38 - A Palate Full of Colors

Imagine you are the artist of your personality. Your personality is your work of art. You are working on it.

To start with, it is not completely your canvas. You inherited it from others; or rather it has passed through many hands, each contributing more features. However even before you got possession of it, you had had some hand at it, since you had influenced the previous artists in some remote way. But now, you are solely in charge, except that you have to watch how people influence you in fashioning it.

           

You have a well-garnished palate at your disposal; displaying a whole flurry of shades. Your eye falls upon a vivid green that yields an impression of vivacity. You remember reading in a book on Sufism that they use a mantram in Arabic to help trigger off that quality; vivaciousness - a life-giving force. It is called Hayy.  Upon gazing at that lush green, you feel recharged, electrified. You feel so full of a life-dispensing power that you could cause the buds of flowers to open up and cure the sick. You daub it on your canvass over some of that non-descript brown, giving it a new gloss. You have dynamized your personality. In fact, you are prancing around your room like a leopard in his cage in want of an outlet for your new-found energy. Hopefully the color will stay, unless of course you spoil it again by one of those dreary moods that come on when unguarded.

Now your glance earmarks that lovely sky-blue. Yes, the sky on your/ my canvass is just too depressingly cloudy. It does not mesh with the bright green you have refurbished your canvas with! There is a clarity about that blue that makes more sense of the green. You hear that blue stands for a kind of immaculate sacredness. That is why the dress and aura of the Virgin Mary are traditionally painted blue. The Sufis thus depict the holy spirit (Quddus), ascribing this epithet to the angels. It is ingenue, cannot stand any artifice, eschews sophistication. You daub it too on the canvass, clarifying your sky with a diaphanous effulgence. All of a sudden, your whole painting lights up.

Can you keep the color? Can you will it to be indelible? Someone comes in the room telling you that she had seen the broach that you had lost on another woman's neck (or was it your pet tie on another's neck?). You are furious. You look back at the canvass: the blue of the sky is smeared. Within a split minute it has been spirited away, it has got murky by your selfish, resentful mood. You try again, promising to guard against ugly thoughts, however justifiable.

Now somehow the lovely golden hue on your canvass strikes your attention. It has a royal quality about it. The glorious golden incandescence has the immediate effect of making you glow. You feel powerful, cosmic. In fact, you now surprise yourself sauntering across your room with a haughty demeanor, head high, bubbling over with self-confidence. You figure yourself as the ambassador of that Being whose body is the universe and sets the pace of evolution by overcoming chaos by orderliness, incongruity by meaningfulness. You are in charge now. As you unwittingly visualize utopic beings ostentatiously manifesting sovereignty, like one would imagine the three wise men, you ponder upon all the reasons why you did not develop that wonderful quality as they did (unless of course you are convinced that you are a master - in which case, I apologize). You figure out that maybe it is because you gave in to compulsions, personal gratification, addictions. Daubed on your canvas, the golden hue confers a sumptuous sheen upon the whole picture. But you soon discover the need to avoid it just being a gaudy glitter.

In fact you wonder whether it would not have been better to have first smeared on the gold as a background, assuming that, that gorgeous radiance would transpire through whatever color you superimposed upon it, conferring upon your painting a rare quality. Assess what this means: effacing unteemed details on the picture and start again! And you are not sure to reproduce what you effaced! Yet somehow you are heartened by the thought that if this is to be your painting rather than that handed by those ancestral people, you are given a chance of updating it the way you like, if you can. It may be an admirable one, but you will wish to make something other of it - imprint it with the hall-mark of your special idiosyncrasies. For example the outlines were too rigid for your liking, you would like to bring in more fluidity, adaptability. Or you would prefer more contrasts. But you do not wish to loose its pristine positive features, all the invested thought and nostalgia and values of all those to whom you are beholden, may be heavenly beings too. It occurs to you that all you have to do is to retain a mental picture of it, and take the plunge.

So with tongue in your cheek, you take courage at heart and wipe out the picture, lay on the gold and start again from scratch! Reflecting upon what this means in terms of your personality, you realize that all that you built up in your being or all that you inherited from your ancestors was precarious if it was not founded upon a masterly spirit of determination, discipline, personal overcoming. Moreover you realize that if you had just added more punch to your personality without it having been deeply grounded in your being by dint of sheer mastery, it would have proven to be a collage, an element that does not mesh with the other aspects of your being. Your personality needs to be organically constructed in synch with all its other constituent qualities.


Now of course the red zooms out stridently at your retinae from your palate. It captures your glance forcibly. It would be very tempting to spurt dashes of red all over the canvas randomly; give it some pep! The effect however would be sloppy, incongruous, like that of a person with bouts of uncontrolled anger interspersed with inveterate weaknesses - a flawed personality. Yet, not without a remote reference to the red scarf to the proverbial bull, the color red does arouse, to put it mildly, a certain vehemence in you. You feel more ready to confront challenges, unmask fraud, flay hypocrisy, unveil a cover-up. You burn with righteous indignation for the falseness, guile, manipulation, deception around you. You feel like righting the wrong, vindicating the innocent. The dervish in you is aroused. The password of the dervish is Haqq: the truth.

Yet too much red, especially in the wrong places can look hideous, unseemly, uncouth, even vulgar and disturbing to sensitive civilized beings. Truth ruthlessly eked out without being blended with compassion can prove to be be cruel, even unwisely destructive. A warm orange would seem to blend nicely with the fierce red as for example in a lovely dawn.

Now, in an other-worldly mood, the many-splendored array of hues on your palate merge in a kaleidoscopic way; somewhat as in a rainbow, yet differently, because they are intermeshed, mutually transpiring through each other in a gossamer effect. How uncanny! Are you living an alternate experience? just tired? or mesmerized? or is your psyche carried into a peak experience by your bewonderment at that marvel of color - the marvel communicated by color?  Perhaps after all the color is just the medium, the device, but what is coming through is more important; it is pure splendor - the splendor out of which the universe is fashioned and which the universe is briefed to display. Remote echoes of the cosmic celebration in the Heavens, manifesting as beauty in nature and as excellence every time you give expression to the higher dimensions of your being on your canvas, perfuse your mind. You have touched upon the keystone of creativity: ecstasy. Again the signature-tune of the dervish: 'Azim', ecstasy arising out of glorification.

If it is excellence that you seek, know that beauty is born of glorification, so is your personality if you wish it to display the splendor behind the universe or rather the splendor trying to transpire though what appears as the universe.
