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inspiration and creative intuition. It is with the spirit that he will discover secrets of matter and form that others have not yet discovered.

The physicist is subject to the law of entropy and the space-time dimension.

The artist goes beyond the space-time dimension: he acts throughout all epochs. A

work of art is immortal and eternal. It has been victorious over not only time but alsodeath. Perhaps the secret of overcoming entropy lies in these two victories.

Time and death dissolve everything, but they cannot dissolve a work of art and thefield of energy that it contains. Nor can they dissolve a work of arts ability to create newtransformative energy fields in whoever looks at it, listens to it, or lives it.

Immortality is the impossible dream of every human being.

Can we deduce that every human being aspires to become an artist?

In the West, immortality has been promised to the saints for the last two thousand years. Before that, in Egypt, it was promised to the Pharaohs and to those who were good.

But not everyone aspires to become a saint or to be good, even when they arethreatened with the terror of final judgment or the weighing of souls (psychostasia).

Too many sacrifices and renunciations are required.

The life of an artist also requires renunciations and sacrifices, but there is anotable difference. Anyone who decides to follow the path of making their life a work of artis not required to mutilate any part of him or herself and does not have to avoid any areaof life or of the world.

Everything must be affirmed and transcended, but not negated nor castrated.

Everything is useful for the creation of the work of art. If it is life itself that must betransformed into a single, immense work of art, it must be a complete work of art that isthe expression of the globality of life and of the totality of one life.

In the search for sainthood, knowledge of evil or its presence are a tragedy, anaccident to be abhorred, an enemy to be fought against, a wrong that must be expiatedthrough continual penitence.

The artist has a completely different way of looking at the presence and the effectsof evil.

Artists face it with pain and anguish but also with serenity and courage, down to

the deepest recesses of their being. They accept getting their hands dirty so they canknow it and pull it out of hiding and so they can learn to extract good from evil. Above allthey face it so they can learn to blend good and evil together, just like white and blackand light and dark colors are mixed together on a canvas to create the objects, the figuresand the secret life that animate it.

If you want to follow me along this path of life as a work of art, I propose that youimagine your life to be like a castle that has 100 or more rooms, that you will want to


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do not belong to the SELF but to the I Person, along with the power to oppose the SELF (hatred and the desire for revenge), to isolate it, to paralyze and destroy it.

If the SELF is the inner artist, the I Person is the craftsman, the main artist;together, the I and the SELF make up the complete, mature artist.

3) The Personal SELF and the I Person are the great unknowns in human life. Todiscover them, to get them to emerge and to strengthen them is the goal we have set forourselves by creating the Institutes of Sophia-Analysis and of Existential PersonalisticAnthropology, that are currently spreading throughout Italy and abroad. They offer theknowledge and the practice of the Sophianalytical method, so as to create life as a work of art.

We work with the students in these Institutes to help them prepare the drawingsthat they will then transfer on the walls and on the vaults of the castles of their own lives.

We dont just prepare drawings for frescoes, we also prepare scores for choralsymphonies.

These institutes are stellar laboratories of Sophia-Analysis. Stellar, because here we are able to reproduce the equivalent of stellar processes within the human sphere:condensation, collapse, high temperatures, high pressure and thermonuclear reactions,

which all are necessary for the birth of a star. We are capable of producing andconcentrating great quantities of the energy of love, freedom and truth. With these we areable to reach the heart of matter and of the spirit of humanity, and set off a chainreaction of continuous transmutation, which is the secret to transforming a human lifeinto a work of art.

In my opinion, the life of a human being must contain these elements for it to beseen as a work of art in process;

1) it must have reached a substantial level of harmonious unity between thevarious parts

of its being.

This step is of primary importance.

2) This process of harmonious unity is not stagnant, it is an energy that iscontinuously

being created. There will always be new parts that must be unified and one can neverstop in this process, except for some occasional rest.

This means that an unstoppable process of transmutation has begun, notsuperficially, but at a deep level, that produces evidence of change visible to both the


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subject and to others. This doesnt happen immediately, but through time, and it comesabout through a dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

We must note that the spiritual growth of the ascetics and the saints is rigidly

linear and not dialectical. We can also note the normal growth process of a human beingis made up of only three phases; childhood, adolescence and adulthood. When this thirdphase is reached, growth is no longer expected, only decline is. Death, then, isunderstood by all, saints and ascetics included, to be the final end of growth.

A person who knows they must make their life into a work of art has broken awayfrom this concept. New growth, new lives and new worlds await them both on this side of death and on the other side as well. The concept of reincarnation is viewed as being rigid,punitive and devoid of imagination. This is not the only world where we can reincarnate:there are infinite worlds. It all depends on discovering the secret of how we can move fromone world to another, from one life to another, rather than winding up into nothingness.

The concept of life as a work of art could very well represent the discovery of this secret.

3) We call this type of energy that is continuously being created, this processof harmonious unification that never stops and that is the synthesis and unification of previous infinite worlds, that is capable of unifying also infinite future worlds, an energythat transcends time and an energy that transcends the law of entropy. These are twomore essential characteristics of a work of art.

To those dreamers who dedicate themselves to research on perpetual motion wecould say that their dream is correct, but they are mistaken in the choice of the field they want to realize it in.

This next requisite is, thus, necessary: that human beings learn how to dedicatethemselves to doing research on this new type of energy, and producing it. It can not bebought in a marketplace nor can it be reproduced in laboratories of chemistry or physics.

It is certain that it can be found in the laboratories of Sophia-Analysis, but nothingkeeps it from being produced in other human laboratories, whether they have already

been invented or have yet to be so.

The parts of human life that must be unified are many, and this is what shows ushow vast our job ahead really is:

1) The Cosmic SELF, the Personal SELF, the Psychological I, the Corporeal I andthe I Person (microcosm with macrocosm together with mind, heart and will).


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2) - The I and the You , the I and the Us the I and the Others , the I and the Polis ,both the one the individual belongs to and the planetary one (the I and theChoral SELF ).

3) - The I and the mother, the I and the father, the I and its ancestors, both recentand

far back in time (the I and its roots).

4) The I and history, both modern and ancient. The I and science, the I andphilosophy, the I and religion, the I and art. The I and the West. The I and the East (the I

with its trunk and branches).

The path of todays wisdom, and of life as a work of art, is represented by theability to make all these unifications, which require a continual synthesis of opposites, acontinual transcendence and a continual transmutation.

It could seem like a utopian project, if not altogether megalomanic and absurd.

It all depends on what your mentality is and what you want to hold on to.

It is not the first time that courageous people who actually changed history wereinitially judged and rejected as being visionaries and madmen.

Here we could remember Christopher Columbus as well as the man who openedthe Northwest passage, who is less renowned.

It is not easy to give up the mental categories that we are accustomed to. It ismuch easier to consider them sacred and inviolable and use them to judge and condemnthose who step away from them and disturb our certainties and our vision of life and the

world.

Today, thousands and thousands of people travel back and forth across the routeopened up by Christopher Columbus. All of this could not be foreseen a few hundred

years ago, and yet, now in the age of the jumbo jet, it is happening.

Thousands and thousands of people travel today the route opened up by Freud as well. This, too, was unthinkable only fifty years ago.

On the pathway of living life as a work of art that I am indicating, how many will want to try to make possible what today is impossible?

It is impossible to answer this question, but I believe that one day there will bethousands.


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If we now limit the number of unifications that must be done, it is without questionthat the first, most urgent step for many people is to unify their personal history.

This history begins with the trauma experienced around the time of our conceptionand continues on with the various facts, both traumatic and non-traumatic, that have todo with our intrauterine and post-uterine experiences from birth onward.

Our artistic ingenuity must be put to good use to be able to creatively unify allthese various experiences into a new form, the artistic form that we will impress on ourmatter and our spirit. The form of our matter and spirit were not chosen by us, they wereassigned to us by history, but they do constitute our essence as well as our veryexistence.

Changing and transforming this essences as well as our very existence can only bethe result of a work of art.

I would here like to tell you how Michelangelo created his David.

The long block of marble from which he made his statue had been layingabandoned for years in the courtyard of the Opera del Duomo in Florence. It had alreadybeen partially sculpted and there was a large hole in it.

The previous sculptor had begun sculpting the block and made the huge hole in it,but was unable to complete the work that he had planned. Others after him were alsoincapable of finishing it.

Michelangelo had gone to the authorities more than once to ask them to give himthe block of marble, but they had always refused him. It was only thanks to hisstubbornness that they finally gave him the marble, almost as though it were an insult.

This block of marble, that had already been cut and hewn according to otherpeoples choices, and then was chipped and abandoned in a courtyard by presumptuousand inexpert hands, seems to be very similar to our own lives. We receive our lives fromhistory and from our parents, with a huge hole in our I and another, even bigger one, inour hearts.

We are never happy with ourselves nor with how we are and how they made usbecome. We are full of conditioning of all types and of thousands of traumatizingmanipulations.

At this point it would be easy to decide to lie abandoned like victims in thecourtyard of history, passing the time by blaming others and by making them the objectof our hatred and our need for revenge.

If by chance our inner artist, our Personal SELF , should come to knock with bothhumility and insistence at the door of the authorities, our prideful and narcissistic I , and


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it should ask to use our life creatively instead of egotistically wasting it, what will weanswer?

Will we give our consent, or will we mercilessly deride the artist?

Our life destiny lies in this choice.

Our destiny is created by our own hands and not by others. It does not depend onhands that belong to the smaller powers like our parents, or great powers, like those whorule nations, or even the Omnipotent, who is said to rule history but which is, in essence,only a projection of our own theomania.

Yes, every one of these hands can mold and condition our lives in a thousand ways, but they cannot keep the SELF, the inner artist, from molding and recreatingeverything that the others have made and destroyed. They cannot keep the SELF fromgiving us a new life, one that is immortal and eternal.

But the I Person can keep this from happening. It all depends on its decision, basedon either love or hatred, to either follow the plans of the primary artist, the SELF , and

work together with it, or to systematically silence it, tie it up and destroy it.

Meanwhile, Michelangelos David is there like a powerful, vital energy field that canunmask our passivity and our existential lies. It is there to show that indeed theimpossible can be made possible, not only once but an infinite number of times.

This statue tells the story of David, a young shepherd, who used a single river rockto knock out Goliath the giant and with him the arrogance of the Philistines, despite Sauland the Jews derision.

Here is something that was considered impossible and that was made possiblethanks to Michelangelos genius, strength and courage. It seemed impossible that auseless block of marble could become a masterpiece that thousands of visitors from everyage and every part of the world have lined up to see.

I myself saw it many years ago, and I have never forgotten it.

Today I have a copy of it sitting on my desk that reminds me, when I need to bereminded, that I can always make the impossible possible. I can always knock down theomnipotence of the various Goliaths that I encounter both within myself and outside of myself, with humility, strength and courage, and thus try to make my life become a workof art.

Here you could very well ask me: but are you doing what you are proposing to us?

And I could answer: what difference does it make?

Leonardo da Vinci studied the laws of flight but he was unable to fly.


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Today we can.

Or I could also say to you: yes, by using a very rudimentary caravel I have landedon the shores of the new world I am proposing to you. But you could build not just acaravel, you could build a Concorde or even a spaceship.

Why not give it a try? There is no doubt that if your highest goal and your most important ideal is to just

reach psychological, physical, spiritual or economic wellbeing, this project is not for you.But if your most pressing ideal is to truly become yourselves, to learn how to love others

with truth and authenticity, to learn to be loved by others like you have never been lovedbefore, to experience joy and to develop life, then dedicate yourself body and soul to thisproject. It will be the most exciting and passionate journey that you have ever dreamed of making.

If your most noble ambition is to become immortal and to have a life thatcontinuously renews itself; if living in only this world is not enough for you because youare hungry for others, then you will enjoy living your life like a work of art and you willenjoy working night and day, like artists do, on the masterpiece of your life. You will knowhow to accept all the anguish and pain, the fatigue and discouragement, the conflict andtension, the love and the hate, the solitude and abandonment. But you will alsoexperience ecstasy, joy and success.

Artists lives are often disorganized, if not downright tragic or at least dramatic,especially in the realm of relationships.

Their works might be immortal masterpieces but their lives are disasters.It may seem paradoxical that I propose to you to become artists and not wise men

and women, when it is the artists who are those who have most mistreated the art of living by preferring to couple their genius with dissoluteness rather than with wisdom.

Well, doesnt it seem like the time has come to change something?

Artists give us great gifts and they have opened a very important route before us:the route of art, which truly exists and is not just in our imagination.

We are now ready to commence this same route, to see whether or not it is possibleto realize the opus of our lives, not through alchemy or asceticism, sainthood orphilosophy, but by transferring the principles of art to life itself and by working on ourlives with artistic techniques.


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If art is dead because it no longer produces masterpieces, we want to make use of art and make it live for us so we can make ourselves works of art. As Persons , not asmasks of ourselves, or as puppets and robots.

By now there really isnt much difference between ourselves and artists: our liveshave become just as dramatic, if not more so.

We must learn to work on the drama of our lives and the urgency we feel to do so isgreat.

We cannot live like saints or gurus, these are paths that are full of dangers, theyare inaccessible and they are often ambiguous. We want to try to live like artists. Thispossibility has not yet been explored. And we can become artists of ourselves even if westart as late as eighty years old.

It is possible to do if every one of us gives up trying to be the very best, divine,exceptional artist.

I dont want to be what I am not.

I want to be myself and for me to become an artist of myself I have all the geniusand creativity that I need.

They are both found within my Personal SELF ; all I have to do is to let it emerge,day after day, year after year, freeing myself of all the obstacles that suffocate and polluteit.

And even if I am not a great artist, I can always work together with other artistsand create a great work of group art that is unique in all the world!

The true obstacle is not whether or not I have enough talent and geniality to be anartist of my own life.

To be brief, I will indicate here only three of the various true obstacles that can befound.

The first is hatred which has been repressed since the intrauterine experience , which splits a human being with a division that is even more dramatic than the onebetween reason and feelings or between mind and heart. This is because repressed hatredsplits the very spirit of the individual, which then disintegrates into a thousand fragmentsand causes a loss of contact with the deep SELF.

But while repressed hatred on one hand creates a splitting, on the other itexpresses a need for security. It maintains the unity of both the internal and external loveobject and it is very difficult to give this security up.


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If I repress my hatred, I convince myself that the love object is still whole and that Ihave not yet destroyed it with my hatred. And, if I havent destroyed it I am not guilty of anything, and if I am not guilty I can continue to live.

So then, is it not possible to give up repressed hatred?

Yes it is, but only after one has regained the security of their ability to makeamends, which today has been lost. This ability has paradoxically been both encouragedand very much compromised by the Christian religion.

If humanity is partially (as the Catholics say) or completely (as the Protestants say)corrupted by original guilt and only Christ, who is God, can repair this wrong, whatability to make such amends does an individual have?

If my original, primordial guilt is for having attacked and destroyed my maternallove object since the time of my paradisiacal intrauterine life, and I have no ability to

make amends to my mother because I am full of only hatred and have no love, who couldever save me? If my salvation does not come from myself but only comes from outsidemyself, if I am still inside, that is still inside the womb, who could possibly save me?

God cannot save me inside the womb and I am still inside my mothers womb. Nor will I ever be able to get out of it alive, if I first dont forgive her and make amends andrebuild her as a love object that is whole. The mother must become a whole love objectthat I have both attacked and also repaired and re-unified within myself, with my ownlove and not with the love of another, even if the Other is with a capital O.

If, instead, my Personal SELF is already with me inside the womb, and it is the

source of my ability to love, it will be sufficient that my I Person decides with every ounceof conviction it has to use this source to save me from my hatred, be it in the present orin the future.

Nicodemus, more than any other, asked a crucial question of Christ: can a manreturn to his mothers womb so as to be reborn?

Only today is humanity becoming capable of finding the answer that Nicodemuscouldnt find.

There is no need to go back into the maternal womb. The fact is that we have neverreally come out of it completely. We are partly in it and partly outside of it. Either we havebeen born only half way or we havent been born at all.

Only those who undergo the strenuous task of individual analysis know what itmeans to go completely back into the maternal womb so as to be able to leave itcompletely, safely and soundly, after having faced and resolved the trauma theyexperienced during their intrauterine lives.**


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If immersing ourselves in religion means looking for a substitute mother so we canescape our problems with our real mothers, no salvation will ever be authentic.

Human beings will always be split. They will be dogged by their hatred, their lies

and their need for revenge even though they may become known and venerated as saintsby thousands and thousands of people.

If we had greater freedom in our way of looking at things, we would see that manyhistorical figures that we consider to be our fathers are no longer worthy of our love.

We can no longer walk away from the truth that is within us.

Mankind is the only subject that is responsible for all the evil and all the good thatit is capable of creating.

Humans can hate and destroy or they can love and make amends to that whichthey have hated and destroyed. To do so there is no need for indispensible externalintervention. All we need is to have full faith in ourselves and in our infinite ability to love.

While others need to project the source of love that can save them outside of themselves and this can help them rebuild faith in themselves, this is all well and good.But if it is exactly this projection that destroys peoples faith in themselves, then it isimportant to recognize this projection as being toxic, and that as a strategy it must beabandoned.

Can the Christian religion transcend itself and give people back their truth andtheir freedom? Transcendence does not mean negating oneself, it means losing oneself tobe able to find oneself again. It is hard to give up the idea of God that has been passeddown to us by the philosophers and the theologians, but it is not impossible. Buddhistshave no God and yet they constitute one of the most important religions in the world.

Atomic destruction is not an ineluctable event, nor should averting it be left todivine grace that will come to illuminate the hearts of the powerful. We shouldnt wait for

an extraterrestrial civilization to come and save us either. That would be sheer madness.

The destiny of humanity lies in the hearts of each one of us. And in each one of ourhearts there is enough hatred and enough love to either destroy us or save us.


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We are all inside of the planet earths womb. We can attack and destroy our motherearth for all the bad things it has done to us or we can love her and forgive her, we canlove and forgive ourselves and then wish to detach from this womb grateful for the life ithas given us and leave it in tact, so we can go to populate this universe and others as

well.

This could very well be the soul of a new religion that has its roots in space, that isauthentically concerned about saving the planet and the human beings that live on it,rather than just about saving and perpetuating itself.

Coming back to repressed hatred, beyond the need to preserve life in a desperateattempt to deny any type of wrong, there is another reason why we could prefer to notgive it up: this has to do with our hurt pride and our need to be repaid, rather thanmended, and remain in the satisfaction we get when we hold on to our need for revenge

with tenacity and increasing subtlety.

What prevails here is a sense of security that is derived from power.

One can maintain ones inner division for their whole life and suffer theconsequences until they die, but they can never give up the security they derive, be itconscious or unconscious, from having at least one type of power: the power of revenge.

This is an unhealthy type of power but it is, nevertheless, power. It safeguards theapparent unity of the I and it gives it the security of being able to survive.

Hatred chooses to survive, and not live.

This type of choice wants nothing to do with life as a work of art.

The power to get revenge has been built on the model of the vindictive God of theBible.

If God, who is love and forgiveness, was not placated and did not forgive Adam andEve their sins until after the holocaust of his favorite son dying on the cross, what willhuman beings need to placate and forgive all the evil that befalls in life, from the firstmoments of their existence? What holocaust will they have to go through?

Will an atomic holocaust be enough?In the meantime, who will be the chosen one who will have to pay for all the

offenses inflicted on the narcissistic I?

Our mother. Our father. Our children. Our partners, ourselves? Or all of these,passionately entwined in a slow but inexorable daily martyrdom?


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The second great obstacle in becoming artists of ourselves is the one that has to do with another choice. This choice is made when we either cannot or do not want to give upour repressed hatred and rather than creating a unity within ourselves and the world weopt for the strategy of maintaining a symbiotic connection with our mothers and with the

world.

This type of strategy inevitably transforms a healthy symbiosis into an unhealthy,sadomasochistic one, where sadomasochism, which inextricably ties the torturer and thetortured together, guarantees that the connection remains and that the pleasure thatcomes from it is also safeguarded.

This is an unhealthy type of pleasure, but it is, nevertheless, a pleasure that allowsus to live and to calmly give up the joy and pleasure of living life as a work of art.

Repressed hatred and unhealthy, symbiotic enmeshment are the main enemiesthat can keep us from creating unity within ourselves and with the world outsideourselves. They are, thus, the greatest obstacles to our ability to make our lives a work of art.

But there is yet a third one that is actually the cause of the first two.

If we want to detach from our mother and at the same time we hate her deeply and we repress this hatred, there must be one essential reason why we do so.

My whole thought regarding life as a work of art is based on the constant thread of death and on the search for the best way to conquer it.

Every human being has a deep fear regarding death and every human being isforced to invent a solution for this problem, whether it is a good one or a bad one.

If we ask ourselves what the very worst solution to have been invented so far is, which is also one that has been universally taught, we can perhaps agree that it is thecreation of a phallic identity.

The essential characteristics of a phallic identity are, in my opinion, two: lovebased on power and possession and life lived as a constant search for power over othersand the power to kill other people.

Said in a simpler, more linear way: every time human beings are faced with thefear of death, they immediately try to find a way to kill someone else (and the worst deathis not necessarily a physical one, it is often a moral or existential one).

This is the essence of a phallic identity: how to kill someone else so as to create theillusion that we can avoid it ourselves.


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When it is expressed in an intimate relationship it becomes: how can I kill theothers freedom and take over my loved ones life? If the other persons freedom dies, Idont die, because I possess the other persons life, I possess life.

The fact that this eventually reveals itself for what it is, an illusion or a lie, has noimportance whatsoever. Even though I havent been able to completely win over my fear,at least I have been able to put off facing it, and that is enough.

When a mother conceives a child and this mother has assimilated from her ownmother and father the basic choice of a phallic identity, in response to the problem of death, obviously her goal is going to be how she can kill her childs desire for freedom.

This goal strikes the child from as early on as the embryonic and fetal stages. It is therethat the childs hatred for its mother begins, and it is there that the child begins torepress its hatred, due to the presence of its love both for its mother and for itself.

Repressed hatred is a defense mechanism. If on one hand it creates a splitting, onthe other it also assures that the process of symbiotic union will continue, which is aprocess that is absolutely indispensable in the development of fetal and post-fetal life. Butthis union, in this manner, is created around the phallus of the mother, which is thepower with which she invades and violently penetrates her childs life so she can possessit, and make it her shield against death.

The childs life is then structured, on one hand, around its hatred for the mothers

phallic violence, and on the other it is based on the assimilation of the same phallicidentity. This comes about through the defense mechanism known as identification withthe aggressor.

Then, when faced with the fear of death, the child, too, assimilates the solutionthat the mother has adopted, and will try to kill the mother.

From trying to kill the mother to trying to kill life the distance is very short, andpractically ineluctable.

Our era is just one step away from doing this in a completely irreparable way,

unless we stop ourselves in time.

If these ideas of mine seem to be very difficult to verify and you feel that you cannotaccept them, reflect for just a minute about what happens when you use the power to

judge and condemn your partners, your parents or your childrens actions.

Isnt a condemning type of judgment a way to kill someone because of your ownrefusal to face the death of some part of your own way of thinking, and your own way of looking at life?


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And how many times a day is your mind busy with such judgmentalcondemnations and death sentences?

Do some research in this direction, and there you will find the presence of yourphallic identity.

If you want to free yourselves of it, now you will know what you can tell yourselves:an artist is someone who faces death and who transforms it into life for themselves andfor others.

A phallic person is one who is afraid of creatively facing death and so decides to killthemselves and others as well.

If by chance you want to start becoming artists in this very moment, I beg you tonot kill me with your judgments and condemnations for what I am proposing to you here;face the death of your old ideas and your old identity creatively, and give birth to a new

way of living.


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What does Life as a Work of Art Mean for Me?

When I came into life we were in the midst of a full-blown war and my firstimprinting came from that: the fear of death, physical and moral violence, horror, terror, acontinuous feeling of guilt, life to be hated and castrated in every way and desire.

We all know that once we acquire certain imprinting we can overcome it only withgreat difficulty.

In this kind of landscape, thinking of life as a work is like saying: lets grow rosesin the desert or cultivate flowers on a glacier.

And even so, when I came to know about Sophia-Analysis and how it was invitingme to live life as a work of art, I immediately held on to this hope and I committed myself fully to the realization of this project that seemed like a complete absurdity.

After having dedicated many years to this goal I still have not completely changedmy imprinting. It would be absurd for me to hope to do so. But I have built many newones to set alongside the old ones, day by day, with tenacity and perseverance. I have

never given up, even though I have often felt discouraged and disheartened.

Life as a work of art has meant and continues to mean for me that I mustcontinually make a synthesis of opposites, which in my case are:

Life and death,

hatred for life and love for life,

Presented by Paola Mercurio at the IV National Congress of the Sophia University of Rome in Milan, Italy, in September 1985, and published for the first time in French, in my book La vie comme oeuvre dart,

Sophia University of Rome, 1988.


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a closing into trauma and an opening out of it,

bit by bit, so as to exhaust its power;

fear of life and a desire for life,

fear of others:

- everyone is an enemy

and the desire to encounter others:

the horror of anything dirty, ugly and evil

and the enjoyment of what is pleasurable, beautiful and good:

the terror of violence and of being invaded by others

and trust in others ability to love.

I havent made Penelopes shroud, nor have I invented the art of counterpoint. Iam making my Persian carpet and I have before me a great mess of threads and patterns;I know that I will see the totality of its beauty when I will have finished.

This will be my work of art.


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CHAPTER II

Choral Group Research on Life as a Work of Art

(text only)

How should we educate our children?

What ideals and goals should we transmit to them?

What should we teach them regarding life?

We want to educate them and make them full of energy, capable of earning money andbeing successful. This is fine, but what then?

Do you want to unconsciously force them to live so as to satisfy your needs that have notbeen satisfied?

Health, money, attachment to the family and a good reputation: are these the only thingsthat you hope for your children?

Cant you imagine something more?

If you have been attracted to the adventures of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, aspoetically described by Richard Bach, maybe you will also be attracted to the adventuresof life as a work of art that I want to propose to you.

Make your children into artists capable of living their life like one great work of art.

What does that mean?

What does that mean in practical terms?

This was originally a paper presented in a conference in Prato, Italy, on April 30th, 1987.


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If you start to learn to do it for yourselves, you will become precious role models for your children to imitate.

First of all we must ask ourselves: what is a work of art?

And how can we become artists?

Everyone who wants to become an artist first of all signs up to follow art courses. There, by following the masters of the past as well as the present, one learns what art is, what techniques one must perfect and how one must work with constant discipline andtenacity, day after day, to reach the goal of art.

Do art courses exist for learning to become artists of your own life?

They do exist and they are organized by the Sophia University of Rome and itsInstitutes.

One needs talent as well as an education to become an artist.

What kind of talent does one need to become an artist of their own life?

It takes the courage to be authentically oneself,

the decision to want to learn about ones deepest self

and the decision to learn to love oneself, love others and be loved, in freedom and in truth .

What is a work of art?

Take a block of marble, transform it with your labor and give it a shape that inspiresadmiration for its beauty, its strength and for the life that you have been able to instill in itand you will have created a work of art.

If you do this with any type of matter: wood, bronze, weaving, stone etc. ... you willhave created other works of art.

Now take your life and work on it in such a way as to imprint upon it a new shape, whichis original and which expresses beauty, strength and harmony and you will have made


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your life into a work of art. You will have saved it from the banality of daily life and by theanonymity of the masses.

Otherwise, lets take the example of a musical instrument: a violin, a standup bassor an entire orchestra. Someone who knows nothing about it would not be able to doanything with them, but an artist who has talent and who has studied at length would beable to pull out a theme, a melody or a symphony.

If we want to, we can imagine our lives like a musical instrument that has fourstrings: the body, the psyche, the I Person and the SELF.

It is a work of art to be able to harmonize these four strings and make music withthem.

If you want to try to do so then you must learn to:

- experience and understand the Corporeal I ,

- experience and understand the Psychological I ,

- experience and understand the SELF , the Personal SELF , the Choral SELF and the Cosmic SELF ,

- experience and understand the I Person .

In the movie Ben Hur we are shown the idea of how each one of us has four horsesthat we must harmonize if we want to win in the race of life. This is an idea that I reallylike and I would like you to see this film or at least the part that shows the race.

Once we have learned to understand and explore these four strings, or these fourfabulous horses, the first thing we must do is create harmony between the I Person and the SELF.

This harmony, which is a fundamental one, will guide us and give us the pushtowards all the other possible harmonies found in human life.

Life as a work of art means living in harmony with oneself, with others and with life.

It is an even greater work to know how to produce harmony around oneself.


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Inner harmony emits vibrations that irradiate outwards and are perceptible fromoutside ourselves.

Inner and outer music are two indispensible elements for a better quality of life.

But be careful, because the obsession to obtain moral perfection and the type of continualfeeling of guilt that comes from it restrict life to only one relationship: that between the I

with the Super Ego and the Ideal I , which produces a cacophony that does not allow theproduction of any type of music or harmony, nor does it allow us to listen with pleasure.

What do we have to do to free ourselves of this obsessive, deafening cacophony?

Can the help of a group be an effective answer? Our experience tells us that it can,as long as the group is structured in the following manner:

a) the group is a place where the ideal of perfection is demolished through a process of implosion and explosion;

b) the group is a place where one can experience the body, the psyche, the SELF and theI Person and learn how to refine the ability to listen to each one of these four voices;

c) the group is a laboratory where one can listen to ones own music (deep emotions,both ones own and those of others);

d) the group is a privileged space where one can train the I Person to make decisions;

e) the group is a place where one can unify all ones various parts and synthesize all theopposites in life, while learning how to respect the rhythm of the dialectical processinherent in every growth process;

f) the group is a source of truth, freedom, love and creativity and of the joy that springsfrom the unification and utilization of these four specific types of energy;

g) the group is a concentration of higher energies that alone are capable of helping uslearn what our historical essence and existence is and what kind of power we have totransmute them into a new essence and a new existence.

This transmutation is part of the creative act that produces a work of art.

Marble has its own essence and existence before it is worked on by a sculptor andafterwards it acquires a new essence and a new existence: the ones that the artist iscapable of instilling in it.


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CHAPTER III

Choral Group Research on Life as a Work of Art

with an introduction and commentary (text in italics)

I have my paper written out, but first I would like to talk off the cuff about themain concepts I would like to share with you, and then I will read my paper.

As you can see there is also a television; I will have you watch a segment of a film(Ben-Hur) and I will share with you some ideas I think are important there.

The essential concept I want to share with you is this: you all know what an artistis; an artist is someone who works on something, for example marble, stone, wood orbronze and creates works of art. Or an artist can be someone who has a musicalinstrument, such as a violin, a trumpet or a guitar and is capable of playing music onthat instrument which is also a work of art.

What I want to ask you is this: do you think it is possible to apply the field of art, which artists have created over many centuries of human history, to our personal lives? Isit possible to live as though our very life were a musical instrument and we were asked toproduce music and harmony with it?

Is it possible to make such a leap?

And the second question is: is it possible today to not only study this step forourselves, but to also pass it on to our children or to the children we work with?

Is it possible, in this historic moment where there is a collapse of many ideals andit is not clear what ideals we can grasp on to so our lives have meaning, so young peopleslives have meaning, so our childrens lives have meaning as they grow up, to propose tothem a new ideal such as life as a work of art? And if this is possible, how can we do so?

This is what I want to address in this paper.

I know that many things are quite heavy and a bit difficult to assimilate right awayand that is why I have decided to first write and then read to you. While we go forward I

will stop every once and a while and explain some things better. Afterwards, during thequestion and answer period, you can ask me questions and I will better elaborate on what

This was originally a paper presented in a conference in Prato, Italy, on April 30th, 1987.


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Everyone who wants to become an artist first of all signs up to follow art courses.There, by following the masters of the past as well as the present, one learns what art is,what techniques one must learn to perfection and how one must work with constant discipline and tenacity, day after day, to reach the goal of art.

Do art courses exist for learning to become artists of your own life?

They do exist and they are organized by the Sophia University of Rome and its Institutes.

One needs talent as well as an education to become an artist.

What kind of talent does one need to become an artist of their own life?

It takes the courage to be authentically oneself,

the decision to want to learn about ones deepest self

and the decision to learn to love oneself, love others and be loved, in freedom and in truth.

What is a work of art?

Take a block of marble, transform it with your labor and give it a shape that inspires admiration for its beauty, its strength and for the life that you have been able to instill in it and you will have created a work of art.

If you do this with any type of matter: wood, bronze, weaving, stone etc. ... you will have created other works of art.

Now take your life and work on it in such a way as to imprint upon it a new shape, which is original and which expresses beauty, strength and harmony and you will have made your life into a work of art. You will have saved it from the banality of daily life and by the anonymity of the masses.


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Otherwise, lets take the example of a musical instrument: a violin, a standup bass or an entire orchestra. Someone who knows nothing about it would not be able to do anything with them, but an artist who has talent and who has studied at length would be able to pull out a theme, a melody or a symphony.

If we want to, we can imagine that our lives are like a musical instrument that has four strings: the body, the psyche, the I Person and the SELF.

It is a work of art to be able to harmonize these four strings and make music with them.

If you want to try to do so then you must learn to:

- experience and understand the Corporeal I,

- experience and understand the Psychological I,

- experience and understand the SELF, the Personal SELF, the Choral SELF and the Cosmic SELF,

- experience and understand the I Person.

In the movie Ben-Hur we are shown the idea of how each one of us has four horses that we must harmonize if we want to win in the race of life. This is an idea that I really like and I would like you to see this film or at least the part that shows the race.

Observe carefully the first scenes of this film.

As soon as the horses appear watch Ben-Hurs behavior with his horses.

Look at the four horses and at Ben-Hur on the chariot.

These are the preparations for the race that will be held later on.

What I want you to observe carefully is how Ben-Hur goes up to each horse and how hespeaks to them.


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Each one is named after a star: Aldebaran, Righel, Antares ...

Look at how Ben-Hur manages to enter into deep contact and get on to the same wavelength with each of the horses.

Those who have seen the film will remember the story of the conflict between Messala andBen-Hur. I would like to ask you to not look at only the directors intention in showing usthis race, his symbolic and artistic intention which has to do with presenting the battlebetween Good and Evil.

I would like to ask you to not read it in this way but rather to look at it as the battle of lifeagainst death and the way death can be overcome.

Not the battle of Good against Evil but lifes ability to overcome and transcend death.

This is possible only if we make our lives a work of art. Works of art have overcome deathand they live forever, even after the artist who has created them has been dead forcenturies or millennia.

This is the theme I would like to suggest while watching the race.

There are nine contestants and nine chariots, each one pulled by four horses.

And here comes Messala.

His horses are all black and he himself is dressed in black, while Ben-Hurs horses are white. Black is a color which symbolizes death and white is a color that symbolizes life.

The wheels on Messalas chariot are doctored.

Just watch and see what it is capable of doing.

And have you noticed that Messala has a whip and Ben-Hur doesnt?

The relationship that Messala has with his horses is a violent one, whereas Ben-Hur

communicates with his horses and has a harmonious relationship with them.

Lets try to reason in this way: the directors artistic intention in making this film, and inparticular in showing us the chariot race, was to tell us: Here, I am showing you asynthesis of what human life is all about.


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The race could very well be the image of what human life is like, of what men and womens lives are like.

What happens?

There is a bit of everything during life.

First of all, our lives must face the problem of death.

We know that we want to affirm our lives, but we also know that there is death and wemust learn how to face this reality, which dominates human life.

Time that keeps on ticking is deaths ally.

In the film, we can see time ticking away in the nine rounds that must be done in theArena during the race.

How often do we say: Life is like an Arena, or The Arena of life?

So we have death, we have time ticking away and then we have unexpected events, wehave traumatic events and all sorts of things that happen; we saw all kinds of thingsduring the race.

Then we have the problem of destructive aggression, of both our own and others wickedness.

Think of what Esther, the female protagonist in the movie, says to Ben-Hur: You have Messala inside yourself . Messala is the Roman horseman dressed in black.

We have to look at life not as a race against other human beings; in this case, the othercontestants represent various parts of life or of ourselves.

We must combat against death, against time, against unpredictable events, againstchaos, against destructive aggressiveness, against evil, the evil that we have within andthe evil that we encounter outside of ourselves.

And then yet again, dont forget, who is it that made their presence known with all their yelling in the Circus?

The whole populace, which was sitting in the seats of the Arena.

How can this be translated in terms of human life?

I would suggest looking at it like this: the continuous, constant torment of other peoples judgment of us and of our actions. In other words, the constant torment of the judgmentthat we ourselves make towards ourselves, about our actions and decisions, that either

we own as how we ourselves are judgmental, or we project it onto others as judgment of


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them. As a consequence we are continuously afraid of others judgment and we arecontinuously conditioned by it.

In what sense conditioned?

Conditioned if we want to make decisions or choices, if we want to authentically beourselves or if, instead, we want to just put on a mask because that way we can betterface judgment.

So, here we have found the symbolic meaning of the populace that is sitting around andis continuously yelling so its presence is felt.

And this we have looked at as being similar to the judgment that continuously yells insideof us and that we hear others yelling at us, by those who are around us and whose

judgment heavily conditions our actions and our lives.

Can you see how many things are present in life and how many things we must face? But

what tools do we have available to do so?

In the film, Ben-Hur had four horses and so did the others.

As I was saying before, the human being has four horses and these four horses can beseen as being the body, the psyche, the SELF and the I Person .

And now I would like to slightly modify what I said so we have an even greater resonance with the scenes in the film.

Lets imagine we have four horses: our body is a horse; our psyche is a horse; then wehave the Personal SELF (which I will define in a minute) as the third horse; the fourthhorse is the Cosmic, Choral SELF . The I Person is the charioteer (I will define this as well).

You all know what the body is, or at least you have an understanding of it that is more orless correct. It may be an approximate definition of the body, but you all know more orless how to recognize the existence of the body.

It is more difficult to understand what the psyche is, or the Psychological I .

When I speak of the psyche I am referring to everything that allows us to feel our desires,our passions, the judgment mentioned above, both our own and that of others, and tomake decisions based on these elements: our desires, our passions and ideals and

judgment of these ideals, both our own and that of others.

The psyche is also mental activity. It is the ability to perceive things through our senses;the psyche is our ability to reason, to think and to fantasize.

How can I help you understand the difference between the psyche and the body?


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Lets try to understand the relationship between these two horses: the body on one side,the psyche on the other.

And now lets introduce the third horse, represented by what I have called the Personal SELF , and the fourth, which is the Choral Self and Cosmic SELF .

What is the SELF in my theory, in my conception of humanity?

You can understand it quickly by looking at it in the following way.

We live on the Earth; the Earth is a planet and it belongs to the solar system.

There is the sun and there are nine planets; the Earth is one of these nine planets.

How does life develop on Earth?

By being in a position where it can receive the rays of the sun; this is the only way thatlife can develop on planet Earth.

Earth has its own elliptical orbit around the sun and it also rotates on itself. According tothe composition of these two elements, the orbit around the sun and the rotation on itself the Earth exposes itself to the suns rays, sometimes more and sometimes less, accordingto the alternation of the four seasons, or of two seasons as is happening in recent timeshere in Italy.

Now lets look at another example.

Right now we are in a room and at the moment we are nearing sunset, so we cannot seethe sun.

If it were morning, who would it depend on to let the sun into this room or to not let it in?

It would depend on whoever should decide to lower the curtains or to raise them, right?

Thus, in this room there is someone who decides whether or not to let the sun in, right?

Said in another way, who is it that decides whether we want to go on vacation at thebeach or in the mountains to get some sun?

We are the ones who decide whether or not to spend the whole day closed up in a room,or to alternate staying inside with going out, and thus expose ourselves to the rays of thesun and receive its energy in such a way that it is good for us and is not so much that itburns us.

And what is it that we do with food?

We nourish ourselves. What does that mean?


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We nourish ourselves with all the energy that the sun has concentrated in the food weeat. The foods we eat are full of solar energy; this is why they are nourishing. Otherwisethey would not be.

It depends on us whether to allow the sun into our lives or not, and how much we let it in

, whether it be a lot or a little.If you have understood this so far, now try to make this next step.

Imagine that there is a solar system inside each one of us. Imagine that there is a sun within us, and that there is a subject within each one of us that can make the decision tocontact our own sun and how often to do so.

What does this mean?

This means that I call the SELF the sun, and it corresponds to the sun in our solarsystem.

Within each of us there is an energy, a solar center full of the energy of freedom, of creativity and of purposefulness. All the projects we want to carry out in our lives arefound within our SELF , in our sun, and all the energy that we need to realize theseprojects is also found there.

Now, the problem is this: if we have been taught since we were children to learn to listendeeply to ourselves, to come into contact with our SELF , then we will know how to live ourlives.

If instead we have not been educated to cultivate this type of communication with our

SELF things become much more difficult; sometimes we know how to recognize it andlisten to it, and others we end up spinning around like a top.

Thus we have to undertake a learning process, if it has not been taught to us already, so we can understand how to contact our SELF , our inner sun that is deep within us. Thistype of contact generally happens through our intuition and not through rationality.

Rationality belongs to the psyche, whereas intuition belongs to the realm of the SELF andis the SELFs way of communicating with us.

With whom, exactly?

With what I have called the I Person .

What is the I Person ?


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The I Person is the charioteer who holds the reins of the four horses, it is the one whodecides how to steer them, how to harmonize them or whip them; how to get them to runor how to stop them.

The charioteer is what I call the Personal Subject, the I Person, the I that decides how to

communicate with each one of these four horses.Lets look now at the fourth horse, the Cosmic SELF .

What is the Cosmic SELF ?

Earth is part of our solar system and our solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy andthe Milky Way is just a tiny little part of the Universe.

Why so small? Compared to us it is enormous; it has billions and billions of stars. Butcompared to the Universe, where there are still billions and billions more galaxies, it isvery small.

We are all part of the life of the Universe.

The life of the Universe, which we cannot separate ourselves from, represents the Cosmic SELF , the fourth horse; we are at one with the Universe, because together we make upone living organism. Through our Personal SELF we are connected with the Cosmic SELF ,as long as we want to maintain this connection and not destroy it.

If you have been following me since the beginning, when I told you that it is possible tomake our lives a work of art, I will here say that it is yes possible, if we learn to harmonizeour four horses, which are the body, the psyche, the Personal SELF and the Cosmic SELF .

All these must be guided by the I Person , the charioteer, represented in the film by Ben-Hur.

As I pointed out earlier, from the very beginning Judah Ben-Hur has a specialrelationship with his horses. He has a relationship of love. He loves all four of his horses;he doesnt prefer one over any of the others, he loves all four of them and he asks the fourto love each other, to be harmonious among themselves, otherwise they cannot win therace.

Then, during the race his approach is not one of violence. He does not use his whip likeMessala and the others do: he encourages them lovingly.

Lets try to bring this, too, into relation with ourselves.

We can use violence against ourselves, besides all the violence that others perpetrateupon us. We must reflect on the violence we perpetrate against ourselves, because theviolence we do to ourselves is much greater than what others do to us.

Previously I gave you an example of how the psyche can use violence against the body.Another example of how we have been violent towards our bodies is how we have decided


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for centuries that the body is the seat of wrong, the seat of evil, and so we have felt wehad to punish it, mortify it and whip it; we had to continuously do penitence and negatethe life of the body, because only by doing so we would be saved from guilt.

Today we dont use this type of violence, but we use many other types. For example, what

kind of food do we give our bodies today? What is the quality of the foods we eat?Everything is polluted.

What is the quality of the air we give our bodies?

It is almost all polluted.

What is the relationship between our bodies and the environment, between our bodiesand the natural world?

We force ourselves, at times, to sit on a chair for eight hours, or to stay in the same place

for eight hours, uncaring of the tools we have available to help us work less or to help ustake care of our physical health.

Can we affirm that today we express a true love for our bodies, for the life of our bodies? Idont think so.

Now lets look at what we have called the Personal SELF and the Cosmic SELF .

What do we do with these two horses?

Are we aware that they exist?

For many of us they are completely unknown entities; we were not taught that we havethese energies, that we have these important abilities within us. Nor were we taught what

we can do to create harmony with these energies within us, with this creativity that lies within our inner sun, our Personal SELF , or with the creativity found in the human groupthat we live with.

At the very least we have been taught to either defend ourselves from others or to attackothers, but not to live harmoniously with others.

And now, lets examine the I Person .

Have we been taught to properly use the I Person , this Subject that is within us, that weare, and that is able to make decisions that are of fundamental importance for our lives.

What are our most important decisions?

Life, both in our inner life and in our relationships, is constantly challenging us to makedecisions that can be based on either love or hate towards ourselves or towards others.


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In this case, training the charioteer to steer the chariot means training ourselves to beable to understand what decisions based on love we must make, what decisions based onhatred we have made in the past or that we are making in the present, and learning howto reason wisely with ourselves and say: Do I really need to make this decision based on hatred? In this moment, am I loving myself? Am I making decisions based on love of myself

and my life that are necessary for me? Or, instead, am I hating myself?

By continuously training ourselves to understand whether we are making decisions basedon love or on hate we become good charioteers.

Then, by becoming capable of communicating with our four horses, we are able to perfectourselves as charioteers, ready to take on the race of life.

What follows is another part of my paper and after this we will open up the question andanswer period.

Once we have learned to understand and explore these four strings, these four fabulous horses, the first thing we must do then is create harmony between the I Person and the SELF.

This harmony, which is a fundamental one, will guide us and give us the push towards all the other possible harmonies found in human life.

Life as a work of art means living in harmony with oneself, with others and with life.

It is an even greater work to know how to produce harmony around oneself.

Inner harmony emits vibrations that irradiate outwards and are perceptible from outside ourselves.

Inner and outer music are two indispensible elements for a better quality of life.

But be careful, because the obsession to obtain moral perfection and the type of continual feeling of guilt that comes from it restrict life to only one relationship: that between the I with the Super Ego and the Ideal I, which produces a cacophony that does not allow the production of any type of music or harmony, nor does it allow us to listen with pleasure.


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Here I would like to explain what the Super-Ego and the Ideal I are.

It is actually very simple, just a bit ago I spoke to you about how we are conditioned byothers judgments of us and by our own judgment of ourselves. In psychoanalytical terms,

we would say that when we are children we introject our parents judgments as well as

the judgment of the society in which we live.

Freud described this introjection as being the Super-Ego, that is, something thatoverpowers the Ego and imposes itself on the Ego in an oppressive, authoritarian manner,both for good and for bad.

Why both for good and bad?

Because there are authoritarian judgments from our parents or from surrounding societythat are positive, for example when a parent tells a child, dont go near the electrical

socket because you can get killed.

This is a positive judgment, a positive imposition.

But if a parent says: Dont ever go out of the house to play because there are cars and you could get hurt, this is a judgment that stands between positive and negative. It is positivein the sense that it wants to preserve the childs life, but it is negative because it imposesa type of castration that will have no end, in that it keeps the child from interaction withthe external world, with other people.

And then there are judgments that are clearly negative: Dont do this, dont do that. Why

are they negative? Because they are unfair? No, the reason they are negative is becausethey are imposed because It bothers me, and the me who is the father or the mother oran authority decides whether things are good or bad based on what affect it has on them.When it bothers them then it is bad, when it doesnt bother them its good.

Here there is plenty of room for a long series of negative judgments that, once they areintrojected, become our Super-Ego, which at this point is also persecutory, since itpersecutes us continuously.

The Ideal I is that which we are not, but we expect ourselves to become at all cost.

We expect ourselves to be perfect, we expect ourselves to be good, we expect ourselves tonever make any mistakes, we expect ourselves to never commit any wrongs. And if someone dare tell us Its your fault, the answer can only be No, its your fault. TheIdeal I is what we build up within ourselves and through it we say: I am perfect, I am immaculate, I am not guilty of anything, I am good, intelligent, and beautiful and to heck with anyone who questions it.


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The Super-Ego and the Ideal I alone make more noise than the whole crowd that was inthe arena and was yelling to urge the contestants on or to condemn them.

If our life becomes occupied by all this noise, it is impossible to make music and createharmony.

What do we have to do to free ourselves of this obsessive, deafening cacophony?

Can the help of a group be an effective answer? Our experience tells us that it can,as long as the group is structured in the following manner:

i) the group is a place where the ideal of perfection is demolished through a process of implosion and explosion;

These are not difficult words. Implosion means the ability to increase our trust inourselves and to accumulate judgments that are positive.

But these positive judgments can become negative ones if for all our lives we stay stuck inthe implosion of this type of judgment: that I am perfect, good, intelligent, without guilt, Inever make mistakes etc. etc..

If we leave inside ourselves only the phenomenon of the implosion, or of the accumulationof these judgments, and we never go on to the phase of explosion, which is how we blowthese judgments up, we end up ruining our lives.

Life needs this type of dialectical process, it needs to on one hand build up the ideal of perfection and on the other hand it must be able to blow it up, at the right time and in theright way.

We need both implosion and explosion.

Where can we learn to do this?

We can learn in a group of Sophia-Analysis.

Here it is important that I explain why everything becomes negative if we stay stuck in thephase of implosion.

The reason this happens is because this is the best way that we can find to build a maskfor ourselves and end up living in such a way that is not authentic. We become false andfull of lies, towards ourselves and towards others.


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If we build our lives on falsehood and lies, do you think this is a life well lived?

By the same token, if in the beginning of our lives, before we are aware of our potential, we dont build up any type of judgment regarding perfection, this would not be a life lived well either.

The dialectical process requires that we build on one hand the ideal of perfection and onthe other, when it is the right time to do so, we are capable of blowing it to pieces, of overcoming and transcending it.

Otherwise we become masks of ourselves, and not human beings who live their lives withauthenticity and who know how to interact with others in an authentic and gratifyingmanner.

j) the group is a place where one can experience the body, the psyche, the SELF and the I Person and learn how to refine the ability to listen to each one of these

four voices;

I completely agree with you that it is not easy to get to know these four horses that I havedescribed.

In group work done appropriately, it is possible to learn to understand these four horsesof ours, or rather these four strings that we are made up of and which we must make ourlifes harmony with.

k) the group is a laboratory where one can listen to ones own music .....

What is our music? It is:

...... deep emotions, both ones own and those of others..

With the help of a group we can eliminate all the noise and connect, at a profound level of communication, with ourselves. We can start feeling our deepest emotions; this is whathearing our own music is about.


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When we feel the deep emotions of others that are expressed in the group, this is likehearing other peoples music and resonating and harmonizing with this other music.

l) the group is a privileged space where one can train the I Person to make decisions;.

All decisions, no matter what they are, can be boiled down to essentially two types. Theyare either decisions based on love or decisions based on hatred.

There are no half-way decisions; whatever we decide regarding our lives or the lives of others either comes from love or it comes from hatred. There is no escaping this reality.

Learning how to recognize when we are in fact making decisions based on love and when,

instead, we are making decisions based on hatred, so we can reinforce the former andeliminate the latter, is also an important process that can be developed in the groupcontext.

m) the group is a place where one can unify all ones various parts and synthesize all the opposites in life, while learning how to respect the rhythm of the dialectical

process inherent in every growth process;

This might be something that is a bit more difficult to explain.

What is a dialectical rhythm?

Earlier on I gave you an example when talking about the implosion and explosionregarding the Ideal I.

Try to assimilate the following idea: we absolutely cannot grow in a linear fashion.

A linear process means: If I want to be good, I must be good always., If I want to be intelligent and able I must always be intelligent and able..

Linear process means going along the same line from a minimum to a maximum, withoutinterruption. There is no possibility for me to go over to another line and explore mynegative qualities.

And why should we explore our negative traits?

It is very important that we do so, and I will explain why.


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n) the group is a source of truth, freedom, love and creativity and of the joy that springs from the unification and utilization of these four specific types of energy;

o) the group is a concentration of higher energies that alone are capable of helping us learn what our historical essence and existence is and what kind of power we have to transmute them into a new essence and a new existence.

This transmutation is part of the creative act that produces a work of art.

Marble has its own essence and existence before it is worked on by a sculptor and afterwards it acquires a new essence and a new existence: the ones that the artist is

capable of instilling in it.

And, finally, the last point:

p) the group is like a star, where the same life processes of a star are reproduced,which are: condensation, collapse and thermonuclear reaction.

Our sun is a star that was created through a process of condensation, concentration,collapse, explosion and thermonuclear reactions, where hydrogen atoms fuse togetherand become helium atoms. They then free different types of energy, light energy, thermalenergy, kinetic energy, etc.

To conclude with again taking from the previous chapter :

How often have you called your children: my little star?

When they were little it was easy to say this to them. Then they grow up and become turbulent, difficult, restless, rebellious, lazy and unwilling to do anything. How difficult it is to now call them my little star.


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You probably dont know that stars are also turbulent and restless, but they never lose sight of their purpose which is to shine and give energy to the whole cosmos.

Dont lose sight of your purpose, which is to make your children into artists of their lives, to make your children into stars that shine their own light for themselves, for you and for others.

Keep on working on this, dont give up when you come up against difficulties and the big and little dramas of life; keep your ideal high for yourselves and for your children.

Stars continuously die and are reborn: this is why they live forever.

Try to learn their secret and teach it to your children.

Follow the example of the stars, you yourselves have within you the same purpose and the same creative ability as the stars.

Astrophysics tells us that we are all children of the stars. The atoms that we are made up of were created by the stars over billions of years.

We are all stardust and not mud. And inside ourselves we carry an infinite quantity of energy of truth, of love and of freedom.

Its true, we do not yet know how to use this energy wisely and often we use it wrongly and we hurt ourselves and we hurt others terribly as well.

If we want to follow the ideal of becoming artists of our lives so we can teach it to our children, perhaps we will know how to better use our energies and we will also learn how to artistically compose evil with good and pain with joy.


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CHAPTER IV

The Religious Conception of the World

and the Sophiartistic Conception of the World

THE RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD

The pre-Christian religions generally follow this basic scheme:

In the beginning of the universe there was order,

then came disorder,

so we have to re-establish order

and this is the task of religion.

The Jewish religion has this basic scheme:

First there was order (the creation and paradise)

and then there was Adam and Eves wrong, which was followed by divine curses and

divine promises.

Order will be re-established with the coming of the Messiah.

While waiting for the coming reign of the Messiah,

This paper was written as a comment on the film Mission , in March 1988, and published in my book Lavita come opera darte e la vita come dono spiegate in 41 film, {Life as a work of art and life as a gift explained in41 films} Sophia University of Rome, 1995, and here slightly modified.


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it is necessary to make use of punishment, revenge,

mercy, to find a scapegoat , and finally,

to create a pact between God and his chosen people.

This is how the concept of an elite is born and this is the basis on which every type of

future racism is justified.

The fear of God is also born and with it the fear of divine judgment is consolidated.

The Christian religion adopts the basic scheme of the Jewish religion and it transforms it

in the following manner:

The Messiah has come and order has been re-established through the Redemption of

Christ.

Now penitence, restoration, forgiveness and participation in the divine order that Christ

has restored become possible.

Adam and Eves wrong is a felix culpa {a happy guilt} (Saint Augustine), because it

introduces the divine in what is human through the Incarnation and the Redemption.

But the order of the Redemption is not for everyone.

Many are called to it but there are few who will be chosen.

Universal judgment will separate the good from the evil forever.

Therefore the kingdom of grace is born but so is the kingdom of terror.

The universe of guilt becomes larger

and the universe of terror is expanded,

so that the universe of Grace and Redemption can triumph.

It was this way for more than a millennium,

but today grace has disappeared and only the violence of terror remains

and the violence of feeling guilty,


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create the miracle of a new artistic creation, which is superior to that which existed

before. They have created the Sophiartistic conception of the world, whose basic scheme

is:

order>disorder>artistic creation = a type of order which is superior to the order and

disorder that already exist.

In this conception evil is still a felix culpa ,

not because it calls for the Redemptor but because it invokes the artist,

the artist of Sophia-Art, the creator of life as a work of art,

instead of the creator of nature or the restorer of the order of grace.

By being able to contemplate life, that is gradually transformed into a work of art through

an intensive effort, these people contact a new creation, a new order: divine harmony that

flows out from the laws of life and from the purpose of the Personal, Group and Cosmic

SELF . And all this blends together and becomes possible through the actions of the I

Person , both the individual one and the group one.

The evil that the individual must face when living his or her life as a work of art can be

metaphysical evil (nothingness and limitation), physical evil and moral evil.

For the Sophia-Art artist, every type of evil is essentially seen as a source of energy that

can be used to create a new order, a new type of beauty, new harmony and new life.

The more Sophia-Artists are capable of blending many different types of energies and

including them in their work of art, the more successful they are.


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Their main problem is not how to control evil or how to make amends for it (even though

this remains a task that must be undertaken), but what they can create and how they

can create from nothingness, from emptiness, from evil, with the energy that comes from

nothingness, from emptiness and from evil.

It is no longer necessary to continuously judge, condemn and separate.

It is instead necessary to compose and recreate, by unifying and transmuting.

In this way the problem of guilt and of salvation from it is solved.

Humans must no longer be saved or save themselves.

They must only recreate themselves, working constantly towards making their lives a

work of art.

The reign of judgment and terror comes to an end.

The reign of continual creativity is born.

The reign of entropy comes to an end

and the reign of inexhaustible energy, the type

that pertains to every true, authentic work of art, is born.

There are no more good and evil, saints and sinners,

but artists hard at work, intent on creating,

individually and together,

not like in the times of the Egyptian pyramids

or the Gothic cathedrals,


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because now, if everyone is an artist,

there are no more slaves nor masters, damned or chosen,

but only people who are free and creative, despite their traumas and their

conditioning, their vices and their virtues, and these people are connected to each other

not by terror or by money but by a new way of living art: art applied to life and not just to

paintings and instruments.

No longer are religion, art, philosophy and science separate fields,

but religion, philosophy, science and art are fused together, and they become one, a

completely new reality, at the time of their fusion.

No longer is God on one side and humanity on the other

There is the universe and the artist, humanity and Sophia-Art.

Now the choice is no longer between grace and guilt

But between human beings that want to become artists of their lives

and artists of the life of the universe

and human beings that prefer to remain cultural animals;

between human beings who want to become Persons and Sophia-Artists

and human beings who demand to become God and they dehumanize and alienate

themselves with the ideal of perfection and theomania

and the will to dominate,

which leaves them panting to try to become the masters of the world, of the earth and of

other peoples lives.


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CHAPTER V

The Cosmological Vision of Sophia-Art

(text only)

The cosmologies that we are familiar with so far in our history are of four types:mythological, religious, philosophical and scientific. Generally these cosmologies werecreated independently from one another. Sophia-Art poses the question of whether it ispossible to create a new one, and blend together elements that pertain to religion,philosophy, science and art.

Lets take this affirmation as a basic assumption: just as ontogenesis mirrorsphylogenesis, the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, so by understanding the microcosm

we can reach knowledge of the macrocosm.

By macrocosm we here mean the universe. By microcosm here we are referring tothe human being, because it seems that we can say with sufficient certainty the humanbeing represents the most complete microcosm in comparison to all the other microcosmsthat exist in nature.

We also have much more knowledge about this microcosm than we do about anyother microcosm. In fact, while we do have inner knowledge of the human experience, noone will ever be able to give us inner knowledge of other living organisms.

Does following such criteria mean that we are building an anthropomorphiccosmology?

Its obvious that we run such a risk and we must continuously check ourselves soit doesnt happen. The best way we can avoid this from happening is to base our research,

as mentioned above, on the ability to unite the essence of this subject as explained byreligion, philosophy, science and art, where each explanation both corrects the others andintegrates them.

This paper was presented for the first time in French, during an international congress of scientistspertaining to various fields, near Marseilles, in autumn of 1988. It has already been published in Italian in themagazine Persona, n. 16, in December 1989, in an issue that sold out almost immediately.


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For example, its obvious that a cosmological vision that doesnt take the dataoffered by physics and astrophysics into account would have absolutely no value. But bythe same token, it would not be of much value if only these scientific approaches wereutilized and others were ignored.

Here we want to affirm that every world view that is created by looking at only onetype of data, be it religious or philosophical or scientific, produces a view that is fallible.

This is the case because it would be a view that is both true and false at the same time, it would always be incomplete and reductionist, and it could never explain the complexity of the universe all by itself.

The point of view expressed in Sophia-Art makes sense in that it allows us to:

a) proceed in a dialectical manner;

b) blend together the contributions from other points of view into a unified one byeither purifying them of their falsehoods and keeping their truths, or byconcentrating their contributions through a synthesis of opposites, thusreaching a concentration of truths that will never be linear but will always becomplex;

c) maintain the complexity of the human phenomenon as a constant referencepoint, and thus have a guide that is based on fact and not on unverifiablefantasies.

Point c) establishes what Sophia-Art defines as being its cosmoanthropicprinciple.

The Cosmoanthropic Principle

To every question that we ask about the universe and that at this time does not

have an answer, we will ask an equal one regarding humanity. The answer we consider asbeing valid for humanity we will consider it as being valid for the universe as well. We

will not assume a definitive and acritical position towards the answers we find. Analogiesare precious tools but they must be used heuristically, as an invitation to formulatedaring new hypotheses and as dialectical departure points, not givens.

Scientific discoveries are the fruit of hypotheses and of research that confirmsthese hypotheses, or of theories built upon

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