Visio Aurea
The creative force transforms the artist's soul into the living mirror of divinity.
On the seventh day of our journey, our caravan stopped at a green oasis that offered breathtaking views of the Dubai skyline. Night fell like a sacred cloak over the endless dunes, while the desert seemed to sing an ancestral song descending from the heavenly heights, a hymn of thanksgiving joined by unseen voices, echoes of a spirituality that transcended common understanding. It was like a concert of stars, vibrating throughout the sand, a kind of melodious thread that united earth and sky in silent communion. It was indeed an atmosphere full of mystery.
Suddenly, a dervish, his eyes alight with a wisdom that seemed to come from other worlds, approached me, carrying an old copper cup in his left hand. With slow, ritualistic gestures, he uncorked a tiny vial and poured three drops of ink onto the clear water in the cup. Fascinated, I watched as the liquid turned a golden yellow, shining in the darkness like a living jewel, then turned a deep green, and finally took on the deep blue hue of the summer sky. It was a sacred transmutation that seemed to follow the laws of a spiritual alchemy that only the initiated fully understand.
Can your art reveal a latent image in a visible image, in accordance with the principle that the true artist does not imitate reality, but participates in its creation alongside God?
The dervish gazed into the glass for a long time, and from the expression of his face it was evident that amazement that the artist experiences before the mystery of creation. He seemed to see strange things in the metamorphoses of colors, which followed one another like the visions of a prophet. For, at the bottom of the cup, a disturbing image seemed to take shape – a small man suspended in infinity, who strikingly resembled God. He seemed rather like a scribe drawing on an infinite canvas long words in a secret language, hieroglyphs of a wisdom that precedes all human languages. Those words did not need a voice, but only a gaze prepared to decipher their immortal language.
I stared at him in bewilderment, for there was something intriguing about all this Hocus Pocus. Then a revelation came to the dervish's mind, like a flash of pure light, an understanding that expressed a fundamental truth about the relationship between the Creator and creation. The vision seemed to crystallize into a short story about a scribe who was also an artist, speaking God's message through his own creation: "Merge with My Essence." But these words were not a command, but an invitation to the highest form of spiritual union—the complete dissolution of the ego into the divine essence through the act of creation.
It was something like the sequence in the film "Pollock" (2000), in which Jackson smears his feet with paint and dances around the empty canvas. The moment the rhythm of the paint drops begins to dictate his movements, Pollock experiences a complete merging with the creative force of the universe, like an instant revelation. With each drop he throws, he no longer projects his own ego onto the canvas, but lets the essence of the painting speak for itself, like an unspoken invitation to "Perfectly Mirror" the primordial unity, the merging with the divinity.
In fact, his act of spreading paint everywhere became a mystical ritual, in which the artist symbolically died to let life flow through the very act of creation. And in the end, on the canvas full of splendor, it was not Jackson Pollock who was reflected, but the Cosmic Pulse itself.
To what extent can you transform your own life experiences into creative material that reveals not only who you are, but also the divine nature that works through you?
To understand a great Creator, you must be a great artist yourself. There is no other way. The dervish understood that the only way you can truly know God is through creation, and the only way to merge with Him is by burning yourself in the flame of inspiration. Neither prayer, nor passive meditation, nor theological study will ever bring you closer to God. True communion with the divine is born from active involvement in the ongoing creative process.
As a rule, the authentic artist rises above the social context that threatens him with destruction, overcoming the limitations and prejudices of a world that does not understand his transcendent nature. And art, his own creation, becomes the only world where he can survive in his full authenticity, where he can freely breathe the spiritual air that his soul demands. Am I right, or not?
In that colorful vision, the dervish saw how the artist makes his own personality the ultimate goal of God's creation. This is not about ego or narcissism, but about recognizing that each creative soul is a unique instrument through which Divinity expresses itself. It is a "Theosis Artistica", a divinization through art in which the human creator becomes a conscious collaborator with the supreme Creator.
How do you handle moments when you feel like an external force is speaking through you, without knowing if you are the one creating or being created?
Here I must make another comparison. In the "Paradise" of the "Divine Comedy," Dante, guided by Beatrice, experiences a mystical revelation in which he understands the unity between the human soul and the divinity. Beatrice urges him to merge with the divine light, reflecting it through contemplation, similar to the invitation "Merge with My Essence. Mirror Me perfectly." This experience transcends the ego, dissolving it into the supreme love and truth of God. Like the dervish, Dante becomes an instrument of the divinity, expressing his vision through his poetry as a creative act.
In itself, the reexamination of the events of the artist's life becomes a fundamental work of creation, because it involves conscious choices, intentional modifications, changing the relationships between facts and people, in order to construct a character that the artist himself accepts as an authentic embodiment of his personality. It is not about falsification or self-deception, but about the art of retouching one's own past through the prism of acquired wisdom, of seeing in apparently random events the red thread of a Narratio Divinae that has unfolded through one's life.
The next day, early in the morning, I remembered that I had met a dervish who mixed colors in a certain way, so as to obtain a sacred composition. And I still don't know if what happened was just a figment of my mind, transposed into the imagination of a dream, or if my mind had constructed a scenario worthy of being told. I don't even know if I spoke about the dervish, or if he spoke through my mouth. What is certain is that a part of me dared to penetrate what was left of the fragment of an original reality, which could only be an echo of God. Or even God himself...
True art manifests itself through sacred connection, accepting that the artist's role is not to express his ego, but to become a conscious instrument through which the creative forces of the universe find expression in tangible forms.
Visio Aurea teaches us that between Creator and creation there is no fundamental separation, but a dynamic continuity in which every authentic artist becomes a cell in the cosmic body of divine creativity.
In the end, I realized that the wonderful cup with colored water was not just a ritual object, but a living metaphor of the artistic consciousness that, through contact with divine inspiration, transforms and acquires new dimensions of perception and expression. And the colors that changed in the dervish's cup were only the external reflection of the internal transformations that every creative soul goes through who dares to make his own life the greatest work of art.
Finally, the message "Be one with Me"is not an alternative, but a manifestation of the same supreme reality: in perfect union with the divine, the artist discovers that he himself is a unique and unrepeatable manifestation of the same cosmic consciousness that created the entire universe.
