Loving the Divine Within

What Cameron meant in her book The Artist's Way, was to spend a couple of hours doing something you don't usually do--maybe visiting a local art gallery, antiques store, or a quiet pond--and using the experience to refill the well on which we all draw for inspiration. It's a helpful practice, but underlying it--and our implicit resistance to taking oneself on a "date"--is the valuing of our own divine nature.  Something about that sounds blasphemous. You might be willing to treat yourself to an ice cream sundae, a bottle of wine, a new coat, a CD or book, but would you consider your inner self important enough to allow your material self to stop working for a while and just, dare I say it, be.

"Being" can also happen when you're in the throes of creative or physical activity--writing, painting, playing or listening to music, skiing, or making love--but some of those activities have implicit goals. As any professional creative (one who earns a living primarily from a creative endeavor) knows well, creativity can be uplifting when you're in the flow, yet at other times it can feel like a burden, especially when you are blocked. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writing about Hemingway, referred to "the most terrible specter of writers: the morning agony of facing the blank page." (If only Julia Cameron had been around back then!) In the same essay, Marquez also quotes the historic interview in The Paris Review in which Hemingway "showed for all time--contrary to the Romantic notion of creativity--that economic comfort and good health are conducive to writing." ["Gabriel Garcia Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway," New York Times Book Review, July 26, 1981] Abundance makes creativity not possible but more likely. For every top-flight artist unrecognized and materially unrewarded while alive--for every Vincent or Frida Kahlo--we can count many more who were well compensated or at least lived comfortably. Money and recognition did not cramp the creative style of Picasso, Bach, or Miles Davis.

Ernest Hemingway

Having said that, I should add that even prosperous creatives doubtless faced the same kinds of everyday conflicts and pains, psychic and physical, that beset the less well recognized. Nor, of course, were they free of the human flaws and inner conflcits that beset us all (as the biographies of the three great masters just named amply prove). So we have every reason to believe that treating ourselves like successful authors, actors, sculptors, or saxophone players would, if anything, aid and not impede our creativity, while not making life so easy that the very tensions that inspire creative output would somehow evaporate.   

Part of our difficulty with embracing ourselves is our desire to avoid the shadow within, which we equate with materialism. During the 8th century, when the iconoclasts were smashing statues and depictions of Jesus and the saints, believing it was wrong to worship "graven images," a Syrian monk spoke out against the practice. "Do not insult matter, for it is not without honor," wrote John of Damascus (675-749). "Nothing is to be despised that God has made." That was a brilliantly compassionate thing to say, not only in support of the inherent beauty of the physical world, but also of inanimate matter. If we can feel that way about a tree, a rock, a cloud, then how much more can we believe that about ourselves. Loving yourself amounts to loving God, since the divine essence has to exist within us. I would go so far as to say that God experiences the world through us, that we are divine eyes and ears and hands and hearts. In that sense, we are divine witnesses.

The advantage of viewing ourselves this way is that it allows us to stand back and look at ourselves as if watching someone else. This is what the great 9th-century Indian master Shankara called Witness Consciousness, and what Caroline Myss refers to as symbolic or archetypal vision. By any name, it affords us the opportunity of not taking things personally, as if some arbitrary force, perhaps embodied in other people, has set out to victimize us. More than that, this kind of vision enables us to view ourselves with the same objective awareness, and even (gulp) love ourselves in our darkest hours. It sometimes feels uncomfortable to say that you love yourself, or to do something loving for yourself that may seem like an indulgence or an act of narcissism. Instead, think of giving something back to the Divine, working with the grace that flows into you from the universe. I used to have difficulty accepting my qigong teacher's assertion that chi (called prana in India and equivalent to grace in Western spirituality) flows into us from the North Star and the Big Dipper. Why those stars in particular? What did the ancient Taoists know that we don't? (Well, lots, but that's another question.) But however we verbalize it, grace or life energy is constantly flowing into us, and we have only to make ourselves available to it. 

The image I get of how we exist as the senses of God is of an enormous fiber optic cable, where each one of us is a light at the end of the cable, which splits into billions and billions of fiber optic threads that all connect back to the Center. We are how God experiences the world; we are actively connected to giving pleasure and delight and dismay and everything else to the divine Being who experiences the world through us, including through our physical bodies. And that in itself is a pretty good reason to love what lies within us--light and shadow alike.E