Let’s find us some spiritual meaning in the popular arts! (Movie poster mashup by ChatGPT.)
“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 3,000 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 unquestioning 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 three 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 longing of many souls for a “practical religion.” He predicted that the demand for blind belief in religion would gradually give way to methods that would enable individual seekers to test God’s existence scientifically, using appropriate investigative tools of prayer and meditation in the laboratory of their own bodies, hearts, and minds.
Swami Kriyananda said that new spiritual movements always spread through the popular arts.
When I pondered Swamiji’s statement, I was baffled to understand how it would happen. In my mind, I had never associated popular art with spiritual inspiration.
Of course, there was art that explicitly included spiritual themes — the movie Gandhi, for example, or Handel’s Messiah, and Michelangelo’s Pietá. But Swamiji had referred to the popular arts, and none of those classics were sufficiently “popular” to fit the description.
When I asked to be shown what it might look like, I was guided to the movies — specifically, to two fairly recent popular films and an exceptionally well-crafted Canadian television series.
So far, well and good. But, I wondered, how can artists and, well, really all of us, find practical ways to draw inspiration from a higher spiritual source?
The answer is simple, though like any worthwhile endeavor, it’s bound to take a certain focus, sweat and grit, and drive.
Still, I realized that knowing the meaning of life had been an immense help to me in my fifty-four years as a writer, editor, and photographer, and that one of the most helpful things I’d discovered is that it’s glorious to be aware of the Big Picture.
I don’t mean that, as a writer, I was obligated to 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. 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 most fully satisfy your heart and soul.
What is spiritual art? Spirituality is about satisfying the universal human longing for happiness and freedom, a yearning that can only be fulfilled by expanding our awareness. All inner growth in awareness is spiritual, thus art can legitimately be called spiritual to the extent that it stimulates expansive aspirations and attitudes in our hearts.
This also means that art can be called spiritual if it inspires us, at our present level of awareness, to take the next step in our journey toward ultimate freedom.
Our happiness and freedom increase as we “get more” by using our tools expansively – when we get more health, love, strength, wisdom, and joy. Thus, the stories that tend to inspire us the most are about people who face difficult tests, obstacles, and suffering, 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 bathwater, shocking him into unconsciousness, and when he awakens, he finds that he can hear what women are thinking.
At first, he uses the gift in his usual cynical way, but in time he develops compassion for women and begins to expand his heart in kindness, finding happiness in helping them.
By expanding his awareness to include the realities of others, he discovers a happiness of a higher, more satisfying kind, and as a result he becomes a better man.
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.
When great masters come into the world to remind us of the perfect fulfillment we can find at the farthest depths of our being, it’s exciting to discover that as we follow their guidance, we begin to discover spiritual meaning hiding in countless ordinary and mundane, even seemingly unspiritual places.
For examples, we’ll go back to the movies.
Be warned: we’ll consider another film and a TV series that we would not remotely dream of recommending to our fellow seekers. In fact, I don’t recommend that you watch them. I believe I was led to them by my Guru, in answer to my silent wish to understand how spiritual themes can be woven into the popular arts. In the process, I found spiritual messages hiding in unlikely places.
Goon is a deeply profane film about a young Jewish man in Canada 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 it – 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 a neurosurgeon with a big practice in Toronto.” My daughter’s a junior partner at a big legal firm in Montreal.”
When they’ve exhausted the material, one of them turns to Doug and says, “Well now, Dougie, what are you up to these days?” Whereupon Doug smiles broadly and says, “I bounce.” The camera then 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 rib him mercilessly as they watch his first attempts to skate. (Which inspires Doug to deliver a beat-down on every one of his new friends, to the delight of their coach, who figures he’s found the right lad for the enforcer’s job.)
The point of the movie is that a good heart will compensate for great failings. It’s reflected in a sweet song, “Work With What You Got,” that plays over the end credits.
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 one at their 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 their roles. 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 in us, as lesser hack TV writers might 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 imminent mental disarray to fend off the waves of people who are just like you and will want to take what you have.
What to speak of the emotionally exhausting characters you’ll have 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 Vaishya existence with as much piercing clarity.
A leading Canadian reviewer called Intelligence “superb TV” and lambasted the Canadian federal arts commission for omitting it from awards consideration, and for 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.
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 smuggling 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 in service to 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 existence. 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 level 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 out of his entanglement with the Vaishya life.
Mary even rubs off on Ted, her sneaking, treacherous co-worker 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 aspirations, 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.
Spiritual progress isn’t accomplished in a single swooping descent of random grace or by an all-out gut-busting 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 long time, and we should be grateful and proud if we’re doing our best to move forward in the right direction at exactly the point where our nature has brought us thus far in our journey.
As Swami Kriyananda said, the spiritual path is not about waiting for the guru to come and make things right; it is about dynamic self-offering. It takes a rare degree of clarity of heart not only to give ourselves dynamically to the Guru and his cause, but to want with the deepest inner love of our hearts to do so.
Until then, as Swamiji often urged us, we must work with ourselves as we are. In Out of the Labyrinth, he says that we should never give something up until we know, “with a sure inner knowing,” that we want something higher.
Suffice it to say that I took immense pleasure from finding Vaishya values so wonderfully portrayed in Chris Haddock’s masterful script.
Levels of Revelation at the Flicks
In truth, the most spiritually valuable films don’t cater to perverted tastes or just tickle our nerves. They are based, to varying extent, on expansive themes. By “spiritual” and “expansive” 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 hundreds, if not thousands of people – executives, directors, cast, crew, artists, technicians – to make a major Hollywood 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 point in the long, unfolding saga 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.)
Still, people do put fences 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, Binay Preston and yours truly. The nuns pretty much ran the community. (Swami Kriyananda said of the convent, “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 warning me not to watch the Dustin Hoffman movie Tootsie which was playing in town. There was urgency in her plea – clearly, she wanted to save me from becoming a transvestite and losing my soul in fathomless perdition.
There was a feeling in the community at the time that unless a film was called Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Play Croquet and Have a Tea Party, it posed a danger to our souls.
I remember watching the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), in which an eccentric teacher, played by Maggie Smith, talks in highly romanticized terms 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 movie, 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 hard spiritual lesson by being confronted with the terrible consequences of her ill-considered words.
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 terrible consequences in order 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 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 squarely, with calm detachment.
Nevertheless, he would cheerfully walk out of a movie after five minutes if he realized that it 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 own growth.
It was an insight that he brought as a corrective to older modes of thinking.
“If you go dancing and drinking, you will burn in hell for all eternity!”
“Why?”
“Because Jesus loves you!”
Kali Yuga theology reflects the rigidity and intolerance of human consciousness in an Age of Matter. It has nothing to do with Jesus’ teachings, which at their simple core urge us to love one another, and proclaim that God is our dearest loving Father and Friend.
Yogananda declared that it’s time we learn to see Spirit 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 everyday lives. And because Dwapara is weighted toward Vaishya consciousness, we may not be able to communicate spiritual values in their purest form to the masses – but we can express expansive values through art in ways that people can understand and relate to.
It may mean that we won’t be able to reach the masses with art that expresses angelic values. But we can tell uplifting stories about merchants, soldiers, farmers, bankers, lawyers, and even criminals that illustrate spiritual principles.
We can study how spiritual themes have carried inspiration in Vaishya art already, in music, books, painting, films, architecture, drama, and sculpture.
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 explicitly encourages our highest aspirations. Or that there will be a ready market among people of expanded, but not yet fully freed consciousness, who will be receptive to refined art that inspires them to expand their awareness at their level with its lofty themes.
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. Television series like Intelligence won’t find an audience in the monasteries, but they’ll hold lessons for people who want to understand the rewards and risks of the Vaishya life, or who are ready to be inspired by characters like Mary Spaulding, who have taken the first steps into Kshatriya consciousness.
The world in Dwapara will need lots of stories about heroes. It will need art that shows how spiritual principles of kindness, compassion, cooperation, honesty, inner strength, focus, steadfastness, and spiritual truth can bring us success and happiness.
We’re fortunate to have such films, television series, and books already – not many, but enough to offer a foretaste of what’s to come.
Books
Out of the Labyrinth: For Those Who Want to Believe, But Can’t