So often I hear someone comment approvingly about someone else. "He (or she) has a lot of talent." Speaking as someone who has no discernible talents I might be accused of envy in what I have to say next but hear me out. I certainly wish I could draw or paint or compose music or had any one of several gifts but I do not think that having a talent is necessarily a good thing. After all, having a talent just means having an ability to do something skilfully but surely what really matters is what you do not how well you do it? When I look around at what people of talent are doing in the world today I see mostly a trail of spiritual destruction. So few talented people are spiritually creative. Most are actively destructive of higher thought, deeper feeling, elevated sensibility.
Here's an exchange pertinent to this subject between a spiritual Master and a young artist as recounted in the book Towards the Mysteries.
"Master: People talk of art, of literature, of becoming productive—what do they know about these things? There is the dissatisfaction of discontent in the human, because humanity is not creatively constructive but creatively destructive. Creative power is used for destructive purposes. Nearly all modern arts are blasphemy.
Artist: But they are experience!
Master: Yes—mere experience. But experience is not vitally fruitful unless the absorbing element comes out of it."
What does he mean by the absorbing element? I would say it's the ability to relate the experience to a higher spiritual value and see it in the light of that reality. Any experience taken on its own terms is regarded as not vitally (i.e. spiritually) fruitful. It may even be spiritually poisonous. Similarly, talent, on the face of it a good thing, can be, and often is today, spiritually destructive. If it is not put to the service of higher understanding it is very likely to advance the ends of that which opposes higher understanding. Look at the world around you and tell me I am wrong.
6 comments:
I think you are absolutely right!! Even before I began to seriously attend to my Faith, I was strongly disturbed by the debasement of art and increasingly of the opinion that all art (or other creative endeavors) should have an uplifting quality...
I wonder if, by "the absorbing element", the Master also meant something along the lines of spiritual fruitfulness in the meditative 'state' which comes of an artist being 'absorbed' in their work - particularly in the case of works that are spiritually motivated..
I too, have no real "Talent", though I have experienced the value of 'doing art' as a sort of spiritual exercise in some Christian creativity workshops our church held many years ago...
"I wonder if, by "the absorbing element", the Master also meant something along the lines of spiritual fruitfulness in the meditative 'state' which comes of an artist being 'absorbed' in their work -" Good observation, Carol. It might also refer to the ability to process the experience properly. To compare it with eating food, it would mean taking in the nutrients while expelling the waste products. Often it seems we retain the latter now.
@William - I think that admiration, or at least respect for, talent is probably natural; and stems from societies when it was reasonable to assume that talents would be used for the benefit of the community.
But now, talents are usually drawn into the value inversion of our ideology; so that they are more likely to be used against the best interests of that society.
You example of the arts shows what happens. For about a century, most of the most talented writers, artists and musicians have made works that promote discouragement, despair and evil actual evil; instead of aiming for beauty they often they deliberately make ugliness and induce disgust.
So talent is no longer something we should automatically admire and respect - it's what people use their abilities for that matters.
TS Eliot said "talent," is simply the ability to recognize tradition.
I think this is correct. it's also a shame to not be able to trust talent today, as naturally would like to...however something is rotten.
This parallels this.
"It took many years of useless poverty and the final mastering
of a really quite worthless trade, to put the concept of work and
working into perspective for me.
It seems to me that "A Job" is about the most worthless
activity a human being could possibly engage in."
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/secrets_of_life/the-spirit-guide-chapter-twenty-four-t2989.html
Rereading this brings me fresh humor. One can spend time on this or that interest, claiming adeptship and mastery to those who judge, but having failed to become adept and master of their self. Desiring has not been honed to produce the highest desires, unless they accept the least of their peers if not their self.
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