Art can take up your experience and intensify it by deliteralizing it and submitting it to your intelligence and your imagination. The arts humanize the emotion and move it toward the sublime, where it can be brought to a level of perfection.
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Psychology tends to be solar, wanting to bring all things to light, to overcome the darkness and make everything manageable. It wants to banish darkness with any means at its disposal. But no one needs such a harsh cleansing and brightening. It would be better to be deepened and darkened by an experience of the night. You would then become more complex, more interesting, less one-dimensional.
Creativity is not just about making fascinating inventions or great works of art. It has to do with shaping your life and cultivating your very soul.
Over time, you may tell it more effectively, and its sheer beauty will help you and connect you to the people in your life. You will find unexpected pleasure in the aesthetics of your thoughts and words, and that, too, will keep you going deeper, looking for further insights and language.
The experience of beauty is not just one of pleasantness but of the power of an image to give order and to clarify your situation.
When you listen to strong, melancholic music or contemplate a sad piece of art, you are taking your attention beyond mere sensation to the interior meaning of your mood. You are educating yourself in your emotion, so that you not only get past it ultimately, but you gain from it from having penetrated deep into its nature.