Art as Truth Is a Pathless Land

We should all be concerned by what is happening in the world—disintegration, violence, brutality, wars, and dishonesty in high places of politics.

As artists, we must ask ourselves: what is the correct action in the face of these phenomena?

What constitutes right, accurate, and compassionate action—one that is not fragmented but whole? Could it be an action that is in itself religious, in the sense of gathering all one’s energies to find the place and limits of thought, and to go beyond?

Since all our activities—political, social, economic, moral, and religious—are based on thought, we must ask: what is the nature of thought? Can thought become aware of itself and of its movements?

We observe that thought is a movement, and movement implies time. Thought is memory accumulated in the brain as knowledge and experience. It creates both the world around us and within us—the world of reality, the world of things.

But can thought solve our deepest problems, given that it is merely the response of memory and experience? Being fragmentary, thought has created a fragmented world—it cannot comprehend what is whole or total.

Understanding what is whole, total, and true is the first step the artist must take to be of use in society. This requires clarity about the limits of reality.

Art, above all, is the ability to place everything in life in its rightful place. It is the artist’s task to understand the field of thought and its boundaries.

The awareness through which the mind understands where it must operate as thought and where it must be silent is what the East calls meditation. Meditation is not willfully achieved, for any act of volition stirs new waves of thought that disturb the stillness.

The ordinary state of consciousness—bounded by space, time, cause, and effect—cannot transcend the limits that meditation does. Meditation arises only when the mind is at total rest: awake, but not asleep.

This stands in contrast to the Western notion of meditation.

Through the lens of what is increasingly known as the “cognitive sciences,” the world is seen as a complex web of interdependent relationships. These connections are held together not by anything fixed, but by reciprocal interdependence—and the very act of observation alters the system observed.

Thus, knowledge is not the representation of a pre-existing world, but the continuous generation of one through observation itself.

In this sense, symbolic images can support anamnesis—the Platonic process by which the soul recognizes itself in the presence of sensible things. In Jungian psychology, such symbols assist the process of individuation—the integration of the individual and the universal, the conscious and the unconscious.

Alchemy and Eastern doctrines also hold that within each human being lies a latent energy which, when awakened, brings about inner completeness—the unity of a divided personality.

In today’s world, the artist—guided by a steady and conscious understanding of the impermanence of all phenomena—can only serve by creating works that pull the viewer, even for a moment, out of the machinery of thought. This act interrupts the continuum of mental conditioning.

If the artist is able to quiet the mind, and if a structure of images emerges from a coherent imaginative axis, the resulting artworks will be “in-formed”—infused with that same axis. They will radiate the one energy capable of generating peace and harmony across all living beings, beyond borders of race, status, belief, or ideology.