Hazrat Inayat Khan now widens the circle: all that one does may be considered an art if one is properly tuned, and similarly, if we are properly tuned to the artistic impulse, we may find inspiration everywhere. The previous post in the series is here.
When the heart is tuned to the proper pitch, it is not only capable of producing or appreciating one kind of art and beauty, but all kinds. Thus there can be an art in architecture. A gifted architect can produce a great deal of beauty in his work. So too with drawing, with embroidery, with the work of dyeing, of sewing. In fact there is nothing which man does which cannot have art in it if he knows how to attune himself to that pitch which enables the art to be expressed. Poetry is an art in the same way. Unless a person is tuned to the proper pitch, he may write poetry all his life and yet it will not please either him or anyone else. So with a painter, or a musician – violin, piano, any instrument – he will not please himself or anyone else during his whole life unless he has become tuned to that pitch.
This shows that the question as to what grade of evolution a person has attained comes in every walk in life. Whether a person be a painter, or sculptor, or architect, or designer, or singer, or dancer, whatever walk he may follow, there is no better source of inspiration in nature whence to draw inspiration from above, than by means of art. The more cultivated the sense of art is in man, the more able he is to respond to the beauty of art, and the more able he is to produce or create something beautiful in himself. The more he comes into touch with that spirit Who is constantly helping every soul toward beauty, the more man can produce. Everything that helps man to approach the beauty of God is sacred. Therefore art can become religion. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there is no better religion than art itself.
When one has reached to that degree of understanding, when one has reached that knowledge of art by which he can become profited, when the heart is once tuned to that pitch by which one can understand and appreciate art, and when one has changed one’s outlook upon life so as to see in the beauty of art the beauty of the divine Being, then one can progress in the true art.
From this we learn that consciously or unconsciously that which our soul is really seeking is art; and yet at the same time man very frequently avoids this very thing that he is really seeking. The right way and the wrong way are so near to one another. The only difference is that a person is journeying along the right way when at every step he can say, “I see the signs that support and help me to go on further, and promise that the goal is before me.” When he is journeying along the wrong way every step tells him, “I am not in the right way, I must go back; I am not on the road on which I ought to be.”
Consciously or unconsciously every soul seeks for beauty, and at each step of our lives we think that beauty is receiving us as we go, that beauty meets us at every step on our path, then that soul is satisfied, is full of hope, knowing that the road he is one is his proper road, and that some day or other he will arrive at his goal. The person who thinks at every step of his journey, “I am not on a right road, I do not like this; I am not pleased with that,” is making no progress. The beauty he is looking for, he is ever leaving behind. He is traveling in quite another way from that which he is expecting.
To be continued …