The artist wants to know what life is
The mystic wants to know what life is
The philosopher wants to know what life is
The psychoanalyst wants to know what life is
The scientist wants to know what life is
And the scholar wants to know what words mean
At the very end of the scholar’s lifelong pursuit
Of dogmatic rationalism
Of memorization and regurgitation
Of rigid certainties and didactic platitudes
Precise measurements
Of incalculable calculations
With inconclusive conclusions
Of logical deductions
Of reason
And proof
Only One realization lies in wait:
That truth is only experienced
Knowledge is only experienced
All else is a great mirage of human mind
A trick of memory
And this is the final thought
And the only realization
The scholar ever has
At the moment of death
(Dang! Better luck next time!)
The Perennial Ground
(The only reason William Blake isn’t called a philosopher
Is because scholars don’t understand anything he wrote)
Pull a random line from William Blake’s latter work
A random line from Krishnamurti’s latter work
A random line from Nietzsche’s latter work
A random line from Carl Jung’s latter work
And a random line from Schrödinger’s latter work
Ask a random test group:
Who’s the artist
Who’s the mystic
Who’s the philosopher
Who’s the psychoanalyst
And who’s the scientist?
They’ve all touched the same place
The same source
The ground from which all arises
Viewed from varying perspectives
Different pinholes in the same red curtain
Different vantage points of the same stage play
Upstage left, downstage right, stage lights and shadows
Language must do summersaults to grasp
The ground which cannot be grasped
All five, in their attempts to describe
Their experiential view of the ground
They all become poets, artists
In our attempts to describe the perennial ground
From which All arise
We are all becoming artists
The True Artist
The psychologist tells you how your brain works
and exactly what’s wrong with it.
The neuroscientist tells you that
humans know very little about the human brain.
The religious tell you why you’re here,
how you got here, and where you’re going.
The True Spirit of enlightened beings tell you
Truth and Knowledge may only be experienced.
The scholarly philosopher
[Professor of the ground, Chuck Patty, Ph. D.]
regurgitates words he memorized
And argues with people who died centuries ago
The True Philosopher inspires All to seek the True Self.
The physicist tells you the material world is the All,
and nothing is known but through the study of the material world.
The True Science of quantum reality
tells you infinity is in every moment,
and the mind creates the illusion of time which projects itself
onto the experiencer as the material world.
The musician memorizes scales and learns technique
And the writer puts words together
And the painter moves color from one place to another
The True Artist
Is becoming the art, becoming the way
Merging with the light and the darkness
Transmuting the infinite pallet of color
Imbuing grace into the subtlest sound
Echoing the roar at the beginning of All
Stretching perceptibility of human audibility
Embracing the inevitability of the eternal moment
Singing life in perfect harmony with death
Dancing between creator and creation
The hand of One becoming One
With the creation and destruction of time and space