The writer's block?

In the mandala of our consciousness we are all in a sense artists. This is something that Alex Grey has recognized in his famous "The Vast Expanse" psalm:

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists—they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity. . . .

Artistic response (rather than conditioned reaction) to life is at least one-third of what we are as human beings. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber points out that virtually every greatest thinker in the history of humankind (from Plato to Kant to Habermas) acknowledged the Big Three, the triumvirate of perspectives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the philosophy of Plato, for instance—to be the essential dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the oughts and shoulds of what must be done by us so as to fulfill our destinies (moral). Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the truths and facts of coming to terms with the cruel reality—and not escaping from it into the vertigo of fantasies and illusions and false hopes (knowledge). But, as Kant argues in his concluding Critique of Judgment, without a cornerstone dimension of aesthetic response to life these other dimensions remain detached from each other. To embody our life as a play of creativity (as a form of art), as I see it, is a foundational component of a healthy and integrated existence.

Playfully writing one's own narrative of life and transcending a writer's block, the blockage that leads to copy&pasting of an old habitual storyline that we learned at some point and that makes us non-existent to ourselves, always looking for new ways of self-expression in the seemingly limited context of our life's framework, constantly searching for new tools for transcending that frame and finding new perspectives to it seems to be a way to balance the Big Three in one's own life. If I deny myself of this courageous creative response to life, I deny myself of life itself.

It is important to embody the Spirit's creativity in a canvas of the individual levels of our being, including the Soul, the ego, the adaptive personae, and the body. It is important to trust one's own artistic feeling that arises in the depths of the Heart. It is important to learn in action how to be a better artist of life than the moment before, to keep searching for new curves and touches in life, to keep looking for novel ways of self-expressing perfection while always already being a manifestation of the ultimate Stillness.

Otherwise life becomes a dull and in/efficient affair of a robot-like human mechanism that keeps self-replicating old constellations of patterns and occasionally passes the Turing test strictly by an accident.

And, as Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully points out, when undertaking any form of art it is crucial to recognize that one's own creativity is not a private property or a selfish achievement, it manifests rather like a gift of Spirit. Even if your art is your life story (and it always is) the same writer's block rule still works; and you can get stuck, as we all do. Your life as a work of art doesn't belong strictly to your individual being, most certainly not to your personae or ego or even Soul, even though the latter comes closer to the essential Source. You can't force it, you have to let it grow.

P.S. And if you are forgetting both the dignity of being an artist and the humility of being a work of art by falling, e.g., into the dominance of either shoulds or facts I ought to wake you up by asking a simple question, the question that highlights the importance of your qualia or subjective joy of being:

"Why so serious?"

(A still from a highly recommended movie on the topic, The Dark Knight.)