True meditation is, first and foremost, to raise one's mind to a world far superior to one's own little world, to lose oneself in wonder and admiration of it and, then, to reflect that wonder in oneself.
The only purpose of meditation and contemplation is to enable man to reach a higher plane of consciousness which will influence and colour his tastes, judgments and attitudes. Meditation should change something in the way you look, in your smile, your gestures, the way you move; it should give you something new, something subtler.
If a man knows how to model and govern his own thoughts and feelings, he becomes capable of purifying his psyche to such an extent that his imagination becomes transparent and crystal clear, and he begins to 'see' the things of the subtle worlds. At this level, imagination and vision are one.
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No one can produce divine works of art if he is not inhabited by Heavenly beings; in order to produce something greater than oneself, one has to transcend ones limitations and journey to higher regions, and there gather divine elements which may be then communicated to others. This, then, is the secret of divine art: to transcend oneself in order to give mankind something better.
The degree of beauty to which an artist can attain, therefore, and which he can express in his work, depends enormously on what kind of person he is. !----Beauty is like a beam of light, it can only be seen in all its brightness if you look at it through a perfectly transparent medium.----! If your medium is tinted, dirty or opaque, the light will appear to be deflected and deformed. THis is why it is so important that an artist should have done a great deal of work on himself before he starts to create; he must become a medium so vibrant and transparent that divine beauty will not be deformed as it passes through him.
What is inspiration? It is an entity which enters a human being, takes possession of him and expresses itself through him. Esoteric Science teaches that inspiration is simply a contact, a communication with a force, an intelligence, an entity belonging to a higher level of reality, which uses us to achieve something that we could never do alone.
When a man rises to higher spheres he absorbs particles from those regions which continue to be active and vibrate within him; in fact they vibrate in such a way as to operate all kinds of transformations in the world. This is the ideal of a true artist, the ideal of an Initiate.
There is one thing you have to realize, and that is that if you are not willing to spend enough time, effort and love to raise yourself to the heights so as to contemplate and comprehend the realities of Heaven you will never bring Heaven down to earth in any form whatsoever. It is not possible to express beauty without first learning how to communicate with beauty. And yet there are a great many artists who think that even though they live in shallow, shoddy lives, they are going to create sublime works of art. No, as long as they do nothing to bring order into their lives and to purify themselves they will simply produce objects of horror; accurate expressions of their own degree of evolution!
From Creation: Artistic and Spiritual by Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov who was a Bulgarian philosopher, pedagogue, alchemist, mystic, magus, and astrologer. Aïvanhov taught the ancient principles of initiatic science. He describes the cosmic laws governing both the universe and the human being, the macrocosm and microcosm, and the exchanges that constantly take place between them.
