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“Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.” ~Pablo Picasso
Rules are meant to be broken. It’s one of the oldest aphorisms in human history. But there’s a difference between breaking them like a pro and breaking them like an amateur.
Amateurs have no discipline. They are all chaos and no direction. They have potential but no potency. Their incompetence is outshone only by their ignorance. They break the rules like a toddler having never understood them.
A professional has discipline. They guide chaos into catharsis. Their potential is made poignant by their potency. Their competence leads to curiosity, creativity, and courage. They break the rules like an artist by first learning the rules like a pro.
A true professional digs deep. His (or her) discipline takes him into the nuts and bolts of the universe. What is my place here in this vast cosmos? What does it mean to be healthy despite entropy? What does it mean to be alive in a universe that is mostly not alive?
The rules of the universe are dictated by Universal Law. Alignment with Universal Law requires a deep understanding of what is healthy and what is not. Health is foundational. It’s the core of Universal Law. It’s that which speaks a “language older than words.”
The dance begins by properly interpreting this language. It begins by learning the rules dictated by the universe (often despite your opinions or cultural conditioning). It begins by discerning what is healthy and what is not. It begins by having the discipline to become aware of the rules that cannot be broken (Universal Law) and the rules that must be broken (human laws not in alignment with Universal Law).
As Herman Hesse said, “As anywhere else in the world, the unwritten law defeated the written one.”
Discipline is a sacred alignment with the unwritten law of health. When you align yourself with health, you align yourself with Universal Law. Thus, the sacred dance with the cosmos begins and the professional emerges.
In order to dance, you must have something to dance on. In order to fly, you must have something to fly through. In order to be free, you must have something to be free from.
Fall in line to learn where the lines are drawn. Tether your ego to learn discernment. Keep your shadow in check to learn boundaries. But eventually you must break rank to learn when boundaries must be transformed into horizons.
In your youth it was necessary to fall in line, tether the ego, and keep the shadow in check to achieve discipline; but in your maturity, it is vital that you integrate them in order to achieve wholeness. True wholeness implies a breaking away from cultural conditioning. It implies the integration of opposites. It implies exploration of the unknown. This is where artistry comes in.
The secret is strategically expanding and contracting. Break the rules, expand past your comfort zone, have a painful adventure, then contract back into your comfort zone to heal. Break, expand, venture, contract, heal. Then repeat. Discipline keeps the cycle going.
It’s an iterative dance. And it is meant to be difficult. It’s meant to be challenging. It’s not for the faint of heart. There’s a ruthlessness to it, an existential violence, a self-inflicted quality that strikes the soul. The goody two-shoes must leave their comfy shoes behind. The self-righteous must learn how to be wrong. The snowflakes must learn how to melt. The amateurs must sacrifice their ignorance on the Vesuvian slopes of their discipline,
Learn the rules like a pro in your comfort zone. Then break them like an artist by stretching it. But it’s a deep stretch. A soul-stretch. It will test your character. It will push your beliefs off a cliff. It will toss you naked and screaming onto the unforsaken path of your own Truth Quest.
As Descartes said, “If you would be a real seeker of truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
Breaking the rules like an artist will cause you to doubt all things. But it becomes a sacred doubt, a hallowing howl, a symbolic death. Suddenly you are free in a way that you never thought possible. You are free to question things, to turn tables, to flip scripts, to push envelopes. You are free to wield outlaw magic: to write outlaw words with outlaw symbols on outlaw flags. You are free to be reborn.
This newfound freedom actually reinforces the rules of the cosmos, it strengthens the Universal Law that binds all things. And from the nest of the Phoenix, you see how everything is connected to everything else. Your iteration gives way to cosmic beauty.
As Nietzsche said, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful”
Beauty comes from discipline and creativity. The discipline to align yourself with Universal Law. The creativity to be defiantly Dionysian despite a rigid Apollonian world. The discipline to hold the tension between opposites. The creativity to transform pain into a painting or misery into music or anger into poetry. The discipline to balance chaos and order. The creativity to transform chaos into catharsis.
To make things beautiful, you must learn how to be violent in your art so that you may be peaceful in your life. Indeed, art that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled state is not art at all. As the artist Banksy tagged, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
This is the epitome of learning the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.
Disciplined art transcends the “solid phase” of the Self and moves directly into the “vapor phase” of the Soul, providing a sacred space for healthy introspection regarding the human condition and its place in the universe.
As Frank Herbert wrote, “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
So it goes with audacious art. It’s always one step beyond reason. Just as the artist is one step beyond the professional.
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About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
This article (How to Break the Rules Like an Artist) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.
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