My motivation isn’t spiritual as much as artistic. What I do in nonduality is art. I’ve created nondual adventures such independent nonduality, a wide open list of gurus and realizers, nondual perspectives, the genre of cinema nondualite’, the independent nondual chat space, a daily e-letter, and street nonduality or the bringing of nonduality to the everyday level of life outside the Internet.
I’ve noted that many people like what I do and some don’t.
It is art, “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” I am motivated to do the art, not to save anyone or the world. If anything or anyone is saved, that’s part of the work of art. I am an artist.
-Jerry Katz
August 21, 2009 at 9:13 am
I love that approach. As a fiction writer, I’m finding myself increasingly fascinated by the question of how nonduality can be expressed in storytelling, especially literary fiction. I’ve just begun, but it feels like the work I’ll be playing at for the rest of my life….
August 24, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Quote: “It is art, “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing,…..”
As Rupert Spira also pointed out in one of his recent interviews re: Art: Beauty and aesthetics is within and by itself Non-Dualism. The total alignment and identification of “I” in and with the product of expression without a separate I-consciousness engenders that Beauty. A spontaneous expression expressed without struggle, without effort is Beauty, irrespective of the content, even if some call it Science! E = m c^2 is beauty!!
September 7, 2009 at 11:59 am
My writing is more art than anything else. I was with a spiritual teacher for many years. After his death I left the group and began to follow my own path of writing as words arise. All I do is capture the moment clothed in words. I guess that is art. Feels like it to me.
September 25, 2009 at 4:02 am
Well Jerry, I’m one of those who like and appreciate what you do. Your blend of wisdom and wit – laced with passion – is beyond “ordinary significance” for me.
Isn’t it a marvel, as an artist, to see what gets written? (Or painted, performed, spun, ex-pressed?)
Gratitude
Louisa
http://thisunlitlight.wordpress.com/
December 13, 2009 at 5:56 pm
hey,
fiction is the ultimate medium for expressing non-dual realisation: because it can take the form and things of phenomenal reality and divest them of self, maybe even despite itself. A few years ago I wrote a fiction piece that, looking back, seems to do that, without having been intended. “The Half-Light” at http://www.whisperedlineage.wordpress.com
Self goes to Witness goes to One Taste. Savour.
December 14, 2009 at 5:43 am
“I am motivated to do the art, not to save anyone or the world. If anything or anyone is saved, that’s part of the work of art.”
thanks for the reflection, Jerry. The nexus between non-dual realisation and its aesthetic expression seems wide open, still under-explored. And some writing seems to emerge spontaneously from the non-dual as Self moves to Witness to One Taste. “The Half-Light”: http://www.whisperedlineage.wordpress.com