Our Last Opportunity? — Clelia Vahni Lewis

On August 14th, 2024, when Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert., he was asked what makes music so important. He said: “Music is one of the last legitimate opportunities we have left to us for a transcendent experience… and I think there are forces out there that are expressly designed to take the creative act away from us, especially with AI as it is coming up—to create music as simply a product. The creative experience is seen as an impediment on the road to the product.”

The act of creation itself is what causes music or any other truly creative activity to be an opportunity for transcendent experience. The same is true for writing. It is an OPPORTUNITY for transcendent experience. That transcendent experience is not guaranteed. One must approach it with sincere devotion, vulnerability, and discipline in order to just possibly, maybe, if you are lucky, enter into a transcendent experience.

And what do we mean by transcendent? Transcending what? Transcending the temporary, illusory, separative identity that keeps our attention trapped away from its essential, sacred, divine nature. And there are forces out there (and within) expressly designed to prevent that from occurring. He said it so simply, so gently. And the conversation went on, just passing that little gem of truth by. One could completely ignore it.

To fully engage with the human experience we need to create, we need to work, we need to meet with challenges and discomfort and pain and limitation in the creative activity of life. If we bypass that we bypass the entire purpose of life itself. If we fail to engage with what we are actually here for, the greater forces that generate life for that very purpose will have no reason to preserve it. (I’m not going to explain that one in this essay).

Which leads to the importance of having an aim, of knowing one’s purpose. If you do not know your purpose, then your attention is not protected, it is at the effect of anything that grabs it, anything enticing, anything that seems like a little bit of something good or pleasurable or interesting. Sure, there are a numberless number of places to go with your attention, but the relevant question is why? Why put your attention there? At a workshop I attended once, led by an Ayurvedic physician and author of twelve books on the sciences of India, I was struck by a short, pithy statement he made: “Where your attention goes, your energy flows.” He was talking about the fact that whatever we put our attention on grows, increases—in effect, we feed it our energy—and therefore, if we want to grow something in particular, say a spiritual practice, then we need to be careful and intentional about where we are putting our attention. There is an esoteric correlary to this idea, which is that everything is food for something else—not might be or could be, but IS. So, what are you feeding?

The mind needs to be contained, trained, held to a purpose. Otherwise it directs attention randomly, which means our life-energy is spent randomly. No wonder we feel despair. Our psyche knows it needs a purpose, a direction for its activities. It knows its life is being wasted, spent uselessly. Of course that makes it feel sad. We are here to engage in creative acts, creating beauty, opening up doors that provide opportunity for transcendence, transcending our limited personas, transcending our limited tribal identities. We are here to touch and be touched by sacred truths that lift our hearts, that invoke love and longing, whether that be through the act of taking care of family and children, cultivating loving friendship or partnership, creating beauty of any kind, learning to communicate clearly with elegance and wisdom, inventing solutions for communal problems, coming together to help build someone’s house or clean up a neighborhood after a natural disaster, taking care of those who are sick or dying or suffering in any way, solving conflict, worshiping our god, seeking the truth about reality, or whatever our authentic sphere of activity might be.

The point is that problems arise over and over again as a means to engage our creative faculties, NOT to be permantently solved forever, not to reach some situation in which we will stop needing to create or needing to solve problems altogether. It is impermanence and change that create the opportunity, it is the delicacy of life, the fragile nature of innocence, the ephemeral nature of beauty. A rose is beautiful because it has a beginning and end, because it begins as a firm and juicy bud, slowly opening, stretching, blooming into its most vibrant color, and then, as it is softening and becoming loose, it exudes its most intoxicating fragrance. If you take a rose and make it permanent, harden it into a product, cover it in a plastic glaze so you can look at it forever and create an endless number of them all the same, it loses its value, its magic, its capacity to inspire wonder and awe. It is not alive.

Human beings have truly become lost in the idea that the highest ideal is to find permanent solutions to our problems, that we can actually eradicate the problems of birth and death, of change and disintegration. We desperately cling to our very limited sense of personal identies (or tribal identities), hoping to stave off change, loss, and death—literally attempting to find ways to live forever. We idealize efficiency and permanence, rather than seeing that impermanence itself is the key quality of our lives that generates the possibility of transcendence, beauty, love, sacred longing and joy. We have lost any sense of sacred purpose.

That is what has made us vulnerable, as we are now, to the forces that threaten to steal our last domains of creative activity and turn them over to nothing but empty, efficient, product-creating machinery. We believe the hype that tells us the creative experience itself, with the challenges and effort it requires, is an “impediment on the road to the product.”

I pray that we heed the prophetic voices that are out there, speaking truth gently and compassionately into the wind.