What is a Life Artist?

Imagine making art, not with paint or clay, but with life itself as your medium. A “life artist,” or “Lebenskuenstler” as the Germans would say, is someone who finds beauty in the colors life puts at their disposal, someone who makes do with the brushes they’ve got and doesn’t pout over a few mistaken strokes.

On the website Lebenskünstler, a Life Artist connotes a person who approaches life with the zest and inspiration of an artist, although he or she may not be working recognizably as an artist. He is a Lebenskünstler. Someone who pieces together his living from various activities that, collectively, bring in just enough money to live. No office, no suit, no boss, no rules. German has a word for such people, the website claims, and English doesn’t. There’s even a higher form of Lebenskünstler, the website says, and that is the Überlebenskünstler, or “survival artist.”

Lebenskünstler – one who recognizes opportunities in life and takes advantage or makes use of those opportunities to make the most out of one’s own life; one who lives life deliberately and to the fullest capacity (concept from Henry David Thoreau of “living deep and sucking out all the marrow of life”); one who gambles with the outcome of his/her own life by seizing opportunity; one who makes living an art.

So, the German word Lebenskunstler means ‘an artist of life’. It acknowledges that being an artist is not, in the first instance, about what you produce, but about your contribution to your environment based on the way you live. As creative entities, we can share our creativity in many ways. By how we dress or decorate our homes, by what we cook, by how we educate our children or entertain our friends, by how we dance and make love, by how we speak about our lives.

The website says that Lebenskünstler refers not so much to people who turn their life into a piece of art, and that it is not for nothing that Berlin has been dubbed a graveyard for ambition. The German capital has a particularly impressive record of attracting those eager to make a living as artists, many of whom succumb to the many initiative-numbing charms and morph into Lebenskünstler ,

Oscar Wilde once purportedly said “I put my talent into my work, but my genius into my life.” 

The website focuses on the Lebenskünstler of Berlin. Going back to the 1970s – or maybe even to the 1910s – there has existed a decadent, artistic underground in Berlin which has placed little value on “making it” for the sake of making it. The king of decadent Berlin is the “poor but sexy” Lebenskünstler, an archetype who has had a huge influence on culture and nightlife here till this day. The Lebenskünstler cares little about his next record deal or art opening or publishing deal. Instead, life is his art. Only “now” matters and how you can make the most out of each moment. Screw success and any concept of “the future” because for decades Berliners – think of WWII, the Cold War etc. – have felt there is NO tomorrow (and they are right of course – we will all die).

The Lebenskünstler’s dilettantish self-expression might have no audience other than his circle of friends or 30 people in some tiny Kleinkunst venue.

So with the concept of the Lebenskünstler we actually have a quite good idea about what it might mean to be a Life Artist. We´ll soon find out that the term fits very well to many other people than the Lebenskünstler of Berlin, and in that connection we will ask whether the Life Artist is a person who creates himself through his will, or whether he is letting an external source of creation work through him?

Art of life is a sovereign life expression. In the sovereign life-expressions we clearly meet something, which arises as richness, gift or grace in our life, something we have not created ourselves, and which at the same time is the actual and carrying in all being together between humans.

The Danish philosopher of life K.E. Løgstrup says, that the spontaneous life-expressions come from the universe, and that the Universe therefore not is irrelevant to Man. He isn´t self-dependant, but is connected with the Universe. So Løgstrup claims, that we must interpret the Universe, and the sovereign life-expressions, as created. In that way we have an external source of creation, which we, with the right kind of living, could become one with. But how?

The relationship is the mirror, in which you can discover yourself. Without the relationship you are nothing. To be is to be in relationship, which is the actual life. You only live in relationship, otherwise you don´t live, life is then without meaning. So it is not because you - as Descartes says: ”I think, therefore I am!” - that you live. Nor do you live because you create yourself, as Nietzsche, Sartre, Rorty and Foucault say. You live because you are in the relationship, and it´s the lack of ability to understand this, which causes conflict.

The reason why that there is no understanding of the relationship, is that we use the relationship to achieve something, become something, to be remoulded. We use the instrumental reason on human relationships, where it only should be used on technical relationships. It is the thinking´s dangerous course, the course of the will to power. The communicative reason has vanished.

But the relationship is the means to expose yourself, because the relationship is to be. It is the actual life itself. Without the relationship you don´t live. In order to be able to understand yourself you must understand the relationship. The relationship is therefore a philosophical sparring partner, a mirror in which you can see yourself. To understand this is to use the communicative reason, which in the context of art of life is a meditative-existential reason.

The mirror of the relationship can either distort or expose the truth about yourself. Most of us see in the relationship, in the mirror, that, we preferably want to see, but we don´t see that which is real. We will preferable idealize or escape, and rather live in the future than seeing the relationship in which we are in the moment.

Becoming is the thoughtprocess, and both Nietzsche, Foucault and Rorty are seeing this in the image of art, as a creative process, but they don´t come out of the intellect, and confuse the thinking, the intellectual training, with the whole of the human unfolding and life itself. They see the whole of the human unfolding as a creative process, which with will can be controlled; that is: controlled by the thinking. Life is seen as a work of art, which Man, with his will, can model as he wants to. But his brush is then the thought, and the colors of the thought is the old, the past. It is therefore not new colors. He is an imitator.

This is not how a true Life Artist works. A Life Artist doesn´t imitate, he creates something new, and the new is life itself, not the thinking. Life itself is his colors.

In order to get in contact with life itself, the Life Artist often spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in carious leisure activities. The question then becomes: are such forms of recreation a waste of time? Everyone needs a break from work, responsibility, and even other people. As Aristotle observed, shared leisure activity is often the glue that bonds friends together. Indeed, the philosopher Josef Pieper went so far as to claim that leisure is “the basis of culture.”

Pieper based his theory on – you guessed it – Aristotle, who said, “Happiness seems to be found in leisure; for we deny ourselves leisure so that we can be at leisure.” Basically, we´re all working for the weekend. Pieper, though, had a specific notion of leisure in mind; not just any old form of rest and relaxation is beneficial for us. Pieper agreed with Aristotle that we must strive to flourish in our nature as “rational animals.” Hence, leisure is most properly that time preserved from the work a day world to spend cultivating our intellectual tastes. Pieper, picking up a line from another Aristotelian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), said that the right sorts of leisure activities – those involving intellectual contemplation – can even make us more like God: “’Because of the leisure of contemplation’ the Scripture says of the Divine Wisdom itself that ‘it plays all the time, plays throughout the world.’”

Many philosophers and other intellectuals have also been, and sometimes still are, accused of being bums in the sense of being useless to society – often forgetting that the democracy and the human rights they live by, are created by philosophers. For any philosophy majors out there, recall the look on your parents´ face when you told them what you were spending their hard-earned college savings to study!

Aquinas, though – in an admittedly self-serving statement – asserted that it is “necessary for the perfection of the human community, that there be persons who devote themselves to the [use-less] life of contemplation.” The problem with society, as Mill has noted, is that we get so caught up in making a living – working to make money so we can have shelter, food, and green nail polish – that we forget to live.

Already the ancient Greek philosopher and Life Artist Epicurus was a misunderstood man with an image problem. Because he recommended that his followers steer clear of lives of political and financial ambition, he was commonly thought to advocate a life of idleness and lazing about. Because he taught that pleasure was the proper goal of good life, Epicurus and his colleagues were dismissed as decadent sensualists. Because he occasionally wrote about food and drink, his philosophy has been characterized as one of wanton indulgence and gluttony. Even today, the term “epicure” is popularly associated with the pleasures of fine food and wine. Add to this the fact that Epicurus, breaking with ancient Greek custom, welcomed nontraditional students – women, servants, and prostitutes – to his school of philosophy, and we can see why Epicureanism was associated with sexual license and rumours of debauchery.

A modern English idler, which promotes all the qualities of an idle way of life, is Tom Hodgkinson (born 1968). His philosophy, in his published books and articles, is of a relaxed approach to life, enjoying it as it comes rather than toiling for an imagined better future. Together with his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney he founded The Idler which is a bi-yearly British magazine devoted to promoting its ethos of 'idle living' and all that entails (read an additional account on idleness in my pop culture files on The Hobbit and The Big Lebowski).

Ronald Hutton´s book The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 demonstrates how the festive culture of the Middle Ages was gradually eroded by the Reformation and the Puritans. It was in this merry time the legend of Robin Hood was formed. Robin Hood is a heroic outlaw in English folklore who, according to legend, was a highly skilled archer and swordsman. Traditionally depicted as being dressed in Lincoln green, he is often portrayed as "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor" alongside his band of Merry Men. Robin Hood became a popular folk figure in the late-medieval period, and continues to be widely represented in literature, films and television. In The Hobbit we discover that this idea of gift economy is shared by Bilbo Baggins, who gives most of his treasures away. Also it is seen in the hobbit custom of giving presents when they celebrate their birthdays, instead of receiving them.

And Max Weber´s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism shows how the competitive Protestants booted out the co-operative Catholics; it shows how a new ethic based on work and earning a lot of money came to replace, in the eighteenth century, the old medieval ethic, which was based on mutual aid. The medieval culture (which wrongly are depicted as a dark age by the Protestant work ethic) combined a love of Jesus, who preached idleness, and a love of Aristotle, who argued that contemplation led to happiness. (I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to banish their guilt around work).

And with Jesus we have the spiritual practice, which I consider to be the central art of life. A spiritual practitioner is namely  a genuine Life Artist.

In my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist I set up six steps in the spiritual practice: that is: some existential conditions, and some, common to all mankind, growing conditions, and growth levels, in the Life Artist´s voyage of discovery into himself, and thereby into life itself. The steps are:

1) The separation of the observer and the observed

2) Religion and supporting exercises

3) Passive listening presence

4) Discrimination

5) Creative emptiness

6) The wholeness of the observer and the observed

Step 5, Creative emptiness, is the condition where the mind is completely released from your perspective, from images of any kind, and the ideas, symbols and conceptions, which are their manifestations. The known has stepped aside for the benefit of the unknown, the beauty of creation. Everything is new, unnamed, unformed, non-linguistic presence. The mind is pure, fresh, young, innocent; completely open and receiving. The mind is awake and the heart is open, awareness and love in one. And in this creative emptiness reality and truth can be discovered, or received, it is one and same.

Lao Tse said it so simple as it can be said, that the wise rules by emptying the mind and filling the stomach. Eckhart called the creative emptiness Virgin Mary, or the Virgin Mary-state, where God the father can give birth to Christ into Man. The creative emptiness is the possibility for the birth of Christ in us.

Jesus said it with the words about, that unless we change and become like children again, we shall never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven (see my post On Asking Philosophical Questions and The Peter Pan Project).

This creative emptiness can in other words not be reached by an act of the will. The creative emptiness comes when you in self-forgetful openness are one with nature. This is a so-called communicative view of nature, which claims that nature is of value in itself, that there is a beauty and richness in nature, which is of non-causal and non-mechanical kind, and that Man as a natural being has a community with this nature. You could call it metaphysical naturalism.

Mogens Pahuus has in his book Karen Blixen´s Philosophy of Life argued, that Blixen, when she speaks about God, is using the word in a quite another meaning than the traditional. According to him she uses it completely synonymous with nature, or rather, the creative powers in nature. It seems like she thinks of the human nature as being related to the rest of nature. The human nature is a unity of spirit, instinct, sensation, body and feelings, something which you can´t control and master by standing outside it, but which is connected to life-feeling, spontaneity and self-forgetfulness, when you are one with it. Reason, you can say, is lying in an adaption to the realities, both in oneself and the surroundings.

Karen Blixen says in a quote from Out of Africa:

“People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...”

This can of course only happen in the Now. You can also say, that where the old before was characterized by personal and collective images, which worked in sequences in past and future, then the old now is characterized by universal images, which work in synchronism with the Now, or with nature. It was this Karen Blixen was describing as the ancient, the original, and which she always was seeking as authenticity, autonomy, possibility, freedom and adventure. It is a return to the Now, to the timeless eternity. As Rabindranath Tagore said: ”The light is young, the eternal ancient light; the shadows are a brief moment´s matter, they are born aged.”

In India, as noticed by Ananda K. Coomarasway, works of art representing indifferent objects, local personages and scenes, such as fill the walls and rooms of most of our museums, have been characterized as desi (“local, popular, provincial”) or as nâgara (“fashionable, worldly”) and are regarded as esthetically insignificant; whereas those representing deities or revered ancestors, such as might appear in temples or on domestic shrines, are perceived as tokens of an inward, spiritual “way” or “path,” termed mârga, which is a word derived from the vocabulary of the hunt, denoting tracks or trail of an animal, by following which the hunter comes to his quarry.

Similarly, the images of deities, which are not local forms of “elementary ideas,” are footprint left, as it were, by local passages of the “Universal Self” (âtman), through contemplating which the worshiper attains “Self-rapture” (âtmânananda). A passage from Plotinus may be quoted to this point: “Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original.”

I have termed these tracks, trails and footprints as “the dreaming tracks and songlines in the artwork of Man and the Universe,” or as “the universal images in time.” They correspond to progressive karma. I have, with inspiration from Karen Bixen, termed the Original as “The Ancient.”

Karen Blixen´s storytelling is about finding the universal images behind everything, the original, as she calls it, the Ancient, where you live in accordance with yourself, with God´s plan with you.

When Karen Blixen was lying in her sickbed, and after having realized, that this maybe was God´s plan with her - she made a pact with the Devil, that she from now on could change everything into stories. And in her stories, and in her following life as a storyteller, she realized the dreams she had had as a young woman.

All her following stories, for example Seven Gothic Tales, are reflections of her own experiences with destiny. They are all about how to find the dreaming tracks and songlines in the artwork of your life - God´s plan with you - and about people who live in accordance with these power lines, and about people who don´t live in accordance with them.

These themes continue in Karen Blixen´s storytelling ever after. She obviously had an experiental knowledge of the steps in a spiritual practice. Her experience of unhappy love and illness must have opened her to this knowledge. She first began her life as a storyteller when she was about fifty years old, and at that time a “finished” storyteller. She had the material ready. But she used the concepts she knew from her own life. Apparently she hadn´t read anything about spiritual practice. Because in the spiritual practice God´s plan with you is called progressive karma. Compensatory karma is the karma you create yourself under the influence of the cyclic forces of nature. Progressive karma is the help you receive from an external source; you could call it the Wholeness, or with a religious concept: God. Therefore this help is beyond your will. Progressive karma is one and the same as creative emptiness.

The place, where you can find your own progressive karma, if such is available, is therefore in the life you have lived, in the history of your present life.

In the inexplicable events in your own life, in the rows of moments of spiritual longing, in the fateful incidents and actions - in them are contained the progressive karma.

In the history of your life there is an artwork. This artwork shows the dreaming tracks and the songlines in your life. It lies as invisible strokes underneath the history of your actual life, and these strokes become visible in the creative emptiness. It is the ancient self-portrait which came into being before yourself.

This artwork of your life is the contribution to your environment, based on the way you live. In Out of Africa Karen Blixen writes:

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?

Karen Blixen depicted herself a witch. The concept of storytelling leads to the concept of the life artist as a shaman. See following texts:

Storytelling as a Spiritual Exercise

Seiðr Shamanism and the Art of Song Healing

The Connection Between Shamanic Healing and Creative Unfoldment (essay).

Pages where I offer counseling in Art of Life:

Meditation as an Art of Life

Nordic Shamanism and Forest Therapy

Related books:

Meditation as an Art of Life - a Basic reader (free Ebook)

A Portrait of a Lifeartist (free Ebook)

Karen Blixen - The Devil´s Mistress (free Ebook) 

Related booklet:

The Nine Gates of Middle-earth (free booklet)

Related blog posts:

The Orchid Pavilion

The Philosophy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Related links:

Links to Idlers

Related pop culture files:

The Hobbit

The Big Lebowski

On Asking Philosophical Questions

“The unexamined life isn’t worth living.”

Socrates, Plato's Apology (38a5–6).

When things aren’t going quite the way you’d like them to, it’s often the result of not asking yourself the right questions. Some questions are hard to confront because you’re afraid you won’t get the answer you want, others because you really don’t want to know the answer.

But the best things in life don’t come easily, and turning away from life’s biggest questions is a sure path to mediocrity.

Asking philosophical questions can change your life. Let´s look into it.

On a beautiful evening in Greece, for now many years ago, I read the French author Antoine De Saint-Exupery´s small book The Little Prince. At that time I was sad and worried, but the book opened my mind, like the sunset opened the evening sky for the stars.

The general theme in the book is humans´ ability to wonder, and the loss of this ability. The first part is the short introduction dealing with the narrator and his wondering view of the world when he was a child, and how adults could never understand the real meaning of things or perceive truth in the world - only the superficial and the usual, because they had lost the ability to wonder. This is generally one of the main ideas of the book; "blessed are the children...".

In his autobiographical work Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry talks about his wonder over the desert; over the wind, the sand and the stars. His books are filled with wonderful meditations over this, yes, that the nights could be so beautiful, that he, as a pilot over the desert, often felled into thoughts, and was in danger falling down.

Saint-Exupéry, an early pioneering aviator, evokes a series of events in his life, principally his work for the airmail carrier Aéropostale. He does so by recounting several episodes from his years flying treacherous mail routes across the African Sahara and the South American Andes. The book's themes deal with friendship, death, heroism, camaraderie and solidarity among colleagues, humanity and the search for meaning in life. The book illustrates the author's view of the world and his opinions of what makes life worth living.

I consider Saint-Exupéry to be one of my central spiritual teachers, who has awakened my own philosophical wonder. In the beginning of the book he writes about sitting in an old omnibus which to him served as a proper symbol of the apprenticeship other pilots before him also had to serve before they might possess the stern joys of their craft. He writes:

“For how many of us had this old omnibus served as refuge in its day? Sixty? Eighty? I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. How many of us had they escorted through the rain on a journey from which there was no coming back?

"I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny.

"Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

"The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.”

The central incident he wrote of detailed his 1935 plane crash in the Sahara Desert between Benghazi and Cairo, which he barely survived along with his mechanic-navigator, André Prévot. Saint-Exupéry and his navigator were left almost completely without water and food, and as the chances of finding an oasis or help from the air gradually decreased, the two men nearly died of thirst before they were saved by a Bedouin on a camel. He wrote:

“You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell forever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into my mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be, and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind. You came towards me in an aureole of charity and magnanimity bearing the gift of water. All my friends and all my enemies marched towards me in your person. It did not seem to me that you were rescuing me: rather did it seem that you were forgiving me. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world.” 

Saint-Exupéry´s most famous book, The Little Prince is the story of the little prince, whom the narrator discovers in the Sahara when he is trying to fix his downed airplane and is in fear of his life. The narrator and the reader slowly come to know the prince's story. He has travelled from another planet to Earth, where he, with wonder, was watching and questioning the flowers, animals and humans. Through this story the narrator learns about friendship, love and truth in a touching way. It is in other words the little prince, who is the philosopher and not the adult.

The Little Prince could be an analogy of our own forgotten wonder over life: our inner lost philosopher.

Asking philosophical questions begins with wonder, often generated by a severe existential crisis.

When philosophy asks questions it directs itself towards the form, not the content. The form is the universal, that which we all have in common. The content is the particular, that which we don´t have in common. If you look philosophical at it, there is a difference between the individual person and Man himself. The individual person is a located being, who lives in a particular country, belongs to a particular culture, a particular religion, and who has a particular content of mind. Man on the other hand, is not a located being. Man is everywhere: the form of consciousness is the same for all human beings. If the individual person only acts in a special corner of the extensive area of life, then he acts without any connection with the wholeness: the form. You must therefore remember, that philosophy always talks about the wholeness, the form, not a part of it, not the content. The smaller is in the larger, but the larger is not in the smaller. The individual person is the tiny image-limited, stagnated and despairing being, who is satisfied with his tiny gods and his tiny traditions, whereas the welfare and weal of all, the sum of the world´s necessity, misery and confusion, are lying Man on mind.

The division of human beings, in for instance Westerners and Orientals, is only geographical determined and entirely random. It has no essential importance. Whether we live east or west for a certain border, whether we are brown, dark, white or yellow, then we all still are human beings who are suffering and hoping, fearing and believing: there is unhappiness and happiness here as well as there. There is not a special Western or Eastern way of thinking when it comes to Man, but the individual person creates these divisions on the basis of his background, which is limited by the images of time: the content.

Love is not geographical determined, it is not hold in honour on one continent, while it is denied on the other. When individual persons in this way divide mankind, it is often because of economical reasons or ideological beliefs, and it happens with the purpose of exploitation.

This does not mean, that human beings not are different in temperament etc. There are similarities, and nevertheless there are differences. It means that the understanding of the individual person not is philosophy. The understanding of the individual person belongs to science. In philosophical respect we are the same.

Philosophy asks after that, which makes a human being into a human being, the common or universal, which all of us are part of, in spite of the fact, that we can behave so differently and be studied in so many different ways. Here it is about what we can term the human nature, and the question is not solved by seeking concluded answers in religion, ideology or New Age spirituality, and nor is it solved scientific by experimenting, collecting systematic observations, and from them create theories. It is solved by thinking and meditating over everything, we already know about Man, and by seeking unity and coherency in it. The wholeness is the reason for that philosophy are seeking unity and coherence, and therefore are using logic as a tool.

The truth in philosophy is something a philosopher strive after experiencing, whereafter this experience can be written down. But the answers philosophers write down in books are not the truth. They aren´t conclusion to anything. They are open for discussion. Philosophy throws out answers to the questions, argues for the answers in a rational and logical way, and investigates their consequences. Written down answers are in constant change. That´s how the history of philosophy moves. The answers are fingers pointing at the moon. The fingers shouldn´t be confused with the moon. But it is clear that some answers are better rationally reasoned than others; they are longer lasting, they are more whole.

So, in philosophy Man isn´t only a result of a single influence. Man is much more complex, and to emphasize one influence, and at the same time understating others, is to cause a lack of balance, which will lead to even bigger lack of meaning and coherency, and therefore to even bigger chaos, much more confusion. Man is a complete process. There must be an understanding of the wholeness, and not only a part of it, regardless how important this sometimes may be.

Only the specialized is fixated in a determined cause, and in this way also in a determined effect. Where there is specialization there is stagnation. Man is not a specialized being. He can break through his limitation, which is created by the images of time – and this he will have to do if he wants to experience reality.

Human nature is the whole of mankind, and do not belong to a certain category. But with the individual person´s mind follows the complicated problems of split, contradiction and war.

So in order to understand yourself you must understand that Man is an inviolable whole, not only a determined being, as for instance a society being with his particular assigned job: a worker, a citizen, a consumer, or a political being, right wing or leftist, or a religious being, Christian, Moslem, Jew, - but a complete whole in which an interaction and a reciprocity takes place.

You must realize, that suffering and split origin from ignorance about your own human nature. As long as you don´t understand yourself, your perspective on yourself and on the world, your personal history, you must, whatever you do, and in whatever area, unavoidably create separation, despair and suffering.

In order to understand yourself you must go out on a voyage of discovery. A voyage of discovery, that goes into your ego and your personal history, and therefore into time as a whole. You must travel up The River of Heraclitus, you must travel up the river of time, which not only is your own personal history, but also the collective and universal history. You must become a life artist.

Therefore, as I point out in my first book Meditation as an Art of Life, asking philosophical questions is a meditative state of mind. I used the expression:

“Asking philosophical questions in a meditative-existential way is the wordless silence within a strong existential wonder.”

In that way philosophical questions function as a kind of Koans. A Koan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and test a student's progress in Zen practice.

The ability to wonder (or to be skeptical, critical) is the philosopher´s basic virtue. If you as a life artist want to start philosophizing, you must therefore become like a child again. Children seems to come from eternity, or the wholeness. It seems like you automatically begin to philosophize when you somehow get a sense of looking at things from the perspective of the wholeness. Therefore enlightened masters also always are philosophers, no matter whether they have any formal education in philosophy or not. Krishnamurti was an exceptional example of a philosopher thinking for himself all the time, but he hadn´t got any education in philosophy.

Sub specie aeternitatis (Latin for "under the aspect of eternity") is, from Baruch Spinoza onwards, an honorific expression describing what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon the temporal portions of reality. In clearer English, sub specie aeternitatis roughly means "from the perspective of the eternal". Even more loosely, the phrase is used to describe an alternative or objective point of view.

In the longing after returning to the source of wisdom, from where all the philosophical questions stream, philosophy becomes an art of life, an exercise, namely meditation. In this movement in towards the source (the form, the universal, the wholeness) you begin to ask philosophical questions in a meditative-existential way: Who am I? Where do the thoughts come from? What is consciousness and where does it come from? Is there a meaning of life? How does man preserve peace of mind and balance in all the relationships of life? How do we learn to appreciate the true goods and flout all transient and vain goals? Is the destiny of Man part of a larger plan?

Finally, in philosophical pedagogic, there isn´t given answers. Philosophical pedagogic is an invitation to wonder, to think for yourself, to become a light for yourself, to develop your own teaching. Krishnamurti said: “I invite you to become aware of your unawareness.” Kierkegaard said basically seen the same: “The only thing I do is to invite to awareness of your paradoxical nature.” Philosophy is about awakening our innate awareness.

Related blog post: 

The Philosophy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (this is a longer version of the above post)

Related books:

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (free download)

Wind, Sand and Stars, by Antoine de Saint-Exépury (free download) 

Other related books and articles:

I have explained the way philosophy asks questions many places, see for example the introduction to my first book: Meditation as an Art of Life – a basic reader. Also see my articles What is Philosophy?, Philosophical Counseling as an Alternative to Psychotherapy.

In my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist you can read several texts on philosophical practice, for example in chapter III; The Lifeartist as a Desirous being (2.A: The Difference Between Psychological Counseling and Philosophical Counseling; and 3.E: The Need of Philosophical Counseling; and chapter V: The Lifeartist as a Communicative Being (2: The Dialogue in Philosophical Counseling). Also see Chapter I; Philosophy as an Art of Life (2.C: To ask Questions).

Related blog post:

On the Nature of Longing

Related in the Matrix Dictionary:

Questioning trap

The Mandala of Kant and Longchenpa

I have suggested, that a human being seems to have two aspects: an energy-aspect and a consciousness-aspect. Seen from the energy-aspect lawfulness rules: your body is subject to the physical laws of nature (both classical laws and quantum laws); your psychic system is subject to the lawfulness of the energy fields and of the energy transformations: compensatory karma. The psychic system is what I refer to when I talk about thoughts and mind.

Seen from the consciousness-aspect, then a human being seems to be akin to the wholeness, to be transcendent in relation to these lawfulnesses (also the quantum laws). The wholeness is one and the same as reality. So, in my view consciousness, wholeness and reality is one and the same. Please give this a moment of reflection. Awareness seems to be a quality of the now, and therefore a quality of life itself: nature. Many ancient Indian scripts say that the Universe is in meditation, or rather: the Universe is one great meditation! When you are in the Now life, nature and universe expands. Awareness seems to have the qualities of openness and spaciousness. Unawareness closes these qualities. We can all experience this quite easily. Take a walk in the forest. Unawareness, or distractedness, cause that we don´t see the nature we are walking in. Awareness causes that we see it much more clearly. And by practicing meditation (awareness in now), you begin to connect with this open dimension of your being. In fact, it introduces you to the unlimited spaciousness that Buddhists call Sûnyatâ (see my book Sûnyatâ Sutras). This spaciousness is also the source of love. Spaciousness is simply love. The openness and the spaciousness come from your heart, not you head. It is not neither mental nor material.

In other words: Matter (hereunder the body) and mind (hereunder thoughts, the unconscious, the psyche, subject, the content of consciousness) – are something else than consciousness itself.

If I should try to characterize this theory in traditional philosophy of mind, it would be a kind of double-aspect theory. The double-aspect theory is a type of mind-body monism. According to double-aspect theory, the mental and the material are different aspects or attributes of a unitary reality, which itself is neither mental nor material (so this is neither a materialist, nor an idealist, metaphysical theory, seen I the light of Western philosophy).

The unitary reality is the form of consciousness, an aspect which is completely neglected in traditional Western philosophy, but very commonly known in mysticism and Eastern philosophy.

In Western philosophy they have only contemplated the content of consciousness, and not the form (though Kant was very close to it with his concept of The Transcendental Apperception, the unity where the self and the world come together). They haven´t looked into the consciousness itself, as you do in meditation, but only followed its direction towards an object; what you call the intentionality of consciousness. In fact, they claim that consciousness always must have intentionality. But this is only what I refer to as the mind. Intentionality is the power of the mind to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs.

Immanuel Kant

Meditation stops the intentionality, and directs the mind into its source, namely consciousness itself, which is one and the same as reality and wholeness. You could also say that meditation changes the consciousness from being one-directional to being bidirectional. Bidirectional consciousness means that the consciousness both is directed towards its form and its content. It is being open to the form of consciousness, aware of both magnetic poles in the field of subject-object experience. I have also called this the wholeness of the observer and the observed.

In his book Bevidsthedens Flydende Lys [The Flowing Light of Consciousness, 2008] the Danish philosopher and spiritual teacher Jes Bertelsen says, then you actually can make a fascinating comparison between Kant and the Tibetan Dzogchen master Longchenpa, because where Kant´s philosophy stops with the transcendental apperception, Longchenpa´s philosophy begins. Where Kant´s philosophy goes in the direction of the content of consciousness, and describes the categories of experience, Longchenpa´s philosophy goes in the direction of the form of consciousness, and describes the categories of enlightenment. Kant doesn´t mention the enlightened state. Longchenpa doesn´t mention the content of consciousness. Tibetan Buddhism in fact has a name for Kant´s transcendental apperception; it is called Rigpa, the knowing of the original wakefulness that is personal experience. So Kant and Longchenpa have the same starting point: the transcendental apperception, but go in two different directions. Together they could form the complete philosophy of the bidirectional consciousness: a mandala of the cosmos.

Longchenpa

As in the creation Kant moves towards the manifestation of the world, and he analyses the categories of experiencing this world. Kant suggested, that space and time were forms of experience, not outer objective relations in themselves, but fundamental common human structures. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell says in Chapter 1 Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination:

It was a startling experience for me, as it must have been for many others watching the television broadcast of the Apollo spaceflight immediately before that of Armstrong´s landing on the moon, when Ground Control in Houston asked, “Who´s navigating now?” and the answer that came back was, “Newton!”

I was reminded of Immanuel Kant´s discussion of space in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, where he asks: “How is it that in this space, here, we can make judgments that we know with apodictic certainty will be valid in that space, there?”

The little module was beyond the moon. That was a part of space that no one had ever before visited. Yet the scientists in Houston knew exactly how much energy to eject from those jets, when turned in just what direction, to bring the module down from outer space to within a mile of a battleship waiting for it in Pacific Ocean.

Kant´s reply to the question was that the laws of space are known to the mind because they are of the mind. They are of a knowledge that is within us from birth. A knowledge a priori, which is only brought to recollection by apparently external circumstance. During the following flight, when Armstrong´s booted foot came down to leave its imprint on the surface of the moon, no one knew how deeply it might sink into lunar dust. That was to be knowledge a posteriori, knowledge from experience, knowledge after the event. But how to bring the module down, and how to get it up there, had been known from the beginning. Moreover, those later spacecraft that are now cruising far beyond the moon, in what is known as outer space! It is known exactly how to maneuver them, to bring messages back, to turn them around, even to correct their faults.

In other words, it then occurred to me that outer space is within inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same.

[…]

There is a beautiful saying of Novalis: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.” That is the wonderland of myth. From the outer world the senses carry images to the mind, which do not become myth, however, until there transformed by fusion with according insights, awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body. The Buddhists speak of Buddha Realms. These are planes and orders of consciousness that can be brought to mind through meditations on appropriate mythologized forms. Plato tells of universal ideas, the memory of which is lost at birth but through philosophy may be recalled. These correspond to Bastian´s “elementary ideas” and Jung´s “archetypes of the collective unconscious.”

[Here Campbell is wrong, since Jung´s archetypes are a psychological reduction of reality. The Buddha realms and Plato´s universal ideas are ontological realms, not psychological realms. Campbell is therefore himself in danger of ending in psychological reductionism. I will return to this].

In India, as noticed by Ananda K. Coomarasway, works of art representing indifferent objects, local personages and scenes, such as fill the walls and rooms of most of our museums, have been characterized as desi (“local, popular, provincial”) or as nâgara (“fashionable, worldly”) and are regarded as esthetically insignificant; whereas those representing deities or revered ancestors, such as might appear in temples or on domestic shrines, are perceived as tokens of an inward, spiritual “way” or “path,” termed mârga, which is a word derived from the vocabulary of the hunt, denoting tracks or trail of an animal, by following which the hunter comes to his quarry. Similarly, the images of deities, which are not local forms of “elementary ideas,” are footprint left, as it were, by local passages of the “Universal Self” (âtman), through contemplating which the worshiper attains “Self-rapture” (âtmânananda). A passage from Plotinus may be quoted to this point: “Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original.”

[I have termed these tracks, trails and footprints as “The dreaming tracks and songlines in the artwork of Man and the Universe,” or as “the universal images in time.” They correspond to progressive karma. I have, with inspiration from Karen Blixen, termed the Original as “The Ancient”].

The unity of the self and the world, the place where the outer and the inner worlds meet, is the transcendental apperception, or Rigpa: the wholeness of the observer and the observed.

Now, if we should follow Longchenpa from the transcendental apperception, it would be in the opposite direction, in towards the Original, the categories of the unmanifested, the form of consciousness, or the enlightened mind. In the following I will follow Jes Bertelsen´s account of this.

The two main forms of practice in Dzogchen are Trekjö and Tögal. And they relate - according to Longchenpa - to the basic division between emptiness (stong pa) and appearance (snang ba). This duality goes a long way back in Indian Dzogchen and further into Indian Mahayana Buddhism. Famous is the distinction and its abolition in the Heart Sutra:

”Here, O Sariputra, form (rupam) is emptiness (Sûnyatâ) and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.”

Trektjö moves from the concrete formations of phenomena, thoughts and experiences, emotions and senses into the Original, into the source from which all concrete formations of phenomena, thoughts and experiences, feelings and senses come: the creative formless openness of the consciousness, the apperception's basic space.

Tögal relates to the appearances because Tögal is to see the apperception's spontaneous self-radiation without that the apperception forgets itself.

Another Dzogchen master, Tulku Urgyen, said: The Tögal visions are rig dang, the self-radiation of Rigpa. However, Tulku Urgyen continued, if there is no actual recognition of Rigpa, the visions are lung dang, manifestations of the karmic wind, pure dual fixation.

The message in Tögal is that consciousness can rest in recognition of its innermost essence. Tögal only works when the consciousness is in the Rigpa state. The visions are only Tögal visions when they are apperceptive: while the visions are happening, the observing consciousness rests in nondual apperception.

Tögal is to see with Rigpa, with apperception, to see with the nondual self-conscious consciousness beyond language.

Where Trektjö is the movement from the dual mind to the nondual wakefulness, Tögal is insight in the creation of the world. Tögal is an insight into how the world, language and mind every moment are spontaneously created by the enlightened unity-consciousness.

This process usually takes place automatical or hidden. Our dual mind does not perceive that the mind itself and the world-image are recreated and thus maintained every moment – seen from the perspective of the totally liberated unity-consciousness.

You can´t see this until you have discovered and stabilized the Rigpa-consciousness - claims Dzogchen. Every single moment's restoration of self-image and world-image can only be seen from the apperception's consciousness-dimension, the nondual wakefulness.

The Tögal visions begin by themselves when Rigpa is stabilized; that is: when the consciousness rests without effort and thought, wide awake in the unity of apperception. It seems to be a common experience that when consciousness, without a single distraction, rests in the recognition of the innermost consciousness somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, then the apperception will begin to perceive the flowing light.

Most often the unfolding process begins with spots or particles of light in the dimension of apperception.

After the end of the state, when the dual mind and language want to describe these apperceptive light particles, the mind will locate them: in the heart, in the center line, in the pineal gland, in the focus point of consciousness, in the infinite blue sky. However, these Tögal points of light are embraced by the apperception. They are in the Rigpa dimension, and they are permeated by Rigpa. They are therefore only dual or analogue localizable. Our ordinary dual mind would - in connection with the registration, or just the description, of such a light particle - be tempted to explain, for example, a focus point of attention, a center of a symbolic circle, an energy whirl, a mandala or a cosmic point; that is: a point in a wholeness that gives access to the information of that wholeness. Or the mind would locate the event to a practice point, a point of Rigpa, a point of origination, or perhaps to the unity point of the apperception.

If the nondual consciousness-continuum does not distract from these flashes of light and bright particles, they will develop by themselves. First, they form strings or chains or pearls of light points. Longchenpa calls them Vajra chains (rdo rje lu gu rgyad).

The dual mind´s association series may be: association chains - thought chains - molecular chains - DNA strings - superstrings - the center line with its chakra spots - light beams - sun beams.

When the light points subsequently have been localized in the heart, in the center line or in the infinity of the consciousness, these chains of light will afterwards naturally be located in the center line or in the outer blue infinity.

When the localization is situated in the central channel, it appears crystal-clear. Longchenpa calls this situation the Kati-crystal channel (ka ti shel sbugs) and describes the crystal-light´s flowing apperceptive dynamics as follows:

"As crystal-light collected inside, stay in Dharmakaya, the basic space of origin."

The essential is the constant, relaxed stay in un-distracted Rigpa-continuity.

Distraction - language, comments, associations, experience-production, loss of apperceptive wakefulness into dual consciousness - transforms the situation qualitatively from nondual consciousness to the common dual mind, now filled with so-called spiritual experiences with their blend of imagination, healing, inspiration and what in today's language is called self-assertion: nutrition and air to the ego.

Here, the situation turns around and goes towards Kant, Campbell, and religious interpretations. There is nothing wrong in this, except that you lose the direction towards enlightenment. The danger is spiritual crises and misinterpretations, or blends of personal, collective and universal images. The latter is what happens, for example, in a psychedelic trip. I have described this in my booklet The Psychedelic Experience versus The Mystical Experience. This has especially to do with the reduction (mix) of ontological realms (universal and collective images) to psychological realms (personal images). We saw that Campbell, due to his inspiration from Jung, tended towards this.

Campbell´s theory is exceedingly conservative and founded on a deep nostalgia: for him, the cure for modern problems is found by returning to earlier notions of spirituality and moral virtue. In promoting a “living mythology,” Campbell harkens back to a lost “golden age” from which we have fallen, but to which we can return with effort and guidance of a “sage.” It is a reductionism, a psychologism. And herewith there is the danger of ending in idealism, and the same psychologizing, emotionalizing and therapeutizing ideology of our society, which New Age and Self-help stand for.

As I showed above, I supply this with my own metaphysical double-aspect theory, and with this a philosophical principle, namely to examine, whether the karmic talk and experiences of the “experts” and their clients remove their energy-investments in the actual reality. If focus is displaced backwards, then the collective time has taken over and spiritual seen there therefore happens an escape. Such an escape is seen both in Freud, Jung, Rank, Grof, Janov, Campbell, rebirthing, regression. None of these people and theories can therefore be said to work spiritual. And if they use the karma idea in that way, it is no longer a spiritual help, it is a collective displacement of the focus backwards in time and therewith out of reality and into the unreality of the collective time.

But what if we continue along Longchenpa´s path? In the foregoing we have described  (with Jes Bertelsen as a guide) the development of the Tögal visions from one point to a chain or line of points. The next step is the spread of colours, as light, which breaks in a crystal, forming rainbow lights. Afterwards, when the dual mind takes over with language and division, this state is usually located in the heart, in the eyes or in the infinity of space. This spread of colour-shades expands to a general bright transparent quality of the apperception's space-like widen dimension as such.

When this last step has been reached, the spontaneous self-radiance of Rigpa unfolds in the Tögal visions: the enlightened apperceptive direct perception of Man, the world, the cosmos, as flowing unlimited light, transparency and rainbow light, permeated by the cohesion of compassion and love. 

Enlightenment has happened. 

Related books:

Bevidstheden Flydende lys [The Flowing Light of Consciousness, 2008], by Jes Bertelsen

Sûnyatâ Sutras, by Morten Tolboll

Krishnamurti´s Notebook -free download (Krishnamurti had daily experiences of the flowing light, which he called different names such as: presence, benediction, immensity, sacredness, or simply The Other or The Otherness. In his Notebook he, in an exceptional poetic way, described these experiences blended with descriptions of nature).

Related article:

Metaphysics. Ontology; Part 1: The Problem of Mind, from my online book Philosophical Counseling withTolkien (here I describe my concept of the metaphysical double-aspect theory).

Related booklets:

Atheist Fundamentalism (my notion of the double-aspect theory is described in the last part).

The Psychedelic Experience versus The Mystical Experience.

Related pop culture file:

Star Wars (here I explain my own space mythology seen in relation to Campbell´s monomyth and the Star Wars space mythology).

Related articles:

The Hero´s Journey (Campbell´s monomyth).

The Philosophy of Karen Blixen (her concept of the Ancient corresponds more or less to the Buddhist concept of the Original – and she seemed to radiate a very high degree of spiritual insight).

The Philosophy of Krishnamurti