The Transformative Power of the Arts
One of my favorite movies of all time is in Latcho Drom, a passionate journey through gypsy music and dance that takes us from their ancient origins in India’s Rajasthan desert through their scattering to places like Turkey, Romania, and Spain (where their music and dance flowered into flamenco). The gypsies have long expressed their travails and joys through their performing arts.
In one scene somewhere in Eastern Europe, a young boy and his forlorn mother stand waiting for a train at a desolate station. Across the tracks a group of gypsy musicians are waiting for the same train. The boy sees them, walks across the tracks, hands a coin to one of the musicians, and asks him to play a song for his mother. They seem touched by the boy’s sweet request and concern, and they hand back the coin.
Then the gypsies break into a cheerful song and start dancing. Even the little boy clumsily hops to the catchy rhythm, a huge grin on his face. And as the camera pans to the sad mother, we see her start to laugh and laugh at her son’s adorable, playful antics. She seems transformed by the exuberance of a shared creative spirit.
Seen as outsiders in the far-ranging countries they inhabit, gypsies experience an us-and-them world. Yet the musicians and dancers in Latcho Drom seem to find a way to join up with each other and with their audience through a creative expression that connects them to a joy not defined by their struggles. They find a common pulse. Their arts let us see both the struggle and the separateness, yet they connect despite their differences.
Along the gypsy trail in Granada, Spain, a friend was walking through the town square late one night when he happened upon a gypsy musician composing, on the spot, a heartfelt song of sorrow for his niece, who earlier that day had been in an auto accident. He was waiting to hear if she would survive. He put the anguish in his heart into that song. Two guitarists sat with him, attuning to his heartfelt melody with an empathic musical resonance, sharing his pain.
A Soulful Spirit
I’ve been a student of kathak, a traditional Indian dance, which has some similarities with flamenco in foot patterns, hand movements, and rhythm. Dance historians say both have the same roots in ancient India. I dance freestyle kathak and in the French West Indies became an accidental performer where a gypsy-style flamenco guitarist was playing at a café. I found myself moved by that inspired soulful spirit to get up and start dancing.
The feeling is contagious. People of all ages—kids, adults, elders—sometimes get up spontaneously and dance along with me or play percussion along with the beat. It reminds me of the joyful exuberance in Latcho Drom, and how these arts have the power to inspire the gypsy in everyone—joining up through music and dance. During carnival on that island I once danced down the streets amidst a costumed crowd frolicking to the beat of marching bands. We were all connecting with our inner gypsy. It makes me wonder what it would take to inspire a widespread contagion of this joyful creative spirit.
I was waiting on hold for a business conference call once, listening to the Muzak, which had a lively beat. Without hesitation I hopped up and started to dance some salsa movements around my office. By the time the call went through and we introduced ourselves, I was in an upbeat, playful mood, which I brought right into our conversation.
Growing up in Manhattan I was surrounded by a family of professional entertainers and teachers. The city was like a creative playground, with art museums my after-school habit. I’ve always felt creativity of any sort—brainstorming, lyrical prose, dance, music, visual art—helps us connect with an inner freedom, one where outside-the-box solutions to life’s problems can be discovered.
The expressive arts expand the limits of our sense of ourselves. While dancing, you gracefully reach and extend beyond your ordinary physical boundaries. In music you send outward sounds and rhythms far beyond your usual range of voice. Visual artists share imagined realities; writing sparks creative inspirations beyond the author’s experience.
John Bowlby observed that children only play when they are in the secure mode; any kind of playfulness signals we share that mode. Evolutionary anthropologists say that there are at least two ways for people to share a surge of the pleasure-inducing brain chemical endorphin: laughing together and making music together.1
Art programs in schools offer kids the chance to express the creativity of the secure mode. When New York City schools cut their funding for arts programs after 9/11, my brother—a musical activist who lived in the neighborhood—started a project to bring musical instruments to local schools near his business, the Off Wall Street Jam. He would donate instruments and organize concerts to benefit the schools’ arts programs. “They cut the classes just when they needed the arts the most,” he said.
Can the arts be used to spread positive feeling and educate the emotions? Aesthetic mediums have an immediacy that reaches the emotions without being censored by the rational mind. The arts and a good sense of humor have been connective forces throughout social evolution, enhancers for social bonding. Time and again I’ve seen how the arts can connect us to a larger dimension of our beings and then share that spirit with those around us.
Music doesn’t need anything elaborate to occur. One spring day in Manhattan a street musician was playing a motley collection of objects that are usually thrown away or can be found in a recycling bin: beat-up aluminum mixing bowls, a glass milk bottle, a large industrial-kitchen-size grain bucket, and odds and ends of metal. He was whacking them energetically with a broken stick. But his music was mesmerizing. A large, appreciative crowd gathered around him on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street. He transformed that piece of street into an intimate jazz venue.
Outside a local health food store one day a middle-aged man was drumming a catchy beat on a large bucket. As people left the store, he connected with them, sharing his joyful spirit whether they gave anything to him or not. In a rhythmic sequence without missing a beat he’d nod and say, “Have a good day. Have a good day,” and one after another, each person would walk off smiling.
The arts reveal our common human nature behind a mask of divisive ideologies. Music and dance seem perfect vehicles for this transmission. They dodge our thoughts and target the deeper parts of us that want to move to the beat, to join up. The arts are a force connecting us across divides.
This creative connective force takes us beyond our limited small selves into what in the world of gypsy flamenco is called tener duende (loosely meaning “having soul” or “inspired spirit”), that moment of “olé!” when we share a contagious intensification of genuine feeling and its expression. Or, as it’s put across the Atlantic ocean, “You rock!”
This inspired, creative spirit can help us tap into reservoirs of inner capacities not often available during our habitual routines. Each of us can find our unique connection to this soulful quality.
Some well-known singers dropping by an encampment for a non-violent demonstration asked, “What do you need? Blankets? Food?” One demonstrator called out, “Your music to inspire us!”2
If we called on this creatively inspired quality more often, it could bring benefit to our lives, our communities, and our global family. It will take such an inspired spirit to tap the inner resources we’ll need for the future of our planet and for global relations. We will need heartfelt compassion and countless insights to open us to new possibilities and a greater potential for meeting the challenges of our time.
Of course we need every resource—education, environmental protection, new technologies, new economic models, health programs—but all of those resources will work better if fueled by creative inspiration and motivated by goodwill and concern for the benefit of all. One force that unleashes our vision and gives us the confidence to take innovative risks is an inner safe haven. When we share that, we find strength in creative connections as a herd of sorts, an ever-expanding tribe of humanity coming together for the common good.
The Spirit of Service
Seva is the Sanskrit word for selfless service. That spirit drove the World Health Organization’s efforts to eliminate smallpox; the eradication of this fatal disease was a human triumph. Several founders of the Seva Foundation took part in that global vaccination drive. Others were volunteer cooks serving and caring for the masses at the Woodstock festival in 1969.
My old friend Ram Dass is a Seva founder; his Indian guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taught him about selfless service as a spiritual path. They intend to carry on that spirit of service in this foundation, tackling needless blindness and addressing other basic human needs in the world’s poverty zones.
I was exposed to one face of this spirit of selfless service during my many trips to India, where I saw how humble families shared with a visitor the best of what they had, even when they had very little. We may not be able to help everyone, but each of us can help someone.
As I was growing up I remember my mother’s warmhearted concern for people going through challenging life situations. She would look after them and do what she could to help them. In my own small way I try to give back through my work and service projects. Compassion is a reflex of the heart.
For the thirtieth anniversary of the Seva Foundation, an A-list of musical activists on a larger mission donated their time for a benefit concert in Oakland, California.3 I offered to make flower arrangements for the dingy dressing rooms and backstage greenroom as well as two giant floral displays for the front of the stage—about thirty arrangements in total.
I have studied Japanese flower arranging, but I was clueless about how to operate at this industrial level. The enormity of this project left me trusting that some unknown forces would help me.
On an early-morning run to the San Francisco wholesale flower market, as the florist was tallying up the bill for this huge stack of flowers, he asked me, “What is this for?” I told him about Seva’s service projects, which moved him to say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And he went back through the long tally sheet, discounting everything by 10 percent.
On my way back to my Berkeley hotel, I stopped on a whim at a small neighborhood shop to pick up two large vases I still needed. The florist there asked to see the flowers that I needed the containers for, so I brought him out to my rented Jeep, where flowers were spilling out the windows.
He looked at me in disbelief and asked how I planned to store and arrange all these flowers by myself. I told him I would keep the flowers in buckets of water in my hotel room and arrange them the next morning. I told him about Seva and its projects for the health of the poor and how everyone was working hard to benefit this meaningful cause. He seemed moved by the foundation’s humane mission and said he wanted to help too.
He had two guys who worked for him transfer the flowers from my Jeep into his flower cooler for the night. He delivered the flowers the next morning, and then he and his staff put in lots of effort to help me with things like cutting the stems and putting all the blooms in water. And the next day they collected everything after the concert was over. When magically, just an hour or so before the concert’s curtain time, I was given two tickets to the performance, which had been sold out for months, I passed the tickets on to the florist and his girlfriend. That spirit of service is contagious—meaningful fun.
How do we enhance this spirit of service? “Learning is the first step in making positive changes within yourself,” says the Dalai Lama. “Learning and education help develop conviction about the need to change and increase your commitment. Conviction then develops into determination. Next, strong determination leads to action: a sustained effort to implement the changes. The final factor of effort is critical.”4
At a Mind and Life meeting on the ecological crisis there was puzzlement over why, when so many people say they care, so few act. Thupten Jinpa shared Buddhist principles for moving from altruistic motivation to engaged action. He asked, “Why is there a gap between knowing and doing?”
Jinpa’s answer: “Because that knowledge hasn’t been internalized. Only when you internalize it are your values transformed. Then you engage in action from that new state of mind and it becomes a natural habit.”
This sequence, Jinpa says, applies to anything from playing an instrument to social activism—and, I’d add, to working with mindful habit change, whether individual or collective. In beginning with awareness of our aspirations, discernment of the benefits plays a key role. Mindful awareness is a reminder to keep our intentions active, which can build to dedication, commitment, and confidence. This leads to joyful enthusiasm, which energizes action.
Selflessly giving wherever there is need reflects one of the more evolved qualities of the secure, integrated mode and represents a defining trait of the mode of wise compassion. I remember being on an intensive meditation retreat with Sayadaw U Pandita when he asked about my motivation to practice. I said, “I feel that I am not only here for myself but for others as well.”
He smiled and said, “I feel that way too.”
This selfless compassion and natural sense of interconnectedness is a powerful force for good. My teacher, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, once gave a talk on bodhicitta, the mind of compassionate awakening, during a retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We were doing lots of compassion practice in our meditation sessions. But that’s not enough, he said. “We need to act on our compassionate wishes and do something that actually helps others. It all boils down to intention.”
Connecting Through the Arts
For a physical embodiment of connecting through the arts, take the energetic dance of the sixty-something Indian master Chitresh Das paired with the young African American tap star Jason Samuels Smith in India Jazz Suites.
Chitresh Das explains how bols—rhythmic counts of the beat—are the language of the dance.5 He sings the count aloud as he dances an elaborate pattern to the beat of the five pounds of bells wrapped around each of his ankles. As Chitresh dances, Jason recites the traditional rhythmic count ta ki ta tha ka dimi.
A jazz trio takes up the rhythm, improvising within the sixteen-beat cycle, while a trio of Indian musicians’ instruments elaborate within the same rhythmic cycle. Jason jumps in with an intricate tap sequence set to the same complex beat that they are all precisely following with each of their instruments: feet, bells, tap shoes, trap drums, tabla, keyboard, sarod.
The elaborate melodies, the beat, the dance movements all build in intensity, until they culminate in a stirring finale and they all land on a mighty “SUM! ” the first beat of the rhythmic cycle.
Then they start an exhilarating set of call-and-response—kathak and tap in conversation. Chitresh brilliantly improvises elaborate dance rhythms and breathtaking steps while Jason watches attentively, his whole body seeming to absorb the moves.
Without missing a beat, the moment Chitresh’s steps end Jason explodes into a high-energy tap response exactly matching the same rhythm. And as he finishes, he folds his palms together in a respectful Indian-style salutation. Then Jason leads and Chitresh responds. Then Chitresh starts again. And so it goes for a dazzling round of improvised synchronicity.
It’s all superbly coordinated, whizzing by so quickly it can only be done with exquisitely attuned mirror neurons, that radar that instantly activates in one’s brain what it witnesses in someone else. These neurons mirror what’s going on in the person we’re with—especially their movements but even their intentions.
Our mirror neurons resonate, prepping our motor systems to respond. For Chitresh and Jason this resonance has evolved to a fine art. And sitting in the audience, I could feel my body wanting to join in the action—a sure sign that my mirror neurons were stirring. The thrill felt by everyone watching this dynamic duo was mirroring the delight Chitresh and Jason radiated in their dance.
When we feel an engaged rapport with someone else—that sense of attunement at the core of joining up—our mirror neurons are orchestrating a dance as elegant as India Jazz Suites. The crucial first ingredient of rapport’s three ingredients occurs as each person pays complete attention to the other. This tunes in our mirror neurons (and other systems of our brain’s social circuitry).
The second ingredient involves another type of brain cell called an oscillator. Oscillators time our responses to someone (or something) and give us our sense of rhythm. With two people in rapt conversation, their bodies move in what looks like a choreographed dance, each responding to the other instantaneously. I’d bet the oscillators in Jason’s and Chitresh’s brains were working at a furious rate.
The third ingredient of rapport emerges from this physical and emotional attunement: joy. It feels great to be joined up. And joy is contagious. By evening’s end the India Jazz Suites audience was on its feet too, roaring its approval.
Over the course of the evening these two artists from very different cultural traditions connected through the universal language of rhythm, the interplay of their mirror neurons forming a bridge across a divide. This joining up through the arts reminds us how interconnected we already are.
The arts have a way of freeing people from cultural trappings and helping us to appreciate the diversity of cultural differences rather than fight over them. If people are creating inspiring music and playing together, they might just forget about why they don’t get along.
“The arts have the power to communicate messages of freedom and human rights,” says Aung San Suu Kyi, who once said she was a fan of Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer.
Marley’s mother was a black Afro-Jamaican and his father was a white businessman from England. Marley’s father rejected him, and during his childhood he also didn’t feel accepted by the black community because of his mixed heritage.
He found a mission in his music: to bridge such divides. At one point a bitterly fought Jamaican election was leading to gunfights between the two opposing camps in what amounted to a civil war. Marley was invited back to Jamaica from England, where he had been living at the time, to headline a peace concert in Kingston, the capital.
At the One Love Peace Concert—attended by an unprecedented crowd of 100,000—there was an electrifying moment when Marley spontaneously called to the stage the two candidates of the warring parties, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. To a raucous tune with a reggae beat, Marley had the two men shake hands. Then he stood between them and held their arms together in the air. All the while Marley kept singing about making peace, and the crowd roared with approval.
“Me only have one ambition, y’know,” he later said, in Jamaican patois. “I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together—black, white, Chinese, everyone. That’s all.”
From time to time some kindred spirits gather to focus on social or environmental issues, to simply connect people, share resources, or to brainstorm in a gathering of the tribe. Their aim is to find ways to make a meaningful contribution to causes they care about. At a roundtable with one such group of environmental activists, I asked, “What do you think really motivates people to want to make a difference in the world?”
An answer came from Bill McDonough, author of the ecology manifesto Cradle to Cradle: “People want to do something together that is meaningful.”
Victor Frankl, who survived a Nazi concentration camp and lived to found a school of existential psychotherapy, described the human capacity to find meaning even in the most dire conditions. He wrote about suffering, that “its unique opportunity” lies in the ways in which we bear this burden. “Life never ceases to have meaning under any circumstances.6
“To achieve personal meaning,” Frankl says, “one must transcend by doing something that directs it to something, or someone, other than oneself, by giving yourself to a cause or to serve another person.”
When people fight for petty ends or are blinded by ideologies, the Dalai Lama says, they have lost sight of the basic humanity that binds us all together as a single human family. But that requires a new approach to global problems. Because today we are ever more interconnected and interdependent, “we need a sense of universal brotherhood and sisterhood, an understanding that we really are part of one big human family.”
If our sense of self should somehow expand to include all others, we’d have a world that works for everyone. But as long as people remain indifferent to the feelings and happiness of others, achieving a spirit of genuine cooperation remains difficult. Conflicts arise from a failure to understand another person’s shared humanity.
As the world population grows and resources become depleted, we face tragedy. A root cause can be seen in people focusing on their selfish, short-term interests, and losing sight of the rest of the human family, of the earth, and of life as a whole.7
Buddhist psychology sees attachment and aggression—and the underlying ignorance—at the root of these tendencies. The antidotes are love and compassion, “the moral fabric of world peace.”8 With these can come a renewal of essential qualities, such as morality, compassion, decency, and the wisdom that transforms ignorance.
We can hope that with the right education future generations will grow up with these values. In the meantime, we can set an example in our own lives and in our own practices. Two important methods for this, the Dalai Lama says, are self-examination and self-correctives.
There is no single path to this; different people need different approaches. My hope is that mind whispering gives us one way to bring those two methods into our lives.