Your True Self
Make the art only you can make
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Your True Self
“Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Throughout the ages, philosophers, artists and sages have all said the same thing, which is this: Do what only you can do, what your soul yearns to do, what you were put here to do.
However, in the modern world, most people are lost and cover up their truth. They are afraid of their truth. They quickly meet what Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, calls The Resistance, which is all the fear, guilt, apathy and anger that subconsciously keeps people from pursuing their Truth with vigor and dedication.
The egos, both individual and collective, stand between you and your primary life task of discovering and becoming your True Self. The ego hides your true self, like the Minotaur of Crete, at the center of a daedalian labyrinth. This is the ego’s attempt to prevent you from finding, connecting with, and integrating your true self which it jealously guards at the center. And any time you do muster the courage to enter the labyrinth to journey into your true nature, the ego blocks you with Pressfield’s Resistance.
However, your soul, deep down, knows better, and counters by causing within you a deep unsettling angst, a sort of quiet desperation that tells you that you when are not yet on the correct path to your true nature.
Hence, since we listen to our egos, we’ve become a nihilistic, production and consumption obsessed society. People now live to work and to consume. But, one must sublimate their ego to the transcendent to become fully themselves.
Modern man, for the most part, isn’t truly connected to his work. He simply trades his hours of work for money, so that he may meet his basic needs and continue to pay for the treasured distractions from his deepest Truth.
In 1958, philosopher Eric Fromm, warning about how the USA could destroy itself said,
"I think [for most people], their work is to a large extent meaningless because they are not related to it...the American man unconsciously hates his work very often because he feels trapped by it imprisoned by it because he feels that he’s spending most of his energy for something that has no meaning in itself”
First, modernity (collectively) destroyed our souls by eliminating spirituality and meaning, which, through endless fear and distraction, has separated most of us from our creative Truth.
Next, modernity destroyed our bodies via junk food, and lack of movement, thus destroying our health, vitality, and our internal drive to live our Truth.
And now, modernity is destroying our minds by removing the need to think.
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein
AI will do the work, and algorithms will serve up entertainment while we gorge on dopamine hits through our screens so that we don’t have to face the guilt of the truth that, deep down we already know - we were put on earth to accomplish much more than we are. We were put here to uncover, become, and live our Truth.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” - Gospel of Thomas
We are, collectively, not bringing forth what is within us, our Truths, and we are suppressing those Truths. And this is, collectively, destroying us.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way. Humans are not meant to live this way. And deep down, we all know it.
Before we can delve into practices, formulas, and methods, we must address the real underlying cause of our unhappiness and our failures to build the lives we want:
Nothing matters, until you end your suffering and find your truth. Until you know what you truly want, and that is more difficult than you might think. You must discover and do the thing only you can do, the thing the Creator put you here to do. Ideas about success or failure at this stage will only hinder your progress.
Accepting the real truth takes facing real fear and pain, the fear that is causing you to suppress it. And, it also means facing the ultimate real truth, and perhaps the reason we are so reluctant to embrace these deep truths, - the ultimate truth being that you will die (relatively soon) and cease to exist. That thought makes us uncomfortable. Obviously, it’s uncomfortable to ponder one’s own mortality, but, furthermore, our refusal to face it leads us to suppress the Truth about what we were put here uniquely to do and to share because, if we pretend we aren’t going to die, we can also pretend that “there’s always time to get around to that.”
There isn’t time though. You are going to die. You have unique gifts and creativity inside of you that only you can bring forth into the world and, if you haven’t faced this, you probably carry subconscious fear and guilt about your extremely limited time being wasted. Hence, until this truth is faced, we all live in a low level state of repression and quiet desperation!
And, worse, when we do finally attempt to “fix” the problem, we turn to yet more entertainment and distraction! For society has programmed the modern human to think he needs to “self-improve” and he looks for tactics and practices to get “better.” You are told to “be positive.” You are told to “fix your mindset.” You read “self-help” and “how to” books and listen to “positivity” podcasts all to “improve yourself.” But 99% of that is entertainment. There is nothing wrong with entertainment, of course, but let’s not pretend much of that leads to living in harmony with the deepest yearnings of your soul.
Consider: Why should one who is facing inescapable death, and soon, need to improve in all these different areas? The time you have left is best devoted to finding the Truth. Your Unique Truth. Your Unique Genius. And when you find it, boy, get ready, because “improvement” (from the world’s point of view) will happen automatically!
Ultimately this quest to find our true nature is a struggle between our mortal bodies and our mind of infinite possibilities, our spiritual side. Our true self is a synthesis of both that we must fully accept: life and death, the logos and the eros, the psycho-spiritual and the sensuous physicalness of a human. The spiritual is our grace, the expansive, forceful, perpetrating male energy striving for freedom and the physical is our gravity, the female energy, open, receptive gathering. The logos gazes to the horizon and dreams, but without the eros is completely lost and untethered from reality, the eros provides the raw creative power that drives all, but without the logos will have no outlet for such passionate power and the energy becomes repressed and destructive. We can also think of them as light and dark respectively. When we repress the dark as “bad” we create shadow sides that, if not given a creative outlet, become destructive and aggressive. We need both yin and yang in balance to create. When we marry the two inside of us in proper equal harmony, then we then evolve into a true human with one foot on earth and one in the stars, ready to live to the fullest, to, once again, believe in magic and create.
Art is certainly the Cinderella of education…we do certainly wish to emphasize that if Cinderella is not allowed to go to the ball she will not stay quietly at home washing the dishes; probably she will set the house on fire instead. — Sangharakshita
The parable of the talents in the Bible is about (among other things) your actual God given, one of a kind, unique talents that you, and you alone possess. How will you feel if you go your entire life with them buried under the earth?
Exploring your unique talents is your only path to create true life, here and now.
"Try to remember that God is the Great Artist. Artists like other artists." - Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
You are here to share your unique viewpoint, in a way that only you can. And creating is the ultimate way to do that.
The greatest art is created by artists whose greatest desire is to create. If creating is not your greatest desire, then this isn’t the path for you. But I believe, deep down, your greatest desire is to create.
If you are an artist, and, if you’re reading this, chances are extremely high that you are an artist or creative of some kind. So pat yourself on the back for a moment. Let me commend you. You may not have found your ultimate truth, but you are allowing yourself to create. You are allowing yourself to make art. You are not, at least not fully, suppressing your desire to create. And thus, while you might not have found the ultimate expression of your unique genius, you have at least overcome fear enough to be walking on the path. That is an unbelievably big first step. You’ve moved beyond “I can’t”, and beyond “I won’t” to “I will.”
So, the next step is to embrace an unrelenting and continuing pursuit of truth. Your Truth.
This is the essential thing that underlies everything else that follows. Once you find your truth, you will know what to do, and you will creatively solve your issues or find the knowledge you need to make that truth a reality.
When you see the truth clearly, you may simply act.
If you know what you actually want, you will act to get it.
People asking for formulas, and step-by-step how-tos before knowing what they want are not yet serious. And those people need to dig deep to know what they want. What they are truly here for.
Deep down, you know what you need to do, to LIVE, for if a flood was coming for your house, you would not sit in your home and look up step-by-step instructions on how to survive a flood, you would surrender to instinct, to a sort of inspiration beyond thought, and simply act to save yourself.
Success in an art business, in marketing arises naturally when you embrace what you know to be right for you, although you may not know it in words, you will know in your spirit. You will know when you are so devoted to your craft that it drives you, night and day. And your motivation is this hunger, not a drive for worldly success, which very well may come, but it won’t be your driving motivation.
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than a cruelly delicate organism with the overpowering necessity to create, create, create- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.” - Pearl Buck
You will see in this space that I recommend many Zen, eastern sounding ideas: Meditation, living in the present moment, noticing wonder in small things, less obsession with metrics, goals and even money.
Sometimes people worry this will remove their drive to achieve. That if they found solace in these things, that they’d just sit around in bliss all day. But this is far from the truth. In fact, the these mystic acts, while reducing the ego’s worldly drives, actually unify your mind around your souls higher drives. And when your mind is unified, it is powerful.
My premise is that creativity and spirituality, or, perhaps, mysticism are all wrapped up together and you can’t untangle them because they are different forms of the same thing. They are ways for you to connect with and see that you are a part of the Logos of reality: that universal force of creation - the transcendent, creative, divine principle itself.
And part of creativity is sharing and inspiring others, and being inspired in turn.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” - Albert Einstein
If you are unmotivated, and you’ve lost your drive, then you haven’t truly unlocked your truth yet. That connection to your inner self and the things that are most uniquely you. Once you unlock that truth, you will know because you will automatically become a creative dynamo. Spirituality makes you a creative dynamo, in the image of the creator, himself. For even God only rested on the 7th day. (And rest is another essential part of the creative process, as is play - we’ll get to that).
Use your intuition. Intuition, or gut feelings, are the whisper of our true selves communicating with us. When you feel drawn to something (or someone), without fear, your soul is trying to guide you. Conversely, when you fear something inside you, when you feel uneasy, look deeper, the more your subconscious tries to distract you from a deep truth, the more likely it IS a deep truth. So push past the fear, or “Resistance” as Steven Pressfield calls it in The War of Art.
When you uncover what you truly want, and that can take months to years, you must go after it with your heart and soul. If you aren’t prepared to go after it with everything (there is no “try”). Then you must drop the desire. You can’t just keep piling up desire upon desire without acting, that will lead you back into that state of distraction and desperation.
For example, in one of our webinars, an artist asked how to do their own painting and juggle that with teaching six days a week. In her heart, she knew the answer (that she did not have time for both) but subconsciously didn’t want to delve that deep. Her subconscious self knew the truth. But her rational mind resisted it. Maybe it was a money issue. But if the deep truth is what you truly want, you must figure out how to make it work. A different schedule. A different job. A smaller budget. I don’t know. But you can’t just pile desire upon desire. You must act or drop it.
So, before you put your art out there into the world, and definitely before you start selling it, it needs to be in alignment with your deepest creative truth.
Oh yeah, and I promise I’m not adding this just to frustrate you, but finding Your Truth is a process that likely never ends or, if it does, it takes most of a lifetime. Because finding “Your Truth” is really finding Your True Self. It is a process of becoming. It is a process of becoming yourself. It is a process of becoming fully yourself.
Once you are fully yourself, you will have uncovered Your Truth to such a degree that you will not feel pigeonholed into a niche, or a medium, or specific projects. You will know what you, and only you, are here to share with your art and a world of different creative possibilities will open itself to you and all of the rest of the Circles of Art Marketing in this framework will fall into magical alignment with your purpose.
“You goal is to be able to say, on the day before you die, that you have fully become yourself” - Kevin Kelly
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You wrote that very powerful message just for me today! ☺️ Perfect timing. Thank you.
Yes, me too!