What Is The Road For Artists?

That's a very good question. What is The Road For Artists? Well, it's the road that I walked and I am walking, and it's actually the road that every artist walks naturally, unknowingly for the most part, and it is facing yourself every step of the way to become the artist you were born to become. To be yourself in front of the microphone. To have your flowers bloom because those are your flowers on your tree. How can any other flower bloom? 

But for that to happen, it takes a long time. Miles Davis says ‘Man, it takes a long time to play music like I play music.’ I'm paraphrasing, but it takes a long time to find your sound, and I don't want to sound like anybody else. ‘If I'm to put something on tape, it ought to be me.’ That's what John Coltrane said. Those are some of my heroes. Jazz Giants. 

I Have contemplated recently why Jazz is so mesmerizing to me. It's because something is planned but everything is unplanned. Every performance is new and fresh. There's some musical elements in place. The rest is improv, and if somebody changes an element, everybody does. So it's the hive mind. Jazz is one.

Such is art. That's the essence of art. That's what I tried to relay in The Road For Artists. The road is walking the road, dying to the false you, to the shadow, to birth the art that you are meant to create. A mirror image of you, an extension of you, you are your art. But as long as there are shadows in the way, doubts and fears, ‘what would others think of me?’ for instance, what's on the canvas is not you then, it's your trauma and you paint until one day you are on the canvas and the canvas is you and the paint is you. There's nobody painting really, there’s just life, and you are the vessel for life to shine through. That's the road, and it's difficult and it's a mirror image of the spiritual road, the spiritual path to self. 

Who am I? Who was I before I was born, and before that? You know, when you really contemplate, who was I before I was born and before that? It's very difficult to come to an answer because... Space-time, right? Because time: past and future. But what is past and future, really? Past is trauma that we carry into the future. It's patterns. It's something robotic. It's a personality, almost static. Changes along the years, but you perpetuate the past into the future. Isn't that time? What if the soul is not off time? What if the soul is one degree away, always safe, safe and sound? What if that's where the peace of God lies? Because we're always safe. We're always safe and sound, right there where we are, now. 

Where was I before I was born, and before that? Now. Here now. One degree away. So, it's like a dimension in a dimension, but you're free of this space. That's why the great mystics say that you don't need to suffer, yet we are suffering. And that's the road. You die to yourself. You die to your suffering. You die to something false anyway, and you are born again as your soul. Though you never were anything else. How can you go to a place you never left? It's impossible. 

So, what's the essence of art? To become art. To be that. To be the dance of life through your hands. A birth of divine artifacts from soul to soul. It captures life and hence it relays life. 

It's like a window to God. Where we are one, safe and sound. Not that we are one-one. You're still your soul, but your soul is connected to creation. You are a part of creation. You are a piece of life. So, you create from a place where life is. You don't create dead art. Unfortunately, it's kind of harsh to say, but... This age is the age of dead art. Let's revive living art. Living art that tasted the soul. 

You know some artists, they taste their soul in one area of life, which is art, because that is what they mastered. For instance, Picasso was his art. He said it takes an entire lifetime to paint like a child. So he was divinity, and divinity was him. He left himself outside the door when he entered the shrine of his art studio. He was alone there. Just a soul. He communed with God while painting. The problem is he didn't bring that same divinity to the rest of his life. 

You know, he played God the rest of his life. But he was a humble servant of the divine, and that was his secret when he painted. He was no one when he painted. He was life. That was his secret. He didn't do anything. 

It's non-doing. It's karma yoga. It's being life. It's being art. The essence of art is to become your art. The essence of art is to find out who you are, and that's the spiritual journey. Who are you? 

And that's The Road For Artists, so thank you very much for listening. I'm gonna go back to making music now, and alive music, living music, not layers away, not degrees away. What would that look like, huh? I'm to find out. 

I'm gonna release some songs at the end of every episode. I'm gonna put a little song, just my guitar and me, back to basics. Perhaps some Jazz piano added. Let's see how that unfolds. 

I trust life. You know what I realised? I trust life more and more. The more layers fall off me, because they were never mine. The more I'm aligned with life. The more I am, the more I am myself, the more life takes care of me. In my misery, I felt alone and fragile, and I had such mistrust to life, and I'm just learning again, like a newborn, like an infant, to trust life and to trust God because he always took care of me. Because I've also realised on the road, and all of these topics are, by the way, topics that I'm going to cover on this podcast. It's just what comes to me naturally now, and then ask questions, please, in the comments, and I will do my best to answer them. I would love that so much more than just me riffing, even though apparently it works. You know, I was petrified before I sat down to the microphone. I was like, who am I to teach? Who am I to teach? ‘Who am I?’ to teach? If the teaching happens naturally, if you are your teaching, then that is that. If you are degrees away and you are not what you teach, then you are a fraud. No one chooses teaching. Teaching chooses vessel. You are what you are. 

So what I've also realised is that the world is a mirror. You emanate. I tell you a little secret. Your emanation is what you get in space-time. So it takes time, it has delay, but that doesn't matter because you just recycle your past. So it's the same thing regardless. So everything is energy, right? Everything is vibration. So you vibrate a certain thing. It's not just what you say and think. It's emotions. Those are charged, right? Because you believe in your thoughts, so you charge them with emotions, but not just that. Let's say there is a person, and you only say the nicest, most loving things to them, but there are undercurrents of you. There is jealousy or there is something you can't really put your finger on it but there is something nasty that you give them. So it's all of you, all your emanations, everything that you emanate. You know, your resonance is what you get back. 

So the world, you created it, that's the thing. You can blame God but when you're on the spiritual journey, it sounds very harsh, but when you're on the spiritual journey you realise more and more and more how you transpire and it's just: you get what you are. 

You get what's in you. You are not separate from your creation. You project yourself onto your creation, and you have done that all along. So when you see that you take responsibility and you witness your reactions to the world and you release them because ‘they're not inherent in my soul’, and this is how you untangle yourself slowly slowly, and it takes time and nobody that's here is done. 

So as I'm learning more and more I want to share selflessly not from my emotional self, not from my trauma but selflessly from my soul. From soul-to-soul. I speak to you from soul to soul. Perhaps it rubs off on someone and they sit in their soul while I speak. That's the goal. 

Again, this is all very new to me. So I'm just grateful for this opportunity to be me, and that's astonishing to me that I can just, you know... I don't need to save anybody, I don't need to teach to anybody. I don't need to be a saviour, I don't need to play that. I thought I had some kind of role to play, but life plays. Isn't that nice? I can just be me. That's kind of freaky. And beautiful. It's like ‘I can breathe out’. Like, ‘it's okay, you can just be you.’ And life takes care of you. But when you're degrees away from you, you are this corrupt piece of life, and you seem alone and fragile. When you clean all that dirt and you're once again you, life shines through. 

Isn't that cool? So that's The Road For Artists. It is the spiritual journey. And the cool thing is that I as an artist, I think I can relay that best to artists, you know? So, that's the unique twist. 

I'm just at the start of my journey. Hence, I want to thank you because by sharing selflessly, I heal myself. So thank you very much. Until next time.