"CREATIVE COLLABORATION": ON GOD AND
THE "INDIVIDUALITY" OF THE HUMAN ARTIST

"Creative Partnership" (2022) Note: the figure coming out of the heart of the artist is meant to resemble Hazrat Babajan, who unveiled Meher Baba to Himself with a kiss in 1913.

"GOD AND THE ARTIST"
September 6, 2024
An amusing anecdote someone told me yesterday, I want to see if anyone has a comment on it. IT TURNED OUT TO BE LONGER THAN I HAD INTENDED. IT IS ABOUT "THE DIVINE AND THE HUMAN, or INDIVIDUAL, ELEMENTS, IN THE ARTS.
NOTE: THIS POST IS MOSTLY ABOUT MUSIC, THOUGH THE PICTURE SHOWS SOMEONE LIKE HAZRAT BABAJAN, THE PERFECT MASTER WHO UNVEILED MEHER BABA'S DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS TO HIM WITH A KISS IN 1913, COMING OUT OF THE PAINTER'S (MY) HEART, TO CREATE THE WORK. The analogue is the same in any of the arts, I think.
***
I work, as I think I've mentioned here, at the MEHER SCHOOL in Walnut Creek, California. (The school is run by Baba's Sufism Reoriented group; this is the 50th anniversary!) I teach preschool, in the section of the school called White Pony Preschool. I'd down to 5 hours a day in Aftercare, which takes place in the less-structured afternoon period. I play songs for children, who gather at a classroom's big Circle...around 25 children, in the classroom I started in this week. BABA, I have to say, gave me these children's songs over the years, a few most years...and NONE since I put out a CD of them about 3 years or so ago. But there are enough to keep the kids' interest, it seems.

Yesterday after our Music Circle, a teacher who is in the room, who is a friend of mine, and new to these songs that kids do little play-acts to, told me he has been enjoying them!

I said, "They really were gifts from Baba!" (Some of the songs are very clever, and perhaps like all artists of every kind, I see and play them now, and wonder, "How did I think of this?" Of course, it is a kind of "channeling" from the Higher Self that accounts for ALL creativity, imo!

Well: My friend told me that years ago, he was enthralled (as were and are many of us) with the songs of Bob Dylan. He then told me he told that to a very "celebrated" BABA songwriter whom he knows.

The songwriter said, "Dylan didn't write them." Meaning, GOD wrote them! The artist is just the "channel" so to speak; the "subcreator", as JRR Tolkien referred to artists.

My wife asked me later when I told her this story, "Did that BABA songwriter think the same about HIS songs?"

He probably did, in the abstract. BUT: for me, it's a BIT more complicated than that, although the spark of all true Art does indeed I think come from the Higher Self, ie God. There is, in my opinion...or, some might say, obviously...a "component" of the artist, the artist's personality, if you will. No one would mistake a Bob Dylan song for a Neil Diamond or a Rod Stewart song.
I find it WONDERFUL, the way the SPIRIT "clothes itself" in a different style, color, etc, for every artist, so that it's not just a generic thing as though GOD is an impersonal "AI MACHINE"...
To me, it's kind of a miracle, the fact that there is something beautiful about an artist's individuality, that the Beloved, the Higher Self, weaves an entity of spirit from...
******
PICTURE: "CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP" (2022)
links to a couple of "my" children's songs:
"The Bunny Song": https://soundcloud.com/max-reif/the-bunny-song
"The Circus Song": https://soundcloud.com/max-reif/the-circus-song

*********