PLAYING THE SPIRITUAL SYMPHONY “Re-inventing and Savoring the Beautiful inside us”

Before tackling my own artistic work, which always remains in search of this BEAUTIFUL “SURE – REALISTIC”, let me provide the learner with the appropriate tools for any intellectual and philosophical work, as stated the famous French painter and the precursor of modern art Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) : “There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other”.

In a few lines I will talk about spiritual and natural truths, which are realities that we often do not take notice of or we often tend to neglect in our daily life.

I-Today we see the human crisis. Man has moved away from himself.

Man is an everlasting dissatisfied being, he has always been confronted with this desire to have control over all his life circumstances, and there is in our life that seemingly dangerous and threatening unknown which scares us.

The unknown seems dangerous and threatening bringing about the fear of losing, the fear of no longer existing as a sound whole being and teh fear of death. The fear of changing results from the fact that we do not know where the present is leading us.The unknown towards which we are moving is worrying us. If I lose my house, my partner, my trade, will I find another. I might run out of money, security and love. Thus the fear of losing goes hand in hand with the fear of missing leading us to a feeling of insecurity, why? Because we know that those who were despised yesterday have become great men today, because the truth yesterday is not the same as two days ago and therefore the truth today might change tomorrow !!! Unfortunately, today’s consumer society has become a screen that covers essential things in life. The majority of society is blinded (to different extents) by the modern life materialism. Because people got used to seeing nothing but consumming objects, we ended up forgetting our true nature, the definition of success since the end of the 20th century has become synonymous with material success. This blindness caused by materialism has become very worrying, which could explain this dramatic increase in psychological disorders and this fast-growing mental imbalance which many of our fellow citizens suffer from, becoming a real threat to our modern society and our children !!!

One important task of meditation is to to awaken human consciousness about the various “pairs of opposites” that coexist in us and in the universe and the problems which they involve as well as the techniques used to balance them. The “pairs of opposites” are the great dualities in which “we are living” and ” swinging”, when we go either towards one or the other such as : soul-matter, happiness-sadness, love-hatred.

 First of all, we have to identify polarity, admit duality, balance opposites and learn to stand firmly in the center, it is a fundamental aspect of psychological and spiritual integration.

God created the universe on the basis of polarity. When the cosmic manifestation started developing, duality was born. The first fundamental duality is that of the manifest and the un-manifested.

In the manifestation process, the fundamental polarity is that of soul and matter. Any polarity is a relation between two elements and, as such, is never absolute but relative to a particular pair of opposites. Thus, the same element may be positive in its relation to a certain “pole” and negative in its relation to another.

II-First necessity of the BEAUTIFUL: Identify and develop the existence of the spiritual dimension.

Beyond any material success, there is a much more important reality, that authentic reality which considers the human being as a whole. It is about balancing one’s inner and outer life. Looking after the physical aspect is a necessary thing. However, it should not be the only drive that requires our attention. It is necessary to seek a balance which ensures the sense of stability and equality, like two loads of the same weight on the plates of a scale. It is also the state of someone who is in control of his position and his movements to avoid falling down. It is impertive to maintain our state of mind in good balance, we must learn how to develop stability and a strong character that enbles us to find a perfect balance, it is the magic secret of lasting happiness not tht is casual!

To develop this magical stability, we should first identify the existence of the “true SELF” of our ESSENCE. It is the discovery of a deeper dimension of ourselves, a bright, powerful and great part that only needs to be developed through experience.

While connected to that magical stability, our inner state changes to enjoy happiness and freedom. Our body sensations change as well, since it acts as a source of energy and elevates our vibrational state. We are invited to realize this state by observing the games of the ego, its resistances, and developing confidence and the « let-it-go ». Practical keys such as observation of our feelings and meditation are suggested. We are invited to identify this inner necessity of the soul by traveling, thanks to the “NTH DIMENSION” that we possess, in order to be able to combine the past and the future while going through the present so as to reinvent our “BEAUTIFUL INTERIOR”.

The spiritual dimension consists in recognizing and better understanding the existence of our ESSENCE and enabling it to reveal itself and develop. We must listen to that ESSENCE, communicate with it so as to reach a deep and intimate knowledge and create the best conditions to take its true place.

For this, we should pay attention to our sensations, emotions and thoughts. We must favor those which are positive (more precisely those that raise us) and transform the negative ones (more precisely those that lay a haeavy burden on us, because nothing is negative), in other words we learn to become masters. Spirituality is a natural function, a state of connection with the Self, but as this function is increasingly neglected, there is a need to be found and developed. Spiritual development is nothing other than a personal development whose aim is reconnecting with our Essence. We have a fresh look at who we are, what life is like, and direct it towards the perception of our Essence. We place back our personality in its rightful place and function to support our Essence.

 This process can be accelerated by cultivating joy. Instead of merely welcoming it, we feed and water it like a gardener. Bringing about joy is a powerful way to keep consciousness in high vibrations. To fulfill that in a practical way, we should pay attention and focus on the savours of life which we enjoy every day, and to express a thought of gratitude for it.

We share on earth the daily realities of human beings, with joys, sorrows, victories, defeats, successes and failures, sometimes singing, sometimes weeping, it’s life down here. However, if we are believers, our gaze rises to heaven, where the one God, the Almighty, the Lord reigns. It is essentially ,in a very extensive sense, a question of relating to God, to the divine, to a transcendent reality, our mind changes, because religion is essentially concerned with evolving the mind. It brings about wisdom and unites you to GOD, then Man perceives and understands the world better.

To evolve, the mind of the human being must analyse the relevant essential truths. These essential truths are about Himself, life and the Creator. It is religion that transmits this knowledge. It provides Man with wisdom. Religion focuses on the essential truths about Man, life and GOD. This knowledge is necessary for Man to better understand the world and evolve. It corrects and balances the vision of things, Then Man’s behavior becomes more conscious and wiser, the heart and mind are ,then, purified. Religion thus enables us to discover and develop this spiritual side that is necessary to fully live the “beautiful interior”.

While being strict in  developing these qualities, we increase and refine the consciousness of ourselves. We become more and more aware of what is happening in us and around us. We take a step back, to have a wider view and to distinguish the true forces behind the appearances of the life games. Being strict in developing our spiritual qualities, we will not fail to pray , we will explore our true inner beauty, “we will then exteriorize the beautiful that exists in us”.

III-Second necessity of the BEAUTIFUL: Maintain balance between spirituality and materialism

Man, the human being, one of the creatures of God is different from others in composition; This creature of God is composed of the Body (or the Carnal Envelope) and the Soul and the Spirit. These two entities have different but complementary actions. They constitute what man is, that is to say, the human being.

The body or the carnal envelope of Man is the visible part through the natural eye. It communicates directly with the five senses, namely, touch, smell, sight, hearing and tasting. The soul of man is inside the carnal envelope it is in the blood. Man’s spirit is in his heart, the center of life; It is not visible and is often ignored. It also contains Man’s spiritual senses which are faith, love, hope, will, desire, consciousness and hatred.

According to Plato, Aristotle and others, the human being is made up of a body and a soul; There is therefore a duality between the body, which belongs to the perishable world, and the soul, which is connected with the spiritual world, with the metaphysical world.

But how can this duality between body and soul avoid all forms of conflict, a conflict that risks to engender unbalance and push everyone to one of the two extremities, in other words, to extremism!

Our life is in perfect harmonic association: Body-Soul and Spirit. It is important to balance both of these natures, which are part of us. One does not go without the other, otherwise there is imbalance. It is necessary to exercise the Spirit as much as the Body, otherwise physical or psychological problmes will emerge. The search for our Essence leads us to listen to our inner Being, to discover deeply what we are. We will perceive what is right for us instead of adopting the opinions dictated by our family, friends, society and the media. Seeking to meet the Self is also to discover our own truth.

However, this harmony found in this complementary balance will enable us to “ERADICATE THE EXTREMISM OF SELF”. The basic law that governs and guides the Universe is the law of balance. Without balance, there can be no life, no perfection and no harmony. All those who bother to analyse and understand any physical and spiritual reality will soon realize that life is based on the balance and harmony of everything.

According to “Spiritual Science Research Foundation” each one of us today is having a fast pace of life. We rarely have time to take stock of our own lives and observe it more closely.

As you can see in the diagram, the blue waves indicate a decrease in the capacity of being projected off balance by circumstances. Indeed our emotional state becomes more resilient and we are able to have control over the two situations positively or adversely in a quiet way. This is due to our knowledge of the Science of Spirituality because we are able to see life more philosophically.

In the mental field, balance raises a fair appreciation of reality, a sound reason that does not yield to the excesses of emotions and feelings.

IV-Third necessity of the BEAUTIFUL: Inject a spiritual dimension in all forms of artistic creation

Man was born with art, he grew up in art and was fed art, but he is unconscious. As spiritual development reaches a high level, art emerges as a kind of ethics and morality. Therefore, to develop art, the being needs to develop his original spirituality and put it into practice.

Today, the spiritual representation in art does not seem to be able to balance temporal erosion and technological dehumanization. It is challenges n a world increasingly dominated by the artificial, superficial, imitation, reproduction, consumption and the rapidly growing individualism and self-centeredness.

However, we can find in history mother civilizations that have left an undeniable cultural heritage and ancestors who have never established boundaries between art and religion, art being a means of showing its spiritual dimension and honoring its God. These civilizations have thus favored the emergence and creation of a very wide range of ritual and sacred objects – altars, drums, masks, statuettes – that are found in the cults that stem from the original beliefs. Thus, painting one’s beliefs and spiritual intimacy was a common approach to creators of all horizons and all dogmas.

Over the centuries, the culture of the divine image and of the sacred space has experienced various fortunes, from Cartesian abandon to frenetic reactivation. The contained violence of the “Sacrifice of Isaac” by Caravaggio (1598) or the “Sacrifice of Abraham” by Rembrandt (1635), or the fresco representing the “Last Judgment” of Michelangelo (1541) show the very strong involvement of artists in expressing the religious and spiritual subjects of their epochs. The Sacrifice of Isaac is a painting of Caravaggio painted about 1598 – 1603 and preserved in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.

The Last Judgment is a fresco painted by Michelangelo, then sixty years old, on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Commissioned by Pope Clement VII, the work lasted six years and was inaugurated by his successor Paul III on November 1, 1541. The fresco extends over a large wall of 16 meters high and 13 meters wide, shaped like a double bezel. The painting deals with the day of the Last Judgment, a subject very often found on the entrance wall of churches. Marc Chagall, painted between 1960 and 1966, Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law, oil on canvas (237 cm by 233 cm) which is located in the National Museum Marc Chagall, Nice in France.

In 1911, an artistic movement was founded in MUNICH by the painters Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This movement aimed at providing a spiritual touch in art. Through his theoretical texts, the group “Der Blaue Reiter” tried to encourage the spiritualist artistic trends which favour, in figurative themes, the harmonies of colors and lines, inspired by music. For Kandinsky art must have an impact on the audience. He must not leave him indifferent. In his book “The Spiritual in Art” and in painting in particular, Kandinsky describes the notions that he considers essential in art such as the “spiritual turning point,” “inner necessity,” or “color.” The author criticizes more the notion of “art for art” than the audience’s attitude.

For Kandinsky this type of painting, limited to technical skills, is a painting without soul due to artists whose sole motivations are money and fame since the aim was only to know how to represent everything. This art which rests solely on techniques does not nourish the spectator’s soul and is therefore purposeless.

In this context Kandinsky said : “A work of art is not beautiful, pleasant, enjoyable. It is not there because of its appearance or shape that delights our senses. The value is not aesthetic. A work is good when it is capable of provoking vibrations of the soul, since art is the language of the soul and it is the only one. ”

“Art can reach its highest level if it breaks loose from from its position of subordination with respect to nature, if it can become an absolute creation and not a mere imitation of the forms of the natural model. Excerpts from the preface by Philippe Sers in 1988

V-Fourth necessity of the BEAUTIFUL: Orchestrate the spiritual symphony

However, to express these same eternal concernss, the artist must reinvent reality, in my case, I will not stop at transcribing a narrative voice of the story, I certainly will not confide to the forms of imitation of these old artistic experiences, becuase to me “The artist must not stop at the stage of passive testimony acting as a standardized or sacred optical reflection and often marked by a certain personal background. The artist should behave as an actor freed from any standardization”.

In fact, I have to guarantee through the “surrealism” image the possibility of bringing together all the inconsistencies, joining all the differences, reorganizing all the forms and orchestrating the symphonies of the opposites, it is perhaps the path that Will guide me to the supreme reality of human sensitivity and dreams!

The spiritual symphony is the result of an encounter between soul and matter, it is a reconnection between the physical and spiritual reality, the encounter of a gaze fixed downwards and of another pointing upwards. It si also the interpretation of a real inner beauty, ” inner BEAUTY born of the faith and e love of our creator, GOD, the all powerful”.

The Third Symphony is an orchestration directed by a new “RUMI”, who as conductor directs a spiritual choreography through the organization of a duality between the different human concerns (the religious and the sacrifice of Abraham …, the materialism of modern life and objects of consumption …), an instrumental duality that combines both the “inner necessity” of Kandinsky expressed through the search for the harmonies of abstract colors and lines and the representation of ritual and sacred objects. This symphony should develop the magical stability that every human being needs. We have just to acknowledge the existence of the “true MYSELF” of our ESSENCE to express and exteriorize the beautiful that exists in us “.

To those who no longer hear the song of their soul, to those who want to hear it more and more, to those who want to master the instrument of their lives to regain their full dimension in the divine symphony of human souls, be this friendly mediator, that performer of the score written for them, so that they might remember this third spiritual melody, which will perhaps vibrate their existence.

Dear readers ! If you enjoyed this post, I’d love continue to share with you a variety of topics. You might enjoy my other posts, below .

I appreciate your comments and feeback. Thank you for your readearship

-THE MANIFESTO. A PLEA FOR THE NEW « SURE-REALISM »

-THE UMPTEENTH DIMENSION

-THE SYMPHONY OF OPPOSITES

– THE SYMPHONY OF LOVE « THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE »

– ON THE ARTIST AND POLITICS

The author : Mourad Elloumi is a professional Artist-Painter and Professor Emeritus of Visual Art, he works to give art and architecture the status of humanities and sciences, thus enabling their authors to participate in philosophical and socio-political debates. For him, it is a matter of expanding the field of vision in time and space with the “UMPTEENTH DIMENSION” in order to better understand diversity, to gather and orchestrate the SYMPHONY OF OPPOSITS so that we can assemble the inconsistencies. This will help to better express the historical heritage and above all to harmonize cultural diversities. It is also a question of responding to the complexity of human nature characterized by a cocktail of realism and surrealism, expressionism and impressionism, and sometimes even abstract obsessions. New connections remain to be established in order to recreate a new result, a synergy between the different forms that reflect a new social or cultural “sure- reality” that is more extensive than the real of the moment,this is the way of the new “SURE -REALISM”.