How Our Art Supports the Reason We Are All Here
Growing the Collective Soul by growing your own soul's virtue. Come on and Shine.
This essay originally appeared on my personal Substack, Clinsights as here.
Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from the original post. You can always read the entire post here.
We are sharing this essay in The BoldBrush Letter because the underlying idea applies to all artists. Please enjoy.
How Our Art Supports the Reason We Are All Here
Why are we here?
The purpose of life is to grow a beautiful, strong, healthy soul.
This is our True Art — our true masterpiece — and this life is the canvas. The state of our soul is the painting. Every thought or action is a brushstroke.
Growing a beautiful, strong, healthy body requires eating clean nutritious food and undertaking wholesome exercise which, when you think about it, means consuming and creating uncontaminated energy: This is also how one grows the soul.
We know what nutritious food looks like, but what is the nutrition of the soul? Virtue.
Virtue is an energy; a power. It is something we absorb to make our souls grow strong and beautiful or, if our souls are malnourished, virtue is something that can repair the past damage that we’ve inflicted.
“The whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all.” – Luke 6:19, KJV
The soul’s “mouth” is our attention. With our eyes, ears, and senses, we consume virtue (beauty, goodness, truth) or we consume “junk food” (ugliness, evil, lies).
“Junk food” includes excessive scrolling on social media, obsessing over the ugliness the media presents as “news,” or endless arguing over politics. When viewed from the soul’s perspective these activities are far more damaging than you think, especially if you don’t counterbalance a diet of soul junk food with the regular “consuming” of virtuous beauty, art, music and joy. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit (their egos) with their souls, and we restore such damage by consuming the true eucharist of virtue with our attention.
The soul’s “exercise” is made up of our actions and thoughts — metaphorically represented by our arm (for actions) and our forehead (for thoughts). Building soul-muscle requires the cultivation of more virtue by engaging in right thoughts, right actions, developing a generous heart, and creating beauty — creating Art. With right “soul-exercise,” our arm and forehead are “marked” with virtue, and with wrong “soul-exercise” they take on the “mark of the beast.”
Through our virtuous actions, our ideas, our creations, our deeds, and our Art this virtue spreads out across humanity growing and uplifting our eternal collective soul.
The band, Collective Soul, knew this truth of virtue. They discuss this very process of looking at virtue (eating) and sharing it (exercise) in their hit, Shine:
Love is in the water
Love is in the air
Show me where to look
Tell me, will love be there?
Will love be there?Teach me how to speak
Teach me how to share
Teach me where to go
Tell me, will love be there?
Will love be there?— Shine, Collective Soul [source]
Our non-virtuous actions have the opposite effect – creating malignancy in our soul and, if shared, spreads such soul-disease out into the collective soul of all.
Virtue abounds endlessly right in front of us (“love is in the water, love is in the air”) but often, we foolishly shut it out in pursuit of junk food instead.
With each soul-bite (attention or thought), you are either improving your own soul or introducing a potential germ into it. With each action, you are either improving humanity’s soul-dna or you are infecting it with disease.
Your own soul reflects the state you have created through your thoughts, inputs, actions and Art.
If someone invented glasses that revealed the truth of each person’s soul, what would yours look like?
Would it be bright divine light, radiating outward and connecting with others in a beautiful emergent web of intuition? Or would it be darkened? Shriveled? And disconnected from the wellsprings of light all around you?
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry sacrifices himself and willingly accepts the full force of Voldemort’s killing curse. His soul then awakes in an out-of-body experience whole and hale. But, he then hears a pathetic noise, he turns and sees the horrifying piece of Voldemort’s fractured soul next to him:
[Harry] recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath. He was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless he drew slowly nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him.
“You cannot help.” He spun around. Albus Dumbledore was walking toward him, sprightly and upright, wearing sweeping robes of midnight blue.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Would your soul look like Harry’s or Voldemort’s?
In a way, such fictional soul-glasses do exist, although imperfectly: Often, an artist’s works will reflect the state of his or her soul.
To do the job of growing healthy souls, we undertake actions that the modern world thinks are useless or, at best, secondary. We grow our own soul by receiving virtue – nature, God, love, meditation, art, music, literature, poetry, beauty, play and many others. We then grow everyone’s soul (including ours) by creating virtue – love, Art, music, literature, joy, poetry, etc, etc, etc.
This is why Art is so important – it is one of the primary activities we should undertake while we are here in mortal school.
And, collectively, we are currently failing.
Your soul isn’t just “there” — it’s something we must grow from the tiny divine spark of inspiration which each of us has been gifted. We are soul-children, and we are here to learn and to grow up.
In fact, our soul is our one True creation and, since Art is one of the mechanisms by which we soul-create, the Arts are not merely “nice to have.” But, instead, The Arts are one of the most important undertakings of humanity.
Shine by Collective Soul, Official music video:
“Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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