Being & Doing

Finding The Balance

I don’t recall who it was that said, there’s something you need to know about yourself that you can only learn by doing your creative work. I’m paraphrasing, but I love that idea.

Being

Meditation is self knowledge, and there is no knowledge of self without meditation. I’m paraphrasing Jiddu Krishnamurti. I love that too, and I love his criticism of meditation in all of its neurotic Western incarnations. The silliness of how we “meditate” and “do yoga”. In Indonesia, they call it “exercise”. How pretentious it has all become, and how corrupt, all the scandals and abusive yogi’s. I digress.

Doing

Being is great, finding out about yourself. Doing is fantastic as well, and not just housework or work-work or service or moving or a fun activity or whatever it is you are doing. But the sense of self when you are expressing yourself is something else.

Not-doing

Not just the not-doing of it, when time falls away, when we are in a flow state, when the mind is really turned on, when the body looks stressed but it’s simply energy embodied. Enthusiastic doing. That’s fantastic, but is there meaning in it? Is there discipline, and when I say discipline, I mean learning.

Action

Make art. That is the way, and everything up to that point is about preparing yourself so you can find out more about yourself and use the findings to contribute to the world.

I’m just realizing that it seems the purest way of both being and doing is expressing yourself in a productive way, and when I say productive, I mean one that results in something to look at or listen to or experience. The done-ness.

The being, or the was-ness has made a thing and we regard it, we observe it. That’s for us, as the consumer of art. For the artist, there is something else. There is truth. We have reality, the reality of the now finished art that is being shared with us, and also with the artist as they experience the art from an observer point of view. Their opinions develop as ours develop.

Discipline

But what only the artist can access, is the experience of having done the art, of the being-ness that made the art, combined with the action of making it.

Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear... It is not discipline first and then freedom; freedom is at the very beginning, not at the end.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is a synergy there that is magical. The artist is hooked. Not on the outcome, but on the process. It frees them. In that space, with that action. It tells them something