Can art provide us with a means

of achieving spiritual insight?

Everyone is familiar with a moment of intense focus and self-discovery in the
presence of great art. Times where you are so caught up with whats in front of
you that you mind goes silent. Personally, I know that some of my greatest
revelations of who I am and how I relate to the world have come from some form
of art. Art such as Breaking Bad has revealed a whole different dimension of the
human experience that I would be unaware of had it not existed. Art is a
powerful tool to achieve spiritual insight due to its ability to use the fundamental
human trait of creativity and harness it to create meaning that goes further than
what is possible from the face value of the world.
Despite appearing like a simple question on face value, there are many different
interpretations on whether art can achieve spiritual insight. To make things
applicable to most areas of life, I will just define art as any expression of human
creative skill and imagination, encompassing all media, painting and music.
Spiritual insight can generally be defined as seeing or understanding things
beyond the physical world or at least beyond face value. Art is a known link
between the two and in many ways can be the same thing. Since the beginning
of known human culture art has been used as a tool for spiritual insight, this can
be seen in Australia through Indigenous artwork depicting the dreamtime. A core
question that many religions and science disagree with is whether this spiritual
insight is from something beyond us through an astral plane or if it comes from
our brain understanding a new perspective. Personally, I believe that its just us
discovering more of ourselves and by being exposed to something that is
contrary to what weve believed or experienced and . But either way, it is clear
that great art causes us to realise something that was previously unknown to us.
Art is perhaps one of the most powerful vehicles for spiritual insight and in many
ways is a rival to religion. The driving force behind both arts and religion is
primarily to find some meaning to life, something that is beyond us. Art is a
powerful way to achieve this by allowing us to use our imagination and intuition
to see beyond the face value of our physical world. It is a tool that allows us to
express creative ways of things that cannot be known purely by experience. It is
an exclusively human trait to be able to dream of new ideas that dont exist in
the real world. Art is the best way to utilise this trait and we can use it to answer
and explore deep, fundamental questions. Theologian Jeremy Begbie observed
that this involves a moment of presence and something beyond just individual
elements of the art, but what it is a whole and what lies beneath it.
It is clear that art is a powerful tool to achieve spiritual insight due to its ability to
use the fundamental human trait of creativity and harness it to create meaning
that goes further than what is possible from the face value of the world. This has
been recognised since the birth of human culture as demonstrated by the close
link between art and religion most ancient cultures. Ultimately, we as humans to

some extent need to use and create art to use our creativity to come to more of
an understanding of the fundamental human questions.