– The home of true poetry is nature
When I was very young, I was very eager to write poetry. I composed verses and mystical tales into which I wove many spiritual truths, visions and prophecies, but I stopped writing poetry as soon as I realized that it was draining me. It was making me hypersensitive and vulnerable and holding me down in the astral, lunar regions. So I abandoned those regions and went to look for true poetry in the sun. And now, if you sense that there is poetry in some of the explanations I give you, it is because I have transposed that poetry into the areas of science and philosophy.

The home of true poetry is nature, for everything in nature is both beautiful and scientific. Nowadays we are in the habit of divorcing science from poetry, but in nature they are closely linked. And poetry and life must also be linked.

A true poet is one who is capable of living the beauty expressed in his or her verse, who is capable of living, thinking, feeling and acting poetically. It is all too easy to compose poetry whilst continuing to live a very unpoetic life!  I have known a great many poets in my life and have had plenty of opportunity to study them. I do not deny that they are often very gifted and very sensitive. Some of them have real genius, but they have never developed their inner strength, will-power or balance, and they think that in order to create they have to plumb the depths of hell.

JOsephine art

In the future, poets will again celebrate the purity, intelligence and beauty of God and the universe. By means of their works, all artists will contribute to the betterment of humankind. Poetry must be based on a higher learning, a divine understanding, otherwise it is worthless and even harmful. This is why Plato, who possessed true Initiatic science, said there was no room for poets in his Republic (because poetry, as it is commonly understood, is a world of illusion and falsehood, a dim reflection of true poetry), whereas philosophers and scientists were welcome.

In the future, artists will no longer be judged on their writings, paintings or sculpture; people will want to know the artists themselves so as to admire the poetry and music emanating from them and from their lives. Artists will spend their lives writing their own book, carving their own statue, painting their own picture. Men and women will no longer be content to create works that are extraneous to themselves; they will spend their time creating themselves, they will all want to live a poetic life, they will want their gestures and all their thoughts to be musical; they will draw the lines of their own faces; they will work to sculpt themselves in the image of God.

Of course, it takes a great deal of time, effort and work to create in this manner, but the question of time must never deter anyone.  In the future, people will spend their whole lives refining and embellishing their own being, learning to be more expressive, more alive and more luminous – and this is far more important than spending one’s life on a painting, a statue, a book or a symphony.

The Bonfin, september 21, 1966

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov,
Complete Works 18, Jnana-Yoga

Painting above, courtesy Josephine Wall