image: colors – arabia.msn.com

Being an artist of life and experiencing all that comes with that, I love this excerpt from Jon Rappoport’s latest article, which you can read in its entirety here: The Artist Within

“The artist within is not a creature of habit. He offloads what is already known and understood, because he wants to reach farther.

Yes, he may build on what he already knows, but this is just the starting point. Soon, he moves across the threshold of the knight errant, and he enters the non-system.

Others mock him and call him crazy, but: they too want to make the journey. They are aching to find the New, because boredom is driving them crazy. That is their central problem, no matter what they say and claim.

They are trying to be smug and self-satisfied. They are trying to be oh so normal. They are trying to be “rational” to the bitter end. They are trying to be something that is slowly strangling them.

But they will never admit it.

Most of all, they will avoid the impulse to create. Creating is their greatest fear. Because they sense they will have to get rid of their pose. They will have to go beyond systems, which compose their armor.

They will have to make a leap. They will have to put something new into the world and defend it against the people they know all too well: critics.

The artist who has already made the leap acknowledges that his core is imagination. He lives through and by it. He doesn’t retreat to the average. He doesn’t give up and strive to become a happy machine. He doesn’t allow the world to dictate to him. He doesn’t sedate himself.

He doesn’t fall back on so-called spiritual systems and their slogans and palliatives. He doesn’t build false gods and pretend they already exist. He doesn’t engage in the daily practice of asking someone or something to save him.

He doesn’t think of his life as an exercise in solving problems. He sees through many lies, but that is just the beginning of his work.

He wants new and startling realities, and he makes them. He doesn’t wait for them to appear.

He doesn’t wait for some ‘superior entity’ to tell him what to do.”