And I am off to Belgrade, fmr. Yugoslavia tomorrow for a conference which I am speaking at.
Will post pictures soon. I have been slacking on reading as well, but now that spring is here I promise to catch up.
Spirit Born People quote:
The Gurus have altered our ideals of inner self-realization. "Know Thyself", is only partially right. The true artistic consciousness or religious consciousness blossoms in its own inner beauty when the inner self of man and the outer self of nature unite. Both partake of Reality which is but a cosmic phenomenon of life. Those who sat in caves, and meditated and found God in their soul, the so-called Yogic idealist, the Zens of Japan, were not truly spiritual; they were still intellectual, the abstractionists, poor moralists who set themselves, in pride of intellectual abstraction, as gods. On the other hand, those who rejected the subjective realities and saught Truth only in the outer objects and their beauty as realized by the senses, the so called Realists, also were intellectual. Their art too, wholly intellectual, touches in its ratre flights the spiritual. There is thus no difference between the Greek ideals of old and the Art-ideals of the East which are based on metaphysics....This was an excerpt from "Notes on Art and Personality from the Sikh Viewpoint". This essay of Prof. Puran Singh gives us a glimpse into the inspiration of art and culture within the Sikh context. The essay starts with the famous line: "First, life. Then, its expression". Its a fascinating line. Now its time to delve in the Guru Granth and realize its import.
Hence it is that the Gurus do not consider artistic expression which needs must be intellectual. They insist first on artistic life and most on artistic inside, on the flame of inspiration burining within at the centre. The rest must follow. According to the Gurus, the spiritual expression of personality can only come thourgh feeling born and bred in the human flesh. Human flesh is the imperfect medium though which the Gurus wish to express the perfect. Beauty is neither outside, within the reach of the realist, nor inside, within the reach of the idealist, as both are seeking an intellectual abstraction. It (Beauty) is beyond intellectal abstractions, in hte actual subjective spiritual union of the spirit of man with that of the universe or Nature.
