What the Arts Can Teach Us About How To Live, Lead, and Love
Why does art matter? In the temporal sense, an artist’s life is not worth very much. Even those artists whose art is valuable in death were often impoverished in their lifetimes. For example, van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million at Christie’s auction in 1990, but the artist struggled to make ends meet. Certainly, the free market in the 21st century does not reward artists, dancers, and musicians the way it does engineers, doctors, and businessmen.
After I left the intense, competitive bubble of classical music, I started to see it in a new way. I realized that music and the arts point to the power of the individual to access the domain past the temporal and material, the world of lasting value.
Art Pushes Us Past Material Reductionism
A root cause of why life is so difficult is because the world today tends to value material reductionism over spiritual expansiveness. By material reductionism, I mean the mindset that if you can’t measure it or put it in a spreadsheet, it doesn’t exist. By spiritual expansiveness, I mean, ‘that’ which is all around, which is unseen and impossible to put into words or bottle up and sell.
Since the Enlightenment period, there has been an emphasis on rational thought and the scientific method. ‘That’ which can be seen and measured exists, and ‘that’ which cannot, does not. It has led to amazing leaps in human quality of life: the Industrial Revolution, electricity and flight, the explosion of science, longer life expectancy, a radical reduction in disease and increase in health and wealth, and the safest environment the world has ever known.
However, in the process of all the external success and outward achievement of the last few centuries, it seems a core part of what makes up humanity has been lost.
For most of history, people believed in myth, in faith, in the power of that which can’t be seen. Well, of course that was the case before modern science and psychotherapy. But now even science is coming to see that there is more unknown than known: there is more space in the universe than matter, more water than land, and psychology states only about five per cent of the brain is conscious and actively used.
At its best, art connects people to this unseen, free-floating energy of life that is all around them. It connects humans to a different wavelength, a deeper channel, that helps them understand life, themselves, and others in more meaningful ways. It calls people to deep inner struggle, reconciliation, and redemption. By looking at the past and the great art that has lasted and has been established as enduring value, humans can brush up against the divine.
Music and art reminds humans that there is more than the physical matter that meets the eye. That life is a mystery, that each person is a mystery even unto themselves. Art calls people out of the ordinary experience and into the unknown spiritual realm that pushes and makes them better. It inspires people to leave the safety of the group and the status quo, of material pleasure and temporary gain. It demands people drop the act, destroy the ego facade, in order to find out who they really are, what they are really about, and what’s really going on here.
Music and art is humbling. It reminds people of their fragility. It is inspiring. It is a living testament to the value of inner leadership because it is a testimony of the creator’s inner work.
It is so difficult to hold onto spiritual expansiveness that even the very symbols of the unseen world — music and art — get co-opted into the material reductionist mindset. When groups try to profit off the inner journey of an individual without doing the work for themselves, things get very confused very quickly. Two examples come to mind.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
First is the reception of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Ode to Joy), perhaps the most famous piece of classical music ever written. Beethoven clearly went on a deep inner journey as a result of losing his hearing — the most important thing to a musician — and came up with a symphony that transcends sound, that ties us all together in universal brotherhood.
Beethoven created a portal to the inner spiritual realm, and yet so many people tried to hijack it. In the twentieth century, virtually every major world political faction tried to own the Ninth Symphony. Coolidge said it represented democracy. The Soviets said it represented communism. The Nazis said it represented racial purity. Even the Japanese celebrated it at certain points in their political culture. But the Ninth Symphony is not alchemy; it is not something that you can rub and turn into temporal power. The paradoxical influence of art, of the spiritual realm, is that it is completely incompatible with power.
My Career in Music
A second illustration of how even art, which represents the spiritual domain, can be overpowered by the temporal domain — proving how difficult inner leadership is — comes from my personal experience as a classical musician. One of my first memories is of me and my dad playing the piano while my mom cooked dinner. Before I could speak or walk, my soul understood there was a profound depth of humanity that I needed to uncover and explore in the arts. As I grew into adulthood in a society that is often focused on the temporal and materialistic, I was moved and mesmerized by the idea that classical music transcended generations through the power of the big questions the music asks.
My heart understood that society preserves music and art from previous generations because it embodies metaphors for life and emotion, a time machine that transports the current generation to another time period much more deeply than just a written historic account. Because words are from the mind, and true music and art are from the spiritual realm. It gives perspective into how people in a particular place and time were accessing the spiritual, transcendent part of life that creates lasting and enduring value. Although my tiny mind could not speak the words, my large heart understood that looking to the past-to other generations, other cultures-can help me find answers to the riddles of today and build a solid foundation for my life.
The rest of the music field was like most any other industry: material reductionist, about credentials, experience, networking, presenting myself and art in a way others expected. And it was a field full of perfectionism, competition, more supply of talent than demand, and ego. So, I left the field of music, a field full of people that have access to the eternal realm more than any other profession yet completely miss the point, disappointed and downright disgusted.
True Lasting Value is not Owned
I describe these two examples to point out that many people want to own things that come from the soul, that are of true lasting value. Things like art and music. But it’s a false start. You can spend all the money in the world on a Stradivarius violin or a da Vinci painting, but that does not mean that you even for one second have any idea of what it is about.
Likewise, you can read every book on psychology and self-help, you can go to leadership workshops, you can even be a coach or pastor or artist. No worldly credential or material proof can access the spiritual realm. You can have the keys to the kingdom and simply stand guard by the gate your whole life, never allowing yourself to unlock the door and walk through, sometimes even preventing others from walking through.
Life is hard. The deep inner journey is hard. But I’d rather move forward than stay stuck. I’d rather unlock the door than be a beggar at the gate.
The deep inner journey is much like music. You can’t see it or touch it or smell it. You know when it’s good, and you know when it’s bad. But in many ways it’s like stumbling around in the dark trying to find a light switch: clumsy and awkward until you find the switch, and all of a sudden there is new light shed on the world. Part of the difficulty of the inner journey is being afraid of what might be in front of you when the light finally gets turned on. But either way, whatever is in the room is still there. I say better to take inventory and find out.
Inner leadership — the process of walking down the road of the deep inner journey — is hard because it cannot be bought, sold, or marketed. It can only be earned through experience, time, and the pain of growth. It is not bound by the laws of this world. Few people are able to do the work of inner leadership because it takes so much time, energy, resources, discomfort, and willingness to engage with an unknown new way of seeing the world, others, and self.
Music and art is not something that can be bottled up, bought and sold. At its best, it connects us to the free floating energy of life that is all around us. It connects us to a different wavelength, a deeper channel, that helps us relate to life, ourselves, and others in more meaningful ways. It calls us to deep inner struggle and reconciliation and redemption. By looking at the past and the great art that has lasted and has been established as enduring value, we can brush up against the emotional and spiritual aspects of what gave those that came before us a firm foundation.
