A conversation on art and spirituality

A conversation on art and spirituality between Aedan O’Shea (writer of fiction and poetry, photographer and eco-artist, singer) and Beatrice Esposito (writer of fiction, journalist, singer)

BE: Maybe we can begin with some of your influences. 

AO: Well . . . John Cage had something of an influence on me. He spoke of writing a music that discovers a sound which has never been heard before. Isn’t that something? In some ways, all songs get at that. But he was trying to carry us way out of our habits of hearing. He wanted us to hear sound as sound. He wanted the work to open us in a radical way.  

LoveWisdom seeks the same. Can all art and poetry do that? Can the poet write things never seen or heard before—and what does that mean?  

Basho tried to write like that. He thought poetry erred when it got subjective or objective. Note that nonduality: Not subjective, and not objective either. Just intimacy. He wrote a poem that went something like this:  

Mist and rain

a day Fuji can’t be seen

that’s interesting! 

He might have said, “What a blessing!” or “Amazing moment!” Seeing what is, without conceptualizing it. Opening to intimacy with life.  

BE: We make a pilgrimage to Fuji because we want to see the mountain. But Basho finds beauty in what is, finds home in the journey itself. 

AO: Yes, that’s a key part of the story. How can art do that in a way which does not simply duplicate Basho’s or Cage’s efforts? No master wants mimics. How can art and philosophy open people up in radical ways? 

BE: So the purpose of art is to open us? 

AO: That’s one way to put it: Open eyes, open heart. But, more like entering the already openness, entering the heart of wonder that already is. The purpose has to be cosmic. It has to cultivate the whole of life and the whole of the cosmos onward. That seems to be the essence of LoveWisdom and art.  

In another way of getting at these things, Cage spoke about sobering and quieting the mind so that it might be susceptible to divine influences.  

BE: He wrote sobering music? 

AO: Sobering, but not sombering, not grave. It means ending our drunken stupor and the habitual noise that drowns out the soul. The purpose of philosophy and art is to sober and quiet the mind so that it might be susceptible to sacredness, susceptible to wisdom, love, and beauty. Cage was an artist, and he felt that art as commonly practiced by other artists did not invite that sort of experience. He felt art usually ended up being about something else, and he almost walked away from the arts because he wanted something more for himself and the world. 

BE: Wouldn’t that sound interesting to hear? If someone said, “I am very susceptible to sacredness,” or, “I am so darned susceptible to love, to wisdom, to beauty”—especially after engaging with a work of art? Normally we might say we are very susceptible to flattery, or we are susceptible to temptation, and so on. We are susceptible to distraction, to anger, to craving. But art could make us susceptible to peace, love, healing, joy, wonder, and deep trust—not merely as a platitude, but as an experience. That would take some training of both the artist and the viewer, wouldn’t it? 

AO: It seems so. We could say that art and philosophy or spirituality can invite us into an ongoing state of inspiration, an ongoing susceptibility to insight and inspiration, ongoing susceptibility to the mystery, to mutual liberation, mutual illumination, mutual nourishment and the other fine things you mentioned, and that this does involve training the mind and becoming intimate with the nature of mind and the nature of reality.  

BE: That’s the sobriety. A state of inspiration doesn’t make for an ordinary sobriety.  

AO: Exactly. It’s like a divine drunkenness. As Hafiz would say, we become the wine.  

BE: There’s something subversive in that. 

AO: Very much so. Subversive to the ego, and subversive to structures of domination and oppression in the culture. Easily watered down through spiritual materialism: false consciousness, ideology, spiritual bypassing. Platitudes about art amount to false consciousness. 

BE: But art can be very powerful.  

AO: No doubt about it. LoveWisdom too. Which is why we limit both, even as participants in terms of audience for art or students of philosophy. 

BE: How does the audience limit the power of art? 

AO: First, we may not let the work in. We have to let ourselves become susceptible. We invite the work in, like inviting a vampire into our home. Some versions of the vampire myth say that a vampire can only enter our home if we invite them in. 

BE: A bit ominous.  

AO: Our life has to be at stake, otherwise the experience gets co-opted.  

BE: At stake, or at the stake? 

AO: Yes. Some poets sneak in bad jokes all the time.  

BE: Would you say engaging with a work of art is like entering a dialogue with Socrates? 

AO: That’s a great philosophical analogy. Art can function more broadly than that, but that analogy illustrates how art and philosophy or spirituality take up the same work. It also reminds us that, typically, it takes a lot of what we might call practice or training to maximize the impact of LoveWisdom and art. That’s not such a great way of phrasing it, but we are talking about putting our whole life on the line. I am the first to admit that this can be scary. If it’s not existentially charged like that, at least a little bit, then we limit ourselves.  

We’ve spoken before about the artist as shaman, and how a shaman has a certain set of spirit helpers, allies, and also what we could refer to as objects of power. That’s a bad concept . . . “objects”. But it gets a western thinker headed in the general direction. Maybe. 

BE: We spoke about how the view of imagination differs in conquest culture versus some indigenous cultures. Some indigenous cultures relate to imagination much more ecologically and spiritually. 

AO: A pleonasm.

BE: Ecologically “and” spirituality. Right. Because you define spirituality as a matter of attuning to how things are, and we cannot have a realistic ecology, a skillful relationship with the larger community of life, if we don’t renounce our opinions and our agendas. 

AO: A more skillful and realistic ecological view means a more spiritual view. Living well in the community of life means communion. 

BE: Can you say a little about imagination as some indigenous cultures view it? 

AO: Some indigenous cultures might understand or wonderstand the quality of mind or experience we call imagination as animal and spirit helpers presencing or manifesting in our lives. Notice that striking difference: Sacred spiritual powers presence themselves in our lives. They function—they manifest as the holistic functioning of life—in/through/as our mind, heart, body, world, and cosmos. I was going to talk about a different shamanic charm, a different element in my own mandala, but this one appears now: We are lived by powers we pretend to understand. 

BE: D.H. Lawrence. 

AO: Yes.  

BE: I love that. You say it often. And here we can sense that what the dominant culture localizes in our skulls and thinks of as a personal possession appears in another culture as powers that live themselves in, through, and as us. 

AO: Powers to which we bear a duty of responsibility and responsiveness—and also through which we fulfill our ethical responsibilities and responsiveness.  

BE: Total interwovenness.  

AO: This is the ecology of mind, and the mind of ecology—intimate participation in the cosmos and in the community of life, the local living landscape, and mysterious powers, the sacred powers and inconceivable causes that make life happen. 

One lives in a place for generations, and the wisdom, love, and beauty of the place can work its magic in/through/as our life and the life of all the beings with whom we discover and create that landscape—with whom we discover and create ourselves and our world. It has cosmic proportions, and carries an ontological kind of responsibility, which means a cosmic level of ethics. It fosters ethical relationships within human families, between human families in tribes and clans, between clans and nations of people. And, quite crucially and centrally, between humans and the other beings of the world and of the cosmos. 

From the indigenous perspective, insisting on imagination cut off from ecology—imagination not intimately and immediately rooted in the living world and the loving cosmos—goes altogether with the cultivation of a mind unwilling to attune to ecological reality—which means cosmic reality. So, fundamentally, the conquest consciousness seems unwilling to attune with reality. We could define that as insanity.  

BE: Insanity means an unwillingness to attune with reality. 

AO: On the other hand, divine madness seems like madness because it attunes with reality no matter what the culture declares as rational. It’s a sacred sanity. 

BE: When we try and ignore the ecology of mind, we become fragmented. It’s a psychotic break, even if it seems like neurosis in many cases. 

AO: Yes, we can get by with it, because, generally speaking, the community of life generously absorbs the consequences of our ignorance. But we have come to the limits of that. 

Insanity means we cut ourselves off from reality, and lose the intimate and immediate sense of sacredness and meaningfulness in the world. Moreover, we begin to look at that kind of relationship as primitive, irrational, and so on. Our deluded condition of mind leads us to judge health as unhealthy, and to judge unhealthiness as natural, rational, and right. It also confuses the personal and the impersonal. We treat our suffering and our imagination as personal, but in fact our suffering connects us with other beings, and our creativity is not a personal possession or even a localizable “faculty” in the brain or the personality, but a function of larger ecologies of mind, a manifestation of sacred powers and inconceivable causes. 

All of this also means we cut ourselves off from magic and mystery. 

BE: That seems obvious as a general suggestion, but can you maybe say something specific about it? 

AO: Well, for one thing, we can begin to look with more care and sensitivity at how to expand our sense of artistic practice. Why try to own and control it? Many artists might think that they allow something to come “through” them, but without a deliberate, discerning, wise, loving, and beautiful practice, it not only seems hit and miss, but this supposed “coming through me” has little to no significant spiritual impact on the artist—otherwise more artists would be sages. 

BE: Maybe in all our veneration of art, it behooves us to keep in mind that we don’t, in the most general way, look to the arts for wisdom, for instruction in life. 

AO: We’ve gotten pretty far into dangerous territory.  

BE: A lot of artists could take offense. They could feel defensive, or even feign indifference. All sorts of reactions. We should both declare our fidelity to art! 

AO: We’re artists. We love and respect the arts. Nevertheless, in that limited but important sense you just touched on, philosophy is more fundamental than art. We can’t fully separate these things, but in a relative sense, philosophy comes first. And thus we don’t have much precedent for artists founding spiritual or philosophical traditions, or even founding political or psychological traditions. We refer to artists as visionaries, but the spiritual traditions have a high bar for what that means, and most artists don’t qualify. Of course, it’s a far worse symptom to declare some techno-capitalist a “visionary,” which we do more often nowadays than we do with artists. However, the spiritual traditions still have a demanding set of criteria for a true visionary, and most artists would have to admit they don’t meet those criteria. Moreover, it seems unlikely that art itself could ever get one there. It requires the philosophical way of life, the practices and philosophical visions, set forth in those traditions. 

In some sense, most artists are philosophical laborers, not philosophical visionaries.  

BE: The territory still feels dangerous. I can imagine artists protesting in all sorts of ways. 

AO: But we are in part talking about a genuine liberation of art and artist, for they tend to function far more as servants to bad philosophy than they realize, and it needn’t remain that way. We inquire into liberation. Even if they think of themselves as rebels against bad philosophy, their reactivity against it may in fact happen mostly in relation to that bad philosophy. 

BE: In other words, the bad philosophy still sets the terms.  

AO: Yes. And a true rebellion or revolution or rejuvenation will demand that they go to more healthy, healing, holistic, and even holy traditions in order to arrive at a better philosophy, which then becomes the context for better art and a better culture. 

BE: We see this over and over, don’t we? For instance, the surrealists received inspiration from psychology and from the occult, but we should point out that this means they really received inspiration from philosophy, since Freud and Jung in turn found inspiration in Nietzsche, the Ancient Greeks, Gnosticism, and so on. And “occult” means some mix of shamanistic, mystical, and pagan philosophies.  

AO: And other painters of the time took their cosmogram from the new physics. That was just physics usurping the role of philosophy, which always inherently involves a basic view of the cosmos. The artist works with the available cosmograms, which get handed to the culture by the mystics, the shamans, the philosophers, the visionaries. If LoveWisdom or philosophy is simply “the way we do things,” the basic way we live, our feel for what the cosmos is and what humans and other beings are, art always comes after that. LoveWisdom is the already-there context for all activity. 

BE: A cosmogram is like a mandala or holographic image of the cosmos, which the culture’s philosophy forms or in-forms. 

AO: Right. We always make a mandala, individually and collectively. And in our case we tend to put deluded, incoherent, or fragmented and fragmenting things in the mandala in place of symbols of wisdom, love, and beauty.  

BE: To get back to magic, would you say magic has to do with a kind of cosmogram, a particular image of the cosmos and the self? 

AO: Yes. It has to do with a participatory cosmogram, a cosmogram of interwovenness. We practice magic so as to attune ourselves with how things are, to liberate beings, to bring health and healing to the community of life, and to create and cultivate the world onward. The practice of magic means the training of the mind, the transcendence of egocentrism, the realization of eco-centrism, and so on. We are dealing with the concept of magic in the most pragmatic and realistic sense, not as something airy-fairy. 

BE: Quite a few artists had serious interests in magic, the occult, shamanism, and so on. 

AO: Again, art doesn’t provide philosophy, but rather no artist can do anything without already having philosophical notions framing their activity. When artists realize they need better philosophies, they go searching where we expect to find them: In the spiritual and philosophical traditions. Even if we were to think, “I’ll look for it in the activity of painting,” or, “I’ll study works of art to find it,” we would have already made a bunch of philosophical assumptions, or we would find that the artists making other works have themselves assumed or studied various philosophical notions. 

But consider my poetic ancestor William Butler Yeats, who did not claim that he found magic by simply writing poetry. Rather, I think he sought out magic, realized that our Celtic ancestors found magic in the land, found magic inherent in reality, and experienced it as an intimate and effective means of attuning with reality and knowing themselves and their World. This magic shaped their poetry and song, their stories, dances, and whole way of life. The art must arise out of attunement with this magic—as a practice of magic. 

BE: Art is a practice of magic. 

AO: Yeats wrote that he had an intimate confidence in a LoveWisdom that included what we would call magic.  

We should go slowly here, because this involves nuances. 

LoveWisdom, traditionally speaking, often seems to involve what the scientistic mind would call magic.  

BE: The scientistic mind?

AO: Yes, science as spiritual materialism, or as dogmatic religion. 

BE: But, isn’t science as we know it dominated by a paradigm that rejects what we would call magic? 

AO: True enough. But some scientists remain open to these sorts of things, others remain far more shut down. Those who naïvely assume they aren’t engaged in speculative metaphysics simply because they dream up their metaphysics after reading popular or technical treatises based on scientific theory and experiment have inducted themselves into a kind of cult, which we can call scientism. 

Anyway, Yeats had the good sense to refer explicitly to the practice of magic, magic as the practice of a philosophy or way of life. Science, too, is a practice—an altogether practice. It’s not a narrow thing that we can isolate in a lab. It happens or arises out of a culture, and thus out of a culture’s basic philosophy. Art happens that way too. 

Let’s try and remain open to discussing magic as a practice, even though the science of the dominant culture has shut us down to it. We want to try and open up to the question of which kind of practice seems most skillful and realistic, most wise, loving, and beautiful. 

In a manner similar to a more indigenous or skillful philosophical view of imagination, Yeats referred to “the evocation of spirits”. Imagination itself means evoking “spirits”. By this definition, art is magic. Poetry is magic. Poetry involves incantation and the conjuring of a world. Yeats knew that well. A poet doesn’t succeed because they make a “work of art,” but because they conjure something in the soul of the reader and in the soul of the world. The technical challenges of art reflect the technical demands of magic. Magic demands a great deal in terms of the form of how we do things, as well as the quality of mind. Incantations demand rhythm and precision, the gestures of magic require grace and precision, and so on. And, most of all, magic demands clarity of mind, the training and attunement of awareness. One must develop exquisite awareness, an ecosensual awareness and a connectedness to all things, in living, loving relationship.

BE: The artist doesn’t “do” the art, but instead evokes spirits who accomplish it. Those are like the spiritual allies of the shaman. 

AO: Yes. And we can consider it more broadly than shamanism. From Homer’s invocation of the Muse to Haydn’s, Bach’s and other musicians’ invocation of the divine, artists with a skillful epistemology have understood or wonderstood that they should not bother trying to “create”. Rather, they should step aside and allow the sacred powers and inconceivable causes to do the work. The ego, the part of us that says, “I,” does not make the art. This comes down to scientific fact. That conscious ego has too narrow a bandwidth to make the art. 

BE: As you often say, Why bother making a work of art when I could let Sophia do it for me? 

AO: Sophia, the divine, the mystery . . . whatever. No one who has excelled in the arts has failed to have some taste of this, some experience of the mystery coming through, manifesting the best work of their life.

BE: And we have our eye on allowing that kind of work to have a more holistic and healing effect on the artist and the world. 

AO: That’s a central part of it. How do we let wisdom, love, and beauty work through us, and also work on us, in such a way that we dispel the pattern of insanity that destroys ecologies and creates so much suffering—even in our personal life—and find a genuinely better way onward for the whole of life? 

As far as working with this evocation, Yeats said he didn’t know what the spirits are. That’s fine. They are part of the sacred powers and inconceivable causes. We shouldn’t pretend to know them. All the brain scans in the world won’t help either. No one writes poems by pressing on their cingulate gyrus. I can’t feel my neurons, and I have no idea which ones get involved when writing poems. But I can certainly engage in the spiritual or visionary practices that again and again prove their capacity to conjure up these powers. 

Anyway, whatever these powers are, Yeats knew they have the capacity to create. We might say they have the capacity to create magical illusions, in a dismissive sense, but the spiritual traditions teach us that what we call reality has the status of a magical illusion. Life is but a dream. That doesn’t reduce its ontological status. It’s a real dream, so to speak. When we wake up from delusion, we find ourselves in a dream, while in the delusion we found ourselves in “reality”. Does that make sense? 

BE: While submerged in delusion, we look around thinking everything we see is “real,” but then when we wake up and touch reality itself, we feel that things are more like magic, more like a sacred dream. 

AO: That’s a nice way to put it. With that said, let’s try and define magic more clearly. Yeats delineates three doctrines of magic. The thing about these doctrines, the big shock of them, comes to this: They became actual scientific principles, what we might call the doctrines of cutting-edge cognitive science and even physics. The scientists take them very seriously, and many of those scientists might protest at any association with magic. But that seems to come from a kind of closed mind, as if we cannot admit and accept the way science presents fundamental challenges to its own dominant paradigm. 

BE: Scientists already seem non plussed by the quantum physics and spirituality angle, and now the last thing they want to hear is a cognitive science and magic story. 

AO: Something like that.  

BE: But you also insist on practicing discernment, and you have offered a lot of criticism of so-called new age or airy-fairy ideas. You just said we want nothing to do with airy-fairy notions. 

AO: Yes. The ego wants to turn the magical nature of the cosmos into a fantasy serving its delusions. Instead, the magic of the cosmos functions as the ego’s ultimate disappointment. Real magic has to do with transcending our ignorance, but the ego wants magic to empower its ignorance, to fulfill its cravings and attachments. 

BE: What are the principles of magic? Maybe that will help clarify these things. 

AO: Indeed, because magic involves expansion into larger ecologies of mind. In other words, magic carries us beyond the ego.  

The principles of magic that Yeats provides go like this: 

First, the borders of our minds ceaselessly shift. That can frighten the ego, because the ego tries to ground itself, tries to maintain borders and barriers. William James wrote about how freaked out he got at the experience that multiple minds might flow into one another—he had a visceral insight into this possibility and it really shook him. We can think of this interwovenness of mindstreams as, in some sense, a single mind or a single mystery—a grand aesthetic, gnostic, passionate nonduality. 

BE: The implicate order, maybe, as David Bohm referred to it? 

AO: Maybe so. Or at least, we could put it that way. It’s wisdom, love, and beauty, or the nonduality of the bodies in Buddhism. It’s not easy to get at. 

BE: Maybe we should consider the second principle? 

AO: As with the borders of mind, the borders of memory also shift. This means our memories may participate in one vast memory, the memory of Nature, the memory of Sophia, or, again, the mind of the Cosmos in its interwovenness, its total nonduality of unity and diversity.  This memory can dwell in the landscape itself, in places and ecologies, and even in lineages and so on.

BE: So, in both of these cases, we find an essential statement of the way mind and memory transcend the skull. This feels spooky because it means mind and memory are not strictly neuronal, and maybe not strictly “personal”. 

AO: Right. 

BE: And we have evidence for these theories? 

AO: Yes. From many directions. For instance, James McConnell was one of the first scientists to demonstrate non-neuronal or extra-neuronal memory. He showed it in flatworms. People such as Monica Gagliano showed it in plants. Plants shouldn’t have memories or even mind, because they don’t have neurons. But indigenous people have engaged with the minds of plants for millennia, and cognitive science began to look at the possibility that any form of life inherently presences mind. The sciences have gone so far as to explore mind as fundamental to the cosmos—such as Wheeler’s suggestion of “it” from “bit,” matter from a deeper layer of meaningfulness. In any case, dynamical systems models of mind demonstrate clearly that we can develop a strict scientific understanding of mind in which mind transcends neurons and brains. And we can find a whole body of research into phenomena that rupture the ordinary boundaries of time and space, of mind and matter—rigorous, peer-reviewed science that many scientists remain ignorant or dismissive about. 

BE: What about the final principle of magic? We have mind and memory transcending the ego and even the supposedly individual organism. 

AO: Just a quick note there, an additional emphasis: Magic ruptures duality, including the duality between organism and environment, and it offers us expansiveness, openness, and wonder.  

BE: Magic challenges our habitual fragmentation, atomism, and the view that we live in a dead universe. 

AO: Yes. Okay, the third principle has to do with how we channel that magic, so to speak, how we conjure and create on the basis of magic, how we reach across those barriers and participate in the cosmos in ways that defy the ego and the dominant paradigm. That has to do with symbols, with mandalas, mantras, incantations, rituals, images, and practices of mind—practices of heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos.  

When we work with symbols skillfully, we kind of evoke or elicit the responsiveness of larger ecologies of mind, we evoke the responsiveness of the cosmic mind and memory, the sacred powers and inconceivable causes. This kind of symbolic work includes, incidentally, much of what we would call tantric practice, esotericism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and a wide range of indigenous and other philosophical or spiritual practices. The spiritual traditions conjure these powers to enhance liberation, to amplify and accelerate the realization of wisdom, love, and beauty. They use this conjuring to heal minds, hearts, bodies, and worlds, to heal ecologies, to grow food, to put beings in attunement with life. We can also use them to conjure up inspiration, so that art becomes much more empowered in relation to our healing and our evolution, on a personal and cultural level. 

BE: This puts us in a different world . . . To live in accord with magic puts us in such a different world. It’s like we currently live in a boring, degraded world, an incoherent world even, and here, we consider a vision of a world constituted by mind and imagination, something alive and alove as you put it, something inherently magical, mysterious, and participatory. In this kind of vision, we participate intimately in the world and in the cosmos. The artist doesn’t make “objects,” but rather channels healing and creative powers, and the work of art might appear more like an amulet, or even like a forest.  

AO: Yes. Not to say an amulet in the narrow sense—though it could actually be one.  

BE: Yes, I meant it in both senses: That an artist might make an amulet, and still think themselves an artist, or the painter might make a painting, but it would carry the presence and power of an amulet.  

AO: Yes, it seems both senses would become possible. Much that we cannot really conceive from within the dominant paradigm might become possible. 

BE: This seems to almost demand a more ritually-informed art, or at least a sense of sacredness. 

AO: Well, we shift out of imagination as some “faculty” of the brain or the “personal” mind, and we shift into imagination as something transcending the ego, and something deeply ethical, ontological, and epistemological, something inherent in the nature of the cosmos. We call upon the powers of Nature, conjure up cosmic mysteries, and we don’t do that for any narrow human purpose, but on behalf of all beings, as a cosmic and ecological activity, an activity of health and healing, an activity of cultivating the whole of life onward.  

BE: Making art becomes something far more expansive than we usually allow it. But, we must certainly invite a whole other repertoire of spiritual materialism. The ego could get just as grand here, if not more so. 

AO: Of course. We have to handle all philosophies the way we would handle a poisonous snake, as Buddha admitted of his own philosophy. And it seems to me that the more potential a philosophy has for liberation, often the more dangers it presents.  

BE: Maybe that holds true in one sense, but in another sense, if a philosophy can attune us with reality, that seems far less dangerous than what we have. As you suggested, the dominant philosophies seem to involve an unwillingness to attune with reality. And artists become, as you say, philosophical laborers, working in service of these philosophies—even if it conflicts with their own professed values. The way we live life and make art now goes altogether with degradation of the ecologies we all depend on—not to mention the fact that the dominant philosophies either put us in a universe of matter that doesn’t matter, or they put us in some enhanced form of delusion, where the ego co-opts the magic for its own agendas. The philosophies that fuel the style of consciousness that dominates all of us involve a crisis of meaning that goes with a crisis of wisdom, love, and beauty. Everything seems to get degraded.  

AO: Yeats said he almost wished he could put magic out of his mind, wished he could just walk away from it, because his understanding of magic left him living in a degraded world. Aldo Leopold wrote something like that. He felt that if you got an ecological education, you found yourself living in a world of wounds. Similarly, Yeats experienced insight into magic as revealing all the ways we have harmed this world, all the ways our ignorance has created ugliness.  

BE: The intimate connection between beauty and magic, between wisdom and magic, between love and magic. It’s all magic. Art that lacks magic ends up lacking beauty. Even if we think of it as beautiful in some way, it could be even more beautiful, more wise, more loving, if it emerged as a practice of magic—a practice that demands training the mind, the heart, the body. 

AO: Right. Yeats saw it everywhere: Ugly houses, ugly hand bags, ugly shoes and pants, ugly streets, all conjured forth by unskillful magicians living out of their false ugliness instead their inherent beauty, wisdom, and love.  

BE: Now we add ugly oil spills, ugly extinctions, ugly nuclear bombs, and on and on—not to mention continuing and even evolving ugly politics, ugly agriculture, ugly consumption, and so much more that was already present in his day. 

AO: Well, the extinctions weren’t new either, and Ireland has suffered dearly altogether with the loss of forests and wolves and countless other beings that in turn went with a way of life, the Celtic way of life that perhaps hangs on by threads, in the memory of the landscape itself. All of this, at local and global scales, shows how what we might call inner and outer ecocide go together. Yeats saw the extinction of ecologies of mind at work in his time and place, the degradation of the landscape of the soul, a slow extinction over centuries of what people once found evident and obvious in many places all over the world.  

BE: And it goes together with conquest consciousness and an anthropocentrism. If imagination has a strictly human origin, we have yet another “reason” to count ourselves superior to nature, and this in turn gives us all the more “reason” to lord it over the natural world. From this limiting perspective, it’s not alive and alove. From this limiting perspective, we aren’t surrounded by mind, by magic, and by sacredness—to which we owe responsibility and reverence. We ignore the ethical imperatives immediate in our home, our ecology and our cosmos. 

AO: And now, we may in some cases even begin to prefer unnatural settings, perhaps altogether with making increasingly unethical decisions. Thus, we find that so-called intellectuals do better in urban environments than non-intellectuals. We have a system in which many of the most highly educated, often those considered most intelligent, have no direct contact with wildness and no sense of loss in relation to that tragic absence. They cannot detect their own insanity. 

BE: You mentioned the place of ethics here. In fact this seems to relate to intellectual conscience, something Nietzsche prized. And it relates to a basic kind of integrity. 

AO: Yes, in general we could say that wisdom leads us to see beauty as an ethical imperative, an imperative of love. That’s basic to our integrity. Here, we mean integrity in the basic ethical sense and in the sense the Daoists invite us to enter into. That has to do with virtue and virtuosity, our wholeness and well-put-togetherness. Our integrity not only relates to ethics, but to efficacy, efficacy as a function of coherence and our practiced and realized wholeness. We empower ourselves when we attune, when we synchronize heart, mind, body, world, cosmos. 

BE: Attune with the Way, which includes Nature. 

AO: Yes. We cannot have ethical or intellectual integrity outside of the interwovenness of Nature and Culture, which means our human minds and the minds of the larger ecologies. Integrity, ethics, empowerment, inspiration . . . all these things arise from attunement with the sacred creative ordering, the way what we call “human” embraces and is embraced by everything else, enfolds and is enfolded into everything else. We have to learn that dance, and when we dance well, we dance the world into being with great beauty, with wondrous wisdom, with mysterious love.  

BE: So the experience of imagination arises as the mindedness of all things. As Dogen put it: All of sentient being.  

AO: Yes. Mindfulness also means the way everything is already full of mind—not in the sense of something reified, but in the sense that reality has no gaps, and everywhere we look we find it totally abundant with luminous awareness. That awareness is luminous, which means open, not stuck, not solid or fixed. But it’s cognizant. The nature of mind is the basic mindedness of nature. 

BE: Our mind arises altogether with everything else.  

AO: This is the meaning of co-dependent origination: Our minds are constituted by all things—and all things are constituted by our minds.  

BE: A spiritual life means understanding that, attuning with the deeper reality. On the one hand, we might wish that as the intention for anything we would call science. On the other hand, we seem to venture into territory scientists would call “superstition” or “the supernatural”. 

AO: Gregory Bateson stands out as a kind of emblematic figure here. He rightly called the dominant paradigm obsolete. The situation involves a great deal of nuance. On the one hand, Bateson valued scientific thinking. On the other hand, he lived at Esalen, in the midst of a “new age” community. He felt far more comfortable with “new-agey” people than he did with scientists. At the same time, he probably disbelieved most of what his dear friends believed—and he would likely feel skeptical about some of the things we inquire into here together. 

BE: That must have been so challenging for him in some ways. And this is how he got to the title of his final book: Angels Fear. He felt a lot of trepidation about wanting to venture where angels fear to tread. 

AO: Yes. He accepted neither scientism nor the supernatural, neither a reductive “mechanistic” dogma nor an airy-fairy one. And he found insanity in both, so much so that he perhaps reactively avoided looking at things we now have scientific data to support, things like so-called ESP. He might have thought that any support for such phenomena indicated no more than the obsolescence of our science, and not the “reality” of such phenomena. It seems to me, however, that he went to far—out of that fear, the fear of treading where angels fear to tread. We could say that’s why Satan hated humans: The divine invites us to go beyond the angels. The LoveWisdom traditions give humans an invitation to explore, as long as we keep our humility. 

BE: All of this seems to matter because you want to approach these things with care, and in fact with humility. If we can admit that we don’t know, if we can admit that Nature still holds secrets and surprises, then we cannot claim certainty about essentially metaphysical matters. The scientist ends up asserting metaphysical notions with far too much confidence—arrogance even. And yet, we don’t want to verge into mumbo-jumbo.  

AO: As Jeff Kripal put it, Nature is already super. It’s super nature—transcending the limits of our concepts and theories. Past paradigm shifts show us how dramatically our cosmogram can change. Why not admit that? Why assert your metaphysics with such certainty, the way scientists do, while denying that one has done nothing more than assert speculative metaphysics? 

BE: How does Bateson deal with this? What does he allow in? 

AO: Let’s not get into a big analysis of Bateson. His views remained unfinished. Let’s at least acknowledge some general things, some of which he might accept, some of which he might reject, but all of which we have to evaluate for ourselves. 

BE: Fair enough. 

AO: We can ask about the relationship between contemporary science and the spiritual and philosophical traditions in many ways. One way might go like this: When we consider some of the advances in cognitive science, and then we look at the religions and philosophical traditions of the world, do we find anything in them that seems rather wise?  

BE: Okay. So, we are used to seeing a lot of superstition and ignorance. We got brainwashed by the so-called “Enlightenment” and by people like Steven Pinker and many others to think of science as truth, and all the rest as “superstition” and “irrationality,” and so on. But, do we find genuine wisdom in these traditions? And we don’t mean this as an easy bar to clear, right? 

AO: Right. Once we recognize the delusions of conscious human purpose, the profound limitations of the bandwidth of what we call consciousness, the realities of larger ecologies of mind, and so on, we can ask whether the spiritual traditions actually facilitate better thinking, knowing, and being, better living, loving, and liberating than our current “enlightened” and “rational” approaches. Do we in fact find ourselves having to admit the superiority of at least some aspects of these older epistemologies, when we compare them with the ways of knowing that operate the dominant culture?  

Among other things, we might find that the sense of sacredness involved something like an integrative dimension of experience, a way to relate to elements of the wholeness of things.  

BE: Integration and wholeness. This feels knotty. 

AO: Well, naughty depends on how prudish your science is. 

BE: What? Oh—not naughty. I mean knotty, like knots, a Gordian knot. 

AO: Oh. Yes. Definitely knotty. We could say that we spend most of our time dealing with things we can affect in linear ways. We deal with linear causality, a functionally Newtonian universe. We can analyze and isolate. We do that all the time in our science: We isolate variables. But what about effects that arise from the whole, and not the parts?  

BE: But, we can’t keep the whole in mind.  

AO: Exactly. The thing that tries to keep the whole in mind is only a part. The conscious mind cannot manipulate the whole, and is in fact affected by the whole, arises in/through/as the whole. 

BE: On the one hand, it seems we can directly experience this. On the other hand, we seem to find ourselves needing a leap of faith.  

AO: Well, let’s look at it from both sides: Faith and doubt. Because we start with doubt, but we don’t know how to doubt anymore. We simply dismiss. 

The Skeptic, in the proper sense, seeks to open us, to open the heart, to open the mind, the body, the World.  

BE: That really gets at it. Do we want a cosmogram that feels open and expansive, a basic sense of ourselves and the world that opens us, or do we think we will function better with a limited, limiting, fragmented and fragmenting view? 

AO: Yes. Of course, the Skeptic gets at the openness first from inquiry. Inquiry itself opens them. They offer an invitation into wonder, not an invitation into dismissiveness. The original Greek word σκέπτομαι (skeptomai) had to do with inquiry, investigation, searching into. The original Skeptic practiced suspense, which means a suspense of beliefs and presuppositions—and also means a feeling of discomfort, as we sit at the edge of wonder and awe, letting go of all the beliefs we use to get ground under our feet, to manipulate and control, to feel “safe”.  

BE: Emerson’s essay on circles has those famous lines about how nothing is secure but life itself. We speak about uncertainty, change, and the incredible energy all around us, and we kind of close up in reaction to it. But what we think of as uncertainty, impermanence, and flowing energy is just life. He says that any sense of love we experience now might get transcended in the next moment, and any truth we hold dear might seem trivial, partial, or even false in the brilliance of new insight. And the famous line is, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” 

AO: Yes, I love that essay. Can we stand the feeling of unsettlement? Can we open to unsettlement? 

BE: The unsettlement somehow leads to a lasting refuge, because, instead of taking refuge in our concepts and beliefs, we take refuge in reality. 

AO: Precisely. We take refuge in the way things are, which is refuge in the pattern, the sacred creative ordering.  

We think of the ancient philosopher Diogenes as a Cynic rather than a Skeptic, but he had the same spirit as the Skeptics. He offered his fellow citizens—and us, still today—some lovely skeptical gestures, despite living out as much the trickster archetype as the sage. He did this as well as Socrates did, because LoveWisdom inherently demands search, inquiry, investigation, and suspense.  

Diogenes went around with a lamp during the day, claiming to be in search of an honest person. He lived in poverty (like Saint Francis), and slept in a sort of large ceramic pot in the middle of town. When asked where he was from, instead of giving the “proper” response for his time (to name the city of his birth), he replied, “I am a Cosmopolitan.” Today, we may at first incline to hear this as, “I am a citizen of the World.” But he apparently said, κοσμοπολίτης, and κόσμος (Cosmos) means Cosmos. We may as well wonderstand Diogenes as saying, “I am a citizen of the Cosmos,” “I am a participant in the Wholeness,” and even, “I am a co-creator and co-discoverer of the Sacred Ordering, the Sacred Patterning . . . I arise as the Patterning That Connects,” “I arise as the Wholeness of Activity,” or even, “I Am That.” The Cynics sought harmony with Nature, and Diogenes seems to have thought human beings mucked up the gifts bestowed on us by the divine, by the mystery, by wisdom, love, and beauty. We muck them up with our agendas.  

BE: The artist needs honesty too. 

AO: We all do. Self-deception is the central spiritual problem. 

BE: That really puts a point on it: Self-deception is the central spiritual problem. 

AO: Because of the persistence of self-deception, and its protean nature, we have to keep renouncing it. Milarepa, the great poet-sage, sang out, “My religion is not deceiving myself.” One Sees this too in the old sage who used to call out to himself, “Oh, Master?” He would answer himself, “Yes?” Then he would say, “Thoroughly awake!” And he would reply, “Oh, yes!” Then he would say, “Do not be deceived by anyone at any time!” and reply, “Oh no, never!” One also finds this in a dialogue between a sage and his student. 

The Master asked a monk who was reading a text, “What’s the title on the cover?”

The monk held up the text.

The Master said, “I’ve got that, too!”

The monk said, “Since you’ve got it, why do you ask?”

The Master replied, “How can I help [asking]?”

The monk inquired, “What’s the problem?”

The Master said, “You don’t notice the stench of your own shit!”  

BE: It seems we cannot express the heart of our being with any intention that conflicts with a kind of nakedness, a bare truth. So, How can we arrive at this nakedness? How can we let go of self-deception? How can we suspend?  

AO: We cannot get beyond our horizons, cannot allow something genuinely new to arise like a sun of goodness or a bright moon of wisdom without letting go of all our fragmenting and incoherent beliefs, letting go of samsara, leaving Sorrowville, dispelling the pattern of insanity. This amounts to something tremendously precise in experience.  

BE: Back to experience. 

AO: Exactly. 

BE: And this is part of the need for meditation, right? Because of how it tunes and attunes our experience. 

AO: Indeed. When we meditate, we inquire into how we create experience, how it arises. We begin to touch the spaciousness of experience. Space can sound nice, but it can feel unsettling, which, as Emerson noted, has positive spiritual connotations. Nevertheless, our ego can get reactive. We start taking off the backpack, taking off the blinders, taking off the armor, taking off the veils, and we verge into nakedness. We can start to get graspy, start to grope for the veils and blinders again.  

BE: Can we go back to sacredness and say some more things that Bateson may or may not reject? 

AO: A fun game.  

BE: With all due respect to Bateson. 

AO: He practiced a wonderful mind. And maybe he would be right to reject some of our suggestions. We consider them in an ironic way, in the sense that, if Bateson could admit that the wisdom traditions had wisdom in them, wouldn’t it be ironic if some of that wisdom happened to fall under the rubric of things he found himself tempted to reject? 

BE: Such a thematic notion: Admitting our ignorance means admitting our bloody ignorance. We don’t get to admit we aren’t sages and then try and declare a list of things we think lack all wisdom. 

AO: Or, assert that we reject metaphysics, and then provide a list of our metaphysical certainties. 

BE: Okay, so systems of thought contain truths, things they assert as true, and which we sort of treat as sacred. In some sense, religions sometimes treat the sacred as beyond inquiry, don’t they? 

AO: At times. Some traditions certainly have things in them that we simply don’t question. It’s just, the Way we do things. It’s the Way. But some traditions encourage questioning everything. The mystical or spiritual orientation in those traditions encourages us to find out for ourselves.  

Now, here is Bateson’s rather brilliant question: If philosophical and spiritual traditions arise to attune us with reality, and if they thus model reality in various ways—models proven effective in various cultures which managed to thrive by keeping their ecologies thriving—then maybe that which they model also contains something like spiritual truths that we can verify. That means, they contain insights or truths which we may doubt and inquire into, but which we cannot really “question”. We cannot be mere “skeptics” about them, cannot be skeptics and cynics as we mean those terms today, because the insights or truths they model carry too much significance in the larger system. If we become irreverent in relation to those truths, we will end up collapsing ecologies. 

BE: We see this all around us. And it does seem that we can connect this collapse to a kind of irreverence, a lack of intimacy with sacredness. 

AO: Our own myths clue us in on this. Gilgamesh seems driven by ego and a fear of death. The sky god tries to punish him for his egoic sins by sending a kind of wild being after him.  

BE: Enkidu. 

AO: Yes. And, somehow, the egocentric Gilgamesh triumphs over Enkidu, and then gets this wild being to help him destroy a sacred cedar forest. 

BE: And then we have the myth of Erysichthon. 

AO: Right. King Erysichthon ordered the cutting of sacred trees, including one most holy to the Earth Mother. That venerable tree, an oak that had lived for centuries, stood as tall over the other trees of the grove as they in turn stood over the grass.  

BE: What an image.  

AO: Yes. This motherly tree, sacred to the Earth Mother. It had garlands and votive tablets around it, indicating the many prayers fulfilled by the goddess. The workers refused to cut it down. 

BE: Naturally, Erysichthon realized how sacred the tree was and went to pay homage, right? 

AO: Of course! 

BE: Or, he behaved like a man possessed by conquest consciousness: He grabbed an axe cut into the tree himself.  

AO: And when he cut into that sacred tree, blood came out of the wound. The leaves and acorns turned pale. A worker tried to stop the king, but the king turned the axe on the worker, killing him. 

The spirit of the tree cursed the king, and the Earth Mother fulfilled this curse by getting Limos, goddess of hunger or starvation to implant a never-ending hunger into the king.  

BE: It’s a spooky scene. Limos sneaks into Erysichthon’s bedroom in the middle of the night, takes him into her arms, and breathes her endless hunger into him.  

AO: Like a nightmare or succubus. It’s a disturbing image, this goddess taking the man of conquest consciousness into her arms and maybe bringing her lips very close to his, maybe even kissing him. 

BE: An image of our own passion out of whack, a sexual image based on craving and unconsciousness, as opposed to liberated, awakened passion. 

AO: And when he wakes, he finds he cannot become satiated, no matter how much he eats. He eventually sells off his whole kingdom for food, and even sells off his own daughter. In the end, he eats himself. 

BE: The sacred as a manifestation of an integrative experience, or a direct intimacy with holism. If we violate that sacredness, we violate the wholeness, violate the integrity of complex living systems, the community of life, and this leads us to essentially eat ourselves. 

AO: We don’t see that our intentions have to remain in accord with the community of life. That level of holism doesn’t come easy. It has to do with a fully embodied and embedded style of thinking and knowing, a style of consciousness that the myths and philosophies of the world, the best ones anyway, seek to help us practice and realize. The mytho-poetic spiritualities encode this holism in the very images of the traditions, from the cosmogram to the artistic motifs, and of course in the rituals, ceremonies, and so on. Even the calendar has this gnosis encoded in it. 

BE: Some of these rituals and so on have an esoteric aspect. 

AO: That happens for all sorts of reasons. But Bateson found this epistemically provocative. 

BE: If that weren’t so abstract it would sound like a sexy turn of phrase. 

AO: Sad, isn’t it? But the heart of the matter has sensuality and energy. Again, this isn’t the only issue when it comes to esoteric aspects of these traditions, but Bateson especially notes his interest in that which must remain unknown.  

BE: Must remain unknown. That seems to touch on the ultimate nonduality of opposites: If you insist on the known, it immediately comes with an unknown. 

AO: And spiritual realization, in its most wondrous fulfillment, somehow brings us to a gnosis that transcends this duality, somehow knows in a manner that leaves the known and the unknown integrated or subsumed. 

BE: This still seems so abstract. 

AO: Yes, in part because it involves complexity and paradox. But here, too, we have mytho-poetic images that capture it, such as the myth of Orpheus, which seems to carry an important message for artists. 

BE: He’s not allowed to look back at Eurydice.  

AO: He’s not allowed to look back. But he does.  

BE: Orpheus is a bard, a poet, an artist. 

AO: What lover does the artist always want with them? What lover can they never gaze upon? 

BE: Their Muse. We cannot see the Muse. 

AO: And in some sense the error comes to dualizing the Muse.  

BE: She’s not “outside” of us, but still, her effects feel like otherness. We don’t know where our best ideas come from. We can rationalize, but we just cannot control the process. We can’t control inspiration and insight. 

AO: The necessity of things unknown and unsaid may appear in the myths and in the philosophical and spiritual traditions precisely because this necessity appears in ecologies. Similarly, if we find spiritual traditions teaching the importance of a profound trust in ourselves and in life, so profound that we cannot conceptualize it and must refer to it as “a leap of faith,” then we may find similar mysteries in the very nature of our action and perception in the world. We cannot “do” our lives, and the spiritual traditions help us to confront the terror that this lack of control can evoke in the ego. They help us resolve the paradoxes of non-doing, non-thinking, and non-knowing.  

Here we can mention an example Bateson might certainly scoff at, or at least feel an angel’s fear, but which to me seems well-supported and perfectly acceptable as an example of the superness of nature: Dowsing. 

BE: Dowsing involves the union of the known and the unknown? 

AO: You can find plenty of dowsers who will tell you that the whole point of the dowsing rods or the pendulum or whatever they use comes to distracting the ego, the knower, so that something unknown can come through. 

BE: They cannot look behind the veil, they cannot look into the eyes of Eurydice, but she can hold their hand and whisper in their ear. 

AO: We can mention holotropic medicines too. And this we mention with some irony, because Bateson had only limited experiences with these medicines, and they left him largely unimpressed. He didn’t think they revealed what the spiritual traditions tried to put us in touch with, and in some sense he was correct: The experiences people have with these medicines tend to remain more limited if they occur outside a context of rather rigorous philosophical training. That’s not to say the experiences can’t seem profound, but that they will have greater impact and depth in the context of training. Anyone at all can sit down at a piano and begin to find scales, chords, and even melodies. What they play will hardly compare with what Oscar Peterson or Keith Jarrett could manage. 

BE: What did he want to discover? 

AO: Well, he wrote in Angels Fear about how we can discuss our thoughts, perceptions, and our experience in general, but we cannot get to the larger space, what he likened to the container of the experience. What’s the nature of that which “holds” all our experience? He felt that religions approach that question, but science does not—at least not in its current form. 

A spiritual or philosophical tradition integrates our experience, bring us into an integrative mode or dimension in which we realize insight into what Bateson called the pattern that connects, and what I might call the sacred creative ordering or patterning. Maybe a spiritual tradition offers a pattern that brings together otherwise fragmented elements of experience, in something like a “cybernetic” understanding of the world. It brings us into a sense of unity and also a kind of communicative web which science as we have it fails to discern. 

BE: He was looking for the pattern that connects, but all he saw was vibrating patternlets of a low-grade trip. 

AO: It seems so.  

BE: But these medicines can bring about far more profound experiences.  

AO: Yes. Stan Grof shared many such experiences of his patients, experiences that defy reason, and which fall into phenomena Bateson explicitly rejects. Of course, he would have allowed that healing could occur, that even near miracles could occur, from within the mind of the patient. So, some aspects he would entertain. But Grof shared a story in one of his lectures and in one of his books about a case that touches on this transcendence of the known in a way Bateson might have appreciated. 

Grof noted what many mental health professionals have, that patients can undergo years of therapy and still remain stuck. Moreover, they can become experts about their issues. They can know a lot about them, such that they could give lectures at a professional conference or even write a book about their Oedipal issues, their various complexes, their attachment wounds, and so on. This intellectual knowledge can have zero correlation with actual progress in maturation or the achievement of real mental health.  

Grof noted that holotropic states seemed exactly the opposite: They could produce incredible healing, but with no knowledge of how or why the healing happened. It really showed the limits of knowledge and reason, how little we truly know about ourselves, and the role of an inscrutable mystery in the world. That’s a key issue. Spiritual traditions can emphasize this mystery in such a way that the scientistic mind wants to accuse them of superstition or obscurantism. Bateson challenges that characterization, instead focusing his scientific mind on the possible necessity of mystery in some non-trivial sense. 

Grof tells about a woman he calls Gladys. Ironically perhaps, her experience happened at Esalen, the place Bateson lived—though he probably wasn’t living there when this happened, it’s the kind of thing that seems quintessentially Esalen.  

At Esalen, Grof and his wife pioneered Holotropic breath work, an adaptation of breathing techniques derived from spiritual traditions which could function as powerfully as LSD.  

Gladys came to one of these holotropic breathwork retreats, and she shared her history of serious depression and anxiety. When she would suffer a severe episode, she would remain in the grips of it for hours. Even the most basic tasks took incredible effort, ordinary things like getting out of bed, getting dressed, brushing her teeth.
Gladys experienced some powerful breathwork sessions in the first few days, but they did not heal her depression. However, as the workshop unfolded, her depression manifested in a great deal of agitation, such that Grof and his wife took an unusual course of action: In place of a group discussion session, they invited Gladys to do some breathwork. This went on for almost an hour, and Gladys began to experience violent tremors, which shifted into coughing, choking, screaming, and then the emergence of what sounded like a foreign language. The Grofs encouraged her to let the sounds come out, without censoring anything. They witnessed increasingly stylized movements and what seemed clearly like a foreign language.  

Gladys sat up and began chanting. It sounded like some sort of prayer. The haunting quality of it began to affect the others in the workshop. No one understood the words, but they seemed deeply moved, and many began to cry. Some of them took up a meditative posture, joining their hands as if praying.  

After she finished chanting, Gladys laid down. She seemed to enter a kind of ecstasy or bliss, even though motionless, and she remained in this state for about an hour.  

Gladys later said that she had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t understand what she had been chanting or why she chanted. She only felt a profound inspiration to do these things. She claimed she had no idea what she had said, that she never heard anything like it before. 

In a wild twist of fate, a psychoanalyst from Buenos Aires happened to be present. He had become interested in the work the Grofs were doing and asked to come and participate. He announced that he recognized this chant, because he was Jewish and had studied the history of his people. He said Gladys had spoken Sephardic or Ladino, a kind of hybrid of medieval Spanish and Hebrew, which he had studied as a kind of hobby. While this psychoanalyst was Jewish, Gladys was not, and she claimed she never even heard of this language, let alone did she have any capacity to speak it.  

The psychoanalyst said that, nevertheless, she had chanted in Sephardic, and this chant that had carried such an impact on everyone present went something like this: “I am suffering, and I will always suffer. I am crying, and I will always cry. I am praying, and I will always pray.” 

Chanting this totally dispelled Gladys’ depression. The Grofs saw her twice after that workshop and the depression and anxiety had not returned. Grof called it one of the most powerful healings he had ever seen in his rather significant healing career.  

Here’s the thing: No psychiatrist in the world could have offered this medicine. If a patient walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, “I have sever anxiety and depression. I’ve tried therapy. It hasn’t helped. Some days it takes everything I’ve got just to get out of the house,” the psychiatrist is NOT going to say, “Ah, well I have just the thing for that. What you do is chant this medieval Hebrew prayer until everyone in the room cries, and you’ll be cured.” 

Bateson explicitly takes up a case like this, namely the Ancient Mariner from the poem by Coleridge. The Mariner has this albatross around his neck, and because of his sin of murdering this beautiful being—a clear violation of sacredness—everyone on his ship ends up dead. He’s absolutely trapped in this horror, this hell realm.  

Then comes the turning point. Can we pull this up on a device of some sort? 

BE: Yes, please let’s. 

AO: Okay . . . 

Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,

And when they reared, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea. 

BE: Shazam.

AO: Shazam. Like magic. 

AO: And Bateson says, there is no way anyone could have told the Mariner, “Here’s what you need to do: Drift along until you see some water snakes . . .” For Bateson, that in part has to do with the fact that the Mariner must bless these snakes “unaware”. It’s the keystone, for Bateson. It has to be without the habitual knower.

BE: It seems so important here that the Mariner essentially goes around preaching a good heart. He preaches what the Buddhists would call the spirit of a bodhisattva or awakening being: To love everything, to love and cherish all beings. He preaches a gospel of love. 

AO: They prayeth best who loveth best. What a radical teaching for our time, right? 

BE: They createth best who loveth best. A radical art teaching. 

AO: We consider all of this because magic has to do with tapping into whatever happened in these cases. The major difference is that, at least in some cases, magic is said to affect the “external” world. Given our interwovenness with the forest, healing ourselves does heal the forest. But the scientific research done of things like telekinesis makes it clear that, however we want to interpret the data, the data show we can affect “matter” with our “mind”. Work done, for instance, at the famous PEAR Lab at Princeton, of all places, shows that magic in the sense Bateson found dubious does seem to exist. 

But, from an indigenous perspective, we find cultures that teach their citizens how to relate to whatever sacred powers and inconceivable causes bring about healing and wholeness, liberation and rejuvenation. The Navajo, for instance, have this central philosophy of sa’ah anagram bik’eh hozho, which we may as well call untranslatable. Of course, then we can’t learn anything at all. When we read around, we find that this basic expression of their philosophy somehow indicates living in attunement with the wholeness, with the sacred creative ordering.  

We might want to call certain aspects of this “supernatural,” but again it’s super nature, the superness of nature. An indigenous culture has ways of connecting or relating with, even attracting, what they sense as holy beings that kind of reside within or as the phenomena of nature. Living well means living in attunement with these beings, living with reverence toward them, living in balance with the intelligence all around us.  

These traditions seem to sense mind as immanent in nature, so to speak. It seems Bateson would agree with that, and he would agree that human mind only a part of the whole. We get so egocentric and anthropocentric. Conquest consciousness fails to grasp that the human mind is not superior to these larger ecologies of mind. The human mind is not even equal to these larger ecologies of mind, but instead must attune itself to them. We could put it this way: The greater overall intelligence abides in Nature, not in the human skull. 

BE Could we say that, spiritually speaking, we are that larger ecology of mind, but when we fragment ourselves out of it, then we get into the whole duality of inferiority and superiority, and then we also need to do serious work to regain attunement? 

AO: I would accept that nonduality. And these traditions have all sorts of teachings and rituals that, on the one hand, get us into attunement, and, on the other hand, can basically make reparations and repairs when we get out of attunement.  

BE: What a cybernetic scientist might call feedback and error-correction. 

AO: Right. We find a flow of thought, a flow of ideas, a flow of communication in the world. Nature is a plexus of communication and communion. The rites, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, and practices of a spiritual tradition help us enter into the living, loving flow of communion, find ourselves in/through/as the interwovenness of things. In a way, we become one with a sacredness not simply localizable in a “god” or anything separable from the whole.  

Delusions or imbalances in human thinking can lead to imbalances in the whole. Ecologies can collapse because of human ego, human agendas. Human beings have to realize that their existence depends on ecologies of mind more fertile, more abundant with wisdom, love, and beauty, with real knowledge and insight, than we can locate in any human ego or group of human egos. It takes rituals and ceremonies to correct human ignorance, and rituals and ceremonies to put humans in accord with reality, so they can live joyfully, creatively, in a healthy, wise, loving, and beautiful way. 

BE: Are we suggesting that artists should let their art practice become more like a ritual or ceremony? 

AO: Jung’s wonderful student and collaborator, Marie-Louise Von Franz, said this herself in an interview. I think she was asked what we could do to improve the terrifying state of the world, and she said we have to revive the very thing we write off as primitive superstition”. She used the example of a sword. She suggested that, in a certain culture, a sword has a soul, and thus no sword smith would dare to make a sword without a ritual.  

BE: That reverence, that refusal to violate the sacred. Bateson was right: From the outside, it feels like religious dogma. But, from a systems science perspective, it might correspond to subtle and sophisticated realities rather than crude primitivism. 

AO: Von Franz said that matter has to cooperate with us, and this demands love and care. 

BE: The Mariner’s lesson! They maketh best that loveth best.

 AO: Yes. Von Franz said we have to live with the metal, live with the fire, and so on. If we don’t if we don’t relate with sincerity and care, with a mind of attunement, then things will go wrong.   

In this interview I saw, she tells the story of when Jung went to the house he built for himself, a kind of little castle on the shore of Lake Geneva. On one visit, he hadn’t been there for quite some time, and he seemed to have a hell of a time at first. Everything kept falling on the floor and misbehaving in general. We might call it mindlessness on Jung’s part. But he instead stood in the middle of his kitchen and said, “My dear friends, I am so sorry to have been gone so long. I missed you, and I love you. I know you are angry with me, but please forgive me.” After that, all was well.  

BE: That’s how it is sometimes though. It feels that way. 

AO: Von Franz said that we should notice the sometimes intense symbolism of these moments. Our psyche blends with what we write off as matter or as a dead world, and we find these sorts of accidents and so forth when we get impatient, when our agendas get going, when our shadows get provoked, and these sorts of things. We need the rituals to tune the mind, to get into attunement again. The unconscious effectively communes and communicates with other parts of the larger ecology of mind, and since it happens unconsciously, we need the rituals to bring balance and attunement as well as atonement and at-one-ment.   

BE: But we clearly need to avoid becoming a plastic shaman, or co-opting anyone’s culture. 

AO: In no uncertain terms. In no uncertain terms. We have to come to this as gestures that dispel conquest consciousness and heal the world, including healing all this karma. And we can take heart that every one of us came from a once indigenous culture. As much as indigenous cultures themselves need to recover from conquest consciousness and revitalize their traditional ways, so too do we in the conquest world need to heal ourselves, and also seek to correct the sins of our ancestors. We need to work on ourselves, and offer whatever we can to the indigenous people who still suffer.  

BE: Many of them stand ready to help us reindigenize.  

AO: Indeed. 

BE: What sorts of things are we talking about? 

AO: I don’t see it as co-opting to burn sage, to make use of anointing oils, to offer tobacco, to make an altar, to light incense, to say prayers, and to do all these things in ways that include the community of life, that include ecologies, that include the land, and that listen to these larger ecologies of mind, that dialogue and commune with them. 

BE: At a basic level, we can understand how lighting sage clears the air. It makes us feel better. And that improved state of mind can lead to better art. But we are talking about more than that, in a way not cheapening these things, but going deeply into them. 

AO: We can discover much for ourselves. If we have a good attitude, if we go into it with some degree of reverence and sincerity, the world will teach us. We need to spend time outside, spend time in the attitude of a student of the world, a student and attendant of sacred powers and inconceivable causes. We need to let the world speak, let wild beings and wild powers and presences speak. 

BE: And. again, we could go to indigenous elders and ask for guidance. 

AO: Indeed. We shouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel or get on some kind of ego trip, and we have to humble ourselves, or else we will make more problems. We should seek initiation in some way, seek genuine teachers—and we have so many available. We can make an effort to consult the traditions of our family heritage, as well as to seek out the best philosophies we can find. We sort of have to fall in love with a tradition, and do our best to focus, avoiding the temptation to dabble, to treat the spiritual traditions like an all-you-can-eat buffet, a kind of supermarket for the soul, in which we grab all the spiritual cake and cookies we can get our hands on, while avoiding the spiritual purslane, the philosophical arugula, and all the bitter greens, the bland veggies, the things we get bored or scared by.  

In any case, we are talking about realizing ourselves, and we can call the process of realizing ourselves by other names. We should probably still think of it as indigenizing ourselves and healing conquest, but we can do it through getting in touch with our own roots. We can call it knowing god, becoming a saint, becoming who we are, fully accepting ourselves, understanding reality . . . whatever we want to call it. You mentioned Dogen earlier. He would call it becoming a Buddha. That means someone totally awake to reality, totally attuned with wisdom, love, and beauty, someone liberated into these larger ecologies of mind, and thus living in harmony with them, living coherently. 

Dogen wrote that Mind itself is Buddha. Buddha itself is mind. We may as well say, Mind itself is sacred, or Mind itself is the divine. What mind? Not our habitual mind, but our wondrous mind, our primordial or pristine mind.  

Dogen cites two of his philosophical ancestors talking. One asks, “What is the wondrous clear mind?” The other responds, “It is mountains, rivers, and the earth; it is the sun, the moon, and stars.”  

BE: You mentioned a different shamanic charm. Can we go back to that, if you still remember it? 

AO: Of course.  

BE: And also, can we talk about the ethics again? 

AO: It’s our focus in a way. And it seems important for people in the dominant culture to recognize that we have roots in a very ethical orientation to each other and to the world. Specifically, the Socratic view seems deeply resonant with the indigenous view. 

BE: Because of his commitment to care. 

AO: Yes, care, attending, and a sense of reverence and righteousness. These all go together. The political notion of justice is, from the Socratic teachings, rooted in righteousness and care. 

BE: We have to attend to our souls, and to the souls of others. 

AO: Attending to our own soul and the souls of others goes altogether with attending to nature, attending to sacredness, attending the divine. Culture and nature arise totally intertwined, and a spiritually rooted culture gives us a path or way of life that involves skillful, realistic, wise, loving, and beautiful relationships with nature. 

BE: We usually think that being an attendant means something one-directional. 

AO: Yes. We have this dualistic assumption. We say that we attended a university. We should say we attended to learning, attended to life, attended to sacredness.  

BE: We tended something. 

AO: We tended the culture. And thus we tended or neglected nature. We attend the sacred, become an attendant to sacredness, and in this world that means tending to the nonduality of nature and culture. 

BE: Could we liken it to serving as an attendant of a true philosopher queen? 

AO: Yes, we could let that help us understand a little about how attending works. If we serve a philosopher-queen, or the Motherly Buddha or divine Sophia, then our service becomes sacredly bi-directional. In serving, we are served, because we will receive wisdom, love, and beauty. This is no argument for monarchy in the political sense. It has more to do with nature, spirituality, sacredness, justice. 

BE: If we serve nature, we are served in the process. If we attend to wisdom, love, and beauty, they attend to us, immediately. 

AO: That seems quite realistic. We can make no distinction between caring for the world and caring for ourselves, and every mindless distinction we try to make in that regard—conceptually or behaviorally—leads to our own degradation. 

Dogen has a wonderful line about refraining from evil. He says, when we refrain from unwholesome action, “the power of practice is immediately actualized.” Immediately actualized. And he says it is actualized “on the scale of the entire earth, the entire cosmos, all time, all teachings, all things, all beings.” He calls that the scale of “refrain from”. That’s the scale of our practice, our love, our ethical conscience, our caring and attention, our service.   

We make a whole cosmos this way. He says that “This very person at this very moment abides in the place, comes from it, and goes to it, where no unwholesome action is created.”  

BE: He speaks often of raising up the whole body and mind, actualizing the cosmos.  

AO: Yes. In that same discussion he says that, when we move mountains, rivers, and the great Earth, as well as the sun, the moon, and stars to practice, they in return move us to practice.  

BE: That’s lovely. We move the mountains to practice. 

AO: And not in the habitual sense of “I will move mountains to make this or that happen.” 

BE: Right, It’s the sense of moving them—filling them with inspiration and love. 

AO: Exactly, the way we would speak of someone’s moving our heart. We let the mountains have their heart, and we move it in/through/as our practice.  

BE: Which includes art. We might have to look at our psyche with care, and notice how we almost take inspiration, without giving inspiration in return. The moon inspires us, the mountains and rivers inspire us. But here you suggest that we could make art as an offering back, offering them inspiration. 

AO: The basic nonduality of giver and receiver. As they say, there is no “gift,” no “giver,” and no “receiver”. 

BE: Because they aren’t separate from our practice, or from us in any way, and it all arises in total mutuality, total interwovenness. 

AO: Dogen puts it wonderfully. He says, This is not the open eye of just one time, but the vital eye of all times. Because it is all the open eye, the vital eye of all times, you move all buddhas and all ancestors to practice, to listen to the teaching, and to realize the fruit.” 

BE: All times. We move even our ancestors. 

AO: We become the reason Buddha woke up in the first place. We moved him to practice. 

BE: As he said, “I teach those that feel.” 

AO: Right. A matter of heart. A path of joy. 

BE: An inherently ethical path, but without the more limited view of ethics. 

AO: Dogen says, when we actualize the power of “refrain from,” then unwholesome action doesn’t manifest as unwholesome action. It’s kind of wild. 

BE: It can’t manifest. 

AO: Well, it has no fixed form. It’s not a thing that exists somewhere out there. So, as soon as we see through this, when unwholesome action cannot overcome us, and at the same time we don’t destroy it.  

BE: Nonaggression.  

AO: We aren’t in conflict with something, or with ourselves.  

BE: Because, holistically speaking, we can’t be in conflict, so why try and manifest conflict? Why fight yourself when you can’t really fight yourself, and pretending to only creates suffering?  

AO: Right. And that holism gets back to practice again. Dogen says that when we skillfully muster or manifest our body-mind in practice, when we bring forth our body-mind practice, then we also manifest the body-mind practice of others, and thus the power of practice becomes immediately and intimately actualized.  

BE: In relationship to creativity and imagination, this means we don’t realize our own creativity, but the creativity of all beings, all things. 

AO: Yes, we come back to imagination as the way we allow the cosmos to presence itself in/through/as our life, our thinking, our activity. We move all things and all things move us.  

BE: You mentioned another shamanic charm, another element in your mandala. 

AO: Gary Snyder. He put together a book he called The Practice of the Wild. What a delightful title. 

BE: I love that book, and his whole ethos of wildness. 

AO: Remember that delightful essay, “The Etiquette of Freedom”? 

BE: Love it. But just like the people watching a mandala being constructed, I would love to hear about what parts of it have a place in your mandala. 

AO: He tells about Cabeza de Vaca. He says that Cabeza de Vaca became, as he imagines it, “unaccountably deepened”. Cabeza de Vaca stands as a mythical figure as Snyder presents him, an image of conquest consciousness that undergoes radical transformation by means of a genuine hero’s journey—as opposed to the makeshift “heroic” voyage of conquest and aggression.  

To undergo that radical transformation, Cabeza de Vaca has to enter a liminal space, drop beneath the threshold of habitual mind. As with any truly spiritual transformation, he has to lose his bearings, enter the unknown, and in fact lose not only his bearings but just about everything, a place of no longer having, and thus no longer able to practice the mind of clinging and aversion, the mind of ignorance and anger. 

BE: He loses everything, so he has nothing left to lose. Just like the Ancient Mariner, another image of conquest consciousness. 

AO: Indeed. After his unintended vision quest, the new man discovered the capacity to heal and to help indigenous people he met as he travelled. However, once he finally arrived back in so-called civilization, he lost the capacity to heal. Snyder puts a sharp point on this moment. He suggests that Cabeza de Vaca did not lose some kind of knack or a bag of tricks or even some kind of superpower. Rather, once he returned to civilization, Snyder suggests he lost the will to heal, altogether with the will to wholeness, maybe even the will to holiness, since Cabeza de Vaca attributed the healing to the divine. 

Why did this happen? 

BE: Because he returned from wholeness to fragmentation. 

AO: It seems so. Snyder suggests that Cabeza de Vaca lost what we might call the will-to-wholeness, a kind of holistic well-put-togetherness. He went back into so-called “civilized” conditions, which meant fragmentation, incoherence, living cut off from the sacred powers and inconceivable causes, living cut off from the land. He encountered “real doctors” again, real doctors who thought they knew—the way knowledge covers over things—and maybe he began to doubt his ability to heal. As Snyder puts it, “To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be whole,” and Cabeza de Vaca forgot the taste of wholeness, the way any of us can forget a major spiritual awakening if we allow it to become stale, to become a memory instead of an ongoing practice and realization. 

BE: Why bother healing anyone when they can go to a doctor? 

AO: Right. 

BE: But that leaves intact a duality between treating something and healing. We can cure someone but not heal them, and we can heal someone but not cure them. But if we take the approach of holistic healing, then we can focus on healing and let go of the cure—whixh can come naturally, so to speak.  

AO: And that would extend to other aspects of so-called civilization. 

BE: Why bother dreaming, when the academics, scientists, and technicians can tell us everything we need to know?  

AO: Ultimately the same as asking, Why bother healing, why seek medicine, when we could seek medication, treatments, “cures”? We would have to accomplish a renunciation. We would have to admit, “I have lost my way.”  

BE: Just as Cabeza de Vaca did. He had to get lost. 

AO: We are already lost. And we might have to be left with nothing—which is the most positive reading of our acceleration of climate collapse: The soul will drive us to lose everything we cannot keep, so that we may realize what we cannot lose. I have seen this sort of thing work itself out very painfully in the lives of individuals. It would be tragic to see it on a global scale, even if it did return us to the sacred in a decisive way. 

BE: But how do we even do that? How can we put ourselves on the line like that? And how do we bring this back to art? 

AO: This is a major issue. And we have to approach it from both sides, because plenty of what people call art has little to do with these kinds of gestures. More art than we care to admit has to do with self-expression, self-exploration in a more limited sense, and even entertainment, if we get very honest about it. We could transform ourselves and the world, could heal the world, if we would cultivate a practice of working with art in a way that allows art to truly work on us, and allows the world to work on us, allows the mystery to function most empoweringly in/through/as us. It has to become part of spiritual practice, part of our holistic way of life.  

BE: But so many artists already feel that art is their spiritual practice.  

AO: That kind of assertion happens in a highly degraded context. When we refer to a holistic way of life, in some sense we have to clarify. Life is already whole, and we are talking about something skillful, a wise, loving, and beautiful wholeness.  

BE: People don’t seem to understand what they’re missing. We don’t know how much wholeness we lack, how much fragmentation we live with.  

AO: The old song tells half the truth. Joni Mitchell sang that “we don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone,” but our biggest problem now comes to not knowing what we’re missing because we never had it.  

BE: We think we can follow a self-styled spiritual practice because we haven’t seen the difference between that and something more skillful. 

AO: And we can look at the results of those self-styled approaches. 

BE: All part of the self-help catastrophe. And of course, artists wouldn’t call their pursuit of art a matter of self-help. But, whatever we want to call it, if art as artists now practiced it would suffice to fulfill our potential as the spiritual and philosophical traditions portray it, then we should see a lot of artist-sages, when in fact we seem to have none—at least, none who arrived at spiritual maturity by means of art alone, with no incorporation of the spiritual and philosophical traditions. 

AO: We face so many nuances. People can make incredible works of art that already have inherent value. But we have to look at the larger context and not try so hard to exempt ourselves.  

BE: I write a great poem and think that the issues in the world have to be with everyone else, because, after all, look at my damn poem here. It’s great. It’s genius even. 

AO: I had this entry way in a place I used to live, and it would get hot in there, which in turn heated up the whole place. Opening the door made a huge difference, so I would leave the door open on hot days. Inevitably, a large flying insect would get trapped in there almost every day, and they would spend a lot of time banging their head against the closed window right next to the open door. They would bang, bang, bang, and their buzzing would sound so agitated. Meanwhile, an open door right next to them. We act as if we are nothing like that. We insist on it, in terms of our behavior and our reactions and beliefs. 

BE: The problem of spiritual anosognosia: We can’t see the limit of our own understanding, or else we would already understand. 

AO: Yes. I think of this in relation to even simple things. For instance, when I was a kid, I loved playing ping-pong—until I played against someone who actually knew how to play. They could do things I didn’t even know were possible, like making the ball spin very fast, hitting curve balls, and so on. It was crazy, and it was at such a different level of play that it was no contest. So, I had no idea how to play ping-pong, but thought I did. Same goes with things like the old game of Scrabble. If you have no idea how many word possibilities you are missing, you play in bliss of how ignorant you are. An expert would make the game no longer fun either, because the fun typically comes in relation to a relatively balanced field of players. 

BE: So much of life is like that, from writing poems to cooking meals. Some people operate at such a level of skill beyond our own that we have no clue what we’re missing, and maybe part of us even fears that, since we are entertaining ourselves and having a kind of hedonic trip. We can’t conceive of the quantum leap of skill that someone else might manifest, can’t really think through our own ignorance. We would need understanding to understand our own ignorance, and understanding is precisely what we lack. 

AO: Nicely said: We would need the thing we lack. A variation on the old Socratic paradox, the Meno paradox.  

BE: Which is about wisdom, right? If we can admit we might become more wise, more, loving, more beautiful, then on what basis would we seek it? If we admit ignorance, then how will that ignorance set out to find wisdom, and how would it even recognize wisdom, or love, when it encountered it? Maybe wisdom and love would simply be invisible to an ignorant person. 

AO: At least in some cases. Or it might seem like foolishness. It might seem illogical or irrational. So, that gets us back to the situation of art, because we are not just talking about skill in an ordinary sense, such as the difference between a skilled and an unskilled ping-pong player. We are talking about a spiritual framework that transcends even skill.  

Recall Zhuangzi’s figure, Cook Ding. When the lord of the house walks into the kitchen one day, he sees this incredible display of mastery, and he says, “Wow! This is marvelous! Who would have thought skill could reach such heights!” But the cook calmly sets down his cleaver and corrects his boss. He says, “What I care about is the Way, or the Dao or reality, and that goes beyond skill.” 

BE: The aristocrat was so ignorant that he didn’t even know how to discern skill in the conventional sense from insight, spiritual or philosophical that manifests as skillfulness. 

AO: Nicely put. Yes, we could call it skillfulness vs skill, since we usually mean some kind of knack, some personal acquisition, or something along those lines. And it manifests, it comes through the clarity of the heart, mind, body, world, cosmos of the sage. It shines forth out of the synchronization of heart, mind, body, world, cosmos presenced in the sage. 

BE: Ordinary skill doesn’t demand genuine spiritual insight, genuine spiritual practice. 

AO: Although, artists, athletes, and others might think of their practice as spiritual or might try to incorporate things like “mindfulness” and so on. Though we may assert such things, it doesn’t mean we know how to make that real. Saying “art is my spiritual practice” and waxing poetic about it doesn’t make it so, no matter what nice experiences we have had or think we have had. 

BE: We’re not talking about making spirituality elitist though, right? 

AO: No. That would be a simple-minded way of getting reactive and trying to dismiss all of this. We are talking about finding the real edge of our practice, or finding out our fullest potentials, or somehow taking the spiritual traditions of the world seriously, or even just taking the state of the world more seriously. We can look at the world and come to the admission that something’s got to give, something has to change, but we so often want it to be things other people do. It’s not that I personally have to renounce anything I really like or feel attached to. It’s the corporations, the liberals, the conservatives, the ignorant people causing trouble, but my art practice is fine as it is, and I don’t need any radical transformation—or, I’m willing to change parts of it, but unwilling to put the whole thing on the line, to put my whole self on the line. How do we get past the corporations and the plantation capitalism—and get to something truly vitalizing and rejuvenative and healing if we won’t let go? 

BE: All of that resistance usually happens with a lot of unconscious dynamics. We never put it so simply. And, in fact, the artist often feels they put themselves on the line in their practice. 

AO: We have excellent rationalizations. Rationalizations don’t work unless they sound convincing, even feel convincing—not only to ourselves, but also to our friends, colleagues, and even others in the society. At the very least, though, we have to sound really convincing to ourselves. It has to sound like reasoning and reality, not like rationalization. 

BE: Another reason when we need some framework for making art and for viewing it.  

AO: But of course, this doesn’t mean an interpretive framework, as in a theory of criticism or a set of hermeneutic strategies, and it doesn’t mean a theory of creativity, as in methods of creation, or theoretical notions about creativity.  

BE: This has to do with the activity of viewing art too. 

AO: Well, we need a way of incorporating creative engagement into our spiritual life in general, so that when we engage and enact powerful works of art, we can allow them to work on us, rather than just giving us an “aesthetic” “experience”. Not only do we ourselves neglect to do this, but social forces encourage us in this neglect. Structures of power prefer that we read poetry silently and alone, or that we make paintings alone, perhaps with earbuds in our ears. I’m not saying that all artists have to work in groups, but attunement with larger ecologies of mind is a practice, one rarely well-served or well-accomplished by most solitary artists. As Buddha taught, we can be alone without attaining solitude, and we can attain solitude without ever being alone. There are skillful and unskillful ways of being alone. 

But, in a basic cultural way, if we start reading any good literature out loud, among friends and fellow citizens, it can open up far more of the transformative potential, for ourselves and our world. And if painters found ways to interact more with the community of life and with human communities too, more empowerment arises for everyone. It becomes a practice of mutual empowerment, mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, mutual liberation. And we break down the duality between nature and culture, individual and collective. Especially if people really meet each other in such activities and encounters, and also meet nature, and hold philosophical dialogue in the spiritual sense, and ask questions, and make connections between art and life, and intimately relate what we call art, science, philosophy, and politics.  

BE: Why isn’t the aesthetic experience enough? Why should art be put in service to spirituality, or philosophy, or politics? 

AO: It already is! No escape from this. Especially in the case of philosophy. This has to do with an insight into wholeness, into the interwovenness of things. We aren’t talking about instrumentality. That’s the key issue. 

BE: When we speak about the “use” of something, or we speak of something’s being “in service” to something, we habitually associate that with instrumental reasoning. 

AO: That happens because of the cultural context.  

BE: But you mean that art inevitably serves, and it will either serve wisdom, love, and beauty, or it will serve a pattern of insanity. 

AO: Starkly put, but ultimately true. We cannot have art all by itself any more than we can have science all by itself or anything else. In one way, we could understand philosophy as a system of relations in service to spiritual passions—a spiritual ecology, an ecology of spirit, a matrix of practice and realization.

BE: The community of life is our way of living.  

AO: Nicely put. We make the world in the way we live our lives, and that includes how we make art—in all the gritty details, not just in broad brushstrokes.  

BE: That definition works for poetry as well, and for most other arts.  

AO: The artist takes up art as a way of life, but often without asking sufficiently intimate questions about what that could or should mean—especially what it means for the larger community of life, which means ecologies and the nonduality of nature and culture. Since we can make impressive art, breathtaking art, without asking such questions, we think we can get away with it, so to speak. We don’t see the karmic consequences clearly enough. Then the audience for any given work will take that work up into their lives and into the structures of power in ways that will often tend toward ideology, false consciousness, and other forms of spiritual materialism.  

None of this makes art a handmaiden of LoveWisdom. It means that “art for its own sake” is itself a philosophical gesture, one that defeats its own purpose if we allow the work to devolve into mere aesthetic experience.  

BE: “Art for its own sake” is already philosophy, but it seems like a bad one. 

AO: Yes. Self-defeating, contradictory, incoherent. 

BE: But aesthetic experience can be so powerful, all by itself. 

AO: I don’t know what this “all by itself” is. Find me an “all by itself”. Where, in this cosmos of interwovenness? 

BE: Atomistic thinking, right? It’s an altogether. But the transformative potential of art, its great beauty and profundity, itself encourages us to let it and artists off the hook. It becomes part of the false consciousness of art. Because art has such power, because it arises from genius, we want to declare it complete in itself. But this essentializes art. The very point here is not to essentialize art.  

AO: There is no sanitized encounter with art. We cannot encounter art in some transcendent realm.  

BE: It’s here and now, this very body and mind, or as you would expand it out: This very heart-mind-body-world-cosmos. Sentient beings, many of them suffering, many of them interwoven with degraded ecologies. We arise as a living community in interwoven ecologies.  

AO: Yes.  

BE: And it’s intriguing how, for instance, we can enter very interesting states of consciousness with respect to art and other activities, without their having any lasting effect on us as human beings, or without their having broad and ethically positive impacts, especially organically enduring ones.  

AO: If the artist takes their work seriously, they give it incredible amounts of love and attention, which immediately involves the cultivation of mind, the cultivation of states of being. That kind of training of the heart and mind, in the context of certain kinds of philosophical practice, creates beings of great compassion and responsiveness.  

BE: You mean practicing a spiritual path, as opposed to practicing art. 

AO: Generally speaking, the artist is not made more compassionate by the making of art—not unless they allow that process to work on them, so to speak—and that’s too narrow. The artist, too, must invite the work in—the work of art, the wise, loving, beautiful activity of art, which transcends making or not making some “object,” “experience,” or whathaveyou.  

Most artists are willing to sacrifice a hell of a lot for their work. A hell of a lot—but not their ego. Once we put every last thing on the line—like Cabeza de Vaca . . . nothing left to lose—then we realize our life as an artist is on the line too. That’s scary.  

BE: Because we already identify as “artist,” and that has to go on the line too.  

AO: Right. And, even saying, “What if I am not really an artist,” or, “What if all this time there has been a deep delusion here, at the very heart of my work, the work I thought was my best?”—that can feel intense.  

BE: We may not like the results of that inquiry, and we may not like the feeling of putting every last thing on the line.  

AO: But that’s what it takes to realize our fullest potential. Being willing to starve yourself a little, being willing to even risk physical death, is, for many of us, less troubling than the risk of the ego’s death, or the death of anything we think we know that we don’t want to let go of.  

BE: And you would say the same holds for our creative work as viewers.  

AO: Absolutely. We can encounter a work of art that really seems to get into our bones. It stops us. That’s a marvelous thing. It can take a lot of hours of meditation to get the kind of stopping a work of art can bring us to in an instant.  

BE: But you are saying that this stopping gets co-opted by the ego.  

AO: Very easily, and quite instantaneously. Without stability, vividness, and ease in our attention and our being, how can it truly take root? If we can’t see through all these games of false consciousness, ideology, and spiritual materialism, or if we pretend they don’t exist for every one of us, we limit art’s power.

Think about it: We sense this tremendous power in art, a power for alchemical transformation in the soul. But we can’t do alchemy if we don’t have a vessel that can withstand the heat. That’s one way of putting the issue.  

However we try to put the problem, the only way to get around it systematically—not a system as in tyranny, but some consistency, some living wisdom and compassion as opposed to a grand crap shoot—the only way I know of involves serious dialogue about art and spirituality, serious inquiry into how we will practice our lives and our loves, and a sincere and wholehearted entry onto a spiritual or philosophical way of life. Not just what we do, but how, and why—with what vision of ourselves and our cosmos, and with what kind of thinking.  

BE: How we practice our lives and our loves . . . Practice is key here. Practice and realization. 

AO: To pass through the kinds of barriers humans create takes spiritual practice and realization, broadly construed. We have to develop practices, within a holistic and ethical way of life, that allow us to work with aesthetic engagements and enactments, whether in the gallery or out in a meadow somewhere. These “experiences” can be healing, and helpful, and very growth-promoting. But the biggest transformations, it seems to me, will not come with any reliability, and also with minimized negative side-effects—that’s crucial—these truly healing transformations won’t come in such a way if we don’t know how to invite them, make space for them, and navigate the situation when it arises, and keep an eye on the larger community of life, to let all the other beings of the world tell us how our art is doing, how well our way of life actually functions.  

We already make a home for the whole community of life. What kind of home does our art empower us to make? What kind of home for all beings does our way of life empower us to create? Is our art a refuge for beings? Is it medicine? Does it vision the whole of life onward? 

BE: And to get to this bigger view—a cosmic view of art—we have to renounce everything that doesn’t function. 

AO: And in terms of making or viewing art, if we don’t know how to navigate or welcome home—or be welcomed home by—something that puts our identity at stake, we will either crack up, or our identity will co-opt the experience. That’s overly dualistic, but it seems we need to realize the basic sense of the situation. 

BE: One of the things that divides people about your work is the range of styles, and I am wondering how this might relate to these issues. 

AO: Is it divisive? 

BE: In the sense that some people like some of your approaches better than others, and this leads critics to belittle some of your work and then give the total output a lesser standing. Even general readers like some things and strongly dislike others, as if they are dalliances or a sign of dilettantism. After all, you have written screenplays, stage plays, novels, short stories, essays, and poetry in more forms than I can recall: haiku, lyrical poems, prose poems, and now these avant garde mathematical/poetic proof poems. And, of course, you often put this work forward as spiritual or philosophical. You take up poetry as an exercise in LoveWisdom, or as philosophical/spiritual practice.  

AO: We spoke about John Cage, and he was an influence on me for sure. But something else happened that really hit me: I encountered the lives of Saigyo and Basho, two marvelous Japanese poets. I already mentioned Basho, and I’m sure most people have heard of him. Saigyo was a poet of the Middle Ages. He was in the Imperial guard, so basically a court official who must have had a pretty decent gig for the time. He worked for the retired Emperor. Probably not a bad job for a guard, easier maybe than working for the active Emperor. And then he left it all behind—not only the job, but his family too. He left it all behind to become a Buddhist monk. Eventually, he expressed this home-leaving in the life of a wandering poet. He was known as Priest Saigyo, but he was a poet, not a priest in the sense of living at a temple and taking care of a flock. He took up the Way of Poetry as his path of practice, and it was a wandering lifestyle, the life of a homeless beggar. This was in a cultural context which saw the Way of Poetry as identical with the Way of the Buddha, or, we might say, the Way of the Divine, a Holy Path, a Path of Sacredness. It was a spiritual way of life.  

BE: That’s something not everyone is familiar with. Some people today don’t see this as an option for religious practice. Today, practicing religion might mean, say for a Christian, that they go to church once a week, or maybe every day in very devoted cases, or maybe they pray every day, or even go so far as become a nun or a priest. But from this Buddhist perspective one could write poetry and even go so far as to become a wandering poet.  

AO: Right. Not that we have to become nomadic. We could find other ways to do it. We could say that art as a spiritual practice might in theory be open to any religion or philosophy. But the Buddhist traditions often emphasize nonduality—that’s at the heart, even if it’s not always emphasized—so this makes sense more readily for these traditions. But, again, there is nothing standing in the way of such practices and insights in other traditions, as figures like Rumi and Hafiz attest. There are cultural factors too of course, factors having to do with the way the arts developed in China and Japan, partially under the influence of Buddhism. A lot of interbeing there. The bottom line is that art in the Buddhisms, in many of the Buddhist traditions, is not restricted to illustrations or depictions of Buddhist ideas or scriptures. The art is not merely iconographic, doxographical, or something like that. It can also be, and perhaps in some sense must always be, something like a path of practice. And that, in and of itself, is already interesting.  

BE: Art is always going to be a way of life for some people. But we’re asking, What does that mean? It doesn’t usually mean a philosophical, spiritual, or religious way of life in the way you describe. It still means a philosophy of life, of course. You made that clear. But it’s usually an inadvertently, ironically, or even tragically narrow philosophy of life, one that doesn’t function for the larger community of life.  

AO: It means living the life of an artist, which in some ways can become just another job, connected with a knack for words or for laying paint, or some set of skills that are in some ways as eccentric as juggling fire. The process of working on the art is not necessarily working on the artist and helping the world, furthering the conditions of life, caring for the community of life and fulfilling a cosmic purpose. The artist does not have to transform in such a case. Their work may change in various ways, and of course people change in various ways over the course of a lifetime. But the artists don’t need to change in a deep spiritual sense in these more accidentally narrow philosophies.  

BE: However, in a religious life, or a spiritual or philosophical life, we expect to transform. We expect to experience major shifts. 

AO: And we dedicate ourselves to the liberation of all beings—even if indirectly, in that our peace affects others and becomes a factor in their lives, and our practice and realization manifest in every stroke of the brush, visible for every being, but immediately affecting all beings everywhere, whether those beings “see” the work or not. 

BE: This gets at what we were discussing before, this transformative potential of art.  

AO: Something in here relates to the other things we were discussing.  

BE: Maybe that will become clearer, but can you finish your thought? You were saying that this idea of art as a Way—with a capital ‘W’ I take it, as in the Eastern idea of the Way, art as a spiritual practice—is interesting in itself, but there is something else, right? 

AO: Well, the something else is the rather astonishing fact that Saigyo left his life in order to receive his life. Somehow, something hit him. This ordinary bloke somehow got hit by a question, a passionate question or need, and he felt he had to put everything down and pursue it. What could be so important? What makes someone put everything down?  

We have a question at the heart of our being, and in order to answer it, we have to give our whole attention, our heartmind, our heart-mind-body-world-cosmos. Not everyone has to walk out of their home and wander the country as a spiritual pilgrim. But we have to leave the nests we make for ourselves, the reified life, the opinions, the comforts, the ideas, the assumptions, the great distance we put between ourselves and life. We can “leave home” while still living in our house, raising a family, caring for a larger community. It can be done. But, however it looks on the surface, we have to leave it all if we want to answer the deep question in our soul.  

BE: One thing that comes up that we should maybe make explicit here relates to developing a willingness to not know what art is. This not-knowing seems important here, and it seems art as a practice demands it.

AO: From the viewer too. Of course, we have to emphasize that the spiritual perspective tends to have in it the nonduality of artist and viewer. The art happens before the thought that divides the work and the viewer. That changes everything. 

But in terms of this aspect you touch on, we have to allow a willingness to be made a fool by art, by a work of art and by the practice of art more generally, a willingness to look stupid standing there not knowing what to “do,” nothing “happening,” nothing to say, just a blankness that we impulsively try to fill.      

In most philosophy, you meet a mind. Not quite a “person” in the conventional sense. A mind . . . like something mysterious and profound, and not dualistic. In fact, you meet the mystery, but it takes the form of mind, and so it seems like meeting a mind. In most art, you meet the mystery too. If we read the work of a philosopher who practiced both broadly and deeply, radically and intimately, we get an invitation to meet them eye to eye, which means an invitation to meet mystery for ourselves. They know they have entered the mystery, and ideally they wrote from there, living there. The artist offers this too, in their own way. But you find a big difference: In most art, the artist crafts the invitation—in one way or another—while in the best philosophy, the mystery itself does the work. That happens in the case of the art too, but there it typically happens in spite of the artist. When Dogen writes, Dogen lets the True Dharma Eye do the writing. It’s a love affair, a dance, fully awake and cooperative. Rumi let the divine sing through him. One can go on and on listing these mystics. But with many artists, they have to fight with their ego to get this to happen, or they swing from moments of bliss back to all manner of suffering and confusion.  

There is a big danger here in getting bound up in discriminating mind. Art is art, so to speak . . . it’s subtle to speak about these things, since art is a whole world, a cosmos. We should count our blessings for every great artist and every great work of art. This cosmos of ours unfolds artfully, creatively, moment to moment. Thus, art exists nondually with the essenceless essence of the cosmos.  

Nevertheless, artists are sentient beings who suffer, and as they perpetuate their lives dualistically, they inevitably sow seeds of suffering. Seeds of salvation too.  

BE: But why does the artist have to sow seeds of salvation? Why do they have to save the world? 

AO: What gives them the right to degrade it? And what gives them the right to withhold medicine which they have the power to provide? 

BE: They’re just making art. 

AO: We’re back to this, because it demands critical analysis. Let’s say I am a painter, and I live in a tiny village. One day, my community gathers and tells me, “When you use that paint, it poisons the water.” Even in the basic sense of having to wash my brushes, the paint gets into the well or spring we use in our village, and people have started to notice. 

We could see this as an isolated act. We see crime this way in a deluded culture. In a deluded culture, we punish the criminal for having committed a crime. But, as Gregory Bateson pointed out, when it comes to a crime, we don’t have a case of one bad decision, but rather an incoherent way of life. That in turn means incoherence in the culture. So, we have a basic philosophical problem, a foundational issue in our philosophy of life in the individual and the interwoven collective sense. We need to organize how we do things in a far better way, and the crime only indicated deeper issues. 

This does not mean the people we call criminals are inherently bad. They are basically good in every case, but they have to deal with an incoherent culture, and their own incoherent notions as well.  

We wouldn’t say scientists are inherently evil just because of the consequences of their work. Their work may, in some sense, count as evil, and they do bear ethical responsibility for that. But we face a larger pattern of insanity, for which we all bear some level of responsibility, and which none of us can pretend we live outside of.  

When we see the impressive rocket, or the new medical treatment, or the self-driving car, we may feel wowed and wooed. But we don’t see the degradation elsewhere. We don’t see that we have to try and treat symptoms here that we created in the process of coming up with the treatment over there, and that the symptoms emerged from exactly that pattern of insanity. We have to stop limiting our own potential like this, in our very manner of thinking about what we are and what is possible for us. 

When an artist pollutes or degrades ecologies, we have detected a pronounced symptom in a much larger pattern of insanity. We may think the artist can correct the problem by changing paints, but that “solution” merely presences the pattern of insanity itself, and furthers it. Rather than coming up with fragmented and fragmenting “solutions,” we have to reorient. It has to do with attunement, and attunement with reality is the basic spiritual gesture. It’s the essence of a spiritual life. 

The last thing we want to do is criticize an artist engaged in trying to save a river ecology, but if their activity presences the basic pattern of insanity that degraded that river ecology in the first place, then it behooves all of us to stop, and to rethink the nature of thinking. If a certain style of consciousness has seized us, then whether we think “river-saving” thoughts or “river-degrading” thoughts, those thoughts appear in the same style. Indeed, most river ecologies become degraded by people who don’t actively think, “I will degrade this river ecology.” They intend something else, but the style of consciousness with which they intend leads to degradation.

BE: This gets back to a holistic rather than a fragmented and fragmenting view of the world and ourselves. The spiritual traditions offer us ways to get out of this fragmented and fragmenting view of ourselves, our art, the river, the pigments. But it’s not easy. We want to just change our pigments and keep on going. Why doesn’t that work? Couldn’t we just find a sustainable pigment source? 

AO: It’s almost as if we have to ask ourselves, as a foundational question, whether or not we think the cosmos holds together. Do we live in a fragmented world, or an interwoven one? And then, Should we think from wholeness or from fragmentation? How do we think in/through/as wholeness? Ultimately, we can experiment and find out what this world is and how to live well in it, but we still tend to begin with a cosmogram, so it behooves us to choose one that makes sense, that seems coherent. 

For all I know, just going down to the river to collect stones which we then grind up into pigments might function. But the spiritual traditions invite us into a far more expansive view, a far more holistic, healing, and holy view. And anyway, we can still ask, What gives us the right to just take stones from the river?  

BE: They’re only stones. 

AO: Exactly. We confess our metaphysics, our speculative assumptions. And our metaphysics may be unskillful, obsolete, inadvertently damaging.  

BE: Even to ourselves. 

AO: Of course. I relate to the river as a taker. I take. I practice no generosity. Moreover, I exclude an entire dimension of my experience, namely intention. 

BE: But you have the intention to get pigments. 

AO: That’s not how intention works. Our intentions make a world, not merely artifacts.

BE: Ah. We can’t avoid making a world, and skillful intentions make a healthy world. The spiritual traditions help us practice skillful intentions. An atheistic mind, maybe someone like Bateson, might say that it helps to have a religious or mytho-poetic metaphor to work with, even if we don’t take it as “really real”. 

AO: Sure, but we also don’t know.  

BE: You are asking, What gives us the right to take and not to give in return? What does that look like? 

AO: Making an offering to the river. We might go to the river with our little medicine bag, and we might have some tobacco that we offer in exchange for the pigment. But before we even get to that, we might go to the river and ask for help, ask the sacred powers and inconceivable causes to help us make a work of art that will fulfill a good function in the world, a work of art that might help and heal all beings. We could then ask where to gather the stones, which stones are okay to take, and which stones must be left in their place. 

BE: The same would hold for gathering plant pigments. Some artists have started growing plants to use in their art. 

AO: Here too, that might be great all by itself. Going to the river or growing plants might be vastly better than having someone degrade ecologies for our art supplies. But we face several issues: We still participate in the pattern of insanity, and for all we know we also perpetuate it. The spiritual traditions demand a total revolution. If we are now asleep, we need to do more to wake up than take our same sleepy mind to the river. We have to rouse the river and let the river rouse us. We might learn a lot by asking the land what it wants us to grow there. Maybe pigments are okay. Maybe we also need or primarily need something else in our immediate ecology, and we may have to ask friends to help us grow the pigments elsewhere. We can’t just force our agendas on the world, no matter how nice we think our agendas are. If the problems we face arise rather directly from the having of agendas, then we will have to allow ourselves the courage to drop agenda-having—at least, if we want to dispel the pattern of insanity, rather than trying to make it look nicer on the surface while leaving its roots intact. 

We can put the question this way: What do artists manifest with their creative practice? Do they create soil? Do they create clean air or clean water? Do they create forests or oceans? Do they create any living ecologies in vitalizing ways? It seems most non-human beings do just that kind of work with their creativity, their creative practice of mind and body. But the embodied artist, whose “mental” “experience” depends on the living world, employs tools in relative isolation from the living world, while extracting from it constantly (however “indirect” the extraction may seem) in order to produce and consume works of art, read books, buy laptops and phones, drive cars, fly to residencies and interviews, store their ever-expanding, digitized verbiage and imagery on servers, and so on.

What kind of world do we artists make with our activity? Does the world itself, the world and all its sentient beings, place any conditions on our creative practice that we should feel an ethical demand to fulfill? From the perspective a more ecologically rooted culture (a more realistic culture), what is the point of art, and what must art include, what must creative practice look like? These will perhaps come to strike us as not only valid questions, but as important ones, perhaps threatening the center of our web of beliefs.

BE: That’s in part our intention with respect to the river, to return to that specific example. We go there to relate to it, that we relate to sacred powers and inconceivable causes. We don’t go to “collect pigments,” which is more like an agenda, but for the sake of mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, mutual liberation, which is more like a spiritual intention. I ask the river to liberate me, and I offer myself for the river’s liberation, offer to create the river with as much care as it creates me. I don’t ask for pigments, but I ask the river to illuminate my being, and to work together with me to further the conditions of life. And I offer gratitude, reverence, and nourishment in return for all the river does for me and all our relations. And I listen, I wait to be acknowledged, like getting permission and engaging in co-discovery and co-creation, as opposed to forcing an agenda, however artistic, onto the world. 

AO: Intention is an inescapable dimension of our experience—including our experience of the river. The river can only arise as experience. There is no other river. Therefore, we have to attend to that dimension of our experience as part of attending to the river, serving it, serving as an attendant of life, an attendant of sacredness, an attendant of divine creation. Our life already has this profound meaningfulness, and working in a more spiritual manner, in a more sacred manner, gets us in touch with that, gets us in touch with reality. We also get in touch with a style of thinking and a style of consciousness, one that renounces dualisms. All of this allows us to further the conditions of life, to cultivate the whole of life onward. 

BE: If we can choose between making art from dualistic mind, or making art directly, so to speak, from the bosom of Sophia, we have an ethical obligation there too—to the river, to ourselves, to all sentient beings, to all of life, to the whole cosmos, including these sacred powers and sacredness itself. 

AO: Overall, making art with clear, calm, stable awareness brings greater benefits to all beings. We can still make powerful art—every bit as powerful as art made from a deluded mind.  

BE: Well, we are basically suggesting it is more powerful, right? Or, more empowering, and so on—more healing, more inspiring, and all the rest—for all the reasons we have touched on. We said that, first of all, there is no isolated art. That means the artist who has a deep spiritual practice, and who has come to significant spiritual insights, of necessity makes different art than they otherwise would if they remained as they had been. They have committed to an emergence, out of confusion, our of aggression, out of delusion, out of the pattern of insanity. 

And then we have the community of life. If we allow the larger ecologies, the larger community of life—which includes spiritual energies and presences—to give us feedback on our art, then the art has to change. When we alter the what, why, and how of our art, it changes, and we are saying it inevitably expands and evolves, becomes better for us and the whole world. 

AO: All true. In some sense, the choice here is not between “good” art and “spiritual” art. It’s all art. We are talking about art, and we are asking if the finest, most empowering art—the most mutually empowering, healing, nourishing illuminating, liberating art—arises from the greatest clarity of soul, the most holistic spiritual way of life, as opposed to merely channeling that same art through a soul bound and fettered. How do we best cultivate the whole of life onward? By what means? 

BE: We seem to go back again to this notion that a work of art can seem powerful. And we have sort of asked whether it’s like looking at a rocket or a brain scanner. It seems really impressive, and it has an undeniable cogency, as an artefact and as what it seems to indicate. But, to caricature the situation, proudly waiving a poem around kind of seems like pointing at a rocket and asking people to admire you. It’s like there’s still a basic mistake there. 

AO: This is not easy to get at, because we do need to make sure we acknowledge the value of art. I think Walter Kaufmann said somewhere that, given a choice between a world with no war or hunger, but also no art, he’d rather have a world with art—even if that meant war and hunger.  

BE: But we are saying it’s a false choice. 

AO: Right. Nevertheless, we can acknowledge that many artists feel free in creating, or feel themselves to be free spirits. Speaking nondualistically, they are indeed free. But we are talking about broad and deep spiritual liberation, which in turn can liberate artistic vision—in ways the artist cannot understand ahead of time. They have to admit their ignorance. 

BE: Suddenly I seem to want to say that Milarepa would never trade his poetry for that of T.S. Eliot. And even further, even though Jesus, Socrates, and the Buddha don’t seem to have written a single poem or painted a single painting, they would not exchange their experience of life for that of Eliot’s, or Picasso’s, Mozart’s, or any of countless other geniuses. And at the same time I recognize what you are saying, that it’s subtle, and that people can get the wrong idea. Can we just put our finger on the place where it’s a false choice between spirituality and art? 

AO: We can try. We could say that Milarepa prefers his poetry to Eliot’s because it comes from the intimate experience that the very nature of reality is beauty, creativity, and also love and wisdom. The nature of things is wisdom and wonder, so it’s not that we “make” art, but that we find the artfulness everything already is, that we let go of the identification and delusion, and simply let the cosmos unfold, in/through/as our whole life, including anything we might make that we would refer to as a work of art. Most artists never enter that mystery as fully as Milarepa seems to have done, and so everything in their art arises from that not-entering.  

BE: But the inspiration sparks out of that mystery—always. 

AO: Yes. And in any case we need art, even if most artists are not sages. The artists don’t have to be sages. We can still root the practice of art in wisdom, love, and beauty, and that orientation already changes everything.  

We value art in part because of its capacity to express things that make no sense from other perspectives. Art can transcend its historical moment for that reason, appearing as a rupture of the dominant forms of life and forms of discourse. The work of art can express paradoxes and contradictions of the moment, new possibilities of being, clarification of our ways of being as they now confine themselves. All of that remains so.  

But what happens when the artist can, in an ongoing way, see everything as the play of primordial awareness, or God, or Sophia, or what have you? What happens when they live a nonduality of nature and culture? What happens when wisdom, love, and beauty flow through them in an ongoing way? What happens when their soul and the soul of the world, in a sacred wholeness, begin to speak through them, begin to vision forth the whole of life?  

What do they become? What does their art become? What does their world become? We are lived by powers we pretend to understand. What happens when we allow those powers to be the sacred powers and inconceivable causes of love and liberation? What world emerges from that? 

BE: This goes back to what you were saying about the system of relations. How did you put it? 

AO: That art is a system of relations in service to spiritual passions. The heart wakes up. Bodhi mind they call it in the Buddhist traditions. The Way-making mind, mind of care and compassion, mind of sacredness, mind of wisdom, love, and beauty as the foundation of the path, as the path itself, and as the fruition of the path. We don’t make the a Way exactly, so much as the Way makes itself and the cosmos in/through/as us. 

BE: And for you, this Way-making mind meant becoming the artist you became. 

AO: Yes. As it did, ultimately, with Saigyo. But I am Saigyo in reverse. I started writing poetry and making visual art, and later saw that I had made a nest out of this—instead of home-leaving, I made a new house, a new fabrication. So, from this larger more carefully contemplated perspective, I wasn’t really an artist. To become an artist I had to give up being an artist.  

BE: You don’t mean in the sense of going on to do other kinds of work? 

AO: No, we mean something else. We could say it this way: To become a poet, you have to stop being a poet. In order for an artist, of any kind—dancer, actor, writer, whatever—in order for an artist to fully become an artist they need to let go of being an artist. That doesn’t mean they can’t make great work without doing so. It means they limit their potential, as great as they may have become, and they remain a little incongruent, that they have incoherence in the soul, and it gets at these deeper spiritual issues, because that incoherence affects the whole world. 

B: Somehow the ego co-opts the process, co-opts the fuller liberatory potential of art? 

AO: Something along those lines. Not exactly that, or not only that, but that’s part of it. And we are also here getting back to the story of Saigyo. 

B: Because he had to stop being a monk to be a monk? 

AO: Well, in some sense, no one is a monk. Who’s the monk? Find me the monk. It’s a concept. Spiritual practice in the sense we mean it here demands getting past concepts. In order to encounter the divine, we have to give up religion. To find religion we have to give it up. That vein of nondoing will inevitably crop up. We can’t control Sophia, we can’t control the divine, we can’t control inspiration.  

B: But you are saying there’s something else here as well. 

AO: Several things. For one, maybe we haven’t gotten clear on the simple fact that renunciation means—well, I love the way Trungpa put it: “Renunciation is realizing that nostalgia for samsara is full of shit.” We sometimes have difficulty admitting how much nostalgia we feel for our own suffering, nostalgia for our own insanity and the insanity of our culture. In a crazy culture, we certainly don’t have nostalgia for the whole catastrophe, and we can give all sorts of intellectuals critique about why things are wrong in the world. But, at the end of the day, we cling to our insanity and our suffering, and sometimes people cling to so much of their culture’s insanity that one can hardly believe it. In any case, we have to renounce everything unreal. That includes our identity and the culture’s delusions.  

You touched on this. Socrates wouldn’t give up what he is in exchange for the identity of “philosopher”. Milarepa doesn’t need to be called a “poet”. He only seeks reality. For Socrates, seeking reality—fully realizing love, wisdom, and beauty—meant becoming an artist of life. He had these dreams that told him to cultivate art. He always understood that as the art of living. Just to be sure, in his prison cell, awaiting his execution, he decided to try writing some poems—on the off chance he misunderstood the dreams. So, even then, he didn’t cling. He didn’t cling to anything. That not-clinging means not clinging to the idea that I have to “be” a “painter” or whatever. 

On a slightly different level . . . this might seem unrelated, but it’s about the same principle in the context of making art . . . We should maybe acknowledge that Saigyo and I took different routes in more than the obvious ways. He wrote waka, a poetic form of 31 syllables. Basho famously wrote haiku, a form of 17 syllables. Now, Basho broke the form sometimes. Instead of 5-7-5, he might write 8-7-5, or 10-4-5, or 5-9-5. He participated in the evolution of form by writing haiku, which previously, so to speak in a past lifetime, had appeared as something called a hokku, a starting verse for linked poems. Basho and others turned the haiku into its own form. Mastery—we should speak of exuberance, and skillful exuberance . . . mystery rather than mastery as in some kind of domination—so, we can say that in the mystery of skillful exuberance, this happens by itself, when it needs to—the artist breaks conventions, reinvents, or even invents something new—allows the new to come through them, from the soul, from and for sentient beings, from and for nature, from the cosmos as a whole. The new form remains rooted in the community of life and the cosmos as a whole.  

BE: This is part of the shamanic dimension or aspect of art. 

AO: Yes. Artist as medial figure, as bridge between worlds that are already nondual but seem separate to the habitual mind. How can we listen to what the soul, the so-called “objective” psyche and “objective” cosmos demands, as opposed to what the ego wants or tries to take credit for? 

Saigyo broke conventions too. We are asking, What drives that? We can ask about these things in different ways. At one level, as a facet of the jewel of art, form has some influence over what we can say. So form raises important questions for all of us. Put all of that together and you have some of the particular questions that have driven me as an artist and a human being: What makes a person leave home? Can we leave home to find home? Can we leave home while staying at home, staying in our local ecology? If something is so important that it makes us leave home, how do we work with it, how do we talk about it, and how do we let it express itself as our lives and our work—even if we remain in our local ecology?  

I’m not saying that my work comes down to just this, but these things and many others have had no small impact. Most importantly, we have to ask how to cultivate the whole of life onward, how to fulfill cosmic-level responsibilities, responsibilities to sacred powers and inconceivable causes, responsibilities to sentient beings, responsibilities to the mystery and the magic. We have to ask how the practice of art can reveal the true nature of reality—not merely through the limited notion of “beauty is truth,” but in the demanding sense we find in the spiritual traditions of the world. 

B: Okay, so there is a big picture about form that gets into deep spiritual waters. If we could maybe put it in the more narrow, artistic sense: We experiment with form in part to discover what form does to the expression of this mystery. Though it’s more than that. 

AO: That’s not a bad way of putting it. We have to make sure we haven’t gotten stuck on a form, which otherwise could help free us, and we have to make sure we don’t get stuck on breaking forms, or we mistake impulse for inspiration, we mistake being “uninhibited” for being free.  

The central notion is liberating expression—Can an expression come from liberation itself, and then lead to liberation? In other words, the artist has to be unstuck—unstuck to form, unstuck to identity, unstuck altogether—and unstuckness is a quality of the sage, the realized mystic, not of the typical neurotic human being. Many artists mistake being “uninhibited” with this spiritual unstuckness. Saigyo left home to force himself to renounce stuckness. It’s not easy. 

BE: Something like the flipside of what I suggested probably holds as well, right? You break a form or experiment with form because the mystery pushes you in that direction.  

AO: Yes, and in either case we face a grave danger of just forcing things into various forms, which means not really allowing the form to have its say, not really allowing nature to have its say, the soul to have its say, sacredness to have its say, the mystery to have its say. Critics who have tried to get at that weakness in my own work have sometimes—not always, but sometimes—made legitimate claims, because I am not unstuck. I am just another deluded being doing their best to enter the heart of wonder, doing their best to practice. In any case, there are dangers and challenges, because art, like many charged things, invites compelling and inventive forms of spiritual materialism, false consciousness, denial, and so on.  

In a concrete sense, sometimes we may want to experiment in terms of finding out what effect certain forms may have . . . just a kind of experiment. Other times, we have little choice. What comes through us comes in its own form. But we cannot work willy-nilly. The point of form, or one point of form, is to give us a way of working with formlessness. Form itself becomes the source of freedom. We can look at that as a lesson in nondual philosophy. People have trouble with that in, say, Zen practice, where there is all this rigid form. They don’t get the nonduality.  

In nature we see this everywhere. An eagle cannot tie a pair of shoelaces. But with that apparent constraint comes the liberation into flight. We can go on and on with these examples of the nonduality of relative freedom and constraint, and these examples fill the history of art, from the form of the sonnet to the material limits—or, we might say the spiritual character or even the personality of things like stone, metal, wood, light, pigment, petal, paintbrush. 

Another way to put it, in terms of art, is that we need some tools. 

BE: —I kind of laugh sometimes at the ideology of tool-talk. People all the time talk about “tools” and “resources” and creativity coaches promise to sell us a “tool kit,” and it all has a silly dimension to it, often with the stain of instrumental thinking and a serious lack of wisdom.  

AO: True. Very true. It also has some helpfulness in it, if we take care. And you sense how often we fail to take care. 

In a general way, there is some sense in which we feel we can’t just get thrown into life, thrown into inconceivable situations with nothing to go on. And that can involve our desire to make things known, to label and control, and so on. We remain dualistic. We dualize by means of these so-called tools, rather than realizing true skill. We miss that we, too, are inconceivable. We’re the same as the mystery. We are this basic awareness, acceptance, connection, nondoing, a primordial knowing and a spontaneous creativity.  

At the same time, formlessness and form go hand in hand. We always have both fully present. None of this changes the usefulness of particular forms. Just like meditation, and certain ways of life in terms of spiritual practice. Without those forms, we can’t begin to handle the mystery. That doesn’t mean that the forms always have to bind up the mystery or cover it over or control it or label it. They are inevitably the direct expression of the mystery, as in Dante’s suggestion that “the new form follows spirit exactly.” Even more, they arise in nonduality. Form is openness, and openness is form. Or, wisdom is love, love is wisdom. When we see that in a visionary way, enter the wonder and mystery of it, we immediately give rise to beauty, touch the beauty that pervades the nonduality of wisdom and love. If we don’t enter that mystery, we end up sowing the seeds of suffering. 

BE: Can I ask how all of this relates to ritual? There’s clearly some relationship here, and in some ways you have invited us to think about how art could become more like ritual. We are talking about ways of life, ways of talking, ways of practicing the creation and co-creation of art and life. For instance, one of the things a person notices in going to literary readings in our area, and in lots of places in the emerging cultures, is that many of them have an element of ritual. The space is ritually opened and ritually closed. Then, with artists like you, there is an invocation of the muse, or in your case, the daimon, or Sophia. These are not the same though, right? Your notion of daimon is something that echoes Socrates, Lorca, and maybe Zhuangzi. Can you talk about some of these things? 

AO: As for the daimon . . . the word and the connotations around it do honor Socrates and Lorca and many others. Lorca felt that the duende was called up not like a muse, which one may imagine as separate from oneself, as external. Rather, one roused the duende in the blood. Still, the duende can enter from outside. It’s like a possession. It enters through the souls of the feet, a spirit from the dark places, from the depths of the Earth and the Soul of the Earth. So, it gets closer to breaking the dichotomy of internal/external, but it seems to me that the duende is still something not quite oneself. To call on the daimon is to call on one’s own soul, something like Buddha-nature I guess, but this too breaks all dualities. In calling on Sophia, this same idea goes a bit further, because Sophia and I are one, and Sophia is the infinite soul. There, the poet honors Socrates as well as Rumi. Rumi and the Beloved are ultimately one, and so it is for the philosopher-poet and Sophia. 

BE: Ritual, again, is part of how we get in touch with the sacred. It’s a formalized practice of attunement, developed or discovered by medial figures in the culture.

AO: It’s not a woo-woo thing. Think of it this way . . . Scientists think they can kill a bunch of monkeys and rats, have ecologies degraded for fMRI machines and test subjects and all manner of equipment, just so they can get this stuff called knowledge, which they want, and which they justify because it’s good for “humanity”. This doesn’t function. If science doesn’t further the conditions of life, it puts itself into a state of incoherence, ethical anepistemological incoherence, as well as basic functional incoherence.

BE: How we further the conditions of life, that has to do with sacredness. If we violate sacredness, we violate the conditions of life.

AO: That’s one way to get at it. The word “sacred” designates something in the larger ecologies of mind that we cannot analyze out, cannot detect with our habitual mind, but which nevertheless functions.

BE: It’s an attitude too though.

AO: Crucially. A view, an attitude, a style of consciousness. That feeling of sacredness is the feeling of LoveWisdom, the embodiment of philosophy, the feeling of attunement with how things function.

BE: So, even killing the monkeys and rats shows up like the symptom of a disease, a disease of ignorance, as the philosophers themselves diagnosed it.

AO: Yes. Bateson might like that we would highlight this as ignorance and as insanity, both of which the traditions suggest. Sacredness has to do with skillful and realistic ways of knowing and being, living and loving.

BE: Art has to do this too, has to attune with sacredness and further the conditions of life.

AO: When art doesn’t further the conditions of life, it puts itself into incoherence. The artist has justifications that sound like those of the scientist: Art for art’s sake, art without limits, art for beauty’s sake, beauty is truth, the inherent power of art, and all the rest. The world itself judges our claims. Socrates critiqued the Sophists for precisely this sort of nonsense, that “man” is the measure of all things. Nonsense. Wisdom, love, and beauty will have the final say, other sentient beings and Nature too, as the living presence of wisdom, love, and beauty will have their say. Art must attune with life, and thus with some sense of sacredness, wonder, serentiy, joy, healing, and wholeness.

BE: “The Photographer”! 

AO: What? 

B: I can’t believe I didn’t think about it earlier when we were talking about Saigyo and art and spirituality. Your short story, “The Photographer”. 

AO: What about it? 

B: Well, I happen to know first of all that you published two versions of it. In one version, the guy keeps telling people, “I’m a photographer.” In the other version, he never even says those words. In both versions, there’s this main character going around, never taking a single picture. He has no camera, and no electronic device on him. We see him helping people in all sorts of ways. He carries a woman’s heavy bag. He pacifies a child who has fallen and skinned her knee. He even goes and gets a bandage and some wound cleaner. He plays with dogs, who seem to adore him. People perk up at his presence. They break into smiles, they loosen up, they get a boost of energy. And any time someone thanks him or praises him or appreciates him in any way, he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I’m a photographer.” Of course, in the other version, he just smiles at them, and the reader is left with the title of the story alone to suggest that this person is somehow a photographer. People sometimes look at him like he might be a little crazy, in a nice way, especially in the version that has him saying he’s a photographer. People take it as some kind of tic. No one in the story has ever seen him with a camera, and when someone asks him about his camera, he says, “Nikon, Canon, Fuji-san.” The “Fuji-san” gives a hint: Mount Fuji, the sacred mountain. And then, if the reader looks into it, Canon got its name from the bodhisattva of compassion, and Nikon might be derived from a word meaning “moment,” or something like that.  

There are a few ways I have interpreted those stories, and usually I see some kind of nonduality between art and life at work. But now it seems that part of these stories, if not the heart, is something so obvious I can’t believe I never thought of it: The guy really is a photographer. Probably very serious about it, very dedicated. But he doesn’t see the real work as making images and showing people the images he makes. Who knows what he does with those images? Maybe he deletes them as he makes them. Maybe there’s a big file of them somewhere. Maybe he never records the images with any device, but rather makes images with a sacred mountain mind, a compassion mind, a moment mind. The soul is the “camera”. The world is the camera and the art. What matters to him is how the work of his art, the practice of this artistic way of life, affects the whole world, affects his way of being with others, seeing things moment to moment. 

Of course, we might imagine meeting a spiritual artist, and we might see them with a camera in their hand, and we might ask, “What are you doing?” and they might respond, “Liberating and nourishing all sentient beings,” and they would really mean it. 

Taking up art has to do with realizing our life, realizing the life of the whole world. We let the art into our life, let it inform our every action, making every moment beautiful, expressive, vibrant, creative, responsive.  

The world is the work of art—the cosmos even—but not merely some “image”. He’s a planetary or cosmic photographer. He doesn’t make the fascist attempt to control the world, or “make” the world, or “aestheticize” one’s work in the world. You could just as easily have called it “The Painter,” or “The Sculptor,” or “The Dancer”. It has to do with this spiritual sense of composition, of entering the mind of beauty and the heart of wonder and participating in the artful creativity of the cosmos itself. Is that right?  

AO: I will not disagree with that. 

B: Yeah, but you almost always say that. Your whole modus operandi very intimately and explicitly involves the reader and refuses finality of interpretation. I admire that, and I grant that no interpretation is final. But why not admit what you were up to? 

AO: Duality. But there was another version of the story too. In that one, the main character goes around planting trees and helping people tend to the land. She always tells people, “I’m a painter.” No one seems to get it. They say, “A painter? Then how do you know so much about fungi and oak trees? How do you know about watersheds and owls?” She says, “They’re artists. They are my teachers.” 

BE: It’s like we were saying earlier: Art as a practice of magic might mean the painting manifests with the presence of an amulet, or it might appear as a forest. Either way, we get a broader view, a more expansive existence, one in which imagination lives in the landscape, in the community of life, in the ecologies of mind. 

AO: Wisdom, love, and beauty arise as mountains, rivers, and the Great Earth—all sentient beings, all of sentient being.