One essential struggle I've dealt with as an artist is that I often turned my suffering into art, but the more I did that, the more suffering became a tool for creation. I found myself courting suffering in order to create. I created something beautiful from my pain, and suddenly pain transformed from something I experienced into a resource--something I reached for to find inspiration.
I started to fear that without this source of inspiration, I might lose my ability to create. There was a fear that peace would make me 'ordinary', but the truth is that fear constrained me more than peace ever could. Peace liberates you to create outside the constraints of suffering, free of fear.
Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. Pain is part of being human. Suffering is the story we tell ourselves about that pain, the way we hold on to it and make it part of our identity.
When I surrendered the need to manufacture inspiration from pain, when I trusted the creative process itself, inspiration began flowing through me from the most unexpected places. There's a lightness that comes from freedom, a seemingly infinite wellspring where inspiration and creation become unconstrained. Since finding peace, the creative process feels different--more relaxed, and more expansive. There's a sense of creating from fullness. Freedom, not suffering, is where art truly begins. I've never been more fruitful in my creation than since I found peace.
I lost a friend to suicide several years ago. The grief got stuck in me because life got busy and I was consumed with taking care of business, including memorial preparations, writing a speech, holding space for others, and so on. Shortly after the service, though, I broke. So I took my little guitar to the coast by myself, and sat by the Pacific ocean every day, finally letting myself feel everything I'd been comparmentalizing inside.
In that quiet space, a song I'd set aside after struggling with it for months suddenly emerged. In one grief-filled episode, sleepless in the middle of the night, words and melody poured out. It was almost like a hallucination. A spontaneous purge of emotion. What had been awkward and incomplete became an homage to life, love and loss. But here's what stopped me: I didn't write that song, I received it. Something moved through me from a source outside myself. I felt it, viscerally.
If we're truly "creating," where does the idea actually come from?
To be clear, this isn't about dismissing craft or technique. Once an idea arrives, the real work begins. You may spend months refining, editing, revising, getting every detail right. The technical skills matter enormously. And plenty of our work is entirely derivative--reworkings of other artists' ideas, variations on our own earlier work, deliberate homages. That's perfectly fine and part of the process. But sometimes there's an initial spark that comes from somewhere else entirely. Where does that come from?
We carry this illusion--a burden really--that we must use effort to surface our ideas. And we get something from this too: the ego gets to take credit for inspiration, and we can claim ownership of what emerges. This creates enormous pressure. We exhaust ourselves trying to generate from nothing, believing creativity depends entirely on our individual will.
But what if creative blocks are actually spiritual blocks? What if the struggle to access our creativity comes from being disconnected from something larger than ourselves? I spent years as a young man feeling like I was an artist without a creative outlet. I kept searching for different mediums, different approaches, thinking the problem was technical. If only I had the right skills, or a different instrument, then I could create. But I couldn't. So I copied instead.
I borrowed, or outright stole every idea I ever put into a composition. Yes, it was filtered through my perspective, and touched by my gifts and my imperfections, but there was no creation of my own. Perhaps you could say that I made something new, but only in the way that a remix is something new. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't diminish the value of what I was doing, but I was craving something I couldn't access--that sacred space within where pure inspiration could emerge. It wasn't until I realized this was a spiritual problem that things started to change.
Some ideas arrive like visitors. They come through us, not from us. In this case, the artist is the antenna, the one who gives form to what wants to be expressed. Think about those moments when something flows through you that surprises even you. Are you creating, or are you getting clear enough to let something move through you?
This type of creation could be seen as a collaboration between your consciousness and an infinite, universal source of creativity. Some may call it source, or God, or the Divine creator. I don't think we necessarily need a name, but I think it helps to acknowledge the inherent mystery within the process. To access it, we need to let go and start listening in order to be open to receiving. This requires stepping away from the noise and finding quiet space.
The path to that quiet space varies for each person. For some it may be a meditative practice, or journaling in the quiet of dawn. For many, it is a substance that creates that opening, a potentially effective, especially at first, but increasingly inconsistent shortcut. For me it is getting lost in nature. Sitting and listening to the water... really listening. Feeling the earth beneath my feet. Watching the sun reflect through the leaves of the trees. Returning week after week, and month after month to witness the changes as nature is constantly evolving. It is this practice of presence, of truly paying attention, that allows you to receive inpsiration rather than always having to manufacture it.
Even when inspiration arrives as a gift, craft is required to transform it into art. The idea may have come in a moment of openness, but then our dedication to the discipline gives it the form it deserves. The spiritual element is the beginning, in receiving the seed. The majority of the work comes after.
There is a spiritual path to this openness, and it is available to all of us. When you stop trying to force ideas and start creating space to receive them, you will discover that the deepest art emerges not from our effort to be brilliant, but from our willingness to get out of the way and let the sacred move through us. We become the vessel, the translator. All of our percieved flaws--the singers wide vibrato, my wrists rendered useless by severe pain that forced me to adapt--make us the unique instrument through which the infinite expresses itself. Perhaps we're all drawing from the same source, the same collective consciousness, each of us giving it our own voice. And in surrendering to that, we find not less of ourselves, but more.
While I've been writing about creativity and artistic expression, I've noticed the same fundamental pattern applies to all areas of human growth. This makes sense when you consider that 'art' in its Latin root, ars, doesn't refer to painting or music specifically, but to all skillful human creation: the art of medicine, the art of conversation, the art of living itself.
In exploring artistic creation, I haven't really been writing about a specialized domain at all, but about the fundamental human capacity to create and transform. What we call 'art' today is just one expression of this deeper creative force that shapes every aspect of our lives. The Latin ars implied both technical skill and truth to the essential nature of things, suggesting that authentic creation, whether we're composing a song or composing our lives, requires the same surrender to what wants to emerge rather than forcing what we think should be.
This creative process, this movement from constraint to freedom, follows a recognizable pattern. There's a cycle we move through when we're ready to shed what no longer serves us. It starts with a problem, something that feels stuck, limiting, or repeatedly painful.
Consider the example we explored in the musings on the artist's struggle: the artist is trapped in cycles of pain, courting experiences that hurt them because they've convinced themselves this pain is necessary in order to find inspiration to create. The problem is clear: they're stuck in a loop of manufactured suffering.
But beneath every problem lies a limiting belief, often invisible until we're ready to see it. In this case: "Without suffering, I cannot create. Peace will make me ordinary." This belief feels true because it's been reinforced by experience.
The limiting belief keeps us circling the same territory, afraid to venture beyond what we think we know about ourselves. We become prisoners inside the boundaries of our own perception.
Then comes the revelation, often when we're completely spent freom repeating our patterns. The artist, having nothing left to lose, realizes that the very thing they thought was generating their art is actually constraining it. The revelation is always paradoxical: what we thought was helping us is limiting us.
This leads to a deeper truth: that the source we've been desperately protecting isn't the only source available to us. There are infinite sources of inspiration we haven't discovered because we've been too afraid to look beyond our familiar territory.
But truth alone isn't enough. Growth completes itself in resolution, the embodied experience of living differently. This means releasing our fear, stepping into the unknown and discovering what we're actually capable of when we're not constraining ourselves with old assumptions.
Problem > Limiting Belief > Revelation > Truth > Resolution.
This framework repeats throughout our lives, each cycle spiraling us deeper into who we're becoming. Once you see the pattern, you can trust, and surrender to the process of expansion. Everything you need is already within you, and the only limiting factor is your beliefs.
A singer I work with sent me a recording of her voice over one of my compositions. As I listened, I was struck by this wide, emphasized vibrato I'd never heard her use before. It reminded me of David Bowie's more artsy moments, with that theatrical, classical quality that cuts through everything ordinary about popular music.
When I told her how much I loved it, she dismissed it. "Do you like that vibrato? Sometimes I just don't really like it or think it's appropriate for the style." She explained that it wasn't even a conscious choice. That it's just what her voice does when she lets it be free. When she stops fighting against its natural impulses. She'd always felt it was "too classical sounding or whatever."
But who cares if it's "too classical"? It's art! That vibrato is her voice when she stops constricting it, when she lets it do what it naturally wants to do, and it's a mistake to write that off as a stylistic misstep. And... it is uniquely hers. She's been fighting against this part of herself for years, worried it's not "pop music appropriate enough," not realizing that this tension, this particular quality that makes some people uncomfortable, is exactly what makes it evokative.
If you don't express yourself and do surprising things as an artist, everything winds up as that sanitized, auto-tuned/filter softened, AI-generated slop that looks and sounds like everything else. Real art comes from the parts of you that don't fit neatly into categories, from the qualities that make you uncomfortable about yourself, from the voice that emerges when you stop trying to control it.
There's a difference between creating from your essence and creating from your ego. When we create from our ego, we're constantly editing ourselves, second-guessing, trying to anticipate how others will receive what we're making. We become curators of our own expression before it's even fully expressed. But when we create from our essence, and we trust what wants to emerge, we become conduits of what is inherent within us.
Our thinking mind may believe it knows what art should be, but our soul knows what art is. Your authentic artistic impulses are perfect, not because they're flawless, but because they're genuinely yours, and they're real.
True art polarizes. It cannot please everyone because it emerges from a specific voice, with all its particular beauty and imperfection. What moves one person deeply may leave another cold or even offended, and this isn't a flaw: it's the entire point. Art that tries to appeal to everyone appeals to no one. When we soften our edges to become more accessible, we often become forgettable. I'd rather be disliked, but remembered, for who I am, than liked, and then forgotten, for who I am not.
There's a difference between communication and pandering. Good art communicates something essential, even if not everyone wants to hear it. Pandering tells people what they already know they want to hear.
Art transforms. Pandering confirms.
The accessibility trap convinces us that reach equals impact, that being understood by more people is always better. But some truths can only be received by the few who are ready to hear them. Some beauty is too specific, too strange, too particular to translate into something universally accessible without losing what makes it beautiful.
When you create without apology, when you trust what emerges from your soul, you give others permission to do the same. Your courage to authentically express yourself becomes an invitation for others to discover their own authentic voice.
The artist's responsibility isn't to be liked or understood by everyone. It is to discover what's true within you, to express it, and then let that be seen, regardless of how it's received. Art is archeology of the soul: you're not constructing something new so much as uncovering something that was always there, waiting to be found.
Your natural voice, your unconscious choices, your authentic impulses... these are the source from which real art flows, not problems to be solved. Trust them. Let them lead. What emerges may surprise you. It may not match your expectations, and it may divide your audience, but that's how you know it's art.
Art has always moved in mysterious ways, often arriving at truths before the world is ready to receive them. Consider the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin in the 18th century, who captured light and perspective with photographic precision decades before the camera was invented. His still lifes possessed an uncanny quality. It wasn't just the realistic attention to detail, it was the flattening of perspective, and depth compression, visual techniques that wouldn't become widespread until photography emerged and taught us to see differently. How did he access this way of seeing before the technology existed to make it common?
This phenomenon repeats throughout history. Artists consistently arrive at innovations that anticipate cultural shifts, sometimes by decades. Consider the emergence of Cubism in the early 1900s, when Picasso began fragmenting reality and showing objects existing in multiple states simultaneously--during the same period that Max Planck and early quantum physicists were discovering that particles could exist in multiple states until observed. These concepts remained largely unknown outside the physics community for decades, yet artists were independently exploring the same ideas: that reality is fundamentally uncertain and fragmented, that the act of observation affects what we see, and that truth exists in probability rather than fixed form.
Similarly, composers like Schoenberg were abandoning the certainty of traditional harmonic structures, creating atonal music where melody emerged from untethered patterns within dissonant structures, while Stravinsky's rhythms suggested a universe governed by uncertainty rather than clockwork predictability. It's as if they were all accessing ideas that are somehow already "there," waiting to be discovered
One explanation for this comes from biologist Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields: the idea that there are organizing fields of information that transcend individual minds and connect all living systems. When someone anywhere makes a breakthrough, that information becomes more accessible to others. This phenomenon appears across species. The famous example involves Japanese macaques who learned to wash sweet potatoes in the ocean. Once a critical number of monkeys on one island developed this behavior, monkeys on distant islands, with no physical contact, spontaneously began washing their food too. Applied to art, this suggests that creative insights might ripple through a shared field of consciousness, becoming available to those sensitive enough to receive them.
Recent research into ultra-low frequency electromagnetic waves and their relationship to the Schumann resonance (the electromagnetic frequency of the Earth itself) offers another intriguing perspective. Scientists like Douglas C. Youvan have explored how human brainwaves might synchronize with these planetary frequencies, suggesting a literal electromagnetic connection between human consciousness and the Earth, with the Schumann resonance acting as a carrier wave, bringing our thoughts halfway across the world. Perhaps artists, in their heightened states of receptivity, are particularly attuned to these subtle fields of information.
Whether through morphic fields, electromagnetic resonance, or some other mechanism we don't yet understand, art has historically moved through collective leaps. Individual artists become channels for ideas that seem to emerge from a shared creative unconscious, pushing culture forward in in a rapid transition, rather than a purely linear progression.
But something changed around the turn of the millennium.
Since roughly 2000, and accelerating dramatically with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media, we've witnessed an unprecedented stagnation in artistic innovation. Music sounds increasingly homogenized, with algorithms determining what gets heard and AI increasingly generating what gets made. Visual art has become dominated by trends that spread globally within days, creating a flattening effect where regional artistic voices are subsumed into a global monoculture. Film and television recycle endlessly, preferring remakes and sequels to original stories. In the most extreme cases, politics has emerged to replace artistic vision entirely, with art celebrated not for its authentic expression or transformative power, but for its fealty to prevailing political norms.
Part of this is certainly economic. Corporate and government centralization of the economy combined with the market's demand for predictable returns has pushed the creative industries toward the lowest common denominator, toward what's most likely to generate immediate profit rather than what's most artistically adventurous. When art becomes primarily a product to be consumed rather than a force for transformation, it loses its edge, its willingness to polarize, its capacity to surprise.
But there may be deeper forces at work.
We now live surrounded by an unprecedented level of noise and disturbance. The constant buzzing of traffic, airplanes, sirens, radios blasting, the near constant glean of harsh, white light from LEDs and digital screens, WiFi signals, cell tower radiation, Bluetooth connections, radio waves from countless devices, all creating a kind of static that overwhelms our nervous systems and certainly interfering with our ability to tune into the collective field. If artists have historically accessed creative insights through some form of heightened sensitivity, the current environment might be like trying to hear a whisper on a factory floor.
More fundamentally, we live in what many would call a spiritual desert. Traditional sources of meaning (religious institutions, community bonds, built in connection to nature) have weakened without being replaced by anything equally nourishing. When the soul is undernourished, when we're disconnected from sources of deep meaning, what do we have to draw from creatively? Art becomes surface-level decoration rather than soulful expression.
The internet promised to democratize creativity, and in some ways it has, but in doing so it has also commoditized it. Additionally, it has created a culture of constant comparison, instant feedback, and algorithmic optimization that's antithetical to the deep listening required for profound art. At root, digital media is information, and it arrives on top of a culture that already prioritizes knowledge and certainty above mystery and wonder. In entering this space we must implicitly resign to the impossibility of silence. The quiet space where artistic truths emerge now overcome by the constant distraction of digital connectivity.
Yet there are signs of awakening.
Spirituality is experiencing a renaissance outside traditional institutions. People are rediscovering ancient traditions, modern-era esoteric practices, meditation, plant medicine, and reconnection to nature, all of which offer direct access to spiritual source without institutional mediation. Mystical experiences are becoming more common and more openly discussed. Artists are beginning to speak again about inspiration as something that comes through them rather than from them, dare I say... God?
There's a growing hunger for meaning that serves something larger than commerce, for experiences that transform rather than merely entertain. People are rediscovering authentic expression, seeking depth and truth over what is likely to trend or go viral. The very stagnation we're experiencing may be creating the conditions for its own transformation, fostering a collective yearning for something more real, more alive, more connected to source.
We are undeniably on the precipice of massive technological, cultural, and political transformation. The old system has fallen apart, and while all the pieces to the new system exist, it remains to be seen how they will be assembled to create the next era. We're witnessing the breakdown of traditional institutional authority across multiple domains, while simultaneously new technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, blockchain, and quantum computing are reshaping the foundations of how we organize society, create value, and understand reality itself. We find ourselves in a profoundly liminal moment, suspended between what was and what will be, in a space where old certainties have dissolved but new structures have not yet crystallized.
I believe we are on the precipice of a spiritual transformation as well. As more individuals reclaim their spiritual connection, as we begin to understand and mitigate the effects of the noise and disturbance that overwhelms our nervous systems and our connection to source, as we learn to create islands of silence in our chaotic world, the morphic field will shift. We're entering a time when humanity can awaken not only to its interconnectedness with each other, but to the fundamental unity of all existence. The recognition that we are not separate from nature, from the cosmos, from each other. This awareness that everything is interconnected, from subatomic particles to galaxies, from individual consciousness to collective fields, will fundamentally changes how we create and what we express. The artistic innovations that emerge from this spiritually awakened humanity could easily dwarf anything we've seen in the past century.
Perhaps we are participants in a collective dream, and each time someone awakens to deeper truth, it creates a rift in the morphic field and makes awakening more accessible for others. Authentic art, delivering messages from source, is an important catalyst for this awakening, cutting through illusion and revealing what is real. Yet this outcome is not inevitable. The same technologies reshaping our world could just as easily be used to entrench our slumber, creating ever more sophisticated forms of distraction that keep us disconnected from source. Whether we collectively awaken or succumb to these distractions may well depend on our ability to create space for silence and peace amidst the noise. Of course, it is equally possible that most people will prefer the distraction of the noise, to the reckoning of the silence, and will choose the former.
The question remains whether art will evolve at all, or whether we'll remain trapped in cycles of stagnation. Will we be clear enough to receive what is waiting come through? Sensitive enough to tune in beyond the static of our current moment? The silence is available to us, we just need to remember how to listen.