On Alignment
On Art and Coherence to the World Soul
Reader’s note: we are reclaiming the em dash — the most versatile and dashing mark of punctuation.
Why is art so good for us? Why is it so important?
There’s a level at which to even ask this question is ridiculous. “Because art is.” Because it’s the most human of activities. But why? What is it about art that is so intrinsic to being human? Why have we been making art for the entirety of recorded history?
The value of art is intrinsic to itself — even asking the question of assigning or subserving it to another function misses the point. And yet, for something so seemingly baked into the fabric of our souls, the interconnectedness of our world would suggest there’s also something more going on here, perhaps just a bit out of sight. Stay with me.
Alignment as allowance, allowing the light and energy that wants to come through you, shaped by your being as instrument. The as-it-is-ness of you. The image: light shown through each of us, a resulting silhouette cast upon a screen. The interplay of life, creative force, you, me, whatever light is shown, whatever shadow is cast, the allowance of that expression is alignment. Is art. A feeling, a state of being, transmitted.
What is it about this process that is so integrating? How does it put us in deeper touch with ourselves, and with something so much greater? How is this timeless and most human of endeavors somehow so instrumental to the coherence of the whole? And how did we get so disconnected?
To attempt an answer, we’re going to traverse the imaginal through the neurobiologic and out the other side. We must first begin inside the act itself. If that expression is open and fluid, it’s open and fluid. If it’s tense and wretched in pain, it’s tense, wretched, pain. Both are creative fire. For many the creative process itself is among the deepest joys available to a human being. The sheer delight, sheer aliveness in making. A place where time dissolves, play consumes, where you feel most yourself and most beyond yourself simultaneously. This delight, this joy, this aliveness – it’s a signal.
But what is it? Is it the process of allowing? The integrating that comes from the transmutation, an inherent alchemy? How linked is this to the showing, the bearing witness that connects us? The soul-to-soul communion that takes place between creator and receiver? Something completes in the offering, surely — deepening, reverberating, expanding — but even if the song is never shared, it’s still alchemy.
It is the expression that brings us to our daimon, our genius, our calling. Attunes us ever more to what is uniquely ours to give.
Alignment to what? To that which wants to come through, shaped by the instrument of our expression — our hearts, our minds, our mana, the physical bioenergetic structures of our bodies.
There is something that wants, asks, beckons to come through you.
The Greeks had a word for it:
“Daimon, of the Ancient Greek. Plato wove it in mythic form in his Myth of Er. Before we are born, so the myth goes, our soul chooses a purpose for us to fulfill on earth. Prior to birth we pass through the forgetful river at Lethe and, drinking from its waters, emerge into life ignorant of the fate our soul had chosen for us. Yet we are accompanied on this earth by a daimon, a spiritual companion, who acts as a ‘carrier of our destiny’ and ensures we fulfill the fate our soul had chosen before birth.
The notion that a daimon accompanies us in life as a ‘carrier of our destiny’ goes back further — Heraclitus, prior to Plato, stated that ‘a man’s daimon is his fate’. The daimon for Heraclitus was a sort of force or indwelling law which determines the course of one’s life.” (Academy of Ideas, 20161)”
And it’s a world myth. “The Roman word was genius, and the Christian word is guardian angel. They are all a little bit different, yet each expresses something that you are, that you have, that is not the same as the personality you think you are” (Hillman2), that has our best interest at heart, that is especially linked to creativity and life force.
“In more recent times James Hillman used the daimon to account for the urge we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, and which we can passionately devote our life to.” (Academy of Ideas, 2016¹)
Hillman conceived the daimon as a psychological complex or force existing in everyone, but also as something more akin to the Greek origins — something beyond, something... religious, whose function is to help us find our personal calling, and provide us with the fire to follow it. [A note on the imaginal for those who could use a foothold3]
James Hillman continues4:
If we entertain that kind of framework then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all but more the gift of an inhuman Daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation but the daimons, not my fate that matters to the gods but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters but soul, and how life is used to care for the soul.
“That’s a completely different way of looking at things,” Rob Burbea4 continues:
"There's something — we use the word, I don't know what else — religious in that. It's bigger than the humanist perspective. And at the end of my life, what will be important to me? I have a sense. It will be my sense of did I do my duty to those angels and daemons that were asking something of me, no matter how difficult what it was that they were asking. That's what I feel that I will be feeling into on my deathbed, that's what seems to matter more than anything else. And it's not separate from life. It's infused in life."
Something bigger than the humanist perspective. Not separate from life but infused in life. Infused in it.
Now more than ever our pantheon is filled with the most spectacular gods, goddesses, bodhisattvas and protectors — from Kali to Quan Yin, Archangel Michael to Padmasambhava — the greatest and most exotic. There’s a reason these great deities, these great archetypes are cultivated and continue to be. But what about the angels and daimons of our own garden? The ones who appeared?
They are asking something of us. And as many an Artist knows — this ask is not optional. What asks to be expressed, what needs to be expressed, when denied, does not wait. It festers. Sickens. The stronger your calling, the more ill it will make you if you don’t honor it. First a whisper, then a shout, then a wretched scream.
Pay attention to the pull, to the harmonics that sing to the pitch of your heart. Should you be so lucky to feel the reverberation in your bones, to know something is being asked of you, a thread you must follow, you don’t know why but you KNOW you must PAY ATTENTION. Honor. Follow. Not blindly, but guided by something somehow beyond you.
Alignment as allowance — allowing the light, the energy, the emotion, the idea to flow through you. YOU. Your being as the transformer. Whatever that be, the facet of light shown through you, whatever shadows you cast, that expression is alignment. That transmission is art.
So, art, in this view, is a survival imperative. For the artist, immediately so. For the disenchanted, no less — though on a longer timescale, and undetectable from inside precisely because we’ve lost access to the perceptual mode that would show us what we’ve lost.
For many an artist to create is not a choice. Before any conscious connection to the transpersonal is established, before they know what the antenna is or what they’re tuning into, the act of making can be how one survives the sheer volume and intensity of what they’re receiving. If you are exquisitely sensitive to a sick and dying world, the pain is enormous. Unfathomable. The beauty, equally so — a royal road to ecstasis. Sensitivity cuts both ways, it’s value neutral, and circumstances often tip the scales. So too the creative act is a metabolic pathway by which feeling gets processed. It’s not strictly transpersonal. This isn’t to romanticize all pain as a portal to the numinous, though that potential is always latent. A person with exquisite sensitivity who grows up in chaos, with abuse, with trauma — all of it compounded by the larger sickness of our time — will often find—need—art to alchemize pain and emotion whether or not there is a conscious connection to the divine yet.
For the disenchanted — the metaphysical flatlanders, the literalists, the materialists who have not yet grasped the material, some notes: The reader may already be familiar with Iain McGilchrist’s hemispheric work. If not, you likely encountered right vs left brain at some point, and likely dismissed it as pop-neurosci. It’s not. The case is robust. And it’s a useful lens with which to understand disconnection and disenchantment — this is for the group who may not “get” art, doesn’t value it. Or who is aghast museums aren’t all photorealistic 15th-century Flemish oil paintings and Roman marble. Who will trumpet the ROI supremacy of replacing middle school choir with coding. As a bridge, McGilchrist is fruitful because we can use the materialist’s own tools to demonstrate their epistemological poverty, the error of mistaking one mode of knowing for the whole of reality (a very impoverished reality).
What follows is an extremely simplified outlay of a much more robust argument, drawing on Adam Levin’s excellent summary in his HEALS hypothesis, itself a summary of McGilchrist5. This split underpins much of the disconnection we’re describing. In brief, the left and right hemispheres amount to two different ways of seeing the world, two perceptual modes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Each of us operates with varying dominance and tendency between the two in (im)balance. The left hemisphere is narrowly focused and deals with parts versus the whole. It deals primarily with the inanimate and abstract, and has led to significant evolutionary advantage through its skill in manipulation of the environment. Perhaps as a result, the left predominates in ordinary consciousness. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, sees the whole, allows for our functioning as social and emotional beings, and catalyzes creative and psychological insights. It embeds us in the natural world, in our communities, integrates us, and predominates in non-ordinary states of consciousness — meditation, shamanic trances, religious experiences. The left conferred survival advantage, the right is largely responsible for what makes us human.
The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts illuminate the whole. You need both. The left is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Yet it’s power-seeking, ignorant of its own ignorance, and in our world, increasingly, in charge.
If not already clear — the conscious state of creation and communion with art is, to simplify greatly, the domain of the right hemisphere. And we have a societal imbalance.
Now — with hemispheric preliminaries out of the way, let’s look at what we’ve lost as the right has atrophied. We’ll start with a question: nearly every culture to exist ever has believed 1) the Earth has things to teach us and communicates accordingly, 2) has described hierarchies of intelligences based on direct experience. So before we point towards a case for mechanism, let’s just take 3 big steps back and ask ourselves if we’re so sure that here — in this small pocket of place and time against 99.9% of cultures, places and people, many of whom were much more perceptually attuned and sensitive — are we so sure that we’re the ones who are correct?
It should also be noted that this claim — the importance, nigh the criticality, of art and its integrating functions — does not depend on whether the imaginal resonates with you as a way of knowing, whether you believe in realms, the divine, or any metaphysics outside of a strict (extremely narrow) reductive materialist stance. But I’m going to make a case for the biological basis of higher intelligence anyway — or rather — I’ll point you here and here for an introduction. The full case is quite ambitious and beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say we are a collection of scale-invariant nested bioelectric fields — that’s life. That’s biology. From sub-cellular ionic networks up to the organism, that’s you, that’s me. Read some Levin. Those nested fields don’t magically stop at the Billy level, or the Johnny or Jane. Of course they don’t. Ecosystems embedded within ecosystems — holons, baby. More on this another time.
So we’re fields embedded in fields, and coherence — alignment — between the scales is the imperative6. How do we do that? To borrow Ruben Laukkonen’s metaphor from his brilliant essay “Multiscale Causality and the Meaning Crisis”: a red blood cell does not have a map of the circulatory system. It is not computationally capable of holding such a whole, structurally cannot, and yet by following gradients, oxygen and CO2, each cell goes exactly where it needs to. Each cell is aligned to the larger whole. We too find ourselves inhabiting larger wholes, the totality of which we do not and can not know — computationally impossible for our minds — and yet there are gradients that we can follow, signals that can lead us into greater alignment, into greater coherence. The left hemisphere sucks at picking up on these signals — feelings of the sacred, synchronicity, bone-level intuition, beauty, art. These are the coupling mechanisms, and without perceptual attunment to sense them and the wisdom and courage to follow them, we uncouple from the whole.
So art behaves as an integrating function — to ourselves and the larger fields we’re embedded in (while also, appropriately, expanding what amounts to “self”). And when we lose touch with those signals, we decohere.
But here’s the kicker — everyone is already expressing, already creating, already channeling something. Because creativity is not just painting. It’s cooking. It’s drumming a beat on the dash of your car. It’s making love, making conversation, tending to your garden. It’s exploring and connecting ideas. Existence itself is the creative act. Expression. And simply recognizing that — noticing what’s already coming through you — is enough to spark the fire. This recognition alone amplifies attunement. Conscious contact with the creative process — however small — begins to re-open the channel. To fire up the whole. And myth, the aforementioned imaginal, these archetypes tune us, they always have, harmonize us, training tracks to teach us. To remind us.
These are all signals from something larger — information that arrives through channels our narrow beam of analytical knowing cannot access. Synchronicity, know-it-in-your-bones intuition, the feeling of the sacred — these are waypoints along a gradient we cannot see and cannot know in full but can feel. So pay attention.
Art as a signal here is unique in that it is tangible, abiding, and shareable. The art object is a tuning fork — it crystallizes the transpersonal into reproducibly accessible form. Synchronicity is a waypoint. Bone knowledge is a waypoint. Art is everyone’s waypoint — the signal made transmissible, across people and across time.
Attunement to the art already expressing itself through us opens the channel further, rights the hemispheres, integrates us while increasing our sensitivity to the signals available to guide us. This is how we cohere to the larger whole we cannot see but can sense — the hierarchy, the greater, broader ecosystems of energy and intelligence we find ourselves amongst — both the human and the-more-than-human world. This is true at the scale of the individual. And at the scale of a society, this function belongs most principally to our Artists — organs of perception for the collective body, voices of the world soul. Our artists are the canaries in the coal mine, people. They always have been — disproportionately sensitive and attuned to the pains, and the joys, to the beauties and the sickness of our societies, of the way we’re going about things. Of the timeless and the very here and now.
This sensitivity should be a gift we all honor and support. Sometimes we do. Often, instead, at the extremes, that sensitivity, that mandate, that genius, that calling, souls encoded to speak on behalf of a dying earth, a dying culture, a sick society — what should be honored, should be respected, should be listened to — and throughout history often was revered, was listened to, the poet-artist-mystic — we have failed abysmally to value. Pushed to the shadows. And in some cases — all the way to Ridgewood.
We’re on a spectrum from Artist all the way to Prophet. And Prophets are always maligned in their time, now more than ever. Simon & Garfunkel knew this, and gestured as much in The Sound of Silence:
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence
At this point you may (rightly) be asking — what the hell am I doing talking about art? I am one of those who used to look at art as something other people did. Something my sister and brother had a penchant for. I went into science, into medicine. And it’s precisely as someone reformed from my blindness that I speak, from the power in recognizing the creation I am constantly taking part in. And from the gift of being close to Artists with a capital A who are attuned to and called forth to speak on behalf of the whole.
I believe there is a power in attuning to the integrating function of art in our own lives, first. Not “value art” as an abstraction, feel art. Feel it in your own expression, however small. There is a fire in millions waiting to be lit by the spark of realization that you are already creating. Already an artist. Make, and make your soul grow, to use Vonnegut’s words7. From there, bit by bit, a reorientation to the gradients here to guide you — and toward understanding why the sensitive ones doing this at full bandwidth, on behalf of the rest of us, need to be honored and supported.
And as that reorientation takes hold, you see the structural failures everywhere. There are actionable implications — from education to patronage to policy, that follow from taking this seriously. But values shift bottom up, inside out, first.
There is something that wants to come through you. Needs to come through you. The creative act is how we honor it — alchemy for the self, and the coupling mechanism between self and whole. The case can be made on the materialist’s own terms — hemispheric, bioelectric — and the case helps, but what matters more is the felt sense. Creation is already moving through you — so recognize it. Tap in. This is art for the sake of art. For the sake of your soul, for the World Soul. For the corrective feedback mechanisms we’ve lost and the active guiding evolutionary force of consciousness we need.
That’s where alignment begins. This is how we steer the ship.
Thank you to the Artists in my life — you know who you are.
Academy of Ideas, “James Hillman: The Daimon and the Search for a Calling” (2016), drawing on Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996). https://academyofideas.com/2016/02/james-hillman-the-daimon-and-the-search-for-a-calling/
James Hillman, interview with Mary NurrieStearns, Personal Transformation magazine. https://www.personaltransformation.com/james_hillman.html
A note on The Imaginal: we are not asking for literal belief in spiritual beings, nor are we reducing these to mere metaphor. The imaginal, in Burbea's and Corbin's sense, is a third category, an epistemological mode of its own. Older and possibly even more fundamental than the literal. This parallels McGilchrist’s work directly — he began as a literary scholar at All Souls College, Oxford. Psychiatry and neuroimaging came later, vehicles to 'prove' what he already knew from poetry. Try it on.
Both passages from Rob Burbea’s dharma talk The Theatre of Selves (Part Three), part of the Soulmaking Dharma series. The Hillman quote is from Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 175. https://hermesamara.org/resources/talk/2013-11-24-the-theatre-of-selves-part-three
Adam W. Levin, 'Hemispheric Annealing and Lateralization Under Psychedelics (HEALS),' Journal of Psychopharmacology 39, no. 5 (2025). Levin's summary of McGilchrist's hemispheric work is adapted here. See McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009; expanded edition 2019), Chapter 6.
A note on coherence, alignment, and the contemplative traditions: what we're describing here — allowing expression to express, allowing what wants to come through — is, at root, the jewel of the contemplative traditions. Allowing Life to express as it is. And the process of cohering here draws a parallel to the resolving of karma, the burning of the knots.
See Vonnegut’s characteristically delightful letter to a high school class, imploring them to make art for no reason other than to grow their souls: https://www.highexistence.com/make-your-soul-grow-84-year-old-kurt-vonneguts-wonderful-letter-to-a-group-of-high-school-students/
As someone who leans materialist, I needed this, to remain open to the creative part of myself. What I cannot see but can feel, you make a great case for on scientific grounds which I thought was unique.