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The Sovereign Artist

A remarkable force to bring joy, peace, creativity and love back into our lives

This article originally appeared on my personal blog, Clinsights, here.

Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from the original post. You can always read the entire post here.

What is The Sovereign Artist?

When I first began writing about how I experience the creative process, I would use phrases such as “connecting your soul to the source,” “your true nature,” “your true self,” or “your truth.” I still use such phrases from time to time.

But none of those phrases ever quite captured, fully, the idea that I was trying to express – the idea that you must connect with your deepest, truest artistic or creative self. That is, you must connect with The Sovereign Artist within.

At the deepest level, all of us creatives (which is in actuality all of us, but that’s a secret) have the same core truth, which is this: We each have the power of divine light, a true nature, that I call “The Sovereign Artist” that lives at the center of our souls, though all egoistic falsehoods must be burned away by the fire of truth to uncover it.

The Sovereign Artist is a remarkable power to bring joy, peace, creativity and love back into our lives and it is the source of our creativity. It is unfettered fun and play. It is the joy of life. It revels in watching a butterfly land on a leaf. It is the flow state. It is ego death. It is what happens when logos and eros, the Word and the Spirit, meet. It is ecstasy. It is light and good. It enables the inner alchemy that turns the mundane into the sacred. It is what happens when you ‘die’ and relinquish the inner throne and allow The Muse and The Shadow to create a new ‘being’ that sits upon your inner creative throne – a being whose greatest desire is to create all that is good and to do it with you as the co-creator.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies it produces much fruit” – Christ, John 12:24 (emphasis added)

The Sovereign Artist inspires us to create something reflecting the beauty of the universe all around us. It is gratefulness. It is magic. It is ‘The Force’ from Star Wars and ‘The Way’ from the Tao Te Ching. It is the Creator. It is God for those that believe in a god, though it matters not what you believe about it. And, just like the rain, it will shower you with life whether you believe in it or not.

Children don’t think about any of this ‘God’ mumbo jumbo, but the light of life smiles upon them nonetheless and they are full of life. It’s not about belief, it’s a much deeper resonant knowing than that. Children simply live in the world that is, and, through their imaginations, transform it into the would that could be.

Know the male,

yet keep to the female:

receive the world in your arms.

If you receive the world,

the Tao will never leave you

and you will be like a little child.

Those words were written by Lao Tse in the Tao Te Ching over 2,500 years ago. By the way, did you know the honorific suffix, ‘Tse’ (as in Lao Tse) which means something like ‘master’ or ‘great teacher’ also means ‘offspring’ or ‘child?’

In some ways, the surrender you must make to tap into this magic is the hardest thing you’ll ever do; to let go of your ego and ‘die.’ But in other ways, it’s the simplest thing in the world to come home to yourself; for it is the state of playful joy of a child, but even better — a childlike state of play with a master’s skill. You simply have to remember.

Creation is not something that happened. God may have rested on the Sabbath, but he got right back to work afterwards. We’re still in the beginning: The Beginning of Infinity. Creation is something that is happening and, if you tap into its creative well, it is something that is supposed to be happening through you. You need only get your false self out of the way. Once you tap into this source of The Sovereign Artist, you will become A Sovereign Artist. You will be free. You will be creative. You will find joy. And, even if your external circumstances have not changed at all, your inner world will suddenly be full of light, energy, freedom, joy and possibility (Though you will likely grow your freedom in your external circumstances as well).

Did you ever paint a painting and simply “lose yourself” into the flow? “It practically painted itself!” artists say all the time. That’s what tapping into The Sovereign Artist feels like. “You” are gone and are in harmony, resonating, with the one song of the uni-verse when you enter such a flow state; for you are channeling the Source.

You better - lose yourselfin the music, the moment

You own it, you better never let it go (go)

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow – Eminim

To connect to this wellspring of alchemy that turns the lead of the everyday into the gold of the gods – the power that transmutes mundane into magic – you must retain your connection to The Sovereign Artist with a heart full of love. In other words, you must, no matter where you are in your career, always retain the heart of an amateur. The word ‘amateur’ derives from the latin amare which means to love. The Sovereign Artist is the power of love and only responds to love. If you try to elevate the love of money into the center position, attempting to give to God what belongs to Caesar, The Sovereign Artist will (temporarily) abandon your throne room.

If The Sovereign Artist steps down from the throne and you create while unplugged from The Source, you will have to do it by force (rather than from true power), solely from the strength of your own will, and all your ‘creativity’ will come with an expensive price tag extracted from your health. Eventually, you’ll pay that price, as I did; as I still am.

All creativity, you see, just like all magic, requires a price to be paid. However, if you are connected to “The Sovereign Artist”, the price is paid by an unlimited universal power source of good and delicious energy that brings you joy. If you shut that source out, you will pay the price directly, mentally and, eventually, as I did, physically.

Tolkien once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that Sauron’s dark magic represented technology, the magic of the machine. And that the elves' magic represented the Magic of Art – of growth, love, creation and harmony.

The machine’s dark magic pays the price by sucking out your soul’s energy, or by stealing the energy of others. This is the type of magic that Voldemort attempted in Harry Potter when he split his soul into many Horcruxes. Each Horcrux, a perversion of true art (and hence a ‘dark art’), stole more and more energy from his soul until he became a pathetic little being sucked dry of all light. And light is power. He tried to operate from his own force, which appeared formidable in the physical world, but no longer had true power. Once Harry allowed himself to ‘die,’ like the grain of wheat falling into rich soil, he grew because of the powerof love, and became ‘born again’, through the older and deeper power of harmony into a stronger being. After that, Voldemort fell quickly to a child, just as Sauron fell to a small halfling.

“But where our hearts truly lie is in peace, and quiet, and good tilled earth, for all Hobbits share a love of things that grow.” – Bilbo Baggins, Concerning Hobbits

The deep elven Magic of Art enables the wielder’s soul, and the world at large to grow in its harmonies with the one song. The true artist masters the practice of elven magic and thus their souls grow large enough to live on in their artwork, and to expand out into the world to share their soul’s light with all, through their Art. Voldemort’s Horcruxes were a perversion of Art. A mockery of the true path to immortality - the growth of your soul, not the egoistic cutting up of it, which separates you from The Sovereign Artist.

Elven magic causes the cup of your soul to runneth over. It is true magic that is powered by the unlimited Light of The Valar, the Song of Eru Ilúvatar – Tolkien’s way of describing what I call The Sovereign Artist.

You see, in practice, when you allow yourself to ‘die’ and enter flow, you feel like The Sovereign Artist is withinyou. That is because, in that state, you are resonating with the one song, the uni-verse, the melody from which all things arise. You become a harmony to the one song and, if you have done the work to master your skill, to ‘prove’ yourself worthy, you become a beautiful unique, resonate instrument which The Sovereign Artist plays with delight.

You see, while it feels like The Sovereign Artist is within you, you are also within it. The Sovereign Artist is that power from which all arises. You are within the Sovereign Artist and the Sovereign Artist is within you. And you will never be truly free until you feel this resonance deep inside.

All of this, by the way, is simply my metaphor for describing the magic of the creative process. Other people use different metaphors. We who write must attempt to describe The Sovereign Artist in poetic and metaphorical language because we are attempting to describe something so beyond our intellectual grasp that it remains a Mystery – a Mystery that is, itself, pure poiesis, poetry.

The first sentence of the Bible states, “In the beginning God made…” The word made in the original greek is epoiēsen, the word from which we derive poetry.

Capturing the pure poetry of The Sovereign Artist in language is such a difficult task that Tolkien invented an entirely new language (elvish) in an attempt to provide new, beautiful and powerful words to properly describe The Mystery poetically.

The Sovereign Artist exists beyond language, but we are intimately close with this living water – we are able to feel and to know it and its creative power. But our logical side (and our language) is too limited and too divisive to fully explain it; for how does one explain the Mind of God?

So, as we continue our exploration of the nature of creativity and how it can save our souls, we will next explore The Mystery from which our yearning to create and express truth and transcendent beauty arises.

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This article is an excerpt from the current book I am writing, The Sovereign Artist.

Inside of each of us lies the divine Sovereign Artist within - a remarkable force to bring joy, peace, creativity and love back into our lives. Join the waitlist for my forthcoming book about the creative process, and how it can save us all.

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PO Box 700534, San Antonio, TX 78270
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