JUST WHAT DOES SPlRlTUAL MEAN?

This essay is a contemplation of the 'spiritual' with reference to the arts and the
wider world. lt is hoped that the artwork accompanying it paints more than a
thousand words as witness to the spiritual potential of art. A philosophical
examination will be undertaken through an esoteric lens from various standpoints,
with some (partly fictional) conversation. We will take a look at what spiritual means,
what is meant by spiritual in art and what it means to describe an artwork as spiritual
in an interdisciplinary way with a focus on contemporary art.
Being a moderate who seeks to understand more deeply what spiritual means, l am
endeavouring to gain a greater understanding of possibilities for spiritual expression
in my own art practice. Because of the highly philosophical and deeply subjective
nature of the question, corroboration will be weak because of the inherent difficulty of
questions relating to the human soul, our metaphysical nature, which has no
scientific validation as yet. Human thought, especially in Europe is a mass of rivalry
schools of thought which makes any philosophical question complex. No conclusions
will be made, but the reader may be left with a few more plausible hypotheses.
A man in the street, or indeed a sociologist might say that "spiritual" is term glibly
and widely used in our world today in recent decades. For a long time had been a
dirty word in secular contemporary art due to its association with organised religions.
ln l987 at a major exhibition of the Los Angeles
County Museum, the theme of the spiritual in art was resuscitated (The Spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985).
Oxford Dictionary: The word spirit derives from the Latin spiritus 'breath, spirit', from
spirare 'breathe'; the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and
character, the soul; the non-physical part of a person regarded as their true self and
as capable of surviving physical death or separation. The spirit, atman, or monad is
the source of life itself, from which soul or psche is derived, symbolic of man in
unity, all his parts synthesised into One.
Let's start with every day usage in social media today. When someone describes
themselves with the adjective "spiritual", it would be an expression of openness and
goodness, as opposed to dogmatic faith. Spirituality can be accessed via religion,
but is not confined to it. Arya defines it as "an encounter with profound sense of
'meaningfulness' without a conceptual framework. (Arya l985:80). A When someone
describes themselves as Christian, it would normally mean open to no other truth
than that of Jesus, but "Christian and spiritual" would connote flexibility and seeing
the good in other paths. "Spiritual and conscious" is even wider, the conscious
element often being comprehended in spiritual.
Jungian: Making art is spiritual because it calls into play the imagination which
connects one to one's higher self, is healing. And gaining artistic sensibility is
spiritual because it adds value to the person and therefore to the collective
consciousness, it's quite simple.
Transpersonal art by an anonymous art therapy
patient.
Art as a therapy, a form of free self-expression is indeed an antidote for a multitude
of physical, mental and emotional conditions, with inspiration derived, as James
Campbell will tell us, from nature and its rhythms, from myth, fairy tales and stories,
art history and the insights of esotericism. Popular spiritualty is thus a democratising
element in world culture today, no longer the monopoly of the monied classes
serviced by the working class artist.
Hundertwasser: Don't be fooled by the universal bluff of civilisation of today,
harmony with the environment is what spirituality is aboutlook to the future and
break the chains!
He was part of a generation redefining art to encompass ethical and ecological
concerns, a pioneer of green architecture and ecological ethics with a sense of
transcendence.
Religion has been centre-stage for all of recorded history. lt has dominated society,
education, law, politics, culture and art. Throughout the Renaissance, the veneration
for antiquity that dominated intellectual life was partly a veneration for the arts of
antiquity, and there was no doubt of the continued divinity of the arts. Christian
religious art has existed since antiquity to instil devotional feeling and knowledge into
the masses.
The painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, in his !i"es o# the most $minent Architects,
Painters, and Sculptors (l550), saw the development of the arts in Tuscany as the
working out of the divine plan.
Vasari: God sent Michelangelo to the world endowed with a spiritual universality in
each art which made him more divine than human. How can we not look to the
spiritual glories of the past?
A century earlier no-one would have considered artists deserving of such eulogy for
their spirituality. Perhaps the beginning of the highpoint of spiritual art in the west,
taking its status far beyond the mechanical arts to endow it with a divine spirituality
until the l7th century. Velazquez was awarded the Noble Order of Santiago by King
Philip lV.
But by the world tour of a painting under limelight to seven million people in the
British Empire in l900 (!ight o# the %orld by the William Holman Hunt) the cult of the
artist had attained its modern status and the break with the old had been sealed.
lnterestingly, Hunt was said to be an atheist. lt is now possible to be "spiritual"
without being "religious" and religious without being spiritual.
Helena Blavatsky: The mental development of modern man means that we don't
need to speak in parables any more. The material has always been the lower end of
the spiritual and the spiritual the higher end of the materialspirit and matter are to
be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the
Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned being whether
subjective or objective. (Blavatsky, H P l888 l:l5. Church based Christianity was
starting to become a sub-culture. Paradoxically, in our postmodern age of
appropriation, nothing is sacred, and yet everything.
Eva Cristina:Ernst Fuchs
Our problem in finding a consensual definition for the spiritual lies in the fact that
there are so many schisms of thought in the twentieth century: secular, religious,
philosophical, scientific, artistic and political. The church lost its monopoly on every
sphere of human affairs and the spiritual escaped into the neighbourhoods, recent
definitions contrast so strongly to those of the Abrahamic traditions. The challenge of
the World Wide Web for traditionally bounded religious communities is now
increasing and exposure to world spirituality in the wider sense is now on the
increase. There are more challenges to the barriers of separatism than ever in
history perhaps.
The mystical religions of the east have taken root in the west; many believe there is
a movement of the soul of orient to occident.
Rudolf Steiner: the spiritual, and the spiritual in art is about identifying the divine
idea behind the outer symbol, we can look to the east for a living tradition of art
serving spirituality.
Eastern mysticism more than western (so preoccupied with God Transcendent to the
neglect of the lmmanent), has always been about transforming the consensual
reality, and art is still the handmaiden of the alchemically spiritual. ln a trip to the
Tibetan province of Amdo, (now Qinghai Province,China) in 2008, l chatted with a
fellow tourist, taking photos, excited about the aesthetics of Thangka painting. l tried
explaining some of the symbology that l had learned as a practitioner of the Heruka
Maha Yoga Tantra with the Tibetan lama Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, but without any
interest.
Lama: A thangka is a key for opening the door of deeper levels of consciousness.
to get caught in its aesthetics is like using a jewel as a paper weight (lol).
Tenzing Rigdol
But if l had voiced my thoughts to my Amdo Tourist l might have heard the grounding
argument of an aesthetician who has dumped the old religions for an updated
version of truth. Their plausible truth, diametrically opposed to the religious and
moralistic view, is aestheticism.
Aesthetician: What's wrong with paper weights anyway if we can transform them?
lnstead of art being the handmaiden of spirituality, why shouldn't spirituality and
everything else should be the handmaiden of art?
The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City is currently exhibiting the work of
contemporary Tibetan artists such as Tenzing who incisively and imaginatively
reinterpret the highly formalized tradition of Tibetan Buddhist art.
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/20l0/07/l9/tradition-transformed-tibetan-artists-respond/
Aesthetician: The experience of art is the most spiritual, intense and pervasive
human experience possible to the human being.
Lama: How childish! Thangka painting is 'formalised' because it is part of a scientific
method for attaining deeper levels of consciousness. l see from the Akashic records
that the same can be said of the Egyptian canon, for example, unchanged for 3000
years.
The new age is happy just to point the finger in the transcendent direction: lt often
refers to that which is "beyond the material, the conceptual and the rational" (Arya
20l3:l). lt claims as its achievment the expression of anything metaphysical, or a
something other in our lives which is difficult to articulate, something that can't be put
into the inadequate boxes of words or images.
Alex Gray's works are representative of a less pseudo form of this movement and
artistic genre.
Alex: My work zaps the viewer into a new way of thinking, he says assuredly.
l998 oil on linen, &isionar Painter Alex Gray
Theosophists: But hold on a minute, 'e are the true messengers of the new age
with capital letters. The hippies, pagans, class A drug-induced visionaries,
ayahuasca touting shamans and psychics etc. are merely a pseudo-symptom.
Lama: They even don't know the difference between spiritual and pschic. The
former comprehends the latter, but the latter not the former, he says wisely.
Alice: Many 'psychics' have developed the illusory 'animal psychism' of the solar
plexus employed by fortune tellers and mediums, not the higher saintly centre at the
brow and crown. When the energies finding expression through the lower centres
are transmuted and carried to the throat and heart by advancing humanity, then we
will really be talking spiritual.
Alex: You notice in my &isionar Painter, the chakras below the waist are inactive,
he says defensively.
Alice: Fair comment.l know you are a good, well-intentioned artist and humanist,
and where there is motivation for human betterment, sound ethics and life-
philosophy and goodness, the spiritual is being expressed, she replies,
patronisingly.
But new age, pseudo or not, is laden with images giving rise to a whole body of art.
lmages of chakras, angels, mandalas, and kitsch images abound. Go to
Waterstones and Mind/body/spirit books on spirituality abound too, full of
bewilderingly contradictorily content from competitive schools of thought.
The best the new age spirituality, such as Gray's images of subtle human anatomy
without the layer of skin that justifies discrimination, are thinking spiritual thoughts
into the collective consciousness.
l recently emailed the Jerwood Prize winner Marie von Heyl to get her take on
spirituality.
Marie: "My interest in the spiritual is a very secular one. l'm interested in the
supernatural as a human concept and attempt to make sense of the world. ln my
work l explore how objects are bestowed with meaning (other than functionality).
This can be esoteric objects or paraphernalia but also entails souvenirs, knick-knack
and heirlooms...
She references Melissa Gronlunds e-flux article on the Gothic in the Digital Age an
Barry Curtis book about haunted houses. And our CASE exhibition at UCA, (#
Shado's )ecame *hosts (2-4 April 20l4) is a sensitive study on the same lines,
with artistic response to a Georgian haunted house in Dorset. The definition of
spiritus here is the supernatural one of the non-physical part of a person manifested
as an apparition after their death.
For a comprehensive definition of the spiritual and a new framwork for art, culture,
life, the universe and everything in the 2lst century, the best l have found is the 20
volume theosophy of Alice Bailey. A reappraisal of the value of contemporary art
might be made in the light of her analysis in *lamour: a %orld Problem, a thesis in
itself.
Peter Howson the +irst Step
Alice: To be 'spiritual' it is to free oneself from the outworn thoughtforms of
materialism, patriotism and ,hurchianit on the road to the uncertain new: a brave
new spirituality of the postmodern man in the face of a new pharisaic authority, come
again on a higher turn of the spiral.
Alice continues: "All that enlightens the minds of men", according to this new
'Aquarian' synthetic and transformational way of thinking, all propaganda that tends
to bring about 'right human relations', all modes of acquiring real knowledge, all
methods of transmuting knowledge into wisdom and understanding, all that expands
the consciousness of humanity and all that dispels glamour and illusion and that
disrupts crystallisation and disturbs the status quo can come under the term
spiritual.
What a woman! World glamour" refers to the "unthinking emotional mess" that has
been produced by the wrong use of the mind for countless generations. Like the
Jungian idea of the collective unconscious, the field of glamour exists as an
individual and mass tangible reality (the subtle emanations of thought and emotion
detectable with Kirlian photography as colours and clouds in the human aura). This
field colours our interpretations of reality, and art can serve to add to or help
dissipate this field according to which part of the artist it emanates from.
By dwelling on the Jewish tragedy, Rothko may have opened himself to collective
glamour which was too much to for him to handle.
Steiner: Artist beware! The astral mess needs viewing from the poise of the higher
mind, held steady in the light of the soul where God is immanent in man, not from
our emotional centre which is the 'path of least resistance' for most.
Jackson Pollock: my epiphany is just as much a disclosure of the spiritual, we're on
our own goddamit with a small g! Real apprehension of beauty in near-chaos is what
spirituality should be about, to hell with caution, l drink and drive, why not?!
lnterestingly, conceptual art might on these lines be seen as a first step to getting us
out of the emotional into the mental focus, at the same time free from the dogmas of
the past. Not that there is anything wrong with the emotionswhen they are pure,
that is.
Astrologer: Our great opportunity and dilemma is the fact we are not only in the
transition from Pisces to Aquarius, but are also changing 'ray influences' coming
through the constellations too, which is unprecedented. No wonder we are seeing
images coming out of the human inscape like the butterfly in metamorphosis we saw
earliera symbol of Aquariuseven Damien is at it. Human civilisation is being
#lipped o"er, to put it simply, and values are consequently all in question. That
means the spiritual is being redefined, based on the ancient truths, of course.
Perhaps Hundertwasser was right then to encourage us to liberate ourselves from
the universal bluff of our outworn civilisation.
lf Theosophists are to be believed, we are on the verge of an age when the
mysteries (including of colour and sound) will be restored to humanity.
($-ternalisation o# the .ierarch 19/0:). For this reason it is supremely difficult to
make any sense of what the changes in arts, religion, of social, economic and
political nature are really about. Optimists and pessimists, the transcendental and
the materialistic, can make cogent arguments that might make any one perspective
convincing. World thinking on spirituality is as untidy as Tracey's bed.
Let's look to Jung & co. for some middle way. He went on about the archetypal in
contrast to the personal. Unlike Freud who trashed fine art, who is therefore barred
from our discussion.
Jung: when the archetype is activated in the artist, and the symbol thereof
expressed, the artist is not only seeking psychic balance for him or herself, but is
meeting a psychic need to the society in which the artist lives. (Smith 20l2:).
ln .ealing the Split, (Nelson l994) about the differential diagnosis between
psychosis and spirituality (highly recommended for the art world) the concept is
given of 'ego-strengthening' and 'ego-dissolving' to differentiate brea1-do'n and
brea1-up (where the individual will have symptoms of breakdown but actually be
experiencing a spiritual opening. Outsider art may be spiritual in the sense that it is
often plausibly symbolic of spiritual rebirth.

Joe Coleman, as seen at Art Brut exhibition, Paris 20l4.
Jung and Nelson give us a benchmark to judge the relative spiritual-ness in art,
maintaining that that which is personal in expression, such as Tracey Emin's bed,
would be less spiritual, whereas art about the archetypal, such as Alex Gray's
symbolism for the oneness of humanity is more. Jung advises the artist to interpret
artwork him-herself in the case of the personal and leave it to others in the case of
the archetypal, right on!
At this point our resident pragmatist intervenes: We're getting too mystic again, the
spiritual can be nearer to home.Remember, anthing that favours human
development is spiritual. Take the performance art of the European Social Forum
street performance art !ab o# (nsurrector (magination 213 $-periments o# .ope
DVD). The evils of economic exploitation was got through to people in a humorous
way, what can be more spiritual than that?
And what about Paula Rego's paintings of abortion scenes because she wanted to
'do something about it' (interview in the Shoc1 o# the 4e'2002?) and quite
possibly did."
Robert Hughes: Yes, Paula's work has a haunting impact, that painting can have
something to say, art moving private conscience and public responsibility.
Abortion laws 'ere liberalised in 2007. lt is possible that such a notable Portuguese
figure as Rego contributed to swaying public opinion. We will leave our discussion of
spiritus here at the worldly point of human need.
The last word goes to Rabindranath Tagore: This principle of unity which man has in
his soul is ever active, establishing relations far and wide through literature, art, and
science, society, statecraft, and religion.
Much is left unsaid on a subject as vast as this. Theses have been written on
outsider art alchemy, creation as a divine quality, nature as spiritual reality, Greek
versus Christian views of aesthetics and the divine, abstract painting and spirituality.
There is each religion's, philosopher's, artist's and epoch's definition of spirituality,
and contemporary thinkers such as Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell, Ananda
Coomaraswamy, Rabindranath Tagore, and visionary books such as 5rantia and
.ierarch that we shall consult another day. BlBLlOGRAPHY
Arya, Rina (ed), (20l3) Contemplations of the Spiritual in Art
lipsey, Roger (l988) The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art
Encyclopaedia Brittanica (l988)
Bailey, Alice (l97l) Glamour: a World Problem
Marie von Heyl email 25/03/20l4
Blavatsky, H P (l888) The Secret Doctrine
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/20l0/07/l9/tradition-transformed-tibetan-artists-respond/
Bailey, Alice Externalisation of the Hierarchy
Smith, WL (20l2) The Psychology of Artists and the Arts
Nelson, John, E (l994) Healing the Split
Tagore, Rabindranath. (l9?) Soul Conscious