Nothing to Hide: Art?

You may have noticed this, but I'll state it anyway: I write. It's my art of choice. I can't draw, can't dance, can sing a (very) little and can push the camera button with no clue whatsoever about what I'm doing. I can also apparently act, too, but that depends on how the wind is blowing (literally; I can act when the wind blows, but if doesn't, my skills are reduced by more than a half. Anybody's guess as to why that happens).

So, in MISA, I used to hang around with the artistic bunch. Being a writer means you're solitary by default when you create, with few exceptions, but it doesn't mean you can't watch others do their stuff, that you can't listen to their discussions and that you can't observe their principles. I was interested in what Grieg had to say about art and how art was generally perceived, so I kept my ears open.

I haven't found anything on Exmisa about these topics (except the 'art' of MISA porn films), so I feel mighty original in writing this

Also, since I'm amused to have gathered a watcher from the Exmisa crew, one of the people I like from there, I'm dedicating this "Nothing to Hide" entry to her.

So. The Art of MISA.

First of all, what Grieg thinks about modern art:
-it is completely degenerated
-it has lost the great spiritual support it used to have in the past
-it has been hijacked by the freemasonry and it is now satanic
-artists need to take drugs and do other such extreme things for inspiration
-art today is created in a purely subjective manner and no rules are followed

Are you outraged yet, deviants? Because I am. Walk into any room of painters, graphics people, photographers, sculptors, or artistic craftspeople and tell them they don't use any principle in creating their art. If they know what they're doing, they'll laugh in your face. Of course they use principles! There's principles to composition, to color, there's proportions and whatnot. I can't use any of that stuff since I'm horrible with visual arts, but even I know they exist.

Grieg ignores this fact. He also ignored the entire history of art - he is oblivious of the principles behind modernism and post-modernism and why things look different now than they did in the Renaissance. He cries out a return to the basics, to ancient art, to 'beautiful art', condemning everything that is happening now.

Grieg thinks that:
-all musicians (except people like Vangelis or Jean Michelle Jarre) are Lady Gaga and Marilyn Manson, complete with the visuals.
-all writers are spurting out violent, weird crap - I have no idea who he's referring to, but I keep thinking of maybe Ryu Murakami's "Almost Transparent Blue", which deals with drugs, vomiting and other such.
-all painters just throw paint on the canvas, or scribble around (in that case, by Grieg's standards, my crappy doodles are the height of contemporary art)
-all artists in the past were awesome.

Truth be told, there's a thing called "Sturgeon's Law", which is an informal law, more along the lines of an observed tendency than anything nailed down. It says "90% of everything is crap". If you choose to point out all the crap, like Grieg does, there's a lot of it to point out anywhere. But he ignores the 10% that is actually quite good.

If you look at the past, the 90% that is crap tends to die off and you remain with the 10%. Actually, less than 10%, because some of the good stuff gets lost, too. Sappho's poems are mostly lost. Gilgamesh's story has been tediously reconstructed from fragments of different ages. Bach's music was almost lost in history. It happens. But if you look at the past and see Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Homer you think 'how lucky those Greeks were, to have all writers ranking so high'. Erm, no, they weren't the only ones. They were some of more - but the peaks. It's the equivalent of people from the year 3000 looking back at this period and saying "Ah, how lucky they were, to have all books at the height of Marquez, John Fowles, Mark Twain and Bulgakov!" I've added Mark Twain because he's actually closer to us than Homer was to the other Greeks. By that time, it'll be a technicality.

So, Grieg looked at the crap, called it crap, by extrapolation called everything crap and he decided: MISA will start a new trend in art! It will revolutionize the planet not only spiritually, but also artistically! And we will have... drums, please... spiritual art! Beautiful art. True art. Art done following objective principles, which have been forgotten and no longer exist in our modern day society.

What Grieg said made me marvel: was he trying to reinvent the wheel? Trying to throw art back hundreds or thousands of years so he could start at the basics again? Yes, yes he was. Completely oblivious to the faults of texts in the past. I liked reading Homer, for example, but to write something like the Odyssey in today's context would be impossible. We've changed. We can't see the world as simplistically as that anymore. Penelope would get some semblance of a life. Odysseus wouldn't be able to kill his maids without any consequence just because they slept with some suitors (probably by being raped). And so on, and so forth. We don't treat some characters as props anymore. We've grown sensitive to the fact that everybody has feelings. Books today have become subtle, have started exploring psychology, dilemmas, clashes between world views, doubts about the world we live in. We've started looking not at the bigger picture, but at details. We don't explain the world, we take one part of it, one tiny detail and we explore that. It's no longer about the general - it's about the particular. At least, that's what I think.

But Grieg wants things differently. He wants art that has universal appeal, that is based on objective universal principles, art that can move and lead all people who see it to the heights of spirituality. A very noble ideal, but practically impossible. I love Vangelis, but I've known people who've fallen asleep listening to him. Mona Lisa is seen as one of the best paintings in the world, but I sort of dislike it. To say that Orpheus's song was so beautiful that everybody was moved to tears is wonderful in a story - it gives a mythical aura to your writings. Try to create Orpheus's song? People might not be that impressed.

Let's say, however, that Grieg wanted to make a noble effort. That he would strive towards the highest of goals in the best of faith and that I shouldn't put him down for trying. Ok. So, what did he do to achieve this goal?

Did he try to become an artist himself? No. He only concerns himself with conferences on various themes, advising people and giving initiations in mantras, techniques, sexual stuff and others to his disciples.

Did he study the history of art? Well, I once attended a series of conferences on "The State of Romantic Trance" in which he equated the love sort of romance with romanticism, talking about Romantic poets and men needing to wash and use perfume in the same breath, so I guess not. I actually guess he's very ignorant on the matter.

Did he study ancient principles of art? Maybe, a bit. He mentioned archetypes and he mentioned Indian Rasas, which are emotions evoked in the audience that views/reads/watches/listens to a certain work of art.

Did he do his research, in other words? I tend to believe that no, he did not. Not really. Because he came up with a 'technique' to enhance creative output in MISA yogis, which I'm afraid I can't post here. Yes, I swore with my hand on the Bible that I would never reveal it, under pain of losing my health and spiritual evolution. However, I think that's bullshit. I'm a woman of my word and I don't need to vow anything to keep my word, in just the same way in which a vow will not stop my revealing what really has no place being kept a secret - such as seeing Grieg and being negatively affected by him, such as the fact that there were meditations against political figures, such as that thing with Romanticism/Romance above. Such as there being lesbian orgies at the Villette every summer. But that's beside the point.

The reason why I won't disclose the technique here is because I wrote it down and placed it... somewhere... and never used it again. I forgot it, ok? I'd love to make a point-by-point examination on why it's harmful, or if not harmful, then pretty much useless, but I unfortunately don't have it. It's also somewhere on a computer that I don't have access to right now, so I might update this later.

But my memory is good enough. And I've found the specifics of a certain project at the back of a notebook and while I don't have the entire process written down there, I am pretty sure that I have the entire thing in my head now, with perhaps some jumbled up timing problems.

...I will so get my ass kicked for this by the MISA yogis. *chuckles darkly*

This process has an 'availability' of 24 hours, like other MISA techniques. It can't last longer than that. You're supposed to go through it every time you start creating.

All these stages are meditations for/with the concepts presented.

0.. So, first. Like any MISA anything, it begins by consecrating the process to God. Aka, a sort of not really prayer, but let's not get too far into that. (have a link instead: www.yogaesoteric.net/content.a… )

1. Then. You are supposed to have the intention to create a certain work of art. You meditate with said intention, which Grieg says is composed of three factors: choice, desire, and will. So you run off and choose what you want to do and intend to do it.

Now, this is a very early stage, but knowing the entire process already, I can point out two things that bother me about it:

a) You always have to manifest this 'intention'. Every time you sit down to work, you have to meditate with your intention to work. Why? If I'm sitting down to work on it, then I have already chosen to work on it and have the obvious desire and will to get it through. What is the point of it?!

b) From the very start, Grieg's ideas of mind-over-art are obvious. He believes that an artist should plan ahead what he wants to do and work on it like an engineer + architect. I have yet to meet a real artist who does things like that. You don't put down the plans and then start building the house. The process is a lot more organic.

This comment might seem a bit out of place here, but you'll see why I've said it later.

Also, I think it's at this stage that you're supposed to either charge some water with the 'energy of the beginning', if you go through the process for the first time, or take a sip out of the water charged with the energy of the beginning, if this is a later time. I am skeptical about this sort of thing, but whatever. If it works, there's nothing bad about it. If you don't, drinking water is good for your health.

2. Choosing the archetype.

Pretty clear for actors. If you have to be a hero, choose the heroic archetype. If you have to be a mother, choose the mother archetype. The point is to tap into the energies of the in-depth structure that you'll base your work on.

Issues with that:

-first of all, it involves working with a clear archetype. Characters, in my personal experience, are way more complex than that. A hero is never just a hero, he has other traits which make him a lot more human. But let's say there's a basic archetype, so if you have that in mind rather than making a character way too schematic, I can see it work out. In "Once Upon a Tower", Mark the wizard is, according to the four mature male archetypes of some system or other (Magician, King, Lover, Warrior) a Magician. Not because he's a wizard, but because he's the sage and knower of truth. He's also a Rationalist. And a Trickster. Choose and pick. So the idea of 'archetype' -> 'character' both works and doesn't.

-second, the way in which you apply the archetype to a character is clear, but to something more complex? What if you have a complex work, such as "The Sandman" by Neil Gaiman, in which you have many characters who live in entirely different worlds that intersect each other? There cannot be a single archetype. If you have a novel, choosing the main character's archetype as that of the novel's archetype can be right, or wrong. Are you supposed to choose a 'type' of literature - a comedy, a tragedy, a romance?...

-third, the archetypes, at least when I listened to that conference, were badly explained. I have been surprised to discover that some people believed that God the Father was an archetype, to which I always answer: "How many God the Fathers do you have?! There's only the one!" Because it is nearly impossible to use the archetype to represent an entire work, or to represent it properly, people had misused the concept - the archetype of Beauty, or the archetype of Divine Love came to be used for this step. In my own notes about the specifics of one of the works that the technique was used for, I find the archetype 'The Soul of God'. What the heck, people?

Quoting wikipedia: "An archetype (/ˈɑrkɪtaɪp/) is a universally understood symbol or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated. Archetypes are often used in myths and storytelling across different cultures." Unless you have more, it's not a bleeding archetype. It's a thing.

In other words, this step implies simplification, doesn't work well, and is badly understood.

3. The synthesis between intention and archetype.

Nobody really understood this at first. I suppose it's because it doesn't make sense. You're supposed to make a medley of the two (in a meditation). You impose the archetype upon the intention and then have a sort of energy combined with a vector and then you kind of know where the work is heading. It sort of maybe makes sense, but it doesn't.

The best I can do for it to make it work is: "You know you intend to do it, you know what 'it' is, now intend to do 'it'!"

Pointless.

4.The state of wonder at your work.

5. Choosing the force idea. Now, I know what you're wondering: what the bleep's a force idea, right? It's supposed to be the idea that motivates the entire thing. Think a motto, very strongly reinforced. A very strong, motivating idea. An IDEA.

I've done a quick search on yogaesoteric.net to gather a few examples, not connected to art:

THERE IS NO CALUMNY, DEFAMATION, CUNNING BUZZ/RUMOUR OR DEMONIAC DOUBT SUPERIOUR TO THE TRUTH. (note: caps in the original)
(this one was supposed to be during lovemaking, for men)  "My greatest happiness, which I feel empathically, completely and profoundly in my entire being, is the happiness to make my lover as happy as possible."

So, big, shiny strong.

This is where Grieg's engineering-approach becomes clearer. The artist must choose some strong idea and base his entire work on it. This isn't just a 'point', it's a sort of manifesto hid inside the text. And it's supposed to be spiritual. "God is every person of the world." "Love can awaken souls." Whatever. Are you starting to get the point?

There are several problems with this:

-it's simplifying matters. Again. Art doesn't have a single thing to say, it usually has a thousand. Some are more prominent, others are not.
-different people will get different points anyway. To try to get them to all get the same point is nearly impossible. Art isn't like maths, to have a single result, the same for all (unless they screw up the calculus). It's like a mirror to reality, which people interpret differently.
-disturbing implications. You can see this as a way to try and manipulate your viewers/readers/audience/whatever towards a point. Consciously. The point is given by MISA and its ideas of spirituality, too, so yeah... it chills me.

6. Structuring the egregore. I know you're wondering what that is, so I'll copy-paste from wiki: "is an occult concept representing a "thoughtform" or "collective group mind", an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people."

To my mind, the egregore is that thing you feel when you enter a certain group. The group of Harry Potter fans feels in a certain way, the group of Twilight fans has an entirely different feeling, and the group of Shakespeare enthusiasts is like neither of the two.

So how on earth do you structure it? Actually, I've no clue. There's a meditation with Tripura Sundari at this step, if I'm not much mistaken (Tripura Sundari is one of the ten 'Great Wisdoms' of Hinduisms - which are called 'Great Cosmic Powers' by MISA - representing absolute facets of the Truth. Tripura Sundari deals with beauty.) Also, a meditation on music.

It doesn't make much sense to me. Especially considering that the egregore includes the audience.

Grieg says that the artist should be in complete control of his or her art. However, there's a big difference between that and what he actually wants to impose on yogi artists: they shouldn't be in control of their art, but of their audience! Everything done is to influence the audience - I'll explain at the end why that, to me, is entirely against the spirit of art.

7. The message. Every work is supposed to have a message. You're supposed to meditate with yours and the audience is supposed to get your message clearly. Everybody should understand what you're saying.

8. You meditate to integrate your work on a planetary level. That's right, people, you're supposed to somehow impose your art on the world through meditation.

9. I think this is when you finally get to work on your creation. All the above meditation stages last only a bit under an hour, which is kind of nasty if you're like me and want to work on more than one or two things every day.

The feedback stage, where you sit and relax and let the feedback come to you. Unfortunately, I can't remember whether I'm not messing up 8 and 9 somehow. There was a working stage, there was a feedback stage, maybe they were one and the same and I just can't recall it properly.

Wait a sec, I hear you say, if you've paid attention. Isn't this thing supposed to have a 24-hour availability?! How can you get feedback if you've only just started working?! If you wrote a haiku and posted it instantly on dA, that'd work, but otherwise?!...

...eh... The feedback can come through things working fine for you while you're working on it, coincidences that look fishy and so on and so forth.

...

yeah...

10. Meditation of gratitude towards God. It makes sense if you're religious. Which MISA people are supposed to be.


All in all:

I can't remember if things are precisely as I posted them. I may have forgotten something out and stages 8 & 9 are a bit vague in my mind. Or maybe the number isn't overly right. There's supposed to be a stage in which you meditate all the people working on the project in the project, I think it was the first one. If they don't know the technique, you use pictures. There may be stuff I got a bit wrong, but this is, essentially, the gist of it.

Why this is wrong:

Nearly everything focuses on the outside of the art, on the audience. It forces you to see your audience and try to manipulate it according to your will. It makes you set very clear restrictions on yourself from the very beginning - the force idea, the message... Once you have them, and you're supposed to have them ever since you start, you can't really change them. This is art with a political purpose. It is pinned down and murdered.

MISA people might disagree with me. People claim that this technique has helped them a lot in their creativity. I wonder, though. I really wonder. Because, you see, MISA, with a few exceptions, is notoriously bad at art. Theater plays in which masters speak 'wise words' and bad characters are straw men. Didactic explanations. Bad choices of color. Check out this allegorical story by Gregorian Bivolaru (if you recall me saying he didn't try to become an artist and doesn't concern himself with art, you'll see why I don't consider this to count): www.yogaesoteric.net/content.a…

The technique has nothing to do with knowing how the art works. It has nothing to do with objective principles. It has nothing to do with the substance of your creations. Instead of focusing on the profound parts of what you do, it focuses on the outside. It aims for the audience, it creates an anxiety of spelling out messages to an audience that's supposed to fall in awe with the ideas that you say.

Some of the books that Grieg gave me as examples of spiritual art are: "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull" (a fable about a seagull who achieves a sort of enlightenment and becomes a sort of spiritual master; it's a bit banal and overly-explanatory, but it was a best seller and it has its good parts); "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran (a philosophical poem; pretty, but again, very explanation-y: "When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.") and "Chrome Yellow" by Aldous Huxley, from which he got some of the precepts on writing that he explained to me (without realizing that it was a satire). There's a pattern: his type of art is the art that explains, explains, explains. I think what he wants from art is an essay in pretty format.

Well, that's not how it works, Gregorian Bivolaru. You've entirely missed the point.

Art is not directed towards the outside. It is directed towards the inside. An artist is supposed to mind his own business and work on the art, not the audience. Of course he's supposed to know conventions, but what he must concern him or herself with is the reality that he or she is trying to mirror. The point is not to try to throw some flesh upon an idea that sounds good. It is to try and discover the depths of something you have glanced. Principles, laws, objective things help you to show that thing to the world, but first you must have it. Trying to work on the audience instead is like working on your charm before an oral exam instead of studying for the exam.

No. You find something. You love that something. You want to show that something. You do your best to bring it out to the world and work hard to perfect it so that others can see what you see. Art is something that begins with you.

So, do I believe in art created by objective principles? By god, yes. Good art is that. Good artists know how their art works and use that knowledge. Those are your objective principles.

Do I believe in spiritual art that can move the audience and help them catch a glimpse of something awesome and transcendental? Yes, I do. But for that, you, the artist, need to go into the depths of that work and bring out the best in it. You need to dig, dig, dig, polish, sweat. You need to discard what isn't good enough.

Where is that in your technique, Grieg? Nowhere. Because you didn't consider that. You assume that you can have a perfect skeleton to build on. But a skeleton is dead - you need a lot of work to bring it to life, you need to be a Frankenstein and a trickster to get around the things you impose on yourself. Whereas to perfect what is imperfect, to bring a wild creature from a beast to something supernatural, well, that involves working with life and it's easier.

Once upon a time, when I visited Grieg, he told me that I was like in the following joke:

The communist car breaks down and the communists make a magic ritual and revive Lenin to fix it. Lenin does and then demands to know what on earth they've done with it. "We don't know, Lenin, you tell us!" "I'll tell you what you did, you dunderheads! You've made all the energy go into the horn!"

I think, however, that it rather describes this technique.

I'll never devise any great method for artists, since there are very many types of people who work on art and they do it in different ways. But if I had to, I'd stress the importance of going deep into what you do, of loving what you do, of trying new things, of looking at something from a different perspective. Of learning to choose what is worthy something and what is not. Of learning not to be afraid to explore, of learning to wonder about the world.

Grieg said: marvel at your work, which is a very short step and a superficial one. I say, no, love your work. Marvel at the thing that's behind it. Marvel at the whole damned world. Love it, hate it, have some reaction, burn it until it's become pure and then put it in your work, which sometimes you'll be pleased with, at other times you'll be desperate about. But love it, don't let it go.

Grieg is not an artist. He doesn't set free, he doesn't answer any important question. He doesn't build taste, nor does he offer any way in which to improve taste. He mentions laws, but offers none. Instead of offering a way to get to more and more profound levels, he points artists towards the outside.

I hate this technique. The only reason why it's a secret is, in my opinion, that real artists would laugh their heads off to see it and destroy Grieg's credibility.

Art does not start with a few half-arsed meditations. It can be a meditation itself. It doesn't aim towards the audience. It can mold itself to the audience, but only when it exists. Its purpose is not to get across an idea or a message, but to bring a facet of reality before others. That is where the others come in - not sooner. They might be the target, but they are not the thing. Art is not just what you see - what you see is a representation of something deeper, which is what you try to bring out. It is a search for something deep, a choice of something to adore, a translation process between something that you have felt and some language that other people can understand.

And I think I've said all that I wanted to say for now.