Join Swami Padmanabha and Patrick Beldio, a Sufi practitioner, scholar, sculptor, and sweet human being, as they dynamically explore the connection between mystery, the mystic, and art in living relationship with each other.

Quote From Radical Personalism that opens the discussion:
“In general, present-day Gaudiya Vaishnavism seems to be stuck in what we may call an overdose of confidence, or a profound inability to deal with uncertainty, liminality, and paradox, all of which create a necessary displacement from our comfort zone. Instead of discarding mystery by claiming a perfect understanding, we are invited to harmonize and include all contradictions and dilemmas in a higher synthesis, as part of our inner project. We call this Radical Unknowing.”

• To this Patrick adds from his own early experience with the Catholic tradition, where often the “right answers” are taught, this prevents a living experience of knowledge, where there is nothing to discover on the other side.

• Then Patrick and Swami share a magical unfolding of the process of evolution of the artist through the art, regardless of the medium. The artists themselves do not fully understand what they are encountering, that they are contending with something that they don’t understand. This is the difference between artists and performers.

• Each new layer of discovery positions the artist n a new level of ignorance which leaves the artist feeling-un-finished. Patrick shares that each sculpture is an object of failure. Acknowledging the failure is part of the success of the art.

• Touched by a quote from Dostoevsky that “Beauty will save the world,” an illuminating discussion further ensues of how art is an entering into mystery and extracting a new sense of purpose, and how by finding that purpose, the world will be save. We are all invited to be artists and to enter int the unknown, extract meaning and purpose and offer that to the world. That is beauty.

• The creative process unites opposites and is a messy job. Those who appreciate that will be transformed. “Art reveals what nature hides” . The creative tension is to reveal the mystery, while at the same time retain the mystery and not feel the necessity to solve it. the artist facilitates a revelation of mystery beyond that of the mind.

• Patrick very openly and vulnerably shared his experience of entering the cave of mystery, and coexisting there for some time as part of his journey, participating in the spiritual exercises as design by St Ignatius, and the crucial role of surrender in the spiritual journey, where there is both an honest wrestling with and an opening to the divine’s will. Silence, and the profound breaking of that silence, has the ability to dissolve the boundary between that separates the gross plane and the spiritual plane, and “let the spiritual energy rain down on earth.”

• Vulnerability and unconditional love was discussed, and how, never having experienced such love, one may be traumatized by it, not knowing where to put it. The English word “blessing” is related to the French word “blessée” which means wound.

• The discussion wound its way to speaking about the value of opposition as fuel for progress and how this is an all-pervading theme throughout sacred texts. Patrick often discusses this with his students. We know that opposition is healthy but yet we still don’t like it. It is experiences as an imperfect means that manifests perfection.

and much much more…

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