The Curse of Sarasvati

Have you every noticed that many artists/writers die in poverty and despair? How their artwork later becomes incredibly valuable, providing riches for someone who might, or might not, be part of the estate of the original artist?

Objectively, this is impossible. Van Gogh is either brilliant or he is not.

This is not a matter of taste, it’s a matter of programming. It’s a matter of profit. It’s a matter of cruelty by a system that needs a energetic inflow and doesn’t dare allow a creative to profit by their own works. To do so might lead to the creative person gaining influence or power, which could lead to the expansion of ideas. A house of cards might topple. Far better to destroy the dangerous artist through poverty or madness and then take all of their stuff.

This is how our system controls artists. Generally, the artist has only one recourse — to sell their creative talents to the system and be drained dry. I don’t mean that they sell their own products or services. I mean that they work for others who treat them as batteries for ideas, designs, what-have-you, and have the life sucked right out of them.

A creative person might be destined to bring in a spectacular new invention, or a revolutionary  teaching method, or who knows what else. But they will never get the chance if they're destroyed by the very people who claim to have their best interests at heart.

At heart…? I think not. I have seen this at play throughout my entire life. The old stories say that faeries cannot create, they can only copy. That’s why they keep humans around, to create for them. And the humans always suffer. This is more than metaphor, it’s true. We live in a corrupted world where the engine of creativity is ground into the dust for the profit of others.

I know this system, I have felt it myself. I wrote my first novel at sixteen. It was inspired by a dream and had elements that would only became truly interesting more than a dozen years later. It was written in 1980 and featured an ancient device called the Matrix that could manipulate reality. It also had a great deal about time travel, time-line jumping, multi-dimensional pocket dimensions and the Mandela Effect (although not by name.) My family simply ignored the book. The act of it being created became a non-event. The experience was so strange that I wonder if my family even remembers that the book exists. Certainly, they had no interest in reading it, not even my professional editor mother.

I don’t mention this as sour grapes or with anger. I mention it because it seems a weird glitch in the matrix, an event that could have been important but was edited out of reality instead.

The next stories I wrote in the early 1980’s featured artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the co-joining of souls. I wasn’t a very good writer yet, but the ideas kept pouring through me and I did my best with them.

One of the strangest stories to date has a series of Astral beings re-writing history whole cloth by re-staging an important historic event using new people as proxies. The people have been brain-washed supernaturally to believe that they are the original historic cast of characters. People outside of the event can't understand how this could possibly change anything but the Astral entities know that reality is flexible and that entire timelines can be changed. (This story remains unfinished.)

Our system has a protocol for harvesting creative energy (which it certainly can’t generate by itself.) A creative must be kept in a perpetual state of stress. (Personally, I create very well under stress, it’s my balancing outlet. This is probably true of others as well.) In a sense, creatives can secrete more juice (loosh) when they’re under stress. So keep them stressed by all means!

I put out the first of two illustrated adult fiction novels two years ago. I took all sorts of hits to my personal economy at that point, losing jobs and getting funneled into lower and lower paying work. (The books, by the way, are well-reviewed and people love them. You can see them over here at Lucina Press.)

There is no sane reason why creative people aren’t at least allowed to create in peace, let alone profit by their own work. There is only one explanation — to kill the expansive soul that has the power to change everything in personal and larger creative fields. We have collars around our necks which is, of course, slavery. Make no mistake, the creatives of this world are slaves. But the chains are actually loose around our necks, even if they're sharply tugged and we're dragged to our knees often. They can only enslave us for as long as we don’t know they’re there. Like all parasites, the system thrives in darkness. At this moment a great many truths are coming to the light about how this world works. Once they’re exposed, then what?  Our builders and dreamers (I use the latter term with hesitation as it’s become loaded with conditioned response behavior) are all half-dead from abuse. We must find a way to reassert our sense of expansive wonder before it comes time to use it.

There are many thoughts about what comes next for humanity, and many people seem absolutely certain that, of all, they have the straight goods. In a way it doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong. What does is that change is happening and the only way for humanity to rebuild is to find the strength to dream bigger.

I leave you today with the Curse of Saraswati (or Sarasvati), the Hindu goddess of Arts and Letters. What is this really describing and why must there EVER be a choice between creativity and wealth?

The "Curse of Saraswati"

When education and artistic skill becomes too extensive, it can lead to great success, which is equated with Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and beauty.

As mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik notes:

"With success comes Lakshmi: fame and fortune. Then the artiste turns into a performer, performing for more fame and fortune and so forgets Saraswati, goddess of knowledge. Thus Lakshmi overshadows Saraswati. Saraswati is reduced to Vidya-lakshmi, who turns knowledge into vocation, a tool for fame and fortune."

The Curse of Saraswati, then, is the tendency of the human ego to drift away from the purity of the original devotion to education and wisdom, and toward the worship of success and wealth. 

Quoted from — Das, Subhamoy. "Saraswati: The Vedic Goddess of Knowledge and Arts." Learn Religions, Apr. 17, 2019, learnreligions.com/saraswati-goddess-of-knowledge-and-arts-1770370.