Let’s find us some spiritual meaning in the popular arts! (Movie poster mashup by ChatGPT)
(This is long, at 5,000-plus words, but I had lots of fun researching and writing it. Hope you’ll enjoy it, too.)
“I am in the prime of my senility,” as Joel Chandler Harris said.
Why, then, I ask a breathless universe with which I am seamlessly entangled, has it fallen to my lot at this late stage in my life (I’m 84) to look for spiritual stirrings in the popular arts?
A great deal has changed in the arts in the last three hundred years. At the same time, much has also changed in religion. The foundations of both systems, which were rigidly bolted together for 5,000 years, have suddenly been loosened, seemingly waiting to be reassembled in more fluidly meaningful forms, in keeping with the spirit of a dawning scientific age of energy-awareness, in which individual experience will count more than mindless conformity and submission to institutional authority.
All of the significant inventions of the last century have been based on Albert Einstein’s discovery that the underlying substrate of creation isn’t matter, as the world believed for five thousand years, but energy.
Paramhansa Yogananda predicted that the new age of energy-awareness would bring sweeping changes to our work, our relationships, and in the arts and religion.
Yogananda said that he was born on Earth in response to a silent prayer of many souls for a “practical religion.” He predicted that the demand for blind belief in religion would gradually be replaced by practical methods that would enable individual seekers to test God’s existence scientifically, using appropriate tools of prayer and meditation in the laboratory of their bodies, hearts, and minds.
Swami Kriyananda said that new spiritual movements always spread through the popular arts. How will it happen? We can get clues from a visit to the movies; specifically in two fairly recent films and an exceptionally well-crafted Canadian television series.
So far, well and good. But how can artists and other creative individuals find practical ways to draw inspiration from a higher spiritual source? The answer is quite simple, even though, like every worthwhile endeavor, we can expect that it will demand focus, dynamic energy, sweat, and grit.
In fifty-four years as a writer, editor, and photographer, one of the most helpful things I’ve discovered is that it’s glorious to be aware of the Big Picture.
I don’t mean that, as a writer, I should memorize the big, fat Chicago Manual of Style, but that once we’ve discovered how the cosmos is constructed, how it operates, and how it’s arranged and what it all means, we find that we can leverage the system to our artistic and personal advantage.
Because lists are unbearably boring, I’ll wait until the end to suggest a handful of relevant books. But, for now, if you can peer at the world and understand what’s going on, you will never lack for inspiration, because you’ll find it everywhere.
Knowing the meaning of life is a great comfort – you know that it isn’t all just sludge, and that there’s a surefire direction that leads lawfully and inevitably to an inner exaltation of joy.
Knowing the big picture will help you find meaning and inspiration in the smallest things – in the details of your work, your relationships, in child rearing, science, and art. If you’re a creator, it will tell you the kind of art-making that will satisfy your heart and soul.
Art exists on levels. Our ability to create meaningful art increases as our consciousness expands in the slow oven of many lifetimes.
There’s art that’s centered around brute survival and base pleasures, and that aims to titillate the senses. Spiritually, it’s baby art – it’s largely boorish buffoonery, like the poor wretches in Akira Kurosawa’s movie The Lower Depths, based on Maxim Gorky’s play, making rhythmic mouth sounds to entertain themselves.
There’s art that is clever. It’s about negotiation, wheeling and dealing, and seeking happiness by gaining petty advantage. Think of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” from the 1879 comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. It’s pure infectious wordplay aimed at delighting a paying audience.
I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
I’m very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General….
There’s art that turns cleverness in service to others – it wants to make people happy and to bask in their approval and praise.
There’s art-making that finds its pleasure in expansive feelings of kindness, compassion, and loving sacrifice – in doing what’s best for others, because it makes the artist’s heart feel expanded and free.
There’s a higher order of heartfelt art that is heroic. It’s about energy, courage, compassion, undaunted perseverance, intelligence, and self-offering in the pursuit of the happiness of all.
Finally, there’s art that comes from a level of awareness that is beyond the limitations of the human heart and mind.
It’s about a purity of love and wisdom that is barely imaginable from the humble perspective of our humdrum lives. It’s the life stories of Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, and Saint Francis. It’s a level of art that calls us to seek the “something” we’ve been longing for through countless lives, and that, once tasted, we realize that we will do whatever it takes, for however long it may take, to get it for ourselves.
Paramhansa Yogananda said, “The caverns of many lives lie buried in your mental soil. All the desires you’ve ever had in the past are stored in them, waiting to attract you to material things. But if you go back to God, you will be able to satisfy all those desires forever in His bliss.”
For an exceptional experience of down-to-earth, humorous, spiritually inspiring Energy Age art, I recommend this wonderful performance of a play by Swami Kriyananda, The Jewel in the Lotus. Due to technical difficulties at the start, the chanting is unusually long. To start at the opening act of the play, drag the play head forward to 16:30.
What does God-inspired art feel like?
At Easter, I attended a performance of “Christ Lives,” an oratorio composed by Swami Kriyananda.
As an effect of the music, there was a feeling in the hall of holiness. The musicians and singers performed angelically. I have rarely felt so moved and inspired. (You can watch the video here.)
It’s the practice of the musicians and singers to meditate and pray before they perform. Before they arrive at the hall, they have asked God to bless them with the power to step aside from the ego and allow Him to use them to give the audience a taste of a happiness and freedom that each one can find within, and that will relieve their pain and suffering.
Years ago, after a performance of the oratorio at a Catholic church in Italy, someone remarked to one of the singers, “You all sang so beautifully – you must spend a long time practicing.”
The singer replied, “No, we hardly practiced at all.”
Later, Swami Kriyananda corrected her. He reminded her that the singers’ years of regular meditation were their most important practice.
There isn’t a lot of art that reaches such a level of inspiration. There’s a great deal of art and music from the past that feels holy because it speaks about God, but Christ Lives makes us feel that God Himself is inviting us to open our hearts to receive Him and commune with His joy in the music, and bathe in His eternal friendship and love.
There are many levels of spiritual art. Spirituality is about satisfying the universal human longing for happiness and freedom. Art can legitimately be called spiritual if it carries a message of hope, because all inner growth is spiritual.
In his book Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t, Swami Kriyananda explains why values are relative, despite the insistence of religious fundamentalists and Church theologians that they are rigidly fixed and unchanging.
The answer is that values are demonstrably relative, but they are also directional.
Swami Kriyananda gives the example of a lazy slob who gets up one morning and puts on his least greasy shirt and goes out to look for work as a used car salesman. His friends all cheer him on, happy to see him taking a step toward greater inner freedom and happiness.
But if Mahatma Gandhi had decided to give up his life of selfless service, and announced that he was setting off to Calcutta to make a killing in rice futures, everyone would have exclaimed, “This man has fallen!”
Again, values are relative, but directional. Each action, thought, and feeling that expands our awareness, at our level, is spiritually nourishing – because it increases our freedom and happiness.
The scriptures of India explain that we have five instruments through which we can find happiness and freedom from suffering: body, feelings, will, mind, and soul.
Of these five, the middle three – feeling, will, and mind – are the ones we can work with directly. The two instruments at the “ends” – body and soul – are outside the scope of our volition. The body, left to its own devices, just sits there, a lump. It’s essential to take care of the body in the spiritual life, because it provides the energy for our search. Thus, we can apply feeling, will, and mind to keep it healthy.
At the other end of the spectrum, spirit is also beyond our reach. We can’t grab it and squeeze it for its bliss; we can only invite it to guide and bless us, as we grow in understanding that Spirit alone exists, and that we are happiest when we bring its guidance into every smallest corner of our lives.
Yogananda’s most advanced disciple, Rajarshi Jankananda, said, “I have come to understand that one-hundred percent of the spiritual path is receptivity.”
Our happiness and freedom grow when we “get more,” by using our tools expansively – when we get more health, love, strength, wisdom, and joy. Thus, the best stories are about people who face difficult tests and obstacles, and who overcome them and grow larger than they were.
Consider the Mel Gibson movie, What Women Want. Gibson plays an advertising executive who uses women cynically; but he can’t write ads for women to save his life, because he doesn’t understand them.
Then a hair dryer falls in his bath, shocking him into unconsciousness, and when he awakens, he finds that he can hear what women are thinking. As a result, he develops compassion for women and expands his heart in kindness, finding happiness in helping them. Thus, he becomes a better man. By expanding his awareness in compassion for the realities of others, he discovers happiness of a higher, more satisfying kind.
What Women Want grossed $374 million worldwide against a $70 million investment. Not a bad result, for a flick that strung an amusing plot on a framework of spiritual values.
The scriptures of the East tell us that we grow in spiritual awareness in four stages, each of which requires many incarnations to learn its lessons fully, as we gain the inner strength, understanding, and awareness to proceed to the next stage.
The first stage is called the Sudra, in which our consuming concern is survival – food, shelter, procreation. At this stage, no real spiritual aspiration is possible – we can only learn from brute experience, like a rat learns where to find food in a maze by receiving a shock at the end of one path, and the food at the end of another.
Very gradually, we learn that by applying energy and cleverness, we can improve our circumstances. Now we’ve entered the Vaishya stage, which is symbolized by the wheeler-dealer merchant.
Spiritually aspiring people tend to look down their noses at Vaishya consciousness, imagining bandits and thieves, eager to cheat and take from others for their own advantage. But while this view may be true during the first stages of our long Vaishya sojourn, the latter stages of Vaishya life hold important, even inspiring spiritual lessons.
At the higher levels of Vaishya Dharma, we begin to discover happiness in caring for others. Our awareness expands as we experience the rewards of turning our hard-won Vaishya strengths of courage, mental focus, worldly know-how, and self-control to the service of family, friends, community, and country.
Yet the Vaishya world also reflects Paramhansa Yogananda’s wry comment that the trouble with this human existence is that it “almost works.”
That’s because, even in the higher Vaishya stages, we are still looking for fulfillment outside ourselves, in possessions, status, respect, and the love and approval of others.
During our Vaishya lives, the universe tries to help us understand that we can never find true satisfaction by seeking it at the expense of others, or by satisfying our desire for material things.
Until we awaken to this realization, Vaishya existence is mosquitoes at the picnic and sunburn and sand between the sheets. Until we gained the karma to be awakened to the next level of awareness, God will continue to make us uncomfortably dissatisfied in our lesser ways.
The Vaishya life is fraught with aggravations, discomforts, broken hopes, frustrations, anguishing pains, a horrifying sense of meaninglessness, and colossal barriers of bafflement.
At this point in our long spiritual adventure, Life Itself tries to get us to wake up, pay attention, and pause and reflect. Until we give up hope of finding fulfillment anywhere but in God, He won’t shirk from giving us our lessons. God isn’t a sadist; He just wants us to grow in happiness and freedom. Paramhansa Yogananda, whose consciousness was fully merged in God, said, “I wish to influence others only by love. I just wilt when I am forced to train them in other ways.”
The next step in the expansion of our hearts is the Kshatriya – the stage symbolized by the spiritual warrior. We enter the Kshatriya stage when we’ve become sufficiently aware of the superior satisfactions of living for others – thus the Kshatriya is symbolized not only by the warrior who gives his life for others, but by anyone who holds the fate of others in his hands and is motivated to help them, instead of using them for his own selfish ends.
Eventually – and it always takes a very long time – we realize that we can provide the greatest service to others by offering our lives, body, heart, will, mind, and soul, entirely to God, in the full awareness that He alone knows what people truly need, and that He alone can help them.
What is God’s joy like? Years ago, I attended a talk by a disciple of a great Indian saint, Sri Ramana Maharshi. Ramana had given his disciple the name Sunyata, or Shunyabhai, which means “Brother Zero,” signifying that he had emptied himself of ego, and God had filled Him with His bliss. Shunyabhai would give a talk at The Expanding Light guest retreat at Ananda Village.
We arrived early, and as we waited, I noticed a number of unfamiliar faces. I thought cynically, “Yeah, these old ladies always show up when there’s a spiritual celebrity in town, but they’re never here when it’s just meditation as usual.” As my eyes scanned the crowd, I noticed one of the old ladies peering in my direction and chuckling softly.
After the introductions, the Ananda minister invited Shunyabhai to come forward. Although he was ninety-three, he leapt to his feet and bounced happily onto the stage like a little child. As you’ve doubtless guessed, it was the “old lady” who had responded to my silent criticism with an amused chuckle.
No sooner had Shunyabhai begun to speak than there was a wave of such powerful, soul-penetrating joy emanating from him that it made us gasp. I realized that that joy held everything I had been seeking in all my countless lives, and that, as I hinted earlier, I would do whatever it took, for however long it might take, to get it for myself.
I have never felt such joy in this life. And I’ve often wondered why.
On this and other occasions, I was blessed to receive from a high spiritual soul inspiration such as I never received from Swami Kriyananda or Paramhansa Yogananda. Naturally, I’ve pondered why it was so. In time, I arrived at an answer that made sense to me.
In the beginning of my spiritual search, I was intent on finding God’s bliss in solitary meditation. But God made sure that I wouldn’t be able to find Him by pursuing a life as a meditating hermit. He made it abundantly clear that one of my greatest needs in this lifetime was to understand the supreme, imperative need to expand my consciousness through service.
Eventually, I realized that if He had given me the bliss I longed for, I would never have given much attention to service, and I would not have learned the spiritual lessons it was meant to teach me. I’ve explained elsewhere how God further clarified my path by paralyzing me from the chest down for three years, which involved two surgeries that left my spinal x-ray looking like a dog’s hind leg, with the result that deep meditation has been impossible.
But I’ve strayed from my point, about finding spiritual themes at the movies.
As I’ve mentioned, Swami Kriyananda said that spiritual movements spread through the popular arts. Thus, I believe it’s important for people who labor in the arts in any capacity, to understand how spiritual themes can lend meaning even to earthy stories of ordinary people.
When great masters come into the world to remind us of the perfect fulfillment that we can find within, it’s exciting to discover that as we follow their guidance, we begin to find spiritual themes hiding in many ordinary, mundane, even seemingly unspiritual places.
Let’s look at some examples. We’ll go to the movies.
Be warned: we’ll consider films and television series that we would never remotely dream of recommending to our fellow seekers. In fact, I don’t recommend that you watch any of these films. I believe I was led to them by my Guru, in answer to my silent desire to understand how spiritual themes can be woven into the popular arts. In the process, I found spiritual messages hiding in the most unlikely places.
Goon is a deeply profane film about a young Canadian man who has a special talent for fist-fighting and is recruited to join a minor league hockey team to serve as its punisher, hence the title of the film.
There’s an amusing scene early in the movie – spoiler alert! – but then I’ve urged you not to watch the film – where Doug Glatt stands outside the temple with his parents and their friends.
The Jewish parents are bragging about their children’s successes. “My son’s is a neurosurgeon with a big practice in Toronto.” My daughter’s a corporate attorney at a big firm in Montreal.” When they’ve exhausted the material, one of them turns to Doug and says, “Well now, Dougie, what are you doing these days?” Whereupon Doug smiles broadly and says, “I bounce.” The camera immediately pans to the curb, where Doug’s gay brother hops out of a small red sports car after giving his boyfriend a peck on the cheek. Imagine the poor Vaishya parents’ humiliation.
The spiritual theme of the movie is simple: Doug is a doofus, but he has a great big heart. He’s fiercely loyal to his teammates, even though they ribbed him mercilessly when they watched his first attempts to skate. Which consequently led him to deliver a beat-down on every one of his new teammates, to the delight of the coach who feels he’s found just the man for the enforcer’s job.
The point of the movie is that a good heart can more than compensate for even tremendous failings. It’s perfectly reflected in a sweet song, “Work With What You Got,” that plays over the end credits, and that I heartily recommend listening to.
An interesting thing about another Canadian product, the TV series Intelligence, is that most of the characters are given equal weight. It’s as if the screenwriter, Chris Haddock, valued his characters’ humanity and respected their struggles, each at his level.
Swami Kriyananda said of P. G. Wodehouse, the English humorist, that he had a quality of all great artists, in that he never wrote-off his minor characters or sped through a minor scene – he always gave them his full, focused attention and energy, however fleeting and utilitarian. Thus, waiters, cab drivers, servants, and other passing players received the same robust energy from Wodehouse’s pen.
In Intelligence, Chris Haddock makes even the shabby murder-for-hire couple that Mike pays to kill a traitor in Mexico City seem very much as we would picture them – gray, soulless people – not in order to stimulate dark feelings of contempt, as hack TV writers would do, but to reveal them as sad people with no possible happy future, in whom the gravity of their crimes weighs forlornly.
What sets Intelligence apart is its amazingly well-drawn depiction of people living the Vaishya life with varying degrees of awareness.
Want an exciting life among criminals? If so, you’d better be ready to keep yourself tensed to the point of emotional exhaustion and mental disarray in order to fend off the waves of people who are just like you and who will want to take what you have.
What to speak of the emotionally exhausting characters you’ll need to deal with in wheeler-dealer land, most fleshily illustrated in Intelligence by Jimmy Reardon’s thoroughly unbalanced wife, Francine and his dangerously google-eyed brother, Mike. I wonder if there are any other modern artistic depictions that portray the nuances of Vaishya existence with as much piercing clarity.
A Canadian reviewer called Intelligence “superb TV” and lambasted the Canadian federal arts commission for omitting it from awards consideration and eventually shutting off its funding. Intelligence was so realistic that the government feared it would remind viewers of recent scandals and make them seem more credible.
I’m guessing it would be a cause for no small feelings of concern for spiritually minded artists to learn that the great master of yoga, Paramhansa Yogananda, referred to the art world with less than unbridled enthusiasm. When Swami Kriyananda made a comment about the arts, Yogananda replied dismissively: “Oh, that’s Vaishya stuff!”
Be warned. If your tastes are elevated and your self-image includes gossamer-pure pink angel wreaths of virtue, or if you’re churchy, please don’t dream of watching Intelligence.
Dramatic works deal with extremes, and Intelligence is embedded in a Vaishya culture where the prime directive is to look out for number one, to the extent of selling enormous quantities of marijuana, ordering the murder of enemies, and operating out of strip clubs. If the series has a redeeming feature, it’s that it portrays Vaishya Dharma with such amazing accuracy.
In Intelligence, Mary Spaulding is the female lead, wonderfully played by Klea Scott. Mary has come a long way toward embracing Kshatriya values – she’s adept at using her hard-won wheeler-dealer Vaishya skills to attain her goal of leading the Pacific division of Canada’s anti-drug intelligence service.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Reardon, Mary’s opposite, is a Vancouver marijuana kingpin who has mastered the Vaishya dance and has begun to dream of exchanging the exhausting wheeler-dealer grind for a less stressful and more expansive life. In short, Jimmy wants to love.
Swami Kriyananda said that it is good for people of lesser understanding to spend time with those who are living on the next higher rung of spiritual awareness. In Intelligence it’s obvious that Jimmy Reardon secretly admires Mary, and would like to be more like her, if he could break free of his deep entanglement with the Vaishya life.
Mary even rubs off on her Ted, her sneaking, plotting enemy in the drug squad. In the end, Ted realizes how exhaustingly his scheming ways are wearing on him, and as his eyes open to Mary’s essential decency and higher aspiration, he changes and gives her his whole-hearted support.
Ronnie Delmonico, Jimmy’s partner, is an entrenched wheeler-dealer who has no wish to leave “the life.” Ronnie warns Jimmy that if he doesn’t keep his head in the game, he will be devoured.
I take two forms of inspiration from this masterful portrayal of the nitty-gritty Vaishya existence.
Let me note, first, how much I love Paramhansa Yogananda and Swami Kriyananda’s portrayal of spiritual development as directional.
Spiritual progress isn’t accomplished in a single swooping descent of random grace, or by an all-out, gut-bursting effort at self-transcendence on our part that squeezes the ego out of us and makes space for enlightenment to flow in. It’s a question of individual, internal growth over a very long time, and we should be grateful and satisfied if we’re doing our best to move forward in the right direction at exactly the point where our nature has brought us in our spiritual journey.
(In a separate article, “Plain Talk About Art, Spirit, and the Merchant Caste,” I quote inspiing passages where Swami Kriyananda describes the spiritual lessons of the higher stages of Vaishya Dharma, from his inspiring book, The Hindu Way of Awakening.)
Suffice it to say that I took immense artistic enjoyment from finding Vaishya values so wonderfully portrayed in Chris Haddock’s masterful script.
Levels of Revelation at the Flicks
In truth, many a blockbuster film that doesn’t cater to perverted tastes or try to tickle our nervous system, is based on expansive spiritual themes. By “spiritual,” I mean that people love a movie where the characters endure hard tests, learn difficult lessons, and become more loving, compassionate, strong, and kind as a result. A cynical exec learns to empathize with women, and as a result, he becomes a better man.
Why don’t movie producers understand this? I blame the grotesque confusion over values today.
It takes thousands of people – executives, directors, cast, crew, artists, technicians – to make a movie. Nonetheless, when a sufficient number of basically decent people come together to make a warm-hearted film, the experience can be magical and the profits tend to roll in.
Witness the documentary Never Surrender, about the making of Galaxy Quest, one of Dreamworks’ first films. The American playwright and author David Mamet considered Galaxy Quest one of just four perfect movies – the others were Dodsworth, A Place in the Sun, and The Godfather.
The actors, execs, and creatives on Galaxy Quest were likeable, earthy folks, and the heavens aligned magically to bring them together to make a movie that expressed their values.
Here’s another point to consider. If you’re an artist, and you’re wondering how to turn your work in an expansive direction that will attract an audience and fill your heart, you needn’t look far. As I hinted earlier, you just need to know how life works, and you’ll never run out of ideas.
At this time in the long unfolding tale of world history, you won’t have to confine yourself to following the specifications of a guy in red pajamas who has the power to burn you at the stake if he doesn’t like your art. (Please watch this Monty Python Michelangelo sketch.)
People put a fence around the higher stages of spiritual evolution. If art isn’t created from the level of Kshatriya and Brahmin consciousness, they feel it can’t possibly be “spiritual.”
In the early years at Ananda Village, I worked in the Publications office, where our crew consisted of thirteen nuns and two men, Binai Preston and yours truly. The nuns pretty much ran the community. (Swami Kriyananda said of the nunnery, “There are some tough babies there!”) They also set the standard for what was considered “spiritual” in the arts.
I remember a particularly forceful nun telling me not to watch the Dustin Hoffman movie Tootsie which was playing in town. There was urgency in her warning – clearly, she wanted to spare me from becoming a transvestite and losing my soul in depthless perdition.
There was a feeling in the community at the time that unless a it was called Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Play Croquet and Have a Tea Party, it posed a danger to our souls.
I recall seeing the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), in which an eccentric teacher, played by Maggie Smith, talks sentimentally to her young female students about the Civil War in Spain, as a result of which one of her girls runs off to join her brother in the war, only to be killed when her train is attacked and bombed.
I told friends that I had found the film spiritually inspiring, which is how I still feel about it.
Shortly before I saw the film, Swami Kriyananda had remarked that it is better to have high energy and strong willpower in the spiritual life, than to be a weak-willed, docile nice devotee.
I felt that Jean Brodie fit the description: she brought her full energy to her convictions, however dangerously unrealistic, and as a result she was given the opportunity to learn a sorely needed lesson, by being confronted with the terrible consequences of her ill-considered actions.
My friends duly watched the film and were dismayed. “What were you thinking, Rambhakta! That wasn’t at all a spiritual movie in any way we could imagine.”
It was tragedy in the classical sense of a person of exceptional energy and a great deal of goodness who suffers from a serious flaw and must experience its sequelae to learn and be purified and freed.
I’ve told elsewhere how Swamiji would go along with us to see a questionable movie, if he felt that it held a spiritual lesson for us. I remember how he sat through the Dustin Hoffman thriller Marathon Man with a group of us from Ananda Village, and how, when one of the nuns closed her eyes during a torture scene, Swamiji told her that she shouldn’t hide from unpleasant realities but learn to face them with calm detachment.
Nevertheless, he would cheerfully walk out after five minutes if he realized that a move was trash and held no useful message.
Paramahansa Yogananda was born to show the world that spiritual progress is directional, and that anything that helps us ascend to higher awareness, starting where we are and taking one brave step at a time, is “spiritual,” in the context of our growth.
It was an insight that he brought as a correction to older modes of thinking in which spiritual truth was defined with inhuman rigidity. Yogananda declared that it’s time we learned to see spiritual principles active everywhere.
If we want to make spiritually uplifting art in this dawning age of Energy Awareness, which the sages of India called Dwapara Yuga, we will have to show how our art relates meaningfully to people’s lives. And because Dwapara is weighted toward Vaishya consciousness, we may not be able to communicate spiritual values to the masses in their purest form – but we can express high values through art in forms that people can understand and relate to.
It may mean that we won’t be able to reach the masses with ethereal art that expresses angelic values exclusively. But we can tell uplifting stories about merchants, soldiers, farmers, bankers, lawyers, and even criminals that illustrate spiritual principles.
We can make art by studying how spiritual themes have carried inspiration in Vaishya art already, in music, books, painting, films, architecture, drama, and sculpture.
These ideas are not for those who cling sentimentally to rigid, nostalgically attractive Kali Yuga forms, or who want to wall themselves off in ashrams, mental or actual, where they can define their own standards.
At the same time, what could be more obvious than that there will always be a role for churches, temples, and monasteries where the art is limited to that which serves our highest aspirations.
If we want to create art that will inspire the masses and give them hope and meaning, we will have to make sure it calls to them from their own next level of growth. Movies like Intelligence won’t find an audience in the monasteries, but they’ll hold lessons for people who need to understand the energy, cunning, rewards, and dangers of the Vaishya life.
The world in Dwapara will need lots of books and movies about heroes. It will need art that shows how spiritual principles of love, kindness, compassion, cooperation, honesty, inner strength, focus, steadfastness, and spiritual truth can bring us success and happiness.
We’re fortunate to have such books, films, and television series already – not many, but perhaps enough to offer us an intriguing foretaste of what’s to come.
Books
Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t