Last week the Dalai Lama was at Emory University, where he holds a Presidential Distinguished Professorship. Amongst the offerings were a teaching on compassion and an exploration of scientific research into compassion meditation. There was also a discussion with Alice Walker and Richard Gere called "The Creative Journey: Artists in Conversation with the Dalai Lama on Spirituality and Creativity."
This was how it was described:
How do the arts help us to express, or indeed to uncover, our spiritual yearnings and questions or certainties? What do the artist and the spiritual master have to teach each other from their respective disciplines? What is the role of tradition (or, conversely, iconoclasm) in maintaining or renewing art and spiritual life? Is the human being innately spiritual, innately artistic?
The first question began, "In the West many people believe that creativity comes from torment, while in the East there is more of a tradition of great art coming from balance and realization." I myself know that this is true because many meditation students have asked a variant of this, equating edginess, boldness and creativity with inner pain, and happiness with dullness, laziness and giving up. Artists, actors, musicians have expressed some reluctance to practice meditation lest they be content in all the worst ways, lying about in placid obliviousness.
Alice Walker responded in an interesting way, saying that early in her career she had felt that good poetry must come from sadness, a notion that she had picked that up from Langston Hughes. But as she got older, she said, she found that she was just getting happier and happier, and was, of course, still writing. Richard Gere talked about being a lost, angry young man playing roles of lost, angry young men, and how the spaciousness of greater and greater happiness allowed him not to identify with those roles, not inhabiting them so fully, but to play with them, to be flexible.
The Dalai Lama took the conversation to another place, seeming to define beauty as a good heart or wholesome mind state, rather than by any external measure. He recounted that many times he had been brought to a cathedral and asked to admire its artistic beauty, but that that didn't hold a lot of interest for him. He was more concerned with freedom from suffering, with internal states, with motivation and heart space.
I suspect that the Dalai Lama couldn't even imagine the concept that one might cling to suffering for a creative edge or think of happiness as a dulling agent. Happiness in Buddhist teaching is seen as inner abundance, resourcefulness, the wellspring of energy within that allows us to serve, give, offer, create. If we don't ever think we have enough, we're not motivated to give. If we are depleted, exhausted, demoralized and despondent, we don't nearly have the energy to help others, to express, to go forth and try to make a difference. So happiness isn't at all seen as laziness but the foundation of very great activity of all kinds.
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Matthieu Ricard: Why Pleasure Is Not Happiness (VIDEO)
WTF is happiness anyway?
I know that I often go through many emotions in just a few moments. I'm not sure if being creative helps me process these emotions, because it helps me find a way to deal with them. But I have noticed that rarely do I feel just happy or sad but a mixture of the two. I often feel this bittersweetness that makes me want to share this experience with others but in a less literal more transcendental way that they can relate to as well. So I can express myself & so that others can feel less alone in their darker times...
That is just my nature though. I'm not sure if others feel this way.
At other times my creativity makes me want to destroy everything & this at times can be scary/takes a lot of courage to get through these moments.
http://www.threeinsights.net/book/
I believe that without some dissatisfaction with the world there would be no desire to make it better by creating beauty, and thus there would be no art. If there's a heaven (which I don't believe) there isn't any art there.
I'm not buying it. Much if not most of the music of Mozart and Bach and even some of the music of Beethoven is happy, even exuberantly joyous. This idea that the artist must be a tortured soul who when he's not creating art is busy drinking or doping himself to death is of quite recent growth.
"Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,
And you know it don't come easy.
You don't have to shout or leap about,
You can even play them easy."
On the other hand, I find I'm more productive when I'm in a good mood.
If you are honestly saying that being stressed and miserable is what lifts you up to be your most productive then I say you are intellectually lying to yourself. If you were being sarcastic then that was funny.
Often pain is what brought forth their best art and when they reached worldwide success, their work seemed lazier and content, it no longer grabbed the attention of the masses as people like to be around happy people and positive messages but they "tune in" to people who are suffereing as it becomes something most can relate to. Still ... both sides have equal contributions they make becuase in the end we ALL have both happy and depression co-exisiting in our lives and we choose which to listen to depending on our state of mind.
I really enjoyed Pamela Grundy's posts. Creatively speaking, I choose to create art whether I am inspired or not. I have no desire to only paint or write when I am 'happy' or 'sad'. True art comes from the beauty of every emotion, and to be able to transmit them into a form that others appreciate is also beautiful.
But over time the blues have given us more of them.
Which is better?
The creativity itself is all that matters.