Artist Struggles and the Inner Path: It’s Painful Creating on the Front Lines

For our world to find new ways forward, it must learn to dream new dreams. Here the artists are, as they have always been, humanity's teachers. But it can be painful out on those front lines, creating new paths towards an unprecedented future.

We artists ache to explore the frontiers of consciousness because we need to embrace more than just a reflection of the world that surrounds us. We need to offer up a new vision of what could be. 

Our artistic vision often has few champions and supporters in the world because its mirror reflection does not yet exist. We’re in the process of manifesting that reflection in the face of what’s established, the consensus reality. This process can be painful—the loneliness, misunderstanding, indifference, the exhausting upward push that seems unrelenting.

But if the inner visions that artists were giving form to were already honored in the world, then there would be no need for them to produce the work in the first place. 

Fantasy novels and myths abound with symbols that address mortality, eternity, and the reach of our human lifetimes. There are Undying Lands, fountains and potions of youth, Elvish blood that prolongs the life expectancy of mortal men, and so on. This is not all mere whimsy. Often, such stories address the core quandary inherent in our nature: unlimited consciousness struggling to express itself within a finite world.

Sacred Play in an Unfinished Universe

In the Parting the Veils series, my protagonist, Esperidi Mon-Sequana, describes the artist’s vocation (and, in the larger sense, the inner path) thus:

“We pursue the urgent outward thrust of our hearts. We play the great game of insecurity, being eternal and yet believing ourselves fragile and vulnerable in the face of a world that often seems hostile and indifferent. We seek to survive after agreeing to forget that we were immortal and can never be extinguished. We course through the sweet rivers of love and rapture and crash against the rocks of disillusionment and even despair. 

“We live in worlds, inner and outer, that seem forever imperiled. Always, the obstacles appear insurmountable, and yet we persist because the breath of life is urgent and unquenchable. We have to believe, and the heart knows, even when there is no convincing the mind. 

“Separation is our teacher in physicality. It is the means through which the universe expands, always under the guise of unpredictability. How could All-That-Is extend itself if it believed itself complete? How could we long for, reach for, and come to know ourselves through the mingled joy and pain of that great unanswerable longing if we didn’t forget beforehand?”

Our artistic vision is a pathway that leads us away from the world for a period of time because the answers we seek are not within it. Once it comes to fruition, though, we ache to express it here in this realm of physical limitation. Otherwise we would not have come. The call of the work is meant to enrich the world, not provide an avenue of escape. 

New Guiding Myths for Cultural Exhaustion

Modern civilizations, here in their waning days, have a way of keeping our energies consumed in petty frustrations and toils, blinding us to life's more epic sweep. When faced with the unbridled force of creativity, we can feel our primal kinship with nature and bond more deeply with one another. Barriers fall away when we’re wrestling with the fundamental question of existence: what life and death are really all about. We humans face the primordial spirit that birthed us and can yet consume us. It cuts through the pettiness, slackness, and complacency of civilized life. It can draw out the best in people and lift ordinary men and women into a more heroic sphere.

Such a goal is worth the pain we may experience along the inner path that is every artist’s birthright.