Philosophy as Art

Where art thou?

Art captivates, art inspires, art portrays. As Terence McKenna once said "put the art pedal to the metal". I use "art" in the purest sense of the word as a form of creative expression - music, poetry, dance etc.

Art is a healthy past time, being able to express our creativity is healing emotionally. We are able to transmute our creative energies into the World. Art is a shamanic tool, the act of magic is itself described as "an art" or "a craft", art is alchemy. Art imitates life, just as life imitates art. It is through art that we can understand and integrate our own psychological processes.

What we need is a cultural renaissance, not a political revolution. The current political and economic system is but a symptom of the stagnation of our art making ability and decay of our psychic environment. Likewise science has furthered the detachment of ourself and disenchanted us from the natural World. A cultural renaissance would itself dissolve the current political and economic system. We must create the culture and stop consuming it. The existing culture is what binds us to the path of self-destruction and insanity. Roll on the archaic revival.

Art's task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. -- Terence McKenna

McKenna also talked about the need to move from the economic axiom of "time is money" to "time is art". A society which is directed by intellect alone is limited by its' linear rationality, whereas a society fostering creativity is in a natural state of expression. Such a society however does not exist inside what we call "civilization". In a co-operative economy instead of working for money, money can become a side-effect of doing good work. No longer slave to money, work serves other goals: beauty, service, fun, or self-expression. The worker, in other words, becomes an artist.

Daniel Pinchbeck epitomizes McKenna's sentiments in his visionary essay "Business Shamanism" excerpted below:

As the history of the last century reveals, what "art" is, the vital essence of modern culture, constantly changes. In traditional civilizations, art was inseparable from a way of life and of being, from expressions of the sacred. It is only modern culture that made art into a separate domain, that secularized it and created an abstruse critical vocabulary around it in order to turn works of art into fetishized commodities. We are reaching the end of this paradigm - returning to a time when art will be reintegrated into society, not as window dressing, but as its expressive essence. As Jose Arguelles puts it, the construct that "time is money" is a misconception, an error of the industrial age. Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe. In the next phase of our evolutionary unfolding, we will discover that time is not money: Time is art. Out of freedom, we have the opportunity to re-invent planetary civilization so that it meshes with human potential and matches the ecstatic flights of the human imagination, co-creating society as a fantastic, collective art form. The current potential for rapid and global transformation to a sustainable or thriving world, for "conscious evolution," is available because of capitalism and corporate efficiency.

We are each a living work of art, author of our life story, poetry in motion. To appreciate that we are all part of a divine process of unfolding allows us to cultivate and refine our expression organically, to be authentic human beings. It transforms us from messengers of the way, to incandescent examples of the way. Like an ornate tree that is able to prune itself, even the dead leaves that have fallen to the ground remain a beautiful reflection of the intangible within.