pedestal so that the beauty is more easily seen to people who are not very conscious and this is actually a very important thing because most people in our society are not very conscious and this also points to another important purpose of art which is to help wake people up and to raise their consciousness you see what art tries to do is it tries to pluck emotional strings in you because human beings are very emotional creatures even the most rational of us and so the best way to transform us and to move us into action is through our emotions in fact that's the purpose of emotions is to create motion emotion is used to manipulate human beings into moving into raising their consciousness so if you want to wake someone up you don't do it by presenting a rational argument that virtually never works what you do is you pluck their emotions until they can tap into their own humanity and they can broaden their perspective and they can see the cosmological perspective and then through that process they wake up because like I was saying most people they walk around life living it in this pragmatic days not da YS but da ze they're dazed they're like zombies and the reason we're like zombies most of the time is because we are very much attached to self survival so we're going through life and our mind our consciousness is mostly geared towards how do I survive how do I earn money how do I keep my job how do I not get fired how do I maintain my relationship how do I have sex and reproduce how do I take care of my kids how do I fix up my house so that have a nice place to live this is all the process of self survival but the problem with self survival is that it's a very robotic mechanical process it's sort of lacks heart and as you engage in self survival you lose contact with the infinite beauty of creation because the thing with Beauty is that it's sort of a luxury it's not practical you don't particularly use or yeah you don't use beauty or the emotions that it serves up in you like joy happiness aww reverence love these emotions you can't really take these to the bank you can't go make a killing on Wall Street with this you can't build yourself a giant mansion or buy yourself a fancy new car with this stuff it's just for you it's for your enjoyment which is why I said originally that the purpose of art is the delight and infinite beauty in infant aggression but of course most people they don't delight in life when I talk about seeing the beauty everywhere and being joyful all the time and delighting in life to most people this is a pipe dream because they're so stuck in self survival mode and their consciousness reflects that so ja the job of art is then to to fix that problem because without our humanity would basically just be a giant ant colony it would be a big factory or collection of robots and what art tries to do is it tries to slap you awake by putting the beauty of infinite creation a little piece of it up on display for you on a pedestal so you can look at and say oh yeah of course look there it is it's so beautiful it's so amazing and then that opens your eyes a little bit and you can say oh yeah look that thing's beautiful too and that's beautiful and that's beautiful in that person's beautiful and I'm beautiful oh my god it's all so beautiful and then that takes you to a whole new level of human being and then you can delight in reality and you can enjoy everything as one giant work of art cosmic work of art from every scale from the highest scale to the very lowest scales this is the case if you go with the magnifying glass or microscope right now and you look at your at your kitchen floor at the tiles and you take one of the cracks and the tiles you just look inside there with a microscope you're going to find an infinite collection of beautiful things at every scale 10x magnification 100x a thousand X 10,000 X 100,000 X a million X just keep zooming in you're going to find more and more amazing stuff there you see but how conscious of you are you of that on a minute-by-minute basis virtually not at all not unless someone reminds you of it and that's where art comes into play art tries to slap you awake and to say hey look dummy look at this thing right here isn't as beautiful wake up and look at this isn't this amazing look at this creation that we're in it's amazing what are you doing sleepwalking through life like a zombie wake up that's the purpose of art now this purpose is served really in two ways in the making of art and in the viewing of art so the making of art is you as an artist trying to make it and what that involves is you have to first of all look around you and yourself you have to get in touch with the beauty something has to appear beautiful to you to inspire you otherwise you can't move beyond that you see if you're just a pragmatic zombie you're no artist so you have to be very observant but as you're observing you also have to collect a lot of that data have it inspires you move you emotionally then what you have to do is you have to start to make new connections you see that thing there and this thing here and you combine them together into some original creation and that involves having an insight and the process that generates these artistic insights is really no different from the process that generates enlightenment insights it's the same sort of spontaneous process which is completely outside of your control you can't consciously produce it on will but of course you can set your environment and you can train yourself in other ways that help to increase the odds of these connections occurring and one of the ways to really increase those odds is by by being emotionally moved by lots of stuff and also studying lots of stuff the more stuff you study the more stuff you observe the more new connections you can create and then of course an important component that is enjoying this whole process of observing and making these connections such that it becomes a spiritual process for you like going to church you don't just do art mechanically waking up at 9:00 and then going to work and then going to home at 5:00 that's usually not how artists work artists usually are more spontaneous and for them inspiration is important sometimes they have periods where they're very inspired they produce a lot of beautiful stuff and other periods where they go dormant and they're not inspired or something's not clicking with her with their art or their creatively blocked you see that shows us that this creative process is is whimsical and difficult to control and it's not something that the rational mind can grapple with very easily which is why a lot of very rational people tend to be out of touch artistically and also spiritually art is a very holistic right hemisphere sort of mentality or process whereas irrational thinking is more of a left brain thing and so you have your spiritual experiences you're putting all these things together and then of course what you want to ultimately do is the artist in making your art is you want to then share this with the world because one of the things you'll realize is when you have a really deep spiritual experience a mystical experience is one of the first thing that will cross your mind is that you'll want to share this with the whole world because it's such an amazing thing it's so awesome in exactly the same way that people love to share photos on Facebook what photos do they love to share the most the most awesome ones they could possibly find or take so if you were let's say here's a simple example which is not a mystical experience but I think people can relate to this let's say you're on Safari and you're just driving there and you see some crazy thing happening there's some lions attacking some zebra and they're tearing it apart just this ridiculous scene that you would probably not not even see in a Discovery Channel documentary and here you are tapping right in front of you it's so amazing your jaw drops you're just floored by this you take out your phone of course right and you start recording the thing and then as soon as you're done recording it you don't even give yourself time to really appreciate it already you're trying to post that thing on Facebook you're trying to set it to your mom you're trying to tell all your friends about this awesome thing that you saw why is that because human beings are very social creatures and one of our strengths is that we share a creativity and insights with each other we cross pollinate that's what makes a culture and that's what makes for new discoveries and scientific inventions we sort of build on top of itself like that sort of snowball effect so that's where sharing comes into place and we are programmed to really enjoy sharing the things that are most beautiful and meaningful to us with our people and this of course goes for artists and for mystics and for for for really for anything that you find meaningful in life that's why one of the best things you can do in your life is make your career about sharing the things that you love the most about life with other people and that's what life purpose is about if you want to know more about that check out my life purpose course where we talk about that in a lot of detail so that's the process of creating the art and then there's also the process of viewing the art the viewing of the art is important because first of all it gives purpose to the artist making the art for sharing to having two people at least but it what it does for the viewer is that it gives the viewer an easy spiritual connection because most of us were in this pragmatic zombified days we're just walking around doing our business we're not seeing the beauty of reality we're not spiritual things at all our consciousness spirit level is very low and so if someone can offer us a quick easy and cheap spiritual connection we'll take it which is exactly why at the end of the day you come home you want to watch a good movie you want to read a good novel you want to be emotionally titillated you want to be spiritually uplifted because your work was so draining for most people right and that's where viewing art comes in whether it's a movie or whatever now of course most mainstream art is quite lowbrow and it might not raise your conscious that much in fact it might sort of get you stuck at a low level of consciousness if you're just addicted to watching TV sitcoms all the time you're sort of misusing the medium if you really wanted to you could use that medium of television to watch some very beautiful stuff stuff that really moves you and inspires you to to go out there and become an artist yourself which is ultimately one of the best things that an artist can do is to inspire you to become an artist yourself in your own way and that's what happens when someone puts Beauty on a pedestal for you like this and it's so beautiful you see it like oh my god I have to change my life to be doing that to be also putting Beauty on a pedestal my beauty will be different than other people's beauties and and that's fine that's actually the best part of this whole process is that I'm providing my own little personal spin on things and contributing in my own personal way to this infinite process of Maya so the viewers of art get infected with higher consciousness if it's happening correctly and this ultimately elevates all of society this makes us more humane this makes us more loving and more compassionate this makes us see different perspectives so a lot of movies function in this way if a movie has ever moved you emotionally made you cry or made you think very deeply what did it usually do it it showed you a new perspective on life a perspective that otherwise would be difficult for you to get like if you're watching some sort of World War 2 Holocaust movie and it really it moves you towards the end well that's because you saw something that otherwise you couldn't experience yourself and then of course you were able to empathize and and have those emotions and feelings that the characters were having you were able to step into their shoes and then that ultimately ends up elevating you and elevating all of society and that becomes important in a way art is like a lubrication for the engine of humanity without art the engine would just run and it would quickly burn itself out because you might think like well an engine is very is very mechanical it's got these hard edges and it just kind of works very mechanically and very robotically yes that's true but also without that organic component of oil lubricating all the parts how quickly will your engine break almost instantly you see you need that lubrication you need that sort of soft touch that's what art provides of course for artists making an impact in the world is a very important thing and many of them actually get caught in this trap of seeking approval where they start to lose sight of their art and the reason they got into the art for the first place which is to have their spiritual connections and just to share it freely in a detached way they become attached to the results of their art and they get very neurotic about it they seek approval and they they they start to get depressed they start to worry that all these creative anxieties and that becomes a huge obstacle for artists now art can be any medium there's no limits to the medium that art could work through that should be obvious by this point just by the fact that all art is completely relative and while this means fundamentally that art is free to be any way it wants to be on a practical level if you're an artist right now try to succeed in the real world then you don't find that to be true you find that practically speaking art is limited very much by culture and marketplace to become a successful artist what you really have to do is you must convince millions of people that your art is beautiful and that can be challenging to do successful artists are the ones that actually shape culture and culture is difficult to change because it's dogmatic that's its function its function is to be this this sort of network that combines many elements together and it has a certain kind of inertia and it creates a sort of commonality between many different diverse elements or different people so this can be difficult to do for artists and one of the challenges of being a great artist is to figure out how to shape culture and not to let it shape you because see of course you can let culture shape you that's important but also mainstream culture tends to have a very lowbrow low consciousness quality to it and you don't want to get shaped too much by that because if you do what that culture will do is that it'll actually beat you down your job as an artist is to rise above culture then come back and bring and elevate the rest of culture up to your level rather than the other way around a lot of neurotic artists they fall into trouble because they don't understand that yes they rise up but then they need approval so much that then they drop themselves back down and they let culture work on them too much and then sometimes culture is just very resistant to whatever kind of art or change you're trying to make in it because it is so low consciousness sometimes this culture will end up rejecting you abusing you demonizing you even killing you if your art is that radical enough because low consciousness is always threatened by higher consciousness see the ego is always threatened by the dissolution of ego and the challenging of ego and dogma is always threatened by open mindedness on new perspectives which is why cutting edge artists often times get criticized and rejected and lost to obscurity there are probably thousands of artists all around the world right now who are great very cutting edge genius level artists but who go completely unrecognized I don't know about them you don't know about them our culture at large doesn't know about them because they just don't fit into what our culture is willing to accept at this point their time has not come or they simply haven't figured out how to present their art in a manner which will appeal to our culture our era and our marketplace how well your art does will depend on how well it aligns with economics and the culture of your time the goal for an artist should really be to find a way to stay true as true as possible to what you find most beautiful in life while at the same time finding a way to pay your bills and that can be a challenge a lot of people who do our struggle with figuring out a way how to monetize the art how to market the art how to make a big impact with their art and yet there's also a danger on the other side where even if you do become very successful and you earn millions of dollars and you have tens of millions of people sharing your work and talking about it that can also be a problem because the success will seduce you to just chase more success and to forget about your spiritual connection and so some artists they become very successful but then they're more miserable than ever because when they weren't successful at least what they had was a spiritual connection and that's actually what makes you fulfilled in life is the spiritual connection success does not make you fulfilled but because they get caught in this trap of success which is of course fed into their minds by mainstream culture so they get tricked by mainstream culture into sacrificing their art and they try to make their art more and more successful more and more mainstream right to make your art very successfully need to make it more mainstream but the more you do that the more you sacrifice the spiritual connection not necessarily but in many cases that's the case okay so your job as a artist who wants to be really good at his or her work is to keep deepening your spiritual connection so that your art is constantly evolving it's never staying still you're always becoming more creative you're seeing more and more beauty around you you're integrating more and more of the beauty inside of you you're connecting those in more interesting and more complex ways and then you're able to actualize that into the world your job is to become masterful at this process of putting Beauty on a pedestal and of course that requires technical skills but also personal development work many artists have the right technical skills but they lack the personal development work and the higher levels of consciousness which are possible to really take their art to the next level which is where spiritual purification comes in your job as an artist is to become every single day of more pure vehicle for that innate creative force sets within all of life and within all of reality and of course within yourself and what does that mean that means reducing your ego because there's an inverse an inverse relationship between ego and art the higher your ego the more your ego will want to infect your artwork and the lower quality your artwork will be whereas the lower your ego the less it gets in the way of the innate creative process within you the more that creative process is able to make some very spontaneous insights that lead to amazing art so I think that the most important thing that an artist can do is number one learn business and marketing and study psychology so you understand how math psychology works so do that but also secondly is make a serious commitment to your own personal development and consciousness work a lot of artists even though they're great artists they're neurotic artists you don't want to be a neurotic artist this is a very bad way to go many artists trick themselves and say well but if I wasn't neurotic I couldn't produce the good art that I produce no that's nonsense what that just means is that you have so much talent and you have so much potential within you that despite the fact that you're neurotic you're able to succeed if you were able to churn your neuroticism cure your fears your anxieties your depression your nihilism cure all your chemical addictions cure your negative thinking cure your need for approval cure your own attachment to your art all those are huge obstacles to producing good art if you do that you can become a really powerful vehicle and then your art will get supercharged and not only will your art results be amazing they will be genius level results but also you're going to enjoy the process more because a lot of artists even though they're able to put out a piece of work then they go home depressed or they take pills they take antidepressants or ultimately they have killing themselves why is that because they're not able to actually enjoy the process you see it becomes a sort of twisted process where Maya uses you as a tool or as a puppet to do its work but then it's sort of just like grinds you up and spits you out in the end you don't want that to be you you don't want your art to kill you you don't want your art to cost you your health or to make you burn out or to make you suicidal enjoying the process is what's key the more you're able to enjoy the process the more spiritual the whole process becomes then you'll see that you're going to be much more prolific you're going to be able to get a lot of more stuff out there into the world and then that's going to just take your art to a whole new level that's a pretty rare thing why is it a rare thing because it's pretty rare I think for artists to actually do serious personal development work or consciousness work and one of the reasons I think that is is because actually many people use art as a form of therapy or like self medication so it's because they're so neurotic that then they don't know what to do so as kids or whatever at some point in their life they just picked up some kind of art they started playing the guitar painting or taking photographs or doing whatever and then they just sort of went with it and they get caught in the cycle of creating art and it became just to have it for them and in a sense it's important because it helps them to kind of get their frustrations out but also they become attached to it where they can't stop because they know as soon as they stop then they're just kind of like going to go depressed they have no sense of purpose anymore so the whole thing is kind of built on the wrong foundation what you want to do is you want to go in there fix up the foundation take personal development very seriously start to implement all the non artistic stuff that I talked about with actualized org and you're going to see how much that could open you up to be an amazing artist if you're an artist and you have a sort of any process then here's something I want you to imagine imagine that five or ten years from now you have done so much personal development and consciousness work that you have let go of all these neuroses and you've had multiple spiritual experiences from meditation self inquiring and doing various retreats and maybe taking psychedelics combining all those together and really purifying all your neuroses so that you're liberated you're free and now imagine how effortless your processes you're just waking up every morning and you're just going into your work you're not attached to it you're not worrying about it you're just working at it and you're constantly enjoying it and you're drawing new connections and you're just learning and you're processing more beauty all around you and then you're putting that on pedestals and you're sharing it with the world and how amazing that is and that whole process is so effortless and joyful for you that might seem like a pipe dream but imagine it just for a moment as a vision for what you could do with all the stuff that I talked about visualize that for yourself try to set that for yourself as a vision of what you can work towards and then of course stick with me and let's work towards that because that's a big goal if it seems like a pipe dream it's probably because it means you have a lot of work to do and that's okay we all have that much work to do but the benefits here are really going to be twofold your art is going to become amazing the process of doing your art is going to feel amazing and then thirdly and lastly is you really should be doing this for yourself anyways because just on a personal level even if you're not doing art you want to be able to enjoy and to be conscious enough to see the beauty of reality no matter where you go and you want to be as as closely connected to that as possible even if you're not an artist that's what you want so really it's like you're killing multiple birds with one stone here so this is exactly what you need all right that's it I hope I've given you a new perspective a deeper perspective on art I'm out of here please click like button for me post your comments down below shows the friend and come check out actualized org where you can browse for more videos you can download mp3s you can check out my blog check out the forum check out the life purpose course check out the book list and I'll be adding more resources in the future and then just stay with me every week for more on this process of self actualization you