Life Art Training
Life Art Training
By Jon Keppel
Welcome, beautiful spirit to this relatively brief training on life art and practicing life art. In this training we will be going through the basics of life art, what it is, who it is for, why it is important, how we can best go about practicing it, resources for studying it and some possible next steps if you are feeling a call to its truth and efficacy.
Let’s jump right in…
Life art can be defined in one sense as the following: Life art is the conception that considers all of life and existence as art and that we as agents of that life and existence are co-creators of not only ourselves but the world of which we are a part. As such we are all life artists and life art.
In a more granular or practical sense or what could perhaps be described as street level understanding, life art is about channeling the creative muse as Love into the world. That is the main and primary description you will need to get started in this work or way of being and the tuning fork if you have been practicing for a while and need a reminder of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Finding your way to this training is really yourself telling yourself that this is the case. This work is nothing more than a sounding board for the natural alignment that the Universe springs forth through in the true promise of being.
Consider now your heart. Not just anatomically but in the truest, fullest sense of the term. If you are scoffing at this notion I pray and beg of you to open your mind to an attitude adjustment, allowing for your thought processes to be rearranged by the efficacy of the meaning of these words drawn forth in this particular order, being inherently loaded and encoded with a knowledge that will help you to get unstuck from a place at which you have been stuck, perhaps for a very long time.
It doesn’t really matter how long you have been stuck. Feel this deeply in your heart and allow for the hurt and pain of life whether inherent or found along the way to all go by the wayside. Allow the hurt and pain to fall away and to reveal the beautiful blossom that is your true heart, the one you know that is made in the center of your inner child and really even from before that in the infinite eternal now that we all share, coming from and going to before the cradle and after the grave. Tap into this and know it by the word Love with a capital “L”.
This is what you must know in your heart. You see this is what you are in your truest sense or perhaps more rightly stated that which senses.
Take a moment now and feel into this Love. Feel how it is boundless and infinite. Feel how those depths go inward to no end and outward to no end and how you stand in your heart as a nexus point of nonlocal awareness at the surface of an infinite inner ocean and an infinite outer sky. This is where we awaken to life. We, double entendre intended, land here on Earth. The art that we know in our heart is something that shares Love in its existence, generating the existential core of all that there is in every heart as a fractal or self-similar part resembling the whole. It is the idea that people in religion talk about when they describe being made in the image of the creator. The part contains the whole. We each are the Universe or rather the Youniverse. Everything that ever was, is and will be is in us even right this very moment. This is the infinite eternal now that I have spoken of. The Living is eternity. I implore you to dedicate the life that you are, the Love that you are to being because that is what you already are at your core. It is an isness.
The practice of life art is the process of reminding yourself of this. The heart always is. But the mind in the nature of mind is meant to focus in through an intermingling way with eternity as it appears in the flux of perception and cognition. It really is a gift and a special time for us to delight in the beauty that surrounds. Any of the malaise in the world, the tragedy and tumult are an expression of the individual or collective confusion illusion that comes about through unresolved though ultimately unnecessary trauma that gets promulgated by thinking that eternity’s appearance is its only state and that there is nothing more.
In a sense, double entendre intended, that is true, but it is a paradox. There is a counterbalance in the mysterious nature of our being and being in the world that comes to show as very real and very efficacious. Notions like the subconscious or higher states of knowing are indicative of these sorts of beyond that inform our Newtonian, 3D, spacetime awareness, experience and activities. It comes down to the quantum of choice. How we see ourselves as an instantiation of the infinite eternal now in a particular state, a state we call life or living.
Life art is the awareness of this. It unclogs the mind of obscurations like doubt, worry, fear and shame and allows for a clear channel from Source, to heart to head to hand to world and vice versa. Seeing this clearly in your heart is a way of describing the process. You use what is called spiritual sight (non-religious knowing) to divine the state that includes the eternal as living. Our roots are in the eternal. Our trunks, our bodies standing tall in the ever-flow of life. Our branches and leaves stretching outwards as our imaginations survey a beyond that is also an inherent aspect of creation itself.
We are a flying tree. All existence is flying and yet we are grounded in the nature of Being with a capital “B”. This Being includes the eternal, the living and the beyond. It may in one sense be all included in what we experience as consciousness so do not misunderstand this as a promise of an afterlife or even past lives. If existence (including non-existence) is a seed that we can best conceptualize as eternally infinite then we are all this giant, floating tree, something beyond life and knowledge and yet something inherently wrapped up in the experience of those as One to unlock the ever-flowing stream of divine wisdom that flows through us naturally once we have let go of the encasement of the seed of Being, an encasement made of illusion to protect our perceptual nature as it is growing in the sensorial field where life is life and all is the One as thus we have discussed.
Life art is the practice of knowing your heart, Life Itself.
Those are the basics of life art and what it is. Life art is for anyone who feels drawn to a forward seeking motion of progress, enlightenment, transcendence and transformation that stands as the continued evolution of our species and the biosphere, solar system, galaxy and cosmos of which we are inherently fractalized aspects of where the whole resembles the part and vice versa. It is really for everyone but specifically it will appeal to people who want to put an emphasis on character building, goodness, Love, Democracy and determination who do not find themselves to be religious nor atheistic. Even the word spiritual will be an approximation of what it actually means to be alive now and tuned into the All of extant reality through expanded consciousness cultivation and responsible technological incorporation all in the service of the Love that is at the center of all. Love is at the center of all. It is not complicated. It is simple yet can be hard to actually practice in everyday life.
Life art is for people who see that we are living in a tumultuous time and that we need to listen to the wisdom of our elders, ancestors and the planet itself to realize that collective wisdom has given us a very powerful gift to use in the expansion and development of ourselves. We know this gift by the word art but our associations, which rightly so, have been drawn from the expression in the world in the name of that word which up until now in the mainstream has been in the form of objects and concepts. The gift here is the understanding that we in fact can allow for and accept, take in and utilize the good full force of fine and common day art together in one determined, unified expression for positivity, productivity, collaboration, kindness and enlightenment (in both senses of that word). It is a good force that has been laying dormant right beneath our noses, laced into the very stream of our breath as the vital stream of Being that runs through us and most certainly is us as our core.
And it is important to say that this is one step in a maturational process of life itself and also the story of human consciousness and being that, just like everything else will evolve, transform and develop over time, dropping names like leaves on a tree as it existentially amends itself and we simply witness this and make intelligible sense of it. This is a giant understanding of consciousness and being. It is a new way of understanding ourselves for folks who no longer see a direct relevance to life of religion nor atheistic driven proclamations. It is about letting all of those words go so that we can arise in our current moment now and be the full true Being. As it has been said, no trees branches would be so foolish as to fight amongst themselves. We are stronger together. We actually are not separated in Being or even being itself for that matter. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, we inter-are. There is interbeing in the world. We already are of one another at a quantum level and the imaginal glue and its story that circulates through the quanta to stay alive keeping the dream of existence alive and well.
This work is for people who see value in the works of Gary Zukav, Eckhart Tolle, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and many others who have been describing a fresh, awakened perspective on where it is we find ourselves waking up and living through and as.
Life art is important for all that I have thus described and because it is essential that we evolve the paradigm of ourselves, the way we see and think of ourselves in alignment with what science is finding through the accessing and assessing of new knowledge as it is revealed in the flow of life. This is always the case and is certainly the case at the time of this writing in the 21st century on Earth. It is the idea of existential amendments just like there are amendments in the U.S. constitution. The same needs to be with our overall understanding and mental model of ourselves as we stand.
The question of how best to go about practicing life art is a question that is unfolding in our day and age at the time of this writing. There is no doubt that personhood and what it means to be humanly-embodied in life on Earth are ways of setting intentions for how actions in the world can be pursued and developed. Keeping to that center of Love always is the absolute best and in the end only way that our current understanding can persist. Love and only Love will see us through the trials and tribulations that arise in the external landscape of being and also the internal one as we draw from its all-encompassing nature. To practice life art is really a whole other training on its own. To be sure, meditation is a fundamental aspect of it. So are visioning, manifesting, prayer, mindfulness, affirmations, and visualization. It demands a quantum elaborated version of a dichotomy between formal and informal practice. Life art meditation is precisely this quantum formal and informal merging of necessarily growing outside of and beyond the container we have come to know as the human mind, spirit and body. The heart remains to be sure but these older paradigms are growing out beyond our previous understanding. One needs to make this a way of being, a way of living, a destiny of presence that automatically informs perception in the body and illuminates what is found there as an aspect of a continuum of Being or even being that is threaded from the unmanifested realm at the furthest, deepest limitless and infinite within to the nexus point of the body and then (to us) outwards into the limitless expanse of that which is endlessly further out beyond our Cosmos and the order of intelligibility that governs its existence. This is intentionally mind-boggling. You know that you are onto it when it all begins to get wavey. Trust that our truest nature, Nature itself is meant to go beyond the container that was here when we were born, both individually and collectively. Let go even of the feeble concept of species. Life art unlocks our comprehension of a divine mystery whose inherent nature is to unfold in spacetime and in the eternal infinite described through the word “now” simply to…
If you would like to study this further please see the website www.jonkeppel.com and all of the resources that are made available there. For next steps please consider joining The Life Art Institute, signing up for the newsletter, listening to the podcast (called The Life Art Podcast), visiting Insight Timer and searching for Jon Keppel as a teacher, reading the blog (linked to through the website), following on Instagram, LinkedIn and Medium.
This is all for this training now. All that you need to know is in this transmission. If you feel like enjoying the process of revisiting this understanding by constructing a positive approach to applying its truth, explore life art further and see what might be possible for you, for the Youniverse, for Love.