Art as a spiritual practice. The interplay between artistic creation and spiritual search in seven Colombian artists

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways in which artistic creation and spiritual search interrelate in the life and work of seven Colombian artists who took part at the Laboratory of Art and Spirituality in Bogotá (2022–2023). Based on a hermeneutic analysis of different narrative and reflexive materials produced by the artists during a ten-month period of spiritual and artistic exploration, the first part delineates the artists’ understanding and practice of spirituality in a plural world. The Discussion section investigates the connections between their artistic and spiritual practices, emphasizing their understanding of art as a vehicle for accessing and communicating spiritual insights. Thus, this work aims at contributing both to the study of the shapes spirituality takes today and to the investigation of their relationship to the arts.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemporary spiritualities
• reconfigurations of religion
• artistic understanding
• arts-based research
• phenomenology
• meaning-making through art

Introduction

What forms does spirituality take for contemporary artists and how do their spiritual searches relate to the ways in which they understand and conduct their artistic explorations? As a modest and limited attempt to answer this question, this paper will explore the manners in which spiritual search and creative work interconnect in a group of seven Colombian artists who formed the Laboratory of Art and Spirituality. This project, conducted in Bogotá for ten months (2022–2023), was designed to investigate the forms in which the arts generate unique insights and types of understanding of spiritual experience (https://www.spiritualartlab.com/en).

There are two main reasons why I consider it important to study the relationships between art and contemporary forms of spirituality. On the one hand, artistic creativity is a central feature of significant forms of spirituality. Mystics do not remain silent after having dwelled in the divine reality which cannot be expressed in words or captured in concepts. Rather, they face the hassle of communicating what they have experienced, and thus share the task of the artist: giving word, form, color, or sound, to that which cannot be fully grasped in any language; or, as Evelyn Underhill beautifully wrote, “having heard ‘the uninterrupted music of inner life’, [the mystic] tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand” (1920, 66).

On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this article, creativity regarding spiritual matters is not the exclusive possession of the mystic. Rather, it seems to be a basic requirement of contemporary configurations of spirituality, shaped by extensively discussed phenomena such as pluralism (Berger 2014); deinstitutionalization of religious experience, belief, and practice (Mardones 2005, 61); and the Western modern turn toward subjectivity as the primal locus of authority and significance (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Taylor 2007). Certainly, contemporary spirituality cannot be defined in terms of clear, unambiguous opposition to organized religion, since as recent studies have shown, both categories overlap in the narratives and self-identification of many people in different contexts (Ammerman 2013; Rodríguez et al. 2021). However, it develops and flourishes beyond the confines of regulated creeds and institutional regulations.

The semantic openness and ambivalence of the term ‘spirituality’, which can be used in diverse senses and not always denoting relation to a divine reality (King 2008) is a sign of the contemporary predicament. Each person must assume the task of finding or giving (ultimate) meaning to life and reality in a context marked both by a plurality of alternative meaning systems and the weakening of the traditional sources of security regarding the validity of a worldview. This ‘difficult and anxiety-provoking task of building their own little world’ (Berger 2014, 14) requires a great deal of creativity on the part of the individual, akin to that exercised by the artist. This is probably one of the reasons why, as Robert Wuthnow claims in his study on the spirituality of North American contemporary artists, people ‘are now turning to artists for spiritual guidance’ (2001, 10, 275). Their works and lives offer public testimonies of the search for the divine in fresh and original manners, as well as of the struggle to integrate different sources and trends of spiritual experience and insight into an organic whole in a fragmented world. Authenticity, experimentation, and integration have become key elements of both contemporary art and contemporary spirituality.

Aims

This paper will track the interconnection between artistic creation and spiritual search in the life and work of the artists of the Laboratory of Art and Spirituality. To do this, the paper will focus on the two sides of the research question presented above: What configurations of spirituality have emerged from the spiritual searches of the Laboratory artists? And how do these configurations relate to their understanding and practice of art? The power of artistic creation to discover and give meaning to life, we will see, is one of the main features that connects it to spiritual search and practice.

Methodology

The methodology of the Laboratory was based on the active participation of the artists as co-investigators of their own spiritual and creative processes, and as partners in a conversation about issues of common concern (Gadamer 2004, 292; Smith 1994). We embraced as a fundamental methodological principle the irreducibility of lived experience and the need to access it from a first-person approach, which we then tried to supplement with intersubjective-oriented exercises, among which dialogue acquired priority. Accordingly, I took part in the Laboratory, both as the lead investigator and as one of the artist-researchers.

There is no privileged, neutral stance on which the researcher can stand to see ‘the other’ from a safe distance. Rather, as a community of inquiry we ventured into the exploration, description, and reflection on the intersections between spiritual experience and artistic creation in the contemporary world, trying to better understand a common reality to which we belong. For this, we used different research strategies, which included first-person descriptions by means of journals and self-recorded videos, as well as different exercises of intersubjective reflection, such as philosophical dialogues and in-depth interviews. Artists took part in seven residential workshops, which offered spaces for spiritual practice followed by times of artistic exploration, and exercises for narrating and reflecting on what occurred in the previous moments. Each workshop turned around a topic related to spiritual experience, and in between them, there were five-week periods for personal artistic work and journaling. This process was also registered in short documentary films which can be watched on the Lab’s website. The project was approved by the board of ethics of Universidad del Rosario, and all the artists provided the appropriate informed consent. The interpretations elaborated in this paper were shared with them, who also had the opportunity to express their comments.

I will present here a thematically oriented analysis of the following materials produced by the artists:

Materials produced by the artists as co-researchers and analyzed in this paper.

Type of material	Form of quotation
Self-introductory essay of each artist	Artist’s initials Essay (e.g, RR Essay)
Self-introductory video of each artist	Initials Video (e.g. RR Video)
River of spiritual life interview of each artist	Initials River (e.g, RR River)
Artists’ journals (of the 5 initial themes), in total 35 entries	Initials journal, workshop number (e.g. RR JW1)
Transcripts of the Dialogues of the first 5 workshops, in total 10 dialogues.	Dialogue workshop number (e.g. D W1)

The Laboratory was formed by 3 musicians, 1 photographer, 1 visual artist, 1 dancer, and 1 poet/philosopher. A social scientist, another philosopher, and a film director also integrated the team. Gender distribution was 5 females and 5 males, aged between 30 and 55 years. The artists (except for one of the musicians and the poet, who were part of the basic research team) were selected employing a call for applications. It was published on social media and directly sent to previously identified artists whose work related to spirituality. The call was open to Colombian artists from May to June 2022. We received 13 applications, which consisted of a self-recorded video telling their views on spiritual experience and practice, a short essay presenting their ideas regarding the relationship between art and spirituality in their works and lives, and an artistic portfolio. These materials were evaluated using four criteria: an outstanding artistic trajectory, a clear commitment to a spiritual search or practice, reflexive and dialogical abilities, and experience in interdisciplinary projects. An initial group of 8 people was preselected and invited to a final selection 2-day workshop that included all the elements and strategies of the 7 retreats of the project. This allowed us to form the final group considering their abilities for collective creation, self-observation and description, interest in the aims and questions of the project, openness towards diverse ideas and spiritual orientations, and disposition to commit to the kind of explorations proposed by the Lab’s methodology.

On spiritual experience and meaning

The following working definition of spiritual experience was included in the call for artists:

For this project spiritual experience is characterized as the sense of existing in relation to the divine or some transcendent dimension of reality, through which people feel they gain deep understanding and insight about the meaning of life and existence, and, as a result of which observable positive transformations are produced in their lives.

This definition contains the basic elements of classical studies on spiritual experience (Gómez 2021; Hick 2004; James 2002). As with all definitions, this one includes some contested ideas regarding the understanding of spirituality and expresses commitments not shared by everyone claiming to be spiritual. Firstly, it narrows the spectrum to people who link spirituality with the search for ‘the divine or some transcendent dimension of reality’. However, given that the interpretation of these terms allows for very diverse elaborations, the backgrounds, notions, practices, and experiences of spirituality present among the group reflect this diversity, which this paper will investigate.

Secondly, our working definition points towards the relationship between spirituality and the search for meaning, which may be disputed as a Modern, Western association (e.g. Meyer 2012). It must be noted that the notion of meaning does not refer in the context of the study of spiritual experience to a mental entity or a merely intellectual product. The focus on meaning-making does not imply an identification of spirituality with beliefs, ideas, or doctrines. Not the meaning of texts or concepts, but the meaning of existence offers the appropriate sense of the term when it is applied to experience (e.g. Hick 2004, 153ff; Gómez 2021). And this sense implies several nuances that need to be noted.

The primary locus of meaning is not concepts, language, or mental processes, but our ways of acting and skillfully coping with the world, which is already a totality of meaningful relationships articulated in our practices (Heidegger [1927] 2001, 83, 97). In this sense, meaning belongs to what is called in the hermeneutic tradition the background or the horizon of fore-understanding (Taylor 1993). It contains the basic interpretations of reality that allow us to see and experience the world and ourselves in a certain manner, directing our ways of acting and thinking. Both presuppositions about the nature of reality, and the principles of evaluation of what really matters, and what constitutes plenitude and human flourishing belong to a background. Interestingly, religious experience (Berger 1990; Gómez 2020, 145ff) and artistic creation (Heidegger 2000) have equally been related to the instauration of this pre-theoretical horizon of lived meaning.

Accordingly, as Heidegger argued, the most basic form of understanding meaning is what he called ‘being-in-the-world’, this is, being practically involved, concerned, and engaged in the diverse activities that constitute our lives ([1927] 2001, 183). Meaning goes embodied in our practices that show who we are and how we see reality. Prior to knowing something and expressing it propositionally, understanding has the form of knowing how to interact with contexts and scenarios (Dreyfus 1995, 46, 111), and being able to appropriately respond to certain stimuli and situations (Hick 2004, 131). In the case of spiritual understanding, this pragmatic orientation of meaning-making implies that it has effects in the life forms of people, as the final point of our working definition indicates. The ‘spiritual meanings’ people discover and generate have practical consequences. Spirituality is always linked to practices and exercises, and spiritual understanding is transformative (Cottingham 2005, 5 ff).

Results of the hermeneutic analysis

Portrait of the spiritual among the lab’s artists: The quest for the divine in a pluralistic world

As a relatively diverse community, not all the members of the Laboratory shared a common view of spirituality. There are, however, certain clear threads and ‘family resemblances’ that allow for a characterization of the group that resonates with some of the categories recently elaborated in the sociology of religion to describe the transformations of ‘religion’ in post-secular, pluralist societies. ‘Spiritual but non-Religious’ (Ammerman 2013; Rodríguez et al. 2021), ‘Multiple religious belonging or orientation’ (Mercadante 2017), ‘Fussy Spirituality’ (Mardones 2005) ‘Progressive Spirituality’ (Lynch 2007), ‘Subjective-life spirituality’ (Heelas and Woodhead 2005), are some of them. Instead of using any of these categories as the main analytic tool, I will ‘go to the things themselves’, letting the artists talk about their own insights and experiences.

Non-denominational, extra-institutional spirituality

One of the most extended characteristics of the group regarding the meaning of spirituality was its tension with and sometimes opposition to institutionalized religion. Even though at some points in our lives many identified with certain religious or spiritual traditions, and most were raised as Roman Catholics in a country that historically privileged this creed, religion was commonly perceived as dogmatic, hierarchical, politically oriented, and many times incoherent with its own teachings. Rather than to a transmitted opinion, this perception was due, in most cases, to close experiences with the institutionalized aspects of a tradition. The following quote bears testimony to this disappointment:

I then went to Rome and saw another face of the Catholic Church, one that I did not like. I was at the source, at the place where the institution is established. I said, “No, I do not want to be part of this.” [They preach] poverty, service, love … no, what I found was judgment, opulence, power. I did not like that at all (XB River).

Besides the perceived incoherence of organized religion, sexual scandals, and the abuse of power by religious leaders appear as significant motives to abandon it. But, as we will see, the intuition that the discovery and relationship with the divine requires total authenticity and following one's own path is perhaps the central force of a deinstitutionalised spiritual search.

Spiritual wandering and the search for meaning and well-being

Most artists of the Laboratory have gone through long and intense years of spiritual search and exploration across different countries and traditions. Three main sources can be identified in the group: Christianism, Easter practices particularly coming from different strands of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the spiritualities of Colombian indigenous peoples. All three components are present in the lifepath of many, and at least two of them in others. And almost in all cases, spiritual search has been a primordial part of artistic exploration and development. In the words of one composer: ‘I was exploring different perspectives, possible spiritual paths that nonetheless are linked to music. They always have a musical expression, which is beautiful’ (AZ River).

Moreover, as we will see in the second section, artistic practices themselves have been places for encountering the divine. This is particularly notable in the lifepath of one of the artists, who wrote in his journal: ‘Oddly, one of the sources that feed the river of my spiritual life is photography itself. Spirituality does not seem to come from an external source. Mystery!’ (GS JW1).

What motivated these quests? The need to face and recover from personal, health, and existential crises is one of the recurrent motives:

My life path is full of overwhelming experiences. I was given the chance to continue living after brain surgery, just when I turned 40 years old. I believe this event was the most important spiritual experience I am aware of in this life. It was fundamental for learning to inhabit and truly know myself, for taking responsibility for my suffering, as Vipassana meditators say (AC Essay).

(…) visiting different paths, practicing yoga, all that search helped me to clarify my inner emotional landscape, and all the trauma I had lived (GS River).

Thus, spirituality is deeply linked for the group with healing and self-knowledge processes that lead toward more harmonious and balanced forms of living. Indeed, in a context marked by a diversity of options and a lack of a central authority, the criterion to evaluate practices and beliefs becomes their effectiveness in bringing about positive transformations, personal growth, and contributing to the flourishing of life (Mardones 2005, 82; Gómez 2020, 44). The capability of giving meaning to life and reality is indeed here a central element for valuing diverse spiritual resources:

The absence of certainties asks us to find a compass, a way of orientation amid uncertainty, a search for meaning. Here we find the tools provided by different spiritual lineages, religions, and other more forgotten strategies such as the contemplative mind and conscious breathing which are proper to human nature (AC Essay).

Later we will explore in which ways the artists manage to integrate all these diverse elements coming from traditions whose fundamental views of human beings and reality may conflict. For now, let us point out a further characteristic of the artists’ spiritual search which resonates with a main feature of the contemporary dynamics of religious change: the emphasis on authenticity as a primordial aim and requirement of an honest and accomplished spirituality. Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead put it in very precise words:

Subjectively oriented selves seek forms of the sacred which enable them to monitor their progress in life by reference to the quality of authenticity of personal, experientially informed knowledge and authority, rather than by reference to the standards of an overarching order which, since it is not of one’s own making, is therefore alien. Such ‘inner’ sacred offers people the freedom to find their own path rather than telling them the path which they ought to follow, and it enables them to test activities to find what works best for their experiences of life (2005, 83).

This emphasis on the uniqueness of each spiritual path which cannot be regulated by any external authority but must respond to the particularities and complexities of individual needs and sensitivities reinforces the sense that personal experience of the divine is the best source of knowledge and the privileged form of authority over spiritual matters. Direct experience of the divine is not only one of the main aims of spiritual search but also the main criterion of discernment among alternative doctrines and practices. As Charles Taylor has carefully shown, this turn toward the subjective characterizes modern ‘conditions of belief’ (2007) and, among other sources, comes from the changes in self-understanding brought about by Romanticism. Crucially important in this connection was J.G. Herder’s articulation of the sense that each person has her own way of being human and her own ‘measure’ (Taylor 1991, 27). The moral significance of one’s own uniqueness and originality has deeply transformed what it means to be human in Western-influenced societies after the eighteenth century. It conveys a sort of implicit key to a flourishing life:

I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me (Taylor 1991, 28).

Reflecting on the value of authenticity, a visual artist expressed, after narrating the many practices, masters, and books she had explored: ‘I stopped looking for outside. My own path has the answers. That was very beautiful. Thanks to this everything else happens’ (AC River). Here she articulated a conviction deeply rooted in the artists of the Laboratory: a mature spirituality requires leaving behind the crutches of external spiritual authorities and commands to discover how the divine manifests in the particularities of own’s life. ‘To be natural, naturally to be what one is. -A dancer wrote expressing her intuition regarding the aims of her search. - There is no hurry to take the place of another living being. I am what I am, and I am thankful for it’ (SG JW4).

Thirst for the experience of the divine

How is the divine conceived beyond institutional affiliation and organized creeds? Here we find a third common trait of the artists’ conception of spirituality. Unlike radically secular understandings of spirituality for which it may be compatible with an entirely naturalistic understanding of reality, for the Laboratory members the core of spirituality is a relationship with a divine, supreme reality, force, or being, who can be met experientially but resists exact definitions or strict rational characterizations.

Among the diverse ways of referring to the divine that are present in the group, two main tendencies can be discerned. Interestingly, sometimes they can be found together in the same individual. On the one hand, some artists describe their spiritual experience in terms of an encounter with a personal divine reality:

God, the supreme spirit who is beyond all names and cannot be grasped in any idea, symbol, or religion, and at the same time is here, in everything, within us, filling our hearts and the entire world (CMG Video).

On the other hand, others simply refer to a non-personal ‘loving source that overflows you and moves you’ (GS JW2). Or ‘something that lies far beyond our ordinary experience and constitutes a plane of perception and consciousness ruled by forces that are above human nature’ (AZ Video). Regardless of the personal or non-personal orientation, a further difference in emphasis relates to the transcendence or immanence of the divine. The former tendency is commonly spelled out in terms of its ineffability, or referring to its superiority to the world:

The divine is the supreme intelligence and love. The supreme goodness, and the highest virtue. That is what I understand by the divine or God, that intelligence that has no equal, which is above everything, and at the same time is a conjugation of the rational with the emotional, with the loving, with virtue. It is that divine energy of virtue at its maximum splendor. Kindness, compassion, mercy, wisdom, intelligence. There is nothing higher than this (RR River).

Transcendence of the divine also implies that ‘it is not possible to define it because rational definitions are very rough’ (AZ River). For one artist, it is even difficult to find the appropriate way of referring to the divine: ‘I do not know how to call the great mystery. I like that denomination; it sets forth the impossibility of its name’ (SG River). The limitations of reason and language to understand and express the divine pose a challenge to fixed religious doctrines and authoritative definitions while stressing the necessarily experiential, personal, free nature of spiritual insight. Being beyond words and concepts, the divine can nonetheless be found in spiritual experience, which becomes a central theme and motivation for artistic exploration:

Reason is a very limited tool (…) it is not the path. Rather the understanding of the divine has to do with inner experiences. These experiences are very hard to translate into verbal terms. They do not even have to do with feelings such as love or sadness. They have to do with much more abstract states. That is the reason why I use sound. It is the only abstract means by which I can translate what I feel and experience (AZ River).

But the emphasis on transcendence is balanced with the affirmation of the presence of the divine in the self and the world: ‘Spiritual experience is for me the whole life. Gradually I learned to discover God in everything, and then everything became a place for prayer, meditation and for giving praise’ (CMG Video). Divine immanence in the world implies for some artists a tension with many traditional forms of spirituality based on practices aimed at overcoming the body and the senses to raise awareness to a realm beyond the world. Interestingly, the affirmation of a bodily, rooted, earthly spirituality is especially essential for the women in the group.

Embodied, earthly spirituality

I do not believe that everything ends here. But I do believe that God is here entirely, not just a piece. And I want to make this journey, until the day I die, something as beautiful as possible, living in gratitude, being aware of all blessings, connecting myself to this language that is here, that is very close to me (XB River).

This quotation from a female singer condenses the sense of an on-earth and for-the-earth spirituality that represents a strong current in the group. It involves a reinterpretation of the meaning of the spiritual search not as an attempt to go beyond the world, neglecting all created things as if they were obstacles or illusory appearances, but rather discovering, enjoying, and thanking the presence of the divine in everything. It also entails ‘the need to make spirituality descend to the body […] The possibility of an embodied spirituality, where the body is not linked to sin but identified with the certainty that there is an indelible fusion between the finite and the infinite’ (SG Essay). Ecological concerns and commitments also form an important part of this spirituality, which particularly for women entails a rediscovery of the feminine, neglected aspects of the divine (Cf. Lynch 2007, 25ff). These aspects are related to ‘the cycles, to the changing rhythm of life that is present in the moon and the sun, in the plants and seasons, in the sea and certainly in my womb. This is my spiritual path today that connects me to this world and this earth’ (XB Video).

Accordingly, spirituality is integrative. Instead of nurturing the traditional Western dichotomies and divisions between body and spirit, this world and the next, the sacred and the profane, it is a form of connection with the divine who is present in the self and the world, and which must be reflected in a right form of living: ‘Spirituality is for me the connection with the source that created everything and inhabits and sustains everything. It is what allows me to be in balance and harmony with the rest of living beings from this and other realms, including mother earth’ (XB Video).

Additionally, this trend of the artists’ spirituality implies that it does not belong only to exceptional life moments, extraordinary experiences, or specific practices and routines. Rather it was commonly affirmed that ‘spirituality is the whole life’ (CMG Video), or that ‘spiritual experience par excellence is life itself, here in this body, with all the difficulties and challenges that this implies, such as illness, problems and the relationship with others’ (RR Video).

Pluralism and the attempts at personal syntheses

The spirituality of the Lab’s artists represents a much wider transformation in the spiritual landscape of contemporary societies in which non-artistically inclined people also take part. As I claimed in the Introduction, the central challenge in this context is finding deep meaning and learning to live in relationship to the divine, when no single meaning system or comprehensive interpretation of reality can any longer claim absolute validity. The ability to embrace diversity and generate creative syntheses, while deeply committing to the search for the supreme source of value, reality, and meaning, becomes thus a basic resource for contemporary spiritualties, one that resembles artistic skills and attitudes. How do the Lab’s artists see religious diversity and what strategies have developed to feed their meaning-making endeavors from different sources?

Firstly, it should be noted that pluralism, more than a contemporary social phenomenon, is taken as a characteristic of reality and the divine itself, for it ‘takes many forms and can be approached differently in different cultures. It has faces and names’ (GS River). Accordingly, the difference in doctrines and practices that can be found in world religions conceals a deeper unity: ‘Even though initially they may seem different or conflicting, deep down they may end up in the same, sharing fundamental aspects. For example, devotion, that feeling of spiritual drunkenness, is basically the same, regardless of whether one is a Christian, a Hindu, or a Sufi’ (RR JW1).

Diversity is the necessary result of divine creativity and radical love that includes all forms and possibilities, instead of generating exclusivist divisions and separations: ‘In the divine garden of creativity everyone and everything, each person, animal species, all vegetables, and minerals, everything has its place to be. There is room for everything, everyone.’ (AC JW1) The first documentary film of the project explores the spiritual sense of diversity in the life and work of the artists (https://www.spiritualartlab.com/en/ladiversidad).

Secondly, the affirmation of the value of diversity is a corollary of a deinstitutionalised, subjective-oriented spirituality. Pluralism becomes itself a part or a kind of spiritual practice, which involves learning from different traditions without delivering to an external authority the responsibility of finding meaning, discovering the divine, and leading a flourishing life. This practice needs to be created by each artist. No other way can correspond to the value of authenticity. How do they manage to creatively discern, select, and reintegrate the elements of different traditions into coherent, living practices and understandings? It is here that the study of the spirituality of the artists can throw light on processes that many people in contemporary societies undergo. Even though much more study and reflection are here needed, I can identify different strategies, some of them related to artistic techniques and forms of exploration:

One is the bricolage, which has been recurrently used as a metaphor for ‘new spiritualities’ since the work of Luckmann (Aupers and Houtman 2006, 202). The following two quotations, from a singer and a visual artist, exemplify this ‘method’ of integration based on the juxtaposition of diverse elements without needing to give them a hierarchical organization or to resolve the inner tensions they create:

I love Yogananda. I still have him on my altar, just like I have Jesus and the Virgin Mary, even though I am neither a Catholic nor belong anymore to Kriya yoga (XB River).

I have taken from everyone and when I need light in my life, I pray to all: To all the masters, beings of light, to all those who have committed to the reconnection of spirits (…) And someone must listen if not all of them (AC River).

But more than an incoherent agglutination of uneven elements, or a superficial mixture of spiritual commodities simply subjected to the logic of capitalism, as different criticisms of new spiritualities go (Possamai 2003), I can identify in the group of artists at least three criteria for the evaluation and integration of spiritual materials in creative syntheses: (a) practices and beliefs have to show their pragmatic effectiveness in the lives of those who undertake them; they have to ‘work for people’ providing ostensible results (Heelas and Woodhead 2005, 90). (b) In line with the value of authenticity, they must be able to resonate with the needs and sensitivity of an individual and be able to lead toward personal deep experiences. And (c) those who teach them need to lead a life coherent with what they preach, be responsible for the consequences of their ideas, and be ethically committed to fundamental spiritual values such as tolerance, compassion, respect for others and the earth, and courage to fight injustice, inequality, and violence of all kinds.

The metaphors of the fabric and of weaving represent an additional form of integration. Here diverse elements coming from religious and spiritual traditions are understood as ‘resources’ and ‘approaches’ that can be used to address existential problems and to enrich one’s search for meaning and the divine. ‘They are all forms and I tie the threads of descriptions’ (XB River). The logic of a design that needs to respond to specific needs and aims and be adequate for a particular audience constitutes the principle of integration. The idea that a broader, more comprehensive, and deeper understanding of life and the divine requires moving beyond the borders of historical traditions, and learning from them all, is also found in the group. ‘Each religion offers tools to work on aspects of life and existence. Then it is possible to track them all to reach something much bigger’ (AZ River).

A third strategy consists in creating one’s own spiritual practices and ‘rituals’, starting from those learned from the spiritual traditions that have been studied. ‘I am not orthodox – commented on this regard the dancer of the group. - I like to do the practices and then allow others to take form. I normally modify the practices, with probably the only exception of the Maha Mantra. I create a lot’ (SG River). Indeed, new spiritual practices are sometimes seen as creative pieces, like artworks that can be valued and judged both in aesthetic and spiritual terms.

A final metaphor found in the materials I am analyzing is that of the radio. Diverse spiritual states described and looked for in different traditions are like frequencies to which one can connect. Then a particular kind of spiritual experience follows. ‘One connects to a radio station, and then if I connect with strong discipline to that, I will listen to that music and those masters talk to me’ (XB River). This metaphor was sometimes used by the artist to account for the fact that one can have different spiritual experiences and see reality from different perspectives depending on the practices one cultivates and the teachings one follows. These tools prepare people to access certain aspects of reality that remain hidden from other perspectives. In the following section, we will see how this metaphor of tuning oneself to certain spiritual frequencies is central to the understanding of the spiritual function and nature of the arts.

Discussion

Exercising the spiritual qualities of artistic creation

We have already seen some aspects in which artistic creation has been part of the spiritual search of the Laboratory artists. It is time now to explore the deep connections they find between their spiritual orientation and their artistic practice. I will focus on three main recurrent themes: artistic creation has spiritual aspects; it induces forms of experience that are alike or equivalent to spiritual experiences; and spiritual experience feeds and leads toward artistic creation.

The spiritual properties of art

For the Lab members, the relationship between arts and spirituality is neither fortuitous nor accessory. Artistic practice is inherently spiritual due to certain features, which are essential for different artistic languages. Firstly, it generates a way of seeing which discovers deep meaning in the world, a meaning that has existential import, insofar as it teaches a lesson for human life, and places human beings in the bigger context of the interconnection of all beings. This way of seeing was linked with the spiritual practice of contemplation by some of the lab artists, and particularly the photographer had made of it the core of his work: ‘I am attracted to discover in the small, ordinary things manifestations of that which is ineffable’ (GS JW1).

The way in which this way of seeing generates a receptive attitude and openness able to discover the presence of the divine in everyday life was the topic of the third documentary film of the project (https://www.spiritualartlab.com/en/locotidiano). Besides an internal disposition, it also implies asking and exploring fundamental questions about what it means to be human and the meaning of life (Dialogue W2).

A second spiritual quality of art enunciated by the artists has to do with its ability to lead toward states of deep spiritual connection. This is valid both for the creator and the receptor of art. With special force, the musicians of the group frequently pointed out the ‘vibratory nature of reality’ (AZ Essay) that makes music ‘a very powerful tool to access emotional states that lead toward high levels of consciousness and communion with the divine’ (RR Essay). Additionally, it helps to create and reinforce social bonds and to intensify devotion.

Thirdly, as it has been widely studied (e.g., Raab Mayo 2009), artistic creation induces healing processes. There are many testimonies in the group in this regard. Artistic creation not only leads to seeing in new light past traumatic experiences, or to recovering balance and meaning after existential crises, but for some, particularly the musicians again, it has intrinsic healing qualities, evidenced for example in ‘medicinal chants that help to cure illnesses’ (RR Essay).

Finally, artistic creation is regarded by the group as a means to reach and express insights about spiritual realities that could not otherwise be obtained or communicated. Indeed, this idea was the central topic of exploration of the laboratory. The arts offer a form of knowledge insofar as they allow one ‘to see beyond ordinary existence entering states of grace’ (RR Essay), and then ‘bring back to everyday life those spiritual understandings that reach beyond one’s own humanity, so that they may materialize and touch the life and reality of other people’ (AZ JW3).

Aesthetic experience is a kind of spiritual experience

Probably the most significant spiritual property of artistic creation for the artists is that at its highest moments, it constitutes a form of spiritual experience. This resonates with recent studies that have explored forms of spiritual awakening occurring in non-religious contexts (Burello 2021). One of the musicians describes in the following terms what occurs when he is improvising:

Then I can empty myself, silence my thoughts, and enter the flow … Sometimes I feel it is not me entirely who creates music in those moments. Indeed, I feel that the I dissolves (RR JW1).

Meditation-like states were recurrently described by most artists, as well as the sensation of being a vehicle for the expression of something beyond themselves. Connection with everything, full attention, a sharp focus, a feeling of joy and plenitude, an expansion of loving awareness, and participation in the unfolding of the creative rhythms of life itself constitute some of the descriptions of the spiritual experience of creation. Here we find clear similarities with the reports of mystical experiences, which have also been noted in other studies (Raab Mayo 2009, 37ff).

The following passage from the photographer not only integrates the common traits between aesthetic and mystical experience but also shows how they become a central drive for artistic work:

How could I describe this experience of “vanishing when I observe”? When I am totally perceiving the phenomena of the world I feel the autonomy, infinitude, harmony, perfection, and independence of the world … I stop existing. It is as if I discovered certain perfection of the world without me, a break from the need for my presence. This is something so subtle that these words cannot express it. The feeling is of peace and joy as if that sort of perception of the mechanism of the world moving on its own gave me tranquility … The certainty that everything, absolutely everything is fine … . It would be wonderful to be able to take pictures of that!! But how? Can that be in an image? The answer is no. But I think it is fun trying to do it and spending life attempting that impossible (GS JW1).

Even with complete independence from the exercises and technics learned from a tradition, as well as from the participation in any kind of ceremony or ritual, artistic creation was reported ‘to be itself a form of meditation and a sort of spiritual practice’ (GS Essay). ‘Writing music sometimes becomes a meditative practice. The outer world fades and the mind focuses on the architecture and the nature of sound’ (AZ JW1). This spiritual independence of aesthetic experience is one of its most significant features.

Spiritual experience and practice lead to artistic creation

As a result of the interplay between spiritual search and the spiritual qualities of art that we have been exploring, spiritual practices and experience prepare, nurture, and stimulate artistic work. Sometimes the artwork intends to further elaborate and discover the meaning of what has been experienced:

During the recording, I had to go back to the moment of meditation to be able to express the right intention in my music … I had to internally tune to that moment to be able to achieve the result I was looking for … . It is interesting to realize how necessary it is to be in the right inner state to achieve a good interpretation. It is not enough with being technically and intellectually prepared. Rather it is fundamental to have the right intention to truly communicate what cannot be said with words (AZ JW1).

Thus, the expressive character of the arts is used as a vehicle for transmitting the emotions and insights gained in previous spiritual events. In these cases, spiritual experience occurs prior to and independently of the creative process which is then used as a tool for its exploration. Just like it occurs with mystical states, the incapacity of verbal everyday language to give meaning and to express the content of experience makes art an indispensable resource: ‘Music is a way of exteriorizing thoughts and emotions that I cannot express with words. There are certain introspective and contemplative states that I try to exteriorize through the ordering of sound and purely musical ideas’ (AZ video).

For other artists, spiritual practice prepares and generates the necessary disposition for artistic creation:

I write with the same disposition I pray, with the same intention and having first made a petition. What do I ask God? Something that I cannot control, that ideas come, that I may find the right point of view, that creativity flows, that the text emerges. All these spring from the same fountain of origin, and then, it flows through my finitude, my historicity, my preconceptions, my vessel (CMG River).

In the same direction, one of the musicians explains the creative power of spirituality telling one of his main understandings resulting from the laboratory exploration:

I have realized that states of spiritual elevation foster creativity. It may be because the mind and the body become quiet and empty. While being empty there is space for ideas, thoughts, and melodies to sprout. But there is something that goes beyond all this. The very nature of the divine is creative, and when we deeply connect to that essence something of it permeates us (RR JW4).

Conclusion

Artistic creation, we have seen, is both a place for encountering the divine and a vehicle to elaborate and express insights gained in spiritual experience. It also provides models for the ways in which people can integrate different sources of spiritual orientation and reconfigure their spiritual practices and identities in a pluralistic world. Artistically infused spirituality may be considered a central ability for meaning-making and a key element in the processes of religious reconfiguration in contemporary societies, which deserves more investigation. All this shows how deeply, and intimately connected art and spirituality are. Particularly for the members of the Art and Spirituality Lab, the divine is not only the source of artistic creativity but given that its/Her/His very nature is creative, doing art is participating in the divine life, collaborating with the divine endeavors. Accordingly, spiritual-oriented art represents a kind of religious experience and practice that opens a whole new realm for the expression and development of contemporary spiritualities.

Acknowledgments

The Laboratory of Art and Spirituality (2022–2023) was formed by C.M. Gómez (Project leader and Artist-researcher), Natalia Reinoso (qualitative researcher, who made the River of Life interviews), Corina Estrada (Research Assistant), Ximena Bernal (Lab Leader and Artist-researcher), Roberto Restrepo (Documentary Director), Angélica Chavarro (Artist-researcher), Alejandro Zuluaga (Artist-researcher), Guillermo Santos (Artist-researcher), Susana Gómez (Artist-researcher), Rodrigo Restrepo (Artist-researcher).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was possible thanks to a grant from Templeton Religion Trust, Art Seeking Understanding [grant no TRT-2021-10479].

Notes on contributors

Carlos Miguel Gómez-Rincón

Carlos Miguel Gómez-Rincón is Associate Professor at the School of Human Sciences, Universidad del Rosario-Bogotá. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Goethe Universität-Frankfurt and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University, U.K. He holds B.A. degrees in Philosophy and Literary Studies. His research areas are interculturality, traditional forms of knowing, philosophy of religion, and hermeneutics. Besides his philosophical work, he writes poetry and narrative.