Why is it that so many musicians and artists suffer from some sort of mental illness? I believe they do because they have tapped into egolesness. I have heard so many artists say that their work doesn’t necessarily come from themselves, it just comes from nowhere. In Buddhism this would be referred to as egolesness, also the place where all creativity comes from. A state that can reached by slowly letting go of your ego through meditation and contemplation. Some people, however, are born with a natural gap in their ego’s, a gap that provides them with the same spontaneous creativity that long term practitioners often have. The big difference with practitioners (people who have worked with their minds for a long time) is that their practice has been holistic and includes their entire being; artists often have huge parts of their personality which are underdeveloped and child-like selfish. I believe that it is this discrepancy which causes them to often suffer like they do. To a lot of artists their creativity is like a hot ball which they can’t seem to handle really well, often causing them to flee into all kinds of harming forms of relaxation such as drugs. In Buddhism it is said that the wide open space in which the master relaxes, can cause the lay man to go mad. So if we experience such products of egolesness, it also forces us to work on the other aspects of our personalities, If we don’t do so, we can indeed go mad.
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